Asked by: Lord Allen of Kensington (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to change the apprenticeship levy and to grant firms more flexibility to use funds from the levy to skill up their workforce.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The apprenticeship levy supports employers of all sizes to invest in high-quality apprenticeship training, both for career starters as well as those looking to upskill or retrain.
The success of the levy is enabling the department to invest £2.7 billion in apprenticeships in England in the 2024/25 financial year, and means that 98% of the English apprenticeships budget was spent over the 2021/22 and 2022/23 financial years. It is important that this funding remains protected to support apprenticeships. The government has no current plans to allow employers to spend the funds available to them on non-apprenticeships training. Allowing employers to use 50% of funds for non-apprenticeship training could create an additional cost of up to £1.5 billion a year. Without additional investment this could reduce apprenticeship starts to 140,000 a year, which would represent an almost 60% decrease on the 2022/23 academic year.
This month the department increased the proportion of the funds that levy-paying employers can transfer from 25% to 50%. This gives levy-paying employers even greater flexibility in how they use the funds available to them while also supporting more apprenticeships in other businesses, including small and medium-sized enterprises, flexi-job apprenticeship agencies and charities.
Employers can choose from almost 700 high-quality apprenticeships and have the option of using flexible training models, such as flexi-job apprenticeships and accelerated apprenticeships. Employers can also access other government-funded skills programmes, including T Levels and Skills Bootcamps.
Asked by: Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the potential impact of the estimated 33 per cent fall in overseas students on the financial viability of UK universities.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The government seeks to ensure that there is a fair and robust migration policy, whilst maintaining the UK’s place as a top destination for the best and brightest students from around the world. The department remains committed to the ambitions set out in the government’s International Education Strategy to host 600,000 international students per year and to increase the value of its education exports to £35 billion per year, both by 2030.
The department expects the UK to remain a highly attractive study destination. The UK has four universities in the top ten, and 17 in the top 100. The UK has a highly sought after higher education (HE) experience, which is respected by students across the globe. The department is hugely proud to have met its international student recruitment ambition two years running.
However, the level of legal migration remains too high. As a result, on 4 December 2023, the government announced a new package of measures to reduce net migration and curb abuse and exploitation of the country’s immigration system.
Our universities are autonomous institutions responsible for managing their own budgets. The department works closely with the Office for Students, the independent regulator of the HE sector in England, to understand the evolving landscape including on risks relating to international students.
It also continues to work closely with the Home Office, the Department for Business and Trade, and other governmental departments to assess the impact of these changes on HE providers.
Asked by: Marquess of Lothian (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what proportion of current students at English universities pay international tuition fees; how this compares with the same figure from 2010; and what steps they are taking to ensure that English universities have a long-term, stable and sustainable funding model.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The total number of non-EU students at higher education (HE) providers in England in academic years 2021/22 and 2010/11 is published and can be found here: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis.
Please note, the data for these years is not comparable as home fee status for EU domiciled students has changed over this period. In 2010/11, all EU students had ‘home status’ meaning they paid the same tuition fees as UK domiciled students. In 2021/22, only existing EU domiciled students had home fee status while those starting their course in 2021/22 did not; they were charged international tuition fees as other non-EU students. In 2021/22, there were 24,365 new EU first year enrolments at HE providers in England.
As autonomous organisations, HE providers have a high degree of financial independence and it is for them to make appropriate and necessary decisions around income, funding, spending and borrowing which ensure their continued financial viability and sustainability.
Asked by: Lord Blunkett (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government which organisations (1) receiving funding through the Department for Education, or (2) holding contracts related to the work of the Department, between 1 January and 22 April have been notified of either (a) a reduction in, or (b) the cancellation of, their funding, broken down by category; which of those organisations will have funding withdrawn (i) in the current financial year, or (ii) over the next two financial years; and what is the total amount that will be withdrawn for such organisations over those periods.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The information is not held centrally and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Matt Western (Labour - Warwick and Leamington)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of trends in the number of teachers in Warwick and Leamington constituency.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Minister of State (Education)
Information on the school workforce, including the number of teachers in each school, is published in the ‘School workforce in England’ statistical publication, which is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.
As of November 2022, which is the latest data available, there were over 468,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers in state-funded schools in England, an increase of 27,000 (6%) since 2010. This is the highest number of FTE teachers since the school workforce census began in 2010.
As of November 2019, there were 609.9 FTE teachers in state-funded schools in Warwick and Leamington constituency. This increased to 651.2 FTE teachers in state-funded schools in Warwick and Leamington constituency in November 2022. Figures for November 2023 will be published in June 2024. School workforce figures for 2024 have not yet been collected.
Asked by: Baroness Verma (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of potential gaps in the provision of free period products in schools in England.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The Period Product Scheme is open to all state-funded primary schools, secondary schools and 16-19 organisations so that girls and women can have access to a wide range of period products in their place of study.
Take up of the scheme is monitored and reviewed regularly. Since its launch in January 2020, 99% of secondary schools and 94% of 16-19 organisations have used the scheme. Management information is published annually and can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/period-products-scheme-management-information. The national supplier, phs, makes contact with all eligible schools and colleges annually to advise them of the scheme and provide details on how to order.
Asked by: Lord Mendelsohn (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact of changes to the student loan repayment system, introduced in August 2023, on female students.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Student loans are valued in the department’s annual accounts in line with the International Financial Reporting Standard 9 and set out in The Government Financial Reporting Manual which is attached.
Under which where future cash flows are discounted to measure the fair value of a financial asset, this should be done using the higher of the rate intrinsic to the financial instrument or the HMT discount rate. HMT set the discount rate annually based on a 10 year rolling average of gilt yields. For student loans the intrinsic rate would be the discount rate that gave a Resource Accounting Budget (RAB) or stock charge of 0%, so the HMT discount rate is used provided the RAB charge is greater than 0%. Should the HMT discount rate result in a RAB charge calculation giving a negative value then the intrinsic rate is used instead, meaning that that RAB charge will take a value of 0%.
The most recent forecasts for the student finance system can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/student-loan-forecasts-for-england/2022-23.
The net present value of future repayments was calculated by discounting all future repayments at a rate of RPI -1.3% per year until the end of financial year 2029/30, and -0.2% per year from financial year 2030/31, to the same point in time as the loan outlay or loan balance. This is the discount rate for financial instruments set by HMT in 2022 and is intended to reflect of the cost of government borrowing. The most recent student loan forecasts using the 2023 discount rate set by HMT will be published at the end of June 2024.
The department has carefully assessed the impact of changes and published a full and comprehensive analysis in the Higher Education Reform and Consultation Document Equality Impact Assessment, which is attached.
The student loan repayment system under Plan 5 is progressive, with repayments being positively correlated with lifetime earnings. The highest earners make the largest individual contributions to the system overall, and the lowest earners are required to contribute the least.
Lower earners, whether male or female, are protected. If a borrower’s income is below the repayment threshold, they will not be required to make any repayments at all. At the end of the loan term, any outstanding loan debt, including interest accrued, will be written off at no detriment to the borrower. No commercial loans offer this level of protection.
The department will continue to keep the student finance system, including repayment terms, under review to ensure that it remains sustainable and delivers value for money for students and the taxpayer.
Asked by: Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government why the Department for Education maintains named individuals' religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability information from Higher Education equality monitoring data, rather than retaining the information as anonymised statistics.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department does not directly collect information from higher education institutions concerning the religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability of students. However, the department does receive these variables from Jisc (and previously the Higher Education Statistics Authority) as part of the student records that they share with the department.
The information is held at a named level to enable this data to effectively function as a longitudinal research source, which can be used to compare educational pathways with other (non-educational) outcomes later in life. This will provide an evidence base against which society can evaluate and monitor the impact of education and training on outcomes and support government decision-making to improve services and ensure equality of opportunity for all irrespective of background or circumstances.
While individual identifiers are retained by the department for matching purposes, at all times the department will minimise the processing of, and access to, instant or meaningful identifiers. Access to named data within the department is restricted to a small number of data professionals with responsibility for matching this data with other sources and creating pseudonymised, or aggregated, versions of the data which are subsequently used for research and statistics.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and what proportion of people who started teacher training courses did not finish the course in each of the last five years.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Minister of State (Education)
Trainees not awarded qualified teacher status (QTS) includes those who ended their training during the year and either left the course before the end (excluding those who left the course within 90 days of the start) or did not meet the teacher standards.
These statistics refer to the academic year in which trainees finished or withdrew from their initial teacher training (ITT) courses, rather than the year in which they began their courses. At this time, statistics on ITT trainee outcomes based on the year of entry are not available.
Academic Year | 2017/18 | 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 |
Trainees not awarded QTS | 1,304 | 1,348 | 1,172 | 1,597 | 2,236 |
Percentage of all trainees with course outcomes | 5% | 5% | 4% | 5% | 7% |
Source: DfE ITT Performance Profiles statistical publications
Footnote: Academic year refers to the year in which the trainee had a course outcome.
The ITT Performance Profiles publication is published here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/initial-teacher-training-performance-profiles/2021-22#releaseHeadlines-tables.
Asked by: Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what is their most recent estimate of (1) the Resource Accounting and Budgeting charge, and (2) the estimated cost to Government of their support for the student finance system, based on future loan write-offs and interest subsidies, (a) in net present-value terms, and (b) as a proportion of the initial loan outlay.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
In the 2022/23 financial year, the Resource Accounting and Budgeting (RAB) charge, which is the government subsidy on student loans, was £5.5 billion, or 27% of the £20.0 billion of loans issued that financial year.
Of student loans issued in 2023/24, the government is expected to subsidise about £5.6 billion, or:
These forecasts are subject to change. The next statistical publication on student finance forecasts, which will contain the final RAB figures for the 2023/24 financial year, will be available at the end of June 2024.