Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many people have received a student loan from the Student Loans Company since 2005, broken down by nationality and by the academic year in which they first received a loan.

The data for the 2020/21 to 2024/25 academic years has previously been published in the attached file.

The department and the Student Loans Company (SLC) have recently strengthened the quality and consistency of their data and now hold robust information on current borrowers’ UK national status and nationality. However, due to GDPR requirements, records are not retained indefinitely. Borrowers whose loans were fully repaid or written off more than six years ago are removed from SLC systems.

As a result, the department does not hold a complete dataset with robust and consistent nationality information over this 20-year time-period. Figures on the number of borrowers by academic year and nationality across the full time series will therefore not fully reflect historical trends in nationality of borrowers.