Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of trends in the uptake of STEM subjects studied at universities.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) collects and publishes data on student enrolments across all UK higher education (HE) providers. This includes data on full person equivalents (FPE) enrolled in different subject areas, categorised using the HE coding of subjects (HECoS) system. Counts of enrolments across all science subjects from 2019/20 to 2021/22 are published in Table 52 of HESA’s Student Data at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-52.

HESA developed the HECoS system to replace the Joint Academic Coding System (JACS) from the 2019/20 academic year onwards. Counts of enrolments across all science subjects from 2014/15 to 2018/19 are still available and published in Table 22 of HESA’s Student Data at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-22.

Due to the change in subject classification system, figures for 2018/19 and earlier are not directly comparable with more recent years. Caution is therefore advised when interpreting data over a longer time series. For more information on JACS and HECoS see: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/support/documentation/hecos.

More recent data on acceptances by subject to full-time undergraduate courses for the 2023 admissions cycle is available from UCAS here: https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/undergraduate-statistics-and-reports/ucas-undergraduate-end-cycle-data-resources-2023.