Education: Exports

(asked on 30th December 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what progress his Department has made in meeting the Government's International Education Strategy export targets.


Answered by
Michelle Donelan Portrait
Michelle Donelan
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
This question was answered on 15th January 2021

In December 2020, the Department for Education published updated statistics showing that education exports and transnational education activity generated £23.3 billion for the UK economy in 2018, an increase of 8.9% since 2017.

In 2019, the International Education Strategy set out the government’s ambition to increase the value of education exports to £35 billion per year and increase the total number of international students choosing to study in the UK higher education system each year to 600,000 by 2030.

The latest published data on the number of international students choosing to study at a UK higher education institution, which precedes the publication of the International Education Strategy in March 2019, shows that the UK hosted around 490,000 international students in the 2018/19 academic year. Recent UCAS data shows that there has been a 11% increase in acceptances for non-UK full-time undergraduate applicants between 2019 and 2020, though this is dependent on ongoing developments in the context of the global health situation. Currently, it is too early to assess the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the number of international students studying in the UK.

As part of the government’s commitment to review progress of the International Education Strategy, the Department for Education is working with the Department for International Trade to produce an update to the International Education Strategy, to be published early this year, outlining plans to support recovery and growth in the sector towards this education exports ambition, through the outbreak and beyond.

Further information can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-revenue-from-education-related-exports-and-transnational-education-activity-2018, https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/16-01-2020/sb255-higher-education-student-statistics/location, and https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/undergraduate-statistics-and-reports/ucas-undergraduate-sector-level-end-cycle-data-resources-2020.

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