Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate she has made of the (a) number of students from (i) the Palestinian territories and (ii) Gaza studying in the UK and (b) the number and proportion of those students that are in the UK on British Council scholarship.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), now part of JISC, is responsible for collecting and publishing data about UK higher education (HE). The latest statistics refer to the 2021/22 academic year.

Table 28 of HESA’s ‘Higher Education Student Statistics: UK, 2021/22’ reports the number of non-UK domiciled HE students by country of domicile. This data is accessible at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-28.

In the 2021/22 academic year, there were 245 (1) student enrolments (2) at UK HE providers who were domiciled in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (formerly the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip) prior to their studies. The major source of tuition fees of five (3%) of them were recorded as 'Overseas student award from HM government/British Council’.

1: Figures have been rounded to the nearest 5, in line with HESA rounding conventions. More information on rounding and suppression strategy can be found at the following link: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/support/definitions/students#rounding-and-suppression-strategy.

2. Enrolments refers to students in all years of study.