Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the effect of the proposed 17.5 per cent reduction in funding for full-time education on 18 year olds from ethnic minorities who (a) have poor prior attainment and (b) speak English as an additional language.

The Department for Education has published an impact assessment, which is available online:https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/funding-reduction-for-18-year-olds-impact-assessment.

The impact assessment looked at the proportion of 18-year-old black and minority ethnic (BME) students in full-time education who attract a funding uplift for disadvantage based on the level of deprivation of their home postcode, compared with the proportion of all 16- to 18-year-old BME students. It shows that 18-year-old BME students in full-time education are not more likely to be from disadvantaged areas than 16- to 18–year-old BME students as a whole.

I am pleased that we have been able to afford to mitigate the impact of the funding reduction on 18-year-olds in the academic year 2014/15. We will cap any losses in relation to this at 2% of the funding that an institution receives for the education of 16- to 19-year-olds.