Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate he has made of the number of students at UK universities who are studying each European language.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) collects and publishes statistics about higher education in the UK and the latest statistics refer to the academic year 2017/18.

HESA publishes breakdowns by subject area at UK higher education institutions (HEIs) but does not go into detail beyond ‘languages’. In 2017/18, there were 84,260 full-person-equivalent¹ students enrolled on languages courses in UK HEIs. This information is shown in table 22 in the following link: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/what-study.

It should be noted that HESA figures are rounded to the nearest 5 and that the figure of 84,260 is for all students enrolled on languages courses. This includes all levels of study (undergraduate, postgraduate etc.) and all modes of study (full-time and part-time).

[1] Counts are on the basis of full person equivalents. Where a student is studying more than one subject, the counts are distributed between the subjects that make up their course.