Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many students who are not United Kingdom nationals received a student loan for the first time in each of the last five academic years, broken down by (a) nationality group and (b) type of loan.

The attached table provides the number of non-UK nationals who received a first loan for the 2020/21 to 2024/25 academic years, by loan type and nationality.

Eligibility for student finance is not based on nationality, but on immigration status and residency, ensuring that access to support reflects an individual’s established connection to the UK, rather than their nationality in isolation. To be eligible, a student must ordinarily be a resident in England and be settled or have a recognised connection with the UK. Students must also have been ordinarily resident in the UK and Islands (Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and/or the British Overseas Territories) for the three years prior to the first day of the first academic year of their course. Some individuals are exempt from these requirements. For example, those with Refugee Status do not have to meet the standard settlement and residency criteria.

The nationality of all borrowers is checked and validated during the application process. Records listed as ‘unknown’ (in a very small number of mainly postgraduate borrower records) reflect legacy data quality issues in this field, which are being addressed by the Student Loans Company (SLC) and the department. This is a live management information dataset which is not static, and data can be updated over time as SLC update their records and re-categorise data.