Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what proportion of students from low-income households attended Russell Group universities in the last three years.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) collects and publishes information on students at UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Provider-level measures on the share of their students who have come from disadvantaged backgrounds are available as part of the UK Performance Indicators; these include the proportion of young full-time first degree entrants who are from low participation neighbourhoods, otherwise known as POLAR3 quintile 1 wards. POLAR3 is an indicator of disadvantage in the absence of income information. The data is provided in the table:

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced in January 2016 that the Government intends to legislate to require individual universities to publish statistical information on admissions by gender, ethnicity and social background of students in order to make each institution’s record on admissions more transparent.