Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the proportion of higher education students who transfer between higher education institutions in any given year; and what assessment he has made of the socio-economic backgrounds of those students.

The Office for Students published experimental statistics on student transfers on 30 November 2021, available here: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/student-transfers/.

The statistics show that 2.9% of students who entered the first year of a full-time first degree in England in the 2018/19 academic year had transferred to a different provider one year after entry.

The statistics are disaggregated by student characteristics, including two measures of disadvantage. These show that:

• 3.4% of students from Participation of Local Areas (POLAR4) [1] quintile 1 (lowest higher education participation) backgrounds had transferred to a different provider one year after entry, compared to 3.0% for those from quintile 5 (highest higher education participation).
• 3.8% of students from Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD)[2] quintile 1 (most deprived) backgrounds had transferred to a different provider one year after entry, compared to 2.5% for those from quintile 5 (least deprived).

[1] POLAR4 is a measure of how likely young people are to participate in higher education.

[2] IMD measures relative deprivation in small areas through factors such as income, employment, education and health.