Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she is taking to help stop the mis-selling of university courses to young people.

Universities are responsible for their own advertising. The Competition and Markets Authority has produced guidance to the sector on their responsibilities under consumer protection law, including what material information about courses they should provide prospective students. A new partnership, announced on 24 November, between the higher education (HE) regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), and National Trading Standards includes tackling misleading precontract information that students rely on when choosing their course. We are also working with the sector to agree ways in which they might incorporate key pieces of data into their course advertising, so that students better understand what outcomes they might expect from courses at the point at which courses are being sold to them.

The department is clear that universities should be transparent about the content of their courses and the likely outcomes that students can expect from them. Discover Uni is a tool, which is owned and operated by the four UK HE funding and regulatory bodies. It is the official, authoritative source of information and guidance to HE courses in the UK and is designed to help prospective students make the right choices about what and where to study, by allowing users to search for and compare information and data for individual undergraduate courses across the UK. The OfS sets the expectation that HE providers will display a link to the Discover Uni website on their course website pages to help prospective students make informed decisions about the courses they sign-up to.