Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the role of the Race Disparity Audit in addressing inequalities in higher education.

At the launch of the Race Disparity Audit in October 2017, the government committed to “explain or change” the ethnic disparities on the audit’s Ethnicity facts and figures website.

Since October 2017 the government has taken action, including on tackling disparities in access to and participation in higher education (HE) for ethnic minority students.

The audit’s ethnicity facts and figures website has been continually updated and extended to allow the public to see if ethnic disparities are improving or not, across over 160 important areas of public life. This has included the publication of data on undergraduate degree results and entrants at different HE providers with high, medium and low entry tariffs.

On February 1, the government announced action to tackle disparities in access to, and successful participation in, HE for ethnic minority students; and disparities in recruitment and progression for ethnic minority academics. This included plans to work with league table compilers on how they might consider performance on tackling inequalities between ethnic groups in university rankings, promoting the new transparency condition, and encouraging HE providers to make use of tools such as the Race at Work charter and the Race Equality Charter in their efforts to address inequality.