Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government why the Department for Education maintains named individuals' religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability information from Higher Education equality monitoring data, rather than retaining the information as anonymised statistics.

The department does not directly collect information from higher education institutions concerning the religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability of students. However, the department does receive these variables from Jisc (and previously the Higher Education Statistics Authority) as part of the student records that they share with the department.

The information is held at a named level to enable this data to effectively function as a longitudinal research source, which can be used to compare educational pathways with other (non-educational) outcomes later in life. This will provide an evidence base against which society can evaluate and monitor the impact of education and training on outcomes and support government decision-making to improve services and ensure equality of opportunity for all irrespective of background or circumstances.

While individual identifiers are retained by the department for matching purposes, at all times the department will minimise the processing of, and access to, instant or meaningful identifiers. Access to named data within the department is restricted to a small number of data professionals with responsibility for matching this data with other sources and creating pseudonymised, or aggregated, versions of the data which are subsequently used for research and statistics.