Asked by: Scott Benton (Independent - Blackpool South)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential merits to the (a) UK and (b) British Overseas Territories (BOTs) of increasing the number of students from BOTs studying at UK universities.
Answered by Michelle Donelan - Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
The government fully recognises the important contribution that international students make to the UK’s higher education sector, including those from the British Overseas Territories, both economically and culturally.
We have set out our ambition to increase the number of international higher education students hosted in the UK to 600,000 per year by 2030, within the International Education Strategy.
The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) publishes statistics on students studying at UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) by domicile. The latest available data is from 2018/19, published in January 2020.
In 2018/19, HESA estimated there to be 2,130 British Overseas Territory domiciled students enrolled at UK HEIs at all levels of study. The table below shows the breakdown by domicile.
Table: Student enrolments by country of domicile, UK HEIs, 2018/19
Domicile[1][2][3] | 2018/19 |
Anguilla | 55 |
Bermuda | 500 |
British Virgin Islands | 180 |
Cayman Islands | 315 |
Falkland Islands | 50 |
Gibraltar | 900 |
Montserrat | 15 |
Pitcairn Islands | 0 |
South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands | 0 |
St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha | 25 |
Turks and Caicos Islands | 95 |
British Overseas Territories Total | 2,130 |
British and EU nationals residing in British Overseas Territories or in other Member States’ overseas territories are currently eligible for Home Fee Status if they are studying at either undergraduate or postgraduate level at English HEIs and have been living in the European Economic Area, Switzerland or the overseas territories for the three years prior to the first day of the first academic year of the course. They will remain eligible for home fee status for the duration of courses starting in the 2020/21 academic year or before. We will provide sufficient notice for prospective students on fee arrangements ahead of the 2021/22 academic year and subsequent years in future.
The Department for Education (DfE) funds Commonwealth scholarships for five or six PhD scholarships from non-ODA Commonwealth countries. DfE funding for the Queen Elizabeth Commonwealth Scholarships means there will be 150 new scholarships awarded by 2025, all of which are open to British citizens from overseas territories.
[1] Numbers are rounded to the nearest 5, so components may not sum to totals.
[2] Domicile refers to country of student’s permanent address prior to entry.
British Antarctic Territories and British Indian Ocean Territories are omitted from this analysis as HESA defines them as having ‘no settled inhabitants’. HESA defines 'no settled inhabitants' as no inhabitants apart from military and scientific personnel, staff of contractors and seasonal residents (https://www.hesa.ac.uk/collection/c18051/a/domicile).
[3] Source: DfE analysis of the HESA student record https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-28.
Asked by: Scott Benton (Independent - Blackpool South)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department records the number of young people who (a) visit Auschwitz on educational visits and (b) take part in other educational visits to remember the Holocaust and its victims.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department funds the Holocaust Educational Trust’s ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ which provides for two students, aged 16-18, and a teacher from every state funded school/sixth form college in England to visit Auschwitz-Bikenau. £2,126,437 is being provided in 2019-20 and £2,193,675 in 2020-21. We expect a minimum of 1,968 students to undertake visits through this programme in 2019-20.
Additionally, £1.7 million for the 2019-20 financial year is being provided for the Bergen-Belsen Commemoration Programme. The programme provides for pupils and teachers from state funded secondary schools in England to visit Bergen-Belsen to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp. We expect a minimum of 1,290 pupils to undertake visits through this programme in 2019-20.