Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department has undertaken a review of the tuition fee-based funding model for higher education.

The government set out its plans for tuition fees as part of the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, published on 20 October 2025.

To provide long-term certainty over future funding for the sector so that it can focus on reform, we will increase tuition fee caps for all higher education (HE) providers in line with forecast inflation in 2026/27 and 2027/28 and then legislate when parliamentary time allows to increase tuition fee caps automatically for future academic years.

Maximum fee limits for undergraduate courses in the 2026/27 and 2027/28 academic years will increase by forecast inflation of 2.71% (to £9,790) and 2.68% (to £10,050) respectively, based on the retail price index (exclusive of mortgage interest payments).

In future years, we will link inflationary fee uplifts to judgements on HE providers’ quality and restrict fee income where high quality cannot be demonstrated.