Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department has made an assessment of the potential impact of the withdrawal of CPLA-linked funding in British universities on local economies.

Higher education (HE) providers are autonomous and therefore responsible for ensuring they have adequate governance and risk management procedures in place. The department expects the HE sector to be alert to risks when collaborating with any international partners.

The government’s International Education Strategy makes clear that the internationalisation of the HE sector cannot come at any cost. A key element of that strategy is diversification. Universities must ensure they have appropriate processes in place to manage risks associated with dependence on a single source of funding, whether that is from a single organisation or a single country.

The Office for Students (OfS), the regulator of HE in England, monitors the risk of over-reliance on overseas income at a sector level. The role of the OfS is not to direct how HE providers manage themselves or to limit their recruitment from a particular country of origin, but to ensure they understand where there is greater reliance and how any risks are being managed, and to take action to protect students from the consequences of unmanaged financial risk, if necessary.