Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she had recent discussions with universities on taking steps to ensure that the statistics on the employment of former students on degree courses are accurate when universities offer courses to new students.

As autonomous bodies that are independent from the government, universities are responsible for their own course advertising. The Competition and Markets Authority has produced guidance for providers on their responsibilities under consumer protection law, including what material information about courses they should provide to prospective students.

The department is working with the sector to agree ways in which providers might incorporate key pieces of data into their course advertising, so that students can better understand what course outcomes they might expect at the point at which courses are being sold to them.

The department is clear that universities should be transparent about the content of their courses and the likely outcomes that students can expect from them. Discover Uni, a tool which is owned and operated by the four UK higher education (HE) funding and regulatory bodies, is the official, authoritative source of information and guidance to HE courses in the UK. It is designed to help prospective students to make the right choices about what and where to study, by allowing users to search for and compare information and data for individual undergraduate courses across the UK. The Office for Students sets the expectation that HE providers will display a link to the Discover Uni website on their course website pages to help prospective students make informed decisions about the courses they sign up to.