Overseas Students: British Overseas Territories

(asked on 21st February 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the number of university students from British Overseas Territories studying in the UK.


Answered by
Michelle Donelan Portrait
Michelle Donelan
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
This question was answered on 28th February 2020

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.

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