Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether they plan to issue guidance to the Office for Students and institutions of higher education that modern foreign languages should be classified as strategically vulnerable subjects and fall within category C1 of the Strategic Priorities Grant.

In the 2024/25 academic year, over half of the £1.4 billion recurrent funding to higher education providers allocated through the Strategic Priorities Grant is supporting the provision of strategically important high-cost subjects that support the NHS and wider healthcare policy and high-cost science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects, for example medicine and dentistry, science, engineering. This is in recognition of the higher costs of teaching those subjects.

The department will continue to work with the Office for Students (OfS) to ensure that costs of provision are assessed. My right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education, will issue guidance to the OfS in due course setting out her funding priorities for 2025/26.