Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the reduction in the number of university degree courses on modern foreign languages.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), now part of Jisc, collects and publishes data on student enrolments across all UK higher education (HE) providers. This includes data on full person equivalents enrolled in different subject areas, categorised using the HE coding of subjects system. Counts of enrolments across all subjects from 2019/20 to 2022/23 are published in Table 52 of HESA’s Student Data, which can be found here: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-52.

Table 52 can be used to determine that there were 34,840 entrants to a HE course in ‘language and area studies’ in the 2022/23 academic year and of these, 11,245 were studying a language or culture other than English, down by 12% from 2020/21. In the absence of a clear definition of ‘modern foreign languages’, all non-English languages have been included for completeness.

Analysing the HESA student record, the department estimates that there were 4,845 courses in ‘languages and area studies’, excluding English studies, with at least one enrolment in 2022/23, down from 5,590 in 2020/21. The HESA data only includes courses where students have enrolled, so it is not possible to quantify the number of courses being offered with no enrolments.

HE providers are autonomous and independent institutions. This means they are ultimately responsible for the decisions that they make with regards to which courses they choose to deliver.