Consultation on changes to ‘Student support for higher education’ official statistics publication series

From:: Student Loans Company
Published: 4 September 2025
Last updated: 25 September 2025 — See all updates

Applies to England, Northern Ireland and Wales

Detail of outcome

Summary of change

The removal of the following tables from the publications:

England publication

Table 3A (ii): Maintenance Loan take-up by the estimated full-time undergraduate eligible population
Table 3B (ii): Tuition Fee Loan take-up by the estimated full-time undergraduate eligible population

Wales publication

Table 3A (ii): Maintenance Loan take-up by the estimated full-time undergraduate eligible population
Table 3B (ii): Tuition Fee Loan take-up by the estimated full-time undergraduate eligible population
Table 3C (ii): Tuition Fee Loan take-up by the estimated full-time undergraduate eligible population by country of study

Northern Ireland publication

Table 3A (ii): Maintenance Loan take-up by the estimated full-time undergraduate eligible population

Reasoning

The HESA Data Futures programme, launched in the 2022/23 academic year, represented a major overhaul of how student-level data was collected and reported by UK higher education institutions. The programme:

Redefined how data is captured e.g. mode of study, provider identifiers, and continuation rates etc.
Introduced a high number of new / significantly altered data fields, whilst discontinuing many existing fields.
Changed existing data definitions.

The transition has created data gaps and inconsistencies that directly affect the ability to estimate student loan eligibility as some data fields used to determine this are either no longer available or have changed definition.

As a result, the Department for Education (DfE), Welsh Government, and Northern Ireland Government continue to face significant challenges in estimating the size of the student population that may be eligible due to changes in data granularity and methodology.

Previously, the take-up rates in the affected tables were calculated using:

Paid loans data held by the SLC, and
The estimated loan-eligible population figure provided to SLC by DfE, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Government.

Due to uncertainty surrounding the estimate’s accuracy, the loan-eligible population figure used in this statistical publication series, is no longer provided to SLC.

Outcome

Subsequently, due to the discontinuation of these eligibility estimates—stemming from the data limitations introduced by the HESA Data Futures model—SLC is no longer able to calculate or publish take-up rates in this series.

Detail of feedback received

We received 1 response questioning the future availability of the data.

Original consultation

Summary

Student Loans Company (SLC) is committed to delivering high-quality, high-value statistical publications that serve the needs of our users.

This consultation ran from
10am on 4 September 2025 to 5:30pm on 18 September 2025

Consultation description

As part of this commitment, we are proposing changes to the annual statistics series Student Support for Higher Education (covering England, Wales, and Northern Ireland), beginning with the November 2025 releases.

Documents