Scottish Government Needs to Introduce Beneficial Education Funding Scheme

 

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According to a study of higher education funding, underprivileged students in Scotland have been left worse off after deduction to government grants, which middle-class families have escaped.

Lucy Hunter Blackburn, Scottish government’s former civil servant, found out that free university tuition and cuts in funding lower-earning students suggests middle-class families and students will be richer by £20m a year. 

She says that lower-income families, which also include students enrolled for further education at colleges, have to bear high overall cost of at least £32m each year after the scholarship cuts have compelled them to ask for larger loans.

Hunter Blackburn said, "Free tuition in Scotland is the perfect middle-class, feel-good policy. It's superficially universal, but in fact it benefits the better-off most, and is funded by pushing the poorest students further and further into debt.

“The Scottish system for financing full-time students in higher education does not have the egalitarian, progressive effects commonly claimed for it," adds Hunter Blackburn.

The figures appeared in her thorough evaluation of student grants across the UK for the Economic and Social Research Council and Centre for Research in Education inclusion. It also revealed that low-income families in Welsh had the most liberal financial support packages.

Hunter Blackburn had implemented the student graduate endowment scheme, which was introduced in 2001. Critics saw this scheme as a fee, and consequently Alex Salmond’s first government scrapped the scheme in 2007. 

She said that there are several factors that middle-class families benefitted from. The cuts in maintenance allowances became effective for the first time previous autumn and have affected thousands of eligible students. It has caused a sharp drop in allowances for families earning above £17,000, forcing students to stay at home or to go for larger loans for payment of their living costs.

A Scottish government spokesman agreed to the figures presented by Hunter Blackburn but claimed that the funding package was aimed to ensure more sustainable and easier to repay costs of studying and is the simplest scheme in the UK. 

The Scottish government spokesman said, "This analysis fails to properly recognise the hugely positive impact on students of the Scottish government's commitment to providing free tuition. In England, most students have no choice but to take out loans to cover fees of up to £27,000 over three years."

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However, Kezie Dugdale, the Scottish Labour’s education spokeswoman, confronted the claim by saying, "The SNP's [Scottish National party] choices have meant our colleges and our poorest young people have borne the brunt of the cuts. Any sort of analysis shows the SNP's policies to be achieving the opposite of what they claim.”

"We need a proper conversation about how we fund universities and our colleges. But I fear that with the referendum, the UK election and the Scottish elections over the next 24 months, the SNP will have no interest whatsoever in taking this beyond the slogans that they never tire of repeating," she added.

The Scottish government needs to come up with education funding scheme that proves beneficial to everybody, especially to the underprivileged families and students.

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