Social mobility charity chairman Sir Peter Lampl believes the government’s decision to drop plans to give the Director of Fair Access to Education more powers will seriously impact on disadvantaged students.
Access
Through his charities the Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation, Sir Peter promotes social mobility through education. His charities help policy makers make informed decisions by providing key research into social mobility and education. The Sutton Trust also runs a number of programmes both in the UK and USA to help under privileged students have the same access to education as those from privileged backgrounds.
In response to the Government’s White Paper, Sir Peter Lampl said: ‘We are disappointed that the Government has apparently dropped encouraging proposals to give the director (of fair access to education) more powers to set targets where universities are not making progress.
“This softening of the original proposals is likely to make it much harder to increase the participation of disadvantaged students.”
Scoring
The Department for Business, Industry and Skills also published proposals in the White Paper which would see new measures introduced to rank the success of UK universities. The results could either allow the university to increase tuition fees or reduce them.
The initiative has been proposed to improve standards across the country. As part of them, universities will be required to publish information about the amount of time students spend in lectures, the jobs they get as graduates and their average earnings before being ranked for their teaching ability.
Those institutions that score highly could be allowed to raise the annual £9,000 tuition fee in line with inflation in 12 months’ time, whereas those that score poorly will be forced to reduce their fees.
Increasing debt
The Sutton Trust recently published research showing the huge amounts of debt UK graduates are saddled with compared to their European and US counterparts.
These new proposals could see that gap widen in the future. With maintenance grants being scrapped from September 2016, poorer students starting university later this year will have around £10,000 in extra debt.
Sir Peter Lampl’s latest blog on the Sutton Trust website, ‘Higher Ambitions’, provides further thoughts on the Government’s higher education white paper:
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