Higher Education (England) Regulations

Debate between Justine Greening and Paul Farrelly

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

I am happy to take an intervention from anyone on the Opposition Benches who thinks that is a bad thing and wants to justify not continuing with a policy that has led to more disadvantaged young people going to university.

[Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

Over the summer I received a heartbreaking email from a young lady who was a student at Keele University in Newcastle-under-Lyme:

“Starting in September both my brother and I will be hoping to go off to university…My parents are having great difficulty trying to work out how they are going to support both of us and have suggested that I drop out of university as they can only support one of us financially. Last year I got the minimum loan from student finance and will be getting the minimum loan again”.

I ask the Secretary of State to consider that this is not just about rising tuition fees or turning maintenance grants into loans, but costs and support for students, in particular for what some people like to call the squeezed middle. Is it not time that the Government looked at this seriously, in the round, for the sake of students from all families in the country?

[Justine Greening]

First of all, there has never been more funding available to enable students to go to university. Secondly, the facts simply do not bear out the hon. Gentleman’s point. If what he says is correct, we would see fewer and fewer students going to university, but the exact opposite has happened. [Interruption.] We can hear Labour Members’ faux anger about how much debt students have, but the bottom line is that they do not want to even engage with the fact that there have never been more young people getting the opportunity to go to university. I was the first person in my family to get the chance to go to university. If Labour ever has the chance to bring in its policy there will be fewer people from backgrounds like mine who will have the chance to go to university. That is a statistical fact.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Gentleman should direct that question to his own Front-Bench team. It is they who are proposing a policy of zero balance by saying we should go from our current structure to no tuition fees at all. As I have said, the big losers would be the most disadvantaged young people in our country. Labour has proposed a policy for the moneyed, not the few. Whereas no cap on students means more students in England, no fees means fewer students. As we know from Scotland, no fees also harms quality, because it means a return to the past for our universities—a past that saw them starved of cash.

[Paul Farrelly]

rose—

[Justine Greening]

I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman again.

In the decades before tuition fees, per-student funding plummeted by 40%. When Labour first introduced fees, it was against a backdrop of an underfunded higher education system.There was a chorus of voices clamouring for change so that we could ensure that our world-class universities could have the funds that they needed.

We now have the highest GDP spending per student in the OECD. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that the 2010 reforms increased the resources being invested in our students by universities by 25% in real terms since 2012. That is why the OECD says that our system is sustainable, unlike the unsustainable, underfunded university systems that we see on the continent. I had a chance to discuss the issue with Andreas Schleicher yesterday, and he made that very point.