Students’ Return to Universities

Maria Miller Excerpts

Tuesday 29th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Williamson]

We continue to work with the sector to ensure that there is the very best quality of teaching. If youngsters have an issue with the quality of teaching, the Office for Students has made it absolutely clear that it will investigate this and take action where it is required against universities that are not delivering what is in their contract with the students.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. Our fiercely independent universities are rapidly adapting to this new way of operating so that thousands of young people who have been hard hit by coronavirus can get on with their lives after six months of the pandemic, and I think they deserve all our support. However, many of those students might have planned to use the summer months to earn money to support themselves through university or, indeed, they might have been looking for part-time work while they were studying as a way of ensuring that they could support themselves through these important years of their lives. I am interested to hear from my right hon. Friend what additional work the universities will be doing to ensure that those students who are working hard will be able to get the support they need if they hit financial hardship.

[Gavin Williamson]

Quite rightly, both this Government and the previous Labour Government put a really high value on ensuring that students who started their studies were able to complete them. The ways in which universities ensure that that happens is something that we monitor closely. We have worked with the Office for Students to ensure that hardship funding is available. That is part of a quarter of a billion pound package that was made available to universities so that proper assessments could be made of students if they required that support. The Student Loans Company also offers a system whereby extra maintenance support can be made available through individual assessment if a student chooses to go down that route.