This post summarises the current position on grants and loans for full-time students in higher education in Scotland, and the background to it.
Background
(i) Fees and other payments
The Scottish Government funds the whole tuition cost for almost all first-time, full-time Scottish and EU students in Scotland, from the government’s cash budget. Therefore no-one from any background has to borrow for part or all of their fees. Scottish students will only need a fee loan (as students in other parts of the UK get, to defer fee payments) if they go to study elsewhere in the UK.
Between 2001 and 2006, young students entering degree-level HE full-time were liable to pay the graduate endowment, a single payment of £2,000 at 2001-01 prices, after finishing university. The income from the GE was in theory ring-fenced for student bursaries. Graduates could either pay it in cash or add the liability to their existing student loan (or take out a first-ever loan) to defer the payment. Because of exemptions for HNC/D students, including those on “2+2” models, mature students, disabled students and single parents, slightly under half of all the full-time students the SG supported were liable to pay the GE, which was bringing in around £23m p.a. by 2007 (more here). When the current Scottish Government says it brought in free tuition, it is referring to its abolition of the endowment in 2007. It is also often, in practice, describing its decision not to use devolved powers to copy either of the fee regimes which have applied in England since 2007.
(ii) Living cost grants
Scotland has relatively low student maintenance grants (here called bursaries). Most living cost support is offered instead as student loan.
Between 2010 and 2012 inclusive, the means-tested grant for younger students, Young Student Bursary, was frozen in cash terms (see here for more on how its value changed from 2001 onwards). In 2013, the Scottish Government cut its total spending on maintenance grants by around £35m, or one-third. The maximum YSB was reduced from £2,640 to £1,750, and it was withdrawn more quickly as income rose. The government lowered the income at which maximum YSB was payable from £19,300 to £16,999. Many students lost £900 a year and some much more. The Scottish Government argued they could make up the difference by borrowing to fill the gap. Older students get the lower-rate Independent Student Bursary. This was introduced as a lower-rate grant by the Scottish Government in 2010, and then also scaled back in 2013.
In 2015, the Scottish Government added £125 back on to some grants, costing it around £5m, and in 2016 it reversed most of the cut to the threshold for maximum grant, raising it to £18,999 (likely to have cost it a bit under £2m a year).
The current system
The resulting living cost model in 2016-17 is in the table below.
| Young | Independent (ie mature) | |||
| Bursary | Loan | Bursary | Loan | |
| 0-18,999 | 1,875 | 5,750 | 875 | 6,750 |
| 19,000-23,999 | 1,125 | 5,750 | – | 6,750 |
| 24,000-33,9999 | 500 | 5,750 | – | 6,250 |
| 34,000 plus | – | 4,750 | – | 4,750 |
A particular feature of this model is that it is built round those from the lowest incomes, especially mature students, taking out the highest loans. Until grants were abolished in England in 2016, Scotland was the only part of the UK taking this approach. It means that someone at a low income who wishes to take out their full entitlement to living cost support over four years faces a debt of £23,000 plus interest if they are younger, and £27,000 plus interest if they are older. Grants are higher in Wales and Northern Ireland (where students also only have to borrow for the first £3,900 of their fees: true for Welsh students anywhere in the UK, for NI ones in NI).
Actual borrowing
Figures on annual borrowing by income are published annually by the Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS). The latest are here (see Table A6). They show that Scottish students borrowed a total of £0.5bn in 2015-16.
Around 70% of Scottish students take out a loan in any given year, and almost all those who borrow, borrow the whole amount they can.
The table below is adapted from the official statistics. I’ve added two columns. One shows average borrowing across the group as a whole, i.e. including borrowers and non-borrowers. The other shows the percentage who don’t borrow in each income group. It’s reasonable to assume from other research that there are more non-borrowers in the higher income group because students’ access to family resources tends to rise as family income increases. It is likely that even within this group, non-borrowers are more prevalent at higher incomes: it is quite plausible that at, say £60,000+, non-borrowers are in the majority.
The net effect of lower income students having higher loan amounts and making more use of loans is that students in the highest income range borrowed in practice around half as much per head (around £3,000) as those in the lowest income band (over £6,000). Another way to look at this is that Groups 1 to 4 below accounted for only 43% of all students, but took out 54% of all debt.
Borrowing by income band 2015-16
| Total students | Borrowers | Average borrowing (active borrowers) | Average borrowing (all) | % Non-borrowers | ||
| 1 | No income details: receiving max bursary | 10,055 | 9,360 | 6,660 | 6,201 | 7% |
| 2 | Up to £16,999 | 23,895 | 19,105 | 5,890 | 4,711 | 20% |
| 3 | £17,000 to £23,999 | 8,955 | 7,220 | 5,760 | 4,648 | 19% |
| 4 | £24,000 to £33,999 | 8,980 | 7,265 | 5,610 | 4,542 | 19% |
| 5 | £34,000 and above | 2,965 | 1,850 | 4,650 | 2,901 | 38% |
| 6 | No income details: receiving no bursary | 70,010 | 46,830 | 4,650 | 3,112 | 33% |
Note: I’ve removed EU students (14,705) from the figure for total students, as these students can’t borrow. I have assumed that they were contained in Group 6, as very few can claim means-tested support. That may not be exactly right, but it should be near enough. Most students with an income over £34,000 will be in Group 6, which covers those who chose not to submit income details, generally because they are above the threshold for bursary. Group 1 by contrast will be those who had no relevant income to declare and got the highest bursary level. Group 5 is a small group whose income details SAAS knows, although they are over the bursary threshold. I have excluded here a very small group of low-income students separately shown in the SAAS table who anomalously have no income but don’t get full bursary: there’s something odd going on with this group (it may be that many don’t complete a full year).
Caution: final borrowing
Separate figures are published each year for students’ final borrowing. The most recent Scottish figure is £10,500. These figures are widely quoted but have to be handled with care. The average will be brought down by the large number of students in Scotland on one or two year courses, and – as shown above – any average will conceal variation by income. More on that here.
Conclusion
The Scottish system is not debt-free in the absence of fees: indeed Scottish students are borrowing a substantial amount as a group each year. The Scottish approach relies heavily on loans to cover the state’s role in providing low-income students, in particular, with living cost support. Grants are now so low that those from the lowest incomes are taking on the most of that living cost debt. Equally, at high incomes, many students will be borrowing nothing.
Defending existing policy in Scotland means defending this outcome.
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It seems common to assume that we’re faced with a straight choice on tuition fees, where the state either funds the whole of everyone’s tuition costs, or all students have to take out a loan for £9,250 a year. It’s a perspective stuck in a binary choice between whatever-we-do-now-in-Scotland and whatever-they-do-now-in-England. Other options are of course available. That’s what this post is about.
A starting point
The simplest alternatives for fees are:
- setting the fee level at some number more than zero, but less than £9,250;
- means-testing fees; or
- some combination of these two.
There’s a fairly common argument that any move away from free tuition inevitably means Scotland would end up where England is: the slippery slope perspective. That puzzles me, because we would only end up there if that was what the politicians we elected chose. It seems to assume we can trust them to keep it free, but not to maintain any alternative position. On this thinking, tuition fees are an addictive drug, from which governments must be kept away at all costs. I’ll come back to that at the end.
If you reject this straitjacket, and believe that the Scottish political system is capable of managing other things, what might the alternatives be, and what would they mean for students?
Note: I’m not advocating a specific model here, but demonstrating one different way things could work, as a starting point for a less constrained debate. There are more radical ideas out there (here’s one), involving more fundamental change. All I want to show is the space for alternative outcomes, just within the current broad general approach.
Living cost support matters
There’s no point designing a student funding system which only looks at one part of the story.
If you are only interested in thinking about fees in isolation, and don’t care much about living cost support, especially for low-income students, then look away now. You and I are never going to have a mutually rewarding conversation about this.
A lot of people in Scotland at this point suggest that living costs are a secondary (or even non-) issue, because students can always live with their parents and/or work their way through. I disagree for the reasons set out in Footnote 1.
The modelling below assumes decisions on living costs are as important as fees, should be interlinked, and looks at combined effects.
Fees: upfront or deferred?
Even the most vigorously ideological advocates of tuition fees recognise that students tend not to have money at the moment. It is very rare to find anyone, not even Milton Friedman, advocating unassisted upfront charges (Footnote 2 describes the UK government’s short experiment with this).
Thus, in no part of the UK do first-time students now have to find the cost of their fees from their or their families’ existing resources. With a few exceptions in Scotland and elsewhere, higher education is free at the point of entry for all first-time undergraduate students in the UK, because at minimum they can take out a government-subsidised student loan to defer the full cost of their fees until they are earning above a certain level.
It’s hard to over-stress this point for readers in Scotland, where it still seems to be widely believed that students in England have had no choice but to find £9,000 a year from their families. Had that been the case, the system there would simply have collapsed. It is precisely because fee costs are deferred that debt is so high in England.
So the model assumes that any fee is matched £ for £ by a government subsidised loan and that, as in other UK systems, the fee loan (a) would be repayable contingent on earnings, in the same way as maintenance borrowing is now, and (b) is added to any maintenance loan to form a single debt, so that no-one is paying off two loans in parallel.
Debt aversion
Regardless of any evidence from England (Footnote 3), it is possible that debt aversion should be a major concern for Scottish policy makers. In that case, however, we should already be worrying.
Living cost support for low-income Scottish students is now provided largely through loans, because grants are relatively low. Here’s the figures for support from the Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS) for 2016-17.
| Young student | Independent student | |||
| Household income | Bursary | Loan | Bursary | Loan |
| £0 to £18,999 | £1,875 | £5,750 | £875 | £6,750 |
| £19,000 to £23,999 | £1,125 | £5,750 | £0 | £6,750 |
| £24,000 to £33,999 | £500 | £5,750 | £0 | £6,250 |
| £34,000 and above | £0 | £4,750 | £0 | £4,750 |
The model below illustrates how in a system which includes some fee-paying, low-income students can still have less debt than in one with free tuition, while protecting the value of their total living cost support.
The scale of student debt in Scotland and its distribution
Around £500 million is now borrowed each year by Scottish students. At the moment, annual borrowing is skewed towards those from lower-income households, for two reasons:
- they borrow more on average, and
- they are more likely to make use of student loans.
As a result, over half of all student loan is taken out each year by students declaring a household income below £34,000, although fewer than half of students fall into that group.
The current statistics don’t allow us to differentiate amongst those with incomes over £34,000. But looking at earlier data, there’s a good chance that there’s a similar skewing of debt within the higher income group, towards middle-income households and away from the highest income ones.
The model removes the current built-in assumption that the highest debts should be taken on by those from the lowest incomes, again while protecting current total spending.
What could be different?
Put simply, we could move the debt around, so that more of this £500 million is taken out by students from higher-income backgrounds, and less by those from lower-income ones.
That means finding more to spend on grant, by spending less on fee subsidies, and expecting those at higher incomes to borrow some of their fee cost.
Mechanisms
There are in essence three ways to get this effect.
- Means-test the fee.
- Apply the fee to everyone, but then have a separate means-tested fee grant which immediately wipes it out for lower-income students.
- Apply the fee to everyone, but then build a means-tested off-setting amount into the living cost grant, before making any other increases.
Different mechanisms would have different implications for practical administration, public understanding/presentation, student behaviour and the detail of public finances. But they would all provide an identical boost to the amount of grant provided at lower incomes for the same level of fee.
One basic model
The model below asks students from the highest income households to borrow one half of the average cost of a university place in Scotland. So students from these households would be offered a government-subsidised fee loan to cover a fee of £3,500 a year. The cash released from tuition fee subsidies would be put back into grants.
How much would a £3,500 fee raise?
SAAS currently supports around 140,000 students, of whom around 15,000 are from the EU. I’ll concentrate for now on moving the public subsidy around between the 125,000 Scottish students. A separate section below considers EU students.
If Scottish students from the highest quarter of student-providing households by income were liable for the fee, it would notionally release around £110m a year from tuition fee subsidies (125,000 x 25% x £3,500).
I can’t say what the income cut-off would be, because the Scottish data on students is now too aggregate to show that. Looking at figures for years before 2013, when more detail was provided, I’d guess it would be somewhere between £50,000 and £60,000 of household income (around the highest 15-20% of all households in Scotland by income, after equivalising for a family of 2 adults and 2 children).
How could the money saved on fee subsidies at high incomes be used to bring down debt at lower incomes?
I’ll spend the money on substantially increasing means-tested maintenance grants, on which we now spend only £55m a year.
It would cost c£30m to switch £1,000 of living cost support from loan to grant for those on the Young Student Bursary.
I’ll spend a further c£40m on giving independent students (for example, those over 25, or who are parents, or married/in a partnership) the same bursary as young ones, and bringing down their debt, because these students in Scotland are on a much less generous grant and a higher loan, and there’s really no good way to justify that.
I’ll also spend c£15m on a new £1,000 grant for students from households between £34,000 and £45,000, because these families, who are not awash with cash, are expected to find much more out of pocket help for their children in Scotland than is the case in the rest of the UK and that’s a concern: more here.
The net annual effect on individual students at different incomes would be:
- Young students with incomes below £34,000 would gain £1000 in grant and lose £1000 in debt, with no change in the total value of their living cost support.
- Those with incomes between £34,000 and £45,000 would gain £1,000 in grant and therefore £1,000 in total living cost support, with no change in debt.
- Nothing would change for those between £45,000 and the fee liability point.
- Those liable for fees would have £3,500 more debt a year and no change to living cost support.
- For mature students it’s a similar picture, except that they would gain more grant and lose more debt.
Using this approach, all students are now offered the same living cost loan (£4,750), with cash grant used to do any additional income-based targeting
I’ve spent approaching £90m. I assume that due to things I’ve failed to take into account, income wouldn’t be as high and expenditure would be higher, so my spending plans may still be a bit ambitious on this level of fee. But they will be in the right general area. If students from the wealthiest quarter of households were expected to borrow £3,500 a year of their tuition cost, it seems likely that we could nearly treble our spending on maintenance grants.
The effect on the new fee payers
Total debt for those at high incomes would come to a maximum of £8,250 a year. Two points about that. First, in practice many of these students would only have a £3,500 annual debt, because living cost debt take-up is lower in this group, presumably because many have all their living costs met by their parents.
But the second is the more important. Low income mature students are already expected to incur £6,750 in living cost debt – and most do. If you have managed in recent years not to be outraged at the reality of a £6,750 annual debt for most mature students with no income, you are not in strong position to be outraged now at a theoretical maximum debt of £8,250 a year for students from high income families which many won’t actually incur.
Is this a good model?
This would be a pretty clunky way to do things. The Scottish system already incorporates large step changes in entitlement, and it’s not an ideal approach. However, because the data comes packaged that way, it’s hard to model anything without copying that.
The point of this model is not to advocate it in this precise form, but to bring out what scale of change would be possible for a particular form of fee liability.
A more radical, and carefully argued and well-evidenced, rearrangement of fee and grant subsidies has been proposed for Wales by the Diamond Committee. The Welsh Government has accepted the recommendations and recently finished consulting on the detail of implementing it. The change has cross-party support, and support from the NUS Wales and Universities Wales. Anyone interested in this debate should read that report (here), as a further example of the range of possibilities.
What about other objections to fees?
If your objection to fees is that higher education is a public good and therefore students shouldn’t have to contribute on principle, I have bad news. Scotland crossed that ideological bridge a long time ago and is now £500m a year into that territory, because all student loan debt is a form of student contribution, whether it’s for living costs or fees. Moreover, there is no realistic chance that the Scottish Government is going to reduce its reliance on student loans to underwrite the higher education system. £500m is roughly the annual cost of the whole FE system, or 1p on the basic rate of income tax.
A separate objection to fees is that they create a “weakest to the wall” market in higher education. That’s not a necessary effect in the model above, in which the SFC continues to decide where the funded places are, and fully funds the fees of three-quarters of Scottish undergraduate students and half the cost of the rest. It is entirely possible to seek a fee contribution from some students (or even all) in a system as planned as the current one, without moving to a quasi-voucher market.
Another objection is that fees change the nature of higher education, converting what should be a purely educational relationship into a purchase, and positioning students as consumers (some people are for this, but many are not). Around half of students in Scottish universities already pay fees, including many on full-time undergraduate courses (overseas students, rUK students). Many others are already taking out large loans to pay for their living costs. Would asking some, or even all, Scottish undergraduate students to borrow to cover some of the cost of tuition create a dramatic cultural shift from where we already are? That’s debatable at best, I think.
But even if you believe that all the things above would be unavoidable and undesirable, is the price now being paid to avoid them defensible? In order to shelter everyone from any fee at all, we have designed a system which means student debt has to be shouldered disproportionately by those from lower incomes, while people from the most well-off backgrounds are routinely leaving university debt free. It’s the least well-off students bearing most of the cost of these principles.
Investing in grants vs other things
One of the arguments often made for fees is that access to HE remains socially skewed and it would be better, and fairer, to subsidise HE students less and spend more on levels of education which everyone uses. The model above doesn’t address that, because it doesn’t release any cash, it just moves it around between existing students.
The model also therefore doesn’t deal with the relative under-supply of places in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK. A thousand extra places fully funded for fees and grant would cost around £10m. Nor does the model offer universities any additional funding per student: increasing university spending has often (though not always) been behind fee rises.
To deal with these issues as well in any serious way would mean a higher fee, and/or one which was less heavily means-tested, and/or ceasing to provide EU students with free tuition (recalling that none of the sums above included them).
SAAS funds just under 15,000 EU students. The total current spending on them is around £100m a year (15,000 x £7,000: they cannot claim maintenance grant). We don’t know yet what the Scottish Government will decide to do about this group.
In 2010-11, the SG was actively seeking ways to charge these students at least something (here). My assumption is that, once EU law ceases to apply and once the current commitment to the 2017 and 2018 entry cohorts has been met, the SG will return to the issue of how it can reduce its spending on this group in some way, so that some or all of the cash is available for other things. At a time other things are under pressure, the sum at stake simply looks too large at first sight to be affordable as a voluntary symbolic gesture.
Where next?
One of the great campaigning coups of the past 20 years has been the success with which so many people have been persuaded that free tuition is essential to widening access and that defending it must be given absolute priority over improving (or even just protecting) levels of student grant. Thus grants in Scotland were cut by a third in 2013 with the support of NUS Scotland, and no outcry beyond the parliamentary opposition parties. Grants are important too, it is sometimes conceded, but not so important we should give an inch on free tuition to spend more on them. According to this view, the only proper way to increase grants is by finding the cash from some other budget, or more tax, and until that happens it is better to put up with what we have than to raid the fee budget.
I don’t expect any real shift in policy here or even in what people are prepared to debate. The SNP, the Scottish Greens, Scottish Labour and the Liberal Democrats all supported free tuition in the 2016 Holyrood elections (though at least the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats also mentioned increasing means-tested grants, and the SNP said it would “work to improve” them). The Conservative offering on fees was much more cautious than the model above, limited to something like the old graduate endowment, and would have raised a relatively small amount, and not for several years.
The appearance of any proposal like the one discussed here tends to trigger Spanish Inquisition-like questioning of Scottish opposition politicians about whether they will rule out tuition fees (grants don’t get a look in), with a moment’s hesitancy being taken as political death. This – for the avoidance of doubt – is an absolutely brilliant state of affairs for people whose parents can fund them through university but much worse news for people whose parents can’t.
This positioning of tuition fees as a box which must never be opened even a crack benefits one section of society. It’s the one I know best, and it has always been good at identifying high-minded arguments in defence of its own interests. But rarely so successful as in this case at persuading other people that they must leave their barricade neglected, and come and defend its one instead. It’s been a rather one-sided vision of solidarity so far.
But here we are. The maths of a more even sharing debt among students in Scotland is really pretty easy. The politics look as impossible as ever.
Footnote 1: Living costs don’t matter as much as fees because …
Students can live at home: (a) no, they can’t all do that, (b) even for those who can, it will not always be a particularly good idea and (c) even when it’s a good option, those students still need to be fed, to travel (especially, often, travel) and to have clothes, books and so on, and it’s not reasonable to expect families on low incomes to absorb these costs unaided.
Also, that students can work is not a killer argument against the equal importance of living cost support. There’s a growing literature on the impact of working, especially in term-time. It’s not all discouraging: some types of working, at some level, for some people, appear to be fine. But the overwhelming message is that those students who don’t take on paid employment, especially in term, will tend to get more out of higher education, academically and in other ways.
But there’s a more fundamental problem with saying that fee loans are a problem, but maintenance loans aren’t, because people can work. It confuses the income and expenditure sides of the equation. Logically, you might as well say fee loans wouldn’t be an issue, given a high enough level of grant, because people could work to pay their fees. Unless you accept the second of these arguments, you can’t use the first.
Footnote 2: Actual upfront fees – the 1998 reforms
In 1998, the UK government introduced an upfront yearly fee of £1,000. It was means-tested (this is generally forgotten), so that – roughly – the top third by income paid the whole amount, the middle third some of it, and the lowest third by income, nothing. The dedicated fee loan had not yet been invented (though living cost loans were boosted with the idea people might choose to use some of the extra amount borrowed to cover the cost). The change was very unpopular with those who had to pay, and the way it was discussed obscured that many paid nothing or only part. It was also accompanied by the abolition of grants, but that attracted much less fuss, as did their reintroduction in 2004.
The 1999 Scottish elections were dominated by 1998 fee regime and the sense that fees must be an immediate cost to families persists in Scotland still. However, when fees ceased to be means-tested in 2006, the UK government also enabled them to be deferred using a government subsidised loan. In passing, this means that nowhere in the UK since 1962 have first-time full-time low-income students been expected to find the cost of an upfront fee with no form of government help. But you could be forgiven for not knowing that, from the political rhetoric.
Footnote 3: Debt effects in England
Researchers looking at the statistics, and interviewing students, have discovered a high degree of willingness (not necesssarily enthusiasm, just willingness) to borrow among young students of all backgrounds in England. Participation rates there, including for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, have increased at least as quickly as in Scotland. This is not the same as saying no-one, anywhere has ever been deterred, and there’s more evidence that older, especially part-time, students are more debt averse. But the last 20 years of data from England (and comparisons with Scotland) on participation levels and access have generally not been as helpful to advocates of free tuition as they might have hoped.
This piece, written in late March, considered how governments across the UK might respond to the sudden loss of earned income many students would be facing. It argued that for some students additional earnings are an essential part of making ends meet and that one quick response would be to increase maintenace loan entitlements, particularly for those not already entitled to the highest levels of support, with decisions about how to treat those loans long-term left for later. I said, “I’d be surprised if people in government and higher education across the UK are not already looking at action in this area”.
A month on, what action has there been?
Reducing students’ costs
This is an equation with two sides. Students not being asked to pay rent for accommodation they are not using is the main obvious reason the crisis might cause their costs to come down.
Action here appears to have been patchy. Rent waivers for university-owned accommodation look pretty widespread, although sometimes on condition of leaving almost immediately, which not all students affected may have found easy to manage. Some of the large commerical providers, such as Unite, also made early decisions to release students from contracts. Not all mass private providers have, however, nor all individual private landlords (see this story from Northern Ireland, for example). There has been one survey (I’m not quickly finding the link but will add it if I can later) which appeared to confirm that students were far from guaranteed rent reductions.
Students living at home already were not in a position to benefit from rent waivers, and some may be in households where the collective income has suffered more generally and the pressure to contribute will feel greater than before. These students are likely to be saving more than others on transport costs, especially where refunds on season tickets are available (as in the Greater Glasgow area), but as in the case of Glasgow, these refunds may take a while to arrive.
Part-time students will have been particularly vulnerable to sudden income loss, although they are also more likely to be in more permanent forms of employment covered by some sort of emergency income protection.
Income
On the income side, responses have varied across the four nations.
In England, the Student Loans Company site has posted this Q&A. The message is reassurance of business as usual, with some compassionate concessions on administrative points. If the household income on which support was originally calculated has suddenly dropped this year, the 2019-20 entitlement can be recalculated, as current rules allow, but not immediately, also following current rules. The only clear change in immediate practice or policy appears to be that students overpaid in previous periods will not be pursued for now for repayments.
Welsh students are offered a very similar set of Q&A, as are those from Northern Ireland.
The Scottish Government appears to be the only one so far which has released any additional cash: what is described here as a “£5 million package of emergency financial support”. The detailed notes describe this as made up of £2m for further education and £2.2m for higher education, in addition to a previous £0.569m for HE (implying a total amount £4.769m). The £5m (the figure widely used by others: on the SAAS website, in the NUS press release welcoming the announcement here and in press reporting) therefore looks at first sight to involve some rounding up, by £0.231m (4.8%), unless there is a further reserve whose placing is still undecided. The HE component is to be disbursed by HE institutions as part of their hardship funds.
The SG announcement is a positive move (though it would be better for trust in government if it had been subject to less gung-ho rounding) and intelligently takes advantage of hardship funds as a rapid route for dispensing cash. But it will not stretch far. There are around 120,00 students in full-time undergraduate HE supported by the Scottish Government (£4.79m/120,000=£23), plus many more part-time and post-graduate ones, and ones from outside Scotland but who have had to stay here, all of whom could in theory have a call on hardship funds.
According to The Guardian today NUS president Zamzam Ibrahim has “called on the government to set up a £60m student hardship fund to help support those who are struggling financially.” This would suggest extra support in England on a similar level to what has been offered in Scotland.
It is not clear if there is any appetite across the UK for a larger scheme, and what support there would be for one based on releasing additional loan, or what sort of take up such a scheme might have. Outwardly at least the authorities appear to be relying for now on the loss of earned income for students not giving rise to immediate critical hardship on a scale that requires major action. That feels optimistic. The Guardian also reports that “An NUS survey of 10,000 higher and further education students across the UK … found that up to 85% of working students say they will need additional financial support because they have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown.”
Even if access to additional loan could not be made available very quickly, an announcement of loan extensions coming in a couple of months might still help. Many students rely heavily on earnings over the summer, a period student funding is already not designed to cover. Full-time students are not eligible for unemployment benefits.
Of course, there will be students who have picked up extra shifts in supermarkets, for example, but the loss of opportunities in the hospitality and leisure industries is going to hit hard. My instinct remains that a more systematic, structural response is going to be needed to avoid many students facing serious hardship up to and including to the point where they may have to drop out, simply in order to obtain benefits. Only the Welsh system, which offers all students the maximum amount for living costs, has some in-built insulation, and even that may not be enough.
Zamzam Ibrahim is reported as believing that “students were in danger of being overlooked”. At the moment that looks a reasonable worry. I still hope people are looking at the more substantial options for intervention here.
Footnote
While student support has not received much obvious attention, the large financial risks to universities have been widely discussed, with talks reported already to be underway between universities and governments in different parts of the UK. The central issue, massive anticipated losses in income, particularly due to a large fall in overseas students, has been well-covered across the media. The Wonkhe website is a good place to look for lots of thought-provoking pieces on what HE faces and how it might need to respond. Alex Usher in Canada has been pressing for institutions to grasp the full implications of students being unable to return to campus in any number until at least January.
Some of this debate applies UK wide, but by no means all. The debate in England about tighter management of unconditional offers, and fears that some universities will scoop the pool to the detriment of others, to fill missing overseas student places, does not resonate in Scotland, where de facto number controls on recruitment by each institution persist.
While the loss of overseas students affects all parts of the UK, as HEPI research showed in 2017, backed by more recent work by Audit Scotland, Scottish HEIs are unlike those in England in relying on cross-subsidy from overseas students to prop up domestic teaching costs, which are not fully covered by the funding the Scottish Government provides direct to universities for the teaching of Scottish undergraduates. Scottish universities which have fewer overseas students as a proportion of their intake were already living closer to this problem than those with more: but it now becomes a clear sector-wide issue. As argued here (in 2015, this is a long-standing point) despite the rhetoric about differences in HE systems across the UK, participation in the market for overseas students is a central part of Scottish Government HE strategy, for financial as well as soft diplomacy reasons.
Whether Scotland will see a drop in students from the rest of the UK is also something to think about: we are a net importer of such students, who make up around 10% of UK undergraduates here. System-wide, these students will also bring in more funding per head than Scots, though less than overseas ones. They will provide a marginal income gain but, more importantly, simply by coming here they help to sustain the sector at its present size. If students are rattling round an emptier the English system, fewer may wish to come to Scotland. The psychology of the pre-vaccine COVID era, with increased risk of sudden lock downs, may also encourage people to stay closer to home, at least for a while. We don’t know yet what will happen there, but it’s an additional exposure Scottish universities face.
As a further obvious point, while universities everywhere in the UK are now pitching for support in a context of massively increased demands on public funds but reduced tax income, Scottish ones do it from a position where their core teaching budget is already part of that competition, in contrast to other parts of the UK, particularly England and Wales. So what is given with one hand is at greater risk of being taken away by another.
Lastly, although Scotland may get its Barnett share of any rescue package devised by the UK government for institutions in England, we have a larger university sector than England, proportionate to population size. So any funds coming north will have to be spread thinner. (Conversely just for once Northen Ireland will see some benefit from being substantially under-provided.) On the other hand, the Scottish Government was on the cusp of an HE-related windfall, with EU students falling out of free tuition, which would have been expected to release around £90m over the next 4 years. The debate about what to do with that money will presumably just have taken something of a swerve.
As a policy response to all this, there still seems as yet no political appetite in Scotland for providing a new source of income for institutions by introducing loan-backed tuition fee contributions of any size, for any group of domestic undergraduates. This is despite the Scottish Government having never used anything like its full share of the student loan pot: several hundred million pounds should in theory therefore be there for easy taking, were fees introduced (the only way this could realistically be accessed: more here https://twitter.com/LucyHunterB/status/1248593756884029440?s=20). There are signs today that university leaders are beginning to challenge the assumption that this policy cannot be discussed: see here.
The lead time for introducing any policy change on fees would be at last a year. An election for Holyrood is scheduled for 2021 (already a year later it should have been). It is hard to imagine a more acute test than the current choices facing politicians of how far free tuition remains an existential policy for the SNP, which must surely anticipate it will remain the largest party, how far other parties continue to regard the issue as untouchable and how far questioning voices in the sector are prepared to challenge the existing policy.
Shortening how long students spend obtaining a degree (most often expressed as the four year degree debate in Scotland, but other versions of this argument are available) does not yet appear to be under discussion. Indeed, there is potential for serious Government-institution tension over degree length. The last thing the universities will want right now is a reduction in how many years the students they do still have are funded to spend with them, while the government has never been more incentivised to bring down the cost of producing graduates. I’ve seen one suggestion that the logic of sticking with free tuition would be (in effect) nationalising the universities, so at least they cannot technically go bankrupt: while that would be radical in constitutional terms, it would not address the fundamental balance sheet problems.
I wonder if one other issue which might be on someone’s radar is that a drop in non-Scots would be an opportunity to reverse Scotland’s lower acceptance rates for domestic applicants over the past decade. However, while that would deal with a detriment experienced by recent and current cohorts of Scottish applicants, in the absence of any change to fee policy, it is only helpful to universities if accompanied by further fee income from the government cash budget, taking us back to square one; and the knock-on effects of letting more students into university would be likely to be a drop in the take up of short-cycle HN courses in colleges, passing on some of the unversities’ problems to that tier of the system.
Substantial changes may well be needed to traditional HE systems in many jurisdictions, in response not just to immediate pressures but the longer term consequences of current events, and, like any country, Scotland will have its own particular issues there. But short-term institutional financial survival is what appears to be weighing most heavily on people’s minds across the UK right now, unsurprisingly enough. And this perhaps also explains why addressing immediate pressure on student incomes remains, I think, an area of unfinished business.
Meet Mike. Mike swims like a fish.¹
Public information films were a constant of my 1970s childhood. Some I can still quote (see above). With others what wasn’t said or shown left the greater impression: if you too grew up in a farming area in this period decades later you may still recoil at the words “slurry pit”, even if you have never seen one.
In the discussion of what happens over the rest of this year, there is much talk about how and when people will be allowed greater freedoms. Perhaps schools will re-open before other things, or masks may be compulsory. The focus is on the content of policy to come.
Since the start of offical restrictions, I have done all our food shopping, applying a calculation that the other adult in the house is older and male and therefore more at risk. Without exception, these trips to the supermarket have required ninja skills to avoid being within one metre, let alone two, of anyone else no more than once every few minutes. Whatever I had done, other than walk out of the shop (which I have, once) it would have been impossible to get well down the shopping list without multiple close encounters of the unchosen kind.
Having now found a time and place which seems to be predictably very quiet, last time out I still reckon that I had to swerve, reverse or (with no space to move) just put up with someone coming within a few feet between 10 and 20 times over perhaps 20-25 minutes. That excludes the aisles I didn’t go down because someone was standing right in the middle having a long think. It’s true that one man and his son were giving a good demonstration of Brownian motion wherever they happened to be, but they were not alone. My rough calculation is that up to a third of people were somewhere between largely oblivious and possibly even (just going by demeanour) resentful of physical distancing rules.
I’ve seen a lot of praise from government for how well people are observing the “stay at home” message. It’s less clear, not just from my own experience but from what I see on social media, that the message that how you behave while you are out can be equally life-saving has sunk in equally well. I could at this point mention the footage from Westminster Bridge last week.
Yet whenever and however restrictions are loosened, how well physical distancing is observed looks likely to be critical to how far and how long allowing people more freedom of movement can be sustained without provoking a further spike in infection and potential re-tightening of the rules, and along the way avoidable deaths.
The time to get people absorbing a message about keeping their distance and acquiring new habits is not when any rules are loosened, but now, before they are. Perhaps government has its own intelligence suggesting these rules are better understood and observed than assumed here. Perhaps Cameron Toll and Straiton in Edinburgh are particular hotbeds of distance-denial. I am doubtful, though.
When the time comes we will not always be able observe a 2m distance. Our pavements are too narrow, and as roads get busier, walking in the road will become much more dangerous (of course, there is also a movement for temporary road closures). Our buildings are not routinely designed with such wide corridors. But risk management is about risk reduction, not risk elimination. Wherever there is space, it needs to be used and where there isn’t, people still need to do what they can. But this will not work if more than a very small proportion of people do not join in: it does not take many free spirits to crash through everyone else’s efforts here.
The law is not much use for this, I think. A regulation requiring a blanket 2m distance would be hugely impractical, even if we were all issued with giant crinolines. Put in caveats about “where possible” and it becomes hard to enforce. Perhaps some obligation could be placed on employers to make reasonable arrangements for distancing their staff. But for the general population out and about what is needed is a new Mike.
The public information message has been very strong on #StayHome. But we also need #KeepBack (or whatever) and we need that well before any rules are loosened, emphatically and inescapably. Governments need to research urgently what is going on with the people who seem to be finding this hardest to do, whether they fit any particular demographic, and target them hard. Maybe many of the people who seem to me to be radiating a low level sense of fury at any disruption to their normality are in fact just scared or preoccupied. Maybe others think they are doing the right thing and just have no idea what these distances mean. I wonder about any public message involving any figure, even just “2”, in a world where a distressing number of people appear actively frightened of numbers.
We have a whole advertising industry which exists to do behavioural influencing, employing very clever people. If loosening the current rules is accompanied by a minority of people grasping with relief the chance to behave as though everything is completely back to normal, we are likely to spend longer in cycles of release and restrict, and the overall economic hit is likely to be harder. It is in the interest of the advertising industry to put its talent at the service of avoiding this.
However and whenever things change, learning to keep our distance from each other as much as possible outside our own homes is going to be part of the making this work as well as it can and a necessary part of how we live perhaps for quite a long time to come. It will save lives. Perhaps more vulnerable people will not need to be so restricted for so long. Like handwashing, this is an issue for public education, not law, and the time for that is as soon as possible. If the achievement of physical distancing is left to current levels of public information, whenever the rules are loosened, I reckon my current ninja supermarket shopping will feel like a walk in a heavily-policed park by comparison. Unless they know for sure that what’s evident in south Edinburgh is exceptional, it looks as though governments need to get to work on influencing our behaviour harder on this now, to monitor it, and to take into account how well we are doing in deciding what to do and when. On this, we will sink or swim together.
¹ It’s very 70s. You have been warned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FsEi2us88
Many students depend heavily on part-time work to make up their income, in the sort of sectors which will be most heavily hit right now. Fortunately, many of them are also already within a form of welfare (though we don’t often think of it as that) through the student finance system. This post suggests some quick decisions which could be made about student finance to help deal with lost income. It looks just at those who are on the main student support package, so excludes those on special packages, which includes nursing and midwifery students in the devolved nations. Their situation is likely to become a separate debate.
A quick search just now doesn’t bring up any announcements on student funding in any part of the UK yet, but that could change quickly. I’d be surprised if people in government and higher education across the UK are not already looking at action in this area.
This post looks particularly at Scotland and Wales, but similar arguments apply for England and Northern Ireland.
Cutting costs
What’s happening on the other side of the equation from income obviously matters. The largest outgoing for those away from home is rent, paid to universities, individual private landlords and, more and more, mass private providers of student accommodation. Rent holidays would be the largest single thing that would take the financial pressure off the student population. So whatever is being done to make those a reality needs to take in student accommodation, and students as private renters. For specialist mass providers, universities and private, allowing contracts to be ended early would also help, and any help with covering the cost to providers of doing that should be looked at as another form of call on the budget for rent support.
Mortgage holidays will affect fewer students directly, but will be relevant to some mature students, particularly, and ought to feed through into suspended rent payments, in some cases.
Commuting students will see their costs fall – but not if they are locked into annual passes. So they will have an interest in anything being done to write off unused travel pass periods.
Substituting for lost work
Action on rent will take off much of the pressure, but the student body is very variable in its needs and some flexibility on the income side will also make sense. Not all students live away from home, and students who live at home use part-time work to deal with financial pressures too.
In Wales, every student living away from home is already entitled to £9,225 of support through a combination of loan and grant (£8,100 grant at lowest incomes, tapering to minimum universal £1,000 regardless of income). For those living at home, it is £7,840 (and those in London £11,530). Details are here. Particularly if there is quick action on rents, the Welsh system already provides a form of universal income that might be enough as it stands, as long as people can apply late for support they had not expected to use.
Total living cost support in other parts of the UK declines as family income rises, and is lower, and there is a more obvious case for intervention.
In Scotland at the moment the situation for full-time undergraduates is what’s shown below (young students top, mature students bottom). The sums are the same wherever students live or study.
I am worried particularly about those people on the £4,750 package who already didn’t have easy access to parental support (£34,000 is not a high household income), and who are very likely to be relying substantially on part-time working.
There is no way the Scottish Government outlay on student loans in the current or next financial year is going to be its pro rata share of outlay in England, so getting Treasury permission to turn on the loan tap more should be open to it as a quick way of easing cash flow pressures on students. Whether additional borrowing provided this way can be commuted to grant, or else written off, would be a decision for later. There would be choices to be made about how much extra loan, and who for, but at minumum lifting the maximum loan for people in the lowest support category looks easily justified.
Changes in parental circumstances
There will also be students whose parents suddenly cannot provide as much help as they did before. An emergency loan extension facility, which again might later be commuted or written off, would be an immediate help for that group also.
Administration
The main practical issue is likely to be having people available to process applications and issue loans, at SAAS and the SLC. That argues for doing things that are as simple as possible in form.
Institutional support
Hardship funds and institutional bursaries are an existing safety valve. But the scale of the call and pressure on administrative staff is likely to limit what can be done with those.
Overview
In Scotland, all these things point to a case for some form of emergency extension of the student loan scheme, which might be as simple as a flat-rate additional borrowing extension to everyone, with the ability to turn round applications quickly the main challenge, particularly for those who are not already borrowers.
Regular readers of this blog will know I am an advocate of student grants. But the reality of the scale of the cash call on government budgets right now means that in this one area where there is an established loan scheme, it offers an additional way of addressing immediate financial hardship, whatever later decisions are taken about what to do about such additional debts. The main argument against relying just on this looks to be how quickly national bodies can process applications, compared to institutions, who will tend to have more facility to move quickly.
Northern Irish students are also on a very restricted level of living cost support, and will face similar pressure on lost work. For English students, living cost support is generally higher than in Scotland or Northern Ireland, but below that for Wales, and England has the same tapering that will catch out students whose family income suddenly drops, or who were already heavily reliant on part-time work to fill the gap left by the state.
In these strange times, student finance may look like a minor issue. But not for those who rely on it. Rent holidays and shortened tenancies will help this group, but the potential for using the student loan system as a source of short-term relief deserves attention too.
The latest UCAS applications data got some coverage last week highlighting differences in trends between Scotland and other parts of the UK (for example https://www.scotsman.com/education/university-applications-by-18-year-olds-dip-slightly-in-scotland-1-4963636). There was an argument over whether the sharper rise in those from the most deprived areas in England (+6%) than Scotland (+3%) meant anything and what the relevance was of the higher numbers in Scotland who do an HN qualification at college without passing through UCAS, before going on to university.
These figures look at the demand for places, not who gets in. What do they show?
Cross-UK comparisons in general
Over the years, people (including the SG, which this week was arguing comparisons cannot be made) have used cross-UK comparisons of UCAS numbers to claim certain things are proved about HE policy, specifically decisions on student funding. Cross-UK comparisons are tricky: but they are not impossible, for the reasons discussed here https://wonkhe.com/blogs/comment-scottish-english-access-must-be-compared/ .
Number of 18 year olds applying
I don’t like comparing this, because there is no control for underlying year-on-year variation in the size of the age 18 population. So I won’t.
Age 18 application rate
This is a much more useful thing to compare, because it controls for fluctuations in the number of 18 year olds in each nation.
Comparing the absolute values still hits the college-level HE problem: there are people who will eventually go on to university in Scotland who are missing from these numbers.
The trend over time is the thing to focus on. It gives a decent comparable measure of how the proportion of young people interested in going straight to university from school has changed. The way age is measured by UCAS takes into account that school leavers tend to be a bit younger in Scotland (so there are relatively few under 18s in the Scottish data).
The most recent age 18 application rate figures from UCAS look like this:
Beware: the y (vertical) axis doesn’t start at zero, so this graph at first glance exagerates relative change over time.
Even so, it’s a pretty clear story of a flat line in levels of interest in Scotland and Wales, and a slight drop in Northern Ireland, since 2016, but a steady increase in England since 2016 (and longer, but 2016 is where the divergence becomes clear).
We cannot tell how far the proportion of 18 year olds applying to college in Scotland has risen or fallen over the period (no data is collected centrally on college applicants), so the invisible Scottish line which includes all applicants to any kind of HE could either have risen or fallen over the period. All we can tell is that applications for direct entry to university in particular have remained static.
If you were inclined to think that any specific detail of funding systems has less impact than is often asserted on whether school leavers will apply to university, this would be Exhibit A. Whether you were to look at total fee debt, total debt (including for living costs), the value of grant, the upfront value of all forms of living cost support (loan plus grant) or changes to the repayment terms for loans, you would struggle to find an explanation in policy variation across the UK over time for the differences between these lines.
Why the application rate for students in England has risen so consistently and unusually, even as the amount of debt involved has grown, is an obvious question. We don’t have the age 18 entry rate by region within England: the absolute numbers suggest there could be substantial variation in that, and exposing that might help isolate non-funding factors (exam results? the economy?).
Of course, effects from one or more funding changes could be being off-set by other factors. But if that thought were to be combined with the common belief that high fee/high debt systems are generally bad for demand from young people, you’d need to ask what was going in England which means the increase would have been even greater, if different funding rules had been in place.
None of this tells you what student funding policy should be, or that funding is completely irrelevant, but it does suggest simple causal arguments about the relationship between funding, particularly individual elements of that, and demand from school leavers should be avoided.
Applicants aged 19 and over
It’s harder to control for demographics once you look across other ages. The way the numbers are provided means extracting this is is fiddly, so this table only compares 2019 with 2018.
The number of applicants aged 19 and over has fallen in every UK nation: by around 3.5% England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and by 1.3% in Wales. The number of 18 year olds has been falling for a while, so the drop in 19 year olds and 20-24 year olds is likely to explained in part by that. That Wales has not seen such a fall in under 25s might be due to less acute demographic change: but if it is not that, the recent changes to student funding there might be relevant. There have been some signs from other data that older students are more sensitive to changes in funding regimes. But then Wales doesn’t have a clear advantage in students over 24, so that’s not an argument that I’d want to push too far.
The particularly large drop in 19 year old applicants in Scotland again could be down to differences in demographics. If not, it’s a bit puzzling, not least as any increased use of UCAS to record college to university moves, as has lately been encouraged, would be expected if anything to cushion the figures for that group.
Students from disadvantaged backgrounds
This year, for the first time (I think) UCAS has published figures based on the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) produced for each nation. Each IMD is different in its detailed construction, but they all measure multiple disadvantages at the level of small areas, rank these areas and then group them into 5 bands (quintiles), from the most to least disadvantaged. Quintile 1 covers the 20% of most disadvantaged areas. The figures here are still not strictly comparable between nations but they ought to be better than previous cross-UK measures for comparing by area type. The SG’s long-standing line, used again this week, that UCAS’s measures of disadvantage in different nations are comparing different things now feels a bit out of date.
Area measures do not tell us directly about individual disadvantage and it could still be that the relationship between area and individual disadvantage varies by nations (perhaps low income people are more concentrated in multiple disadvantage areas in one nation compared to another, for example).
Still, area disadvantage in the Scottish Government’s benchmark for success in widening access so it is not off the wall to compare these numbers.
The percentage change for 18 year olds and for all applicants in each nation by IMD quintile is shown below, along with the overall change in the age 18 population, for context.
The press association story linked above compared the +6% in Q1 in England for 18 year olds with the +3% in Scotland. The age 18 population has dropped a bit more here, but not enough to explain the gap.
It’s imperfect, but I think it’s reasonable to say that over the last year applications from school leavers direct to university from the most disadvantaged 20% of areas have risen faster in England than Scotland. Wales and Northern Ireland both look less good again. Scotland has a particualrly sharp cliff-edge between Q1 and the rest. This may reflect the recent intense policy focus on Q1 in Scotland.
Across all ages, things look better for Scotland compared to England in IMD Q1, though less good outside those areas, including in Q2. Again the cliff edge between Q1 and the rest is much sharper in Scotland.
A wider point is that single year comparisons are generally less revealing than those looking over a longer period, so a further piece of work could use the IMD figures going back further, and control for changes in the number of 18 year olds over a longer time.
Conclusion
UCAS is the nearest thing we have to a measure for demand for university places. With the move to publishing IMD figures for every nation, our abilty to compare groups of applicants by area type, at least, has improved. An application rate at 18 for each IMD quintile in each nation would be even better, because that would remove any remaining demographic effects.
Even allowing for all the limitations, these figures show that:
- over recent years demand from school leavers has grown faster in England than in other parts of the UK;
- in the past year at least demand from school leavers has grown faster in the 20% of most disadvantaged areas in England than in Scotland (and Wales and Northern Ireland are both further behind);
- the fall in applicants aged 19+ over the past year is negligibly different between England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, but Wales fell less; and
- in the past year Scotland saw faster growth, relative to the other nations, for applicants in total, of all ages, from the most disadvantaged 20% of areas, although both for 18 year olds and all ages the cliff edge in the year-on-year change between Q1 and other area types was especially sharp in Scotland.
Comparing IMD figures over several years would reveal more.
UCAS numbers remain a dubious basis for making claims about the inherent superiority or inferiority of any nation’s student funding system. Still, something has stimulated faster growth in demand from school leavers, specifically, including those from the most disadvantaged areas, in England since 2016. What that might be, however, is a whole other question.
Note on data
All data available here: https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/undergraduate-statistics-and-reports/ucas-undergraduate-releases/applicant-releases-2019-cycle/2019-cycle-applicant-figures-30-june-deadline
Change in the total number of 18 year olds in each nation extrapolated from the application rate and absolute numbers in 2018 and 2019.
An announcement is expected soon on living cost support for students in Scotland, expanding on a few things made public this weekend. This looks likely to be the formal response to last year’s Scottish Government review of student funding.
This post provides some context for any announcement, by bringing together information for the four UK nations on living cost support for full-time undergraduate students in higher education. Unlike the Diamond review in Wales in 2016, the Scottish review did not make proposals for post-graduate or part-time students, although it did also cover support in FE.
Why make comparisons? Mainly because claims of being “best in the UK” have been used repeatedly to justify developments in Scotland over recent years, and might be expected to be made again. The main message from the material below is that comparisons here are complicated: beware of sweeping claims to “bestness”.
Total value of maintenance support
The analysis below covers support for students studying HE-level courses, whether at college or university.
(i) Away from home
The majority of students from all UK nations live away from the parental home, including those from Scotland. These students will tend to face the highest costs, especially for housing.
The graph below shows the total value of support, i.e. any grant plus loan, currently on offer for students living away from home in 2018-19 in the different UK nations. Also included (dotted line) is the proposal from the Scottish student support review. The graph shows what students get if they take out their whole loan: different approaches in the UK to loan and grant are looked at in more detail below.
Scotland on current plans sits some way below Wales and England, except at the highest incomes, with a maximum of £7,625. It is above Northern Ireland at incomes below £34,000, and marginally below at higher ones. Generally, families in Scotland are expected to find a lot more upfront help than those in Wales or England, especially once income tips £19,000 and until it reaches over £50,000. The Scottish system is often held up as being distinctive in the UK because it is not based on “ability to pay” (the FM repeated this at the weekend): but if your pre-tax household income is £25,000, your family is currently expected to find some £2,500, or more, a year upfront towards your keep than they would be in some other parts of the UK.
If the Scottish government accepts the review’s recommendation that all students should have access to £8,100, by increasing student loans, and implements it in time for 2018-19, total support will still be higher in Wales, but only in England at incomes up to £29,000. The change would substantially improve the total support offered at lowish-to-middle incomes..
In the nations other than Scotland students get around an additional £2,000 if they study in London and are living away from home (not shown in graph for simplicity), meaning that for students in London, Scotland is the least generous nation.
(ii) Living at home
Scotland has a larger minority of students living in the parental home than elsewhere (it is hard to get good data, but the figure looks to be around 45%). In the other UK nations, such students get around £1,500 less than those away from home, but the Scottish system does not make this deduction, so Scotland compares better for this group, sitting just £25 below Wales at incomes below £19,000. It is also above England up to £19,000, but is substantially less generous for some incomes not much above that. It is always better than Northern Ireland.
If the student support review recommendation is accepted, then Scotland will have the highest support in the UK for those living at home. Having the highest combined grant and loan package for this group can only offer a limited basis for claiming “bestness” however, as:
- Much of this support is offered as loan, while these students appear less likely than others to borrow, and may even live at home partly to reduce their borrowing, meaning the notional amount is less likely to be realised in practice. Students living at home who choose only to take their grant will do better in Wales and Northern Ireland (see below).
- Many students do not have the option of living at home.
- It is students who live away from home who face the highest costs.
(iii) Part-time undergraduates
Part-time students in Wales and England will receive a pro rata share of the main living cost package from 2018-19. On current arrangements, this will not be the case in Scotland and the student support review did not include part-time students its costings. So the Scottish government would have to go further than the review recommendations to do anything for this group.
(iv) FE students
Scotland is already providing much more support to this group than other UK nations (I don’t have charts for that: it is evident from a general scan of the situation). Adopting the review proposal to put them onto the total value of support as HE students would reinforce that. However, the review recommends doing this through both an increase in bursary and the introduction of loans into FE. Take up of loans is already lower among HE students in college than in university: it seems likely therefore that take-up among FE students in practice of the new full £8,100 grant and loan package would be limited. The review’s proposed higher maximum grant of £4,050 would however still compare well with other parts of the UK, just by itself.
Overall comparison
A full comparison of living cost support means looking at the balance of grant and loan, and once loan comes into play, it is misleading not to bring in debt for fees.
The chart below shows how systems compare at various incomes for those living away, but studying in their home nation. For the English and Welsh, crossing a border within the UK makes no substantial difference, but for the Scots and Northern Irish, you have to imagine a £9,250 additional fee charge if they wish or need to do so.
Above the line in blue is the value of upfront living cost support (“spending power”), separated into grant and loan, with the impact of acting on the review recommendation shown as an additional element for Scotland. Below the line in red is the associated debt, separated for fee and living cost loans. The living cost debt mirrors the spending power given by the loan.
(The chart for those living at home would be similar, but takes about £1,500 off the maintenance loan elements above and below the line for the nations other than Scotland.)
The comparison above works best for those on identical length courses, such as one and two year HNs, or degrees which take the same length of time in all parts of the UK. However, an honours degree in Scotland takes 4 years compared to a more typical 3 in the rest of the UK. The chart below is therefore a better comparison for most honours degree students. Above the line it still shows the annual value of living cost support, as this is consumed immediately; but below the line, it now shows accumulated debt over the period of study.
If an extra year of study is factored in, Scotland is already similar to Wales, especially for mature students. At low incomes, these two will be near-identical, in terms of total annual living cost help and accumulated debt, if the Scottish review recommendations are accepted. For mature students at the lowest incomes (which is most mature students), the marginally higher debt in Wales is all due to their great spending power. [Note added: The difference in interest rates while students study is not added in here. Relative to lower interest Scotland/NI, that adds £3-4k for those at incomes up to £35k in Wales, but more for those where gap is already larger, ie with higher borrowing in Wales and England.]
At lower incomes, if you can save a year of study by not being in the Scottish system, Northern Ireland is already the lowest debt nation, reflecting that living cost loans are very limited, as well as fees being lower than in Wales or England. It will be the lowest debt nation on this model at all incomes, if the Scottish review recommendations are implemented, again reflecting its less generous living cost support.
England is always much higher, and Wales joins it as income rises, yet again because it uses loan to offer more living cost support at higher incomes. This chart cannot show:
- how far take-up of loan will vary in practice, especially of living cost loan. Maintenance loan take-up is 85%+ in the rest of the UK, but only about 70% in Scotland, where there is substantial non-borrowing especially among students from higher incomes. How far higher income Welsh students use their new, higher loan will be something to watch.
- the effect of the higher interest used in England and in Wales. In Wales this is partially off-set by a flat-rate write-off of £1,500 as soon as a graduate starts to repay, which will remove some or all of the the effect of higher interest during study, but not later.
- how far headline debt will translate into actual repayments: higher debts are less likely to be repaid in full than lower ones.
The last point is critical, but very hard to predict. Higher interest will further increase the total cost of repayments, in England and in Wales. But write-offs are expected to have most impact on the highest borrowers. Then again, even among the English and Welsh, some people will still feel the full force of their initial borrowing: there will be higher earners who receive no write off, and middle earners who do benefit from a write-off, but mainly or all of accumulated interest.Thus the difference in costs by country actually experienced over time should be less stark on average than shown in the graph, especially for women, who tend to earn less than men, but the variation round the average for students who left HE with similar debt will be very large for England especially.
Is anyone best in the UK?
It really does depends who you are, what you care about, who you regard as equivalent to who, and how you take into account that some of the difference in debt is because students get different levels of benefit in different systems.
Scotland is already best for FE-level students, regardless of any further announcements made this week.
For HE, if your family finds it hard or impossible to support you, Wales’ post-Diamond review package works best, taking the pressure off family contributions across the board. At lower incomes it offers this help almost all in the form – grant – likeliest to be taken up, so that overall debt for this group is similar to that for fee-free Scots, especially mature Scots.
If you are going to be a pretty lower earner who is unlikely to pay back much of your debt (a group which will disproportionately be women), again the Welsh system looks best: generous upfront support at little later cost. However, if the Scottish review is implemented, future low earners who can live with their parents while they study will get most to live on in Scotland.
Similarly, if you are part-time, and cannot contemplate studying without help with living costs, you want to be in Wales or otherwise England, where there’s at least the option of a loan. In both those nations, however, you will need to be willing also to borrow for fees.
On the other hand, if you are full-time, young and from a family who can manage to cover much of your living costs in cash and kind, and want to and can get a place in Scotland, Scotland offers the best deal, with the option even of emerging debt-free. Don’t be a Scot who wants to study in London, though: they get an unusually raw deal of relatively poor living cost help plus fees. The Scottish system is generally poor for border crossers, as is the Northern Irish one: both are high debt, for limited upfront help.
Both England and Scotland suffer from skewing debt towards those at lower incomes, which is an ethical rather than a practical point, complicated by the theoretical possibility that later write-off will mostly smooth out differences in initial borrowing: that is much more likely to hold true in England, but even then only up to a point, and doesn’t look at first sight to hold well for Scotland at all, but ask me again about that when I have finished the PhD.
In other words, the only way to deal with any claims about bestness in student support is to test them in detail. The question is always, best in what way, for who? Best of all of course might be for governments (and others: the recent student support review didn’t cover itself with glory here either) to stop making general claims like this at all. With a much-trailed announcement coming soon in Scotland, I wouldn’t however advise throwing away your bingo card just yet.
What to make of announcements at yesterday’s SNP conference about student funding? The most comprehensive information comes from the Scottish Government’s press release .
Loan repayment rules
The increase in the repayment threshold for student loans from April 2021 is a clear improvement. The current threshold for student from Scotland (and Northern Ireland) is £18,330: the figure rises each year roughly in line with inflation. The increase means that from April 2021 those earning between whatever £18,330 has been inflated to by then (somewhere in £19-20k range) and £25,000 will cease to make any payment. Those earning over £25,000 will pay a bit less than £600 a year less than now. The £25,000 limit matches that applying already in England and in Wales, and is higher than than the £22,000 which was in the 2016 SNP Holyrood manifesto and the current Programme for Government, and endorsed by the Scottish Government’s student support review last November.
Another improvement is the reduction in the period before a loan is written off, from 35 to 30 years, bringing Scotland into line with the rest of the UK.
Why these changes improve the situation for lower-earning graduates is discussed in more detail in this post. That post, which drew attention to Scotland’s unusually strict repayment terms within the UK, was written in March 2014. NUS Scotland’s campaign for change came subsequently, manifesto commitments were made by the SNP and other parties in 2016, and the changes will take effect in 2021. So improvement will have been a long time coming, but it is at least now firmly scheduled for the future. The impact will first be felt a week or so before the next Holyrood election by those with month-end wage payments, as an increase in take-home pay of up to £50 a month, and so just meets the “within this parliament” promise in the SNP manifesto. Scrutiny of the decision ought to examine why it is not being implemented any sooner.
Increased grant for care experienced students
In March 2016 the Widening Access Commission recommended all support for care experienced students in higher education should be provided as grant. At that point, all young students unable to declare any family income were on a grant of £1750 and a loan of £5750. As most care experienced students would be expected to fall into the group with no family income, they were very likely to be among those who had suffered a cash loss when the maximum YSB was cut (from £2640 to £1750) in 2013, and who were faced with the choice of getting less support or borrowing more. The new 100% grant was implemented in 2017-18.
The announcement means first that the 100% grant support for these students in HE will increase from £7,625 to £8,100 from this autumn, increasing their support by 6%. The total maximum value of support has been held at £7,625 since 2015-16; this increase is enough to restore these students’ support to its 2015-16 real terms value (which was worth around £8060 at current prices). The change has been announced relatively late for the academic year 2018-19, so that the relevant SAAS literature is suddenly out of date. In practice, the delay probably will not have mattered for individual decision-making.
The other, more significant, change is that the same grant will be made available to care experienced students in FE. FE here refers to the level of study, not the place: there are HE students in college, on HN courses. Care experienced students in FE are currently on a lower bursary of £4,185, and no loan. So this almost doubles their funding, and is a major improvement. For this group, the lateness of the announcement is more likely to mean some people may already have discounted continuing in education for financial reasons who might not otherwise have done so, but this will still be substantial useful funding for those who do enter from this autumn.
The Scottish Government expects the change under this heading to cost around £5.5 million. Most of this cost is likely to be incurred in FE, where funding will rise by almost £4,000 a person. I can’t quickly find numbers for the take up of the existing bursary in HE, but a £475 increase per head won’t cost much there. It probably is not a coincidence that in the budget last autumn (p73) the additional £5m was identified for implementing the student support review was added to the budget of the SFC, which administers FE bursaries, rather than to the budget of SAAS which covers HE. Scrutiny here might look at why the specific use of the SFC’s £5m could not be announced any earlier, to aid student decision-making for 2018 entry.
The main student support arrangements
The final element of the announcement, on which more detail is promised in the press release “in the coming days”, is that
£16 million will be invested next year in increasing college bursaries and university grants for students from the lowest income families and expand access to them
The notes to the press notice add that “Bursaries for further and higher education students will be increased from 2019/20.” This is helpful, as the First Minister’s speech (here at c21:40mins onwards, or text here) was less clear on timing, with the FM stating “as a first step, we will spend £16m next year to increase college bursaries and university grants … “. The next academic year starts in August, but next financial one is 2019-20, so it’s important to know which was meant.
Total spending on means-tested bursaries in HE is around £60m, and on FE bursaries it is around £90m, so the proposed increase across all bursary spending is around 10%.
£16m is exactly the amount the student support review calculated it would cost to increase the existing bursary in FE to £4,050, under its “Option 2”. For young students living at home the maximum is currently around £1,000 less than that: for older students and those living away it is already just below £4,000.
The £8,100 being used for care experienced students is also the same figure the student support review recommended as the value of combined grant and loan support for all students (as a “minimum income”). The care experienced bursary has moreover up to now been based simply on replacing the loan element of the main package with grant. So the increase to £8,100 for this group might be expected to imply that this is the new maximum which is going to apply more generally.
I wondered aloud if, if a general increase to £8,100 were planned, it would be done using loan or grant. Unprompted, the relevant SG Special Adviser appeared to answer it would be grant.
I read this initially as saying that there was indeed going to be a general increase, and it would be achieved by grant. However, realising later that the FE figure quoted is specifically for the care experienced bursary, it looks like Colin McAllister was not referring to the package of support for all, but only to that for care leavers. It remains unknown therefore whether the total value of maximum support in HE will remain the same, or be increased using loan, or using grant.
Using grant to increase the maximum to £8,100 for those at low incomes would imply a rise in maximum YSB from £1,825 to £2,350, and in ISB from £875 to £1,350. That would cost around £15m, I think. It would however also leave an even bigger drop in entitlement as soon as family income exceeded the eligibility threshold, to £1,125 YSB and zero ISB. So some extra money would probably also have to be spent on smoothing. The £16m would be all used up on HE alone.
It looks more likely therefore that the Scottish Government is heading towards accepting the review’s Option 2, at least as far as bursary is concerned. That would mean higher FE bursary and no change to HE bursary. The remaining question is then whether it will also follow the review’s proposal that total support should be raised to £8,100 for FE and HE students at all incomes, by increasing loans in HE and introducing them in FE for the first time. The review estimated this would mean issuing around £231m more in loans each year: annual lending to students is currently around £500m.
When will more be known?
The announcement “in the coming days” could be very soon. There is a PQ down for answer on Wednesday, 13 June about plans for student support. 13 June is the next Education oral PQs, and as this is from the government Chief Whip, it can safely be assumed that it is what’s politely known as an “inspired” PQ (and less politely, a “planted” one).
In passing, the phrasing is a bit odd, as it reads as though the review picked out care experienced students uniquely for a minimum income. It didn’t, but recommended this for all students, and argued that care experienced ones get it all as grant. But the reference to a minimum income does give a peg for announcing such a thing for students more generally, so the slightly peculiar wording may be deliberate.
How would living cost support in Scotland compare with other parts of the UK in 2018-19, if it was set at £8,100?
That’s a whole different blog post. I’ll do that in the comings days, as SG might say.
The SG is currently moving to a new website. The new site provides only a minimal amount of material on the student support review.
It does however give a link to the archived version of the old one. This had more documents, including a list of members and minutes. Unfortunately, clicking on the individual document links for those now produces this:
So the minutes seem not to have made it to the archived version. However, they were publicly available at least until 30 November 2017, which was the date the versions below were cached by Google (I saved them from that source on 13 December). So they are here, for anyone interested. There was also at least one meeting of the review after the summer, whose minutes never made it on online.
I presume that the appearance of the words “Virgin Money Holdings” in the tab at the top of each document reflects the system on which they were created (that would be consistent with the font not being Times New Roman, which is used widely in SG: it used to be the system default setting, with deviation discouraged, though I don’t know if that’s still the case). The tab appeared when they were originally accessed from the SG site and has stuck in my saved versions.
This post attempts to reconcile two contradictory claims.
The first is this.
However, he is previously on record as having gone to university from a comprehensive, quite specifically:
Young’s use of this scheme has attained semi-legendary qualities, as he was a grade off meeting the offer and also ignored the college’s request to obtain an additional O-level, so that according to a story he has often told, he relied on a clerical error and his father’s intervention to get a place.
Young appeared just to have admitted, therefore, to having misled Oxford about the type of school he was attending when he applied, in order to obtain easier entry. That would be something of a story for someone in his new position at the OfS, not least coming on top of what was already known about his admission.
Otherwise he appeared to be inventing a grammar school history, to deflect criticism of unpleasant comments he had made about other students when younger. The news story he refers to is here, and here are fuller quotes:
(Returning to Young’s first tweet above, the journalist might have been forgiven, one feels, for reading this as an uncomplimentary set of comments about people from grammar schools. Presumably the nuance missed was that Young and his friends meant only some people from grammar schools.)
On examination, Young turns out to have attended three secondary schools, the first two definite comprehensives (until he was 13 one in London, then one in Devon, after his family moved), and the last (where he did his A levels) a single sex grammar school back in London, which had started going comprehensive a few years earlier. In this BBC programme (at 21:55), Young says “I was in the last grammar school year” when he entered the sixth form of William Ellis.
So Young seems to have gone to Oxford from a grammar school (as far as it affected him), albeit one which was shifting to comprehensive status in the years below him. Equally, it’s reasonable to observe that he wasn’t a typical grammar school boy, not having gone through selective entry at 11. Young explains in the same BBC programme that entry to William Ellis’s sixth form had only a minimum requirement of 5 O-levels at Grade C, which he able to meet because, after resits, he had 4 such O-levels and a CSE at Grade 1, which was technically equivalent.
So it turns out Young could reasonably claim to be both a grammar school and comprehensive product, and at a grammar school or a comprehensive in his final school years, depending on how you look at it. Indeed, going through articles while researching this, he could be observed claiming to be different things at different times, depending on the context. Thus, in the Oxford Union debate which is the source of the quote at the top he referred to receiving a lower offer as a comprehensive pupil, in order to argue that these schools were damaged by depressed expectations. In arguing for his particular model of free school, however, he has compared his experience in a sixth form grammar with his earlier comprehensive period to argue for the superiority of the former.
To complicate matters, Young has only sometimes described the entry scheme as being specifically for comprehensive pupils. In a biography, he described it as being a scheme for applicants “from state schools”, which he clearly was, and expands that it allowed people to bypass sitting the entrance exam and have a “rigorous interview” instead (everyone had a rigorous interview: the difference was that the traditional exam/interview route meant successful candidates knew they were in, whatever grades they got, as long as they were at least 2Es).
Even more vaguely, he has also said he entered under
a special scheme to encourage people who weren’t ‘conventional Oxford material’ to apply to read PPE. I certainly fell into that category. I failed all my O-levels first time round and after retaking, ended up with four Cs and a grade one in CSE Drama.
Along with his description of the type of school he went to, and the scheme under which he entered, Young’s account of his initial exam results varies a bit. They are always bad, but sometimes he fails all his O-levels, sometimes there was one O-level and sometimes an O-level at Grade C in English Literature and a CSE in Drama, out of four O-levels and 4 CSEs attempted. Also, the extent to which the child of his particular background (see footnote), was not “conventional Oxford material”, simply because he had done very badly at O-level is arguable (I say this as someone from a pretty similar family background, if a few notches less posh). But that Young felt it “certainly” to be the case, even at the age of 45, stands out for me. And it is a reasonable observation that to get even as far as an interview at an Oxford college under any scheme with 4 Cs at O-level and a CSE was indeed pretty remarkable. You might indeed expect the college to have been swamped by running interviews for applicants from comprehensives, or who had previously been at comprehensives, had it been well-known that it was commonly applying such a threshold to anyone who had attended that sort of school.
I feel I ought to be able to shed more light on this, as I went to Brasenose from a comprehensive two years later. But I don’t remember any specific college entry scheme that year for some or all state school pupils, or any of my comprehensive-educated friends ever mentioning one. That doesn’t means the scheme Young describes didn’t exist two years before, or when I applied: it would just be useful here if I could remember anything about one. Maybe the account which relates it specifically to PPE explains this. I studied a different subject, entering via the conventional exam route. In passing, I’m slightly puzzled that Young makes it sound as though he applied to one college directly, as I’m pretty sure that when I did it admissions were centrally adminstered: we listed a number of colleges and they then considered us, in a sort of mini-UCAS system. I can’t quite see where the sort of scheme he describes would fit in that, but it’s a consistent element of his account that it was a named member of staff at the college who had set up this scheme, whatever its precise rules were.
So Young’s two claims appear most obviously capable of being reconciled if:
- There never actually was a scheme only open to comprehensive school pupils, or
- The college treated him as a “comprehensive enough” pupil because of his earlier educational history, or
- He took advantage of William Ellis’s shifting status, although it did not affect him directly.
The first would only raise the question why he ever claimed there was. The second would have been a kindly interpretation on the part of the college, choosing to place more weight on the impact of Young’s past school experience than his present school. In that case, I hope they were making at least similar general concessions to people applying under the scheme who were not subsequently doing their A-levels in settings with such intense academic support (and that Young is only incorrectly guessing when he says at one point that his was probably one of the lowest offers the college ever made). The last possibility on the list above would just have been a classic bit of middle class gaming of the education system.
Young went on to do very well at university: it’s only his recent appointment to the OfS that makes any of this remotely worth bringing up. But given that, it seems moderately interesting to wonder which of these applied.
Update 6 January
A further description of Young’s entry is here
Some people will accuse me of hypocrisy because I was the beneficiary of positive discrimination. I applied to Brasenose because it had introduced a scheme to attract candidates from state schools and, after a gruelling interview, I received a low conditional offer. Nevertheless, I’m a good illustration of why such positive discrimination is wrong-headed. My father was a Labour peer and when I applied to Oxford I was at a grammar school on the edge of Hampstead Heath. I didn’t deserve special treatment, yet if Oxford and Cambridge set aside places for state school applicants it would be those like me who’d gain, not children on free school meals.
So here the scheme is desribed as generic to all state schools, to show that such schemes will benefit people who don’t need it (thus his previous poor O-level performance at a comprehensive is omitted from the story).
Footnote
Young’s father attended a series of private schools (some of which sound pretty horrible) in the 1920s and 1930s, and was a graduate of the LSE who trained as a barrister before becoming one of the post-war UK’s great social reformers, for which he was awarded a peerage when Young was in his mid-teens. His mother attended Bedales before going to Cambridge and then worked as a BBC producer before having children, and continued to be a successful writer and artist. He has recalled how he grew up in a house constantly visited by the great and good and has written about both his parents touchingly and with affection. In a neat tangible example of what these sort of advantages can mean in practice, Young tells a story at one point to the BBC about how his father was able to help him with a 6th form essay about House of Lords reform by sharing his reflections on being in the House of Lords. He claims it was the first one for which he ever got an A. He does also say however that his parents didn’t take much direct interest in what was happening with his school work until his initial O-level disaster. At that point, he credits his father’s decision to send him to a kibbutz for three months with transforming his situation, not least because it broke his 3 year pot habit. He reports coming back determined to go to university (specifically Oxford) and as a first step resitting the three O-levels he had failed, achieving “with Herculean effort”,he says, a C in all of these, enabling him to start his A-levels at William Ellis.
Update on 29 December: A check of recent SG FoI responses today brings up this one published by SG on 22 December, just after the post below was written. The SG had been asked by the original inquirer, presumably, to clarify what was covered by the item listed as “Scottish Government Procurement £51,143.50 – In relation to advice concerning procurement of Baby Boxes”. The response was that
To clarify, the figure for “Scottish Government Procurement” is not an item of Scottish Government expenditure. This refers to a funds transfer between Scottish Government cost centres and is an internal “re-charge” to cover work undertaken by Scottish Government staff in the procurement team. Re-charge policy for procurement is corporate, ie normal practice that applies across the whole of government. The figure represents 147.5 man-days at various charge rates.
So this amount was not, as assumed below, expenditure on external legal advice but on internal advice recharged by one part of government to another, because staff in Procurement do, it turns out, levy an internal charge for their time. It’s not clear whether this was legal advice or advice of some other sort. It clearly affects the analysis below: there was still a £92,000 investment in procurement-related advice, but not all of this was externally provided.
As long as this relates to existing staff costs, and no new staff were recruited specifically due to this (temporary agency staff, for example), this information reduces the additional public spending incurred due to procurement advice to £41,000. The £51,143.50 would then instead be an internal opportunity cost: the new response describes it as the equivalent of around 7 months’ work on producing advice (147.5 days, out of around 250 in the working year). That in turn implies an average annual cost for the staff concerned of almost £90,000 a year. Even allowing for the recharging of on-costs, that’s pretty high in civil service terms. Something a bit out of the ordinary still seems to be going on.
It was odd and confusing that the original response defined “all spending to date” as including this element of internal staff costs, but not any others. However, doing so still shed a useful light on how significant procurement-related advice was in total, as an expense in one form or another.
I have left the original post unamended, because I think the main point of interest here stands, but readers will want to bear this new information in mind.
Original post
Baby boxes have been in the news again. Yesterday’s coverage was of some new SG research (worth a separate post at some point). But there’s also new financial information available for this policy which gives some insight into how the Scottish Government works, especially the power of political imperatives, and attitudes within government towards the parliament.
Costs to date
A Freedom of Information response was published on the SG website on 30 November which gave a breakdown of all costs to date of the baby box policy. I don’t know who submitted it (it was not me).
Here are the costs in each year to date (categorisation by this author). The biggest surprise is that £91,885 was spent on procurement advice, more than was spent on research (£80,444).
MacRoberts LLP (£40,621 in 2015-16 and £120 in 2016-17) [correction: should say 2016-17 and 2017-18: table is correctly labelled] is one of the big commercial law firms in Scotland and has a standing “framework” contract with the SG for providing external legal advice. SG lawyers don’t charge internally, so the £51,144 in 2016-17 [correction: 2017-18, as above] assigned to SG Procurement must also be for external advice, though we don’t know where from [See update note above: this turns out to have been an internal charge]. Two large payments in different financial years suggests complexity, for example that the question was so tricky MacRoberts had to be paid in instalments, or a second substantial question arose, or the first advice didn’t do quite what was needed.
The relevant background here will be the granting of the baby box national contract, worth £35m over 4 years, with no competitive process to APS Group (Scotland) Ltd (more here, from August). APS Group (Scotland) Ltd is a private limited company 75% owned by the Cheshire-based APS Group Ltd. It has a standing “framework” contract with the SG, for “publishing, printing, design and associated services”.
Back in August, I observed that
the decision not to submit this to competitive tendering must surely have to had to be put through the legal wringer, given how it stretches the interpretation of the terms of the existing call-off contract and that it is so large in value.
The existence of that legal wringer is now confirmed, and its cost.
A competitive tendering exercise would have meant some delay. SG would have to say how much time a competition would have added to the process, but it would be a matter of months not years. Even so, it was presumably enough to jeopardise meeting the commitment in the SNP manifesto that scheme would start nationally in the summer of 2017.
A report in the Times today notes:
The box is one of the policies that Ms Sturgeon is most proud of. The first minister drove the idea through from the first plans to implementation
Was £92,000 spent only in order to avoid politically unwanted delays? That looks possible. The sum at stake is small change in the overall government budget. But it’s also not nothing. Deciding to spend that much public money on legal advice is never a trivial decision.
Whether there was a larger cost to how this was handled is more unknowable. The theory of competitive tendering is that it saves money, for example by avoiding a single supplier having the public purse over a barrel. As the SG Procurement pages put it, the purpose of the procurement rules is “ensuring value for money for the taxpayer”. No-one can say how far a competitive process would have brought down the cost. What can be said is that in acting as it did, the Scottish Government was choosing to spend a substantial amount of money specifically in order to avoid testing the water on costs and not just for the first year, but for four years. The contract will not fall to be re-let until the run-up to the next Holyrood elections, for reasons that aren’t obvious.
The budget for 2018-19
In last week’s budget document, an odd arrangement continues from last year, in which baby boxes are listed as part of the Children and Families budget within the Education and Skills portfolio (p71), while the cost is in fact being met by the Health and Sport budget (see the Health tab in the Level 4 spreadsheet linked here: baby boxes contribute to producing the total shown for Early Years in Table 5.03 on p57 of the main budget document). Having now done this twice, the SG must for some reason prefer this to matching the words accurately with the numbers. The Parliament did not complain last year about the implications for scrutiny of this confusion, even though it involves switching between Ministers and parliamentary committees. Unless MSPs make an issue of it, it looks likely to become embedded.
The budgeted sum is £8m in 2018-19, although the FoI response above shows planned spend in 2018-19 of £8.8m, in line with the amount APS is contracted to receive. So for some reason SG is under-budgeting by 9%/£0.8m in the figures provided for parliamentary scrutiny, compared to the figures it is holding.
Who profits?
In health policy, the use of public spending to pay private providers is sensitive. So the location of this spending in the health budget is salient. 99% of baby box spending has been direct to private suppliers and this will continue. The FoI response explains that the payment to APS covers:
Baby Box contents, Distribution Centre Activity, Delivery Charges, Contract Management, Customer Contact Centre costs, Print costs, Operating Margin.
Operating margin is in effect profit: APS is a private firm, after all. Further, this contract involves a lot of stuff that’s not APS’s normal business, on a large scale relative to its pre-box turnover, so quite a lot of sub-contracting, involving even more people’s profit margins, seems likely.
So that’s £8m (if you are an MSP), or nearly £9m (if you are anyone else) a year now being spent from the health budget directly in the private sector. Of course masses of the health budget already ends up with the private companies who supply the NHS. Here however a new national service provided out of the health budget is being commissioned by central government from a for-profit organisation, which is delivering it (literally, for once) direct to individuals, with private profit being extracted at various points. It may be a model with merits in this case, and I suspect most people won’t be bothered. But it’s curiously at odds with a more familiar government rhetoric which positions any form of privatisation as a threat to essence of a public health service, even when services remain free. (Opticians, dentists, pharmacists and some GPs occupy a blind spot here already, I realise.)
Conclusion
Whether or not this was a policy the FM had driven personally, the precedents being set here would deserve attention: direct private contracting by government for a new national service out of the health budget, costly effort to avoid competitive tendering, repeated inaccurate description to parliament of which bit of government is responsible for providing the money, and under-budgeting.
I think MSPs should make a fuss if the budget materials provided to them are not factually correct, as a matter of principle, regardless of the policy or scale. But on this one they didn’t last year, as far as I know, so the government may be banking on a further free pass. The award of the contract to APS has not caused the government much parliamentary discomfort either. So it’s doubtful the decision to spend so much money on legal advice, to all appearances just to avoid several politically-unwanted months delay to implementation, will attract much criticism. As reports of positive responses from parents to getting a box build up, scrutiny of the policy process may look increasingly irrelevant to the media and politicians of all shades.
Perhaps opposition parties will be tempted to bank the precedents being set here for their own future use: you can see why they might. The current administration would not be the first to find the constraints involved in contracting rules frustrating, or to want as much freedom as possible in how they report figures to the Parliament.
For all sorts of reasons, the baby box policy continues to be a fascinating case study in the operation and scrutiny of government policy-making in contemporary Scotland.
This post adds a substantial new item to the list of problematic ways the recent review of student support in Scotland has invoked cross-UK comparisons. In this case it has done so by ignoring half the relevant Scots and getting some figures for the other devolved nations wrong.
If readers sense a degree of exasperation at the game of comparative whack-a-mole associated with this report, they would be right. It’s a distraction from what really matters – but it’s that very distracting quality which makes it hard to ignore.
Debt at low incomes across the UK
The report of the student funding review as originally published on 20 November contained this table (at page 30), which appears to rank UK nations by the amount of total debt expected for students on the lowest incomes, living at home.
Source: Student funding report as originally published 30 Nov 2017
Something looked immediately wrong: at the launch, I quietly alerted the review team to the Welsh fee figure being too high (it should be £9,000, and thus the total debt £6,824): the on-line version has since been corrected for this. But more generally the figures looked too high to be the “living at home” rates – Wales and Northern Ireland especially caught my eye.
Coming back to this more slowly, I turn out to have been wrong about Wales, where I’d failed to keep up with this year’s increase. But the Northern Irish figures are indeed well out. Northern Irish maintenance debt is shown at double the correct amount for those on maximum support, and total debt is therefore overstated by £1887. See Footnote 1 below.
This is not the most fundamental problem with this table, however. There is a greater flaw which becomes clear on re-reading. It only shows the figures applying for Scottish students classified as “Young”. It omits those Scots treated as “Independent”, who have higher expected debt.
Ignoring this group is very hard to defend, if your aim is to give readers an accurate picture of how the Scottish system compares with others for those at the lowest incomes, because independent students will be around half of all those entitled to maximum support: see Footnote 2. They will include many of the people facing the most challenging immediate financial circumstances.
Indeed, as the report notes on page 40, even the description in the table is not quite right, because some students under 25 are classified as independent (the report notes those with children, those who have been self-supporting for some time; other examples include those living with a partner: page 53 here.)
I feel bad that I didn’t immediately spot this omission, even skimming an 84 page document while also trying to listen to the presentation.
Assuming the final report was actually cleared by the group, I’m completely baffled as to how fourteen people who had spent a year reviewing student support managed to agree a document containing a table purporting to make cross-UK comparisons for low income students which missed out half that group in Scotland. The separate arrangements for young and independent students in Scotland are laid out, without commentary, 4 pages earlier in the text.
The table corrected
This is what happens if the Northern Irish and Welsh figures are corrected, and Scottish independent students welcomed back into the fold of those we care about enough to mention. New or changed figures in bold.
And look. Young Scots still have least debt, but the Northern Irish leapfrog Independent Scots. It ceases to be true that Scotland always has the lowest debt for those at the lowest incomes: it depends on your age and other things. Also, the figures for all four groups of students in the devolved nations are more obviously closely bunched.
A fair-minded person should point out here that the low debt in Northern Ireland is achieved by not giving students nearly as much to live on. But applying that logic, as Northern Ireland slips down the table, Wales jumps to second place: borrowing there is £74 higher than for independent students from Scotland, but total maintenance support is £314 more.
Whichever way you look at it, low income independent students in Scotland – half the membership of the “maximum support” group in Scotland – borrow more than those in one of the other devolved nations.
Perhaps it’s different if you look at the rates for those living away? Those are arguably more important to compare. Young and independent students from Scotland do then both have less total debt than all the rest: but the “Wales problem” persists – low income students from there borrow £1638 more than Scottish independent students, but have £1878 more to spend as a result (see Footnote 3).
Why is the table included?
The table is included to back up this statement (emphasis added):
Before describing our recommendations, it is important to understand the context of student loans as they currently operate in Scotland, including comparisons with other parts of the United Kingdom.
Currently Scottish students studying undergraduate higher education courses in Scotland are at an advantage over other students in the rest of the United Kingdom. This is partly because they do not have to pay any tuition fees which are funded by the Scottish Government. As a result, the total maximum annual borrowing of students in Scotland is lower than elsewhere in the United Kingdom, as shown in the table below:
The highlighted statement is actually true: the trouble is that the table above doesn’t show maximum annual borrowing, it shows the borrowing associated with getting the maximum support. These are not the same.
In Northern Ireland and Wales debt rises as income rises. The maximum debt is incurred in Scotland and England at the lowest incomes, but in Northern Ireland debt is at its highest once income reaches just over £41,000 and in Wales it peaks at incomes of around £50,000 (see Footnote 4).
Thus, the table that matches the words does give Scotland an unambiguous place at the top of the league table. But it also inconveniently brings out that Scotland currently shares with England a system designed to indebt the most those who start with least, and that Wales and Northern Ireland don’t.
The importance of being careful
Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell comes to mind.
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Just taking this table on its own terms and ignoring the dislocation from the text, it:
- overestimated the debt in Wales a bit (just enough, as it happens, to affect the comparison with Scottish independent students)
- overestimated debt in Northern Ireland spectacularly
- omitted the c50% of Scots on maximum support who face the highest debts
The first of these I raised privately with the review team on 20 November, thinking it was one minor error. I spontaneously said then I wouldn’t mention this as a criticism (accidents happen), and I am sorry now to break that promise. But it turns out to form part of a pattern of errors and omissions which all tend the same way. Collectively, these result in a table showing a sharper distinction in annual borrowing between Scotland and the rest of the UK than justified. That’s before even getting into the 3 year/4 year degree issue, about which the review says nothing.
The Welsh fee level for in-country students in 2017-18 has been public knowledge since September 2016 (if you remember seeing something about it going up by £295, that was a plan for 2018-19, abandoned in mid-October). The Northern Irish arrangements are set out in this leaflet. None of this required so much research to get right. A government-sponsored review could always have run the figures past the other governments, indeed.
Part of larger picture
This comes on top (see here) of
- a straightforwardly incorrect claim in the report that Scotland currently has the best loan repayment rules in the UK; and
- a claim that it will do so in the future, which is far from self-evident, and requires detailed substantiation which isn’t provided.
Indeed, immediately after the table discussed above, the report includes another comparing loan repayment rules between Scotland and England, omitting Wales and Northern Ireland, and commenting only on the element where Scotland has a more favourable regime than England (interest rates) and saying nothing about the two elements it shows (repayment threshold and write-off period) where it doesn’t.
All this comes after a claim used in the PR round the report, but not the report itself, that the review’s recommended model is superior in a more general way to UK systems, which I think the review team struggled to back up when asked, putting it kindly: but you can judge for yourself – see here.
What’s going on?
The review has proved itself to be rather fonder of making superlative comparative claims about the funding position in Scotland than in presenting the evidence needed to support them.
Any of these, and other things besides, may be relevant:
- The review’s Finance Sub-Group consisted only of Scottish government officials and the Chair (end of Annex E here: all the other review sub-groups had at least a few other members of the main review group). The full group met 8 times that we know of, with the 7 meetings for which minutes are available lasting one hour: see here. Opportunities for the review group to explore collectively the financial assertions put to it look to have been limited.
- Related to this, it seems likely the report had to be cleared by members very quickly, if indeed the final text was seen by everyone, which I start to wonder about: small signs of this include typos in the heading of the table discussed above.
- The Scottish government likes these kind of comparative claims. The review may have been concerned to package its findings in ways which offered Ministers potentially appealing lines (I will mention again the hiring of Charlotte Street Partners to do media work around the launch of the review).
- The review may have been relying on others to provide it with information or briefing it didn’t have the capacity to check: I see more and more signs this process was under-resourced.
- What it was given by others just wasn’t right, for whatever reason – anything from deliberate skulduggery (I would hope not) to simple error (never under-estimate the scope for simple error in government). However, errors always look more accidental if they don’t all tend the same way: I worry especially about that grey zone, where a figure isn’t properly checked, because it feels like what you want to be true.
- Related to that, collective belief in Scotland just being best, because… well, just because. We have free tuition. Our ministers are good at giving heart-felt speeches about fairness. Look, how much do we really need to check the numbers?
Whatever explains it, the result is the same: a mild air of triumphalism which obscures hard-to-defend elements of the system, in this particular case, that some of the most financial vulnerable and disadvantaged students in Scotland are given even less grant and more debt than others. On the young/independent difference, the review
- includes a table showing the difference between independent and young students on page 26, but at no point discusses this difference,
- makes a general statement on page 40 that “The Board considers it important that both independent and estranged students are treated in a similar way to other groups of students”, but
- recommends on page 12 an option involving no change to any of the current levels of higher education bursaries.
Ah.
Conclusion
I am getting fed up with unpicking questionable comparisons. I certainly didn’t expect it to be such a large part of assessing the findings of an independent review. It is just very disappointing. Does it matter? I think so, because I reckon it fosters political (and official?) complacency and the dismissal of uncomfortable evidence.
I’d prefer us to look at the Scottish system in its own right and ask what’s the best we can do now, with what we’ve got? The review was a chance to dig deep, to look at ourselves honestly in a brightly lit mirror, to move the debate out of rhetorical flourish and onto more substantial territory, drawing on solid evidence, where needed. To stop using what other people are (or at least are asserted to be) doing to deflect scrutiny of the full effects what we are choosing to do ourselves. To use comparisons to help our understanding about the range of choices and their consequences, not to play down difficult features of our system.
Thus, to repeat, we give those coming into HE from the lowest income households only £1,875, or even just £875, in non-repayable grants and ask them to borrow the rest of what they need to live on. We could easily give them more grant, but we prefer to use that money to keep the children of the professional classes out of any debt whatsoever for fees (and often, therefore, any debt at all). And we use UK comparisons to reassure ourselves – apparently – that that’s OK. “Best”, even.
Once upon a time, I wrote a report on student funding in Scotland, including some analysis of the use and abuse of comparisons. I called it “The Fairest of Them All?” and ended it with an extract from The Emperor’s New Clothes. Old stories of power, blind eyes and difficulty with unwelcome truths seemed resonant. The report noted:
The evidence gathered here and the arguments drawn from it may be uncomfortable and counter-intuitive for some readers … In [Andersen’s] story, of course, the townspeople eventually allow themselves to admit the true position. In Scotland, where the most advantaged sections of society are currently sitting very comfortably, it is harder to predict how the story will unfold.
This review was an opportunity – however constrained – for some of the great and the good (no-one likes being called that, but any review members still reading will have to bear with me on this as being a reasonable description of most of them) to use their independent standing and collective voice to encourage the telling of a new, more self-critical type of story, which consistently put the treatment of the most financially vulnerable at its centre.
Only NUS Scotland, who the report noted pressed for a higher grant option at least to be costed and included, and has called the current system “broken”, seems inclined to stir things up. But generally the old narrative of “bestness” evidently still holds considerable appeal.
Footnote 1: Northern Ireland
The Northern Irish arrangements are clearly summarised here (p12).
Someone seems to have seen a reference to a “maximum loan” of £3,750 in NI for students living at home but failed to appreciate that this amount is only a starting point. Actual loan entitlement depends on the amount of grant a student receives: “if you receive a Maintenance Grant, we will reduce the amount of Maintenance Loan available to you” as the leaflet puts it. The system has worked this way in Northern Ireland for years. The table in the Scottish report shows a combination of maintenance grant and loan that never occurs in the NI system.
In exceptional cases, a rule is applied where students get the full amount of grant and it does not reduce loan. Then, the grant is reclassified as “special support grant”: for technical reasons, this reduces problematic interaction with the benefit system, in cases where that is relevant. This system is used in NI, Wales and England and the review report indeed recommends in a different section that Scotland should consider adopting it too. You could argue that the NI loan figure is therefore OK because this combination of grant and loan would hold for a student on special support grant: but it would be a heroic line to take, as then the Welsh figures would also need to be changed, for consistency, the table heading (“maintenance grant”) would be wrong and the comparison would exclude most students from low incomes in these countries.
Footnote 2: Independent students as % of those on maximum support
[Updated 4 December: minor wording changes to make clearer, in response to a question from a reader]
The official statistics (Table 8) record 17,890 students on Independent Student Bursary (ISB) in 2016-17. ISB was only available to those declaring household incomes below £19,000.
The other means-tested bursary, Young Student Bursary (YSB), was claimed by 31,220 but this includes some students on less than the full rate of YSB, and therefore not entitled to maximum level of total support. They come from incomes between £19,000 and £33,999.
The statistics (Table A6) also show that 24,915 students who received either type of means-tested bursary declared an income of less than £19,000, and a further 10,515 received the max bursary without being required to demonstrate the precise level of their low income. There’s a further group of 1,580 who weren’t asked to demonstrate their income, but got less than the full bursary: I suspect this includes quite a few people who dropped out mid-year. The best available estimate of those falling within the group entitled to maximum support is therefore 37,010.
On these rough assumptions, those on ISB accounted for 48% of all those on the maximum rate of support. This calculation is a bit rough, but near enough for “around half” to be used as a reliable description.
Footnote 3: Away rates
The table below reworks the one published, but uses the rates for those living away from home.
Footnote 4: Maximum borrowing
The students facing the maximum borrowing are those from the lowest income households in Scotland and in England. In Northern Ireland, borrowing is highest for those above the cut off for grant. In Wales, borrowing peaks at around £50,000: this is the point where grant entitlement stops and before some loan entitlement is further withdrawn, under the system currently used there.
[Posted 29 November and updated, as marked, 30 November]
A press release issued yesterday by Jeane Freeman (SG Minister for Social Security, but acting here in her capacity as an MSP) was headlined “Brexit blamed for fall in EU students”. The press release accurately noted that UCAS had identified Brexit as a likely factor in the 4.4% fall in applicants to UK universities from the EU in 2017 and argued (emphasis added):
it is concerning that the UK has become an increasingly less popular destination for EU students since the Brexit vote last year. This is bad news for our universities and for the wider Scottish economy, which is boosted by hundreds of millions of pounds generated by EU students each year.
The Tories’ increasingly insular approach to the world and the endless uncertainty they have created for EU citizens living here in Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley is damaging the UK’s reputation, our economy and future prosperity, and the SNP will do all in its power to protect EU citizens in Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley and continue making Scotland an attractive place to work and study.
The same highlighted line was used verbatim by the convenor of the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee to The National.
I suspect those highlighted words will be seen again.
How safe it is to assume that a fall in actual EU students (as opposed to applicants – see below) is mainly due to Brexit? Surprisingly, it is possible to take a reasonable stab at answering this, and the answer is almost certainly “mostly not”. Most of the fall appears to be due instead to something mysterious going on this year in Scottish universities.
Applications vs applicants vs actual students
There are three sets of numbers here
- Applicants – the figure which has dropped by 4.4% across the UK – are the individuals interested in attending university.
- Applications are the number of different approaches these people make to universities (in 2016 and in 2017, the average number of applications per EU applicant was just over 4).
- Then there are those who have a successful application. The measures discussed here are “placed applicants” and “acceptances“. These are both defined by UCAS as someone who has been “placed for entry” into HE: “acceptances” is used once the admissions cycle is complete.
The last is the nearest we have to actual students (not identical, as some placed applicants may not actually show up, and some may somehow bypass UCAS, but it’s very close). This is the group that matters if you are interested in the effect on the economy.
The UCAS press release notes the fall in “placed applicants” from the EU in UK universities is at 2.1%, around half the fall in applications. It is still a fall, however.
EU applications, applicants and acceptances across the UK
This week’s UCAS figures only provide some UK-wide totals, so it’s necessary to look at some earlier numbers to get an idea of the variety of underlying patterns across the UK.
The tables at the foot of this post give the most recent data we have on EU applications and placed applicants in different parts of the UK this year, from June (for applications) and September (for placed applicants). UCAS doesn’t appear to publish nation-by-nation data on EU applicants (surprisingly, I may be missing it) [Update 30 Nov: I was, but it doesn’t change the picture – note added atfoot of post], so I’m using changes in applications as a proxy: the ratio between the two appears reasonably stable across the two years at UK level, which is the only level at which I can measure it.
At the level of the four UK nations the best data we have at present suggest that changes in actual placed applicants this year bear little relationship to changes in applications.
Applications fell in Northern Ireland and Wales, but placed applicants rose. In England, placed applicants fell (by 1%), but by substantially less than the fall in applications.
In these three nations, universities appear to have become more willing to accept applications from the EU, off-setting the fall in applicants. The total fall in placed applicants across the rest of the UK as at 14 September was 130 or 0.5%.
By contrast, Scotland saw the smallest fall in applications but much the largest fall in placed applicants. Uniquely in the UK, Scottish universities appear suddenly to have become (much) less willing to accept applications from EU students, taking 560 fewer or 12.2% less.
As a result, Scotland accounted for 85% (560/690) of the drop in placed EU applicants in the UK, as known in September.
Of course things could have changed since then. But this week’s UCAS figures record a UK total of 30,540 EU acceptances, compared to 29,850 placed applicants in September, an increase of 2.9%. It would have taken some extraordinary re-shuffling in the last few weeks to change the general picture above.
Brexit … or something else?
Brexit affects the whole of the UK. Something else seems to be going on here, specifically affecting Scotland.
Maybe EU students applying both to Scottish and rUK universities have had just as many offers as ever from Scotland, but for some reason this year have been more likely to turn them down in favour of ones from institutions in the other UK nations. I’m pretty doubtful about that, but for now it remains a theoretical possibility.
Far more likely is that Scottish institutions have become less likely to make offers to EU students. This might be system wide, or an effect concentrated in those institutions which recruit most heavily from the EU.
There’s an obvious reason why this might have happened. Universities in Scotland are subject to new government targets to widen access, but the system is not being expanded, because the policy of free tuition makes it expensive for the Scottish government to put in more places. To admit more people from disadvantaged backgrounds, universities must either therefore admit fewer Scots from less disadvantaged postcodes, or take fewer entrants from the EU, the other group who qualify for funded places (rUK and overseas students are irrelevant to all this).
Over the past year or so, there’s been quite a lot of concern expressed about the potential for the “displacement” of students from less disadvantaged areas to accommodate growth in those from more disadvantaged postcodes. That the acceptance rate (the success rate for applications, in effect) for 18 year old Scots has dropped to a historic low in recent years has also become more widely known. In addition, EU students cannot count to the achievement of the new SIMD-based access targets (as SIMD is a Scottish area measure) but in some circumstances may be counted in the baseline of all home students: when/if that happens, their recruitment will automatically dilute the achievement of access targets.
So the big drop in EU admissions specifically in Scotland this year could be due to a change in admissions practices across the sector which has reduced the likelihood of EU students getting an offer. One possibility suggested by someone who knows more than me about the technicalities of admissions (not hard) is that more places are being filled by unconditional offers, which tend to go to Scots, leaving fewer for conditional offers, apparently commonly used for EU students.
If that’s what’s going on, most of the fall in actual EU students in the UK this year would have nothing to do with Brexit and everything to do with the pincer effect of two Scottish policies – free tuition (and thus capping) and the drive to widen access.
Is this good or bad?
Ms Freeman and Mr Dornan are concerned at the economic impact of the loss of EU students.
However, Ms Freeman, and the Scottish Government, have both welcomed the 2.4% (850) increase in Scots admitted to university this year, most of which appears to have been enabled by taking fewer people from the EU.
So there’s a tension here, explicit in the full Freeman statement. The SG, perhaps more alert to the two-sides-of-same-coin issue, has not made the same argument about the fall in EU numbers (as far as I have seen).
Conclusion
We need to see the final figures next month for EU applications and acceptances by UK nation to confirm the pattern in the summer/autumn data.
However, though a fall in applicants may be attributable to Brexit, at the moment something quite different – the response of universities in Scotland to the interaction of the Scottish government’s fee and access policies – appears more likely to be driving most of the fall in actual EU university entrants this year across the UK.
Update
After writing this I found this story, which includes this quote from the Minister for Employability and Training, Jamie Hepburn.
Scotland’s Minister for Employability and Training Jamie Hepburn said ministers were “deeply concerned” by the fall in applications, which he blamed on the Government’s decision to pursue a hard Brexit outside the single market. “While Scotland fares better than England when it comes to attracting EU domiciles, it is still worrying to see this decrease in applicants, the damaging reality of Brexit,” he added.
It turns out to be based on an SG newsrelease (emphasis added)
It has to be said that while we welcome international students from out with the EU we are deeply concerned that these latest statistics also show a decrease of 4% in the number of applicants from the EU. While Scotland fares better than England when it comes to attracting EU domiciles, it is still worrying to see this decrease in applicants, the damaging reality of Brexit. We are urging the UK Government to ditch their hard Brexit model which will no doubt have a hugely negative impact on areas such as Higher Education, not only in Scotland but also in the rest of the UK.
So the tension between deploring a drop in EU students and welcoming the rise in Scots made possible by that goes right to the heart of the official government position.
Data
Table 1 EU Applications at June 30 https://www.ucas.com/file/115926/download?token=Qs0vX0tF
| Change | |||
| 2016 | 2017 | % | |
| Eng | 169130 | 158540 | -6.26% |
| NI | 3210 | 2980 | -7.17% |
| Scot | 47570 | 45490 | -4.37% |
| Wales | 8010 | 7590 | -5.24% |
| UK | 227920 | 214580 | -5.85% |
Table 2 EU Placed applicants at end of clearing (14 Sept in 2017) https://www.ucas.com/file/125616/download?token=YiT_YQ-M
| Change | ||||
| 2016 | 2017 | Nos | % | |
| Eng | 24200 | 23970 | -230 | -0.95% |
| NI | 340 | 370 | 30 | 8.82% |
| Scot | 4610 | 4050 | -560 | -12.15% |
| Wales | 1390 | 1460 | 70 | 5.04% |
| UK | 30540 | 29850 | -690 | -2.26% |
Table 3 Percentage share of the fall in EU placed applicants between 2016 and 2017 (from Table 2 above)
| Eng | 35.38% |
| NI | -4.62% |
| Scot | 86.15% |
| Wales | -10.77% |
Change between September and November EU placed applicant/acceptance figures (all UK) comparing total from Table 2 and figures from page 7 https://www.ucas.com/file/135626/download?token=pQL3AOVK)
| 2016 | 2017 | Change: nos | Change: % | |
| Sept (placed applicants) | 30540 | 29850 | -690 | -2.26% |
| Nov (acceptances) | 31350 | 30700 | -650 | -2.07% |
| Nov as % Sept | 102.65% | 102.85% |
EU Applications (as at June 30) per applicant (as reported at end of cycle): all UK
(from Table 1 above and figures p6 https://www.ucas.com/file/135626/download?token=pQL3AOVK)
| 2016 | 2017 | |
| Applicants | 53560 | 51185 |
| Applications | 227920 | 214580 |
| Applications/applicant | 4.3 | 4.2 |
Update for EU applicant data by nation
I missed this UCAS note which gives EU applicants by UK nation as at 30 June.
https://www.ucas.com/file/115901/download?token=bzdJIyHR
The changes are similar as for applications and produce the graph below, which closely ressembles the one for applications, above.
Today UCAS released some of the data which will end up in its full 2017 End of Cycle report. Its reporting provides a great example of the endless flexibility of UCAS data as a source of headlines, and the SG’s flexibility on whether UCAS is a source of comparable cross-UK figures
Comparisons
The SG has taken a pretty hard line in the last 18 months on how UCAS’s coverage is too incomplete in Scotland to make comparisons reliable. The line has run across government: here for example is the Cabinet Secretary for Culture in July this year.
The caveat about the higher proportion of HE students in Scotland who are outside UCAS, because they are doing shorter HE courses in college, such as HNs, has become increasingly prominent in UCAS publication in the past few years: it is the very first thing you will read in a couple of the documents published today.
I ended up writing a piece defending UCAS as a source of comparable data a while ago, because the force of rebuttal was so strong. I’ve discussed the same question on More or Less. I have argued that these figures have limitations, but remain useful especially as a source of comparative information on entry into university direct from school: the “non-comparable” argument is too sweepingly dismissive.
So today’s SG news release was a bit of a surprise. It’s worth quoting in full (emphasis added).
UCAS figures also show highest ever acceptances to Scottish universities.
A record number of Scots were accepted to a UK university in 2017, figures published today show.
Over 36,500 Scottish domiciled applicants accepted a place for this academic year – an increase of over 850 or 2.4%.
All other UK countries saw a decrease in the number of their residents accepted to university.
The figures were released by UCAS in their first End of Cycle Report 2017. It also shows a record number of all applicants accepted to Scottish higher education institutions in 2017 – up 1.7%.
Further and Higher Education Minister, Shirley-Anne Somerville, said:
“It is great to see that Scotland is bucking the trend across the UK, with more of our prospective students securing a place at university. This follows on from the record numbers last year.
“It shows that our education system is supporting an increasing number of people to access higher education – giving them the skills they need to succeed.
“This is also another record year for Scotland’s universities, with the highest ever number of applicants accepted to study here. It is testament to the fact that Scotland remains a destination of choice for students, due in no small part to the reputation for excellence that our institutions have worked hard to achieve.”
Background
The UCAS Undergraduate End of Cycle Report 2017, Applicants and acceptances, patterns by age is published by UCAS.
Can figures which don’t include colleges show “that our education system is supporting an increasing number of people to access higher education“? Well, no: for exactly the reasons the SG has previously argued, to make a claim about all forms of HE we would need to know the trends in college entry too, and the SG does not publish those in the same way.
The government is on safer ground with their cross-UK comparisons of university entry (as others were before) because this is what UCAS covers. But again, on their previous strict reading of comparability, without knowing what’s happened with non-UCAS college-to-university movement, even there the picture is incomplete. I would guess that it’s unlikely this has fallen and it’s more likely also to be rising. But we don’t know that from these figures. Nor at the moment will the SG from any others, to the best of my understanding.
Anyway, comparisons are back in fashion and that’s generally more sensible than the all-out rubbishing of UCAS figures for this purpose. But a touch more consistency would be good.
Ups and downs
The success of the Scottish government in getting its news lines to provide the Scottish copy on this was evident. Its lines were prominently reported: it is likely that reflects the Press Association’s circular, but I don’t know. These are the pieces I have so far found:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-42128344
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scots-buck-trend-as-record-number-get-into-university-vpmd86m3s
https://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/news/scotland/record-number-of-scots-win-place-at-uk-university/
http://www.insider.co.uk/news/scots-students-getting-into-university-11592604
Yet UCAS observed in its press release that
A record proportion of 18 year olds, from across the UK, gained a place at university or college in 2017. This is despite a fall of 1.2 per cent in the 18 year old population in the UK in 2017. … The entry rate for 18 year olds in England increased by 0.8 percentage points to 33.3 per cent, whilst the entry rate for the same group in Scotland increased by 0.6 percentage points to 25.9 per cent. The entry rate for Northern Ireland decreased by 0.4 percentage points to 34.5 per cent, and for Wales it fell 0.1 percentage points to 29.4 per cent.
I’ve not seen any of this picked up in Scottish reports (although I can’t see past the Times’ paywall: its headline follows the SG’s news release.)
There were 207,920 acceptances from 18 year olds from England in 2017, thehighest number on record. This is 3,075 (+1.5 per cent) higher than the number ofacceptances in 2016. England was the only UK country which had an increase inthe number of 18 year old acceptances in 2017. The number of 18 year old acceptances from Scotland remained unchanged from last year, at 14,875.The number of 18 year old acceptances from Wales and Northern Ireland fell in2017.
These increases resulted in the highest cohort entry rates ever recorded for England, Scotland , and Wales. For England, Northern Ireland, and Wales the increases were driven by higher proportions of 18 year olds entering HE in 2016 , while in Scotland it was driven by an increase in both the 18 year old entry rate in 2016, and an increase in the first time 19 year old entry rate in 2017.
Over the longer term, UCAS notes
In 2017, the 18 year old entry rates for England, Scotland and Wales are substantially higher than at the beginning of the reporting period in 2006. In England, 18 year olds were 35 per cent more likely to enter higher education compared to 11 years ago, while in Scotland and Wales they were 17 per cent more likely.
England’s all-age figures were particularly pulled down, it appears, by the sharp drop in older entrants to nursing. This happened just as the UK government introduced fees and abolished quite high grants for this group in a single step.
UCAS notes in its Executive Summary
In England, record high 18 year old entry rates every year since 2013 have placed downward pressure on the number of 19 year olds applying, and consequentlybeing accepted. This, in combination with changes to student support arrangements for those starting nursing courses in England, and a favourable employment market, will all have played a role in the drop in applications and acceptances from older age groups this year. These falls mean that, for the first time since 2012, overall UK acceptances have decreased . However, this 0.5 per cent decrease still puts UK acceptances at the third highest on record.
It adds elsewhere
The larger falls among older age groups were, in part, due to the fall in applicants tonursing courses in England. As reported in June, there was a 23 per cent reductionin applicants from England to nursing courses this year. Because nursing applicantsaccount for a large proportion of all applicants, from older age groups (40 per cent of main scheme applicants aged 25 and over applied to nursing in 2016), the patterns for nursing will have had a large impact on the overall patterns shown in Figure 2.1.
Particularly good news stories for Scotland that were missed
Interestingly, although the SG highlighted that Scottish providers saw a +1.7% increase of entrants from all domiciles, it did not note this was the highest in any part of the UK (page11 here).
It also could have noted that Scotland saw the sharpest increase in acceptance (in effect, success) rates for 18 years olds: however, this is from a base which was historically low, and remains well below the English and Welsh position. As argued elsewhere, this is likely to be due to the more limited capacity of the Scottish system to expand in line with rising demand. Northern Ireland has a similar problem.
What’s going on?
The last set of figures we had from UCAS showed that Scotland was very unusual in seeing a fall in entrants from the EU this year.
We don’t have the new figures for Scotland broken down by domicile, yet (we should next month). But it would take a big shift in a short time for this to have changed. It seems likely therefore that for some reason universities in Scotland, specifically, have admitted far fewer EU students this year. We don’t yet know if this was due to a particularly sharp drop in applicants from the EU, or some change in university admissions practice north of the border.
This would have left more room for Scots, with whom EU students compete for funded places. Relatively few Scots go outside Scotland to study, so the chances are that that 2.4% rise for Scots across the UK is close to figure for Scots in Scotland. So the SG can fairly point to the rise in Scottish domiciled students (it would be criticised for a fall, after all). But it’s probably not SG policy that’s mainly responsible for that but the – as yet – unexplained drop in EU students here, after many years in which their numbers have risen much faster than those for Scottish entrants.
Meantime, older students in England have taken a particular hit, part of which seems likely to be directly due to local policy, affecting a specific group (nurses). It’s also possible that the abolition of grants in England is having some effect on this group in particular: that needs more thought and analysis. Once the other devolved nations are added, the complexities of possible causes for differences multiply. Are the Welsh figures affected by people hanging back for the post-Diamond changes next year, which will involve higher fees but also higher grants, as part of a general increase in the combined value of loans and grants for maintenance?
Looking at UCAS data across the UK functions mainly as a reminder of how complicated the relationship between policy and changing numbers can be.
Conclusion
The need to turn complicated UCAS data into instant headlines puts an increasingly strained conventional media under enormous pressure to look for (or pick up) relatively simple accounts. The variety of things which can be lifted from the figures means that it would be a flat-footed government that couldn’t find something to put in a headline.
This year UCAS has made things a bit easier, by having a phased release: today’s figures will be followed up by a further fuller briefing next month. That gives everyone time to digest this set ahead of the next round of headlines, which ought to cover things like entry by area disadvantage (SIMD in Scotland) and provide figures for different domiciles in each UK nation.
Whether the SG will hold on to its rediscovered willingness to compare UCAS numbers at that point is impossible to say. But it will be interesting to watch.
On Wednesday, the Scottish Government issued a press release about its budget settlement for 2018-19, which included this (emphasis added):
Of the additional money the UK Government announced as being added to Scotland’s budget, over half of it – £1.1bn – are financial transactions which the Scottish Government cannot spend on frontline public services, and which have to be repaid to the Treasury.
At FMQs the next day, the First Minister developed this theme (emphasis added)
Let me explain exactly why the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s announcement in the budget yesterday is accurately described as a con, because I was watching. He stood up and said, without qualification, that his budget would deliver an extra £2 billion for Scotland.
….
Not only is it the case that this money, in the words of the Fraser of Allander institute, “can’t be used to support day-to-day spending on public services”, it has to be repaid by the Scottish Government to the UK Government.
….
Although the budget provides some consequentials, more than half of those are financial transactions, which the Scottish Government cannot spend on front-line public services and which have to be repaid to the Treasury.
A little later in the same session, the FM was asked about the student support review which had reported on Monday. She noted (emphasis added):
I do not disagree with Iain Gray about the importance of the issue [the balance between loans and grants], but the level of total student support is now up. The average support per student is now up, more full-time higher education students than ever are receiving support and almost 3,000 additional students qualified for a non-repayable bursary or saw their funding increase last year.
Now, it’s true, as the FM went on to say, that there was a small annual rise in non-repayable funding in 2016-17 (which slightly reversed large cuts made in 2013-14, which she didn’t say).
However, when the SG uses “support” it uses it to mean everything paid to students for their living costs, as grant or loan. Exhibit A in this argument is this news release from 22 August 2012, which announced – “without qualification”, as it were – increases in “support” entirely provided through loans, while forgetting to mention a one-third parallel cut in student grants. More recently this one described how postgraduate “support” was rising, referring again only to increases in loans. Many other examples of this language are scattered in news releases and parliamentary comments. Over the past decade, “support” is only up because of loans (see Footnote 1), which of course have to be repaid (emphasis added).
You’ve probably worked out where this piece is heading.
We are not good at discussing how money that is on loan fits in the public finances. Is it real money we/students should be glad of? Is it not? The Scottish government has just presented an extreme case of contradictory perspectives, in one session of FMQs. But the FM also hinted at the way out. Funding which includes an element of loan should be described “with qualifications”. Repayable funding is not the same as non-repayable cash, but it is also different from getting nothing (see Footnote 2). Money provided as a loan should be shown separately and acknowledged as a distinctive form of “support”.
So I have some sympathy for the FM’s line that rolling together non-repayable and re-payable support into a single figure is misleading. I just wish the SG would apply this principle when it talks about the money it gives students.
Footnote 1
Click to access statistics_1617.pdf
Footnote 2: are student loans good or bad?
There’s a place for student loans: they have made it possible to fund a larger system, giving more people opportunities, without large cuts in funding per student for tuition and living costs. Given the pressure on public services in general, I am doubtful any UK administration could afford to manage without them, or that it would be the right choice to replace them entirely with cash, saving a transformation in the amount of cash governments here have to spend. My argument about recent history in Scotland is that it’s not right for loans, even income-contingent ones, to land disproportionately on the those who start with least, and that a government which is increasingly reliant on loans for funding students needs to be honest about that. Also, a policy position in which loans for fees are a terrible burden to be avoided at all costs, but the state using loans to help those in most need of help with living costs is a cause for celebration, makes sensible debate of the choices very difficult, while tending to shelter the better-off from debt relative to those from lower incomes.
Footnote 3: write-offs
Outstanding student loan debt is written off, after 35 years at present, if a graduate has earnt too little to have repaid in full by then. I don’t know if any of the “financial transaction” funding in the budget may also be written off in certain circumstances. If not, there’s an argument that the two are not strictly analogous. However, it would not be a great argument. Most student loan in Scotland will be repaid. Also, resting on student loan write-offs in this way exposes a bigger problem with government lines. Write-offs will be much lower in Scotland than England, (a) because amounts borrowed here are less likely to go beyond what graduates will be able to repay in full, and (b) for the time being, the earnings threshold for repayments here is lower, and the write-off period longer. But Scottish ministers routinely unfavourably compare headline average debt in England with that in Scotland, without explaining that the difference in actual repayments will be less pronounced.
As this post noted, surprisingly the recent report of the Scottish student finance review did not set out what its proposals would mean at different incomes. Nor did it show how entitlements would change at different incomes under its recommendation. This post aims to fill that gap, providing a few charts which are missing from the review report. It argues that although the change is limited, and restricted to increasing loan, there is a case for these changes in HE, especially from the perspective of those at middle incomes. It also looks at how, on paper at least, the proposal addresses Scotland’s current regressive distribution of student debt: it argues however that more use of grant would do that better (using the Welsh approach to funding a flat-rate system as an example).
The arguments about loans in FE are not discussed here: they raise different issues.
How entitlements change
The review’s formal recommendation (the”hybrid option”) is considered here, not the “aspirational” higher grant one. Under the hybrid option, the review recommends no change to HE grants.
The two graphs below, one for young students and one for independent students who are (and are assumed to remain) on a lower grant rate, show how the recommendation would change loan entitlements in HE at different incomes.
The proposals for HE have a quite limited impact at the lowest incomes. Mature students tend to fall heavily into the lowest income group, so the changes for them in practice would be particularly limited.
The changes would be more substantial however for those at incomes of £19,000 and over, and especially at £34,000 and up. This would reduce the pressure on these families to contribute upfront, provided students are willing to borrow more. The amount currently available, especially for those at just over £34,000, implies a pretty large contribution relative to household income (and the current Scottish system expects substantially more from families at this level than is common in the UK more generally). This is the real “ability to pay” issue.
In the absence of any other funding there is a case for just releasing this extra loan, especially from the perspective of those at middle incomes: it wouldn’t justify any grandiose claims, but the best shouldn’t be the enemy of the better-than-now and (unlike when grants were cut in 2013) this wouldn’t make lower income students have to borrow more just to stand still, and it ought to go a little way to spreading debt more evenly by income (see below). It would though sit uncomfortably with the Scottish Government’s long-standing, if increasingly detached from reality, anti-debt rhetoric.
The aspirational higher grant HE option and FE recommendation can’t be modelled, because no information is provided on how the review’s costings assume grant would reduce as income rises, in either case.
Debt distribution
The new model is more progressive on paper, with expected loan now increasing, rather than falling, as income rises. How far the additional loan is taken up at high incomes (and if so, not used as a cheap form of saving for the future) would determine how far changing the model on paper alters the distribution of debt students incur while studying in practice. I think take-up at higher incomes, especially for essential living costs, will be patchy. But it would still be more than now.
I worry also about nest-egg building by those from high incomes, as a new form of hidden advantage, because of the low interest rate on student loans here. We could apply higher interest to loans to those from better-off households (but we won’t). Even without that, however, I think on balance this risk is worth taking for a few years, but ideally the use of the new loans at higher incomes would be monitored.
As noted elsewhere, the change would be achieved by increasing debt at middle and higher incomes rather than bringing it down at lower ones. Using grant to reduce debt at lower incomes would be a more certain way of achieving a less regressive loan distribution.
What happens with higher grant
The Welsh plans for 2018-19 show how the same starting point – a flat-rate support entitlement – can produce a very different assumed levels of debt and debt distribution with more use of maintenance grant.
(Figures for Wales taken from the table on this site, with estimates by this author for the income points not shown.)
The graphs above of course exclude additional borrowing for fees, which adds an additional flat-rate amount at all incomes. But even after that a strong skew will remain. A footnote considers separately how total actual borrowing would compare between the two systems (not that much at low incomes), but that’s a different point, which also reflects different decisions about how much of the cash budget to commit to HE, as well as the split of investment in grants and fees.
The Scottish government could achieve the same targeted effect as above, at no extra cost and retaining its lower average debt levels than Wales. That would mean investing more cash in grants and less in fees. The review was prevented from exploring such options.
One further, important advantage of a high grant approach to providing a flat-rate entitlement is that take up of living cost support is likely to be much higher at low incomes. Even where people are willing to take on fee debt as an unavoidable price of getting into higher education, it’s plausible they will be less willing to take on living cost debt and, say, work excessive hours or limit their choices to what they can do living at home. Already in Scotland, among young students qualifying for means-tested grant, between a fifth and a quarter don’t use their living cost loan. The review disappointingly does not acknowledge, far less explore, this.
Conclusion
I don’t understand why the review doesn’t include the income charts at the top of this post. Equivalent ones are prominent in the Diamond review, from which the review has borrowed its central concept of a flat-rate entitlement, and the required figures must have been available to the review, for them to produce the published costings. They usefully bring out that in HE it’s those at middle to lowish incomes for whom the decision whether or not to accept the recommendation is likely to matter most. They get a pretty raw deal at the moment with living cost help.
It’s clearer however why the government might prefer these charts not to be in. They illustrate how much the Scottish system depends on loans to underwrite living costs, and how much the review’s strict remit forces it further down that road. The charts above throw into sharp relief that the rhetorical association so often made by Scottish ministers between fees and debt is far from the whole story.
All figures used above are here Student support review_changes by income
Footnote
Two things affect the comparability of total borrowing between the new Welsh and recommended Scottish system:
- the addition of fee debt in Wales, at £9,000 for those in country, and
- different values of total spending for those living at home (£7,650) or away (£9,000), compared to the single Scottish amount of £8,100.
However, the difference in total annual borrowing at the lowest incomes, especially for mature students, will not be very large. It is close enough that a low-income Welsh mature student who decided to limit themselves to the same £8,100 total as in Scotland would have marginally less final debt after three years (3 x £9,000 = £27,000) than a similar Scot after four years (4 x £7,225 = £28,900).
The figures above are for those studying in their home nation. To adjust for border crossing from Wales, add £250. Border crossers from Scotland will have £9,250 more debt.
The review of student funding was asked to look at changes to the student loan scheme in Scotland.
Its recommendations are:
- an increase in the loan repayment threshold to £22,000. But it adds “The Scottish Government should consider increasing this to £25,000 based on current proposals in England. This additional increase would cost around £27m per year.”
- remaining on the current Plan 1 interest rate (lowest of RPI, or 1% over base rate)
- reducing the period after which debts are written off to 30 years.
These are all welcome steps, very much in line with suggestions which have been floating round in Scotland for some time (here are mine from more than three years ago): all parties but the Greens promised a higher threshold and short write-off period at the last Holyrood elections.
Specifically, the recommendations do not go beyond what was in the SNP manifesto and translated into the current Programme for Government. The only difference is that it is not specific about the timing of the introducing the new threshold, which in PfG and the manifesto was described as being achieved by the end of the current Parliament (2021).
The review makes one new loan-related suggestion, which is to write-off its suggested new FE living cost loans if students move into HE.
Thus the added value of the review to this process has been limited, given this is largely existing policy. But it is useful to have the £27m estimate: I am surprised it is so low, but that may reflect that fewer students here borrow large enough amounts for write-offs to come into play.
Comparative claiming
The review claims that:
should our recommendations be implemented, student loans in Scotland would offer the best terms that are available anywhere in the United Kingdom. (emphasis added)
In similar vein the report says elsewhere that
the Board took a fresh look at the terms of student loans available in Scotland, and worked on enhancements that can be made to ensure that students in Scotland can be offered the best lending terms that are available anywhere in the United Kingdom (emphasis added)
At Monday’s launch, Scotland having the best loan scheme in the UK was a strong theme. The lower interest rate than England or Wales was quoted several times: this seems to have strongly captured the imagination of the review. The review does not acknowledge the findings of bodies such as the IFS or economists like Nicholas Barr that interest rate subsidies are most helpful to the highest earners. But that perhaps is reasonable, given that even with higher borrowing levels the review proposes, more people will continue to fall within the range where their loans are likely to be repaid in full, compared to south of the border.
The argument about loan terms
The report argues the combined effect of the system changes above and lower total amounts of borrowing in Scotland in the absence of fees justify this claim. However, there is a difficulty with including the last of these. “Terms” (especially “lending terms”) has a specific meaning in relation to loans, of any kind: it refers to the rules under which repayments are calculated, irrespective of the amount borrowed.
Existing terms
The report goes further at one point and claims “Loan terms will remain the best in the United Kingdom” (page 32, emphasis added). But Scotland clearly does not currently have the best loan terms in the UK.
The table at the foot of this post shows that Scotland at present has a combination of the lowest repayment threshold and longest repayment period of any UK nation. At minimum, it logically has to be worse at present than Northern Ireland, which has the same threshold and interest, but writes off sooner.
So “Loan terms will remain the best in the United Kingdom”? You can’t remain being what you aren’t already. An independent review should not be suggesting what is not true.
Future repayment terms compared
Here the “best in UK” claim needs back-up that the report does not provide.
The comparison with Northern Ireland is easy: Scotland would now be the same for interest and write-off period, but with a higher repayment threshold. Definitely better terms.
The comparison with England and Wales however relies on the trade-off between the impact of a lower interest rate (mostly, but not always, see footnote below) in Scotland against starting repayment £3,000 sooner. Welsh graduates will also have the first £1,500 of the loan written off when they start repayments, which takes a lot of the edge off the extra interest acquired over the period of study. For lower earning graduates, the English or Welsh systems could still be better. To make the “best” loan terms claim stand up, you need to do some modelling to prove your statement. But none is provided. It is my understanding none has been done.
Most crudely, someone who spends their working life earning more than £22,000 and less than £25,000 would be unambiguously better off in England or Wales. That’s too specific an example to rebut the whole claim: but we need to know how the threshold interacts with the interest rate across earnings deciles more generally for the “best terms” claim to mean anything. Ideally, the models would be compared using a number of different notional initial debt amounts, to check how sensitive the general comparison is to the total amount borrowed.
In other words, the report makes an assertion for which it fails to provide the necessary evidence. Indeed, it is not clear that the authors realise they need to produce this sort of evidence to back up this sort of assertion.
How about total repayments?
Even if including differences in total debt levels is a red herring in the comparison of repayment terms, it would of course be relevant to a comparison of actual total repayments. It would be a different point, but a perfectly valid one to make.
Again, this claim still needs detailed comparative modelling of the repayments associated with expected borrowing under each scheme. Averages are not very helpful, as there will be so much variation round them by income. So the obvious thing to do would be to compare each system a number of times, using the anticipated final debt for a range of comparable students, from different incomes and therefore with different support packages. An issue here is that though annual borrowing will generally still be lower in Scotland, degrees here are generally a year longer, and in comparing graduates’ likely total repayments it would be artificial to ignore that. For those from low incomes final debt for an honours degree could be very similar in Scotland and Wales: for them, the combined threshold/interest rate trade-off will be the deciding component.
Putting it all together, the review’s recommended option might still mean that Scottish honours graduates who started from low incomes would consistently face lower total lifetime repayments than their English, Welsh and NI counterparts, but it’s not self-evident. I’ve not even mentioned yet Scottish Parliament modelling in 2013 which showed how, at that point, differences in the loan terms (conventional linguistic usage), including Scotland’s lower threshold, meant the lowest earning Scottish graduates could end up paying back more equivalents from England who had borrowed more than twice as much. Loan repayment comparisons are complicated things.
In other words, to make a robust comparative claim about the combined effect of total debt and new repayment terms needs … proper modelling. And again none is offered and it is my understanding none has been done. At the moment all we have is an unproved assertion.
Conclusion
The apparent muddle between loan terms and total repayments is unhelpful. But my understanding may be wrong, and the review may have seen analysis which backs up it comparative claim in relation to either (though it is plain wrong about the status quo). However, it then needs to show its workings (it still could, of course). Or it may have jumped to conclusions without having commissioned the necessary analysis: that would be something worse. It would mean a high-profile claim of the review was built on the sand of an untested assumption of superiority.
There were already signs (see here) from the handling of the launch that review members may be susceptible to falling into a “Scotland The Best” trap – the assumption that one prominent difference in Scotland’s favour simply must mean it is generally better than everyone else at the whole of something. The one part of the review report where it makes a superiority claim about a specific element of student funding was an opportunity to reassure on this point. But close reading of that section fails to provide that reassurance.
Table: Current and proposed loan terms in the UK
| Scotland now | Scotland proposed | England and Wales now | England and Wales proposed | NI now (no changes publicly proposed) | |
| Interest | Lowest of RPI or 1% above the BoE rate | RPI plus 3% while studying.
After leaving, variable rate dependent upon income. RPI where income is below repayment threshold. Rises on a sliding scale up to RPI plus 3% where income is £41,000 or more |
As Scotland | ||
| Unpaid debt written off after | 35 | 30 | 30 | 30 | 30 |
| Repayment threshold | 17,775 | 22,000 | 21,000 | 25,000 | 17,775 |
Footnote
For those earning below the repayment threshold used in England or Wales (£25,000 from next year), the interest is RPI. For Scottish and Northern Irish ex-students the interest rate is RPI unless the bank base rate falls to more than 1% below that. In that case (as now: when the 2017-18 rates were set, the base rate was 0.25%, RPI 3.1%) interest is lower for Scots and the Northern Irish. But if the base rate and RPI become closer again, low earning English and Welsh students could be on the same interest rate as Scots and the Northern Irish. There is not a guaranteed lower rate for the latter groups.
“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons” Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is how I feel about claims of policy superiority between the different UK nations.
At Monday’s launch of the student support review, in her opening remarks the chair drew attention to criticism of a line run in pre-briefing, that the review proposals would offer the best support for students available in the UK. I presume the criticism in question was mine, here. She denied its use was inappropriate and repeated the claim on behalf of the review group, saying it would be “the best student package available in the UK”. The claim does not appear in the actual report.
I was kindly given the chance to ask a question, so I asked how they felt the review’s recommended outcome compared specifically with the proposals for Wales, from which their headline suggestion, a flat-rate support entitlement, borrows.
Replying on behalf of the review, Russell Gunson of IPPR Scotland, and previously of NUS Scotland, identified three things which were better. Here is what I noted he mentioned, with some comments:
- The inclusion of FE students
In Wales, at very low incomes full-time students (unless on EMA) are entitled to a grant of £1,500 and part-timers half of that. The review’s proposals suggest a maximum grant of £4,050 and access to a loan topping the total up to £8,100. The review has however kicked part-time support into the long grass, and over the following day it became clear EMA students were not included in its recommendations (see here): Wales also still has EMA, at the same rate (£30/week). So the Scottish proposals are much better for full-time students in FE who are not on EMA.
- The loan repayment terms, referring to the interest rate and the threshold
The interest rate on loans in Wales is higher than the Scottish one (though it may not always be by very much, depending on a person’s earnings level and the relationship at any given time between RPI and the Bank of England base rate: bear with me here). But the Welsh government will continue to write off £1,500 of debt at the start of repayment, which in practice will wipe out much of the effect of the higher interest rate during study, especially for those whose borrowing is kept down by access to a reasonable level of maintenance grant. Meantime, the threshold is an odd thing to cite. In Wales, it will be £25,000, from next year, compared to £22,000 in Scotland, from a year which the review does not specify. The Programme for Government suggests it will rise to that level by the end of this parliament. So it’s the interest which is (in most cases) more favourable under the review proposals: the repayment threshold is actually worse.
- The treatment of those on benefits.
I have to accept this claim at face value. The interaction of benefits and student support is a very specialist topic where I don’t pretend to be able to be able to make comparisons. Let’s assume this claim would withstand further scrutiny.
To be best in the UK, the package by definition has to be better than the one in Wales. That claim rests on the things in bold above. Not mentioned, but could have been, was the total value of combined bursary and loan support for HE students living at home, which would be £8,100 in Scotland, but will be £7,650 in Wales.
There are areas where the Welsh arrangements will be more favourable, which weren’t mentioned:
The total value of support for those living away from home, who make up the majority of HE students in both nations and who by common agreement face the greatest cost pressures: this will be £9,000 (£11,250 in London) for students from Wales, compared to the review’s £8,100.
The inclusion of part-time students, who will get support pro rata in Wales, but remain unaided for living costs under the review’s package. The review makes general statements about the desirability of funding part-timers, but remits the issue back to the SG and its recommendation’s costing is for full-time students only.
Much (much) greater use of non-repayable means-tested bursary to provide this living cost support in Wales, so that living cost loans will be much lower at low and middle incomes.
The extension to taught post-graduate students in Wales, who will get a similar package to undergraduates, although the implementation of that in full will take longer. The review did not look at taught post-graduates: Scottish ones can now borrow something towards fees and living costs, but the Welsh arrangements for this group will be much better.
The opening video presentation for the launch emphasised the problem of student hardship, i.e. students not having enough to live on. This is also a strong theme in the report. So how systems compare on total living cost support, especially for the people facing the highest costs, feels like it should weigh pretty heavily in any objective comparison, on the review’s own terms. As might how far that support is offered at low and middle incomes on terms which are more likely to actually be taken up – that is, how much is grant. The Welsh plan is substantially better on both those counts.
The inclusion of full-time non-EMA FE students is balanced by the exclusion of all part-timers, in HE and FE, and post-graduates. I’m going to write elsewhere about specific comparative claims made in the report about the loan scheme, but in brief the interest rate difference does not self-evidently outweigh a £3k difference in the repayment threshold, particularly for low earners. Clearly, benefit interaction is a very serious issue for those who are affected, and they will tend to be particularly financially vulnerable, but the review does not say what proportion of students are affected by this, or how much money may be involved. I think one, ideally both, figures would have to be reasonably high to justify a claim this mattered more than differences in general support, especially grant support.
What about fees?
The review made its claim specifically about its own proposals, from which fees were excluded. But if fee debt and funding is regarded as relevant then other comparisons would apply.
In Scotland debt for those who study in-country will be lower per annum, which for many people may be the be-all-and-end-all. However, the difference with Wales will be pretty small at low incomes, and in a few cases the extra year of study in Scotland for an honours degree may more than wipe it out. Those who leave Scotland to study will have higher debt at low and middle incomes, compared to counterparts from Wales, because they will pay the same fees, but get little or no maintenance grant by comparison.
As well as applying to all Welsh students, not only those who stay in-country to study, the Welsh package concentrates non-repayable cash funding far more on those from households with the lowest incomes, protecting them more from debt relative to those from higher income families. That’s only arguably better: it depends on your thinking this matters. But that is the whole point about my complaint about these general comparisons. Perspective matters and needs to be made explicit.
“A” for effort?
The chair also seemed to be offering one further argument for the UK comparative claim, which was to do with how hard the group had
“tried to create the best in Scotland”
The argument sounded to be that in doing the best they could, the group must have come up with the best package in the UK.
If that was the implication, then there’s a huge logical leap. I don’t doubt at all that the review members feel they did the best they could within the terms they were given. When I run in the school parents’ race I try to do the best I can, within my own considerable constraints. It doesn’t mean I win.
In any case, the review itself identifies that there was a better, higher grant, package that is not their recommendation because it was beyond their remit. Moreover, the Diamond review no doubt also felt they did they best they could for Wales. So on this logic theirs must be best in the UK, too.
Best in what way? Best for whom?
It clearly bears repeating that student support systems have many different elements, some of which matter more to some people than others, and which will affect people differently depending on their circumstances. Then there are people like me who worry about system-wide effects, like how students are treated relative to one another. The chance of finding one which is best on every conceivable important measure in most, let alone all, cases is low. No UK scheme achieves that now or in the near future will manage that. Assertions of “bestness” become increasingly meaningless and value-laden, the more general they are.
Even narrowing it down to students from particular backgrounds, it is rare to find a system which is “best” on every obviously important measure. When I compared UK systems in detail a couple of years ago, there was only one group of students for whom one system came close to being objectively “best”. For students from families earning at least £54,000 who stayed in-country to study, and were not later low earners, Scotland clearly offered the best terms. I think that will remain true under these proposals, but I haven’t re-run the sums.
Conclusion
There was no need to run this line. There was no need to double-down and repeat it unprompted. It was not included in the report: it appears to have been developed in the final stages of deciding the presentational approach. Student support is not a cross-UK beauty contest or an arms-race: comparisons are enlightening and thought-provoking, but the primary focus should be on the policy choices being made within the boundaries of each home nation, and who benefits (and who does not).
The benefit of a review such as this should be that it lifts the debate above the political stramash which typifies the discussion of student funding in Scotland. It was a chance to concentrate on the mechanics free of the more questionable rhetoric. So it has been simply disappointing to see this highly rhetorical distraction device being brought out again. At least this time, unlike in 2012, it has been possible to test the basis. Readers can judge the answer offered for themselves. To me, it sounded more like an explanation hastily reached for after the line was decided, than the conclusion of a piece of careful analysis and deliberation, from which the line was drawn.
I think the review is a little diminished by its association with this claim. It was so central to the line run by the government, and echoed by NUS, in 2012 that it is hard to believe it has appeared spontaneously. In any event, its use was ill-advised. There’s nothing wrong with any review trying to get the most favourable hearing it can, for all the hard work it has done. It may even sometimes be judged that that requires paying for professional PR advice, as is happening here (two senior partners of Charlotte Street Partners, Kevin Pringle and Andrew Wilson, were present at the launch). But for an exercise like this, there’s no price that can be put on being perceived to be above spin.
There are a few other issues which stand out as deserving more attention, in no particular order.
The benefits of the new flat rate entitlement to those just above to grant cut off, where family contributions are currently high relative to income, and to those at higher incomes whose parents cannot or will not support them, as long as they are willing to borrow.
The movement of FE bursaries onto an entitlement basis – a generally good thing, although the report’s references to increased interaction with the benefit system may hint at why this has not been done before. It’s not clear if this needs legislation.
The extension of loans to FE as an issue of principle: that raises some interesting questions. The ground has been partly broken by FE fee loans in England. The report doesn’t mention whether the review looked into any potential for lessons from that. I think this might need legislation: the report does not address that point.
The review’s claims that loans terms here are and will be superior to those in other parts of the UK: one of these is wrong, others don’t have the supporting analysis that appears to be required required to back them up (more on that to follow). Generally, from the repeated references to it at the launch, the fact of lower interest rates in Scotland than England and Wales (though not Northern Ireland) seem to loom large in the review’s worldview. At the launch, it was implied that the proposals in the report go beyond the existing SNP manifesto commitment to improve loan repayment terms: I don’t immediately see that, beyond a gentle nudge to consider following the English and Welsh rise to a £25,000 repayment threshold, but need to check again.
The review’s discussion of attitudes towards loans. It suggests a negative press for loans is more of an issue in other parts of the UK. But Scottish government ministers are extensively on record themselves talking in very negative terms about loans, where they are used for fees, without any apparent concern about how that might affect attitudes to borrowing here for living costs, and the SG has not actively promoted loans as a funding source in Scotland, despite promises to the parliament during the autumn 2012 that it would do so. However negative the media, there’s been quite strong official promotion of loans in other parts of the UK, by contrast, for obvious reasons.
The further discussion at the launch about the basis for a more general claim of the recommended system being best in the UK: a short post on that will follow.
The suggestion student support should be calculated only to cover 25 hours a week of study for full-time students, to allow up to 10 hours of paid employment within a 35 hour week: that compares to 35 hours assumed in Diamond. The views of university and college teachers on this would be interesting.
The lack of any discussion of the fall in numbers taking a grant in recent years, the possible reasons for that and its implications for a Scottish funding model: that’s very disappointing.
The review’s recommendations about the relationship between benefits and student finance. The report shows that for reasons that are not at all clear, Scotland is the only part of the UK which has not adopted a way of labelling/packaging support to reduce its impact on benefits. The review makes recommendations it hopes will more than catch that position up: but it appears to suggest that for quite a few years Scottish policy has failed to spot a relatively simple way to provide practical help to at least some student on benefits. That’s quite a finding, if I am reading it right.
The general evidence base and presentation of supporting figures in the report: on a first read, it feels much thinner than others on this general theme here and elsewhere in the UK over the past two decades. There’s more to say on that, and the resourcing of the review, probably.
There are various recommendation about system administration and information, which look sensible, particularly for a large improvement in on-line resources. They are probably more for others to comment on.
The report of the SG’s student support review was published yesterday: it is available here http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2017/11/3884. This post looks at its treatment of grant and loan, and says the last rites over bullet point 2 of recommendation 19 of the Commission on Widening Access.
Remit
It’s difficult to over-state how far this review was constrained by the remit the government set it (see page 15 in the link above).
It could not be the Diamond Review (although there are signs it aspired to be something of a Diamond for Scotland), because in Wales Diamond was given free range to look at whole of higher education student finance and its complete effect on students. This review was specifically told not to look at fees. So though the review describes itself as aiming to be “holistic”, it had no choice but to be holistic with a large hole.
The group stuck carefully to the prohibition on looking at fees, and it’s not clear there was any appetite to do otherwise. As the chair said at the launch yesterday:
We really support, I’m sure everyone does, the Scottish government’s focus on funding tuition fees. We commend that.
The odd effect of this remit restriction was well-illustrated earlier this year, when the Scottish government invited tenders on behalf of the review for comparative research into systems in other countries. Bidders were specifically asked to exclude fees from the comparison, but still to draw conclusions on the relationship between student funding and participation. (The final report is available here, by Anna Round and Russell Gunson of IPPR Scotland, the latter also being a member of the review group.)
On top of this, the government told the review not to come up with anything expensive. As the report puts it:
But the Scottish Government also made it clear in the remit that any recommendations from the Review should be made in full awareness “of the evident constraint on the public finances”.
Or as the chair, Jayne-Anne Gadhia, put it at the report’s launch (I hope I was writing fast enough to get her exact words).
in other words, could we do this and not cost the government very much more money
Grants versus loans
The review kicked a bit more against the funding restriction, but only a bit, listing a further option which would mean increasing means-tested grants, at a cost of £123m. NUS Scotland strongly pushed for that (supported by Unison). But this “50/50 bursary to loan balance” option is described only as “an aspiration of most of the board”. It’s not the review’s recommendation.
The review more generally says
how should levels of loans and bursaries be balanced? This was arguably the hardest question we considered. The Board found it helpful to view the costs landscape as a journey to be achieved over time. However, the rate of progress to fair funding and parity is for the Scottish Government to determine based on the public funding they wish to allocate in any particular year
That feels a rather jargon-heavy (“view the costs landscape”?) and non-commital position. It is certainly well short of strong arguments made for targeted grants as a progressive intervention in the Diamond review, and previous ones in Wales: those however were free to switch resources from fee subsidies to grants, to make their recommendations affordable.
The recommendation
The review recommends a “hybrid approach” which is will keep HE grants at their current low level (especially low for mature students), and put a little more into FE bursaries, but rely on loans to give everyone, at all incomes £8,100 of total support (copying from the Diamond Review’s flat-rate model, but ignoring its arguments for the substantial use of grant to achieve this).
Surprisingly perhaps, the report only shows what its recommended option would mean for the lowest income young students in HE, and the lowest income FE students, and no others.
But given it assumes no new grant spending in HE, it seems reasonable to fill the gaps using the existing HE grant levels: see below. I think it’s untransparent of the review not to include this table (or whatever equivalent it has used to produce its costings). It suggests wariness of making clear how much loan its package would involve for most students, if they wanted to make the £8,100 reality. But that’s the consequence of living with the existing level of HE grants.
In passing, I’m disappointed the review doesn’t comment on the lack of justification for giving mature students less grant than young students.
| Young | Independent (mature) | ||||
| Household income | Young Student Bursary | Loan: new (old) | Independent
Student Bursary |
Loan: new (old) | |
| 0-£18,999 | 1875 | 6225
(5750) |
875 | 7225
(6750) |
|
| £19,000-£23,999 | 1125 | 6975
(5750) |
0 | 8100
(6750) |
|
| £24,000-£33,999 | 500 | 7600
(5750) |
0 | 8100
(6250) |
|
| £34,000+ | 0 | 8100
(4750) |
0 | 8100
(4750) |
|
This change does address the complaint from people like me that the previous system was designed round higher debt at lower incomes. Whether in practice it translates into a distribution of borrowing no longer skewed towards the lowest incomes will depend on whether higher income families withdraw from providing living cost support on any scale (or their children borrow the money on top of that). That is, a less regressive pattern of borrowing by income will depend on a significant rise in student indebtedness at high incomes, rather than a reduction in it at lower ones.
Around one-quarter of students on YSB don’t take out a loan: the review report disappointingly does not discuss the implication of that for its proposals, although it does discuss the need to encourage a more positive view of student loans, especially as an alternative to commercial debt.
I can’t repeat this table for FE students, as the review recommends an increase in grant, but only says what this would mean at the highest rate (an increase from around £3200 to £4050) and not how it might then taper. The cut off for FE grant is much higher, at £45,000. The review really ought to have shared in more detail its assumptions about FE grant and loan at different incomes. It says its planned increases in FE bursary would cost £16m (+25%) on current spending.
We know that YSB students in college are less likely to borrow than those in university (30% in college do not vs 20% in university). That raises further questions about what sort of take-up of loans there might be among FE students in practice. The review confirmed yesterday that it had not tried to estimate this. Its costings assume 100% loan take-up.
Conclusion: an Access Commission recommendation quietly buried
It’s worth remembering that some of the origin of this review was Recommendation 19 from the Commission on Widening Access. Emphasis added.
Recommendation 19: The Commissioner for Fair Access should commission research, within three months of appointment, to assess how student finance impacts on the participation of disadvantaged learners in higher education. This research should consider in particular:
-
Whether, and to what extent, levels of student finance impact upon access, retention and choice of institution.
-
Whether, and to what extent, the balance between loan and bursary impacts upon access, retention and choice of institution.
-
International practice on student finance and the impact this has on access and retention.
As “Implementing a Blueprint for Fairness” puts it (emphasis added):
Further and Higher Education Student Support Review
This independent review, chaired by Jayne-Anne Gadhia, CEO of Virgin Money, has a remit to thoroughly review student support and ensure that the entire system is firmly focused on meeting the needs of all students in further and higher education. The review was launched in October 2016 and is scheduled to report to Ministers by autumn 2017. The Chair met with the Commissioner for Fair Access in May to discuss the links between the Student Support Review’s work and the findings of the Commission. Work to deliver Recommendation 19 (Research on student finance) and Recommendation 20 (Better information on student finance) will be considered in the context of this review.
In terms of addressing the second point of Recommendation 19, this review just didn’t. With no substantial analysis of alternatives and their possible implications, it simply embeds the cuts in HE grants made in 2013, doesn’t challenge the longer standing placing of mature students on a lower grant rate, and increases the use of loan substantially. But that can be traced directly to the constrained remit the review was set by ministers. The chance to look seriously at the balance of loan and grant was removed by government before it started. Recommendation 19 will now be marked as ticked off, I suspect, but an important part won’t have been done. Point 2 has been quietly killed. There’s presumably absolutely no political appetite for stimulating any debate on how loans compare to grants as a way of funding living costs.
Towards the end of Through the Looking Glass. Alice, very hungry, arrives at the final banquet. However, just as she is about to dig into a leg of mutton, or a plum pudding, she is introduced to it. And, as the Red Queen says “It isn’t etiquette to cut anyone you’ve been introduced to”. “I won’t be introduced to the pudding, please,” Alice says, “or we shall get no dinner at all.” “Pudding – Alice; Alice – Pudding” the Red Queen persists.
This has long struck me as explaining the tone of much public policy debate in the small policy community that is Scotland. Everyone has been introduced, repeatedly.
It came to me again today at the launch of the report of the Scottish Government’s Review of Student Funding. First, it was good of them to invite me. Second, everyone was of course really lovely, and the staff who had supported it gave me their time at the end to deal with a whole lot of technical questions I had, which were dealt with patiently and straightforwardly. And now I feel as though I am standing over the plum pudding, with my cutlery in mid-air.
So before digging into the report, it’s important to acknowledge that whatever criticisms may be made of the report, or the process, or particular findings, or the presentation, the people involved deserve recognition for having put a lot of time, over and above their usual duties, over the better part of a year, to try to make sense of what was a very constraining remit. Within that, they have made some recommendations which have potential to have a lasting impact for the good. I’ve read through the minutes and you cannot fault the earnestness with which the group approached all this. We should be grateful that people are willing to take on this sort of work.
The story of this review is above all the story of its remit. Limited by that, the review has made its case over 84 pages. As the Red Queen says, after the pudding gamely chats despite having lost a slice (Alice finally loses patience with etiquette), “it’s ridiculous to leave all the conversation to the pudding”.
The next post will attempt a critical overview of the main recommendations.
Adventures In Evidence 