Don’t just help the privileged

3rd May 2002, 1:00am

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Don’t just help the privileged

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/dont-just-help-privileged
Ministers’ reluctance to extend education maintenance allowances shows that elitism is alive and well, says Nadine Cartner

EDUCATION maintenance allowances hang in the balance. There have been hints from these pages and other reliable sources that the Chancellor will provide the funds for the scheme to go nationwide.

But ministers won’t commit themselves, and at last week’s lobby of Parliament no one was assuming that we have won this one. Gordon Brown spelt out his child tax-credit scheme in the Budget. Will his prudence stretch to maintenance allowances as well?

The sector’s lobby of Parliament demonstrated admirable unanimity on this matter. But we need to continue to expose and question the widespread assumption that university students should enjoy privileged access to state support. These students are more favoured than other groups of students - in spite of their more affluent backgrounds and futures.

Colleges must assert that this mindset as dated and elitist as the old graduate double-vote policy - abolished more than 50 years ago. A radical, just and holistic student-support framework is needed.

Student-support policies must embrace adults with no or few qualifications; people in their 40s and 50s in declining industries made redundant after a lifetime in one job; women in their 30s looking to launch a career once the kids are at school; young people from poor backgrounds who are tugged out of full-time education for economic reason. In other words, the students who populate all our colleges.

The Government is considering bowing to political pressure, partially to reverse recent changes regarding university fees. If that U-turn gobbles up resources that could have supported a national system of maintenance allowances, then this is a reactionary step.

Many educationists still support the principle of universality in respect of higher education fees. But this is unrealistic, partly because of the expansion in HE numbers but also because the modern social and economic agenda demands that we embrace many more learners in our student-support policies.

Ivan Lewis has described the proposal to roll out allowances as “extremely expensive”. But the pilots suggest that they provide the critical incentive for 16 to 18-year-olds from lower-income families to stay on in education. Retention among allowance holders improves by 5 per cent or more.

Currently, there are 20 per cent fewer disadvantaged young people in education than young people from better-off backgrounds. The social and economic benefits of allowances outweigh those of lifting some of the HE fees burden from middle-class students. Current evidence suggests that middle-class people will not be deterred from going to university by the existing fees policies, so why lighten the fees burden?

That money can be deployed elsewhere to educate someone who needs the financial incentive to participate. Fifty per cent of HE students are currently exempt from paying fees on grounds of family income - such support for less advantaged students should, of course, continue.

The Government’s priority target of 50 per cent of 18 to 30-year-olds into HE by 2010 depends on colleges delivering the candidates with level 3 qualifications. Allowances are critical to that target.

Broadly, the learning and skills sector is charged with promoting prosperity and social inclusion by enabling many more people to reap the benefits of skilled and reasonably well-paid employment.

To achieve this, we need a framework for student support that targets disadvantaged people, so we can attract more of them into education.

However, ministers have chosen to consider support for HE students independently of other forms of learner support, rather than develop an overall framework. This decision reflects the outdated assumption that HE students are a special case.

There is a groundswell of respected opinion for a framework for learner support which links equity with hard-headed notions of what will benefit the economy as a whole. At present, the campaign focuses on allowances for young people. We need to enlarge the framework in ways that include the adults in our colleges.

Nadine Cartner is education officer for the Association of College Management

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