Calls for long-delayed update to higher education funding

Wednesday 08 December 2021

A university student support group is calling for long-awaited changes to Jersey's "out of date" higher education funding system to be made urgently, amid concerns the matter will fall off the agenda after elections.

The Student Loan Support Group (SLSG) has sent a letter to the political tasked with scrutinising education, highlighting how the current university funding scheme does not keep up with current UK rates, and that the last change to the postgraduate bursary scheme was 21 years ago.

Summing up the group's main concerns, Nicki Heath of the SLSG told Express: "We'd like to think that it's still as affordable for students to go as it was in the past, so we need to have a reevaluation of the scheme.

"They need to review the postgraduate funding situation because we're now lagging way behind even the UK on access to that level of higher education.

"Ideally, we need to have those details as soon as possible and for that to be in place by 2023, because otherwise, with a new States Assembly, we might end up having to go to the beginning again, and that would mean the scheme becoming out of date again, which was the problem we had at the beginning in 2015 [when the support group was initially set up, ed.]."

Pictured: The need for an updated higher education funding scheme was agreed upon by the States Assembly two years ago, but still nothing has turned up.

She said that the current grant scheme is "now two years over its intended review date as agreed by the Assembly”, following a proposition to update the scheme approved by States Members in 2018.

SLSG's letter noted: "The plan was to review before the end of 2021 and that "any proposal needing to be debated by the Assembly in order... would be in place for the academic year 2023/24, giving sufficient time for parents and students to plan ahead. We had confirmed this with the Minister recently.

"The Minister told us that officers were due to present the options, and he was taking that to the [Council of Ministers] for a decision."

The letter said that, although in a November meeting Education Minister, Deputy Scott Wickenden, had brought up that the new grant would involve adjustment for inflation (RPI), "there is no detail of what the RPI adjustment will be."

They added that the maintenance grant - which currently stands at up to £7,500 depending on a student's circumstances - was also in need of review to keep up with current costs.

"We would expect the RPI to be calculated based on the start of the current scheme figure at the minimum, and ought to be reviewed each year," the letter reads.

"The cost of student accommodation in the UK has outstripped the UK RPI consistently for years."

They added that the current "step changes in the maintenance grant causes problems. If a parent works one hour of paid overtime, it can mean a student loses £1,500 of funding."

On the issue of postgraduate funding, they noted that "this has not been reviewed for as far as we are aware, 21 years, and exists as a bursary largely unchanged."

Whilst students doing PGCEs, Diplomas in Social Work, Legal Practice Courses (LPC), and Bar Professional Training Courses (BPTC) can apply for funding assistance, all other postgraduates have to apply for a Jersey bursary of up to £10,000, of which only 12 have been given.

Ms Heath explained that this differed from other jurisdictions, observing that in the UK, there are now various loans to help assist postgraduates.

After SLSG's letter submission, Ms Heath said that the latest the group had heard was that there would be more information on the updated higher education scheme in January.

In response to queries from Express, a Government spokesperson said: "Like all submissions, we will carefully consider the comments to Scrutiny by the Student Loan Support Group. In the meantime, it would not be appropriate to comment while the Scrutiny process is underway."

They did not give a date for when details of an updated scheme would become available.