University Alliance has made their submission to the Autumn budget, which will take place on 28 October.
Overview
Our submission focuses on the fiscal and policy reforms that will help turn the UK into a technical education superpower. Working together, we must create the following three conditions to achieve this ambition. We will explain why these conditions are needed and the changes necessary to create them.
- Building coherent and stable technical pathways from levels 2 to 8;
- Removing barriers to access and success for learners at any age or stage;
- Ensuring financially viable professional and technical universities.
1. Building coherent technical pathways from levels 2 to 8
Recommendations
- Allow some V Levels in large qualification sizes to ensure existing successful qualifications can be retained.
- Commit to greater transparency in the short-term about how Growth & Skills Levy receipts are allocated and spent and commit to using 100% of funds collated through the Levy for skills development in the longer-term.
- Commit to protecting level 6 apprenticeships from further funding restrictions based on age or standard.
- Extend access to modules through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) to level 7 and to all subjects linked to priority and IS-8 sectors, including the creative industries.
- Ensure English devolution does not lead to further fragmentation of delivery and accountability for technical education.
- Create a single Department with Cabinet level oversight of post-16 education, skills and research.
2. Removing barriers to access and success
Recommendations
- Reduce the upfront cost of higher education participation through reforms to the student maintenance system:
- Increase parental income thresholds and address the real terms cut to maximum maintenance support levels following high inflation in 2022-24 (a 10% cut over two years)[1], which has not yet been reversed.
- Make it easier for students not supported by their parents or wider family to be classified as independent.
- Raise the value of targeted maintenance grants; ensure they apply to courses linked to all growth-driving and priority sectors, including the creative industries; and fund them within the student finance system rather than the international student levy – a precarious and politically charged income stream that will disproportionately impact teaching-intensive universities.
- Implement an “apply early” campaign with the Student Loans Company as a low-cost way of helping ensure Student Finance and Disabled Students’ Allowance payments arrive by induction rather than weeks into the first term.
- Fund the Transport Committee’s recommendation on young people’s bus travel (Recommendation 27, Buses connecting communities): a pilot free bus pass for under-22s, valid for travel at any time of day, through the review of the English National Concessionary Travel Scheme.
3. Ensuring professional and technical universities are financially viable
- Honour the commitment in the post-16 white paper to legislate for annual increases in tuition fees linked to inflation,
- Require the Home Office to publish a fiscal assessment of the cost of Student visa refusals and processing delays,
- Rethink the international student levy and decouple maintenance grants from it.
- Protect long-term funding for research and development, including Quality-Related (QR) funding and Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF), which returns £14.80 for every £1 invested
- Convene a citizens’ assembly on how post-18 education should be paid for and by whom -addressing the trade-offs between graduate contributions, taxpayer investment, student numbers and the survival of local provision – and committing in advance to respond formally to its conclusions.
