24 January 2008

University think-tank Million+ - OFFA Report

Pam Tatlow from the university think-tank Million+ said “There is no doubt that universities which have a first class record in widening participation have done what they said and spent significant amounts of additional fee income on providing discretionary bursaries for full-time students and on outreach work. These universities have more students from lower income families and this is an excellent performance which, ironically, has the potential to reduce the unit of student resource compared to other institutions.

The report signals that some health warnings need to be applied to the current system. The failure of students to claim bursaries confirms our own research that the HE funding and student support system in the UK and in particular in England is enormously complex, not only for universities to administer but for full-time students themselves. It is also quite bizarre that students from the same socio-economic background, studying the same course receive different discretionary bursaries according to the university at which they study and what that university judges it can afford to pay. This is neither equitable nor fair and it is why a number of English HEIs have always advocated a national bursary scheme – a policy subsequently adopted in Wales.

The success of outreach work should ultimately be judged by the social profile of students actually enrolled in an HEI. This will not be confirmed until later. It is far from clear that the use of additional fee income will have made any great inroads into a more inclusive social profile across all institutions. This is a complex issue but so long as funding support systems focus on full-time students and HE funding incentivises full-time provision then we are unlikely to make serious further progress. The OFFA report confirms yet again that institutions which have a higher proportion of their student body attending on a full-time basis and a less inclusive student profile have a clear resource advantage over those institutions with a significant number of part-time or non-traditional students.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. OFFA was established as a result of the 2004 HE Act which introduced variable tuition fees for students in England. Universities are required to submit Access agreements to OFFA for approval and then financial returns to indicate the extent to which they have fulfilled those agreements.
2. The report covers the statutory bursaries which HEIs are obliged to pay to low income full-time students if they charge the maximum tuition fee and any discretionary bursaries offered by individual institutions. Access agreements can also include outreach work – also recorded in returns to OFFA.
3. The Million+ report ‘Reality Check: student finance regimes’ was published in November 2007. It concluded that the student finance systems which have developed within the UK since 2004 were ‘exceptionally complex’, a ‘whole system’ approach should be adopted to future reform and that there was a strong argument in favour of streamlining the current complex arrangements if widening participation was to remain a goal for government.

Download Reality Check: student finance regimes

For interviews contact: Pam Tatlow, Chief Executive, Million+ (020 7717 1655 / 07795 645241)