Cribsheet daily 10.11.10

Protest march against increase in tuition fees — Students and lecturers gather in central London to protest against university funding cuts. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA

@GemmaTumelty (former NUS president) tweeted a short while ago: "Have just heard chants of 'you say cut back, we say fight back' past the window from students heading there from ULU!".

Yes, the demonstration against tuition fees is well underway – and you can follow all the action throughout the day on the Guardian's live blog.

The union says "significantly more" than the predicted 24,000 are going to turn up, after a surge of interest in the past two days. Its president, @AaronPorter, has just tweeted: "Looking like this will be the biggest student demo in a generation." The Guardian data blog shows which parts of the country they're coming from.

Here's a summary of the issues from our education editor, Jeevan Vasagar:

Why are they protesting?
The government is proposing to raise tuition fees, allowing some universities to charge as much as £9,000, while cutting university budgets by 40 percent. Currently, students in England pay £3,290 pounds a year. Students, lecturers and some university vice-chancellors say these proposals are an unfair transfer of the cost of higher education from society to the individual.

What is the likely impact of the budget cuts?
The cuts are expected to hit the arts and humanities hardest, as funding for science, medicine and engineering is likely to be protected. In practice, this means universities which are able to charge the full £9,000 should raise enough money to provide a full spectrum of courses, but newer universities are likely to focus on vocational degrees where they can be sure of attracting students. The fear is that the arts, especially modern languages, become the preserve of the most privileged students.

Will a big hike in tuition fees put off poorer students?
The government says not. Even after top-up fees were brought in under Blair, the numbers wanting to go to university kept rising. Research published in May by Offa, an education watchdog, found that top-up fees had not increased the disparity between rich and poor teenagers attending elite universities.
But that increase was small compared to what is being proposed now. Vice-chancellors who wrote a letter published in the Guardian today fear that working class families are more debt averse than the middle class.

What does the government say?
Ministers say a change to the way universities are paid for is inevitable. Britain is shifting from an elite system paid for through general taxation to a society in which, in a few years' time, more than half of young people will go to university. They say that cuts have to be made to budgets as part of wider austerity measures but the strongest universities will flourish and grow. Poorer students will benefit from scholarships and universities which
charge more than £6,000 will have to show they are doing more to widen access.

In the past few days, Guardian readers have been voting in a poll on whether students are right to march on this issue. Support for students was steady throughout, and as the poll closed it became overwhelming: 90.9% said yes, 9.1% said no.

Other education news on the Guardian

Teacher who lost voice gets £150,000 compensation. Teachers TV have a helpful video on how you should use your voice in the classroom.

Middle-class students face drop in university funding after government admits mistake

Tuition fees: a mother's advice to her son

Education news from around the web

The Telegraph has a story about student high jinks at Cambridge – five years of bad behaviour revealed in a dossier

Academics say the coalition's academies policy will reinforce advantage

The Independent has a nice story about a successful Muslim school helping out a struggling, mostly white college

The Mail analyses the "crippling 30-year debt" students are going to face

The National Literacy Trust is encouraging everyone to buy a book for a child this Christmas.

Competition

Do you have a clever way of using technology to teach children at your school? Enter the Classroom Innovation awards by sending us a short video of what you can do. There is a primary and secondary category and each winner will get £7,500 of Asus computing kit.