The chancellor, George Osborne, has announced two major changes that will affect UK higher education:
1) Student maintenance grants will be replaced with loans from 2016-17. These loans will be repaid under the same terms as tuition fee loans once a graduate earns over £21,000 a year, saving the government £2.5bn by 2020-21. The maximum value of the maintenance loan will be increased to £8,200, but graduates will have to pay it all back.
2) Institutions that can demonstrate excellent teaching, supposedly through the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework (Tef), will be allowed to increase their tuition fees in line with inflation from 2017-18.
The Russell Group has welcomed the move to increase tuition fees for those universities that provide excellent teaching, saying that since 2012 inflation has eaten into the value of funding available. Meanwhile, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers fear that scrapping maintenance grants will stop some young people from going to university.
Here’s how the sector has reacted:
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