Higher Education Bill

Higher Education Bill

“Reforms to education will help every child fulfil their potential wherever they live, raising standards and improving the quality of schools and higher education.”

The purpose of the Bill is to:

● Ensure that our post-18 education system promotes real social mobility, helping students onto pathways in which they can excel, and is financially sustainable.

This will help support people get the skills they need to meet their career aspirations and to help grow the economy.

The main benefits of the Bill would be:

● Ensuring people are supported to get the skills they need throughout their life.

The Bill will enable the introduction of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement, a new and flexible way of providing loan support for post-18 study. This will provide individuals with a loan entitlement equivalent to four years of post-18 education (£37,000 in today’s fees) that they can use over their lifetime for a wider range of studies, including shorter and technical courses.

● Fulfilling the manifesto commitment to tackle uncontrolled growth of low-quality courses.

The main elements of the Bill are:

● Ensuring that appropriate fee limits can be applied more flexibly to higher education study within the Lifelong Loan Entitlement and that they can be effectively regulated.

● Subject to the conclusion of the higher education reform consultation:

o setting minimum qualification requirements for a person living in England to be eligible to get student finance support to enter higher education, helping to ensure students can pursue the best post-18 education and training options for them by taking pathways through which they can excel; and

o fulfilling the manifesto commitment to tackle uncontrolled growth of lowquality courses by taking specific powers to control numbers of students entering higher education at specific providers in England.

Territorial extent and application

● The Bill will extend and apply in the main to England and Wales, with some provisions extending across the UK.

Key facts

● We have four universities in the global top ten. Our powerhouses of research have led the world in vaccine discovery and produced a Nobel prize winner each year for the last two decades on average. Two thirds of British start-ups valued at $1 billion or over were founded by graduates of British universities. Last year, 18 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds were 82 per cent more likely to go to university than in 2010.

● The current student finance system does not incentivise or offer a clear route for an adult to undertake higher learning flexibly over their lifetime. A 2018 survey found around 24 per cent of the population had considered part-time higher education in the last ten years but had not enrolled. The main reasons for this were financial concerns (tuition fee costs were cited by 44 per cent of respondents).

● Our skills system has been very efficient at producing graduates but there is still a need to ensure people get the quality technical skills that employers want. Data shows that only four per cent of young people achieve a qualification at higher technical level by the age of 25 compared to the 33 per cent who get a degree or above. Moreover, only 66 per cent of working-age graduates (not including postgraduates) were in high-skilled employment in 2020.

● Data from the Office for Students shows that students who enter higher education with lower prior attainment are more likely to drop out. For example, students entering with A level grades of DDD have a drop-out rate of 6.7 per cent compared with a drop out rate of 4.7 for students entering with A level grades of

CCC.

● There are some higher education courses where outcomes are unacceptably low, leading to bad outcomes for students and taxpayers. In 2021 the Office for

Students found that at 25 higher education providers fewer than half of the students who began a degree could expect to finish it and move on to professional employment or further study.