In this article I will be talking about the potential banning of student loans by the government for students who do not achieve at least a grade 4 (C) in English and maths at GCSEs, also A-level students who fail to achieve at least two grade Es.
For those who may not know, GCSEs (The General Certificate of Secondary Education) are a set of exams which students in the UK are required to take at the end of their secondary school education at the age of 16. Secondary schools in the UK are 6 years long from Year 7 to Year 11. GCSEs are mostly used to apply for Sixth forms or equivalent where they would be studying 3 subjects of their choice based on their GCSE grades and interests. Then students would take their A-level exams to get a place at a university, you could think of it as like the American SAT tests for college.
The Student Loans Company have been around the UK for more than 30 years since 1989 when it was established. They are “a non-profit making government-owned organisation that administers loans and grants to students in colleges and universities in the UK” stated in the government’s website.
What is the reason behind this restriction? The aim of this ban is to weed out “low quality” courses from universities. This is determined by those courses which have a high number of students dropping out and with the number of students with graduate jobs after completing these degrees being low. The Department of Education has said that it is concerned that "not all students receive the same high quality of teaching" and that many students become burdened with debt with limited career prospects. They believe that students should be fully prepared and in a good position to go to university. A reason for this is because around 45% of student loans comes from taxpayers and the average debt among the cohort of borrowers who finished their courses in 2020 was £45,000. The Government expects that 25% of current full-time undergraduates who take out loans will repay them in full.
Unfortunately, this is where the problem begins. Students from more disadvantaged backgrounds will be affected the most. Every student deserves to have a chance to improve their prospects and going to university is a major door for them to achieve this. With the new restriction, this door will now be closing many opportunities against them. This is contradicting what the government wanted to implement which is the idea of giving more pupils the chance of entering higher education. Clearly, this is not the correct approach to obtain this objective.
A recent news article interviewed a professor from Brunel University Benjamin Zephaniah, in which he shares his story on his journey to becoming successful. I will summarise this article below, but you can find out more about it via the link at the end of this article.
Some of the most affected students are students with learning disorders such as dyslexia. Dyslexia’s definition according to the oxford dictionary is “a general term for disorders that involve difficulty in learning to read or interpret words, letters, and other symbols, but that do not affect general intelligence.” Professor Benjamin Zephaniah has dyslexia, but he is now a successful poet, writer, and musician. His response for The Guardian was “In school, I was a failure. Now they study my books to pass exams. We have to be a bit more creative and open-minded about the way we get students into university. I’m a huge fan of apprenticeships. But in many things, you can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach. Not everybody should go to university, but not everybody who fails their GCSEs shouldn’t go to university.”
The idea of not going to university because of not being able to pay for tuition fees if certain grades are not achieved is dream crushing. This would discourage lots of students from applying to university and will have a negative impact on both students and universities.
Hopefully this opinion piece has given you a brief insight of what’s happening in the education sector at the moment because it isn’t talked about much in the news. I think as a student, even if it does not affect us directly it will affect future undergraduates. Therefore, it should be something highlighted.
Here’s the link for the interview above:
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