Bursaries and institutional aid in higher education in England: do they safeguard and promote fair access?

Abstract

The 2004 Higher Education Act introduced variable tuition fees of up to £3,000 for full‐time undergraduates in England. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) charging the maximum tuition must give low‐income students bursaries of £300. On top of this mandatory minimum, HEIs now provide additional discretionary financial support exceeding this level to these and other students. The degree to which these new bursaries and discretionary financial support have become a policy instrument for improving access and widening participation has not, as yet, been documented. Little is known about why the government introduced bursaries and what the government saw as their role. Even less is known about the type of bursaries HEIs have introduced or how they are being used, because up till now they have not been examined systematically. This article presents the first such analysis. It concludes that, from the evidence currently available, a mismatch exists between government aspirations and HEIs’ actual use of bursaries and scholarships. Moreover, the bursaries and scholarships put in place may perpetuate existing divisions within and across higher education.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Fulbright Commission for their support in conducting this research which was undertaken while the author was a Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2007/08. I especially would like to thank Bridget Terry Long of Harvard Graduate School of Education for her help, support and invaluable comments when writing this article and while the author was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, and Erin Riley for her excellent research assistance. I am also grateful to the other Fulbright New Century Scholars for their comments on this paper, especially David Chapman. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the help of the Office for Fair Access in supplying me with various data.

Notes

1. All figures quoted here apply to the 2006–2007 academic year, when the income threshold for receipt of a full maintenance grant was £17,500 but was raised to £25,000 from 2008–2009.

2. This important defining feature of mandatory bursaries will end in 2010/11 when mandatory bursaries will be set at 10% of the maximum tuition fee.

3. By March 2006 this figure rose to 122 HEIs (OFFA, 2006) and by the following year to 124 (OFFA, 2007). Further Education Colleges’ provision was excluded from the analysis.

4. The Times Good University Guide ranks universities according to measures in eight key performance areas: Student Satisfaction, Research Quality, Entry Standards, Student–Staff Ratios, Services and Facilities Spend, Completion, Good Honours and Graduate Prospects. All sources of the raw data used are in the public domain. It is recognised that such rankings systems or ‘league tables’ are controversial and the choice of criteria are open to debate (HEFCE, 2008).

5. These institutions had median UCAS Tariff scores of 530–430. These data were derived from 2006 median tariff scores accessed from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (nd) 2006 Teaching Quality Information data: Details of UCAS Tariff points for entrants. Retrieved from http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/nss/data/2006/ on 4 December 2007.The scores are based on the grades achieved in A‐Levels or equivalent qualifications. A‐Levels are a national General Certificate of Education qualification usually taken in the optional final two years of secondary schooling and are traditionally a prerequisite for university entry.

6. Data on school background and socio‐economic classification of under‐represented groups were derived from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) Performance Indicators in Higher Education in the UK in 2006/07 accessed from http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/content/category/2/32/141/ on 4 December 2007.

7. Those with household incomes of between £17,501 and £22,499 received £3,000 in their first year and £2,600 thereafter, while those with family incomes of between £22,500 and £37,425 received between £2,500 to £100 per annum on a sliding scale linked to their income.

8. The study only included potential bursary beneficiaries—students in receipt of a full or partial grant—from households with incomes below £60,000.