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Stephen Tall

Why Lib Dems shouldn’t keep schtum about tuition fees

By Stephen Tall | Thu 14th August 2014 - 8:35 pm

tuition fees vote“University tuition fee rise has not deterred poorer students from applying”. That was the headline in The Guardian this week reporting new analysis by the Independent Commission on Fees chaired by Will Hutton:

The raising of tuition fees to £9,000 has not put off students from disadvantaged backgrounds from applying to university – although the gap in applications between those from wealthy and poor backgrounds remains wide, according to new analysis. …

The commission found that university application rates for 18-year-olds in England have continued to recover from their post-rise lows, with application rates for 2014 entry – including students who will receive their A-level results on Thursday – almost two percentage points higher than in 2010.

While students who are not eligible for free school meals – available for pupils from households earning less than £16,000 – remain more than twice as likely to go to university, the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students has narrowed from 30.5% in 2010 to 29.8% in 2013.

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , , , , and | 206 Comments
Stephen Tall

The pupil premium isn’t a quick-fix solution, it’s a long-haul policy

By Stephen Tall | Thu 20th September 2012 - 9:00 am

The pupil premium — additional cash targeted at the most disadvantaged children — is the policy of which Nick Clegg is proudest and with which he is most closely associated. The policy itself dates back to Julian le Grand in the 1980s (when it was touted as a progressive version of school vouchers) but it was Nick who put it firmly in the political mainstream as long ago as 2002 in a pamphlet he co-wrote based on experiences of it working within continental Europe.

Though the Tories nominally signed-up to the concept of a pupil premium in their 2010 …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , and | 7 Comments
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