Revive minimum entry requirement plan for loans, say Tory MPs

Low-achieving school pupils should be banned from taking out student loans for English universities, according to a report by right-wing Conservative MPs.

The “New Conservatives”, a group of “Red Wall” MPs who were elected in 2017 and 2019, also want the government to ensure that more student loans are fully repaid.

It is the latest attempt by the parliamentary group to drag the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, to the right on education policy, after their previous calls to axe post-study work visas and to stop the poorest performing universities from recruiting overseas.

The report, authored by MPs Jonathan Gullis and Lia Nici, says students who fail to pass GCSE maths and English qualifications or get three Es at A level should be banned from applying for student loans.

They say former prime minister Tony Blair’s famous higher education entry rate target of 50 per cent is to be blamed for the “ballooning graduate population”, with some providers benefiting by offering “poor-value courses”.

“There is a common misconception that young people have the right to attend university – but they do not have the right to study ‘Mickey Mouse’ courses at the taxpayer’s expense,” says the report.

“Young people receive 14 years of publicly funded education – anything on top of this is a luxury, not a right. There are many benefits to be gained from education, but when it is the taxpayer footing the bill then education should be about helping people to enter the workforce and establish their careers, in turn contributing to the wider society.”

Ministers had considered bringing in a minimum entry requirement along the lines advocated by the MPs, but ultimately decided against it, having been warned that such thresholds would require complex exemptions to avoid penalising groups such as mature students.

The authors write that it is the students with the lowest academic attainment who tend to undertake poorer quality degrees that do not lead to graduate-level salaries.

They write that too many courses are “propped up by government funding [and] do not deliver value for money to the students” – providing few contact hours and limited earnings potential after graduation.

The New Conservatives, therefore, want to reduce the number of UK students attending university, and estimate that this move could cut student numbers by 15 per cent.

However, the report does not mention the potential knock-on effects on the sector of such a reduction in student numbers.

The group also call for all graduates to start repaying their student loan at a fixed amount of £45 a month until they earn more than £31,000, following a three-year “grace period” – because so few people ever repay their loans in full.

“Such low likelihood of repayment has created a cohort of young people that are far too laissez-faire about taking out loans for university study, complacent in the knowledge that they are unlikely to ever have to pay it back,” it says. “The low repayment rate means that young people take out loans to attend university without having a clear end goal in sight.”

The New Conservatives want the government to use the savings from these and other higher education measures to focus on a huge expansion in apprenticeships instead.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com