Wonk of the year Lucy: ‘The signs are that the wrong people are being made to pay for current higher education policy in Scotland, in skewed debt or lost support, restricted opportunities and squeezed funding overall. As far as I can recall, no-one in Scottish university senior management has ever argued with me about this in public, nor got in touch to tell me privately that they disagree’.
Education
Brutality of small decisions: student grants
‘every time ministers highlight the increase in the threshold in 2016-17, they are doing so on the back of these dramatic losses for two or three thousand young people from low-income homes every year from 2013-14 to 2015-16. I’d not be so proud of that’.
Education and inequality Part Three: Greater Glasgow
‘What we have here is clear evidence that points to what many people believe anecdotally: there are many parents in Glasgow who believe their children’s education is better served by a school in one of these more affluent suburbs’.
Education and inequality: Part Two
Why do some parents send their children to secondary schools outside the catchment area? In the second part of his series on education and inequality in Scotland, Andrew Conway finds associations between school placements and relative wealth, house prices and population density.
Mapping educational inequality in Scotland
How to assess educational inequality? This is the first in a series of posts by Andrew Conway looking at placing requests and what, if anything, they can tell us about how educational inequality varies across Scotland.
Widening access: a modest proposal
‘Most access initiatives target the people identified as disadvantaged. We remain less comfortable curtailing the effects of privilege.’
Student debt and grants in Scotland: an update
“The Scottish system is not debt-free in the absence of fees: indeed Scottish students are borrowing a substantial amount as a group each year. The Scottish approach relies heavily on loans to cover the state’s role in providing low-income students, in particular, with living cost support. Grants are now so low that those from the lowest incomes are taking on the most of that living cost debt.”
Let’s debate different models for student fees and grants
“there is no realistic chance that the Scottish Government is going to reduce its reliance on student loans to underwrite the higher education system. £500m is roughly the annual cost of the whole FE system, or 1p on the basic rate of income tax” Scotland’s leading expert on another model – and more – of funding HE.
Why do girls do better than boys in education?
Professor Emer Smyth,from the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, on the widespread, but little studied, issue of the underperformance of boys at all stages of education from pre-school to first degree. What are the causes and what can be done?
More powers yes, higher taxes no
“Scots are only slightly more egalitarian than people in England, while support for redistribution has declined across the UK. People will pay for specific services, notably health, but are not keen on redistribution. They want more powers for Scotland but are less keen on different policies or taxes.”