Spending review: what it means for higher education

<榴莲视频 class="standfirst">Some key points to take away from George Osborne’s speech today and the Treasury’s spending review document

十一月 25, 2015

THE reporters

The headline cut in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills budget is 17 per cent. This will see the department’s total budget, resource and capital, decline from ?16.6 billion this year to ?13.2 billion in 2019-20.
The current ?4.7 billion research budget is being protected in real terms over the spending review period to 2019-20, and will rise by ?500 million over that period. It will also include a “new ?1.5 billion Global Challenges Fund”.
Teaching grant, currently about ?1.4 billion, will be cut “by ?120 million in cash terms by 2019-20”. High-cost subject funding will be protected in real terms. But student opportunity funding, for the poorest and disabled students, worth about ?380 million within the overall teaching grant budget, will be cut. The government will ask the Higher Education Funding Council for England to “reduce and retarget” this funding.
Current students and graduates who took out loans after 2012 will be asked to pay more in repayments, via a freeze in the ?21,000 repayment threshold until April 2021. The government had originally pledged to uprate the threshold in line with earnings.
The government has confirmed plans to introduce postgraduate loans for 2016-17 and has dropped its plans to restrict these to students aged under 30. Now, anyone under 60 will be eligible.
Maintenance loans will be introduced for part-time students in 2018-19, a move that the government says could benefit 150,000 people by 2020.
Students wishing to study a second degree will be able to access a tuition fee loan from 2017-18, provided that the course that they wish to study is in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM).
The government will reduce the discount rate – the rate at which government borrowing is costed internally – which will bring down the write-off rate on student loans from its current 45 per cent to about 30 per cent.
Nursing students will have tuition fee grants scrapped and replaced with loans, while the cap on places will be removed.
?165 million of Innovate UK grants will be replaced by loans by 2019-20.