Poor students ‘undermined’ by £50m access fund

The government’s £50 million National Scholarship Programme, designed to provide bursaries and fee waivers to students in the wake of increasing tuition fees to £9,000, has been dealt a blow by research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The research shows the NSP is administered differently by each university and that most universities cannot tell students what level of support they will receive in advance. “The effectiveness of this financial support in encouraging participation of students from poorer backgrounds is likely to be undermined by these levels of complexity and uncertainty,” says the IFS report.