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Meet the parents

Anne-Marie Canning urges those making decisions around student finance to listen to low-income families

I’m sitting on a train from my hometown in Yorkshire to Essex with a suitcase full of student finance paraphernalia from 2004 onwards: leaflets, statements, application forms. There comes a point when your family says enough is enough, the paperwork that has lived in your old bedroom for 15 years has to be dealt with. I’m scanning the annual totals and interest rates and remembering how it first felt seeing those numbers.

Many versions of me have looked at these papers: 18-year-old me as a student, 22-year-old me as an unemployed graduate, 25-year-old me working my first job, 28-year-old me as a manager, and now the me that is leading an education charity and, perhaps most importantly, is the parent of a little boy.

Tuition fees and student finance are being debated as next year’s general election approaches and parties consider their manifesto pledges. Commentary better than mine is available about the various choices and approaches an incoming government could take. However, any reform to the student finance system must consider the perspectives of parents and carers. Their voices are often missing in debates about how to fund higher education but are highly influential in how children make decisions about their futures.

Student finance has become a significant part of young adulthood in the UK. More than 50 per cent of young people under the age of 30 will go to university—and numbers are rising, with the admissions service Ucas predicting a million undergraduates entering higher education by 2030. This means millions of parents and carers will have a stake in the future of the student finance system and any proposed changes.

Financial challenges

The last meaningful piece of research into parent attitudes towards the current funding regime was carried out in 2019 by Opinium for the Department for Education. The four years since then have been challenging for families, who have experienced pandemic lockdowns and the cost of living crisis.

In May, a briefing from the Covid Social Mobility and Opportunities study showed that financial inequalities had significantly widened, with 52 per cent of lower-income families reporting worse financial health after the pandemic. This will have heightened anxieties about student finances for families with members considering university study.

The Opinium research, which included a survey of 1,064 adults (of whom 131 were parents of prospective applicants) and a qualitative conversation with 20 parents and carers, indicated a mixed understanding of student finance repayments, low knowledge of interest rates, some awareness of write-off levels and minimal understanding of the state’s contribution to costs. Understandably, knowledge of the student finance system was more incomplete among less advantaged and first-generation families than among more advantaged families.

Across the board—irrespective of education history, socioeconomic background or understanding of the system—parents wanted the government to invest more in higher education, but they believed students should contribute too. The survey and qualitative work revealed a common consensus that tuition fees are too high and that the balance between government funding and student contributions needs to be addressed.

Parental priorities

Asked to consider various policy options and trade-offs within the student finance system, parents said their key priorities were reintroducing grants and lowering interest rates. Ten minutes browsing the forums of Mumsnet shows these concerns are still salient, with threads upon threads of parents worrying about changeable interest and repayment rates. Five minutes on student finance TikTok is just as instructive of the student view.

For most students, applying for student finance is a shared endeavour with their parents and carers. We know parents and carers have a massive influence on educational outcomes. Evidence from the US shows that educating parents about finances has a powerful effect on undergraduate students, enabling them to better manage their finances during their studies, and that this has a positive knock-on effect on student academic performance and happiness.

So, it matters that parents and carers understand and have confidence in the student finance system.

Understanding the system

Student finance is the first topic of questions from parents and carers in every one of our Brilliant Club Parent Power chapters, established across the UK to offer advice and guidance on accessing higher education and developing skills in community organising.

Parent Power mums and dads tell us that it takes them a long while to fully understand the system and the implications for their children. Once they understand it, the main issues they are angry about—rather than the overall tuition fee level—are the interest accrual on student loans and the lack of grant funding for maintenance. These feel unjust as they weigh most heavily on low-income applicants and their families. There’s also a sense that the goalposts are continually moving as government makes regular changes to manage the student finance bill.

In the early days of the £9,000 fee regime, I was a schools liaison officer, criss-crossing the country to deliver talks to parents. I remember how much time I spent with families explaining the system.

Over the years, many of the more positive messages I had for low-income families—maintenance grants to help lower-income students; low interest rates; low thresholds for write-offs; Access to Learning hardship funds—were eroded. These had signalled to parents from ordinary backgrounds that the powers that be wanted to support their children in accessing higher education. But over time, these bright moments in my talks were disappearing, and so was the message of support.

Funding reboot

What would a more humane student finance system look like? What might parents and carers like to see from a reboot?

Parents and carers are clear that maintenance costs matter the most. Loans are essential for helping students who cannot rely on parental support to pay their rent, feed themselves and pay for essential learning resources. This is an important issue in the context of the cost of living crisis, when many families will struggle to make the ‘parental contribution’ the student finance system assumes of them.

In January, the Sutton Trust reported that nearly half of all students were asking for additional help from their families amid high incidences of meal-skipping and other forms of hardship. While it is right to talk about tuition fees, interest rates and repayment terms, we must remember that these impact students further into the future. Maintenance loans impact students right now. They can be the difference between a student eating today or not.

Schoolchildren are already acutely aware of this. Watching student finance talks at our recent Scholars Programme graduations, I was struck by how pupils were preoccupied with questions about part-time work and food discounts, and how this took precedence over conversations about tuition fee rates and repayment. Many parents and carers think that the means-tested maintenance grant, which was removed in 2016, should be reintroduced—something that former universities minister David Willetts has also advocated. This would help avoid lower-income students graduating with higher debt levels or needing to work extreme hours to survive as undergraduates.

Student finance is a critical part of the growing expectation, from parents of all social classes, that their child can go to university if they wish. No matter what the system is, it imposes a heavy emotional burden. It’s time for those making decisions about student funding to show low-income students and their parents that their participation in higher education matters. The more opportunities created to listen to their voices, the stronger those decisions will be.

Anne-Marie Canning is chief executive of the Brilliant Club, which works closely with hundreds of parents across England and Wales. She invites anyone interested in building parent and carer voices into student funding inquiries, panels or decision-making to get in touch.