In the news this week: 24 July 2015

Poorest students will owe 'substantially more' than their richer peers, warns new budget analysis

Students from the poorest families will leave university owing 'substantially more' to the government than their richer peers, warned analysis of changes to student funding in the budget released on Tuesday.

The BBC reported that respected think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), warned that replacing student maintenance grants with a repayable loan will result in the poorest 40% of students at university in England graduating with debts of up to £53,000 from a three-year course

UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, told the Mirror the plans were 'a tax on aspiration' which exposed the government as 'certainly not being on the side of the strivers'. Speaking to the Independent she said the government's changes to student funding would make degrees more expensive and saddle the poorest students with the biggest debt. She said: 'We should be helping talented young people to get on, not penalising them during their studies and then again much sooner after they graduate.'

Think tank criticises research funding

A think tank this week said British universities are wasting time and public money carrying out 'pointless' research projects to get funding and push themselves up the rankings in an effort to secure cash from the REF, which the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) says involves huge costs for universities and distorts priorities.

Sally Hunt told the Telegraph that the IEA was not alone in criticising what UCU also considers a flawed process when it comes to the REF. 'However, we want to see better funding that expands our research base, covering more institutions and more diverse areas of research. History has taught us that some of the biggest breakthroughs have come from speculative research and it would be foolish to try and measure projects purely on their economic potential,' she said.

Warnings of 'financial meltdown' in further education

There has been a 'rapid decline' in the finances of the further education sector in England, warned the public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, this week. Its report showed that almost half of colleges were in deficit in 2013-14.

Meg Hillier, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, described it to the BBC as a 'deeply alarming report' and added that she do not think it was any exaggeration to say the future sustainability of the further education sector is at risk of 'financial meltdown.'

UCU urges Michael Gove to support prison educators

Responding to justice secretary Michael Gove's speech on prison education last week, UCU said that more needed to be done to support prison education staff and that prison education needed stable and effective funding. A recent UCU report highlighted how competitive retendering of prison education has led to instability and damaged offenders' access to education.

Sally Hunt said: 'UCU has long argued that prison education must be at the heart of the rehabilitation process. However, learning undertaken by prisoners must be meaningful and cannot be done on the cheap.'

Gender pay gap in further education

Female teachers joining the further education sector are likely to get paid significantly less than their male counterparts, warned a study by the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) released today. The research found a quarter of women coming into the sector to teach had a starting salary of less than £20,000 - compared to just 11 per cent of men.

FE Week reported the study's findings that, on average, men teaching full-time earn £2,340 more than women teaching full-time, despite little variation between the age of men and women when they enter the sector. The pay gap exists in spite of women making up the majority of teachers (64 per cent) in the sector.

More support for UCU's overhaul of university applications

UCU's recent report calling for a complete overhaul of the university admissions process where students would apply to university after receiving their grades got the warm backing of a former student this week. Writing on the Guardian's Higher Education Network, John Wilson described how he was let down by the current system 15 years ago when he performed better than expected in his A-levels.

He argues that times are changing and so the system must too. 'As choosing to go to university is a big financial decision nowadays, the least the government could do is make the application process less of a gamble. I think that post-qualification applications (PQA) offer a fairer future,' he says.

Give us our research summers back

Also writing for the Guardian's Higher Education Network, an anonymous academic said that now summer was upon us, academics needed the time to perform their research. The academic highlighted the long-hours culture that staff now suffer and how administrative tasks have grown to account for 20% to 30% of the working week, pushing academics' core activity - research - to the margins.

The author concludes that if university administrators want staff to conduct world-class research, then they need to make time for it and that preserving the summer for research is key. They argue that this could mean cultural changes such as making it socially unacceptable to hold administrative meetings during a designated part of the summer period. But without a change, they say, summer vertigo will soon dissolve into autumn regret.