When policies change there are always some who lose out retrospectively but that's life. I'm still reeling that I've been screwed out of £56000 by my retirement age changing from 60'to 67 overnight.
Both my kids have huge student loans but I would still support restoring free uni tuition. I'm going to be very controversial here but in the days of free tuition there was a much more stringent admissions policy. You had to have a certain level of academic ability to be considered whereas nowadays with the free market and every place of study calling itself a university anyone who can pay and scrape some sort of pass at a level can go to uni.
This sounds good in principle but in practice a university degree has been seriously devalued with some people at uni totally wasting their time, finding it hard to find work where if they had left school at 16 and gone into an employer based scheme more suited to their more practical talents they would be more fulfilled and successful.
As a labour voter, I look back in horror at Tony Blair's Education for all manifesto. Everyone has got different strengths, some practical, some academic and at 16 most people work out which of those two routes are best for them. An academic education is not the only form of education. Instead of providing more pathways for the more practical of us, successive governments have encouraged this wholly inappropriate expansion of university education to cover up their inability to provide high quality apprenticeship options. It's very obvious to teachers which children thrive in an academic environment and which need a more practical skills based curriculum to shine. There's nothing worse as a teacher seeing a bright, creative child lose belief in themselves as they're only assessed on what they can achieve academically.
Bring back free tuition fees but widen the options for which it can be used, so society reaps the benefits of a more usefully educated graduate whether that be of an apprenticeship, or traineeship scheme or a university.
Reading Alan Bennett's memoirs recently, I was struck by his awareness of and gratitude for the fact it was free education for all that enabled him, from a typical working class family, to go to university and become the success he is today. Many famous people in their 70s and 80s had similar working class backgrounds. Certainly many of my family have moved from poor working class manual workers in the 50s to upper middle class, wealthy, solely due to the free education for all in the 50s and 60s. My cousins were able to be privately educated so rapid was the rise but I hope they haven't forgotten how they got there and vote for policies which deprive others of those rights.
On Question Time last night it was being argued that 1% more children from poor backgrounds have gone to uni in England under student loans than in Scotland where fees are paid.
As a teacher, I can tell you, the reason some bright children from poor families don't go to uni has got little to do with whether fees are paid or not paid. It's more to do with life experience and aspiration. Some of the brightest children in primary are worn down by abusive family lives and are totally alienated from education by the time they get to secondary school
. The Tory government a few years ago funded an initiative in schools where these children were identified and money provided for a year to provide academic tuition, more one to one time with the teacher and opportunity for more trips to widen their experiences. As a teacher I did my best for these kids during that year of extra funding, but to be honest, we teachers always try our best for these kids but school is not the place to fix social deprivation. Government investment in the wider society these children live in is the only way. Better housing, support for mental health and disability, opportunities to work through state funded childcare, well funded and staffed social services etc all the things this government is cutting to save the fortunate in society paying higher taxes.
You could have the best schooling in the world, but if you have to go home everyday to a cold, smelly house where your parent is lying in bed catatonic with depression and you're not sure if there's going to be anything for tea that night and you're too ashamed to have friends round, sometimes worried to go to school in case something happens to your parent while you're out concentrating in school is not going to happen.You tell no one because you don't want to be taken away from your parent who you love very much. Even if your teachers realise what is happening all they can do, apart from making sure you have something to eat when you get to school and something to take home with you, often out of the teacher's own pocket, is inform social services which are so underfunded that your needs may come too low on the prioritising of need that social workers are forced to carry out so squeezed are they at the moment.
Free tuition fees are essential to allow access to education for all but investment in social services must happen too for it to be a level playing field.