'It is reasonable to conclude that the government's proposals for grade-conditional loans are deliberately discriminatory towards students from poor backgrounds.'

Alex Birch is a freelance journalist writing on issues of class, disability, gender, and culture

Last week, The Telegraph announced Department of Education plans to limit student loans to applicants who meet certain grade thresholds: No student loan for pupils who fail GCSE maths or English. Another proposal being considered is banning students who fail to attain a minimum of EE at A-Level from accessing student loan funding. The paper’sEducation editor wrote that the policy would be “aimed at limiting the huge cost of universities to the taxpayer and cracking down on low-quality degrees”. 

Right-wing handwringing about ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’ is hardly new. Tying student loans to grades would be. Such a policy would explicitly convey to students whose qualifications fall below a set threshold that they don’t deserve to go to university (unless, of course, their parents can foot the bill).

With high course fees making student loans a necessity for pupils from poor backgrounds, putting obstacles in the way of loans will inevitably hit them hardest. Even if applicants from poor backgrounds had equal educational attainment to wealthier applicants, this would be the case. But they don’t. In this country, being born into a wealthy family has long been one of the greatest determinants of your future academic success.

The evidence for this is extensive. Between 2009/10 and 2011/12, Oxford University reportedly accepted three times more pupils from Eton College than pupils on free school meals.

Forget Oxbridge: for pupils from the poorest backgrounds, even passing English and maths is an achievement. In 2020, just 49% of children eligible for free school meals achieved English and maths GCSE grades 9-4 (roughly equivalent to A*-C), compared to 75% of pupils not eligible for free meals.  In conditions of poverty, even the brightest pupil can be outperformed by their relatively mediocre privately educated counterpart, which is why the very best academic research supports contextual admissions for disadvantaged university applicants.   

All of that considered, it is reasonable to conclude that the government’s proposals for grade-conditional loans are deliberately discriminatory towards students from poor backgrounds. Prior attainment is a surprisingly bad predictor of success at university and cannot be used as a blunt tool to exclude applicants who have experienced disadvantage. 

This is a deeply personal issue for me, as someone who was a ‘non-traditional’ university student. I received free school meals and sat my GCSEs at a school that appeared in the league table for the country’s worst results.

When I submitted my UCAS application, I didn’t have a C in Maths. In part, this was due to a kind of learned helplessness I’d developed in response to being taught that I lacked prospects. I was the child of a ‘benefit scrounger’ (in the words of one of my peers), so why bother?

Diane Reay’s book Miseducation is filled with quotes from interviews with working-class pupils who express similarly negative sentiments about their own potential. Reading her work was a revelation. I had believed that I was ‘stupid’. I learned that I had been failed by a classist system in which poor children are systemically underestimated: stereotyped from a young age as ‘thick’, ‘lazy’, even criminal.

Against the odds, I graduated with First Class Honours from a Russell Group university. Much of the credit belongs to my woefully underfunded further education college, who took a chance on me by admitting me to an Access course. Had there been a policy in place in mid-2010s that barred applicants without the requisite GCSE grades from getting student loans, I’d probably have been deterred from university altogether. 

My journey to higher education is one that is virtually unrepresented in the higher seats of power, filled as they are with men like our current Secretary of State For Education, Nadhim Zahawi, who attended private school, like the majority of his predecessors did. These politicians are profoundly out of touch with the realities of schooling in this country. I presume that’s why they can so readily feign concern for disadvantaged young people who are sold low return degrees from low status institutions. Perhaps their detachment is what makes excluding people who don’t pass the right exams from higher education outright seem like a solution?

I have some questions for politicians who support grade-dependent loans. Do you think that the first-generation student who doesn’t get a graduate job out of their ex-polytechnic degree arrives at that position because they weren’t smart enough for university? Do you truly, hand on heart, believe that the degrees they are studying for lack value in themselves? Or is the real problem that working class students largely go to working class universities that are stigmatised accordingly by graduate employers? Could it be that the problem is a rigid class system, rather than too many people entering higher education?

Higher education is a good in itself. But degrees are also necessary for getting into many industries.At a time when inflation is skyrocketing and welfare benefits remain stagnant, the government’s proposals threaten to grease Britain’s already slippery ladder of social mobility.

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