Upsetting changes in Durham Grant Scheme

I'm confused... what is this registration thing and how does Durham differ in this from other universities?

I can't remember who told me, it was a member of staff I think. It was a year or 2 ago so I can't remember, sorry.

The registration dates (2 days) are always on the SPA website, so you could have just planned to spend the whole 2 days in Durham? A couple of my friends have worked for the last 3 weeks of term and have managed to come back in time but I don't know their travel arrangements. Lots of people miss it to work at Wimbledon and either get early registration permission or pay the £100 fine from their wages.

I don't see any evidence of the university bending over backwards for finance firms/banks, they pay a significant amount to attend the careers fair and hold presentations in Durham and I'm not sure the university helps them too much as they use local hotels to host events. When I've been to the careers service, they've always had huge amounts of information about non-finance careers, and as I said I receive a lot of emails from the careers service advertising non-finance graduate schemes and presentations.

With respect, that is a bit like going to an agricultural college and complaining of cow pats.

Durham is a collegiate university, therefore it wants people to partake in collegiate activities. You only have to look at collegiate universities such as Kent, York or Lancaster to see what happens when the university takes its eye off this particular ball.

Oxford and Cambridge don't force people to buy into their college life. They are real collegiate universities as teaching takes place in them unlike ours which are just glorified Halls of Residence.

Registration is where students register for the modules they will take in the next academic year.

It used to involve walking to college to pick up forms, going to your department(s) at a certain time to get them signed, and then handing in the form to Student Planning and Assessment and getting a piece of card stamped as proof the student has completed the process. Oh, and lots of time waiting.

It was quite archaic as some universities, but not all, did registration online. Last year was the first year Durham went to an online system. This can still involve going to your department and meeting with a member of staff to confirm modules using the online system and, as I found out last year, the online system frequently crashes.

The difference with Durham compared to some other universities is that this registration period is three to five weeks after the end of exams and final summative deadlines and the student is expected to remain in Durham during this time even when no teaching takes place. I had no problems with this, partly because I only live 20 miles away so could always pop home without anyone knowing, but also because it provides an opportunity to have free time with friends and get involved in various activites without worrying about academic work. However, it should be a choice and students should be able to return home without the prospect of facing disciplinary action or financial penalities. Some students have asked to return home early as they have jobs back home and need to earn money but the university deny them the permission to register early and therefore earn.

Thank you for replying and the information. That does sound like a serious drawback for someone from Somerset who would need to get holiday work!!!! I think that's a no for Durham then. Shame.

And this is all kept secret until you turn up on the first day where it's all revealed and you're forced into it?

And you took what they said for granted with proof or reason? As I said, Oxford has shorter terms by 3 weeks in total over the course of the academic year (I think). I really wouldn't have minded if it was for a few days but three weeks to do no work at all? Make the exams three weeks later then I'd say the excuse "to make it a full time course" is justified. If not then all it does is force the "college" life to students who really don't want to be there. Is that what the university really wants? Because I was so tempted to buy a graffiti set and decorate university buildings just to keep myself amused.



Pay the £100 fine from their wages? How much are students supposed to be earning these days? Time you pay for travel, pay the fine, you might not be with much left from the work. As for travel arrangements, I could be from Coleraine, Plymouth, Aberystwyth, or from Lerwick. All of which are in this country and would be an arse to travel to and from Durham on such conditions just for registration. As for SPA I think my time they put it very late and they had the usual proviso that they are subject to change blah blah blah. I graduated in 2011.



Yes but by having a dispropionate representation of IB firms at careers fairs gives them a significant advantage and can be seen a tool to socially engineer students thinking into believing that this is all there is to offer. I was informed by an older graduate that it wasn't like this 10 years ago at general fairs. You'd get some representation of journalism, 'Governmental' areas such as the civil service and the military during some point in the year but the only non-banking and accountancy firm I noticed was the Financial Services Authority. And that was directly oppositie Barclays Capital, presumably spying for fraudsters. I believe this has been the case with universities nationwide. I have checked the careers fair myself for roles that I preferred more but there wasn't much within criminal justice and law (for non-law degree students). One of my ex-lecturers said one of the reasons why he's retiring was because of exactly this. No idea if he carried it out though.

Thank you for replying and the information. That does sound like a serious drawback for someone from Somerset who would need to get holiday work!!!! I think that's a no for Durham then. Shame.

It does seem to disproportionally affect low income students with children. It therefore overtly discriminates against a particular group; trapping them in a no win situation as the university has set a criteria but has failed to provide the means for these students to fulfil it.

As the rule seems to be to apply to a college for accomodation, I would do just that, children, pets and all...

Do people who 'live out' belong to a college. I assume that they do. For those people, if there are restrictions on receiving the money in cash then the remaining amount should be given at least as a fee reduction. What proportion of their own money are Durham putting in aside from the National Scholarship scheme? This sum cannot be subject to cash rules.

It is a poor compromise Durham has come up with to be honest. I have extensively researched bursaries across universities now and Durham's rather startling claim that it offers one of the most generous bursaries available is nonsense.

The £3000 pound is on a par with most other universities of similar standing and below the amounts allocated by Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge and many others. There is more on offer from Exeter or Kent to be honest. (However Durham is to be praised for not directing the cash to fee reduction as the government wished. If you do meet the criteria you do get the full benefit of the full bursary towards living costs and using the collegiate system as an excuse for doing this is fairly nifty political footwork.)

Of course many are offering a division between cash, accomodation allowances and fee reductions in various ways. Some of the less well off universities are offering fairly basic bursaries as they take a higher proportion of eligible students already.

Sorry to hear the changes may affect you.

Fee reductions are usually worthless as (especially if you're a more mature student) you are unlikely to ever pay off the full amount earlier. Having the money up front is much, much, much more useful. The NUS and the money saving martin website guy have written loads about this. The only 'person' fee small (£1000-£3000) fee waivers benefit is the treasury.

Kent are offering:

A fee waiver of £4,000 for the first year (ie the first year’s tuition fees reduced to £5,000)
A cash bursary of £1,000 for the first year
A further cash bursary of £2,000 in each of the years 2 and 3 (and 4 where relevant)


Which, for a 3 year course, is a cash bursary of £5000 and a fee waiver which will reduce your tuition fee debt from £27000 to £23000. The fee waiver isn't 'real money' at all.

Durham are offering £3000 cash/accommodation discount a year, so that's a total of £9000.

So they are both technically offering £9000 off your costs, but Durham is offering you cash which you definitely receive, whereas you won't know if you'll ever get to repaying your 24th thousand pounds of fees until years in the future. Durham's is a much better deal (assuming you get cash instead of an accommodation discount).

Exeter are even worse - a £2000 fee waiver each year and £1000 as an accommodation bursary, OR a £3000 waiver each year.

So your fees would be £6000 instead of £9000 (assuming you don't want accommodation). Again, most 18 year old entrants are unlikely to repay more than £18000 of fees so this is again not 'real money' at all.

http://www.nus.org.uk/en/news/news/nus-calls-on-nick-clegg-to-explain-daylight-robbery-as-70m-is-taken-from-students-pockets-to-pay-for-con-trick-fee-waivers-/

http://www.nusconnect.org.uk/news/article/come-clean/Bursaries-and-fee-waivers-the-facts/

I agree about the fee waivers but Kent and Exeter have other parts to their bursary which takes the cash amounts up. You've only shown how they deal with the distribution of the National Scholarship part of the scheme.

Exeter's total offer for low income students comes to £2500 cash per annum plus the fee reductions, in addition they have offered my son a scholarship which isn't really even mentioned anywhere and came through with their offer thus making their offer about £500 in cash above that of Durham's cash offer but with fee reductions remaining in place.

Kent was one of the best offers available apart from Bristol Local Student's scheme (which offers no fees at all for all three years and a cash grant of £3500 per annum!!!) Kent's scheme adds on additional monies for low income students achieving AAB or higher which takes their cash amount above Durham's too.

Durham in contrast seems just to be concentrating on the National Scholarship money £3000 and not to have added on any other scheme of its own so in the end, though they have made sure the National Scholarship money is used for living costs (which is brilliant!) they still don't come out as 'one of the most generous' as they claim on their website due to the other schemes other universities have added on in addition to the National Scholarship Programme.

One thing I would say though is that it is awfully complicated and requires researching every university individually and tracking the Nat Scolarship and their other schemes. Lots of people will miss out on what could be really good deals in consequence.

Hi all, is there anyone affected by this changes in Durham Grant Scheme? We cannot have it anymore if we rent outside Uni

Well if you're on the minimum wage, you earn more than £100 per week.

Anyway, some departments do have teaching (eg field trips) and the term dates are clearly stated in the calendar anyway. Yes other unis finish earlier - but many unis start in early or mid September compared to Durham's early October. So you can work for the same length of time.

At the end of the day, the term dates are up about 3 years in advance so you could have chosen to look them up if it was a big issue for you. Being at uni for 30 weeks of the year isn't much out of 52 weeks, and you have the entirety of July, August and September not in Durham (plus a week in October, usually). What would you have done if you'd been a science or archaeology student and had compulsory labs/field work during those 3 weeks?

On the exam timing, this has been discussed loads. Later exams = people get marks in the holidays so don't know if they need to get books out for resits, and also can't receive feedback. Plus lecturers have to mark exams in the holidays, which cuts down their research time and they do not like that idea at all.

Looking back, I should have just bought Call of Duty on the Xbox, and play that 24/7 because it would shown how useful those three weeks are.

I just went on their websites and clicked on the finance button so I thought that was all their money, do they offer extra cash then?

Durham is spending its own money too - in 'steady state' (ie by 2015), they will spend £4.1m a year on the Durham Grant and the NSP will provide £1.3m (
http://www.offa.org.uk/agreements/AA_0116%20Durham%20University%201213.pdf).

So they are putting in a lot of money (but yes it is ridiculous that it has to go back into the uni by making students live in in their final year. I'm very much in favour of (young) students living in in 1st year for reasons mentioned above, but definitely not compulsory final year living in college when so many of the students' friends will be living out.)


I agree that it's complicated, it would be so much easier for everyone if UCAS or someone could have a system where you typed in what course you wanted to do and your household income and it gave you a personalised spreadsheet telling you exactly what your fees would be at each uni, and how much bursary money they would give you. The good thing is that if you (or anyone else) tells student finance your household income, they tell the university so you will automatically get any bursary money/fee waiver that you're entitled to, even if you don't know you can get it.

Please don't make a decision based on this, the term finishes (ie everyone can leave) in the third/fourth week of June. Durham's holidays are as long as, if not longer, than most universities'. You get more than 3 whole consecutive months off in the summer which is just as long as other unis, the only difference being that they may finish earlier and start back earlier. Depending on your subject, you may well have contact hours in the last 3 weeks of term anyway.

Thank you for this! That really helps clarify things. My son has now put Durham as his insurance offer.

I would have said something about that Not playing devils advocate here but those weeks would've been a good opportunity to take part in some voluntary work (I mentioned NEPACS but, as you are no longer looking at a career in the prison service, and it's unlikely they would have offered short term palcements, it's a moot point). I regret not travelling more, specifically not going to Glasgow.

And yeah, not relevant to the thead but there is a law careers event specifically for non-law students. Didn't I ever tell you about it? I logged into the careers website the other day and noticed I saved the event from 2007 (I'd completely forgotten about it until then so it is likely I never told you).

Hi all, is there anyone affected by this changes in Durham Grant Scheme? We cannot have it anymore if we rent outside Uni