New proposals to ban student loans for students who fail maths and English GCSE

To the people whining about how it will be discriminatory against poor people I’d like to say I went to one of the roughest secondary schools in Lancashire in an area so bad it’s been featured on a dispatches documentary but I still managed to get two A’s in my English subjects and a B in my maths. Poverty is no barrier to good grades

But a student with a rich family will be able to circumvent this requirement. If you want to install minimum GCSE requirement across the board then fine, but why should a degree be paywalled off for poorer families?

serious question ...how can a rich family circumvent this requirement?
(asking for a friend whose daughter just cannot pass GCSE maths despite repeated attempts and a tutor)

Presumably because the proposal is that GCSE Maths would be a condition of accessing a student loan rather than a university place? So those who did not need a loan would not be affected?

serious question ...how can a rich family circumvent this requirement?
(asking for a friend whose daughter just cannot pass GCSE maths despite repeated attempts and a tutor)

As the above opening post suggests, the GCSE proposal is but one small part of a package that has been designed with the intention of limiting access to university education as we have come to know it. The plan, if implemented, will affect every student and recent graduate in England and Wales and it is important that everyone grasps the magnitude of what is involved.

First there is the question of money. So many graduates are now entering low paid employment that they are simply not repaying their student loans. According to the Department for Education, the value of outstanding loans by the end of March 2021 was £161bn and it is forecast to rise to half a trillion pounds by 2043. So now we have an impending decision to lower the repayment threshold from £27,295 (a figure frozen from 2021 at a time when inflation exceeds 5%) to £25,000 and freeze it at that until 2026, combined with an extension of the repayment period from 30 to 40 years. The message is clear. Study for a 'low status' degree and you will be worse off than if you never went to university at all.

Then we have the tinkering with the requirement for English and Maths at GCSE and two E grades at A level. While it is understandable that there must be a minimum standard of English, which is, after all, the language of instruction, it is not immediately obvious why a History student would need to have GCSE Maths. This is, in reality, just another way of cutting the numbers.

What you think of all this largely depends on your view of what university education is all about. Is it, like secondary schooling, an entitlement for all, which should be funded by the tax payer - or is it a means of educating the best and brightest for the highest paid jobs?

As a starting point, I would argue that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. In 1960, 4% of 18 year olds went to university. Last year, it was around 50%. And yet, we still cling to the three year BA or BSc format that was intended for the élite. All young people have come to expect a high quality education and training beyond the age of 18. But that should not mean a three year honours degree, of the traditional kind, for half the population, many of whom cling to the notion that a degree will get them a better job with higher pay. They are also entitled to share in the student experience of living away from home and having fun, which in decades past was reserved for the privileged few. What is needed, long term, is a complete restructuring of higher education. The proposal to offer everyone a notional 'life-long loan' (estimated at around £37,000 at current costs) is a good starting point, although there is a strong case for making at least part of this a grant rather than a loan. For many, it holds out the prospect of periods of study interspersed with periods of work.

So the GCSE proposal, taken on its own, is actually something of a distraction. We need to look at the big picture. In the short term, what seems clear is that some degree courses - and possibly some institutions - are destined to become unviable.

To the people whining about how it will be discriminatory against poor people I’d like to say I went to one of the roughest secondary schools in Lancashire in an area so bad it’s been featured on a dispatches documentary but I still managed to get two A’s in my English subjects and a B in my maths. Poverty is no barrier to good grades

I'm still sceptical about how many people actually get admitted to university without GCSE maths and English at all though, considering that if you fail them in year 11 and go on to post-16 education you have to retake them alongside your A levels/other level 3 courses.

Yet you still seem to lack critical thinking skills.
I went to state school. I straight 9s, including in English and maths. I agree that you don't need to be rich to pass your GCSEs, and getting 4s is not hard, so it'd be simple for me to just look at this and immediately agree because if I applied for student loans with this law in place it wouldn't affect me at all.
However, you've missed the part where only people who fail their GCSEs and can't pay for university without student loans would be banned from higher education. Therefore, if a rich student manages to get an offer from a university without passing GCSE maths and English they could still go to university. To stop this being discriminatory against poor people the government would have to ban students who failed maths and/or English from being admitted to university at all.

I'm still sceptical about how many people actually get admitted to university without GCSE maths and English at all though, considering that if you fail them in year 11 and go on to post-16 education you have to retake them alongside your A levels/other level 3 courses.

Also is it English language or literature?

So the news of the minimum requirement for the GCSE English and Maths results for student loans, does that mean that students will be restricted if they didn’t get a grade 4 (standard pass) at the age of 16/17 regardless of resitting and achieving the required grades.

Also is it English language or literature?

Undoubtedly, this would affect mature students the most, as high-school graduates will be required to sit their GCSEs until they pass both subjects, at least until 18, with the possibility of 19. Mature students won't be able to start a degree anymore because they would need to complete their GCSEs, which they won't be able to do if they cannot afford to spend time or money on their GCSEs.

Ultimately, I don't see how this will stop "low-quality degrees" - like Horology, and Gemmology, if this is their aim. Most degrees anyway will require GCSE in Math and English; the only degrees I've seen without that requirement are Open University degrees - but many of their degrees are all excellent high-quality subjects anyway, so stopping a huge supplier of degrees - like the OU, from being able to do so, is a huge blow for mature students.

In-fact, I am curious what the impact will be on OU's degrees - one of the largest supplier of degrees.

Ah, maybe that's the reason why they are doing this, the government wants to cut down on the amount of people taking degrees at the OU, as we know hundreds of thousands of students study at the OU as one of the most popular degree providers. I think that might be what the government is aiming to shut down,

So the news of the minimum requirement for the GCSE English and Maths results for student loans, does that mean that students will be restricted if they didn’t get a grade 4 (standard pass) at the age of 16/17 regardless of resitting and achieving the required grades.

Also is it English language or literature?

You'd mentioned an element of retrospection to it - is this to do with the thresholds?

I'm also sceptical about this - the vast majority of degree courses ask for GCSE maths and English anyway so to say it is discriminatory against poorer people may be true in theory but less in practice I think.

I think @Thisismyunitsr makes a good point that if you can't get English or Maths you will certainly struggle to get a graduate job so maybe it would be better for young people without those qualifications to take it as a sign that uni is not the best option for them. The unis that do accept people without GCSE English and Maths currently may not be representing very good value for money in the long term but that is not their problem right now,it is the students problem after graduation.

Yes. They have already frozen this year's threshold at £27,295. If they are going to set the threshold for new students at £25,000 and freeze it at that level until 2026 then presumably they are going to freeze the threshold for existing students and recent graduates as well. We shall need to see the details but that's what I am expecting. That would be a significant retrospective measure: students and graduates were led to believe that the threshold would rise every year, in line with average earnings.