Tuition fees to be slashed at universities with inadequate teaching under new government plans
The current fee for full-time undergraduate degrees in England is £9,535 per year
Universities offering poor-quality teaching will be forced to cut the cost of their tuition fees under tough new government plans to hold higher education to account.
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Institutions with teaching branded as "inadequate" by the Office for Students (OfS), an independent regulator, will be effectively banned from charging the annual fees from the standard £9,535.
A white paper expected within weeks will set out how steep the cuts could be but insiders suggest the reductions could amount to hundreds or even thousands a year.
The crackdown follows the first tuition fee hike in eight years, which saw the cap for full-time undergraduate degrees in England and Wales rise by £285 annually in September.
A Whitehall source told The Times: “We won’t let universities charge maximum tuition fees if they are not providing high quality teaching and meeting the required standards of excellence that students deserve.”
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It comes as a YouGov poll in September found that one in six students in England and Wales were dissatisfied with their course, while two-thirds said the quality of teaching and graduate pay didn't justify the price tag.
Meanwhile, a 2020 report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies revealed that one in five graduates would have been better off financially if they hadn't gone to university at all.
Currently, under the OfS' Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), introduced in 2017, universities are ranked gold, silver or bronze based on the quality of teaching, student experience and graduate outcomes.
In 2023, the OfS also added a "requires improvement" category to its TEF.
No universities have received this rating overall, but some did in specific areas, such as teaching and assessment, resources, student engagement and support.
In August, a report suggested that university students in England must undertake more than 20 hours of paid work a week just to meet the basic standards of living.
A report from Hepi, TechnologyOne and the Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP) at Loughborough University estimated a student in England will need around £61,000 over the course of a three-year degree, or around £77,000 if studying in London, to reach a minimum socially acceptable standard of living – all excluding tuition fees.
For students in England, the maximum annual maintenance loan (up to £10,544), which is available only to people from low-income households, covers just half the costs faced by first-year students, the report said.
It also found that even with the highest levels of maintenance support, students in England must work more than 20 hours per week to meet a basic standard of living.
Part-time work pressures are also "squeezing out" the other elements of a university experience such as studying, sports, societies and socialising.
The Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) think tank called for maintenance support to be increased to allow for students to reach a "minimum socially acceptable standard of living".
"Maintenance support is currently woefully inadequate, leading students to live in substandard ways, to take on a dangerous number of hours of paid employment on top of their full-time studies or to take out commercial debts at high interest rates," Nick Hillman, director of Hepi, said.
"We hope our results will lead to deeper conversations about the insufficiency of the current maintenance support packages, how much the imputed parental contribution should be and whether it is unreasonable to expect most full-time students to have to find lots of paid work even during term time."
A spokesperson for Universities UK said: "Going to university is an investment in your future, and no-one should have their experience of higher education limited due to financial pressures.
"Universities already offer scholarships, bursaries and hardship support for students who are struggling, but this research shows that the maintenance package just doesn’t go far enough.
"This is why we are calling on the Government to increase maintenance support offered to students to better track inflation and living costs, so that everyone with the potential to succeed can do so, whatever their background."
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has said the Government is "looking at all of the options" for how to support university students.