Colleagues, please see below the recent policy update from Jane Forster,\u00a0touching on Student Information, NSS boycott, HE and Research Bill, Maintenance Grants and Loans, Education and\u00a0Social Mobility, Autumn Statment and more:<\/p>\n
Last week was all about the HE Bill (which meant it was also about TEF, fees, student loans, immigration and Brexit) \u2013 and the Autumn Statement:<\/p>\n
Student information<\/strong> \u2013 the QAA have announced a consultation<\/a> on their draft guidance to institutions on student information following the Competition and Markets Authority guidance in 2015.\u00a0 It closes on 7th<\/sup> December.<\/p>\n NSS boycott<\/strong>: After the National Union of Students had appeared to back away from a national boycott of the NSS, saying that they would support individual unions and only call a national boycott as a \u201clast resort\u201d, on Wednesday they announced<\/a> that they would be calling for it \u2013 as trailed in the Guardian on Tuesday<\/a>\u2013 because of the link between the TEF and fees.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see how this plays out when the HE Bill is debated in the Lords next week.<\/p>\n HE and Research Bill \u2013 <\/strong>The Higher Education and Research Bill passed its third reading and report stage on Tuesday \u2013 read my separate blog here<\/a>.\u00a0 The Lords second reading is on 6th<\/sup> December and a lively debate is expected there, probably on many of the same issues as were discussed in the Commons, although it would be good if more of the actual Bill could be discussed. As expected, in the Commons the (helpful and non-controversial) government amendments were all passed and most of the rest were not discussed \u2013 and none were passed \u2013 but the debated amendments were mostly about TEF, student loans, the impact of immigration changes and Brexit \u2013 all very interesting but not directly relevant to the Bill \u2013 and all that were pushed to a vote were dismissed. The official report of proceedings is here<\/a> and the Dods summary of the debate with the key points made by the participants is attached \u2013 ignore the off-putting first page \u2013 it gets better. UUK\u2019s note on concerns and proposed changes to the Bill was published just before \u2013 these changes will now all be dependent on lobbying in the Lords. UUK published a briefing for MPs attached to a blog<\/a> on what they want to see changed.<\/p>\n Maintenance Grants and Loans \u2013<\/strong> this is likely to remain a hot topic in the HE Bill debate, the House of Commons library published a short and interesting briefing in October<\/a> on the impact of the changes.\u00a0 These briefings are factual and politically neutral so are a helpful reference point.\u00a0 It summarises how the position has changed and flags that while debt will go up, affecting students from disadvantaged backgrounds the most, actual repayments will not go up anywhere near as much, because many of the additional loans for maintenance will not be repaid (they are repaid after tuition fee loans).\u00a0 Of course, high earners from disadvantaged backgrounds will have to repay significantly more.\u00a0 It also looks at how much the change from grants to loans will affect participation and concludes that it is likely that it will.<\/p>\n A reminder that there are currently consultations on maintenance loans for part-time students and also on loans for PGRs \u2013 please contact policy@bournemouth.ac.uk<\/a> if you want to comment on those.<\/p>\n And Research Professional noted that the government is still planning to sell the student loan book \u2013 starting in 2017.<\/p>\n Education and Social Mobility \u2013 <\/strong>A House of Commons briefing pack<\/a> was also produced ahead of the debate on education and social mobility on Tuesday (you can read the debate on They Work for You<\/a>).\u00a0 It summarises the recent Social Mobility Commission State of the Nation report<\/a> \u00a0and the position in relation to FE and schools and highlights falls in spending on further education.\u00a0 It provides a very useful reading list for those of you interested in this area.<\/p>\n International staff and students and immigration controls \u2013 <\/strong>On international students, there was an interesting response in the HE Bill debate from Jo Johnson that caused a ripple on twitter \u2013 after all the concern about TEF being used to limit international student numbers (thanks to Wonkhe for finding the quote on Hansard).\u00a0 The Minister is taking an unorthodox and refreshing approach \u2013 apart from telling everyone to calm down (just before the quote below) \u2013 he has been speaking widely about how welcome international students are and even appeared at the Times Higher Education awards last night and repeated the message.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have no plans to introduce any cap on the number of non-EU students who can come to the UK to study. No decisions have been made on tailoring or differentiating non-EU student migration rules on the basis of the quality of the higher education institution, or on how that might be achieved\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWe want compliance to be a strong feature of our system. It is important that the sector should do all it can to be compliant with Home Office regulations\u2026 [the Home Secretary] mentioned compliance and quality. High-quality institutions are compliant institutions; they are one and the same.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n There are stories that the consultations on immigration (on rules for employers and on international students) may not now come out until the New Year \u2013 we were expecting it\/them in the next couple of weeks.<\/p>\n Another House of Commons briefing paper was published on the \u201ceffect of exiting the EU on higher education<\/a>\u201d last week\u00a0 ahead of one of the many debates on this topic which is being debated everywhere including in the HE bill debates as noted above.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t change anything but if you are trying to catch up on any of the specific issues e.g. research or students it is a very useful reference source with helpful links.\u00a0 Interestingly it doesn\u2019t talk about EU staff at universities \u2013 something which is often missed because it is not a specifically HE issue \u2013 but one that is very important \u2013 although it does note a number of parliamentary questions that cover staff including the recent reassurances from Jo Johnson that staff should be able to stay as long as the EU reciprocates.<\/p>\n We are also awaiting the next steps in the Education Committee inquiry into Brexit \u2013 the chair tweeted how important this was but at the time of writing they hadn\u2019t published all the evidence.<\/p>\n Autumn Statement \u2013 <\/strong>Theresa May made a speech to the CBI<\/a> pre-announcing the investment in research and development in the Autumn Statement on Wednesday.\u00a0 UUK have published a blog<\/a> on the Autumn Statement, which contained few surprises as most of the news had been trailed \u2013 and apart from letting fees (which may affect the local accommodation market for students) the only really interesting bit for universities is the \u00a32bn investment in R&D.\u00a0 This is new money, but it sounds as if it will be very targeted to innovation\/commercialisation projects and science in industry \u2013 so concerns remain about the risk to research funding more widely following Brexit.<\/p>\n Colleagues, please see below the recent policy update from Jane Forster,\u00a0touching on Student Information, NSS boycott, HE and Research Bill, Maintenance Grants and Loans, Education and\u00a0Social Mobility, Autumn Statment and more: Last week was all about the HE Bill (which meant it was also about TEF, fees, student loans, immigration and Brexit) \u2013 and the… Read more » about HE policy update<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1273,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[308,5,369,34,1],"tags":[412,380,304,87,411,397],"class_list":["post-4429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-he-students","category-news","category-policy","category-resource","category-uncategorized","tag-autumn-statement","tag-he-policy","tag-international-students","tag-nss","tag-social-mobility","tag-student-finance"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4430,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429\/revisions\/4430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}