Charles Martin is an award-winning business student with political experience. He is reading Law at the University of Exeter.
Underlying the importance of a well-functioning education system is a prevalent concept: the desire to create a strong foundation for the next generation by unlocking the potential of the younger generation.
Pulling certain policy levers relating to education could be pivotal for the Conservative Party to capitalise on a bid to gain greater goodwill with younger voters after such a heavy election defeat.
Only by accessing these younger voters can a polling breakthrough be achieved.
Although primary and secondary education policies are vital, they are much more inclined to appease over 30 voters, especially parents with children in the education system. Putting the spotlight on higher education policy instead is vital in attracting the students within the system.
Those in the university system, and those who have experienced it, feel many areas need reformation, leaving a lot of ground for remedying policy to be introduced. The biggest potential policy change is with our dysfunctional student finance system.
The two largest issues within the student finance system include one that affects students whilst they are studying (maintenance loan allowance) and one that shows its effect post-university (the “graduate tax”).
Running a university, and studying at one, are both expensive operations; the university needs to ensure it is putting adequate funding into quality research, keeping teaching standards high, and maintaining facilities to a satisfactory grade.
Currently, for students in England, part of this funding is passed on to the students in the form of tuition fees, currently capped at £9,250 for home students.
Despite this cap relieving some of the financial pressures, many students feel the biggest hit in the cost of living at university, with the maintenance loan system operating on a “means-tested” basis.
This functions by assessing each student’s household income and providing those with less income access to more student finance. What this system fails to consider is the rising cost of accommodation and whether or not members of the household the student is coming from can fund their studies.
According to the Gov.UK maintenance loan calculator, a household income of £40,000 a year allows a full-time student studying outside of London to be granted a maintenance loan of £8,035. This is irrespective of the dependants of that income within that household, such as younger siblings.
This means an only child under this system will be granted the same amount of finance as that of a student coming from a household with many dependants on the household income. This highlights a major social mobility issue that must be reformed.
How much each loan consists of is another factor.
It is not uncommon for maintenance loans to hardly cover rent in practice, with the maximum allowance for outside of London being just over the £10,000 mark. This shows that even if there were to be reformations in the allocation of funding, it still would not be a sufficient amount to cover both rent and food costs, which the maintenance loan is supposed to be for.
Even after all of the above is said and done you then have to face the fact that you have to pay these loans back, which has become something of an impossible task for the vast majority of graduates.
This is down to a whole host of different reasons such as the fact that the interest rates on the loan stack up quite high, as well as the sheer size of the loan in the first place.
This creates somewhat of a “graduate tax”, as there seems to be no feasible way of paying back the loan in its entirety on an average salary, leading to graduates paying a sum of their salaries throughout the entirety of their working lives.
This has created a predicament where university study has been made extremely unattractive to prospective students, in favour of less costly apprenticeships or degree apprenticeships.
This will have a devastating impact of the quality of research our universities produce, as some of the brightest minds from low-income families may deem it unaffordable. The pass over of knowledge between professors and students is also consequently decreased, a deficit which students then carry on to their respective industries after graduating, as university study becomes increasingly unattractive.
Striking the right balance between finding a system that provides universities with the funding they need as well as mediating tuition fees for students is always going to be a precarious task. However, a reformation is evidently needed, and whichever party can offer a solution could win the goodwill of younger voters.
These are just two of the many areas that need desperate change and something which the next leader of the Conservative Party and Shadow Education Secretary should put a spotlight on.
As the Opposition, the Conservatives have greater political capital to probe on this issue, as Labour now has the burden of being the Government. Whereas Labour will be assessed on their current actions, the Tories will be assessed on their record. The latter is always the preferable way to make a charge on an issue such as education, as the government of the day will be on the defensive.
To bounce back from such a drastic election defeat the party needs to make major statements in key areas of society, including education, as only when the basics are done correctly can the party start to thrive and find its feet again.
