Downing Street Says » Universities

» Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Universities

Asked if the Prime Minister thought that rich students should be allowed to buy places at university, the PMS said that our universities policy had been designed to do two things; firstly, to deal with the sustainability of university finances, which required us to take some difficult decisions about the way the cost was shared between the taxpayer and the students. Secondly, we were trying to improve access to higher education and universities, particularly for those from more disadvantaged backgrounds.

The PMS went on to say that if the journalist had been referring to comments made by David Willetts this morning then what Mr Willetts actually said was that we were listening to proposals and once we had set out our policies in the White Paper we would ensure that we improved access to higher education.

Put that one of the ways of improving access was to let richer people buy places and use the money to help fund less privileged people, the PMS said that at the moment there was a quota system, which meant that some people who had the required qualifications to get into university were turned away. One thing that could help us improve access and social mobility would be if we could increase the number of university places and therefore enable more people who were currently being turned away to go to university. We were looking at how we could do that effectively, but we had not yet outlined the policies. David Willetts had been talking about the objectives of our policies, not the policies themselves.

The PMS went on to say that we were listening to suggestions for increasing access, whilst recognising that we were starting from a position where there was a problem with the funding of universities, which we had to deal with. For example, one suggestion was that some charities could potentially sponsor people to go to university, which under the current system wasn’t possible. We would test any specific proposals against our objectives.

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Universities

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