On 29 September, the government announced the return of maintenance grants for college and university students from low-income households. However, before we get too excited that this might look like (gasp) actual socialism from Labour, universities have warned that the new plans will backfire massively.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson was clearly very excited to make the announcement. She posted three slight variations on the same tweet in just over two hours:
Access to our colleges and universities shouldn’t just be for a wealthy few.
That’s why I’m bringing back maintenance grants for those who need them most.
Labour is ambitious for all our young people, no matter their background. I’m putting our values into action.
— Bridget Phillipson (@bphillipsonMP) September 29, 2025
The Tories scrapped maintenance grants, kicking away the ladder for working class kids.
It’s discouraged so many from going to university or college.
It’s forced too many to work every hour God sends instead of focusing on their studies.
That stops now. I’m bringing them back.
— Bridget Phillipson (@bphillipsonMP) September 29, 2025
The Tories scrapped maintenance grants, kicking away the ladder for working-class kids.
Education shouldn’t be just for a wealthy few.
That’s why I’m bringing targeted grants back and putting our values into action. pic.twitter.com/h67F3fpwol
— Bridget Phillipson (@bphillipsonMP) September 29, 2025
Details, details, on maintenance grants
Maintenance grants were abolished by the Conservatives back in 2016. The previous year’s grants cost the around £1.6bn.
Labour now plans to pay for the new grants by placing a levy on international students’ fees. The press release stated that:
This will maintain a competitive offer for international students while ensuring the benefits are shared more visibly at home, directly benefiting disadvantaged domestic students. The international student levy will apply to England only.
So, in a now-familiar move for Starmer’s Labour, we’re seeing politicians decrying immigration publicly, whilst privately bleeding immigrants for all they’re worth. Please don’t vote Reform, we’ll do their dirty work for them!
The announcement didn’t state exactly how much this levy would be. For that matter, it didn’t state how much the grants would be, or the income threshold to qualify for them.
It did, however, state that the grants will be in place by the end of parliament, and that they’ll be targeted at students on “priority courses aligned with the government’s missions and the industrial strategy”. We have no details as of yet, but that sounds an awful lot like “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber”. Feel free to pursue your dreams, so long as you dream of aerospace engineering.
‘Depleting vital resources’
So we’ve got a bit of casual xenophobia and overtones of STEM-supremacy in the mix, but maintenance grants for low-income students is still a good thing, right? Unfortunately, universities have warned that this may actually result in fewer places to go around for UK students.
Vivienne Stern, Chief Executive of Universities UK, said:
Extra money to support students from diverse backgrounds to study courses critical to economic growth is the right idea – but this would be executing it in the wrong way.
A levy on international students will not help disadvantaged students, it will hinder them. As emerging evidence already shows, it would reduce the number of places available for domestic students and mean universities have even less of their scant resource to invest into expanding access and supporting students.
In the UK, less public money goes into higher education than in any other developed nation, with domestic and international students paying a higher share. Universities already contribute a huge amount to government priorities and if, after more than a decade of effectively freezing domestic fees the government wants them to do more, it’s time we had a debate about making a greater contribution from the public purse.
Likewise, Russell Group chief executive Dr Tim Bradshaw said:
The levy is a terrible policy that will damage universities at a time when they are already facing financial challenges. The money taken out of universities will mean less is available to invest in high-cost teaching facilities, in research and in work to underpin local communities and economic growth.
The ultimate irony is that the levy will mean fewer places for UK students as a portion of international fee income is already used to offset the deficit on teaching undergraduate courses. It will also undermine the significant investment universities already make in bursaries, hardship funds and other measures designed to support students.
Of course, we can welcome the intention for government to boost support for students facing the biggest financial barriers through the reintroduction of maintenance grants, but this is not the way to do it.
As yet it is unclear whether the government’s plans would put more money overall into students’ pockets, while limiting grants to certain subjects risks restricting student choice. Depleting vital resources for something that may not materially increase day-to-day support for students would be a short-sighted move.
We know it won’t work
International students already provide as much as a third of the income of one in six UK universities. Garnishing that vital funding with a levy for low-income students means that there’s less money for the universities in the first place.
What’s worse, the government already knows this. Back in June of this year, the government published a research briefing on international students. It stated that:
Reductions to teaching grants, the freezing of tuition fee caps, rising costs have meant many higher education providers have looked to the tuition fees of international students to cross-subsidise shortfalls elsewhere in budgets. In 2023/24 fee income from all international students was £12.1 billion. This was 23% of total income, up from around 5% in the mid-1990s. International fees are not capped in the same way as the fees of ‘home’ students, and so providers can charge significantly more.
Maintenance grants are a great thing. Tuition fees and living expenses are a massive barrier to potential students from low-income families. But what Labour is proposing is another populist policy based on thinly-veiled xenophobic posturing. Even by their own analysis, this plan will not work.
As Vivvienne Stern suggested – it’s time that Labour considered some actual socialism for a change and paid to uplift disadvantaged students from the public purse, rather than pointing the finger at immigrants yet again.
Featured image via the Canary
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