World Class Funding
What are you doing?
We are making the case that, in order to have a world class education system, we must have world class funding for higher education.
This is especially important following the government’s announcement of major spending cuts to universities from 2011.
Wendy Piatt, director-general of the Russell Group of large research- intensive universities (which includes Leeds), recently said that "reducing the amount of funding per student will create real and long-term difficulties for UK universities and will serve only to undermine the quality of the student experience."
As part of this case, we will continue to lobby the government to increase spending on Higher Education in the UK from the current level of 0.9% of GDP to a level of 1.1%, in order to meet the OECD average.
Increasing higher education spending by 0.2% would mean an extra £2.5billion to spend, which could be used to reduce the tuition fees students pay by £1000 every year or to improve the university experience through funding better facilities or a 67% increase in the number of lecturers.
Why are you doing it?
The current student funding system is unfair, as students take on a large part of the cost of their higher education when the government could be contributing more.
This leaves the average students with debts of over £15,000 when they graduate from university and deters many students from going to university in the first place due to fear of the debt involved.
How are we doing it?
We are currently building as broad a coalition of support as possible by involving students, trade unions and local further education colleges.
What have we achieved so far?
Leeds City Council conducted a scrutiny enquiry into higher education in Leeds at our request, with the final report supporting some of our key positions such as that there should be no further increases in student tuition fees and that a well-funded National Bursary Scheme should be introduced to provide financial support for students.
We tabled an Early Day Motion in parliament to support the aims of our campaign which was signed by 23 MPs and all our local backbench MPs.
We’ve received favourable coverage in the Yorkshire Evening Post and Leeds Student and our campaign has the support of the NUS.