How you can save your maintenance grants.
On Thursday this week, students were blind-sided. It has been decided that all current and prospective students from England won’t be able to apply for maintenance grants year on year. Maintenance grants have been scrapped and Higher Education has now been made even more inaccessible. This is a saddening act that saddles the poorest students with even more debt!
Rather than holding a full debate and vote in Parliament, a legislation committee made this decision behind closed doors. Only 18 MPs voted to scrap maintenance grants for English students. How can any decision that affects millions of students, putting them into significant amounts of debt, be made like this? This wasn't in the spirit of democracy. Through the work of NUS on Friday 15th January, an opposition day debate will take place on Tuesday 19 January at 1.30pm. This means your MP can fight against cuts to maintenance grants.
At the moment, students typically graduate with up to £40,500 of debt in three years. But for students who rely on maintenance grants, this will increase to £53,000 and will be forced to take on additional loans in lieu of grants.
This amount of debt creates a huge barrier to students accessing Higher Education. Access to education should be based on an individual’s ability and willingness to learn, not on their financial background. The scrapping of maintenance grants is discriminatory, it risks making education inaccessible to large groups of students and we will do our best to fight against this.
How we can fight against this:
Join us in contacting both your Cardiff MP and your MP at home using the links below:
From your Elected Officers