The news again has been full of talk about cutting English tuition fees from £9,250 to, say, £6,000. While psychologically attractive – as it reduces the perceived ‘debt’ – the practical impact is to take money off universities, risking the quality of education, and handing it to very high-earning graduates. I bashed out this explanation on my...

If you started university between 1998 and 2012, the Government plans to sell your student loan to the City. If you started in 2012 or beyond, chances are the same will happen to you. If you went before 1998 then your loan has already been sold, and you probably know there were substantial problems. The House of Lords’...

  The amount of the living loan that students aged under 25 get when they go to university is dictated by a means test of their PARENTS’ income.  A reduction in the living loan starts for students from families with incomes of just £25,000/yr and the amount received can be halved for those whose parents earn £60,000. In...

Update Note 25 May 2017: The ready reckoners below have been updated with the new 2017/2018 living loan amounts. Also since first writing this blog, and seeing the strength of feeling it attracted, I have written an open letter to the Uni Minister asking him to start telling people about this. Yet sadly received his no we won’t...

You graduate from uni, ready to face the world – check your student loan statement online and discover £150 a month interest is being added. It’s a frightening prospect. However, for many people this statement and the interest added is irrelevant and may as well be ignored. I’ve often heard it said that all English students in England who...

It’s against all forms of natural justice and good governance. The Government, without asking Parliament, has changed the terms of student loans, long after many students signed up to them – indeed some had already graduated when they did it. More than 130,000 people signed a petition forcing a parliamentary debate on this hike that will cost...