FEMALE students are being disproportionately hit by a failure to offer sufficient financial support to those studying part-time.
There are currently 236,000 part time students in universities and colleges across Scotland with women accounting for 61 per cent of them.
However, part-time students do not have access to the range of loans and bursaries available to full-time students making the cost of studying much harder to meet.
Susan Stewart, director of the Open University in Scotland, has called for the issue to be addressed in a forthcoming Scottish Government consultation.
Ms Stewart said a recent independent review of financial support, chaired by Virgin Money chief executive Jayne-Anne Gadhia, had an opportunity to address the issue, but had “excluded” part-time students from its recommendations.
art-time study also includes higher proportions of disabled, low income and students from disadvantaged backgrounds compared to full-time study.
Writing in The Herald, Ms Stewart said: “These 236,000 part-time students, whether at college or university, aren’t currently eligible for financial support.
“The review was a chance to fix that. After all, it cited fairness, parity and clarity as its guiding principles.
“Imagine my surprise when it chose to exclude part-time students from its recommendations. Despite its central recommendation that all students should be entitled to a minimum income of £8,100 a year, what the review really meant was some students.”
Ms Stewart said Open University students often talked about an “earnings trap” where, having left school and started work, they found the cost of rent and childcare too much to pursue part-time study.
She added: “Putting part-time students at a disadvantage based on the way they need to study doesn’t make sense and is not fair.
“It’s also an economic necessity. Demographic trends show us that, in a world of rapidly changing technology, we don’t have enough young people to fill the jobs we know are coming soon.
“Scotland is a small country and we need to take advantage of the talents of all of our people which means they need to be able to re-skill and upskill in order to change jobs and careers – for most people already in work, that means studying part-time.”
The call for parity for part-time students was backed by academics and student representatives.
Mary Senior, Scotland Official for the University and College Union, said changes to student funding were a step in the right direction, but more needed to be done.
She said: “There needs to be greater flexibility with the timing of loan and bursary payments to address hardship issues students can face over the summer, and we need to ensure vital financial assistance is extended to part-time students.”
Liam McCabe, president of student body NUS Scotland, welcomed the Scottish Government’s intention to look at the issue of part-time students.
He added: “We hope to see any future recommendations being probably resourced, and aimed at creating greater equity in the system.”
Part-time higher education students, regardless of income or background, are not currently eligible for student maintenance support in Scotland.
Students earning less than £25,000 may be eligible for the part-time fee grant, which waives tuition fees.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here