Why the SNP should deliver a better deal for Scotland's poorest students

He had a tough upbringing and lost his father aged nine, and although his state school was in a deprived area of Edinburgh, its teachers inspired and encouraged him to get to university, the “first in his family” to do so.

Although from, by her own admission, a more middle-class background, Kezia Dugdale spoke of being raised by teachers, who taught her of the “power of education to enrich lives”, and its ability to “liberate people from a pre-determined destiny”.

My own “story” falls somewhere in between. Like Mr Murray I grew up in Edinburgh, though in Lochend rather than Wester Hailes. I went to Leith Academy, at which I was an unremarkable student, and then to Aberdeen University, where I had a similarly unremarkable undergraduate career. My journey was neither pre-determined nor a triumph in the face of adversity.

Nevertheless my backstory has left me uncomfortable with educational orthodoxy and suspicious of many alternatives. I was educated at a state school, and although a recent survey concluded Scotland’s half-century experience of comprehensives has generally been a good one, I remain unconvinced, not least because pupils educated outwith the state sector perform so much better on almost every measurement.

Yet the dominance of independent schools – in terms of access to university, the professions and higher incomes – is something that makes me deeply uncomfortable, as does the beguiling middle-way offered by academic selection. Many comprehensives, on the other hand, do little more than process students.

I’m in a similar quandary over higher education. I matriculated at Aberdeen in 1995 so missed the two fee regimes that followed. I received a modest grant for at least a couple of years and financed the rest through loans. In an ideal world I’d rather tuition was free, but then we don’t inhabit an ideal world. The thought of students from affluent backgrounds sailing through four years at university for “free” has always struck me as unfair, a subsidy for those already doing pretty well.

But these are views that, in the modern Scotland, one isn’t allowed to hold. At Holyrood last Thursday the Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson made the perfectly reasonable – and indeed “progressive” – proposition that graduates might contribute something towards their education once they start working, money that could then be used to help increase bursaries for poorer students.

In fact, Ms Davidson was essentially advocating a return to the “Graduate Endowment” scheme that operated until the SNP scrapped it in 2007, a £2,000 “fee” Scottish students used to pay after graduation and which was used to provide student support, including bursaries, for future generations of disadvantaged students.

Naturally, the First Minister dismissed Ms Davidson’s suggestion out of hand, positively relishing the thought of the Scottish Tories fighting next year’s election with a pledge to reintroduce tuition fees. The Scottish people, added Ms Sturgeon confidently, would be the judge.

The First Minister called this “principle”, but what sort of principle is impervious to consistent analysis showing that middle-class Scots have benefitted more than those from poorer backgrounds? When it comes to tuition fees, as someone recently said of US Republicans, the SNP are increasingly fact-sensitive, and the most recent facts (from the Student Awards Agency for Scotland) clearly show students from disadvantaged areas are receiving less in grants and bursaries than in previous years.

As the education expert Lucy Hunter Blackburn has argued in a typically comprehensive analysis, almost everything the First Minister said in defence of this uncomfortable reality was open to challenge. Ms Sturgeon quoted NUS Scotland hailing “the best support package in the whole of the UK”, a claim not only out of date but one the Scottish Government now qualifies with “for students who live at home”; and yes, ministers might have increased bursaries, but thus far only by enough to restore about a quarter or so of her own government’s cuts.

Many of the First Minister’s statements about the superiority of Scotland’s student support package, meanwhile, depend upon loans, which with typical hutzpah she attacks the UK Government for moving towards. Ms Sturgeon also railed against the idea of a graduate tax, but in reality student loans (now issued in Scotland at the rate of £0.5 billion a year) amount to much the same thing, the main difference being that graduates who started from poorer homes will in most cases end up paying back a larger share of their future income than they would under a conventional graduate tax.

Thus the SNP’s emphasis on “free” tuition looks like what Neil Kinnock once called “a rigid dogma”, an unbreakable code the party is determined to stick to, no matter how outdated, misplaced or irrelevant to real needs. And so we’ve ended up with the “grotesque chaos” (to quote Kinnock again) of an SNP government – an SNP government – sustaining a system of higher education that has not seen poorer students’ chances of going to university improve any more than in the UK as a whole, while also giving them less cash help to do so.

The First Minister is fond of saying – and indeed it’s become something of a mantra – that if it hadn’t been for free tuition she wouldn’t have made it to university. Now if the theoretical fees had been up front (which, it’s worth remembering, they aren’t in England, and never were in Scotland for those at the lowest incomes) then she might have a point, but it also skirts over the importance of adequate grant support, which one assumes the SNP leader received as an undergraduate at Glasgow in the late 1980s.

Curiously, when it comes to pre-university education Ms Sturgeon is much less dogmatic, embracing the idea of national testing and considering allowing parents at St Joseph’s in Milngavie to run their own school. One might almost describe such policies as Forsythite, an echo of the approach – vehemently condemned at the time by Labour and the SNP – of the Thatcherite Scottish Office minister Michael Forsyth more than 25 years ago.

In Perth last weekend Scottish Labour proposed what it described as fully-funded university places for looked-after children, a noble ambition, although I’d go much further. Why not reserve university places for a certain number of pupils at every state school in Scotland? For the poorest pupils these would be fully funded with cash (not loans) to cover fees and living costs, with those from wealthier backgrounds financing this through something akin to a graduate tax.

Yes, it would mean reintroducing fees at some level for some (not all) students, but it would also be potentially transformative, liberating so many more Scots from pre-determined paths, from a heavy and unfair share of student debt, and from the class structures that still dominate Scotland and the rest of the UK. The status quo, to wear out a cliché, simply isn’t an option.