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Higher Education

If the hon. Lady looks at my or the federal party website, she will see that the first thing that I did when the statistics came out—during the half-term recess, I think—was to welcome them. I welcome more people going into higher education, as would most of my colleagues. That does not mean that we cannot question some of the assumptions made about those statistics. As the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) said, the UCAS statistics do not include the large number of people who apply directly to institutions, either because that is the way that they do it or because they are studying part-time. About 40 per cent. of students currently study part-time. The statistics leave those people out of the equation. We do not yet understand, because the statistics have not been made available to us, the effect of the arrangements on them. On social class differences, the Minister is clinging to a 0.3 or 0.4 per cent. increase—depending on which table one reads—in participation by lower socio-economic groups. Such a marginal increase in one data set is nothing to draw firm conclusions from. Earlier, he conceded that I had a fair point—just for once—in mentioning that the biggest sub-set of data in the UCAS statistics relates to students who do not volunteer information on their parents’ socio-economic group. We cannot draw hard conclusions from such statistics. Debt may or may not make a difference. In some circumstances, in which a person is determined to go to university, I accept that it may not. Were I making my university choices again, despite coming from probably a similar background to the Minister’s, from what he said earlier—mine was a single-parent family from a council house in south Wales—I would like to think that financial considerations would not have stopped me. But some people in a similar group might make a different decision. Even if people do go on to university, the issue might skew their choice of institution or subject. We do not know about that yet. Student bursaries are completely bewildering. I tried to replicate my choices of 20 years ago via the Aimhigher website and gave up after struggling to find out the different levels of financial support for the different institutions and subjects—history and economics—between which I was choosing at the time.