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Higher Education

We are going back in time to try to cost the overall proposal to phase out tuition fees. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that it is not just my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham who makes sure that the sums add up. I make sure that they add up in my portfolio as well. Our proposed extra foundation degree places for year 1 and year 2—foundation degrees are a two-year programme—are fully costed in the second year as well, and our aspiration in the second year to start phasing out the final year tuition fee cost is taken into account. That was dealt with in my previous answers. Widening participation is mentioned in the Conservatives' motion, but they had remarkably little to say about it. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of people attending university over the past 40 years, if not in the past 10 years, but that increase in participation in higher education has not been a socially balanced increase. That is the problem on which we should now focus. We know that in some social groups there is saturation point among those who go into higher education, whereas in other social groups things have barely changed since the 1960s. The child of a manual worker who did not go to university is just as unlikely to go to university now as in the 1960s, when I was born.