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Too many people across our country do not get the chance to succeed.

So the government is committed to supporting the aspiration of every person who meets the requirements and wants to go to university or pursue an apprenticeship, regardless of their background, where they live and their personal circumstances.

Those aren’t my words – they’re the words of the House of Commons’ HE supply teacher Janet Daby, who answers for actual (Lords) minister Jacqui Smith whenever a question comes up about universities or students.

This answer is a typical one – in which she notes that in the summer, the department (for education) will set out its plan for HE reform and that it will expect providers to play an “even stronger” role in improving access and outcomes for all disadvantaged students.

Specifically on financial support:

Whilst many HE providers have demonstrated positive examples of widening access, including targeted outreach and bursaries, we want to see the sector go further.

Back in 2014, partly to get “top-up fees” through Parliament, then secretary of state Charles Clarke announced that a new Office for Fair Access (OFFA) would be created – and that it would require universities to offer up some of their additional fee income in bursaries.

Assuming that a proportion of student financial support should come partly via universities’ own budgets has always created a tension – between those who say that local decision making (aka institutional autonomy) is better at designing schemes that get the money to where it’s really needed, and those that argue that redistributing fee income within a provider rather than across the country means that financial support ends up being based not on need, but on the number of other students at your university that need it.

We used to be able to see that clearly. OfFA used to track how many “OfFA countable” students each provider had and their spending on financial support, and it would generally show that providers doing the most for access tended to have the least to spend per student.

Over time, direct student financial support declined in popularity. Research questioned bursaries’ impact on applications (unsurprising given how hard it was to find information on them), and it tended to struggle to find retention benefits from 2006-2011 – findings that then got extrapolated far beyond their timeframe.

Pressure to demonstrate impact led providers to focus on entry and completion metrics rather than the experience students were having as a result. That seemed less critical in the mid-2010s when inflation was low and maintenance loans were cranked up to hide the fact that grants were eliminated. Students living at home (more likely from widening participation backgrounds) also got relatively generous maintenance support compared to their costs.

Eventually, provider-level reporting on student financial support pretty much disappeared as the Office for Students started to emphasise outcomes over experience or spending transparency.

But with maintenance support over the past few years some distance from inflation, and the income thresholds over which parents are expected to top up stuck at the level they were set at in the year that Madeleine McCann went missing (18 whole years ago), we really do need some sense of how the mix is panning out.

So to help us to understand what’s been going on, for the fourth year running we’ve managed to extract some data out of OfS via an FOI request.

The data

Ever since the days of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA), HESA has collected data on the amounts of student financial support, and the number of students that helps, for each university in England – and here we have that data over the past few years.

It covers four different types of spend on student financial support:

• Cash: This covers any bursary/scholarship/award that is paid to students, where there is no restriction on the use of the award
• Near cash: This includes any voucher schemes or prepaid cards awarded to students where there are defined outlets or services for which the voucher/card can be used
• Accommodation discounts: This includes discounted accommodation in university halls / residences
• Other: This includes all in-kind or cash support that is not included in the above categories and includes, but is not limited to, travel costs, laboratory costs, printer credits, equipment paid for, subsidised field trips and subsidised meal costs

Some caveats: We remain less than 100 per cent convinced about the data quality, this doesn’t tell us how much money is going to disadvantaged students specifically, it doesn’t tell us about need (and the extent to which need is being met), I’ve yanked out most of what we used to call alternative providers for comparison purposes, and it only covers home domiciled undergraduates (and below, in terms of level of study).

But it is, nevertheless, fascinating. Here’s the numbers for each provider in England:

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If we nationally just look at cash help, in 2023/24 just over £496m went to just under 311k students – a spend per head of £1,598 – very slightly above last year’s £1,464 per head.

But dive a little deeper and you find astonishing disparities. In the Russell Group the £ per head was £2,362 – about £40 up on the previous year. Across Million+ providers that figure was £726 – just £4 more than 2 years ago.

Interestingly, per student helped, the Russell Group spent the same in cash help per student as it did in 2019. Maybe inflation doesn’t apply in elite universities, or maybe they’re getting worse at recruiting those on low incomes. Meanwhile the cash spend per student helped across Million+ universities has almost halved from £1,309 in 2019/20.

Clearly all universities are under financial pressure – but what we see is almost certainly an artefact of redistributing fee income around a provider rather than around a country, and it appears to result in manifest unfairness.

Even if we don’t adjust for inflation, spend per student helped has fallen for 45 universities between 2022/23 and 2023/24, and since 2019, it’s fallen for 56 universities. If we do apply inflation (CPI), only five are beating their 2019 SPH. No wonder students are struggling to come to campus.

Some may say that it might be better just to look at what’s been going on under the auspices of formal, declarable access and participation work. HESA finance data now includes a look at expenditure – but not the number of students that expenditure covers, nor the total amounts invested pre-pandemic, and nor the amounts allocated in premium funding, all of which would aid meaningful comparison.

Moving money around

I tend, in general, to be a fan of redistribution and cross-subsidy. It can help reduce economic inequality, promote social stability, and ensure that everyone has access to basic necessities. It reflects a commitment to fairness and the idea that a society should care for all its members.

As such, the logical bit of my brian never had much of a problem with the Charles Clarke/OFFA expectation – it was at least aimed at ensuring that everyone got to have a decent experience at university.

But the redistributive effects of moving money around a provider when some providers (which already tend to be the richest) have fewer poor kids to spend it on never really added up.

If you really wanted the system to be fairer, and for the most money to reach those who need it most, you might start by acting regionally. I doubt that John Blake’s regional partnership structures – which will involve cohort-level renewal for Access and Participation Plans will actually go as far as expecting providers in a region to pool their bursary or hardship spend – but there’s a very good logical case for that kind of approach.

When students at Salford are getting £358 each in cash help while their neighbours at the University of Manchester are getting £1,829, there’s a very strong case for pooling the money.

But even if that was to happen, beware the regional agglomeration effects. The region with the lowest higher education participation rate in the UK is the North East of England, at 33.4 per cent. London, with its 63 per cent rate, ought to be giving some of its spend on student financial support away to support participation up North.

And once you’re there, you (re)realise what many said at the time of the Clarke announcement – that moving money around a university when participation in universities is so unequal to start with is no way to run a fair system.

And even more importantly, it’s not fair on fee-paying students. When the assumption was that fees were a small part of the overall funding mix, we could say to students that the state’s contribution would be focussed more on those in need.

Even with fees at £9,000, the redistributive effects of some paying much more than that through interest of RPI+3% and some much less via the repayment threshold and the cut-off – all while funding a moderately comfortable financial support system for all – was some sort of egalitarianism in action.

But once the subsidy slips away, and students are expected to pay back almost all of the debt they incur, we end up expecting their personal debt to do what the state ought to do. And while it’s one thing for your fees to be spent subsidising other students at your own university, it would be quite another for them to be spent subsidising those at others in your region, or even around the UK.

Then add in the fact that in UUK’s cuts survey, just under half of universities (49 per cent) say they may still need to cut hardship funding and 59 per cent say they may need to cut bursaries. Even if some sort of tougher APP regime was to find a way to stop that, that just means that wider cuts will fall on everyone – and so for some students, less and less of their actual contribution will end up being spent on their actual education.

It turns out that the progressive taxation – ensuring that those with higher incomes contribute a larger share of their earnings to public services – is the much better way to promote economic fairness and reduce income inequality. Who knew?