Madam, – The last budget’s cuts in higher education grants have been much publicised in recent months. What has not yet been discussed is the latest in a string of measures which seem designed to eliminate disadvantaged students from higher education.
The renewal form for the back-to-education allowance, which is currently being sent out, is threatening in its implications. The form offers various unclear and confusing options, each of which carries warnings that, in choosing them, the applicant may be eliminated from certain schemes.
This is an obvious attempt to bully social welfare recipients out of the higher education system. The reality of the impact of any of the available choices is unclear, but the connotation is that, if the students choose to remain in education, they will be heavily penalised. The option to just give up, not qualify, and return to a life on benefits, is the main emphasis of this form, and seems to be what people are being pushed towards.
This is a cruel, ill-advised, and short-sighted measure, which amounts to making a short-term saving by putting all previous investments in the bin, and forcing hard-working people who wish to contribute to society back into the social welfare system and a life without hope, rather than allowing them to qualify and incorporating them into the workforce. Most disturbingly, these cuts will also apply to those in receipt of disability benefit. Those brave and determined enough to take on this challenge should be supported and applauded, not penalised.
This new measure will affect people whose prospects are already unfairly limited, and I find this utterly indefensible.
From a Labour Minister for Education and Skills, this amounts to a complete about-face from the values that ensured his election. Deliberately targeting the most vulnerable – choosing to withdraw opportunities from the poor and the disabled – is the antithesis of the values his party was founded on. Currently, they will have a major impact on about 7,000 people, and adversely affect a further 25,000. But it is the implications for the direction of future policy that should be most worrying.
The attempts to punish pensioners in the previous budget were greeted with wide-scale public outcry, and resulted in a change of policy. The claims Mr Quinn has made in relation to these cuts – that altering previously implemented policy is not possible (which has been the only defence of their actions the Government has offered so far) - are clearly nonsense.
They can change these policies, if they choose to do so – but they will only do so if there is enough of a public outcry. – Yours, etc,