Skills-based higher education driving student financial support
Over the weekend, HEPI published a blog on reclaiming education through localisation for Afghan women and a blog on the future of languages in multilingual Britain.
Today’s blog was kindly authored by Peter Gray, CEO and Chairman of the JS Group.
If universities are to adapt to the latest skills-led demands of the Government (and to match the stated national future industry priorities), they will need to look well beyond their course and employability provision at many other aspects of the student experience.
One such key area is in the connection between student financial support and employability opportunities. It is important that those students from lower-income or more restricted backgrounds are financially equipped and able to take advantage of, for example, off-campus experiences with employers to ensure they aren’t denied these frontline opportunities for skills development and for making connections. While there are many charities working to structure and access these opportunities, it is the funding itself to enable this full participation that needs particular attention.
That’s why I can foresee a new demand for universities to steer more and more bursaries, scholarships, and special-case funding streams towards helping students with skills-based experiences. It is a trend that is already growing – as JS Group’s latest annual analysis of patterns in student financial support demonstrates. In recent years, we’ve assessed the overall use of £296 million of such support provided to 584,000 students.
In the last 12 months (the 2024/25 academic year), we have looked at the use of this funding by students, the formats of payments and the timelines of when funding is being used and applied. This data (from our Aspire platform) is immensely important as it can draw on real-time and (student) user-based experiences to ensure universities have the evidence to make future decisions about their student support investments.
A notable trend this year – which is in part explained by an expansion of participating universities providing data and the use of funding from Turing and Taith public funding schemes – is in how more and more students are using cash-based support from their institution to address the costs of work placements or associated travel, or to recover such expenses.
Expenses claims are up by more than six per cent, use of placement funds is up three per cent and travel is up by more than one per cent. Our indicators show more action in these areas alongside continued support for accommodation, household bills, groceries and course-based resources.
Our feedback survey of students as funding beneficiaries also shows the value that they place on funding for levelling-up (in terms of their ability to participate in opportunities) and for strengthening their perception of value and belonging with their university.
If, as we expect, there will now be a national policy drive to steer more embedded work-related and skills-driven activities as part of the higher education experience, then it makes sense for universities to reassess how they are using their financial support beyond cost-of-living and cost-of-learning applications.
Comments
Ron Barnett says:
Forgive me if I say that this is yet another HEPI blog about higher education that speaks just of skills and not once of education.
The last sentence includes the phrasing: ’embedded work-related and skills-driven activities as part of the higher education experience’. At least, this wording recognizes that a genuine higher education extends beyond work-relatedness and skills; and we do sometimes see this kind of en passant acknowledgement towards the end of such blogs. But what those additional components might be so as to form a genuine ‘higher education experience’ we are never told!
The result is that the policy and public debate about higher education is not just dominated by interests in skills, work-relatedness, employability and marketability but entirely obliterates any sense that this might be a territory of education.
Surely the time has now come when we should abandon the term ‘institutions of higher education’ in speaking of universities and like institutions and, instead, opt simply for ‘institutions of higher skills’. After all, there is now – it seems – no political or public interest in, or appetite for, any educational role that such institutions might possess and seek to realize.
Ron Barnett
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