WEEKEND READING: Beyond access: how subject-linked maintenance grants will reshape opportunity

This blog was kindly authored by Sunday Blake, Policy Manager, GuildHE.

The proposal to reinstate full maintenance grants for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds is a positive step, and even now that the dust has settled on this policy announcement, it is still, rightfully, being celebrated across the sector.

The move is one which recognises and addresses something many voices in higher education have been arguing for years: that for poorer students, living cost support is not simply a marginal incentive but a basic condition of access to higher education.

It is though, important to note that this move is technically not a ‘return’ to maintenance grants – as it has been widely reported. While there is a reintroduction of maintenance grants, they come with a significant shift in eligibility. Such eligibility is not satisfied solely on a student’s socioeconomic background or personal circumstances (as before) but now under the new the system eligibility for maintenance grants is based, not just on where the student comes from, but where they also intend to go. This is because eligibility has been narrowed to a set of ‘priority’ subjects defined by the government’s industrial strategy – a shift that places a number of disciplines, including many creative degrees, outside the scope of the new grants.

In this way, maintenance funding has been reframed from a neutral enabler of broad participation into a lever designed to steer the choices of some students towards what the government thinks they should study.

Subjects of support

In practice, this means that a number of disciplines fall outside the scope of the reintroduced grants.

Eligible subjects are expected to include STEM and technical disciplines, health and public service professions, teacher training, and subjects aligned with priority sectors such as construction and architecture, advanced manufacturing, digital technologies, and energy and green technology.

Subjects outside these priority areas are unlikely to be eligible. This is expected to include many creative arts disciplines, as well as a range of humanities, social sciences, and business-related degrees. Students choosing these subjects would rely solely on the loan system for living cost support; on parent contribution; their own income from working whilst studying; or not be able study these subjects at all.

Such an approach makes sense in principle when designing for national skills needs – more on that later – but it sits uneasily alongside the participation principles that the government itself applies elsewhere.

Opportunity for all

The concern that access to certain subjects and careers is shaped by the students’ ability to absorb financial risk – and the actions to mitigate this – are already well established in other areas of policy

For example, there is already a broad and welcome consensus in government and incoming policy, reflected clearly in the Making Work Pay consultation, that unpaid internships are unfair. This is not just because of the concern young people who are working in such unpaid internships are exploited – but also because of concerns for young people who aren’t working in such unpaid internships.

The logic is, that unpaid internships are unfair and exclusionary because being able to afford to do an unpaid internship (and reap the benefits it offers) rests on a level of financial security that those from low socio-economic backgrounds may not have. The Government articulates this clearly in its consultation and its commitment to ban them

“for a fair and inclusive labour market where everyone has the opportunity to succeed based on their talent and not their financial circumstances.”

In short: some employers misuse internship structures to get free labour, especially from the young people who can afford to perform it, and that isn’t fair on those involved. Equally, unpaid internships create barriers for those without financial support who cannot afford to perform unpaid labour, which widens class divides in career access, and that isn’t fair, either.

The former concern is about exploitation; the latter concern is about who gets to access opportunities and who does not.

This matters particularly for the creative industries, where research shows that unpaid or underpaid internships are common entry-level pathways – and that these practices act as a barrier to social mobility for students and graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Many graduates are expected to complete multiple placements before securing stable work. Unsurprisingly, those from higher-income backgrounds are far more likely to manage this. Those from working-class backgrounds participate at much lower rates. This is not because of a lack of will or ability, but because the economics simply do not work.

Talent or trust fund?

Against that backdrop, creative higher education actually plays a disproportionate role in supporting social mobility. Sutton Trust research shows that while only around 20 per cent of working class people in employment hold a degree, the figure is three times as many for working class people in creative occupations. In other words, a degree is often the primary –  and sometimes only – route into creative careers for those without family wealth or networks.

Subject-restricted maintenance funding will raise the same issue. Where access to financial support, through grants, is unevenly attached to particular routes, the effect is not simply to ‘nudge’ choices but to determine who can participate at all.

That is why access to creative higher education matters so much if widening participation is meant to extend beyond education and into the labour market.

Skills design

Now, about that skills design. GuildHE research shows that creative degrees develop technical, entrepreneurial, and transferable skills that support portfolio careers, self-employment and innovation across the wider economy, not just within the creative industries themselves.

These are not low-value pathways. They are simply non-linear ones.

Creative graduates move across sectors: digital, design, communications, education, public service, technology and policy. This is vital workplace and career adaptability. In a labour market defined by change, creative education builds exactly the kind of flexible capability that priority sectors consistently say they need – even if current funding models struggle to recognise it.

There is also a strategic timing issue at play. The current proposal responds to immediate and visible skills shortages. But higher education is not a rapid response unit. Students entering university now will graduate into an economy several years on – one with shifted skills needs. Funding models that lock participation to today’s priorities risk training students for today’s – or even yesterday’s – gaps, rather than the future economy. Even The Robbins Report committee found “no reliable basis” for such forecasts back in the 1960s.

In contrast to narrowly defined pipelines, creative routes produce graduates who can move with the economy rather than chase it. In periods of rapid change, such adaptability is a form of resilience that the wider economy depends on.

And underpinning all of this depends on students entering higher education in the first place.

Maintenance funding does not always operate as a gentle incentive at the margins of subject choice. A student who has grown up drawing, designing, performing or making does not respond to the removal of maintenance support by ‘re-optimising’ into a priority subject. A fantastic artist who cannot go to university to study art does not suddenly become a fantastic engineer. They do not go to university.  And once they are priced out, they do not later reappear in Government-defined priority sectors. That talent is simply lost.

The pipeline problem

The government has rightly committed to rebuilding creative curricula in schools and has recognised the role of the arts and culture in prosperity and placemaking. Aligning maintenance funding with those ambitions would help avoid unintended consequences for social mobility and ensure that skills strategy widens – rather than narrows – the talent pipeline.

And if the aim is to increase participation in priority fields, there is scope to look at a broader and more effective set of levers: earlier investment in the pipeline; stronger careers guidance; better supported transitions; and reducing the overall financial risk of participation.

It is also worth asking how incentives are distributed across income groups. If financial pressure is used to encourage students who rely on maintenance support to choose priority subjects, are there equivalent mechanisms nudging more affluent students in the same direction? Or does the policy operate mainly by narrowing the choices of those who can least afford the risk?

Maintenance funding works best when it enables participation, not when it becomes a sorting mechanism that determines whose aspirations are financially viable. Across other areas of policy – from action on unpaid internships to wider commitments on fair access to work – the government has recognised that opportunity should not depend on a young person’s financial security. If widening participation is truly meant to extend beyond access to higher education and into the labour market, that same principle must apply here too. The ability to study – including through creative routes – must remain financially possible for those without the luxury of choice.