Universities minister David Willetts has recently claimed that students from middle-class families will get support in the form of the maintenance package. The universities minister said that the details of the proposed maintenance package for students on higher education funding contained in last week's ministerial statement were wrong. According to that statement, the maintenance loans for students from families, whose incomes are between £42,000 and £60,000, would be increased.
But today, David Willetts says that students would receive £120 less in maintenance loans. He says that a 2.5% reduction for almost 2.5% of students is quite fair. It is the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills that decides all technical issues of loans and grants for essay. Simplifying the way loans are given to students will lead to the situation when some students receive less in future than now.
Maintenance loans aim at helping students to cover their living expenses while students from the lowest income families receive means-tested maintenance grants.
In the coalition's education policies this is not the first time the mistake was made. In July Michael Gove, the education secretary, had to apologize for errors made in lists of school-building programmes.
