Mature Students

(asked on 12th March 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that people aged over 21 are encouraged and supported to access higher education.


Answered by
Sam Gyimah Portrait
Sam Gyimah
This question was answered on 15th March 2018

Studying later in life can bring enormous benefits for individuals, the economy and employers.

Many mature students choose to study part-time. The government introduced up-front fee loans for eligible part-time students in 2012/13 to meet the full costs of their tuition. We are further enhancing the student finance package for part-time students by introducing maintenance loans, equivalent to full-time, in 2018/19. We also intend to extend the part-time maintenance loan to eligible students studying distance learning courses in 2019/20, subject to the development of a robust control regime to manage the particular risks and challenges associated with this mode of study.

Evidence shows that accelerated courses appeal particularly to mature students who want to retrain and enter the workplace more quickly than a traditional course would permit. We legislated in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 to allow a specific fee cap to be set for accelerated degrees, removing a key barrier to their wider availability. We recently completed a public consultation about the provision of accelerated degree courses, and will respond later this year.

In our first guidance to the Office for Students (OfS), which sets out our priorities for access and participation plans for 2019/20, we asked the OfS to encourage higher education providers to consider the recruitment and support of mature learners.

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