Today Vince Cable, Secretary of State for BIS, gave a speech on HE to HEFCE’s annual conference. The main points are as follows:
- The government will review OFFAs powers.
- A headline figure of £9k for fees at a given institution will not necessarily be representative of the average fee at that institution because of fee waivers and scholarships
- There should be variability of charges within institutions, reflecting differing costs between courses.
He also restated government’s intention to
- withdraw places which are unfilled, with no assumption that HEIs will get them back
- either to cut the teaching grant or reduce student numbers to manage higher costs
- expand FE provision of HE, and private provision of HE
- modify student numbers to reward low charging HEIs.
The full text of his speech can be found here.
