Foreign Perspectives

The more I read about the ELQ debate, the crazier it seems to become.

At the moment, I’m actually exempt from what might be crazy increases in university fees as I live in Northern Ireland which is one of the minor exemptions in the grand scale of things. Sounds great to not apply the charge to the whole of Northern Ireland but seeing as we represent about 1/40th of the UK population it’s not such a big deal as it first sounds. That said, I can’t see that exemption staying forever so I was curious about what other exemptions that I might be able to avail of should the need arise in subsequent years.

First up are foundation degrees however the problem with most (all?) of those is that you need your employer to sponsor you and they’re in a fairly limited range of fields at the moment too. That said, several of the courses in my current plan are within foundation degrees. Why then should someone hit by ELQ have to pay, say, double the cost for doing a course when someone else doing the very same course and with the very same prior qualifications be paying half as much? No reason really apart from the crazy nature of the ELQ funding debate.

Although it seems impossible to get a fully definitive list of the exemptions this does include certain medical subjects, youth studies and social work which creates some loopholes for me. Psychology isn’t exempt from ELQ but the majority of psych courses that I’ll be doing over the next couple of years can be allocated against a Diploma in Health Sciences which is presumably exempt and most of them can go towards a youth worker or social work qualification too. Incidently, note that the SIRV (Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects) subjects aren’t exempt from ELQ.

What the regulations don’t appear to even consider is that students don’t always have to be studying towards a specific degree. That’s much more apparent in the case of the Open University but it also applies in many universities. As far as I know one could allocate courses against an exempt qualification (or series of them if necessary) in most universities right up to the penultimate year; in the case of the OU it would be possible to do this right up to the end of the final course. What happens then if someone “changes” their mind at the last minute and picks up the qualification that they really wanted all along? There’s quite a substantial difference in funding (around £4k for non-ELQ, perhaps £16k for ELQ) so I’d have thought that a lot of people would be looking into this possibility.

Overall, it sounds very much like a Gordon Brown “savings” plan ie saves lots of money on paper but in reality it just adds to administration costs and doesn’t save anything at all.