Is the student grant on its way back?

That’s partly because while a £1,000 boost involves the same outlay today, the former at least means that the Treasury can say that in the long-term, a proportion of it will flow back.

It does also, though, involve a loss of control. Direct funding can be targeted – spent on the courses, students or places that have higher costs or represent a political priority.

It’s interesting, then, that i News is reporting that the Department for Education has opened talks with the Treasury about reintroducing student maintenance grants for those from poorer backgrounds.

One source said:

There is a live conversation between DfE and Treasury… [there] is a conversation about maintenance loans and what you might do about the maintenance package.

Whether “live” means that some sort of interim arrangement on both fees and maintenance might be coming in time for 2025 – the announcement on that is due any time between now and January – remains to be seen.

If nothing else, it seems unlikely that the government will get away with business as usual over the announcement. “The return of the grant”, however much it is means-tested, would be a shiny political symbol that could cover all sorts of need for a longer, more detailed conversation.

Almost everyone around the edges of the system mentions the way in which George Osbourne scrapped the grant. Former universities minister Alan Johnson did so on the Today programme just this week.

On the one hand, there will be many in the sector that will lament the idea that the poorest students will get a symbolic boost if it turns out that doing so has been traded off against more maintenance loan.

If we notionally said that students are likely to pay back 75 per cent of the loan, the Treasury could be simplistically suggesting that DfE can either have £1,000 in grant or £4,000 in loan. It wouldn’t be as exciting politically – but I know what students and the operators of their food banks would prefer.

The other option is that some existing loan is swapped for grant. That was actually Corbyn’s proposal – the symbol cut through, but the fact that such a wheeze wouldn’t have purchased any extra food or paid another month’s rent was conveniently forgotten.

The irony about that option is that it wouldn’t cost much at all. As the Augar panel noted, those from the poorest backgrounds tend to have the worst labour market outcomes anyway – and so swapping debt that you predict will be written off for a grant that never manifests on the SLC annual statement should be straightforward, if fairly impactful.

The clear and present danger is that Treasury officials are being briefed to find something that has maximum symbolic salience, minimum long-term cost and doesn’t tie the government to any particular principles (like, say, the “triple lock”).

That would be a shame. In the absence of data that tells us what students actually need (beyond that HEPI work on a minimum income for students), the use by the Welsh and Scottish Governments (and the Augar panel itself) of a minimum wage anchor to determine the maximum maintenance package would at least be a good start.

If we used the Wales/Augar confection (37.5 hours per week, 30 weeks per year) and took the Low Pay Commission’s prediction on where the minimum wage will come out next year (its consultation tells employers to prep up for £11.89 an hour) that would mean a max loan (away from home, outside London) of £13,376 a year.

If would also help if it uprated the household income threshold over which we start leaning on parents and relatives to make up the difference, which ought to mean a threshold of about £37,000 rather than £25,000 here in 2024.