Northern Ireland students get a 20 per cent boost to maintenance

Economy Minister Conor Murphy – who is actually standing in the current Seanad elections in Ireland and so will quit Stormont if he’s elected – says that the increase will provide students with an estimated additional £50 million per year to assist with living costs.

Or will it? One of the endlessly frustrating aspects of student finance announcements in all four UK nations is that we never get to see the numbers behind the announcements.

In the devolved nations, that’s partly because ministers like to take credit where they can, despite the fact that increases (and the envelope to deliver them from) are actually pretty much controlled by the Westminster Treasury.

As a reminder, No.11 takes the overall costs of the subsidies in the English loan scheme (through the repayment threshold and the write off), divides that by the total English population, multiplies it back up by the population in the nation, and then allows devolved ministers to pull levels within or top up that envelope.

It’s also because of fiscal drag. I can’t tell you whether that £50m figure is £50m more than they’re getting now, or £50m more than they would have been getting given that the threshold over which NI expects parents to chip in on top of the loan will likely remain at £19,203, where it’s been for over a decade. In the context of quite dramatic increases to the minimum wage since then, now looks astonishingly mean, rendering the maximums quoted as pretty meaningless.

This is a further bit of catch-up for Northern Ireland – there was a whopping 40 per cent increase to maintenance loans back in 2022, but it still means NI’s baseline students studying away from home £9,757 entitlement is lower than England (£10,544), Scotland (£11,400), and Wales (£12,345) and that threshold will choke off a good chunk of proportion that get it.

Murphy says that university should be “the time of their lives in many regards before they get into the working world”, but plenty will already be the “working world” clocking up hours alongside their studies.

On the old Welsh/English “how many hours does full-time study knock you out from earning” calc (37.5 hours a week, 30 weeks) that £9,757 is worth £8.67 an hour, some distance from next year’s £12.21 per hour minimum wage for those aged 21 and over. Put another way, £11,607 is worth 950 hours on April 1st’s minimum wage – 425 hours fewer than they’re supposed to be studying for.

Some could argue that living costs in NI are lower – but given that a higher proportion of NI’s students leave the country to get into HE than any of the other nations (mainly a capacity issue), that does leave those students especially short.

Oh – and there’s also no sign (yet) of any movement on the tuition fee.