Theresa May Mark 2

I stand corrected. 3 terms per year at £9 thousand per term equates to £27 thousand plus the maintenance loan of £8thousand. £51 thousand to £68 thousand is a heck of a lot of money. How many graduate jobs pay less than £21 thousand? Therefore the student probably will start paying back the money as soon as he/she starts work. They will be paying it off until they are near to retirement. They will have to decide whether they can afford to get married, have children, buy their own home, or not go to university at all. I feel very angry about this and my children are all grown up with their own families.....it is my grandchildren who will be denied the right to reach their full potential.

Yes, they will be paying it off until they reach retirement - and still owe most of it! You'd be surprised how many graduate jobs pay less than £21,000 and don't forget that many graduates don't do graduate jobs. Females are likely to pay back less, because they still tend to take career breaks or work part-time after having children. It's a graduate tax rather than loan repayments.

The whole system is riddled with loopholes. For example, graduates who inherit money can escape the repayments. However, the fees should never be a barrier for poorer students. As I mentioned, some universities still give non-repayable bursaries. My son is getting £2,500 a year from his university, which he won't have to repay.

Don't blame it on the Scots, criminals and foreigners!

Even if a graduate is earning £30,000 a year (which is the average), he/she will still be paying less than £1,000 a year in repayments. He/she has to balance that against the amount which could have been earned without the degree.

The problems facing young people financially are more to do with high house prices, high cost of NI and pension contributions and childcare.

I don't think student fees are fair either, but they're being made a scapegoat here. It shouldn't be forgotten that it used to be a very small percentage of people who received fully funded higher education, subsidised by those who didn't receive it.

Interesting story:

www.theguardian.com/education/2011/apr/25/prisoners-law-degrees

May is going to have her work cut out re-introducing grammars. Ruth Davidson has said that it isn't part of the Scottish manifesto ( it isn't part of the English either, but why let such a small detail bother this government), and it will never be part of the Scottish Tory educational plans.
The government is also showing anxiety over Morgans threatened rebellion let alone Gove. Even Rudd has been careful in her wording about the proposals.

Backbencher's are dead against it. Mays tiny majority seems suddenly to have disappeared over this one. It will be interesting to see how she deals with it.

At long last Leadsom appeared, although she had little to say. Given her brief is environment, food and rural affairs, you would have been sensible to assume that she would have given farmers some reassurance over subsidys etc. But no, her interests only lay in the badger cull and selling tourists British air at £80 per go. We must only be grateful that she never made it to PM and the small grip she appears to have on reality.

We have also been told that our soldiers will no longer be subject to the ECHR rules. Why?? What is this government trying to hide? Difficult in future if we site one of the reasons for going to war as human rights.
The MOD is claiming that most claims are spurious. Difficult argument to defend when we know that the MOD has paid something like £20million for cases of abuse.

A former Lieutenant Colonel said that the MOD willl only pay up if the case is indefensible or it has something to hide. So £20m would seem to be the tip of a very unhappy iceberg.

DS has now paid off his student loan and he is married with children and aged 35.Similarly, nephew aged 36 also married with children has paid off the loan.True, it may not have been quite as much as a loan taken out by an 18 year old today,but it was still a very substantial amount, and they had no monetary help from us.So am not sure if in real terms it was any less than is the case today.

Regarding the change in the laws about soldiers/ lawsuits I listened to what was said on the Daily Politics Show, and it seemed sensible stuff.The Geneva Convention rules still apply, as does all criminal law which can be applied to the Army just as much as civilians.Serious cases of wrong doing will be investigated.What won't be considered are charges against the army for holding a person in custody and interrogation ( which has to be done.)

I think Mrs May will do her very best to be a good PM. I could not stand Cameron or Osborne because they were so much for the upper classes and didn't care about anyone else. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and so be it was their idea of a society that works for all. I think so far Mrs May is trying to do what the country is calling for. I hope she succeeds. I am not happy about the way she tried to humiliate Mr Corbyn though, she is better than that surely?

If Mr Corbyn would just drop his stance on trident and the submarines I think he would gain a few votes. I think he is a decent man, but some of his policies are extreme.

I think there is nothing wrong with Grammar Schools, in fact I support them. I do however feel that everyone should have the choice of where and what kind of school they want for their children. Most schools in UK are good as is the teaching, what we need is a variety of schools that meet the needs of the children going to them. There is room in UK for every child and I do not just mean academics I mean those children who are more suited to hands-on work such as plumbers, builders, car maintenance technicians, shop workers etc etc. We have a wide skill set in this country and we need them all.

Re: The new regulations on the army. Will they be letting those soldiers who went to jail out now? I bet they put their ticket in straight away, I know I would. You do your job and in terrible circumstances with inferior equipment provided by this government.....and you end up in prison? That is not right imo. They need to tackle the bullying that goes on in the Army too from the top down. I know from first hand how the Army treats the young recruits and it is not nice, in fact it is humiliating for them. The NCOs took a delight in shouting at them in front of civilians.

It was a great deal less in the past than it is today!

The fees would have been only a thousand or so a year and they would have been eligible for non-repayable bursaries. Not only that, but it was possible to pay them off early, so even a relatively small windfall or savings could have been used.

My daughter is 23 and started university, when the fees were £3,000 (just before they went up to £9,000). She did a four year course and her total debt is now around £27,000. She is not allowed to pay off more than a certain amount a year. The interest is currently more than than she is allowed to pay off. She has resigned herself to paying a 'graduate tax' for 25 years. She still thinks it's worth it. New entrants have to wait 30 years, before the debt is written off.

The unfairness about the current system is that wealthy parents can pay the fees upfront. Many of them are already paying £20 - 30+k a year for school fees, so university is just a continuation of that. Not only that, but people with wealth can arrange their financial matters, so that it appears that they have a low income and can escape paying the loans back.

The total amount of the debt is largely irrelevant - it's the amount which has to be repaid every year, which it's more like a tax (which some can escape).

Comprehensives are able to teach children who are going to be academics and those who are going to be plumbers.

Yes dd I think the amount then was £3,000 a year.That sounds about right.

According to The Money Advice Service

You have the right to pay off your student loan more quickly by making at any time single payments of £5 or more directly to the Student Loans Company.

You can do this even if your salary does not yet reach the starting level for repayments. You also have the right to pay off your outstanding student loan in full at any time.

Student loans are the biggest con trick perpetrated on the public. They will probably cost the government more eventually than the grants system ever did. Partly because of the percentage that will never be paid off and partly because of the costs incurred in collecting the repayments. Even the Institute for Fiscal studies warned in 2012 that there were too many variables to accurately predict the real cost of loans, but that most indications were it would not be much cheaper than a grants system.

@roses

If your children are now in their mid 30s and went to university when they were 18, it's unlikely they paid more than £1,000 a year.

Tuition fees were first introduced in 1999. The fees at the time were about £1,000 (variable). Fees of £3,000 a year were introduced in 2006 and raised to £9,000 in 2012. In just 13 years they were increased by a multiple of 9, which is way above inflation.

@Ana

That must be new, because it certainly wasn't the case when the £9000 grants were introduced. Martin Lewis, amongst others, protested, so maybe he's won.

Just checked and you're right. The rules were changed as a result of the outcry. However, anybody with a 2012+ loan would be bonkers to try and pay it off early. The money could be used better by investing in property, which has a higher capital return than interest paid on the loan. Approximately 75% of the money loaned to students will be written off anyway, so it's crazy to try and pay any of it off early. The voluntary repaymenht option is used mainly by the self-employed and those living overseas.

This is what Martin Lewis has to say about repaying 2012+ loans:

www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-repay#tabThree

Hope Theresa May does everything that Oxfam want her to.

act.oxfam.org/great-britain/cameron-inequality-petition-even-it-up

Theresa May has had her bluff called over Brexit.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/03/eu-commission-still-refuses-uk-talks-before-article-50-triggered

dd It was obviously what you say, if you checked , but there were all the living costs on top of the tuition fees, so think their total cost per year would then have been about £3,000 a year.The rent alone cost a great deal, and of course, £3,000 then was a lot of money.It has certainly risen a lot since then though, and a neighbour's son has opted for living at home for his last year to save money, I think perhaps that those whose Uni is near home will do that.

@roses

I think you're on a different planet or in a different timezone. The only university within commutable distance for my son was Cambridge. Unfortunately, he didn't achieve the grades to go there and Cambridge doesn't approve of its students living outside college anyway.

The total cost today is about £17,000pa. Even with inflation, it costs a hell of a lot more to go to university.

daphnedill which university is it that gives bursaries?