Clause 23 - Condition that may be required to be imposed by English funding bodies
Higher Education Bill
2:30 pm
Mr David Chaytor (Bury North, Labour)
I hope that my hon. Friend's answer to me will be a little more developed than his answer to the Minister. My hon. Friend and I accept that we have fundamentally different understandings of the role of the market in post-compulsory education. Can he tell us how, at any time during that whole long post-war period, when there were no fees, and when grants were freely available, and even into the 1990s, when there was a part-loan, part-grant system, and even up to 1998, when there was a fixed fee system, that helped to widen participation as of right? Does he not accept that when higher education was wholly, or almost wholly, funded out of general taxation, it functioned entirely as an extension of the middle-class welfare state, and kept working-class young people out of university, because there was not enough investment to provide them with places or to encourage enough of them to continue education beyond the age of 16? What evidence is there that the system that he is defending—