Student Loans and GCSEs: Death to Art Schools
At the end of February 2022, government ministers announced a controversial set of plans to make over the requirements for student loans in the UK, to address the so-called ‘crisis’ of student loan debt in the country.
Currently, the debt stands at £161 billion, and is estimated to reach half a trillion by 2043. To combat this, a new plan has been unveiled which would see a number of measures implemented for a range of reasons, the most prominent being to reduce the number of supposed ‘poor quality courses’. The measures include: repayment to be owed over 40 years rather than the current 30, and the repayment threshold to be lowered from earning over £27,000 a year to £25,000, a change that will hit low-income graduates hard.
The most controversial of these changes, however, is the requirement for aspiring students to have passed both their English and Maths GCSEs, an idea that the art world (in particular) has protested against. The idea that an artist should require to know the square root of Pi, or how to calculate quadratic equations is frankly absurd. Yes, maybe a small amount of maths is required for creative degrees; I myself studied in Textiles and know that for pattern cutting and designing, numbers are very useful. I also know that I scraped a C at GCSE and the content of my exam was hardly related to the applied use of Maths in my degree. Many of my peers didn’t pass their Maths GCSEs, but in three years of studying it never presented itself as an issue. Most importantly, it did not make them any less of an artist. Perhaps if the GSCEs were more relevant and had practical applications, the new rule would make sense. But, as the curriculum currently stands, it is simply not relevant for creative degrees.
The implications of these changes will be serious, and felt immensely by the UK’s creative industries. Naturally, the arts would have a low uptake, and there would also be a significant effect on those wanting to pursue creative degrees in later life. Older students are a cohort not to be underestimated; over 20% of students on my degree were over 40. Whilst not an artist, my own partner failed many of his GCSEs including maths yet, now at the age of 27, has just completed his Engineering degree and been awarded first class honours. With such a result, the idea that he could have been blocked from even trying to start his degree at all is as worrying as it is laughable.
The proposed changes will primarily, as most government plans do, affect low-income families the most. Students in more privileged circumstances may not have the results in English and Maths, but will still be able to enrol as this change crucially only affects accessing loans, not university enrolment itself. Degrees are already difficult to access and maintain for low-income students; many try to balance studying alongside work, and their participation in Higher Education can lead to large costs on books, materials, field research etc. This new change will only widen disparities.
You can’t help but feel that students are being punished for events they have little control over. Yes, they can study and revise and work hard in school, but they are actually still children, a fact that many seem to forget. Their worlds are affected by many circumstances beyond their control. It seems ridiculous that they could potentially be haunted by exams they sat when they were 15 when the time comes to decide whether they want to go to university. Reasons for poor GCSE results include: family bereavement, divorce, separation and illness, to name only a few. Imagine telling an 18 year old that how they handled a crisis at 16 was the reason they now can’t access higher education?
The government, of course, believes they are doing us all a favour and eliminating ‘poor quality courses that don’t have any benefits to graduates long term’. Somewhat of a contradiction is their very own press release in February 2020, which stated that the creative industries in this country contributed £13 billion to the UK economy every hour, up 7.4% on the previous year.
It’s not entirely clear what they deem as a ‘poor quality course’, but reading between the lines we can see that it’s the arts that are on the block. The government defines a ‘poor quality course’ using metrics such as average graduate salary, employment figures (measured in an old-fashioned way that doesn’t really account for freelancing), and completion rates.
Since we’ve all now experienced multiple national lockdowns, it is undeniable that the things that kept us entertained during the hardest and longest days will have spawned from the mind of a creative degree student. Netflix, podcasts, reading, crafts, baking; each one of these lockdown hobbies is made possible because of the people with creative degrees furthering them, making them accessible, teaching us through YouTube and blog posts, websites and articles. The spotlight is on the importance of the arts now more than ever, and we must nurture that and raise it up, not run it into the ground.
Written by Rachel Anderson
Rachel Anderson is a Textile Artist and Writer based in Hull, East Yorkshire. She is passionate about Textiles and Arts Education as well as social and political issues. Having studied her degree in Textiles she is now self employed taking on art commissions, writing, and delivering talks about all the above.
