WHILE her friends were stuck on campus over a wet weekend last term, Natasha Jackson, a fashion student at the University of Northampton, was enjoying a leisurely lunch in Milan’s Piazza della Scala after some serious window shopping in the nearby fashion district.
The trip was paid for by a £500 travel bursary from the Honourable Cordwainers’ Company, won by Jackson on the strength of her second-year undergraduate fashion show.
With tuition fees rising to £3,000 a year (albeit deferred) and the cost of living rocketing, bursaries and scholarships are making a vital contribution to some student finances.
In Jackson’s case, student prizes and scholarships have been a valuable supplement to her student loan and were a key factor in her decision to apply to Northampton.
She says: “Milan is the centre of Europe’s fashion and leather industry so it was a really great chance to see a catwalk show and I got to see Prada and Dolce & Gabbana.
Advertisement
“In my final year I am specialising in designing men’s shoes and have already had a work placement with Church & Co, the Northampton shoemaker, which has given me a final-year scholarship.”
This year the Government obliges all universities to redistribute part of their extra tuition fee income as bursaries to poorer students, which is monitored by the Office for Fair Access.
Universities are obliged to pay a minimum of £300 to anybody eligible for the full maintenance grant (where family income is below £17,000) and most offer much more. Other bursaries are discretionary and are linked to objectives such as encouraging more students to study less popular subjects such as mathematics, science and engineering or to encourage enrolment by poorer students who may not have considered doing so otherwise.
Northampton has held down its tuition fee to £2,500 and is supplementing it with a range of undergraduate bursaries — £500 to students receiving the full maintenance grant and an additional £500 “postcode allowance” targeted at students from the locality and from the East Midlands conurbation.
Frank Burdett, Northampton’s Pro Vice-Chancellor, says: “We have always had discretionary scholarships donated by local industry but we are redistributing a proportion of our top-up fees to help students from low-income families and from the locality. This year our level of applications is 1 per cent up on last year against a national trend that is 3 per cent down.”
Advertisement
To check on your entitlement go to the Ucas website, which has a link from the list of degree courses to the bursaries or scholarships available. More information is available on www.direct.gov.uk/studentfinances and there are useful and entertaining “threads” on student finance in the online discussion forum www.thestudentroom.co.uk.
The Confederation of British Industry has information on business scholarships. Vocational degrees are often sponsored. In construction, for example, 15 top UK civil engineering firms interview A-level candidates for places at Loughborough and Salford universities.
Simi Gandhi, learning and development manager for Bovis Lend Lease, says: “We sponsor 200 undergraduate trainees taking four-year sandwich degrees. We pay them a £165-a-month books allowance while they are at university and offer them paid work placements during holidays and in their gap year.”
Students should check what prizes or bursaries are on offer with the university department to which they are applying, says Lucy Smith, bursaries and scholarships officer of Goldsmiths College, London.
“We have a special support grant for course-related costs covering expenditure such as books, travel and childcare. Students on a maintenance grant will get an additional £1,000 from Goldsmiths.” As well as widening participation and lightening the financial load, universities use scholarships to raise academic achievement. The London borough of Lewisham, in partnership with Goldsmiths College, for example, has endowed the Mayor’s New Cross Award, a £10,000 scholarship to the best qualifying male and female A-level student in the borough. The award is meanstested and aimed at bright students from a poor background.
Advertisement
The University of East London (UEL) is offering 200 achievement scholarships of £1,000 each, to attract the “brightest and best”. The scholarships recognise not only academic achievement but sporting success, creativity and good citizenship.
Kayley Mulvihill, 18, from Dagenham, has been awarded a UEL achievement scholarship in the creative category. Mulvihill, a pupil at All Saints Catholic School and Technical College, became interested in creative writing after joining a school writers’ club in Year 11. Inspired by her teachers and a local poet, Mulvihill has started work on a novel, Destiny Awaits.
Mulvihill will now begin a combined honours degree in English literature and creative and professional writing in September.
She says: “I was really pleased when I heard that I had been awarded the scholarship. I worked hard on the application and now I am really looking forward to developing my creative writing skills at UEL.”