This question came up in the AQA’s November 2021 7192/2 topics paper, in the families and households section.
This post includes some advice on how to interpret the item and answer the question.
Applying material from Item C, analyse two ways in which family diversity in the UK has been influenced by government policies (10)
Using the item…
The item in this case is very short and also a bit tricky, directing you to ‘aspects of diversity’ rather than policies.
TWO types of increasing diversity…..
more divorced families….
more same sex couples.
The item then refers to government policies more generally.
So what this seems to be directing you to do is to talk about a range of policies in relation to increasing divorce and the increase in same sex couples.
As with any question it’s probably a good idea to not have too much overlap, so try to apply different policies to both types of diversity.
Policies relating to increasing divorce
The divorce act of 1969 led to a rapid increase in divorce, changing the grounds (you should include details of this). However divorce had been increasing before the act and continued to increase after the act so clearly there were social changes contributing rather than just the policy.
The 1984 divorce act made divorce possible after a shorter period of marriage, there was an immediate spike in that year, so clearly this made a difference.
Benefits for single parents make it easier for women to get divorced in families with children so they are not as financially dependent on men, apply terms such as breadwinner/ role/ carer role and Feminism.
The equal pay act of 1975 – women equal pay to men, more financial independence, same logic as above.
This is crying out to be evaluated… divorce has been going down for 20 years, one of the reasons is immigration (still a policy), immigrants have lower divorce rates.
Maternity and paternity pay may have helped ease (lower) the divorce rate as these take pressure off young families.
Final evaluation – it’s probably more about social changes and social policy changes reflect that!
Polices relating to an increase in same sex couples
The civil partnerships act 2004 made it legal for same sex couples to get a civil partnership, same basis as marriage, reduced stigma, increases number of formally partnered couples.
Same sex marriage act 2013 enabled same sex couples to get married, further reducing stigma.
Analysis point: possibly the number hasn’t increased, just the amount of openly gay couples.
Adoption Act (2004) made it legal for same sex couples to adopt children on same basis as opposite sex couples, increase in same sex families.
All primary pupils in London schools are going to get Free School Meals from September 2023 according to an announcement from the Mayor of London on Monday.
This new policy will cost £130 million, save the average family £440 a year and benefit around 270 000 children.
In an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme (20/02/2023) Henry Dimbleby, former head of the government’s national food strategy, explained the benefits of universal free school meals and the ideological barriers which have prevented this policy being enacted at a national level.
Trials had been done under the Labour government way back in 2013 in some local authorities including Newham, Durham and Islington which revealed that providing universal free school meals to all pupils significantly improved the academic performance of children who had previously been on free school meals, but the the performance of ALL children improved.
Those who had previously been on free school meals saw the most academic improvement, one theory for this change being that when ALL pupils can access free school meals it changes the culture of the school, removing the stigma of poverty at mealtimes and thus makes poorer students feel more included.
What about the rich kids who don’t need free school meals?
All children already benefit from free education which includes access a whole range of other material resources such as text books, so adding on free school meals isn’t that big a deal!
There is also evidence that all children benefit from this policy and it closes the inequality gap: A more recent study from Sweden showed that the introduction of universal free school meals improved the lifetime income of poorer students by 6% and the richest people’s only rose by 2%
The biggest drag on our economy is long term sickness, and the biggest cause of this is poor diet.
Why don’t we have free school meals in England?
According to Henry Dimbleby the current Tory government are ideologically opposed to universal benefits and this is the main reason we do not have free school meals for every child in England and Wales.
Both Nick Clegg and Michael Gove were in favour of universal free school meals when we had a coalition government, but since then neoliberal ideology means the government isn’t prepared to find the money to care for the poorest children in society.
Signposting
This material is relevant to the compulsory education aspect of the AQA’s first year of A-level sociology.
It is especially relevant to the topic of social class differences and education, as universal free school meals seem to be one of the most effective policies which can reducing the effects of material deprivation on educational achievement.
It is also a reminder of the continued harms of neoliberal education policy.
Government policies favour the old and harm the young
The gap in wealth, income and governmental support between the young and the old has grown significantly in recent decades, to the extent that the social contract between the generations is now broken.
This general injustice is further fuelling inequalities between the young as those parents with sufficient wealth are increasingly passing it onto their children before they die, while those with lower wealth simply cannot do this.
These differences have been fuelled by changes in government policy which panders to older people because they are more likely to vote than younger people, and older people are also more likely to vote Tory, the dominant party of the last four decades which has resided over social policies that have persistently favoured the old over the young.
Older people have benefited from:
Decades of a well-funded, functioning NHS delivering free health care at the point of delivery.
A well funded education system, including free universities and grants to pay tuition fees.
The most generous pension terms, with many retiring on full, final salary pensions.
The treble-locked pension going forwards, with pensions rising 10% in line with inflation.
Properly funded council housing, much of which was sold off under Thatcher providing very cheap home-ownership for millions.
The opportunity to become a ‘share holding democracy’ when Britains’ nationally owned water and gas companies were sold off, again under Thatcher.
Being able to buy their own, very large homes which they now under occupy. 67% of homeowners of retirement age have two or more spare bedrooms.
Young people suffer from:
A now underfunded NHS which is so crippled even nurses have taken the difficult decision to strike as a last ditch effort to get the government to fix the broken social contract and pay workers a living wage.
An education system which has seen a 20% real terms cut to funding under the Tories since 2010, and they have to take out loans of tens of thousands of pounds to fund a degree on which they are soon going to have to pay almost 7% interest (while pensions are increasing in line with inflation.
Their pension age has been pushed back to at least 68 and replaced with average salary rather than final salary schemes in most cases.
Very high property prices to the extent that most people have to save for a decade until they can afford to buy in their mid 30s and with current inflation mortgage interest is at a 20 year high.
Having to live in shared accommodation or with their parents into their early 30s in increasing numbers of cases.
Their earnings are relatively lower thanks to steadily rising inflation and made dramatically worse by the recent cost of living crisis.
It is also the case that the chosen government response to the Covid-19 Pandemic, that of locking down the country for six months, was mainly to prevent old people dying, and it was young people who paid the price for this: especially those whose education was harmed.
Increasing inequality among the young
According to a recent report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) based on a cohort of young people in their early 20s and 30s, the parents of the well off will provide their children with £17bn in gifts and loans in 2023.
And children of university-educated homeowners, who are already the highest earners, will receive six times more than the children of renters.
This is only human: of course parents want to and will help their children financially if they have the means.
David Willets who recently chaired the intergenerational commission has pointed out, however, that this ‘natural’ desire of individual parents to help their particular children is bad for society as a whole. They may be ‘good’ parents but they are not good citizens.
Social policy solutions
The commission has suggested several government proposals to combat generational injustice and restore the social contract between young and old people, such as:
Making older people pay more tax to benefit the young
A massive housebuilding programme to help bring down house price
Reforming council tax to make larger properties pay more
More secure tenancies for renters
Ending zero hours contracts
Abolishing various loopholes which allow people to avoid paying inheritance tax
Increasing capital gains tax on wealth gains.
The most radical proposal of all was a £10 000 citizens inheritance grant to every 30-year old to go towards housing, education, or pension.
Challenges
The most significant challenge to improving the lives of young people through social policy is the lack of will within government, and especially within the Tory government.
The simple truth is that the majority of voters are over 50, and most of these vote Tory, and people vote in their own self-interest.
So we’ve got a situation where the Tories and probably Labour if they wish to get into power are going to keep pandering to the old and allow them to keep their wealth and high income.
The problem is that this has to crack at some point!
I mean, it is young people who work and raise most of the tax revenue, after all!
This material should be of general interest to any sociology student wondering why their life is so difficult, and it is also relevant to the topic of social policy, part of the Theory and Methods aspect of second year sociology.
Education policy to combat racism has gone from ignorance, through assimilation, integration, multiculturalism to aggressive majoritarianism in 2022.
Gilborn (2008) divided policy approaches to combatting racism into eight phases:
Ignorance and neglect (1945 to late 1950s)
Assimilation (late 1950s to mid 1960s)
Integration (mid 1960s to late 1970s)
Cultural pluralism and multiculturalism (late 1970s to late 1980s)
Thatcherism: the new racism and colour-blind policy (mid 1980s to 1997)
New Labour: Naive multiculturalism (1997 to 2001)
Cynical multiculturalism: from 9/11 to 7/7 (2001 to 2005)
Aggressive majoritarianism (2005 to present day).
Ignorance, assimilation and integration
The government’s response to immigration from 1945 to the late 1950s was that of ignorance and neglect. The government largely ignored the issue of immigration from mainly the Caribbean, India and Pakistan and put no educational policies in place to do anything about the children of immigrants.
This was in line with the racist colonial mentality that people from Africa and the Indian subcontinent would do primarily menial, unskilled manual jobs which required little in the way of educational input to prepare them for.
Assimilation
From the late 1950s to the mid 1960s the government’s official response to immigration was to expect immigrants to assimilate to the British way of life, meaning that they were expected to adapt and become just like the majority white British population.
This was very much a one-way expectation, with ‘them’ being expected to become ‘like us’. Any racial tensions in schools during this period were interpreted as a migrant problem – some immigrants were just not trying hard enough to assimilate.
Integration and education policy
By the late 1960s policy makers had begun to realise that the assimilationist approach was impractical – Indian and Black-Caribbean cultures were not simply going to disappear after a period of time and there was a move towards policies being more accepting of cultural diversity.
This period saw the introduction of the Race Relations Act in 1976 which made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of ‘race’.
Multicultural education
Education became more multicultural from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.
The late 1970s were a period of large spread social unrest due to the failures of Capitalism leading to mass unemployment and poverty, which were disproportionately felt by black and asian minorities.
This was a period in which ethnic minorities were protesting more about the high levels of marginalisation, poverty, unemployment and racial discrimination they were experiencing which resulted in a number of widely publicised riots such as the Brixton Riots of 1981.
Part of this resistance by young ethnic minorities manifested itself in more disruption in school and higher truancy rates.
The Swann Report was published in 1985 as a response to such unrest and this represented something of a landmark change in thinking about how policy should combat racism:
It recognised that cultural diversity was a positive force for social change and that a society with a plurality of cultures was richer than a more homogenous white culture.
It recognised that ethnic minorities in the U.K. faced higher levels of unemployment, poverty and racial discrimination.
It explicitly identified institutional racism as a problem which it defined as ‘where the official institutions in society, such as the education system… operate in a way that automatically discriminates against and disadvantages certain groups.
It also recognised that racism was not just a problem that ethnic minorities had to deal with but that it was also a white problem, and that white people needed to be educated about racism, especially in white-majority areas.
The Swann report caused division in central government and was largely ignored there, but many Local Education Authorities acted on its findings and introduced changes to make education more multicultural.
Multicultural education involved understanding and celebrating difference in education
Two examples of multicultural education included:
having classes which specifically educated students about the languages, religions and diets of different minority ethnic groups.
Changing text books so that they had broader representation of ethnic minorities.
However early multicultural education has been criticised for being condescending and ignoring institutional racism, seen by many as tokenistic and doing little to really foster a mutual understanding and respect between cultures.
Anti-Racist Education
Anti-Racist education believed that racist attitudes needed to be explicitly opposed within schools and that active measures needed to be taken to ensure equality of opportunity for all ethnic groups. Anti racist policies were primarily adopted by some of the more left-wing Local Education Authorities, to whom the New Right Tory government was opposed in the early 1980s.
Colour Blind Education Policy
The New Right Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher and John Major adopted what David Gilborn (2001) has described as a ‘colour blind’ education policy because it ignored ethnic diversity altogether.
This was convenient for the Tories in the early 1980s against the backdrop of the Falklands’ war and increasing popular concern about the amount of immigration to the U.K. and a rising fervour over (white) national identity.
Two ways in which the New Right’s education policies were colour blind include:
Leaving everything to market forces and individual choice which took no account of ethnic diversity.
The National Curriculum which was introduced in 1988 was also highly ethnocentric if we examine some of the core subjects such as languages, literature and history. The only languages which were options for students were white European languages and there was almost no recognition of black and Asian minority cultures in history or english during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Naive multiculturalism
Gliborn (2001) characterises New Labour’s education policies as being a form of naive multiculturalism. He suggests that while New Labour acknowledged that significant ethnic inequalities existed and that something had to be done about this, they in fact introduced no significant policies to actually to do so.
Rather, in education, they assumed that issues such as racial discrimination would be tackled adequately through the introduction of Citizenship into the curriculum.
Cynical multiculturalism
The September 11 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York ushered in what Gilborn (2008) refers to as an era of cynical multiculturalism in social policy. This means that while New Labour maintained a rhetoric of commitment to promoting ethnic diversity and equality of opportunity the policies they introduced were more similar to the assimilation/ integration phases of the 1950s and 1960s.
For example New Labour made it harder for the spouses of recently arrived immigrants to join them in the U.K., they sped up the deportation of illegal immigrants and they put more emphasis on the importance for migrants to learn English.
Aggressive majoritarianism
Gilborn (2008) suggests that since the London Bombings of 2005 the New Labour government adopted a stance of aggressive majoritarianism.
The media discourse at this time was one of Islamophobia and of how integration policies have failed, and there was something of a return to assimilationism.
There was also more open criticism of veiling as a problem rather than an aspect of diversity and acceptance of diversity was more likely to be seen as destabilising rather than something to be celebrated.
The Coalition government carried on the majoritarian agenda, with the then Prime Minister David Cameron saying in 2011 that multiculturalism had failed and that we needed a stronger identity in the UK to prevent extremism.
The Coalition government’s introduction of British Values into the curriculum is another example of a more assimilationist majoritarianism.
British Values are today taught as something passive and peaceful and the policy discourse suggests that greater social harmony can be achieved if everyone accepts ‘Britishness’ as a core identity rather than us celebrating multiculturalism in schools.
British Values – A form of cynical multiculturalism?
We might also interpret the ‘PREVENT’ agenda, introduced in 2011 as an example of this – which highlights the fact that some elements of Islamic culture have failed to integrate and it is the job of schools to identify these failures and intervene to prevent these aspects of Islamic culture from harming the majority.
It also seems to be the case that the government thinks that we are now in a post-racial Britain – that there is no real problem with racial discrimination anymore so education policy need not address this.
Signposting
Education policy and its relationship to ethnicity and racism is a topic within the AQA’s A-level sociology specification.
The latest statistics rom the ONS show that half of all women now remain childless until they are 30, which reflects a longer term trend of declining birth rates in England and Wales.
In fact, birth rates have been declining for around 10 years now, previous to which they had been increasing, but why is this?
Why have birth rates been declining for the last decade?
Writing in The Guardian, Poly Toynbee identifies two main reasons to do with increasing economic hardship and Conservative austerity policies which fail to make work attractive for women with children.
She notes that the dip in the birth rate started when The Coalition government introduced their austerity policies in 2012, and this meant heavy cuts to child services, such as Sure Start, making it less appealing to have children.
But mainly this change seems to be about economic factors – people have fewer children when they think there are going to be tough economic times ahead – and our economies been creaking for years, especially if we look at the cost of housing.
You may think that the chosen social response to the Pandemic that was Lockdown would have encouraged people to have more children, as work has become more home-based, but the reality of this for women was having to balance home working and home schooling.
And now there’s more uncertainty than ever going forwards – about the Pandemic, about the economy, and, frankly, who can blame anyone for not wanting to bring children into this new post-pandemic world of ours.
NB…. this could have dire consequences ten years down the line for our ageing population, now there will be even fewer working age to retired people.
Sources/ Find out More.
I heard about the ‘half of all women are childless until 30’ stat on Radio Four this morning.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood in 1985.
This might be a novel, but it’s a useful way to introduce social policy and the family! It’s also an example of a type of secondary qualitative data!
The novel is set in the United States and imagines a future where the majority of women have been rendered infertile because of environmental toxins, and the few women left who are fertile and able to bare children have become ‘handmaids’.
‘Handmaids’ are given to elite families, required to have ritualistic sex with the male heads of households so that they can bear the families children.
The country is run by a totalitarian state (called ‘Gillead’) which subscribes to a conservative christian ideology and maintains tight control over many aspects of people’s lives, but especially the Handmaids – these are brought up in ‘convent like’ schools, and educated into their role as ‘breeders’ – they effectively get passed around from elite family to elite family to bear multiple children for them.
The novel is told through the eyes of the main character, Offred. What is particularly bleak is that Offred remembers life before Gilead, when things were relatively normal – declining fertility rates eventually lead to a slide into this totatlitarian control over women.
The novel is nicely summarized in the video below.
You can also watch the TV adaptation on More 4 here.
Social Policy and the Family in the Handmaid’s Tale
Government policy towards families is extremely controlling of women in htis novel. The Gilead Theocratic State has near total control over women’s reproduction – fertile women effectively have no right to control their own fertility – that right is given to the elite families.
Fertile women also have no right over their children, these are given away to the families the Handmaid belongs to.
Could this level of control over women happen in real life?
Atwood refers to her novel as ‘speculative fiction’ – a situation which could happen in the future.
The book was a commentary on the political and social climate of the United States in the 1980s, with the widespread embrace of conservatism, as evidenced by the election of Ronald Reagan as president, the increasing power of the Christian right and its powerful lobbying organisations such as the ‘Moral Majority’ and ‘Focus on the Family’, as well as the rise of televangelism.
Commentators such as Joyce Carol Oates and English professor SC Neuman have suggested that the book is a Feminist crititique of the attempted restriction of women’s reproductive rights which various Christian Fundamentalist lobby groups were trying to bring into law – such as giving civil rights protections to foetuses, which would have effectively made abortion illegal.
Atwood herself says that the Handmaid’s Tale was inspired by two real world social polices:
Nicolai Ceausescu’s preoccupation with boosting female birth rates in Romania, which led to the policing of pregnant women and the banning of abortion and birth control
The idea of ‘giving’ the offspring of lower classes to the ruling class came from Argentina, where a military junta seized power in 1976, subsequently ‘disappearing’ up to 500 children and placing them with selected leaders.
The Handmaid’s Tale: Even more relevant today?
The handmaid’s tale might be even more relvant today given the recent shift in US politics with the election of Donald Trump dovetailing with fears of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his vice president’s anti-gay and anti-abortion beliefs.
Handmaid costumes even became common at protests of laws intended to limit women’s reproductive freedom.
Sources: Some of this post was adapted from this blog post.
How do policies on family life vary from country to country? This post explores some of the cross national variations in policies on the following aspects of family life:
Marriage
Divorce
Benefits for single parents
Maternity and paternity pay
Gay marriage
This post should be relevant to the social policies topic within the A-level sociology families and households module, and there’s also some possible relevance to the religion module too, as some of the variations in family-policies are due to religious traditions.
International Variations in Marriage
Marriage policy seems to be the one which varies least – the majority of countries have 16 as the lowest legal age for marriage, with a few countries having set the age at 15.
There seems to be a problem (from the Western perspective) in Iran which has a policy of allowing temporary marriages – which several families use to marry off children much younger than 16 years of age.
The Philippines remains the only country on earth where divorce is illegal
The worst affected people here are the victims of domestic violence, who are mainly female, who can only escape an abusive marriage through a legal separation, a status which prevents them from remarrying should they so wish.
Japan is also an interesting case in relation to equality, because women have to wait six months after divorce to get remarried, whereas men can get remarried immediately after a divorce.
International variations in Maternity and Paternity Pay
There is significant variation across the developed world in the number of weeks of full-time paid maternity and paternity leave new mothers and fathers are entitled to – ranging from over 80 weeks to less than 10 weeks – and in the case of the United States of America, women are entitled to no weeks of mandatory paid maternity leave at the Federal level – that’s left to individual states and employers.
NB – with 12 weeks of full maternity pay and only 2 paid weeks for paternity, the UK comes very near the bottom for its quality of state support for new parents.
72 Countries still have laws against gay relationships
NB: The above map is taken from a blog called ’76 crimes’ – 76 must have been the number of countries where there were laws against homosexuality at the time the blog was initially set up – however now there are only 72 countries.
I guess this shows progress, it also shows you how not to name a blog!
Most Northern European countries pay parents for having children, through ‘universal child benefit’ – parents get paid no matter what their income. Payments vary from around $2000 in France to over $8000 in Luxembourg.
The United Kingdom is one of the few countries which means-tests its child benefit, so higher income households do not get it.
Most less developed countries such as the United States have no child benefit allowance for new parents.
Below is a timeline of some of the social policies which changed childhood, from the early 19th century through to the present day.
Most people would adopt a ‘March of Progress view‘ and argue that these polices improved the lives of children, however there are some sociologists who see these policies as placing too many restrictions on children.
The main types of social policies which have changed children’s lives are those relating to work, education and child welfare and protection.
This post was written primarily for A-level sociology students studying the families and households module.
The 1833 Factory Act
Made it illegal for textile factories to employ children under the age of 9, and they had to provide at least twelve hours of education a week for children aged between 9-13.
The 1867 Factories Act
Made it illegal for any factory to employ children under the age of 8, and they had to provide all children aged between 8-13 with at least 10 hours of education a week.
Thomas Barnardo also opened his first children’s home in 1867.
The 1870 Education Act
Mass Education for children aged 5-12 was introduced
This is effectively the introduction of national primary education in Britain, although it wasn’t made compulsory for all 5-12-year olds until 1880, and the quality of education could be very poor indeed in some areas until the Education Reform Act of 1944.
The 1878 Factories and Workshop Act
Banned the employment of children under 10 in Factories.
The 1880 Education Act
Schooling in Britain made compulsory for every child up to the age of 10. Local Education Authorities
1889 – The Prevention of Cruelty towards Children Act, commonly known as the Children’s Charter
This Act gave the State the right, for the first time, to intervene in relationships between parents and their children. The Police could now enter a private residence and make arrests if a child were being mistreated.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Towards Children (NSPCC) was established in the same year.
This policy and new institution together laid the foundation for modern child welfare, and the idea that the state could intervene if parents were not being responsible.
The 1908 Children’s Act
This established juvenile courts, so that children would be prosecuted according to different standards from adults.
It also introduced a formal register of Foster Parents, formalising the idea of State approved Foster Parents taking over from ‘removed children’ who had suffered abuse from their biological parents.
The Punishment of Incest Act was introduced in the same year – this made sexual abuse within families a matter for state intervention and punishment, previous to this the Church had been responsible for dealing with this.
1918 – School Leaving Age Raised to 14
The 1944 Education Act
While students of sociology should be familiar with this date as the year in which the Tripartite System was introduced (and students probably familiar with criticising this act!), at the time this was a huge leap forward in the rights of children.
The 1944 Education act was the first time the State really took responsibility for education at a national level, rather than leaving education to Local Education Authorities. The act saw a huge increase in funding for education funding for education and a massive building programme of new secondary modern schools.
The School Leaving Age was also raised to 15.
The 1948 Children’s Act
This established a children’s committee and a children’s officer in each local authority and represents the emergence of ‘child protection and welfare’ being a major responsibility of each Local Authority.
A series of legislation throughout the 1960s and 1970s, often in response to high profile deaths of children at the hands of their parents or foster parents, consolidated children’s social services and safeguarding strategies in Local Authority in the UK.
1973 – School Leaving Age raised to 16
1989 – The Children’s Act
Gave children the right to protection from abuse and exploitation and put child welfare at the heart of everything the Social Services did. It also reinforced the central principle that children were best looked after, wherever possible within families.
1991 – The Child Support Act
This gave children protection in the event of Divorce – it emphasised that prime concern of family courts in a Divorce should be the welfare of the children.
2003 – Every Child Matters
This was a government report following the death of Victoria Climbie
It outlined five key principles that every child should have the right to:
Be healthy
stay safe
enjoy and achieve
make a positive contribution
achieve economic well-being
The idea was that everyone working within children in any capacity should be ensuring these principles guided their interactions with children.
2013 – Children were required to remain in education or work with training until at least the age of 18.
Further Legislations
The history of child labour, education and welfare legislation doesn’t stop here, there is more, but I am!
NB Safeguarding is now a big policy agenda, but to my mind it doesn’t really do anything new, it’s just refining and rebranding Every Child Matters and previous policies.
Cutting free tuition and bursaries for student nurses seems to be a good candidate for the one of the worst social policy decisions of the decade…
The NHS is currently critically short of nurses, with 42 000 posts in England unfilled.
This seems to be due to a decision by the Tory party in 2015 to remove free tuition and bursaries for those undertaking nursing courses, requiring nursing students to take out loans to cover their fees and costs of living while studying.
It appears that the prospect of starting a nursing career up to £50K in debt has but people off applying for nursing in droves. Since 2016 nursing applications have dropped by one third, and they are down 40% among mature students.
There seems to be a direct correlation here between the removal of bursaries and people deciding to not do nursing courses, which makes sense given that nursing is a low paid, stressful and low status career: who would want to start out £50K in debt?
In 2015, it was projected that the policy would have saved £1 billion a year, but this is almost certainly not going to be the case as it is estimated that nearly 50% of loans to student nurses will be written off because they will never earn above the repayment threshold, and because of the requirement to hire nurses through more expensive agencies.
It is estimated that replacing agency nurses with regular full-time nurses would save the NHS £560 million a year.
Why did the Tories introduce this policy?
It could be due a total disconnect between elite Tories and the kinds of people doing nursing degrees. Most Tories will have no idea what it’s like living on marginal wages and the difference bursaries can make down at the bottom of the pay scale.
Or it might be ideological – deliberately done to put the NHS in crisis and make it more expensive to run, justifying (in a downward spiral) the further outsourcing and selling off for profit later. Tories don’t need it after all, they have private health care.
It can’t be due to any rational decision making as this policy clearly makes no financial sense on any level.
