What the Lifelong Learning Entitlement does to living cost support
The Department for Education has published how maintenance support will work when the Lifelong Learning Entitlement launches: loans for living costs available for modules and shorter courses as well as full degrees, with entitlement drawn from the same lifetime account. It is the detail that decides whether studying part-time while working becomes financially possible. Student finance explained covers the current system.
Department for Education, 29 May
Course friends and other friends do different jobs
Research finds that friends made on your course and friends made elsewhere serve distinct functions — the first sustain attendance and academic confidence, the second carry you through everything else — and that students with only one kind are more fragile than those with both. A useful corrective to the advice to simply join more societies. Making friends at university covers the practical side.
Apprenticeships promised a bigger role
The Prime Minister has said apprenticeships will be central to a new approach to opportunities for young people, as one university’s apprenticeship provision ranks highly. Degree apprenticeships now attract four times the competition they did, and the applications open earlier than university ones — which is the practical fact behind the politics.