Part-time Students And part-time Study In Higher ... - Universities UK

part-time students. If a student has a partner, their partner’s gross income is added to the student’sincome. Then, just like income tax, deductions are made from this amount as follows:• Student’s personal allowance £14,969• Allowance for partner £2,000• Allowance for first/eldest dependent child £2,000• Allowance for each subsequent dependent child £1,000To receive full support, a student’s household income must be less than £14,970 (after thedeductions listed above) and if it is between £14,970 and £22,000 partial help is available on asliding scale, reducing their tuition fee grant, and then their course costs grant.Thus, students may be ineligible for this student support because of their intensity of study (ie,studying less than 50%), and/or they have already an undergraduate degree or higher qualification,and/or their household income is too high.In addition, students studying at least 10 per cent FTEs are eligible for discretionary hardshipsupport from the Access to Learning Fund.4.3.2 Students’ eligibility for course and fee grantsThere are, therefore, three main eligibility criteria for the main sources of student support:• intensity of study;• level of entry qualification; and• income.The effects of these three eligibility criteria will be examined in turn.• Intensity of studyTo identify eligibility for student support we therefore need data on entry qualification, personal andhousehold income, and number of children as well as intensity of study. Thus we can only deriveeligibility for 1,470 (69%) of the surveyed students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. 26Roughly one-fifth of these students were not eligible for student fee and course grants becausethey studied for less than 50 per cent of a FTE course.Thus, in policy terms, it is important to examine whether there were any major differences betweennon-eligible and eligible students – namely, those students studying less that 50 per cent of a fulltimecourse and more than 50 per cent (60+ credits).There were no significant differences between these two student groups in terms of their gender,age and whether or not they were distance or non-distance learners.26 This is because such a large proportion of students did not know the number of credits they were studyingfor plus other missing data on for instance, income.Part-time students and part-time study: Strand 3 Universities UK 51