For eleven months now we have been gripped in the jaws of the Covid19 health pandemic. It has brought hardship on businesses and livelihoods, upended our very freedoms and liberties and unfortunately for too many families it has brought heartbreak and sorrow at the loss of a loved one.
The area I want to focus my remarks on today is the impact that Covid19, and with it the necessary measures of lockdowns that the Government has introduced to suppress the virus, has had on education. Specifically, the toll this has taken on university students.
Many in this House will have experienced the excitement, anticipation and nerves of those first few days at university. Meeting new people, settling into student digs, attending that first lecture and yes out of the gaze of mum and dad, enjoying a drink or too more than you should.
But for thousands of students this year and last, that experience has been denied them. They are experiencing a university education and lifestyle through a screen, back at the family home, as the Covid19 virus continues to swirl around us.
Now university staff and lecturers have gone above and beyond to support students and ensure they can still receive the education they signed up for. Yes, it is online. Yes, it is not ideal. But at least the offer is still there.
However, this is not comparable to the experience students should be getting. It is not offering students access to the resources and facilities that cohorts before them could utilise. Therefore, we have to ask is this year really worth over £9,000 for the education and experience students are getting?
Moreover, is it right that when we ask students to do the right thing and stay at home, away from university, they are still being charged for rent at their university halls of residence?
This next generation are going to the pioneers in industries and endeavours none of us can even imagine right now. In the post-Covid world we are going to need new talent to drive our Green Industrial Revolution, to charter our course around the world as Global Britain, to end up educating and training the generation that comes after them, and yes to be the scientists of the future who will discover new vaccines for diseases and viruses we don’t know of yet.
So far, these students have had a raw deal, through no fault of their own. I think we should do something now to help these students out, and we can start by reducing their university fees for the Covid19 period and not asking them to pay rent on university accommodation they are being asked not to stay in.
These might seem like small gestures, but they matter. We need to be doing all we can to support young students through this challenging time. They face an uncertain job market, and economy battered by recent events and so let’s take off some of the burden now. University staff are playing their part with the provision of education, now as a Government we should do our bit, and relieve the financial pressures our students are facing.
-ENDS-