Scholarship help for gifted students in poorer families

Kirklees Council and Huddersfield University are each providing £75,000 for a scholarship of £3,000 for first year students.

To qualify for the support applicants need to be from Kirklees, have a household income of less than £21,000 and achieve at least 320 UCAS points at A-level.

Students living in the poorest parts of the district, those in care or who have been homeless will also be treated as a priority.

The bursary will reduce a student’s fee at Huddersfield to £4,950 for their first year and is expected to benefit about 50 full-time undergraduates.

The award will also be worth more than £3,000 to students because it reduces the amount of tuition fee debt they have which will accrue interest.

To achieve 320 points students will need to do better than achieve three B grades at A-level.

Kirklees Council leader Mehboob Khan said: “We want to create ladders of opportunity for our residents to succeed. This scholarship will help foster ambition and unlock potential.

“It will increase the proportion of residents attaining higher level skills, increase their overall lifetime wage earning potential, lead to lower levels of employment and poverty, and most importantly, it will raise the aspirations of other residents from similar backgrounds to enter higher education.”

Huddersfield University’s vice chancellor Prof Bob Cryan, said: “I am delighted that Kirklees Council has decided to support local residents in this way.

“As someone who was raised in Huddersfield, and chose to study here at my home university I can vouch for the life changing impact of higher education, and the excellence of the Huddersfield experience.”

The cap on tuition fees is increasing to £9,000 next year as universities cope with a large cut in their teaching grants.

Huddersfield is set to be the lowest charging university in the region having set its fees at £7,950.

The up-front cost of the fee will be met by Government loans which graduates begin to pay back once they earn £21,000 or more.

Any university charging more than £6,000-a year under the new system has to have a package of support it will provide poorer students approved.

Earlier this year the Office for Fair Access published tables showing how much every university was planning to spend supporting students from deprived backgrounds up to the end of the 2014/15 academic year.

These figures revealed that Huddersfield is planning to spend the biggest share of money it receives on income from fees above £6,000 in the region on measures to support students from poorer homes.

Yorkshire universities are planning to spend more than £70m in fee waivers and financial support by 2015.