University access cash 'wasted'
Nearly £400m of public money designed to get students from poor backgrounds into Britain's best universities has been wasted, a committee of MPs will say today.
A report for the cross-party Public Accounts Committee lambasts the Government for "slow" and "poor" progress in using universities as an engine of social mobility. It claims that £392m of taxpayers' money, allocated over the past five years to improve the proportion of young people from working-class backgrounds going to leading universities, has been ineffective.
That money has correlated with only a 2 per cent increase in the number of students from the poorest backgrounds enrolling in higher education.
Edward Leigh, the Tory chairman of the committee, said: "It is dismaying that the Government seems to have little idea what the universities have been doing with this money."
An aide to John Denham, the Universities and Skills Secretary, said: "It's disappointing that they've reached conclusions based on figures from 2006."
Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies