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Educate the Gap

Labour’s decision to make museums freely accessible to all opened a once inaccessible door to the masses, yet it was never broadcasted on the BBC as ‘breaking-news’; it didn’t make it to the front page of the Telegraph. Of course, if there is enough controversy in a governmental good-deed, then it will make it to the press. Such as the headline on page 2 of the Sunday Times: Taxpayers to fund ‘gap years’ for poor. I am sure across the country many CEO’s, Lords and Dukes, while being served their morning coffee in the comfort of their own mansions, threw down their newspapers and sneered at that headline, which dutifully read in their minds as: I’m paying 50% tax and they’re giving those scum free holidays to India!

Of course, what they don’t realise is that for a 17 year-old sixth-former with a stay-at-home mother looking after 3 other kids, a father earning the minimum wage at £6.19 working 40 hours a week at a grand total of £990.40 a month before tax and contributions, asking for that 8 quid to go to a museum, that 15 pounds for a book, or that two-and-half grand for a gap year, unfortunately, just doesn’t come into the equation. The reasoning behind the coalition’s idea is simple: rich kids enter working life better off, not only financially but also in better standing in terms of experience and what they can bring to the table.

A 21 year old who has volunteered in Costa Rica, helping impoverished kids to better their English, and then backpacked for 4 weeks through the Latin American subcontinent has life experiences which a 21 year old waiting on tables in Leicester simply cannot compete with. Who is to say that the student from Leicester isn’t more suited to the volunteer role than the spoon-fed son of a barrister? We will never know, as the student from Leicester is stopped from showing us what he can offer thanks to a single barrier: money.

This idea to offer poorer school leavers government-funded gap years is perhaps one of the few realisations of Cameron’s eternal promise to “spread privilege.” Once it is executed, it needs to go one step further and help students from poorer backgrounds at school, sixth form and university.

How do poor students need help at university, surely all students are equal at university when it comes to financing thanks to the universal student loan? Wrong.

The student loan means all students borrow the same amount of money but the amount they borrow is so small it can only really cover the most basic of costs, such as accommodation and food.

If that student from Leicester wants to live in a half-decent hall room which will provide him with enough piece and quiet to study, if he wants to be able to do nothing but attend classes, study, spend time in the library, as well as contribute to university life by participating in team sports and clubs, then he’ll have to quit the two nights a week and all weekend bar job, with out which he can’t pay the additional fee for the half-decent room, the food in the university cafeteria, the sporting equipment and the social costs.

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