William Trevor created a bursary for a promising student in Omagh.
"Where there is any money available, I wish it could be used to provide water and electricity, improve education by building libraries and laboratories, provide orphans with bursaries and create job opportunities for Nkandla people".
We are told that scrapping the bursary will create more nurse training places – and that's fantastic, we need more nurses, but who's going to train them?
For instance, if you have to hire buses to ship students to and from university then start a bus company, use it to create bus route where the commercial routes don't go, and use the profit for student bursaries.
I do feel, however, that adding bursaries, exempting some students from one or two years of fees and attaching conditions to higher fees in some institutions will only serve to create a system so complex as to leave many 17 and 18 year olds unsure of what assistance they can expect.
Fame Academy, derided as derivative, is not being reordered, although there will be a charity celebrity special, but the £1m bursary scheme it created is applauded.
The government encouraged them to do this, first by making cash bursaries mandatory in 2006, and then with the introduction of the National Scholarship Programme (NSP), which was created in 2012 to allay fears created by the threefold fee cap increase to £9,000 per year.
Bursaries for marginalised students to cover student fees (including materials, access to services such as libraries, etc).. Equally importantly, posts need to be created in the public sector to absorb new graduates.
