Education experts have expressed fears that the abolition of the student maintenance grant for the poorest young people, combined with increasing tuition fees, will set back widening participation and deter those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds from going to university.
We need a radical overhaul of the Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) landscape, with much greater emphasis on ensuring better advice and guidance – particularly those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds – from independent sources, recognising that schools, colleges and universities have their own vested interests.
Apart from Sierra Leone, which is ranked last, the other most disadvantaged nations, from the bottom up, are Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Chad, the Central African Republic and Mali.
These children and young people are among the most disadvantaged citizens from across the developing world and are not only excluded from the opportunity of education and learning for their own individual development, they are missing out on the opportunity to contribute to their communities and economies when they reach adulthood".
What is lamentable is the exclusion of the most disadvantaged children from the new schools.
Reaching these goals will require improved educational quality for the most disadvantaged children from the earliest years.
The reduction in coverage among the most disadvantaged stems from an agentic element to labelling and restaurant bans.
"Unless we invest in the most disadvantaged children from the earliest years, we will continue to see in the next generation the same poverty and inequalities that divide and destabilize our world today – and rob us of the potential of so many young people," said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.
Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg last week announced an early roll-out of free places in 10 areas to enable two-year-olds from the most disadvantaged backgrounds to benefit from the free hours from this September, rather than September 2013, as previously planned.
Smokers' reported desire to talk with smoking cessation advisors increased linearly with economic disadvantage (measured by Townsend index) such that demand for support was highest (44.6%) from the most disadvantaged and lowest (39.1%) from the least socially disadvantaged groups.
