University students took out £3.4bn in student loans last year, £386.5m of which was for top-up fees.

English students have to pay up to £3,000 a year on top of their tuition fees thanks to whipped Scottish Labour MPs voting through a bill to impose top-up fees on English students even though it didn’t apply to students in Scotland and a majority of English MPs had voted against it.

Scottish students don’t pay top-up fees in Scotland, nor do the Welsh in Wales.  EU students don’t pay in either of those countries but English students do no matter where they study.

Gotta love that union dividend.

The SNP is abolishing university top-up fees entirely for Scottish and EU students studying in Scottish universities.

Scottish university students don’t pay top-up fees like English students do because education is a devolved matter and MSPs decided not to introduce them north of the border for Scots although English students studying in Scotland have to pay them.  Top-up fees were introduced in English universities for English students entirely thanks to whipped Scottish Labour MPs after the majority of MPs from English constituencies rejected them.

Currently, Scottish university students have to pay their tuition fees and take out student loans to finance themselves whilst at university.  However, from 2009 tuition fees will be abolished altogether for Scottish students and the loans will be replaced from 2011 with maintenance grants meaning that Scottish students will be able to study at university for free.

There is a price to pay though – the cost of wiping out all these charges is £2bn per year – but don’t worry, the English taxpayer is footing the bill.

King Cameron of Leftytown is expected to sack his Europe spokesman for the unthinkable crime of criticising the party over it’s latest lefty socialist policy – abolishing grammar schools.

Graham Brady produced statistics showing that selection at the age of 11 improved GCSE pass rates amongst all sections of society, especially amongst ethnic minorities.  Grammar Schools are generally the preserve of the middle classes and in Camerons Conservative Party nobody is allowed to draw attention to the fact that King Cameron himself and most of his cabinet are public school boys.

Liebour have done their level best to destroy the education system in England with a system that strives to bring every child up or down to an average – no underachievers, no overachievers, just average children with an average education and no desire whatsoever to achieve anything in life.

Selective education works, it’s worked for years and if politicians would just leave it be it would continue to work for many years to come.  Do we really want an entire generation of children given the same type of education that produced John Prescott?

New guidelines are being drawn up by the British government to force universities to take more students from ethnic and underpriveleged backgrounds.

The new guidelines – which will only apply in England of course – will mean that universities will have to take into account ethnicity, whether the applicants parents went to university and whether they have been in a council care home instead of considering the application on merit.  This means that applicants who are Grade A students, white, English and not from a broken home could miss out on a university place so the university can fulfill its “diversity” quota with a student who isn’t suited to university education but is black or asian and from a broken home.

Positive discrimination isn’t.