In What Lies Beneath a Hardship Fund Application, we looked at how one institution's hardship support have evolved over time. Here we explore, when the sector recognises a new group of vulnerable students, does that recognition actually change who a hardship fund helps or is the need responded to somewhere else entirely?
Tracing the history suggests a recurring pattern, and it has real implications for the group currently bringing that question into particularly sharp focus.
A potted history
of who the fund was built for
The Access to Learning Fund, introduced by the government in 2004, replaced existing university hardship funds and identified a limited set of priority groups: disabled students, care experienced students, lone parents, and final-year students. The ALF framework left a lasting imprint on the way hardship support has been assessed. Although the national fund itself disappeared in 2014, elements of that framework are still recognisable in many hardship fund criteria today, more than two decades on.
Estranged students subsequently became much more visible in higher education policy as a group requiring additional support, recognition of a group whose need is, in many ways, as acute as a care leaver's. But look closely at how that need actually gets met in practice, and a pattern starts to emerge.
Recognised, and factored
in outside Hardship provision
🐝 Care leavers and estranged students are
formally part of most institutions' “vulnerable groups” list. In practice,
their extra need has increasingly been addressed through separate, dedicated
bursaries and targeted support schemes, rather than through the hardship fund's
own criteria stretching to cover them.
🐝 Young carers followed a similar path, identified as
needing support, but that identification has typically happened through
widening participation (WP) initiatives and outreach, not necessarily through
an expanded hardship fund category.
🐝 First in family emerged as a recognised issue later
still. Again, the response from universities for example Manchester Met, where
targeted funding and support was introduced, was to build something new
alongside the hardship fund, not to fold the group into its existing criteria.
🐝 Ethnicity and religion follow the same pattern almost exactly.
Both are actively addressed through widening participation initiatives across
the sector. Neither typically features as an extra layer of need within a
hardship fund assessment itself.
The pattern:
recognition without a route in
Put the history together and a clear shape emerges. The sector has
repeatedly recognised new groups of vulnerable students. Almost none of that
recognition has changed the hardship fund's own core criteria. Instead, each
newly recognised group has been met with a parallel structure, a dedicated
bursary, a WP programme, an outreach scheme, built alongside the fund rather
than into it.
What's stayed in the
hardship fund's own criteria, what's been routed to parallel schemes instead,
and what has no route in yet.
That's not necessarily a bad system. A dedicated, well-resourced
bursary can serve a group better than a generic hardship top-up ever could. But
it does mean the hardship fund's own criteria can look frozen in 2004 while the
sector's overall response to student need has genuinely moved. The Hardship Fund
isn't the whole picture, it never was. The question worth asking is what
happens to a group the sector recognises but doesn't yet appear to make
provision for?
One striking current gap: white working-class boys
Government guidance named this group explicitly nearly a decade ago. In 2016, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills called on universities to focus outreach on white boys from the poorest homes, alongside other underrepresented groups. The recognition itself, therefore, isn't new. The question is what happened after the recognition?
What's changed is how visible the absence of a funded response has become.
In June 2026, an Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes reported significant disparities in GCSE English and maths outcomes for white British pupils eligible for free school meals compared with pupils who were not eligible. The Centre for Social Justice's Lost Boys research similarly identifies white working-class pupils eligible for free school meals as having particularly poor outcomes.
An analysis reported by The Telegraph in June 2026 identified at least 15 Oxford and Cambridge scholarships, bursaries and financial-aid schemes aimed specifically at students from BAME backgrounds, while identifying only one such scheme for which white working-class men appeared to be eligible and two for white working-class women.
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A contested framing, worth
separating from the numbers Some politicians, including Suella Braverman and Laura Trott, have characterised the scheme-count gap as evidence of a “two-tier” system. That is a political interpretation of the figures, rather than an established finding of the analysis, and this post does not take a position on it. |
Whichever framing you take from the politics, the underlying pattern is the same. For care leavers, estranged students, young carers and first-in-family students, that gap eventually got filled by something ~ a bursary, a scheme, a targeted budgeted support. For white working-class boys, a decade on from the guidance that named them, that something still doesn't appear to exist in any consistent way.
So, are Hardship
Funds still stuck in the past?
Not quite, a more precise version of the criticism is more useful than
the blunt one. While hardship fund's own criteria have generally stayed close
to its 2004 shape, this may be because the sector's mechanism for responding to
newly recognised need, has been to introduce something other than a
tweak to the fund itself. For groups with an active outreach infrastructure and dedicated funding behind them, the need may therefore be addressed somewhere, even if it isn't addressed through the hardship fund itself.
Perhaps the better question isn't whether hardship funds are ‘stuck in the past’. It is whether the sector has developed a recurring habit of responding to newly recognised disadvantage by building something alongside the hardship fund, rather than changing the fund itself.
A decade on from their disadvantage being flagged, for white working-class boys, there does not appear to be a consistently available national pattern of targeted university financial support.
This matters because hardship assessment is ultimately about the individual student's circumstances and whether there is a financial shortfall that could affect their ability to remain in study. Priority groups can help universities identify particular forms of disadvantage, but they do not necessarily capture every student whose circumstances create financial need.
A decade on from their disadvantage being flagged, there does not appear to be a consistently available national pattern of targeted university financial support for white working-class boys.
So, should hardship funds step in to respond to their disadvantage, in the absence of an alternative?
If you're a student who doesn't obviously
fit any of the established categories mentioned above, our guidance is to ask your university's Student Money Advice/Support service whether your circumstances can be considered and what funding or other
support exists to help you.
This is a developing and, in places, politically
contested topic, figures and framing may change as further reporting and data
emerge. Hardship fund and bursary criteria vary by institution: always check
your own university's current schemes rather than relying on the general
pattern described here.
Sources:
https://educationaloutcomes.org.uk/
