Government unveils cash plans for gap year students
School leavers taking a gap year to do volunteer work could be awarded up to £45 a week under new government proposals.
Student leaders have expressed some scepticism over the plans to fund a year between university and school for thousands of teenagers.
Chancellor Gordon Brown outlined a multi-million-pound programme to enable students from poor backgrounds to spend a year working in the community.
In a speech to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, he said: “We want to examine whether we can, through making it a national priority, engage a new generation of young people in serving their communities – and provide nationally and locally the means by which they find it easy to participate.”
Currently students finance a gap year themselves and many cannot afford to do so. A gap year is viewed as a great opportunity for students to gain some experience of the world before going to university.
But the National Union of Students said most would be put off by the prospect of tuition fees when they took up their place at university.
NUS president Mandy Telford said: “If the Government pushes ahead with its top-up fees plans for 2006 I presume it will exempt students wishing to take a gap year in 2005, and start university the following year, from paying the higher fees.
“If not then it is highly unlikely many students will delay going to university if they have to pay even more money for their course. The Government cannot expect students to do this kind of work and then be charged extra through higher tuition fees for doing it.”
The government has already launched a pilot scheme which caters for 60 students and now plans to allocate millions to the scheme as it is rolled out across England and Wales. A Scottish service for young volunteers will also be set up, provisionally called ScotCorps.
The plan is based on the AmeriCorps model in the US, which involves as many as 50,000 students every year.
Under the UK government proposals, students would be paid to carry out community work such as caring for the disabled, teaching youngsters to read and restoring facilities in their area.
The “multi-million pound” gap year scheme will be unveiled in this summer’s Comprehensive Spending Review.
