'Wrong advice' over graduate fee

The 2,457 postgraduate students were asked in March to pay the endowment

Students have been given the wrong advice about paying their graduate endowment fee, ministers have admitted.

MSPs voted to scrap the one-off charge of �2,289 from April last year.

Postgraduate students, who had deferred payment, were initially told they must pay back the fee immediately and that they could take out a student loan.

However, it has emerged that regulations would not allow this. Ministers said measures would be rushed through Holyrood to rectify the issue.

The 2,457 affected postgraduate students had previously been told they would have to pay back the charge before they had even finished their studies.

However, Education Secretary Fiona Hyslop has now given assurances that repayment would not be requested until the students had finished their studies.

Labour welcomed what it described as a U-turn by the Scottish Government.

We will be writing to all students concerned next week with an update Fiona Hyslop

The affair stems from the Scottish Government's decision to scrap the graduate endowment, which is the sum payable by students after they graduate, to help the less well-off.

This left a group of students who had graduated from 2005 onwards, but who had stayed on in higher education as postgraduate students, eligible to pay the charge before they finished their studies.

They were asked in March to pay the endowment, either by cash or by taking out a student loan.

However, Ms Hyslop said: "During detailed examination of the rules, we have found that a previous agreement for payment by this group of students of the fee by loan is not supported by the relevant regulations."

'Original position'

These regulations were laid before parliament in March last year, two months before the Holyrood election, and took effect in August.

Without action to rectify the anomaly, the affected students would have had to pay up in cash because they would not be eligible for a loan from the Students Awards Agency for Scotland (SAAS).

But new regulations to be laid before parliament on Friday will enable the students to pay the graduate endowment by student loan.

Ms Hyslop said: "For students who have already paid the fee but who are still continuing their studies, we are currently exploring what options are open to us to put them back in their original position.

"We will be writing to all students concerned next week with an update."

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