Students are feeling increasingly bold. Flickr/Chris Beckett. Some rights reserved.
For students the take-home message from the summer budget is that fees are up, while maintenance grants are out. Although the raising of tuition fees in line with inflation is not nearly as dramatic as their tripling in 2010, the scrapping of maintenance grants is going to put the government under fire from a student movement which is growing in confidence.
The 2010 student protests were never just about tuition fees. Also at stake were huge cuts to university teaching grants, and the abolition of the education maintenance allowance in England. The latter in particular drew thousands of working class further education students into a movement which stormed the Conservative campaign headquarters and found itself on the receiving end of police batons and horse charges in Parliament Square.
