Students cutting back on food and essentials need more support as the cost of living bites

If it wasn’t a dire enough decision by this government to drastically underfund catch-up for the generation whose education was so brutalised by the shuttering of schools during Covid, we now see that same government entirely failing to support the worst-off students through a raging cost of living crisis.

Research published today by the Sutton Trust, which I founded and chair, makes unignorably clear the struggles now being faced, in particular, by students who have progressed to university from deprived and low-income homes. The findings, and their implications for the long term, should worry anyone with even a passing interest in social mobility in this country.