7. Will the First Minister make a statement on funding for postgraduate students in Wales? OAQ(5)0434(FM)[W]

The Cabinet Secretary for Education will confirm this week that loans are to be made available to students beginning a postgraduate Master’s course in the 2017-18 academic year.

Thank you for that response. Perhaps the First Minister will be aware, following an item on ITV Wales news, about the story of Emma Stenson, from my constituency, who has turned to crowd funding to try and pay her way through a postgraduate course to become a physican associate in Bangor. Now, Emma has a first class degree in medical sciences, but she is having difficulty in affording the course because of her and similar students’ inability to access postgraduate loans in Wales. The health service needs Emma, and therefore students like Emma need that support now. As well as the pledge for students in the next academic year, and we are grateful for that, of course, how can we look at students who are at risk of dropping out of courses now in an area where we truly need their expertise?

Well, of course, if the course is starting in the autumn of this year, by then, the assistance and support will be available for someone like that. They will have had, of course, much less support than students from England in terms of the previous course. But one of the things that we had to resolve was to ensure that more funding is available for postgraduates coming out of universities in order to ensure that financial support is available to them, and that is exactly what will happen in the autumn.