National Scholarship Programme

The primary purpose of the National Scholarship Programme (NSP) is to benefit individual students from disadvantaged backgrounds directly as they enter higher education (HE). It will apply to students entering HE from autumn 2012.

We administer the programme on behalf of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which sets the overall policy and funding level.

About the programme

The programme has the following features:

It will provide a direct benefit to individual, eligible students.
Each eligible student will receive a benefit of not less than £3,000 (full-time and pro rata part-time to a minimum intensity of 25 per cent). This is a one-year benefit, not a recurrent, annual entitlement.
No more than £1,000 (pro rata) of the overall award is to be provided as a cash bursary.
The programme will not to be used to fund outreach programmes, which universities will continue to fund through alternative means.

The Government's contribution to the programme will be £50 million in financial year 2012-13, £100 million in 2013-14 and £150 million from 2014-15.

It is expected that those institutions wishing to charge above the 2012-13 basic fee level of £6,000 who are required to submit an access agreement to the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) will provide a matched contribution to the programme of at least the same value as the government contribution.

Initial programme announcement

Funding the programme

To allocate the funding available, we calculate the funds for each institution in direct proportion to the numbers of HEFCE-fundable home and EU students enrolled on its programmes.

2013-14 allocations

Revised final allocations for 2013-14 are now available, which supersede those published on 8 March 2013 and the provisional allocations published in the guidance document.

These allocations are based on data from the latest data collection exercises for 2012 (the 2012 Higher Education Students Early Statistics Survey (HESES) and 2012 Higher Education in Further Education: Students Survey (HEIFES)).

They rectify an administrative error in the 8 March allocation and take account of an institutional transfer of student numbers as well as changes in the opt out status of a small number of institutions.

All institutions that have been affected by the revisions to the allocation will be contacted individually.

2013-14 allocations

Download the 2013-14 final allocations as MS Excel Spreadsheet (64 KB)

The provisional allocations were based on 2011 HESES and HEIFES data.

2013-14 guidance and provisional allocations

2014-15 allocations

Revised provisional allocations for 2014-15 are now also available. These follow from provisional allocations published in January 2013 alongside the 2014-15 guidance.

Institutions are reminded that if they wish to charge more than the basic fee in 2014-15 they should read the programme guidance with the new guidance for producing access agreements for 2014-15.

For 2014-15 matched funding contributions will only be required from those institutions with an access agreement. All institutions however must complete the associated template through the HEFCE extranet to let us know their intentions, and we have written to all institutions providing details on how to do this.

The deadline for submitting institutional intentions for 2014-15 and access agreements has now passed.