Ruskin is doing it

Sir – I share Ian Flintoff's concerns about widening participation in education for local people due to the increase in tuition fees (letters, September 8). I want to reassure him and Oxfordians that there is an Oxford college that has a very long history of making further and higher education available to working class people from Oxford. At Ruskin College the vast majority of our students are from Oxford and we are extremely proud of our very diverse student population. We do not require people to have any formal qualifications to apply for our certificate in higher education (equivalent to a first-year at university) and most of our students are usually entitled to a bursary that covers tuitions fees and some of their maintenance costs. As many of our students then progress on to our second-year degree programmes it doesn’t take an economist like me to point out that this can help reduce the costs of higher education over three years.