As you may know, the Scottish Government recently announced changes to the income assessment applied to student support calculation. All students, new and continuing, will have their support calculated using the new rules. These will be applied from next academic session, 2008-2009.
The following explains the changes in what information is required by SAAS.
Student income
- We will no longer be taking any scholarship or sponsorship into account;
- We have expanded the list of ‘unearned income’ to include things like maintenance;
- We will only apply one annual disregard to all types of ‘unearned income’, including private pensions.
Parents' income
- We will now be asking for parents’ partner income, even where the partner has not adopted you;
- We will take maintenance coming into the household into account, along with some benefits that are classed as ‘replacement living costs’;
- We will take Working Tax Credits into account;
- We will no longer include Retirement Annuity Premiums (RAP), Superannuation or membership fees as a disregard against income;
- We will disregard maintenance that is payable to another family for a student studying in either Further Education (FE) or Higher Education (HE).
Partner income
- Students who are over 25, or meet one of the current criteria to be classed as ‘exempt from parental contribution’, and this is not because they are married or have a civil partner, we will now take income from any partner into account.
- Students who are under 25, and do not meet one of the current criteria to be classed as ‘exempt from parental contribution’, such as you are not married or don’t have a civil partner, but have a partner, we can now treat them as an independent student. We will ask for details of their partner’s income, rather than their parents.
Changes to independent status and entitlement
- Students who are under 25, and do not meet one of the current criteria to be classed as ‘exempt from parental contribution’, but are a single parent with a child of any age, we will no longer take their parents’ income into account. They will still be eligible to receive the Young Students’ Bursary package of support;
- Students who are under 25, and do not meet one of the current criteria to be classed as ‘exempt from parental contribution’, but have a partner and a child of any age, we will no longer take their parents’ income into account. We will ask for details of their partner’s income. They will still be eligible to receive the Young Students’ Bursary package of support;
- Students who are under 25, and do not meet one of the current criteria to be classed as ‘exempt from parents’ contribution’, but have a partner, we can now treat them as an independent student. We will ask for details of their partner’s income, rather than their parents.
- All students under 25 with dependant children are eligible to receive the Young Students Bursary package.
Supplementary grants
- Students who have a partner and are not married or living in a civil partnership, can now claim Dependants’ Grant for that partner, depending on their level of income.
For more information, see our question and answer section on the changes to income assessment.
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