Professor Maggie Cusack:

I have reflections if people want to hear them. My experience is of the Scottish system. Education is a devolved matter and is not reserved for Westminster. That means that we have a complex situation where Scotland states that students will not pay fees but can have access to a loan. They have the bond for their accommodation and living expenses, so students still finish with debt but it is not on the scale that students south of the border have, where, when they came in initially, the fees were £9,000, the highest in Europe.

We then had a complex situation where we had home students, EU students, who are in a similar situation, and then what are described as "rest of UK" students. There were, therefore, all sorts of fee structures going on there.

I spoke about my passion and the fact that education is genuinely transformative. That is a debate for a society to have. We must ask if we genuinely want to have a meritocracy and is that what we are willing to support. I hope the answer would be "Yes". We must think about how we best achieve that. This is a huge topic and one that warrants a lot of careful discussion to really understand as a society which direction we want to take. In England, the decision was made, as the committee knows, almost over a weekend. It is not as if the situation there is similar to the one in the United States where people can decide when their baby is born if they are going to invest for college fees. That was not an option. One then starts to see real differences in who can and cannot access quality education. That is a big societal debate.