University of Leeds is offering students £10k and free halls to defer a year

Students in the Law and Business School are being offered the financial incentives

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Students who have applied to the University of Leeds studying law or business are being offered £10k in cash and free accommodation for their first year as an incentive to defer their entry to the 2022/2023 academic year.

This is due to thousands of students exceeding their offers, with 44.8 per cent of A-level results in England, Wales and Northern Island being A* or A grades.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first financial incentive offered to the latest students to be awarded their A-levels by teacher graded assessments, with medical students being offered up to £10k to swap unis.

With unis like KCL and Leeds not offering spaces through Clearing, Leeds said on their website that they “do not have undergraduate vacancies for clearing or adjustment for 2021 entry.

Interim Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University Peter Jimack told BBC News that the university was making the offer to some students as courses are oversubscribed.

He said that teacher-assessed grades meant it had been harder to hand out “genuine” offers, as the grading system left it “harder to predict” the numbers of successful applicants.

Jimack told the BBC: “We’ve contacted students on a small number of programmes in two schools to let them know that we are going to make them an offer to defer to next year with an incentive of a cash payment of about £10,000 and our fee for their halls of residence in their first year being paid by the university.”

However, the Deputy VC did reveal Leeds is creating 30 extra spaces to study medicine for students unable to get a place at other Universities like Exeter, which also offered students £10k and free accommodation for first year.

This puts Leeds in the hot-seat regarding tuition fees. Current students have faced over two years of Academic Disruption, and have had no face-to-face teaching.

Leeds have confirmed a “blended learning” approach for the next academic year, and exams and lectures have been confirmed to be online.

Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary even admitted that unis not doing in-person teaching shouldn’t charge full fees.

Williamson told Sky News that: “Our direction is clear and we do expect all universities, unless there’s unprecedented reasons, to be moving back to the situation of actually delivering lessons and lectures face-to-face.”

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