General election 2017: policy comparisons

Conservative Party

Launch a review of funding across tertiary education as a whole, exploring options for student support across different routes.

Introduce a national retraining scheme with costs met by government.

Forgive new teachers on student loan repayments while they are teaching.

Introduce significantly discounted bus and train travel for apprentices.

Make it a condition for universities hoping to charge maximum tuition fees to become involved in academy sponsorship or the founding of free schools.

Labour Party

Abolish university tuition fees from Autumn 2018, funded partly by higher corporation tax.*

Reintroduce maintenance grants for university students.

Restore the Education Maintenance Allowance.

Replace Advanced Learner Loans and fees with direct funding so that further education courses, including ESOL, are free at the point of use.

Liberal Democrat

Establish a review of higher education finance.

Make sure there is no more retrospective raising of student loan repayment rates or selling-off of student

loans to private companies.

Reinstate maintenance grants for the poorest students.

Green Party

Scrap university tuition fees.

Write off student debts.

Fund full student grants.

Restore the Education Maintenance Allowance.

Increase public investment in further and higher education.

Conservative Party

Work to build up the investment funds of universities across the UK so they can be listed, and engage more British investors in higher education.

Labour Party

Create a National Education Service (NES) for England offering cradle-to-grave learning, free at the point of use.

Liberal Democrat

Reinstate quality assurance for universities applying for degree-awarding powers.

Green Party

Call for an end to privatisation in education.

Conservative Party

Retain students within net migration target, and reduce annual net migration to the tens of thousands.

Toughen visa requirements for students, and strengthen requirements for graduates wishing to work in the UK.

Increase the Immigration Health Surcharge for migrant workers and international students.

Increase the earnings thresholds for people wishing to sponsor migrants for family visas.

Double the Immigration Skills Charge levied on companies employing migrant workers.

Labour Party

Immediately guarantee rights for all EU nationals in UK and secure reciprocal rights for UK citizens in EU countries.

Remove international students from net immigration numbers.

Britain to remain part of the Erasmus scheme.

Crack down on fake colleges.

Liberal Democrat

Recognising their largely temporary status, remove students from the official migration statistics.

Reverse the damage to universities and academics by changing the country's course away from a hard Brexit.

Recognise the value of international staff to universities and promote international collaboration.

Green Party

Immediately guarantee rights of EU citizens in the UK and seek reciprocal arrangements for UK citizens in the EU.

Retain schemes like Erasmus.

Conservative Party

Invest in further education colleges to make sure they have world-class equipment and facilities.

Create a new national programme to attract experienced industry professionals to work in FE colleges.

Allow Institutes of Technology to gain royal charter status and regius professorships in technical education.

Make sure that people working in the 'gig' economy are properly protected.

Labour Party

Abandon plans to build new technical colleges and redirect the money to increase teacher numbers in the further education sector.

Set a target for all UK teaching staff in further education to have a teaching qualification within 5 years, and consult on teacher sabbaticals and industry placements.

Reverse cuts to Unionlearn.

Give all workers equal rights, whether part-time, full-time, temporary or permanent.

Ban zero-hours contracts and work with trade unions to end workplace exploitation

Liberal Democrat

Reverse all cuts to front-line college budgets, protecting per-pupil funding in real terms.

Stamp out abuse of zero-hours contracts, create a formal right to request a fixed contract and consult on introducing a right to make regular patterns of work contractual after a period of time.

Strengthen enforcement of employment rights, including by bringing together relevant enforcement agencies and scrapping employment tribunal fees

Green Party

Phase in a 4 day working week with a maximum of 35 hours.

Abolish exploitative zero hours contracts.

Abolish Ofsted.

Conservative Party

Introduce a right to lifelong learning in digital skills.

Bring forward a new integration strategy, part of which would include teaching more people to speak English.

Replace 13,000 existing technical qualifications with new T-levels, and increase the number of teaching hours to an average of 900 hours per year with each student to complete a three-month work placement.

Introduce a UCAS-style portal for technical education.

Introduce a new right for employees to request leave for training.

Deal with local skills shortages through Skills Advisory Panels and Local Enterprise Partnerships working at a regional and local level.

Establish new institutes of technology in every major English city.

Labour Party

Establish free lifelong education in further education colleges, including ESOL.

Improve careers advice

Increase investment so colleges can deliver T-levels and an official pre-apprenticeship trainee programme.

Devolve responsibility for skills to city regions or devolved administrations.

Set up a Commission on Lifelong Learning to integrate further and higher education.

Liberal Democrat

Aim to meet all basic skills needs including literacy, numeracy and digital skills by 2030.

Create individual accounts for funding mature adult and part-time learning and training, and provide for all adults individual access to all necessary career information, advice and guidance.

Facilitate across the UK an effective and comprehensive system for credit transfer and recognition of prior learning and qualifications.

Develop national colleges as national centres of expertise for key sectors.

Expand higher vocational training.

Develop a national skills strategy for key sectors, including low-carbon technologies, to help match skills and people.

Green Party

Increase public investment in further and higher education.

Conservative Party

Increase spending on R&D to 2.4% of GDP within ten years, with a longer-term goal of a 3% GDP spend.

Additional support for R&D through the £23bn National Productivity Investment Fund.

Labour Party

Meet OECD target of 3% of GDP spend on research and development by 2030

Seek to stay part of Horizon 2020 and its successor programmes.

Liberal Democrat

Protect the science budget, including the recent £2 billion increase, by continuing to raise it at least in line with inflation, with a long-term goal to double innovation and research spending.

Fight to retain access to Horizon 2020 and Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions funding and underwrite British funding from these sources if lost as a result of Brexit.

Green Party

The Green Party manifesto does not refer to research and development.

Conservative Party

Allow large firms to pass levy funds to their supply chain, and develop a new programme to allow larger firms to place apprentices in their supply chains.

Allow the levy to be used to pay the wages of staff engaged in national training scheme programmes.

Deliver on the target of 3 million apprenticeships for young people by 2020.

Drive up the quality of apprenticeships to ensure they deliver the skills employers need.

Expand degree apprenticeships for public sector workers (e.g. in health and education), and explore teaching apprenticeships sponsored by major companies, especially in STEM subjects.

Labour Party

Maintain the apprenticeship levy, and work with devolved assemblies to improve its operation.

Allow the levy to be used for pre-apprenticeship programmes.

Protect the £440 million funding for apprenticeships for small-and medium-sized employers who don't pay the levy.

Aim to double the number of completed apprenticeships at NVQ level 3 by 2022, and consult on introducing incentives for large employers to over-train numbers of apprentices to fill skills gaps.

Require the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to report annually on quality outcomes of completed apprenticeships

Guarantee trade union representation in the governance structures of Institute of Apprenticeships.

Liberal Democrat

Ensure that all the receipts from the Apprenticeship Levy in England are spent on training.

Aim to double the number of businesses which hire apprentices.

Green Party

Enable apprenticeships to all qualified young people aged 16-25.

Conservative Party

Statement that prisons should help prisoners learn English, maths and work skills.

Invest over £1 billion to modernise the prison estate.

Create a national community sentencing framework with a focus on helping people turn lives around.

Labour Party

Annual reports on prisoner-staff ratios, with a view to maintaining safety and ending overcrowding

Insist on personal rehabilitation plans for all prisoners.

Liberal Democrat

Transform prisons into places of rehabilitation, recovery, learning and work, with suitable treatment, education or work available to all prisoners.

Green Party

The Green Party manifesto does not refer to prisons.

Conservative Party

Support the public sector and civil society in identifying extremists, countering their messages and promoting pluralistic, British values.

Establish a Commission for Countering Extremism to identify and expose extremism.

Labour Party

Review the Prevent strategy.

Address government's failure to take any effective new measures against a growing problem of extreme or violent radicalisation.

Liberal Democrat

Scrap the Prevent strategy and replace it with a scheme that prioritises community engagement and supports communities.

Green Party

Reject Prevent and pursue a community-led, collaborative approach.