In a room of leftwingers, some things are guaranteed to get a round of applause. A jibe at Rupert Murdoch, for instance, or a broadside against austerity. And one of the surest ways to get heads nodding is to rail against tuition fees. But why?

A solution to the row over tuition fees - bring back maintenance grants Read more

I have a working-class background, and was the first in my family to go to university. I understand why free education raises a cheer. Everyone wants to believe that success is a simple recipe that requires only the ingredients of dedication and hard work. Fees seem to be a barrier not just in a financial sense, but also in a symbolic one. They say university is not for the poor.

It sounds plausible that fees have prevented people like me from higher education. At a pre-election rally, Jeremy Corbyn told voters that £9,000-a-year fees had resulted in “fewer students from working-class communities going to university”. The evidence, however, tells a different story. By any measure, the proportion of disadvantaged students at English universities has consistently risen since tuition fees were trebled.

Free education could encourage even more working-class students to attend university, proponents will argue. Yet in Scotland, which does not charge for tuition, the gap between the poorest students and the richest has not closed to the extent that it has in England. This isn’t surprising: funding from general taxation often leads to capped student numbers, and the privileged then benefit the most.

Abolishing fees is intuitive, but paradoxical. Those in favour often say education benefits society – there should be more of it. I agree. Crucially, though, this doesn’t require funding university places solely from the public purse. On Thursday, it was revealed that nearly half of all young people in England go on to higher education – the highest since fees were trebled.

The Labour party’s position is a bad idea that is popular. In some aspects, the recent Tory party announcements don’t even have that advantage. The plan to raise the repayment threshold to £25,000 should be welcomed; it will save graduates money, and is not as regressive as lowering the cost of tuition. But it’s laughable that the decision to cap fees at the current level is lauded in certain sections of the press as a “revolution”. If this is a revolution, it’s one that won’t even get low-income students to the ballot box, let alone the barricades. Why vote for the status quo when the opposition is promising education free of charge?

More important, the endless focus on tuition fees obscures the bigger issue facing most working-class students. When you’re struggling to pay ever rising rents, or to fork out for your food bill, fees are largely irrelevant. The extortionate cost of living matters much more than the cost of tuition. It’s for this reason that nearly 9% of full-time disadvantaged students didn’t make it past their first year in 2014-15.

Tuition fee repayment earnings threshold to rise to £25,000 Read more

The focus ought to be on bringing back grants. Maintenance grants should be restored, and generously funded. Special attention should be paid to those from marginalised backgrounds. Disabled students and those with caring responsibilities, for example, are more likely than the student body at large to be from low-income backgrounds. Cuts to Disabled Students’ Allowance should be reversed, and carers should receive financial support to study.

Some might accuse this of being a false dichotomy. Can’t we have both? But public policy is always about prioritising scarce resources. If the goal is increased social mobility, Labour spending more than £11bn on what is effectively a middle-class bung is not the most efficient way to achieve it – and it’s certainly not progressive.

Inequality in education starts young. So must measures to tackle it. The commitment to free university places was the big-ticket item in the Labour party manifesto, nearly double the spend on schools or early-years intervention. This is completely back to front. Schools are facing a funding crisis, and nearly a third of Sure Start centres have been closed, to disastrous effect. In this context, spending vast sums on scrapping fees feels like deckchair rearrangement on the Titanic. Free university tuition should be far down the wish list of any leftwinger – not the centrepiece of Labour’s education policy.

Everyone uses their ideology to orientate themselves. However, on education many on the left are treating their principles like a compass needle: pointing in one direction, no matter what. The Conservatives’ proposal to cap fees at their current level may persuade some. Labour’s idea to remove tuition fees entirely will undoubtedly persuade more. But what makes good politics doesn’t necessarily make good policy. For those from backgrounds like mine, free tuition is not the answer.

• Josh Salisbury is a freelance journalist who has written extensively for the student newspaper York Vision