Our Story

Back in 2015 I was working in market research in Higher Education when I realised something important. Interviewing young undergraduates from lower income backgrounds, I became acutely aware of the financial sacrifices and trade-offs they were having to make, compared to their better-off peers, to get through to graduation.

Without the ability to rely on the ‘bank of Mum and Dad’, life as a student involved having constant background financial pressure e.g. not joining sports teams because of the cost of kit and membership, not spending money on clothes in order to prioritise textbooks etc. Maybe I felt this even more acutely having had the government student grant cover my entire expenses during my university days in the 1980s.

As it happened, at the same time I was doing another relatively well-paid job for a corporate client. I was so inspired by the talent, determination and resilience of these young people, I went back to one of the schools in the original research and offered to fund a couple of modest Scholarships for two of their students about to step-up to university. Of the two students - from Birmingham - one was starting a Drama degree, and the other something very Mathsy (he had taught himself Further Maths A-level outside of school hours). They both wrote thank you letters that were brimming full of excitement at what lay ahead for them.

I thought at the time that if I can do this, surely there must be lots of other people in my situation who would also be willing to ‘pay it forward’ (though I don’t think the phrase was a thing back then). And with that, the Reading List Foundation was born.

With two friends who had also benefitted from a free university education (the wonderful Maria Williams and Mark Thomas), we went about setting it up from scratch. Research we had carried out at the start showed 79% of students from lower-income households in England had cut back on essentials because of financial pressures – a figure I imagine is even higher today. A student would often buy the textbooks they could afford rather than the ones that would really benefit their studies.

Facing such pressures while accumulating loans of upwards of £44,000 seemed a stark contrast to the financial support enjoyed by the many generations of graduates who had their university education funded by society as a whole.

This contrast was brought into even clearer focus when the last remaining element of Maintenance Grant for Living Costs was withdrawn in the Budget of 2015. Although replaced with a loan, support still does not stretch to cover basic advised living costs at many top universities. Furthermore, the Maintenance Loan has failed to keep up with general inflation for a number of years, at the same time as student rents have seen runaway rises (an issue many non-students have had to face as well).

In the 11 years of our work in schools and colleges across England I am pleased to say we have supported over 2,000 students, studying subjects from Astrophysics to Zoology, at universities from Exeter to Edinburgh.

We now have six trustees - myself, Oxana Bolshova, Janet Kipling, Julie Sadler-Smith, Emily Macaulay and Francesca Catling. I handle the day-to-day functioning of the charity, and can be contacted here.

We are still relatively young but ambitious - we aim to eventually have a Reading List Scholarship in every state-funded Year 13 in England. We would love you to help us get there.

Alan Terry - Co-founder