For some time serious concern has been expressed about the availability of financial support for students through the discretionary awards system. In the light of this concern, the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Sir John Cass’s Foundation decided to commission a survey of discretionary award giving by the local education authorities in England and Wales. Their aim was to seek to establish the facts in a way that was both more up-to-date and more detailed than the statistics routinely collected by the Department of Education.

The National Foundation for Educational Research was chosen to carry out the survey, and this report is the result of their work. A complete, but shorter, Report of the Main Findings and conclusions is also separately available. The reports represent the outcome of an ambitious and comprehensive survey; at the same time, the outcome is disappointing for two reasons. Some LEAs are making generous levels of student support locally available but, as the report itself sets out, much of the information sought proved to be unavailable so that the detailed factual position is less clear than it should be. Also the report established beyond doubt that potential students’ chances of obtaining discretionary awards, and hence – all too often – those potential students’ educational opportunities, depend merely on where they happen to live.