How much are parents supposed to give their children when they go to university?

There are a MASSIVE number of problems with the parental contribution system.

First, £1,130 is BEFORE TAX, so if you've crept into the higher rate tax band, that means those dependent siblings are meant to be supported on £655 a year!!! Even basic rate tax payers are meant to support those dependent children with less than £760 per year!!!

Second, by looking at income BEFORE tax it ignores the massive difference in tax paid by different families. A family with only one income (i.e. 40% of all families with children) can easily find themselves paying £4000 more tax without being anywhere near rich. Fundamentally this is because the system hasn't kept up to date with the income tax changes since 2008 which drove the personal allowance up massively and dragged the higher rate threshold lower (and no, it DIDN'T help the poor, it helped couples earning up to £80K between them).

Third, the level of parental contribution is SO large, it will actually drag many families below one of the most widely used (both by the government and academics) definitions of poverty (i.e. after tax income of less that 60% of the median for a family of the same make up).

Fourth, if you child happens to be talented in music or dance, the problem gets even worse because the same nonsense is used in calculating the parental contribution to the fees for those specialist schools.

The article also doesn't mention that student finance isn't assessed on your parents income but on "household income". Like a previous poster mentioned, this affects families that have split up, and single parents that enter relationships - the partner's income will be counted against the student loan, even though that partner is not the student's mother/father, and may also be paying 12% of their gross income in child maintenance for their own child who is at university!