Scottish Executive abolishes fourth-year fees for all UK students Final-year tuition fees are to be scrapped for English, Welsh and Northern Irish students studying four-year honours degrees at Scottish universities.
The Scottish Executive has said it will find the cash to cover the cost of waiving fourth-year fees from October next year.
It ends the so-called Scottish anomaly that the government created in the Teaching and Higher Education Act. This meant that English, Welsh and Northern Irish students would have to pay for the fourth year of tuition at a Scottish university from which Scots and other European Union students were exempted.
Since then, the Scottish Executive has abolished up-front tuition fees for all Scottish and other EU students in all years, prompted by the Cubie report. Until this week's decision, other United Kingdom students were still eligible for fees in all four years.
The decision came as Sir George Quigley published his report on the anomaly. Sir George said that the irregularity had put students from the rest of the UK off Scottish universities.
He recommended the end of the anomaly for this reason, not because of any inequity inherent in the arrangements.