Obviously, the main pitfall in creating an ‘example’ budget for a student’s time at University is that the cost of university, and a student’s means to meet these costs, vary wildly depending on location and their family’s situation. Our example will be based around a student from a lower-income family, receiving the maximum tuition fee loan, maintenance loan and maximum maintenance grant, as well as the average annual bursary.

If you use KidStart every time you shop, you’ll have no problem putting aside £25 a month (with some left over) for your child. If you do this from the birth of your child to when they’re university age (you just need to click through from KidStart to your favourite online shop in order to get money back for your purchases) you’ll have a tidy lump sum to present them with. 
So, £25 a month = £300 a year. After 18 years, you could present your child with a £5,400 lump sum (£1,800 a year if you wanted to make them eke it out over their entire course) or you could invest it into a Junior ISA (see more below).

If you invested £25 a month of your KidStart savings into a Junior ISA, your £5,400 could be worth more like £8,700, which could definitely help manage the cost of university. Of course, the value of your investment can fall and you could end up with less than you put in because the Junior ISA provider generates the return on your investment by investing in stocks and shares, so they can go down as well as up.

If you save half of the £20.30 you receive in child benefit per week, you can put £480 a year into a Junior ISA. The rate of return these provide is linked to the value of the companies that the ISA providers invest in. This means you can end up with less than you put in, but realistically you might get an interest rate equivalent of 5%. From birth to university age, this would give you a total of around £14,000. Assuming your child will attend university for 3 years, this would give them £4,666 a year - although it should be noted that the money will be available in one lump sum and it will take the self-control of your 18 year old to resist spending it on something frivolous! KidStart has teamed up with a number of providers.

It’s impossible to give a table of bursary figures, because they vary from university to university. The only certain thing is that institutions that charge full tuition fees must award an annual minimum of £338 to students receiving the full maintenance grant. It’s really only useful to talk about averages:
So, in 2010-11 the average bursary, across all institutions, for a student receiving the full maintenance grant was £900.
The average was considerably higher – £1,573 – for more selective institutions!