Just over a week ago, The Firm broke the news regarding the Scottish Government moves to end funding for the Diploma in Professional Legal Practice (DPLP).

The news attracted justified condemnation from across the legal profession. The Law Society made it clear that it would resist this policy.

The final position was left unclear. The Scottish Government has refused to comment or provide further clarification on the matter, pending a more official policy announcement. Today, that announcement was made.

The announcement is headed, somewhat optimistically, “Postgraduate funding access widened”. It reads very positively indeed. It is filled with words like "positive", "pleased", "simplify" and "improve". The tired old “ability to learn, not ability to pay” cliché is thrown in for good measure.

What you will not see in the announcement is the word “cuts”. But that is precisely what the announcement heralds as regards diploma funding.

The announcement is vague. I have attempted to deconstruct it, and explore the likely implications for Diploma students.

I suspect the new position is as follows. There will be no grant funding awards as there were in the past. Those 300 awards have gone. The press statement is woefully unclear on this point, but that seems to be the implication. The cuts have happened, and we have been informed merely by implication. No doubt the Scottish Government did not want to ruin a nice shiny press release with the nasty "c" word.

It is unacceptable that we must be forced to "read between the lines" like this.

There will, across the entire Postgraduate Student Allowances Scheme (PSAS) scheme, be an increase in the number of loans available. This move from grants to loans will ensure that those of limited means who wish to enter the profession will be required to accept further levels of punishing debt.

Quite apart from the fact that a loan simply represents another crippling burden of debt, the loan allocations are not ring-fenced. It will be for individual law schools to "bid" against other departments and other universities for an allocation of support. A variety of other taught diploma-level and MSc courses will be bidding for funding from the same "pot". Law schools are not terribly used to this bidding process, so the extent of support which will be available is not at all clear.

Of course, one can have a debate as to whether the DPLP ring-fence arrangement was ever justified. I believe that it was, simply because a DPLP is a professional qualification requirement. The DPLP is not simply a "CV booster" or something which might be pursued for academic interest.

I interpreting the situation, I am having to infer, speculate and, at times, guess. This is not acceptable. Students deserve further clarification.

The Scottish Government must now come clean on this issue. Undergraduate law students will wish to make fully informed decisions as to their future plans. That, as things stand, is not possible.

The removal of grant funding has the potential to throw the legal profession, in terms of diversity, back in to the dark ages. Today’s announcement will come as a bitter disappointment to undergraduate students and to all those practitioners who believe that access to their profession should not depend upon financial resources.

Fraser Matheson is an LLb student at the University of Aberdeen