York St John University has revealed plans to charge £8,500 a year for a degree – just below the £9,000 ceiling permitted under the Government’s higher education reforms.

The university has notified the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) that it intends to raise the fees to £8,500 for students starting in September 2012.

Its plans are conditional upon the approval by the OFFA, which is expected to have responded by July.

Professor David Fleming, vice-chancellor of York St John University, said the fees are needed to maintain and improve teaching quality and investing in resources and facilities.

In an email to staff he wrote: “Our main headline fee for UK and EU first degree full-time study will be £8,500 per annum. This rate does not apply to all programmes at all levels. We are charging a simple range of prices from as little as £150 for a short language course to £12,500 for an international student studying on an MBA.

“I believe the package we have put together will enable us to continue to offer an exceptional student experience and to build on the work of our key workstream areas.

“We have invested over £75 million in our campus over the last ten years and demand for our programmes has risen by almost 40 per cent over the last two years.”

But the common move by universities across the country to charge the maximum or near to the maximum amount of tuition fees has been slammed by the National Union of Students (NUS).

Aaron Porter, NUS President, said: “When the Government forced these ill-considered plans through parliament they claimed that fees above £6,000 would be the exception rather than rule, but that was quite clearly a pipe dream.

“Ministers have claimed that OFFA has the power to regulate fees, when in reality this process is nothing more than one of rubber-stamping vice chancellors’ attempts to charge as much as they can get away with. With no one to stop them, universities are rushing to charge the maximum £9,000.” York St John University, which was granted university status in 2006, currently has around 6,000 students.

A number of fee waivers, bursaries and scholarships are included in the tuition fee package, a spokesman for the university said.

Students with families earning under £10,000 a year will have a £2,000 waiver in fees a year, families earning between £10,000 and £19,000 will have a £1,250 reduction and families earning between £20,000 and £30,000 will have £750 waived.

So far, 58 universities have declared fee levels. Of those, around two-thirds want to impose a flat-rate of £9,000. A further six are charging the maximum amount for some courses.

Among those to confirm plans for £8,500 tuition fees are Teesside University, Leeds Metropolitan University and Northumbria University. Universities to set fees at the maximum £9,000, include Oxbridge, Bath, Durham University, the University of Leeds and Bradford University.

The University of York will not reveal its tuition fee plans until June.