The Education Select Committee’s Report On FE: Groundhog Day or Ground Breaker?

We’ve been here before. In 2005 the Foster Review of Further Education observed “there is a mismatch between the aspirations of FE colleges and available funding”. In 2015 the Public Accounts Committee raised the alarm over the “declining financial health of many colleges”, a warning the National Audit Office echoed, while noting some improvement, five years later. In 2019 the Post-18 Review declared “funding is a fundamental challenge in FE”. Now the Education Select Committee has loudly repeated the same message : “The further education sector faces significant funding challenges due to prolonged real-term cuts since 2010”. Their report is emphatic: “It is crucial that the government increases per-student funding across all post-16 funding streams.”

The Select Committee's report is packed with useful analysis, discussion and recommendations on all aspects of further education, but the one theme that stands out above all is the chronic underfunding of the sector. Not just revenue funding, but capital funding, and funding for college staff pay, are all found to be lagging well behind what is needed for a sector widely acknowledged as crucial to the nation’s skill challenge and therefore pivotal to driving economic growth. To add insult to injury, the insistence of the Treasury on charging colleges VAT despite being reclassified as part of the public sector, remains unchanged.

The report’s many recommendations on improving funding for FE are therefore very welcome, but is this going to prove to be another Groundhog Day for FE, where the cries to alleviate the sector’s financial problems fall on deaf ears? The big difference now is of course the arrival of a Labour government, which has made education and skills a bigger priority than previous administrations, and heaped additional roles and responsibilities onto the FE sector in particular. Labour governments have been historically much more financially supportive of FE than their political rivals, perhaps because Labour voters are far more likely to be dependent on adult and further education to improve their lives.

But as we all know, the country’s faltering economy has placed huge fiscal constraints on the Exchequer, and big rises in public spending for the NHS, defence, and welfare benefits are leaving little room for increases anywhere else. We can only wait and hope that a Labour-led Education Committee, talking to a Labour government, will finally end the revolving door of funding initiatives which only partially address the underlying problem. In particular, the ever-widening gap between college and school teacher pay (lecturers earn over 15% less) is creating a staffing crisis that is threatening to de-rail colleges’ delivery of skills training in crucial STEM subject areas

On other issues the report is pragmatic, detailed and well-evidenced. It echoes the concerns of many  that Skills England is not strongly enough embedded in government as it has no statutory foundation, and its senior team lack appropriate seniority. The jury is out on this, mainly because Skills England has had such limited impact so far it’s hard to judge its effectiveness. The recommendation to move responsibility for Post-16 SEND to the Skills Minister is a sensible one. The proposal to move to a three-route model for English and maths teaching strikes a good balance between the need to continue raising literacy and numeracy skills whilst not crushing students’ confidence and morale with repeated GCSE exam resits. The call for Level 3 Applied General qualifications to be retained is also very welcome; as the report notes, T Levels – whatever their theoretical merits - have not taken off in practice and are most certainly not a substitute for BTECs, City & Guilds, and other L3 courses.

The report doesn’t set out to be groundbreaking. It falls short of offering any overall vision for the future of the FE sector, making little reference to lifelong learning, which must surely be a core principle for a fit-for-purpose 21^st century education system. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given the proximity of a Post-16 White Paper which will hopefully set out a long-term strategy based on moving from competition to collaboration, from fragmented initiatives to systems thinking, and from education designed as a “single shot” system, to a through-life paradigm.

The report could have been subtitled “The Road to Norwich Pier”, taking a leaf out of George Orwell’s classic 1936 book “The Road to Wigan Pier”, which documented the poverty and hardship of pre-war industrial Britain. Not only because it sets out vividly the struggles of college students, staff and leaders managing on such a thin gruel of funding, but because the Committee’s visit to City College Norwich as part of its evidence gathering clearly had a big impact. In CCN’s Principal, Jerry White, the sector has found a new hero, whose evidence is quoted several times in the report. Jerry is hardly a firebrand – in fact he has a calm and focused personal style – and Norwich is hardly the stereotypical post-industrial Northern town the public might associate with economic hardship and high reliance on the education and training colleges deliver. By strange irony, the 2005 Foster report quoted a CCN alumni, the comedian Stephen Fry, who said: “After a ruined first attempt at education, Norwich City College quite literally saved me from disaster. It gave me…an opportunity to go forward with learning in an atmosphere that suited me in a way that school never could. Further Education of this kind is one of the unsung achievements of our society.”

Twenty years later, a bit better sung, but still sadly underfunded.