Worcester Further Education Colleges

Debate between Robin Walker and Mark Garnier

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a real privilege to follow such an important and passionate debate. As a historian and as a parliamentarian, I associate myself with the important points that were made in commemoration of the holocaust.

It is a great pleasure to be able to speak on a subject that is dear to my heart and of enormous importance to my constituents. I am grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to the Minister for staying until the Adjournment to hear it.

In the week when we received job figures showing the lowest number of unemployed people, and young unemployed people, in Worcester since 2008, this matter touches on the skills that young people need to get into work and the opportunities that they have in our colleges. As a county centre for both education and industry, Worcester is fortunate in having a number of excellent educational institutions.

The Minister will be aware of my long-running campaign for fairer funding for our schools. Today, however, I want to focus on our colleges, particularly the two that provide opportunities for thousands of 16 to 18-year-olds in Worcester, the Worcester college of technology and Worcester sixth-form college. Although I appreciate that the debate is focused on further education, and that the college of technology is therefore the prime concern, I hope the House and the Minister will indulge me if I raise issues on behalf of both those important institutions.

There are similarities and differences between the challenges that the two institutions face and the nature of the capital funding that they require, but the illustration of those differences is an important point for the Minister to understand. She will be aware of the deeply lamentable record of the Labour Government on the capital funding of colleges. They presided in this area, as in so many others, over an enormous escalation of hopes and a catastrophic failure to manage and deliver. The sad story of the Learning and Skills Council, and its drive to replace functioning buildings with shiny new ones at enormous expense, is symbolic of much that happened under the previous Administration. Both Worcester colleges were victims of that saga.

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate, and may I add Kidderminster college, where I serve as a governor, to that list of Worcestershire-based colleges? It also had a £40 million promise cruelly yanked away at the last minute after something like £150,000 of important college funds had been invested in feasibility studies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Garnier]

I have finished.

[Mr Walker]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, which was intervened on, and I congratulate him on raising the case of his local college that was so cruelly treated by the last Labour Government.

Our sixth-form college in Worcester was promised a building programme that could have cost more than £30 million. It underwent substantial work in planning what it was told would be a complete rebuild, enabling it to expand its capacity and provide new and better facilities. It incurred costs of more than £200,000 in putting together a bid that would have been successful if the Learning and Skills Council had shown a greater degree of financial continence than the Government who presided over it.

With the collapse of the LSC, the school received not a penny. Not only were hopes dashed and promises broken, but ongoing repairs that should have been started were postponed and important maintenance work put off in the hope that a shiny new building would render it unnecessary. Problems that had helped to justify the need for a new building were made greater by the failure of the last Government to deliver on their promise. In short, it was a fiasco. Fortunately, the college of technology was not so far down the line with its plans and incurred fewer costs—only around £114,000. It, too, was encouraged to believe that at some point a magic pot of money would offer scope for new buildings and a move from a split to a unified site.

I am not sure whether the Minister has visited Worcester recently, but if she has she will have noticed that functional though they may be and although they occupy a magnificent site alongside our Norman cathedral in front of the River Severn, the buildings of the college of technology are far from being the most beautiful on the city’s skyline. I and many of my constituents hope that one day what the architect himself described as “functional concrete blocks” might give way to more elegant buildings, better suited to the role of inspiring minds. The college, recognising that a small up-front investment in bringing together disparate sites could reduce running costs and generate ongoing savings, hoped to make that happen, but such hopes were to be bitterly disappointed by the last Labour Government.

Some FE colleges elsewhere in the country received funding to replace nearly new buildings, but during the last term of the Labour Government, Worcester college of technology received no capital grants at all. Its principal, Stuart Laverick, described to me how

“the last Government’s inept management of the capital budget for the sector made the FE estates playing field very uneven.”

I regret that in his statement Mr Laverick, who is not known for being shy or retiring in defence of his establishment, may have understated his case. Our college of technology plays a huge role in providing skills for young people and adults, and in making people ready for work, yet it was left neglected by the last Government as their recession saw youth unemployment soar. Unemployment rose from 500 in December 2008 when the Labour Government announced the disaster of the collapse of their Building Colleges for the Future programme to a peak of 800 in August 2009—a peak to which, I am glad to say, it has never returned under the coalition Government.

I do not want to focus only on the past and the sad failings of the previous Government, but on what we can do, and what the Minister and her colleagues in the Departments for Business, Innovation and Skills and for Education have already done to help and the further steps they can take. There was good news for FE colleges in the autumn statement and the subsequent FE capital strategy, and a new £550 million investment programme has been announced for the FE estate. When rolling out that programme, I hope the Minister will ensure that lessons are learned from past mistakes.

There has been good news for many sixth-form colleges through the building condition improvement fund, which was wisely introduced to help some of those so let down by the collapse of the LSC. Investment received by Worcester sixth-form college under the coalition can truly be described as transformational. Faced with a crumbling exterior, leaky windows, wildly fluctuating temperatures, water leaks that were beginning to cause structural damage, and visible faults that were at risk of undermining the excellent academic work taking place, the management of the college did not sit idle. It put together well formulated plans to re-clad the building and invest in new windows and a new look over the space of two years.

The management discovered that, by using the approximately £1 million per year available from the building condition improvement fund and by planning carefully, they could cure many of the defects left by Labour neglect. The targeted investment of a reasonable amount of capital has enormously improved the energy efficiency of the building, and I am delighted that that means investment in a new heating system is now a viable option—in the city famed for its production of the best boilers in Britain.

The principal of the sixth-form college, Michael Kitcatt, wrote to me recently to set out some of the improvements. He wrote:

“As you know, the building was constructed in the early 1960s around a concrete frame and over the years, cracks had developed around the rendering which was enclosed by the frame. This was causing rainwater to penetrate into the ceilings and walls of the rooms. However, under the LSC’s capital programme in the middle of the last decade, we were encouraged to work on plans involving the building of a totally new College and demolition of the existing building. As a consequence, no money was spent on addressing the issues of the College building…The BCIF funding has been really valuable and means that, by the end of August we will have entirely overclad the building and replaced all the original windows. As explained above, the project has been undertaken for essential structural reasons in order to make the building sound and watertight for the foreseeable future. In addition, of course, the insulation installed and the modern double glazed windows have hugely enhanced our environmental efficiency. However, the project has also transformed the outside of the building aesthetically and we have had many positive comments from students, staff, parents and visitors about how good the outside of the building now looks, some even being along the lines of its looking like a new building.”

Of course, the principal would not be doing his job if he did not ask for more, and I would be failing in my job as his MP if I did not pass on his request. He goes on to say:

“In terms of continuing to address the issues of the building.... we are now working on [a project] to modernise the Science facilities and remove the temporary classrooms from the site. If we are to take this forward, however, we would probably need a funding scheme with more flexibility than BCIF has had so far, for example, the possibility of a two year allocation, giving greater certainty over the funding allocated and removing the need for all spending to take place in a single financial year.”

I can assure the Minister that if she or a colleague could take time to visit the college, they would see the very great need to upgrade its science labs, and the opportunities in doing that and removing the last remaining temporary classrooms on the site to reduce running costs. That would also raise the profile of science, technology, engineering and maths subjects, which the Government are doing so much to encourage.

As a member of the Business, Innovations and Skills Committee, I applaud the Government’s focus on STEM subjects and on encouraging rigour in the A-level system. Our sixth-form college has increasing numbers of students taking these vital courses. The Minister will be interested to note that enrolments in science and maths courses have risen from 1,074 in 2009-10, to 1,179 in 2010-11 and 1,239 in 2011-12. They reached a record 1,346 in 2012-13.

The college points out that the existing facilities are too small to accommodate the growth in demand and too outdated to maximise the benefits of the welcome increase in STEM enrolments with a commensurate increase in the student experience. I urge the Minister to give serious consideration to its next bid for funding and to look at ways in which the BCIF programme could be made more flexible to allow greater investment over a longer period.

The college of technology has not been eligible for the BCIF, which was focused on the sixth-form college estate and not the further education sector. The college has, however, received a total of almost £400,000 in capital funding over almost three years of the coalition Government from the renewable grant and the capital works grant. That is in stark contrast to the complete lack of capital in the period from 2005 to 2010. It has been allocated a further £120,000 for the current academic year under renewal grant phase 3, and has bid for funding from the Skills Funding Agency’s enhanced renewal grant.

Regrettably the college’s last high-quality bid for phase 3 of the initiative, which I wrote to support, was not successful. The principal has pointed out that, in his own words,

“the feedback we received in relation to our recent bid suggests that officials are still not effectively challenging inflated projections and unrealistic growth assumptions. The information provided during the bidding process suggested that a relevant focused narrative rather than some spurious unsubstantiated inflated figures would be given more weighting. At Worcester we therefore focused on how what we were proposing was aligned to the Worcestershire LEP and Worcester City’s development plans and supporting economic growth while meeting quality, employability, apprenticeship and NEET agendas as well as hitting space saving and energy saving targets…We were informed that the narrative was strong but we scored only 1s rather than 3s because the narrative was not backed by data to show the impact on learner numbers and success rate figures.”

He pointed out that the criteria on which they were judged and awarded scores of 0 to 3 were not transparent, and it was not always possible to get feedback on what data would be required or what figures would hit the scoring thresholds. More worryingly, he went on to say:

“Worse was to come when we were told we scored a zero on the Disability Discrimination Act compliance question because the Worcester proposal did not add to this agenda because we were already fully compliant. So those who rightly committed their own resource to comply with the law get less points than those who have allowed their estate to remain non DDA compliant.”

I am sure that, as a Minister with responsibility for equalities, she will agree with me that it seems ludicrous for the funding criteria to encourage colleges to actually break the law, and that we should support those colleges that have prioritised supporting their most disadvantaged students.

I have written to the Minister with responsibility for FE colleges, the Under-Secretary of State for Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock), with some more detailed feedback from the college of technology. I will not ask the Minister to address each of its points today, but I ask her to take into account the serious concerns it raised about the last round of ERG funding and ensure that future funding is distributed fairly and transparently. The good news is that the Chancellor announced significantly more capital funding for the FE sector in the autumn statement. I know that as we speak the college of technology is working on a new bid. I am also glad that the Government have brought forward the date for resubmissions for round 3 of the ERG, and I hope that if the college submits a revised bid, it can be given a fair hearing. Such a bid would be particularly beneficial in its impact, as the college has now announced its intention to move its remote Barbourne campus into the city centre and thereby consolidate its estate. Not only does that make sound financial sense, but it will benefit the city centre economy by bringing more students into local shops and restaurants, and bring the many vocational students who study there into closer contact with the working world. I recently opened a high street salon owned and operated by the college of technology, which is providing apprenticeships and genuine work experience in a professional setting to young apprentice hairdressers. I have every confidence that its work-focused approach will benefit many of my constituents. The college’s major role in supporting apprenticeships will make a difference to the employment prospects of young people in the county.

I do not ask the Minister to promise the world, as the last Government did. I thank her for the investment that the coalition Government have already made in colleges in Worcester. I ask her to listen to the concerns that I have raised and look kindly on the bids that these two excellent colleges will be putting forward. I ask her to liaise with her fellow Ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Education to ensure that we make a little money go a long way and, after the fiascos of the past, invest in reasonable, high quality, skills-focused projects that will make a real difference. I extend an invitation to her, and any relevant Ministers, to visit these two colleges and to see both the excellent work they have already done and their sensible plans for future investment.

School Funding

Debate between Robin Walker and Mark Garnier

Tuesday 24th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Walker]

Absolutely, I could not agree with my hon. Friend more. That injustice would be made all the more clear if there were greater transparency on school-by-school funding.

There have also been some moves to protect special needs funding and to simplify arrangements for early years provision, all of which we welcome. The Government set out plans to end disparities within local authority areas but, with a perhaps understandable concern to limit turbulence, they have so far resisted dealing with disparities between authorities until 2015. There is much to praise, therefore, but that last point is a profound mistake.

The biggest and most obvious flaws in the current funding system, as my hon. Friends have pointed out, are the yawning gaps left in per pupil funding between neighbouring authorities. There is a gap of £1,088 between annual per pupil funding in Worcestershire and neighbouring Birmingham; my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) mentioned the gap of almost £900 between Leicester and Leicestershire, the lowest funded authority; and there is the stunning gap of nearly £5,000 between the lowest and the highest authorities. We have often discussed such disparities before, and I accept that there are many historic and political reasons for them, but the Minister has accepted the point that no firm formula underpins them any longer. The successive layers of government priorities that created those gaps have ossified over the years, and the gaps have grown ever wider as spending has grown, creating an unfair and indeed unjustifiable system.

It is extremely welcome that the Government have recognised the problem, and the previous Government suggested that they were beginning to do so, but it is not enough to recognise a problem—the challenge is to correct it. When the previous Labour Government opened a consultation on funding reform but proposed no preventive action, I and many others present would have accused them of dithering. Now that my own coalition Government, whose education reforms I support strongly and whose pupil premium I have praised, are proposing no action until after the next spending review, I cannot do otherwise with them. To accept the need for fundamental reform but to postpone any move towards it is similar to a dentist recognising the cause of a toothache making a patient’s life unbearable and then offering to deal with it in three years’ time. If such a case came to our surgeries as MPs, we would react with outrage. On behalf of all the teachers, head teachers, parents and—above all—pupils in our schools, we must demand swifter action now.

The question is not about a system that rewards the neediest areas and gives least to the best off. If that were the case, the City of London would hardly be the best funded authority in the country, nor Kensington and Chelsea in the top 10. Since the introduction of the pupil premium, many F40 authorities have received a good chunk of pupil premium funding, despite the factors mentioned by my hon. Friends, showing that there are significant levels of deprivation in many F40 areas. In my own urban constituency, I have wards that are among the most deprived in the entire country. However, the low level of underlying funding, before the allocation of the pupil premium, means that many head teachers in those wards tell me that they need the extra money to break even—to keep their schools afloat—and that they cannot spend the money on what it was intended for, to improve the chances of the most deprived.

[Mark Garnier]

My hon. Friend and neighbour might be interested to hear about my recent discussions with some schools in Wyre Forest. Usually, a school expects to pay somewhere between 80% and 85% of its budget on staffing. Now, because of the very low funding formula, we see typical schools in such lower funded areas spending nearer 90% or even more than 90% of the budget on staffing—an intolerable situation for their head teachers to manage.

[Mr Walker]

Absolutely right. My hon. Friend from Worcestershire points out that the extra money from the pupil premium is sometimes needed to support such costs and it is not necessarily reaching the target at which it is aimed.

We all recognise that it is impossible to correct the problem overnight. Ministers have said that their consultation threw up widespread support for reform but also much concern about turbulence. Interestingly, the teaching unions came out strongly in favour of postponing the issue; in doing so, they might have been representing many of their members, but they were certainly failing to represent the interests of those members in F40 areas whom we meet day in, day out.

The many MPs I have spoken to and the volunteers who make up the F40 executive recognise the need to avoid setting one part of the country against another in a scrap for funding. We also recognise that it is incredibly difficult to change the system radically when spending is under extreme constraint. We can idly wish that the previous Government had been quicker to act and more determined to deliver, but what is done is done; the opportunity to correct the glaring inequalities in the system during the days of ready money has now been lost forever. In the tough conditions of today, however, the need for fairer funding is all the greater. Worcestershire school leaders tell me that they understand the need for constraint and, like other public servants, they are straining every sinew to deliver more with less, but they are harder pressed to do so when there is an open and acknowledged injustice in how they are funded. In Worcestershire, we have schools within a few miles of the boundary with Birmingham that must deliver lessons on a budget hundreds of pounds per pupil lower, that must compete for teachers with a much better funded authority down the road and that are now being asked to accept the same constraints as that neighbouring authority, having missed out on many of the benefits of easier times. It would be neither fair nor reasonable to make no move in the lifetime of this Government to right such wrongs.



I am grateful that, within days of his March announcement, the Secretary of State met the Chairman of F40 and some of its local authority members to hear their concerns. Neither he nor the Minister would have been surprised at the profound disappointment they expressed at the decision to postpone until 2015 the move to a new formula. At that meeting, it was agreed that further representations would be accepted from the group on changes that would not hurt the funding of other authorities, but would mark a first step, however small, towards greater fairness. F40 has since sent in its suggestions, which I strongly support.

We have heard about Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, and I want to introduce Mark Twain to the debate. He wrote:

“The secret of getting ahead is to get started”.

F40 has suggested some options for getting started. It looked at the cost of bringing the lowest-funded authorities up to the level of Lincolnshire, which is the 41st worst-funded authority, and found that that would cost almost £300 million. It considered giving each of the lowest-funded authorities a small flat cash bonus to help, but found that the difference would be too small, and the process would simply rearrange the league table, pushing some authorities outside the F40 down the tables. Under its preferred option, it has proposed making the shift towards Lincolnshire levels of funding, but doing so proportionately, taking each of the lowest 40 one third of the way towards that level. That modest suggestion has the advantage of giving most help to those who need it most, while not altering the fundamental balance of funding.

F40 has suggested that Ministers should seek the £99 million cost directly from the Treasury. I think all hon. Members here would support the Department for Education in applying for that. However, knowing the harsh constraints on public spending that are Labour’s unfortunate legacy, will the Minister consider whether any of it can be found from other sources within the education budget? The sum of £99 million is less than the set- up costs of the new Education Funding Agency, and a very small amount relative to the £1.25 billion earmarked for the pupil premium next year, or the £2.5 billion that it is set to reach by 2015. It could make a major contribution to the work of that vital premium, ensuring it had its intended effect in the areas that it currently has difficulty reaching.

The sum of £99 million is a tiny amount compared with the £36.5 billion paid out under the dedicated schools grant to local authorities and schools around England. If that £99 million were taken equally from all those authorities better funded than Lincolnshire, it would equate to just 0.4% of their DSG funding, and cost no single authority more than £4 million. I hasten to add that that is not what F40 nor I propose, because we prefer no authorities to lose out in the quest for fairer funding, but such a change would be a small step towards a fairer system at a cost that would enable them to stay well within their minimum funding guarantee that no school lose more than 1.5%. At the end of the day, it is up to Ministers to decide the best way of meeting the challenge. We are here today to urge them to do so.

I shall illustrate how the problem has developed. During the first year of the Labour Government, when my predecessor in Worcester used his maiden speech to promise fairer funding as a result of the abolition of assisted places, the gap between Worcestershire and the national average stood at £230 per pupil, and was £380 between us and our neighbours in Birmingham. By the end of that Labour Government, the gap with the national average had risen to £371 per pupil, and with Birmingham it had doubled to £760.

The coalition agreement focused on fairness, but it is disappointing to record that under the coalition Government the unfair gap has widened further. In the current financial year, it stands at £482 per pupil against the national average, and £1,088 against Birmingham, almost three times the gap in 1997. For too long the system has been working against us. For too long we have faced an ever-widening gap. The Government have been brave to recognise the flaws in the system, and right to recognise the need for fundamental reform. However, as Benjamin Franklin said:

“Well done is better than well said."

Today, we are asking for a down payment on reform, a firm signal that the changes that we all agree are needed will be delivered, and a first step towards delivering them. The last Government failed completely to deliver on the issue. The present Government not only can, but must deliver. I urge the Minister to respond positively to the urgent representations from F40 to set much-needed change in motion, and to deliver a real improvement to schools in Worcestershire and across all the areas that have hitherto been left behind. We must not just talk the talk on fairer funding; we must walk the walk. As Shakespeare said: “Action is eloquence”. The Government have displayed great eloquence in dealing with the issue. Now is the time for action.