Education Funding for 18-year-olds

Bill Wiggin Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship in this excellent debate, Mr Williams. I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) on securing it. There is clearly passion about the issue throughout the House.

The further education and sixth-form sector has been neglected and under-supported for many decades. It has not had the rightful support that it needs, which is a great shame, because it does extremely well with the resources that it has. We have heard that education for 16 to 18-year-olds gets about 22% less funding than for pupils up to 16, which seems problematic. We in Cambridge are hit particularly hard, because our county gets the lowest funding in the country for all schools, followed by poor funding afterwards. That is a separate issue and not for the Minister, but I hope the Government will correct the long-standing anomaly that pupils in Cambridgeshire get £600 less each per year than the English average. That does not seem fair to me.

My constituency is served by three excellent institutions, all of them for some reason right on the boundary; some are just inside, some just outside. They are Long Road sixth-form college, Hills Road sixth-form college and Cambridge Regional college, and they do extremely well. Hills Road sixth-form college has a national reputation for leading the way in the sector. If one looks at entry into Oxbridge, which I do not think is the only way to measure success, its performance is right up there; it gets more pupils in than anywhere other than Eton and Westminster, and it is a state-funded sixth-form college. That is what we should be aspiring to in state-sector education throughout the country.

However, the Government changes, of which the measure we are discussing is one, will make it hard for those colleges to provide the four A-levels that they have often provided and that are often provided in the private sector. They are worried about whether the example that they have set for so many years will continue, or whether that excellent exemplar of what the state can provide will be lost. They have huge problems.

[Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

Hereford sixth-form college is another outstanding performer. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government could—it would be much appreciated by everybody if they could—consider how much VAT such schools can reclaim?

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I was going to say that next. I have debated this matter in the House, as have many other hon. Members. One big problem is that the general education sector does not have to pay VAT, but the sixth-form sector does. If equal money is given at the beginning but one sector has to pay VAT and the others do not, that is a huge problem. A sixth-form college’s VAT load is typically £300,000. If the Minister could fix the problem with the Treasury, that would be solved. Cambridge Regional college pays £1 million in VAT. That is a huge difference and there should be a much easier way to solve the problem.