Adult and Further Education

Caroline Ansell Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

I agree. I am sure that my hon. Friend will champion the need for FE in his area, under whatever branding or name it might come. I absolutely agree that we need to see an increase. I will come to more of the reasons for that shortly.

The IFS also reported that colleges and sixth forms have seen a long-term decline in spending per student relative to schools. That goes all the way back to the 1990s, when their funding was around double that of primaries. In 2022-23, it was lower than spending per pupil in secondary schools and only 11% to 12% higher than spending per pupil in primary schools. The report noted that although extra funding in the 2019 and 2021 spending reviews meant real-terms increases in funding per student up to 2024-25, those will only partially reverse previous years of cuts and the impact of increasing numbers up to 2030. It is important to note that that analysis came before the high and persistent rates of inflation that we have seen over the past six months. In real terms, the analysis from the IFS shows that both sixth forms and FE colleges have seen a substantial reduction in per pupil funding since 2018, and have lost close to £1,000 per pupil since 2015.

Why does that matter? We will all know from our constituencies—my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Darren Henry) has just given an example—about the hugely important work of the FE sector and local sixth forms in preparing students for academic and vocational qualifications that offer them a brighter future. They are quite literally engines of social mobility.

I am incredibly proud of the work of Heart of Worcestershire College in my constituency and the excellent Worcester Sixth Form College, and I regularly visit both institutions to celebrate their students’ success. I put on record my thanks to the recently departed principal of Heart of Worcestershire College, Stuart Laverick, who was a great champion for the college and the sector. I look forward to working closely with his successor, Michelle Dowse. We also have a number of smaller providers, including schools that operate sixth forms—Christopher Whitehead Language College and Tudor Grange Academy—which, alongside our popular and successful sixth-form college, increase the choice and range of options for post-16 pupils in Worcester. It is fair to say that all those schools regularly raise with me their concerns about funding.

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

I will take this opportunity to put on record my thanks to East Sussex College. It is equally as high-performing as Worcester and is the social mobility engine that my hon. Friend described. However, the finances, which he referred to, mean that it is in a very competitive field for the workforce. It is squeezed between schools and higher education. That means they struggle to recruit the quality, highly skilled staff that it needs to take us further and higher and to deliver on the Government’s priorities. Does he recognise that scenario?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Walker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that clarification. I am sure my right hon. Friend the Minister is listening carefully. I know he is not averse to making the case to the Treasury for funding, so I urge him to take from this debate the strong cross-party consensus, reflected in the Committee’s recommendation in paragraph 179 of our report, that:

“To prevent a further narrowing of 16-19 education, the Committee urges the Government to undertake a wholesale review of 16-19 funding, including offering more targeted support for disadvantaged students.”

[Caroline Ansell]

Before my hon. Friend moves any further into his excellent speech, the witnesses to our inquiry were compelling when describing the impact of defunding on particular cohorts of students. On the impact of defunding BTECs, for example, they talked about vulnerable groups, including those with special educational needs. Does my hon. Friend agree that for those groups, it is especially important that we keep open those pathways to success?

[Mr Walker]

Yes, absolutely. My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to that specific issue; I was going to come back to it later and touch on the fact that it was partly the equalities impact of those decisions that led the Select Committee to its unanimous recommendation.

I will focus briefly on the element of targeted support for disadvantaged students in our recommendation that I just touched on. I recently took part in an inquiry of the all-party parliamentary group for students, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield)—I should call him the hon. Gentleman, but I call him my hon. Friend because we have worked together for a long time. That was an eye-opening inquiry, which reinforced the need for an urgent review of support for the most disadvantaged in the FE sector.

The Government have rightly increased the level of pupil premium in schools, and have used programmes such as the holiday activities and food programme and the levelling-up premium to keep up a relentless focus on tackling disadvantage. However, there is concern about the support available for disadvantaged students in FE, and widespread worry that the available bursaries just do not go far enough. The extension of the pilot for pupil premium-plus to post-16 students was welcome, but we have to query why the extra support for that age group is so much lower than the extra support available to pupils under 16. My constituent Harrison Ricketts, who was in Parliament today to support a Youth Employment UK event, gave powerful and reasoned testimony to the APPG’s inquiry about the pressures facing students. I hope Ministers will look carefully at some of the recommendations in that report, which are pretty reasonable and not necessarily very expensive.

In fairness, there are elements of the Minister’s response to the Education Committee report that I welcome. The response expanded on investments for the financial year 2023-24. The Government state that they

“will invest £125 million in increasing funding rates for 16-19 education, including a 2.2% increase in the national funding rate for academic year 23/24…and an increase in funding for specific high value subject areas in engineering, construction and digital to help institutions with the additional costs of recruiting and retaining teachers in these vocational areas.”

With regard to supporting pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, the Government draw the Committee’s attention to the 16-to-19 bursary fund, and state that in the last academic year,

“almost £152 million of 16-19 Bursary funding has been allocated to providers to help disadvantaged 16-19-year-olds with costs such as travel, books, equipment and trips, an increase of over 12% on the previous year.”

The response also states that the Government will continue to approve the international baccalaureate diploma for funding, and clarifies that they did not say—as I think the Committee took them to have said—that they will withdraw funding for the international baccalaureate careers programme.

I want to expand on the recommendation about the level 3 qualifications review, which we have debated at some length. The concern of the Committee is not that we do not believe in pursuing high-quality and high-value qualifications such as T-levels; we are concerned about the pace with which the Department is pursuing that course, and the risks of removing advanced general qualifications where students currently find them a valuable pathway to progression. A wider review of funding could help find the resource to maintain a wider choice for students, more flexibility and a range of routes to progression, including T-levels. We have highlighted significant equalities concerns if Ministers persist with the current approach, and we do not feel that those concerns were properly or fully addressed in the Government’s response, which we published today.

I do not have time today to detain the House on all the recommendations in our report, but I will highlight the need to address the issue of workforce if we are to deliver on the Prime Minister’s very worthy ambition of more people taking maths to the age of 18. In our inquiry on teacher retention and recruitment, we have heard worrying evidence about the extent to which the Department has missed its targets on maths teacher recruitment, and in the first session of that inquiry the Committee heard from the FE sector that whatever problems exist for retention in the schools system are compounded in the post-16 space. Around 25% of college teachers leave the profession after just one year compared with around 15% of teachers in schools, and three years in, around half of college teachers have left compared with around a quarter of schoolteachers.

In fairness, I should acknowledge some welcome elements in the Minister’s response in this regard, such as the updated teacher support fund, the national professional qualification for leaders in primary maths and the expansion of the Taking Teaching Further programme for further education, but I am not convinced that these small initiatives fully address the scale of the challenge.