Education Funding for 18-year-olds

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Williams. I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) on securing the debate. I draw attention to a declaration of interest: I am an advisory governor of Eastleigh college in the neighbouring constituency to mine.

Hampshire has a fine tradition of sixth-form colleges. Some of the best in the country can be found in our fine county, including Peter Symonds college, which I attended. However, my constituency has no sixth-form provision whatsoever in the state sector, which means that virtually every 16 to 19-year-old is sent elsewhere. The colleges that they attend have different specialisms and are of very different sizes. Some focus on vocational training and others are highly academic. They cater for different types of students from different backgrounds, some of whom have excelled at GCSE and some of whom have not.

I want to mention some of those colleges, not as an exercise in name checking my favourite college principals but to highlight the variety of experience. Some are huge, including Peter Symonds college, Barton Peveril sixth-form college and Brockenhurst college, all of which cater for well over 3,000 students. Others are much smaller. It is a pleasure to follow my neighbour, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham), who mentioned Richard Taunton college, which is less than half the size of some of the bigger colleges in the area. Brockenhurst has a particular specialism in special educational needs, and when I visited last year I was particularly impressed with its dedication to those who faced different learning challenges. Sparsholt college, one of the country’s leading land-based colleges, provides a significant focus on vocational qualifications. It has emphasised that it has only 44 18-year-old A-level students, but it has 358 18-year-olds on vocational courses.

Why might students need an additional year at college, and what would be the financial impact on colleges? I will not revisit the VAT issue, but the Minister is well aware of it. There are many reasons why a young person might not achieve the results to which they aspire at GCSE, at A-level or in a vocational course. We all remember the problems with GCSE English last year, which in Hampshire particularly affected boys, and I recall how the colleges I have mentioned really stepped up to the plate and met those challenges. They compromised, put on additional classes and held resits of English GCSE. How much less flexible might they have been if they had thought that a fiscal penalty would result from their keeping those young people for another year?

What of Brockenhurst, which has a phenomenal track record of helping those with physical disabilities and special educational needs? Why should it receive less funding for a third year of study for a student who has overcome physical problems, as a result of which they need an extra year of study? Surely, we want to encourage young people to stay in education to achieve their maximum potential and we do not want to give colleges a reason to say no.

I am the mother of a 15-year-old, so I have been completing college application forms recently. I was struck by the additional information form that was required by the outstanding college in Hampshire, which asked for any additional reasons why a student might not complete their study, and I wonder how much more rigorous such forms will become. Two years ago I visited April House, a specialist eating disorder unit in the constituency of my neighbour, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen. I emphasise that although eating disorders can affect anybody, they particularly strike 17-year-old girls who are high achievers academically. Three of the girls I met were at the same sixth-form college, but their studies had been disrupted—forced to a temporary halt—by their condition. It was not their fault, it was not the college’s fault and it certainly was not their parents’ fault, but all three girls had been negatively affected. Nevertheless, they were hoping to go back to college. I do not want colleges to have an excuse to say no to that type of student—to see illness as a reason not to accept them back on to their course because they can foresee a negative fiscal impact in having them back.

There are some great colleges that do a brilliant job of getting teenagers back on the road to education. I cite in particular Richard Taunton college, and we have heard the figures from the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen: 212 of 1,159 full-time students are 18, and 30% of them have come from other colleges. I always used to say to students, “You’re a long time old. Education is critical, but getting it wrong, admitting that you have made a mistake, making the necessary changes and moving on is all part of the learning process.” I will be a lot more reluctant to say that to them now.

I have 20 seconds, but I wanted to touch on the subject of summer-born babies, who we know are statistically likely to perform less well than their older classmates. That is measureable through GCSEs, A-levels and university admissions. What about those teenagers who, just through a freak of their date of birth, might require resits to achieve the required grade?

I shall finish with the thought that we must also think about those who come to the UK late, whose parents get divorced, who are bereaved or who have been sick.