16-to-19 Education Funding

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Nicholas Dakin

Thursday 7th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[Nic Dakin]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The tragedy is that already the post-16 curriculum has shrunk so we are already in danger of getting to where my hon. Friend describes, and there is concern about where we might be going in future.

The funding that schools and colleges now receive to educate sixth-formers covers the cost of delivering just three A-level or equivalent qualifications, and little more. As a result, the wider support offer to students has been greatly diminished. That means it is increasingly difficult to address properly the concerns expressed by employers that young people lack the skills to flourish in the workplace. The CBI’s 2016 education and skills survey, for example, expressed concern about the current education system, with its emphasis on grades and league tables

“at the expense of wider personal development”.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we need to continue to commit and invest more in the sector to ensure that it does not shrink further.

I think everybody would agree that programmes of study in which students have too much free time are not effective at getting the best out of them. The students are in transition from a fairly directed pre-16 learning environment to the independent learning of HE and the world of work. That transition needs to be properly and appropriately supported.

On a recent visit to Scunthorpe’s brilliant North Lindsey College, the excellent principal, Anne Tyrrell, remarked on how the demands from students with mental health problems had grown exponentially in recent years. Many schools and colleges lack the resources to address the sharp increase in students reporting mental health problems. That is a real issue that has been compounded by cuts to NHS and local authority budgets. The charity Mind recently found that local authorities now spend less than 1% of their public health budget on mental health. We know that students with better health and well-being are likely to achieve much better academically and that participation in extra-curricular activities has a positive effect on attainment. Such things are interlinked and related.

It is clear that the student experience in schools and colleges is deteriorating as a result of the funding pressures that hon. Members have drawn attention to in their own constituencies across England. For example, two thirds of sixth-form colleges have already shrunk their curriculum offer; over a third have dropped modern foreign languages courses; and the majority have reduced or removed the extracurricular activities available to students, including music, drama and sport.

Even more concerning, almost two out of three colleges do not believe that the funding they receive next year will be sufficient to support students that are educationally or economically disadvantaged. So the underfunding of 16-to-19 education is fast becoming a real obstacle to improving social mobility.

As costs continue to rise, the underfunding of sixth- form education is becoming a major challenge for all providers. Schools increasingly find themselves having to use the funding intended for 11 to 16-year-olds to subsidise their sixth forms, which risks damaging the education of younger students. Small sixth forms in rural areas are increasingly unviable, lacking the economies of scale to provide students with the rounded education that we all believe in.

Grammar schools are increasingly raising their voices in serious concern about the underfunding of 16-to-19 education.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend acknowledge that sixth-form colleges such as St Brendan’s in my constituency are particularly hard hit because they do not even have the 11 to 16-year-old funding that might better enable them to support 16 to 19-year-olds?

[Nic Dakin]

Sixth-form colleges are particularly affected, as my hon. Friend describes, and they cannot claim back VAT in the way that schools do, so that puts them at a significant disadvantage overall.

The treatment of 16-to-19 funding is in stark contrast to the pre-16 funding that was protected in real terms under the coalition Government and protected in cash terms during the previous Parliament. The Secretary of State’s recent announcement of an additional £1.3 billion for schools does not apply to students aged 16 to 19; nor does the minimum funding guarantee for students in secondary schools. That puts them at a disadvantage, with 16-to-19 education being very much the poor relation.

Yet the average funding of £4,530 per student received by colleges and school sixth forms is already 21% less than the £5,750 per student that is received to educate 11 to 16-year-olds in secondary schools. That compares with average spending on students, once they go into higher education at 18, of £8,780 per student. Perhaps we can learn from the private sector. In private schools the funding of students actually increases post-16 to £15,300 per student to reflect the additional cost of teaching 16 to 19-year olds. As we approach the autumn budget, now is the time for the Government to focus on this very real problem and resist the temptation to hide behind the glib arguments they have used in the past. After all, the new Minister is well grounded, practical and sensible: the very antithesis of glib. We look forward to her response.

It is welcome that there is now a single national funding formula for 16-to-19, but that does not compensate for its inadequacy. There is still inequality, as I have mentioned, between schools that can claim back VAT and colleges that cannot, leaving the average sixth-form college with £385,914 less to spend on their students. There is no evidence base for the Government’s assertion that the funds provided are sufficient. That is why I support the joint call from the Association of School and College Leaders, the Association of Colleges and the Sixth Form Colleges Association for the Government to conduct a proper review of sixth-form funding to ensure it is linked to the realistic costs of delivering the rounded full-time education that we all want our young people to have.

The Government’s other assertion that success in school is the best predictor of outcomes in 16-to-19 education has not been supported by any evidence either. I know from my own experience how students who have struggled pre-16 can make spectacular progress with the proper support post-16. Bluntly, the Government have provided no evidence to justify reducing education funding by 21% at age 16. The chronic underinvestment in academic sixth-form education is bad for students, for our international competitiveness and for social mobility.

It is the students that matter. We are at real risk of letting them down. That is why I am calling on everyone to get behind the ASCL, AoC and SFCA’s excellent Support Our Sixth-formers campaign, and I ask the Government to respond positively to their two clear, simple asks: first, to introduce an immediate £200 uplift in funding to improve the support offered to sixth-form students; and secondly, to conduct a review of sixth- form funding to ensure it is linked to the realistic costs of delivering a rounded, high-quality curriculum. A modest annual increase in funding of £200 per student would help schools and colleges to begin reassembling the range of support activities required to meet the needs of young people.

The uplift is affordable. It would cost £244 million per year to implement, and it could be largely funded by the underspend in the Department for Education’s budget for 16-to-19 education, amounting to £135 million in 2014 and £132 million in 2015. At a time when 16-to-19 education is in dire need of additional investment, schools and colleges should at least receive all the funding that the Government put aside for 16 to 19-year-olds. As funding rates for sixth-formers have been fixed since 2013, such a modest uplift would also help schools and colleges to deal with the inflationary pressures and cost increases that they have faced during that time.

It is time for all of us, including the Government, to support our sixth-formers and give them a fair deal. In her response, the Minister can make a good start by saying that she is determined to champion high-quality general sixth-form education as well as T-levels and apprenticeships. She could also commit to ensuring that both the £200 funding uplift and the fundamental review are carefully and properly looked at as part of the autumn Budget process. She is tenacious and determined. She is capable of ensuring that the Government stop letting sixth-formers down and start investing in them properly for the future of all of us.