Further Education Funding

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

As usual, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) has said, at a time like this, with so many people losing their jobs, further education and its ability to agilely shift to retraining people are particularly important. It is very concerning that we have seen real financial sustainability issues in FE, a topic that the Public Accounts Committee has raised a number of times. That sector has come into this crisis working from a challenging base, with its funding base for adults in 2020 still at 2013 levels.

As the Minister knows as a former member of the Public Accounts Committee, this sector has been on a difficult trajectory for seven years. She has been involved in some of those discussions, so I do not need to run through the figures with her: I am sure that as a former member of the Public Accounts Committee and with her business background, she is hot on the numbers, and the numbers matter here. That base funding causes a lot of the difficulty and the inability to be as agile as the sector can be, because of the way in which the sector is used to working with adults—of course, it works with young people as well, but I am mainly talking about adults today. Those adults have sometimes come from challenging or different educational backgrounds, and have not followed a traditional trajectory in training: level 2, level 3, and so on.

We on the Public Accounts Committee will be looking again at this topic; that inquiry is coming up, and we will increasingly be looking at sixth-form colleges as well, because that is obviously a concern. However, I particularly want to talk about FE today. There are particular issues with the covid pandemic, so I will talk about funding first, and then some of the practical issues.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

We are here for a debate about funding for further education, which my hon. Friend is coming to, and many of us are concerned about the overall amount of funding. However, alongside that, we are seeing things such as the Government sending £330 million allocated for skills back to the Treasury because it has not been able to be spent under the apprenticeship levy. There are other examples, which I will come on to, where the issue is not just the overall amount being spent, but the fact that how it is being spent means that it ends up not being used.

[Meg Hillier]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I am going to touch on the apprenticeship levy. It was an interesting and bold policy initiative, but as he has rightly highlighted, it has its pitfalls and, indeed, is not always going to the right places. If I have time, I will touch on that as well, but I want to get the immediate funding issues around covid on the record first.

As the Minister will know, the last time that FE colleges were encouraged to come together to save costs—part of the challenge of living on a low funding basis—Hackney College became part of New City College, a consortium of colleges. It has been keen to keep recruiting 16 to 18-year-olds, because in the current climate it wants to make sure that it does not turn students away. It has managed to recruit 200 above its funded target, which is costing it £1.2 million a year: that is a cost to the college directly, money that it is having to take out of its own base costs if it is not funded, and I hope that the Minister will look at that issue. We should not be turning people away from study, and it is great that New City College is not turning people away, but obviously that money has to come from somewhere, so another part of the system is losing out.

The funding tolerance for adults is also a very interesting point. In London—this is a happy circumstance for my constituency—if the colleges meet 90% of their adult rate, meaning that they keep those students in place, they get 100% of the funding. Nationally, the figure is 97%. It is difficult enough to keep in place adults from a different education trajectory who are perhaps juggling families and sometimes jobs as well as study; it is harder than if people are in compulsory education. Add to that the complexities of covid: ill health, and people perhaps dropping out after having to self-isolate because they had covid or have long covid. They can enrol and lose out. That means the figure can very quickly drop below 97%.

Nationally, the Minister needs to look at the tolerance level. As she knows, I am not for wasted money or deadweight money; it is certainly not something I would advocate. There is a very high threshold at the best of times but, with covid, it is particularly challenging. A bit more tolerance would enable colleges to plan and focus. As agile and clever as they are, I am sure they could find ways to fill gaps in those places. I will come to explain how they can be really agile by providing short courses for people.

The costs of covid compliance have to be mentioned, because it is expensive. Fewer people are in the building, and there is less activity in some ways. New City College spent £200,000 from its reserves to support students in the first lockdown. As the Minister knows, many colleges up and down the country have run out of money due to their challenging financial circumstances. There will be a crisis point if those colleges are not supported to survive.

We do not ever want to see a college go bust. Colleges are the main education providers in small towns, but they might be hampered by previous loans from Government, some of which we know have been converted to grants. Even then, however, such colleges are in great difficulties financially. If they go bust, where will the adults in that area go? The Government have an agenda of levelling up areas of the country that have traditionally not recovered from some of the post-industrial job losses in previous decades. If they lose their FE colleges, where will the training come from for the people who are now losing jobs in some of the sectors that are particularly suffering because of covid?

I want to touch on capital funding. It is good that the Government have said they will match-fund capital expenditure to ensure that colleges can patch themselves up, but the constraint of having to spend the funding in the current financial year is challenging. We are already in November. Although the announcement on funding was made a while ago, some of the projects that could be delivered are a bit longer range or are very disruptive to the working of a college. Add in the covid measures and it becomes even more challenging. We all know that a lot of work goes on in schools and colleges during the long summer recess or the breaks, but the summer recess comes after the end of the financial year. Although I recognise that it is difficult in some ways, it is not beyond the wit of Government to look at extending the deadline and perhaps making it a two-year capital funding programme, so that colleges can plan.

The Minister knows as well as I do that if things are done in a rush because the money has to be spent by a certain point, they are not necessarily done well, or the right things are not necessarily done. We should allow colleges to spend that capital money as effectively as possible. It could be spent on better covid measures to enable people to work more easily in those circumstances, or on enhancing facilities for the sort of job creation that we will need and that they will need to train for. I will touch on that in a moment.

It would be good if we could have more flexibility. An example of why this is needed comes from Hackney College, where there is an atrium with a leaking roof. It is a £500,000 job. The matched funding is very welcome, but it is a big job and will really disrupt things. If that has to be done before the end of the financial year, it will be challenging—if it even gets done.

I will move on to how we train people for the jobs that will still exist after covid, and for the ones that will emerge. I hope the Minister will tell us what shared intelligence there is of the local and regional skills that will be needed. Having a strong London authority means that there is some understanding of the jobs that are available in London but, given the nature of their work, a lot of London workers now do not have to live in London. There will be an interesting and challenging job for everybody in working out where people will be and where the jobs will be available. If somebody is working in care or certain other jobs, they clearly have to be physically present, but that is not the case for lots of jobs.

There really needs to be some analysis. I hope the Minister can shed some light on what analysis is being carried out not just in her Department, but across Government, about what jobs and skills might be needed. It might seem early to start thinking about that, but it is never too early to start planning. Things might shift and they might change, but if we do not start thinking about it now, there will be far more people without jobs in the right places. Imagine retraining for a job that does not exist in a year’s time because we have not got it right. We need to be thinking about that and sharing intelligence as much as we can. I am not saying the Government have all the answers, but they have a very strong role in co-ordinating this effort.

We need to move quickly. Existing mechanisms for funding new courses are very slow. Let us consider some of the jobs for which need might be rising. With Brexit looming, the health and social care sectors face a real struggle. I know from looking at the issue with the Public Accounts Committee that getting people to work in social care in the Minister’s own constituency is very challenging because of the costs. If the Government are serious about levelling up and investing in infrastructure projects, construction will be vital. Digital enablement of all sorts of careers will also be important. I happily represent Hackney South and Shoreditch, where understanding how to work digitally and adapting quickly has been a hallmark of people’s success in surviving and coming through the pandemic so far, so it is definitely something in which we need to train people.

Those examples are the reason for my hunch about what might be necessary. Putting people on six-month intensive courses—my local college reckons that that could be done for between £3,000 and £3,500 per person— could quickly get them out of unemployment, off benefits and into work. Alternatively, as they may still be on furlough with their job winding down, facing redundancy even if their sector survives, it might be better to train them before they have to claim support from the state.

There is a constraint, however, about which I hope the Minister will give us some reassurance, even though it is not her remit alone. Those six-month intensive courses, for which I just gave the costs, would entail only 15 hours per adult per week, because under the current rules the college cannot start planning a longer course. If anyone studies for 16 hours or more, they are no longer eligible for benefits. That trap will be devastating as we come out of covid. People will be trapped on benefits because they have lost their jobs, but they will not be able to train for other jobs because they would no longer be able to claim benefits. We would find ourselves in a Kafkaesque circle of doom.

I hope the Minister will try seriously to tackle that. If that time threshold were raised, colleges could be so much quicker and more efficient in targeting and supporting adults back into work. Funding for that sort of short-term, swift reskilling would usually come from the approved national skills fund, which is, again, something over which the Minister can have some very direct influence, I hope.

That fund is normally released in the summer. We are now in November and already in our second lockdown, meaning that people will lose their jobs. The Minister knows that one of my bugbears about all Governments is what I call cost shunting, which is something that the Public Accounts Committee highlights all the time. If we do not get that money to train people now, many of them will start claiming benefits and there will be all sorts of ramifications for their lives, homes, livelihoods and so on. That will cost them, the state and the taxpayer a lot more in the long run.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough mentioned the apprenticeship levy. The Public Accounts Committee has looked at this and we were concerned that, in order to get the money out of the door, it is quite easy for companies to put money into MAs and other higher-level apprenticeship programmes. I think we would all acknowledge that the levy was really intended to train people in much lower-level careers, so that they could either reach higher levels or change career.

I do not have all the answers, but the Government need to look at how the levy works. As the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), has said, it is criminal for that money to be levied, only to then go back into Treasury coffers. I am sure that we would all back the Minister if she took on the Treasury and demanded that that money be syphoned back into education. We might find a harmonious point of cross-party agreement in these challenging times. I launch that campaign here and now, and tempt the Minister to agree with it when she responds.

I am sure that the Minister has our support to act fast. We need safeguards in place, but I have no desire to see more of my constituents lose everything just because we have a bureaucratic deadline of next summer rather than November and the 16-hour rule that prevents those who are studying from claiming benefits. We need to unjam the system so that people who want to work and retrain are encouraged to do so with every tool in the box. Colleges stand ready and waiting. I pay tribute to East London Advanced Technology Training, which trains people in my constituency but is already losing students because of the loan scheme.

Will the Minister also look at the loan scheme for level 3? Many people will not take on the debt now, but they need support to ensure that they are retrained and can work and support themselves. My constituency is poor, but there is no poverty of ambition. I now have the new poor: people who had good jobs and want to work again. They just need a little leg up. They do not want a handout—they want a hand up. I hope that the Minister has heard me and will answer my questions.

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[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is pleasure to serve under you, Mr Hosie, and to follow the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse). I wish to start on the point with which she ended. I have seen the power of the union learning fund and how it can transform people’s lives and prospects. At a time such as this, when we know that so many people will lose their jobs, we see the importance of the fund. It is not just about the fund; it is about the union learning reps who accompany people into training and support them through it in the workplace. That is the transformative element that the trade unions have worked on, offered and developed, It is not just a beacon in the workplace, but a springboard to take people forward in their career.

[Meg Hillier]

I thank my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse). The fund is so much better value for money because through it people can be properly supported into training and that does not involve throwing good money after bad. Someone is properly trained and qualified when they have completed their course.

[Rachael Maskell]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. She is absolutely right. When a course is completed, we see the impact on productivity. We know that the Government have had a real problem improving productivity, so I would have thought that would have seen the value of something that helps them with that. If the ULF is ending, I trust that a Rolls-Royce version of a new fund will come forward that embraces the value of trade unions on the ground. They are there to work alongside workers.

I want to touch on my local colleges in York. We are fortunate to have two: York College under its principal, Lee Probert, and Askham Bryan College, our agriculture college under its principal, Tim Whitaker. They face specific challenges in this covid period and I thank them both for their leadership and all the staff for what they have done over the past few months. It has been a really challenging time in ensuring that their environments are covid secure and that they are gearing up to support our economy. They certainly need help.

The two colleges have come together with York’s two universities to form Higher York, which does not look inwards in education, but looks out to localities, society and the economy to see how we can rebuild our city’s economic base, which is so important at this time, and so release the potential opportunities for our community. That will be particularly important at a time when unemployment in York will be absolutely devastating—among the worst in the country. We are staring down that barrel at the moment, and it is deeply disturbing. Higher York needs more support to deliver that transformative agenda, which we desperately need.

Higher York can drive the economic recovery in our city, and I believe that further education, blended with higher education, is the key that is needed to unlock our economic recovery at this time. As Higher York is proving, we need colleges to be at the heart of shaping the local economy and the skills base that will be required in the future. Taking a local economy place-based approach to skills planning is so important. I recognise the matrix of needing to look at sector skills, which has very much driven skills strategy for a long time, but we also need to look at local place. With devolution and many other measures being put in place, the local economy is very much coming to the fore.

Given how our economic base is developing, with specialism in particular segments of the economy, skills provision can really boost the local economy and blend with employers’ opportunities and needs now and in the future. A lot of work has been done in York on the green economy and how we can sustain the bioeconomy, which I spoke about in this Chamber only a few weeks ago. That could see a growth of 25,000 people through a skills process to enhance skills. That is at the root of how we build a recovery into the future.

I want to address a number of things with regards to covid. The first is what I shall call the basic need of having a covid-secure environment. The Government have come forward with the obligation to provide that, and rightly so, but there are costs, none of which are recoverable at the moment. York College, for example, has spent £400,000 on becoming a covid-secure environment. That is money that the college wants to put into education, and therefore it is important to see some of it recovered.

Secondly, cash-flow issues are particularly acute at the moment. My colleges have come forward with a simple solution to help—something the Minister probably barely needs to ask to change, but it could make a real difference—which is the alignment of the economic cycle between the Education and Skills Funding Agency, the funders of FE, and the colleges. The ESFA funding year runs from April to May and the colleges’ from August to July. That causes a real cash-flow difficulty. A little tweak to the system would make a world of difference.

On the issue of capital funding, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) mentioned earlier, Askham Bryan College in particular is an old college. The facilities are tired and yet the match funding is prohibitive, especially at a time such as this, with the additional pressures the college is facing. I ask that the issue is revisited, so that some more capital grants can be made available to FE, because the estate is important to delivering vital education to young people and adult learners.

The fourth issue is the wider funding formula, which we know is crucial in order to gather skills. We often look at the minimum cost of provision, but there is a wider cost. We need to look at the wider costs of not investing in our learners, particularly in things such as the recruitment and retention of staff—technical as well as teaching staff—which is really important. Obviously the wider economy is a draw, but we must ensure that we can deliver classes. Class sizes at the college in York are getting bigger and bigger, and the opportunities in the curriculum are getting smaller and smaller, in order to try and balance the books. This should be a key investment. I would therefore welcome a further education White Paper if it had a proper funding formula for FE hardwired into it.

My fifth point is about mental health investment. Many young people have felt the stress and strain of covid. I know from discussions with the principal and previous principals that York College has had challenges around the mental health of its students. We need to ensure proper mental health facilities are in place. It does not have the resources that are invested in universities and is not benefiting from any of the investment in the schools mental health programme. I ask the Minister to look at a mental health approach for FE, and for proper resourcing for facilities.

Finally, I want to talk about the longer-term opportunity and planning for further education. We have a really big challenge ahead in the skills that people are going to demand for the new economy. As I have said, it is for local areas to plan their approach. It will improve productivity and rebuild the economy, but, more importantly, it will give people a bridge from their current place of employment into new employment, without having to go through the massive dip of unemployment. That is what I fear. That linking through for every person on the cusp of losing or their job—or even before that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch pointed out powerfully—would enable us to sustain our economy and protect people. Everything should be done to enable that process. I am working with the trade unions and the local not-for-profit sector, as well as Citizens Advice and the jobcentre, to see how we can ensure that there is a skills-based approach to recovery injected into our city, but we need support from the Government.

I was concerned about the impact of the apprenticeship levy being returned to the Treasury; it is a lost opportunity for investment. Back at the beginning of the current crisis, there was a call-out for shovel-ready projects to try to kick-start the economy and build skills. I would ask for shovel-ready apprenticeships and opportunities in order to use that money wisely and to invest in the skills that are needed now. Colleges would welcome the opportunity to reach out further.

I have a final point on asylum seekers, who are arriving at this very difficult time and are being placed in difficult circumstances. There is a lack of connectivity into FE. In my city, young people have been placed in a hotel, without a connection into college and skills. I appreciate that that could be quite a transient group, but there is an opportunity to engage young people who are coming here and to ensure that they are on that learning journey. It is a good use of resource and time, but the connectivity between the Home Office and education is not there. It would be really good to see more investment in those connections at a time when people are waiting for their applications to be processed, not least because it is taking so long at the moment.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Gillian Keegan)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) on securing this important debate. I know that FE is close to her heart; she has first-hand experience, having served on the board of governors for Sheffield College. I am delighted to be discussing the vital issue of funding FE for young people and adults, and agree with all hon. Members who have said that it is especially important as we seek to recover from the impact of the global pandemic.

FE delivers not only high-quality provision for our 16 to 19-year-olds, but lifelong learning for adults. It provides learners with fundamental skills and gives them the opportunity to partake in learning that they may have missed out on in school, giving them a vital second chance, as the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) said. Equally, it gives learners the opportunity to retrain, to learn new skills, to go on further in learning and to progress in their careers.

All hon. Members here are passionate about this issue—that comes through in their speeches—and their constituents are really focused on it as well: it means such a lot for their everyday experiences and for the opportunities of their children. I am personally truly committed to the sector, having left school at 16, started an apprenticeship and been trained by an FE college in Merseyside that unfortunately is no longer there—much like most of my schooling, actually; none of the places I went to are there any more. Hopefully, there is no correlation between that and the fact that I attended them.

Over the last decade the level of FE funding has fallen, and Governments have had to make difficult choices about public spending, but we are now making real, positive changes for the FE sector and I know hon. Members will all be delighted with what they see in the FE White Paper. The spending review of 2019 saw the first FE funding uplift in a generation, and we have increased 16 to 19-year-old funding by £400 million. Of course people will call for more, but that is a 7% increase—the biggest injection of new money in a single year for a very long time, with funding increasing faster for 16 to 19-year-olds than for five to 16-year-old schooling. That has been welcomed by the sector.

[Meg Hillier]

I cannot let a figure glibly spoken like that pass—it may be, in percentage terms, the biggest injection of cash in a single year, but that is because for at least seven years, if not more, there has not been even an inflation-level rise in funding for local authority FE colleges. The Minister should be a bit more cautious about how excited we are supposed to be about even trying to begin levelling up FE to where it should be.

[Gillian Keegan]

I appreciate the hon. Lady’s comments. FE funding is quite complex, because at the same time over this decade we have also invested £2.5 billion in apprenticeships, and we will come to the many new areas of investment, all of which have benefited FE colleges. We have already announced one of those: the £1.5 billion capital programme for the transformation of the FE college estate to make colleges great places to learn. That will enable our colleges across England to have buildings and facilities that can deliver world-class tuition. We are not limiting ourselves to a single country, but we want to be world class, and I am committed to that.

We want to give people of all ages the opportunity and means to participate in lifelong learning, to learn valuable skills and to have the confidence to retrain in new areas. That is why we have also committed £2.5 billion to the national skills programme. The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) mentioned the national retraining scheme, but we have replaced what was left of the £100 million with that £2.5 billion, which is a massively increased investment. There is no way that that is not an increase.

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[Gillian Keegan]

I am very happy to, because I asked that question just as I was leaving to come here, and the number of requests for emergency funding has not changed: it is still just those five colleges. However, things clearly will change, and we are now going through other changes as well. Another month’s lockdown could have impacts on other incomes, apprenticeships and so on, so we keep this issue constantly under review, and keep a team in place to help people and make sure we are aware of any stresses and strains on the system.

[Meg Hillier]

The Minister obliquely referred to the 97% tolerance level—that is, where 97% of students stick to their course, the funding is given at 100%, whereas in London if 90% of students stay, the colleges get 100% of the funding. Is that something that she will be looking at, or can have a discussion about? That little bit of tolerance can give a little bit of flexibility to colleges, and perhaps prevent them from getting to the point where that is a contributory factor in their coming to the Department for emergency funding.

[Gillian Keegan]

The flexibility that we have introduced is to make sure that attendance is not impacted by coronavirus, through having blended learning and dual systems in place. That is going to be increasingly important, because some people may be shielding or may be with people who are shielding, and will have concerns. That is why we have insisted on having the capability and flexibility to offer that learning in many different ways.

For those people who are not able to take up a job or a work-based learning offer when they come to the end of their learning, we are investing over £100 million in a brand-new offer of classroom study in high-value subjects to support 18 and 19-year-old college and school leavers to progress into employment. These courses are aligned to priority areas for economic recovery and well-paid, rewarding jobs, and as the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch mentioned, in some cases that could lead to increased numbers for those particular courses. We are considering the impact that this will have, and are considering providing extra funding during the year to help support those colleges.

For those who have minimal work experience and lack the skills or confidence to enter employment or start an apprenticeship, we are making £111 million available to triple the scale of traineeships. These are like pre-apprenticeships, and they can be very flexible, specifically tailored to the needs of young people and adults to help them into the workplace. They provide opportunities to develop further skills, work preparation training, work placements and sector-focused vocational learning or support a transition into work or an apprenticeship. They are also designed to help people get on to the next stage of an apprenticeship.

A number of hon. Members have mentioned apprenticeships. Some £2.5 billion a year is invested in apprenticeships, and we have introduced a lot more levy flexibilities to try to ensure that all that money can be utilised. We have put in place 25% to transfer within a sector or a supply chain, which I know has been welcomed. We need to work more to make this function better, because it is a bit clunky at the moment.

We need to focus on SMEs and the opportunities that they provide for apprenticeships. We also have a redundancy service, which we have just put in place, for apprenticeships. There are some signs of good news. More than 1,000 employers are advertising vacancies and opportunities at the moment on that service for those who find themselves redundant.

It is essential that every young person has access to an excellent education when they finish compulsory schooling at 16. The Government plan to spend over £7 billion this academic year to ensure that there is a place in education or training, including apprenticeships, for every 16 to 18-year-old. I appreciate that the base rate of 16 to 19 funding has been static for many years, so I am pleased that we were able to increase it by 4.7% this year.

We are also transforming technical education in this country, providing a lot more opportunity, particularly through the introduction of new T-levels. These pioneering qualifications will create a highly skilled generation of students who are able to meet the needs of industry. It is fantastic to see that providers have begun the roll-out of T-levels for 16 to 19-year-olds. I am sure hon. Members will visit their local colleges and I urge them to see the students there. It will give hon. Members a real boost. One chap said to me, “When I saw the curriculum and I heard about it in my school assembly, I thought it was too good to be true. Now I am on my eighth week and it is even better than I thought.” To hear young people so excited about those qualifications is amazing. They are also welcomed by the sector, because they attract a significant amount of funding and capital investment. I look forward to rolling those out, because that will provide another stream of funding—up to £500 million per year when they are all rolled out.

I recently visited my local college in Chichester and met some of the trailblazing students. Their enthusiasm and excitement is really catchy. The state-of-the-art technologies that they are using are brilliant to see. I have seen the latest equipment in manufacturing and the latest technology and software. I have seen them using virtual reality and immersive technologies. Those are the gold standard in technical education, which is why I feel confident that we will have a world-beating system.

We want to support and encourage providers to deliver programmes that will really help young people and adults to succeed in the labour market and, in particular, are valuable to employers, even if they cost more to deliver. That is why we have introduced a premium pay to providers to deliver level 3 qualifications, which are of high value to businesses but cost more to deliver

We need to provide the skills that employers and businesses are looking for. It is vital that we are in step. It is such a fast-moving market; we have seen that even more with coronavirus. I have worked for 30 years, and technology has impacted businesses’ operating models unbelievably quickly. We need to ensure that we keep in step.

The lifetime skills guarantee will give adults who missed out on that first opportunity the chance to succeed by fully funding their first full level 3 qualification, as was mentioned by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch. I hope that is welcome, because it is a breakthrough and it is something additional. It will really give adults a great chance to progress further in their careers or change careers completely.

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[Meg Hillier]

A few moments ago, the Minister said that there would be some discussion about potential in-year funding for colleges. Does she have a date for that, or do we need to wait? Is she expecting it to be announced in the forthcoming spending review?

[Gillian Keegan]

I do not have a date right now—I will come back to the hon. Lady—but it is something that we are discussing and it has been raised a number of times.

We are acting quickly, and in a way that we have not had to do and have not done before. The skills toolkit, which we have put together to give people something to do while they are on furlough, is a great example of that. We have discovered that during the last lockdown about 22 million people took to learning, so there is a massive appetite among people to learn. We need to look at those opportunities, and the skills toolkit offers many different courses. I encourage hon. Members to promote that far and wide to their constituents, and to the many people in their constituencies who may want to signpost people to those courses, because they have been developed by employers and with employers, are of a really high quality and can help people to upskill in their own time.

The Government are committed to supporting and encouraging high value, but of course we do not want to neglect the basics; the basics are important. A digital entitlement has just been introduced—from August—and that is key. Half the adult education budget is devolved, including to the Sheffield city region, from next year, which is in line with the commitments. Of course, we also have the European social fund, which is in place till 2023, and the UK prosperity fund, which will increase it.

I want just to touch on capital, which was mentioned. The £200 million is the initial £200 million of the £1.5 billion, so there is £1.3 billion still to go—I am proudly boasting that we have £1.3 billion more to go. We brought the £200 million forward for two reasons. One was that there are a lot of repairs and day-to-day things that colleges want to do; but also we wanted to encourage them to kickstart some of the local market in terms of construction, so there was a “Build, build, build” element to that as well.

We are also investing up to £290 million in institutes of technology. Those are across the country; there will be 20 of them. That fantastic collaboration will make a massive difference to the opportunities for young people as well.

Our FE sector is diverse and resilient. It supports learners of different ages and backgrounds to develop the vital skills that they need, including for green jobs.

[Meg Hillier]

Will the Minister give way?