College Funding
Debate between Mike Amesbury and Daniel Zeichner(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Daniel Zeichner
As always, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It is very difficult for people working in the sector to plan ahead. With years of area reviews, and all the rest of it, it has been a tough time. At the moment, the situation ahead does not look that good.
Further education colleges provide our communities with access to skills across the board. We see even more diverse challenges there. Although, in their response to the petition, the Government acclaimed their commitment to the adult education budget, in reality the initial teaching and learning funding allocations for adult further education and skills in England fell from a baseline of £3.18 billion in 2010 to £2.94 billion in 2015-16—a reduction of 14% in real terms—and more for the non-apprenticeship part of the adult skills budget. Since then, there has been an increase in funding for apprenticeships, but that really cannot make up for the thousands of people across the country who have suffered as a consequence of these cuts, and who want to upskill and reskill, as technology changes our jobs and our lives.
What about those who work in colleges? College staff were mentioned earlier. Staggeringly, college teachers are paid on average £7,000 a year less than those in schools, according to the University and College Union. In conjunction with busier jobs and fewer resources, this is stretching staff to breaking point, as any of us who go into colleges will hear.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
On that point, 57 members of staff were recently made redundant at Warrington and Vale Royal College in my constituency when the Northwich campus was closed. It is facing funding pressures of about £4 million as a direct result of this under-resourcing.
Daniel Zeichner
My hon. Friend is right and sadly there is a familiar story of not only redundancies, but insecure contracts. The level of morale is really challenging for so many staff. Unison’s head of education, Ruth Levin, pointed out that colleges have faced underfunding, leading to job cuts, course closures and larger class sizes “for many years”. She went on to say:
“Pay in further education has fallen by more than 21% in real terms over the past nine years”.
It is clear that further education colleges have been hit the hardest in recent years, and it is simply not possible to continue down this road of less funding and more demand.