Further Education
Debate between Neil Carmichael and Baroness Laing of Elderslie(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)
St Helens college has shown good, strong and innovative leadership, but it gets funding now only where there are job opportunities and training. Teachers from my college went to the Liverpool docks, to Dock Road, to provide education, at 7 o’clock in the morning, to some 200 Chinese speakers who did not speak English. It was a huge success. There are no bounds to what that college does. It has the inside of a plane to train people in flight hospitality—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. It might be a valid point, but it is not a speech.
Neil Carmichael
I nearly made an intervention myself. I listened to the thrust, however, and obviously I agree that strong leadership should be combined with the good management of resources.
The second characteristic is an ability to embrace other mechanisms and other types of FE colleges within the wider framework of an overarching body. It is important to note here the success of UTCs being run in conjunction with an FE college. This is going to happen in my own constituency. We have a UTC, with a training centre making use of a decommissioned nuclear power station, that is bringing together the kind of training we need, specifically for renewable and nuclear energy. So we have to be more innovative in how we structure these things.