Catholic Sixth-form Colleges

Nick Gibb Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. It is not for the first time in my case, but I am not going to say that it is too often—it is never enough.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) on securing this debate. Catholic sixth-form colleges make an important contribution to education in this country and the Government recognise the distinctive role that they play. To address the important issue raised by the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane), we value faith schools generally. I share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) that it is the right of parents to be able to bring up their children in their faith and that the state should provide faith schools to enable them to do that. The Government have provided capital through the voluntary-aided route to enable the Catholic Education Society to establish more Catholic faith schools in this country.

I am aware that the Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills has met the hon. Member for Harrow West to discuss the issues facing this group of colleges. The Minister has also recently seen at first hand the quality of the educational and wider opportunities provided to young people at St. Dominic’s Sixth Form College in Harrow. I welcome the opportunity to explore the issues further today.

I want to begin by paying tribute to all the hard-working staff, principals, heads and governors in those colleges. Sixth-form colleges at their best not only provide excellent academic education, but help provide direction to young people and help them to grow in maturity through those crucial years. They allow young people to develop outside a school environment, giving them the aspiration to achieve in whatever field, job or career they want to pursue. Catholic sixth-form colleges provide that within an atmosphere of moral guidance and pastoral support.

Catholic sixth-form colleges represent a significant proportion of sixth-form colleges in England—14 out of 60, not including those that have become academies—and 17% of sixth-form college students attend a Catholic college. Such colleges are focused on meeting the needs of local communities and are key to our drive to improve social mobility. A high proportion of students in sixth-form colleges and 16-to-19 academies are from disadvantaged backgrounds. Colleges provide excellent support to help those students achieve high results and progress to sustained education, apprenticeships or employment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) was right to point to the priority that Catholic sixth-form colleges give to social justice. My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) pointed out that 12 of the 14 Catholic sixth-form colleges are rated “good” or “outstanding”. Academic excellence has always been, and remains, at the core. More than a third of sixth-form colleges are rated by Ofsted as “outstanding”. Looking at the 14 Catholic sixth-from colleges in England, the picture is even better, with seven out of the 14 rated “outstanding”, and five other colleges rated “good”. I recognise that that has been achieved in increasingly challenging financial circumstances.

Of course, an Ofsted rating is only a snapshot and I know that colleges are constantly reviewing their practices and procedures to see whether further improvements can be made. Two Catholic sixth-form colleges, for example, have benefited from support from the Government’s strategic college improvement fund. St Dominic’s Sixth Form College is partnering with St Francis Xavier Sixth Form College in south London. The fund supports colleges to improve the quality of provision and helps to mobilise and strengthen improvement capacity within the further education sector.

I congratulate sixth-form colleges on the successful implementation of the reforms to A-levels over the last few years, with the first wave of exams in 13 new subjects in 2017 and a further 12 last year. The reforms will continue to be rolled out over the next two years, with the first exams in a further 20 new A-levels in summer this year and another 13 next year. Exam reform is never easy. In the last 30 years, we have had four significant reforms to A-levels—the introduction of the advanced supplementaries, Curriculum 2000, which introduced the AS/A2 structure, the introduction of the A* grade a decade ago and now demodularisation.

In the run-up to the spending review that is expected later this year, we have been looking closely at the sustainability and funding of the FE sector, including sixth-form colleges. The Government understand that the sector faces significant challenges, and the Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills has made it a personal priority to address the constraints and their impact over the last year. Campaigns such as “Love our Colleges” and “Raise the Rate” have helped raise the profile of FE and sixth-form colleges and their important work.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East raised the issue of 16-to-19 funding for colleges compared with sixth forms in schools. We have ended that unfair discrimination between colleges and schools. All institutions now receive funding according to the same base rate. The funding system aims to ensure a common entitlement. The same formula is applied to all students and different institutions now receive the same funding rate.

However, we recognise that funding per student in the 16-to-19 phase has not kept up with costs. We protected the base rate for funding for 16 to 19-year-olds at £4,000 until the end of this spending review period, but that is, of course, against the backdrop of previous reductions and the impact of inflation—reductions that happened because we had to tackle the historic and unsustainable deficit that we inherited in 2010, representing 10% of GDP. As my hon. Friend the Member of Harrow East pointed out, we prioritised protecting core school funding for five to 16-year-olds, because that is where the biggest influence on life outcomes happens.

The position has been made more difficult by reducing numbers of students. The number of 16 to 18-year-olds in the population has been falling for 10 years and it is now 10% lower than in 2008-09.

The hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) raised the issue of the lower base funding rate for the third year of 16-to-19 education. She is right to do so, but that lower level does not apply to students with special educational needs.

As the hon. Members for Harrow West and for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) pointed out, capital funding is a key concern for sixth-form colleges. Unlike general further education colleges, sixth-form colleges can bid for the condition improvement fund along with schools. Unlike academies, SFCs can borrow, and many have productive relationships with banks, although some of them have found it harder to borrow in recent years—a point that was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East.

We recognise that an important challenge facing sixth-form colleges in many areas over the coming years is to prepare for the anticipated increase in student numbers. That increase is, of course, an opportunity to recruit additional students and receive the associated increased funding, but in some cases it needs extra up-front investment—for example, to build new classrooms—so we will look carefully in the spending review at how we can help colleges to prepare for the increase in student numbers that many of them now anticipate.

It is true that we have made a teacher pay grant available to schools and academies to ensure that they can afford to implement the school teacher pay award this year, and that it did not extend to FE or sixth-form colleges. Compared with maintained schools and academies, colleges have a different legal status and relationship with Government, and they are not covered by the recommendations of the School Teachers Review Body. We concluded that we could therefore not extend the teacher pay grant to colleges. We are considering colleges’ needs separately ahead of the coming spending review, to help make the case for the best FE funding. The Government are concerned about ensuring that FE colleges can attract and retain the staff they need to deliver high quality education. Again, we welcome the input of Catholic sixth-form colleges.

[Gareth Thomas]

I am not sure I accept the argument the Minister is making for the last pay award, but let us put that to one side for now. Can he tell us whether he has sorted the issues, so that the next teachers’ pay award will be fully funded not only for colleges that are academies, but for those that are not, such as the Catholic sixth-form colleges that have been mentioned and all post-16 institutions?

[Nick Gibb]

That will be very much an issue for the next spending review, but perhaps a neater solution would be to address the issue of the conversion of Catholic sixth-form colleges to academy status. I am aware that the issue of academy conversion is very significant for this group of colleges. Indeed, each Catholic sixth-form college was asked to consider joining an academy in the reports of the further education area reviews covering their areas, but I understand that only three of the 14 made an immediate decision not to pursue that option.

I should explain—as other hon. Members have explained—that the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 includes specific freedoms, which permit Catholic sixth-form colleges to maintain and develop their religious character. Fully equivalent protections are not included in the legal framework for 16-to-19 academies, which are a distinctive type of institution compared with other academies established through the Education Act 2011. The provisions that allow sixth-form colleges to consider faith when appointing governors and staff, and that allow them to teach religious education and provide collective worship in line with tenets of the Catholic faith, do not currently exist for 16-to-19 academies.

When the legislative framework for 16-to-19 academies was first established, we did not envisage establishing them as faith-based 16-to-19 institutions. At the time, our view was that EU directive 2000/78/EC prevented the creation of new post-16 vocational institutions with a religious character. We had adopted a blanket approach, so that no post-16 provision could be established with a religious character. We are now exploring how to put in place the right conditions to enable Catholic sixth-form colleges to convert to academy status with their existing freedoms.

I know that my ministerial colleagues have met representatives of Catholic sixth-form colleges and the Catholic Education Service to discuss this issue. As the hon. Member for Harrow West pointed out, it would require primary legislation to make the necessary changes, but the Government’s legislative programme does not yet provide the scope for such legislation. We will of course keep this under review in future parliamentary Sessions, and we will continue to work with this group of colleges and with the hon. Gentleman to try to find a solution to this problem.

[Bob Blackman]

Clearly there is the issue of any potential legal impediment. Will the Minister confirm that, provided the United Kingdom leaves the European Union on 29 March, that legal impediment will fall way and it would be up to the Government to bring forward a change in the law—a private Member’s Bill could achieve the same—that would enable Catholic sixth-form colleges to academise if they chose to do so?

[Nick Gibb]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. I think later legal advice shows that the issue is more nuanced than that, and it might be possible to legislate even while we remain subject to the EU directive. I very much hope that we can take that forward when an opportunity arises.

Last year, sixth-form colleges raised concerns about the creation of new 16-to-19 free schools and the approvals process for academies to create new sixth-form provision. We have listened to those concerns and strengthened the criteria we use to assess new sixth-form proposals. For all schools that apply to open a sixth form, we have set a clear requirement that all local sixth-form and FE colleges must be consulted prior to a business case being submitted. Furthermore, during the last free school application wave, we were explicit that all applications for new 16-to-19 provision must provide evidence of need for additional places in the area, and that any request is likely to be approved by exception only. In the guidance for wave 14, which we published recently, this requirement was strengthened further.

I conclude as I began: by paying tribute to the excellent academic achievements of Catholic sixth-form colleges and their support for improving social mobility among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. I recognise that such colleges have particularly felt the tightening financial circumstances, despite our protection of the base rate of funding. The issue of academisation is significant for the sector.

I echo the sentiments of the Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills when she spoke at the winter conference of the Sixth Form Colleges Association in January. As we prepare for the spending review, explaining the issues through opportunities such as this debate will help provide strong arguments for the sector. More importantly, the continued delivery of excellent education and strong pastoral support and guidance will be the best advert for further investment in Catholic sixth-form colleges and all colleges in this important and high-performing sector.