Adult Learning

Pat Glass Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2014 Westminster Hall

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) on securing the debate, and I welcome the Minister to his post. We have entertained one another through two Education Bills, when he was a lowly Parliamentary Private Secretary, so it is good to see him in his elevated position.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

He was never lowly.

[Pat Glass]

Indeed.

We have heard that FE is the Cinderella tier of the education service. Although successive Governments have attempted to put additional funding into the primary and secondary sectors and—perhaps to a lesser extent—into higher education, tertiary or further education has long been underfunded and undervalued. However, all previous neglect pales into insignificance when compared with what we have seen since 2010.

It is becoming clear that the pace and scale of the most recent FE cuts is having a devastating impact on adult learning and the long-term economic future of this country. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has cut spending on the adult skills budget by 35%, with total spending falling from £3 billion in 2009 to £2 billion now.

The Department has, I acknowledge, chosen to protect a number of areas financially, and I welcome that. Community learning, offender learning and financial support for individuals have all been protected, and those who receive benefits or take courses at the lowest qualification levels continue to receive free courses, but I think—perhaps cynically—that that is more about massaging the unemployment figures than it is about improving learning. Funding for apprenticeships has been protected, so that the number of apprenticeships for those aged 24 and above has increased, but arguably it has increased far too quickly and at the expense of good outcomes, quality and younger apprentices. All that is forcing FE colleges to subsidise free training for adult apprenticeships at the expense of younger students. Even with all that, employers are still not prepared to deliver on their responsibilities. The Government have transferred £340 million to the employer ownership of skills pilots up to 2015-16, but so far only 20,000 students have started a training course through those pilots.

We have already heard about FE loans, so I do not intend to say very much more about that, except to bring Members’ attention to the recent research commissioned by the Association of Colleges, which highlights that the number of students on advanced and high-level courses who now require a loan, but did not in the previous year, has declined by 20%. It has gone from 107,200 students in 2012-13 to 84,300 in 2013-14.

In addition to the cuts imposed directly on FE colleges budgets by BIS, the Department for Education has also cut funding for students aged 18 and above. Although that is operational across the educational sector—it affects schools, special schools, sixth forms and so on—the most vulnerable students will be hardest hit, and most of them will be in the FE sector. Students over 18 on courses funded by the Department for Education are most likely, as we heard, to have missed periods of education, or have special educational needs, or be those who just need an additional year; a little more time to get the GCSEs that their peers were able to achieve at school. They are the young people closest to being NEET, and the evidence shows that such students will primarily be in the FE and adult learning sectors. When I questioned the former Secretary of State for Education, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), he said that he regretted the decision to cut 18-plus funding, but that it was the best worst option. The former Secretary of State left office with a £1 billion overspend on free schools and academies, but still saw the best worst option as being to cut funding to the most vulnerable students, the people closest to being NEET and the most likely to cost this country dearly over the next 45 to 50 years if we do not get it right for them now.

We have a strong higher education sector in this country, with a strong research base that is recognised internationally, but only 40% of our young people go to university. For the remaining 60%, good quality alternatives to full-time degree study are reducing. We need a rebalance towards technical and vocational education, and that is vital in ensuring the continued and sustainable growth of the economy. The last 50 years have seen a continuous gravitational pull towards academic education, which has accelerated since the conversion of polytechnics to universities. Academic is seen as good and vocational as bad, and anyone with any sense knows that we cannot build a sustainable economic future on that kind of foolishness. We have a skills shortage across the economy, and it is not going to be filled by a couple of city technology colleges and the odd engineering-based free school. We need a sustainable and high quality route to technical and vocational education, and that route is being systematically damaged through unsustainable FE cuts and the march towards the amalgamation of FE colleges.

Adult learning is at the heart of bridging the skills gap, and FE colleges are perfectly placed to deliver in a skills shortage. They are experts in the area. Following years of investment by the previous Government, many have state-of-the-art facilities, are widely respected by local employers and are at the centre of their communities. We need to maintain that, stop cutting the heart out of our adult learning and FE systems and recognise their role in our recovery.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Skills, Enterprise and Equalities (Nick Boles)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. It is also a pleasure, and an unfamiliar one, for me to be in a Westminster Hall debate—although we are not actually in Westminster Hall—in which I am not facing a crowd of angry Back Benchers from my own party; they are much less gentle in their attacks than Labour party Members have proved to be today. That was my experience as planning Minister, and an uncomfortable one it often was. It is reassuring to find myself in the traditional position of mainly facing criticism, as well as inquiry and constructive suggestion, from the Opposition. I am, however, also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) for his contribution.

We have covered a lot of ground today. I want to be clear that almost everyone who has contributed to the debate knows more about the area than I do. I am still myself an adult learner, and a rather slow one at that, so if I do not have the detailed technical grasp to answer all the questions, I apologise. I am happy to have further discussion and correspondence with any Members who feel that I have not adequately answered their questions.

While setting the context, I am afraid—I hope that the shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne), will forgive me—that I must remind the House of a few awkward truths. Clearly, there has of course been a substantial cut in the adult skills budget; no one is denying that or pretending otherwise. As the author of a notorious note, which I will forbear to repeat the few words of, no one knows better than the right hon. Gentleman the financial environment that we inherited when we came into government. I also suspect that, had his party stayed in government after the election, no one would have been more ferocious than him in making the case for protecting that part of the education system that every child must go through, and which is critical to every education—whether academic, technical, vocational or professional. That is, of course, the schools system. That is what the Government have done. It has been difficult and painful and it has involved sacrifices in other areas, one of which has been in the adult skills budget.

The second awkward truth that we all need to acknowledge is that much of the spending in the adult skills budget—

[Pat Glass]

Will the Minister give way?

[Nick Boles]

I am happy to.

[Pat Glass]

I want to remind the Minister of another awkward truth: the £1 billion overspend on the academies and free schools budget. The Government had priorities and they made decisions—they chose to put money into new and experimental areas, while making cuts that affected the most vulnerable children in our society.

[Nick Boles]

Let us put to bed the ridiculous shibboleth that somehow free schools are an experiment. Free schools are, basically, new academies; they are exactly the same as academies. Tell the children at free schools that their schools are somehow different or experimental and that the money spent on them, that £1 billion, is not spent on the education of the children of Britain. I think that they would give the hon. Lady the flea in her ear that she so richly deserves—