16-to-19 Education Funding

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[Nic Dakin]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. The reality is that the squeeze on funding for education for 16 to 19-year-olds puts pressure on special needs support not only in colleges but in school sixth forms. This issue covers sixth-formers wherever they end up in the system.

Recent research from the Institute of Education describes sixth form education in England as “uniquely narrow and short” compared with the high-performing education systems elsewhere in the world in places such as Shanghai, Singapore and Canada. Our sixth-formers are now funded to receive only half the tuition time of sixth- formers in other leading economies. As my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Thelma Walker) pointed out, as little as 15 to 17 hours of weekly tuition and support has become the norm for students in England, compared with 30-plus hours in Shanghai. Students in other leading education systems receive more tuition time, study more subjects and in some cases benefit from a three-year programme of study rather than two.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making some incredible points. Students are rightly now staying at school until 18 and those extra two years are important in tackling the country’s skills challenges. Does he agree that we need to invest properly because otherwise we will be reduced to a core curriculum rather than the expansive experience that young people need to prepare them for life beyond school?

[Nic Dakin]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The tragedy is that already the post-16 curriculum has shrunk so we are already in danger of getting to where my hon. Friend describes, and there is concern about where we might be going in future.

The funding that schools and colleges now receive to educate sixth-formers covers the cost of delivering just three A-level or equivalent qualifications, and little more. As a result, the wider support offer to students has been greatly diminished. That means it is increasingly difficult to address properly the concerns expressed by employers that young people lack the skills to flourish in the workplace. The CBI’s 2016 education and skills survey, for example, expressed concern about the current education system, with its emphasis on grades and league tables

“at the expense of wider personal development”.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we need to continue to commit and invest more in the sector to ensure that it does not shrink further.

I think everybody would agree that programmes of study in which students have too much free time are not effective at getting the best out of them. The students are in transition from a fairly directed pre-16 learning environment to the independent learning of HE and the world of work. That transition needs to be properly and appropriately supported.

On a recent visit to Scunthorpe’s brilliant North Lindsey College, the excellent principal, Anne Tyrrell, remarked on how the demands from students with mental health problems had grown exponentially in recent years. Many schools and colleges lack the resources to address the sharp increase in students reporting mental health problems. That is a real issue that has been compounded by cuts to NHS and local authority budgets. The charity Mind recently found that local authorities now spend less than 1% of their public health budget on mental health. We know that students with better health and well-being are likely to achieve much better academically and that participation in extra-curricular activities has a positive effect on attainment. Such things are interlinked and related.

It is clear that the student experience in schools and colleges is deteriorating as a result of the funding pressures that hon. Members have drawn attention to in their own constituencies across England. For example, two thirds of sixth-form colleges have already shrunk their curriculum offer; over a third have dropped modern foreign languages courses; and the majority have reduced or removed the extracurricular activities available to students, including music, drama and sport.

Even more concerning, almost two out of three colleges do not believe that the funding they receive next year will be sufficient to support students that are educationally or economically disadvantaged. So the underfunding of 16-to-19 education is fast becoming a real obstacle to improving social mobility.

As costs continue to rise, the underfunding of sixth- form education is becoming a major challenge for all providers. Schools increasingly find themselves having to use the funding intended for 11 to 16-year-olds to subsidise their sixth forms, which risks damaging the education of younger students. Small sixth forms in rural areas are increasingly unviable, lacking the economies of scale to provide students with the rounded education that we all believe in.

Grammar schools are increasingly raising their voices in serious concern about the underfunding of 16-to-19 education.