Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Rupa Huq and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Thursday 21st March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

5. What estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of delays to planned rail reforms.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

15. What estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of delays to planned rail reforms.

Equality of Funding: Post-16 Education

Debate between Rupa Huq and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Tuesday 25th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

My hon. Friend is quite right; that is very worrying. A headteacher in my area talks about the difficulty of recruitment into the sector when there are far better options for pay within the wider teaching sector, let alone the idea that teachers of STEM subjects can often get better pay elsewhere. That seems wrong.

With the Budget and a spending review looming, the Government’s short-term priority should be to raise the rate, but the long-term ambition must be to level up funding and undo the mistake of 2011 to ensure that 16 to 18-year-olds receive the same investment in their education as younger students. There is little point in investing heavily in pre-16 education and even more heavily in higher education at £9,000 per student—depending on current moves in the HE review—if the pivotal stage in the middle continues to be overlooked and underfunded.

Sixth-form colleges and general FE colleges also face a number of specific disadvantages that exacerbate the issue. For example, since incorporation, colleges cannot reclaim their VAT costs, but schools and academies can. The Sixth Form Colleges Association estimates that the average sixth-form college has to redirect around £350,000 per year—4% of their income—away from frontline education of students to pay the VAT “learning tax”. What sits behind that and many other funding inequalities is the inexplicable decision to classify colleges as private sector bodies. Even private schools and private sixth-form colleges are not classified in such a way because they are third sector charities

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a passionate speech. I would add to his list another disadvantage to colleges. Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College was in massive arrears. The current principal, Karen Redhead, has turned it around towards being back in the black again, but the insolvency regime promises to punish her even further, while other people are being bailed out for not managing things as well as she has. Will my hon. Friend comment on that?

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

We need to look at those issues, particularly the way that we manage debts linked to buildings, which has got a lot of colleges into trouble in the past.

For sixth-form colleges in particular, the vast majority of their income comes from the Government, and a private sector classification is simply impossible to justify. A few years ago, the Government allowed a pathway for sixth-form colleges to become academies, but it is not right that the Government require a change of governance in the organisation for it to be classified as part of a particular tax band, rather than working out the best governance for the institution to give the best education, which is what we should focus on.

All colleges suffer when the Government decide to exclude them from initiatives such as early career payments, or funding streams such as the teachers’ pay grant, which was afforded to schools. Their incorporation in 1983 by the then Secretary of State, Keith Joseph, removing them from local authority oversight—a historic mistake that has led to a widening of the gap since the 1990s. Only the equalisation of structures across the board will solve the problem.

Brighton, Hove & Sussex Sixth Form College—or BHASVIC—is one of the sixth-form colleges in my constituency. It has grown by 630 students since 2014, but its income has grown by £1.5 million only, meaning that the student body is up by 21.7% but the income is up by 13% only. The principal of BHASVIC wrote to me saying that

“Whilst the additional income for 2020-21 is welcome, it barely makes up for inflationary cost pressures over the last couple of years”.

BHASVIC will use the money simply to plug the gap, rather than actually investing in IT, teacher development and other things that are needed, particularly for student wellbeing—colleges also face the burden of rising rates of mental health problems.

BHASVIC is one of the lucky few. It has been able to bid and draw from a limited pool of funding for capital works on academies. Unlike school sixth forms, colleges do not hav a dedicated pot of money and must bid against academies for building and maintenance. For general FE colleges, it is even more complicated in that they have to bid with local economic partnerships for funding. The myriad capital funding streams to pay for buildings leads to a lack of joined-up thinking and a postcode lottery of facilities in our education system.

The views of education providers, teachers and principals are unanimous: the funding gap has a devastating impact and is felt widely. When I secured this debate, the House of Commons digital engagement team posted on Facebook asking for feedback from students and staff. Abi, one of the respondents, said that her sixth form cannot even afford basic items such as extension cables for computers, and teachers are having to pay out of their own pockets for printing. That is totally wrong. A Reddit user said that A-level politics was dropped midway through their course because the teacher left and the school could not afford a new specialist in the department. Another student reported that their college has had to shut its canteen, which it cannot afford to maintain, so students now eat at the fast-food joints across the road, blowing out of the water any aspirations for healthy living and eating.

One way colleges have tried to manage those difficulties is through a flurry of mergers into super colleges in an attempt to pool costs or recreate the services that the local education authority provided before 1993, but such mergers often mean a centralising of course provision in just one or two campuses across the network, and lead to teachers and management being further away from the students and communities they serve. I do not want to say anything bad about any individual colleges—many have staff who do fantastic work—but the mergers render the Ofsted regime not fit for purpose. Multi-academy trusts are inspected per campus, but for a multi-campus set of FE colleges, there is only one inspection, so we have no idea of the differences between two campuses offering the same courses and options. That lack of granularity renders the Ofsted inspections almost worthless.

Erasmus Plus Programme

Debate between Rupa Huq and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Thursday 21st June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I totally agree, and I believe the Government are in favour of the Erasmus+ scheme. We have heard positive sounds from the Government, but we now have to put our money where our mouth is.

Erasmus+ is a valuable resource that contributes a vast amount of scope and depth to the British university and youth sectors. My former colleagues and I spent three years in and out of Brussels negotiating the current scheme, which was formed in 2014, and it brought together the Socrates, Erasmus, Leonardo, Grundtvig and Youth in Action programmes—the higher education, technical education, schools exchange and youth work programmes—and sometimes we forget that Erasmus+ incorporates all those different sectors of exchange.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent and powerful speech. I went on one of the predecessor schemes. Has he seen the figures from Universities UK showing that 7.8% of black and minority ethnic graduates who have not studied abroad are unemployed, whereas 4.6% of black and minority ethnic graduates who have taken part in student mobility projects, such as Erasmus+ and its predecessors, are unemployed? I did it, and I did not turn out too badly.

The Government place great faith in the race disparity audit. Does my hon. Friend agree it is important that we should cherish and prioritise Erasmus+?

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I totally agree. Some predecessor and current programmes of Erasmus+ are particularly good at diversity; 50% of its participants are from economically deprived or other minority backgrounds, and it helps improve not only grades, but longer-term outcomes. If I may say so, my hon. Friend has done very well for herself.

With a budget of €14.7 billion, Erasmus is an educational scheme that is not only continental, but global in reach.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. There are examples coming out of our ears of the good work that the programme does.

Last month, Universities UK launched its Go International project to outline the reasons why international exchange is vital for our economy, education sector and young people. It also produced a very good little report. In fact, the Minister for Universities came and launched the project with us and said some good words about the importance of international exchange. We need those good words to turn into good actions, so that we can secure the Erasmus programme’s position. I believe that we all share that desire.

[Dr Huq]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, as well as the obvious numerical and financial benefits that higher education brings that we can see in Horizon 2020 funding and the Galileo programme, there are also socio-cultural benefits, as he has alluded to himself, to these type of exchanges? The fact is that, two years on from the referendum, we are still in the dark about what will happen post 2020. That shows that, with a lack of contingency planning, the Government rushed into this referendum, and they still do not know what they are doing now.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

rose—