16-to-19 Education Funding Debate

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Department: Department for Education

16-to-19 Education Funding

Alan Whitehead Excerpts
Thursday 7th September 2017

(6 years, 6 months ago)

Westminster Hall
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Alan Whitehead Portrait Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
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Like my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins), I wish to shine a spotlight specifically on sixth-form colleges. Many hon. Members have discussed them in this debate; some have one in their constituency, while others do not, due to the distribution of colleges around the country. I have one in my constituency; there about 90 unequally distributed around the country, but in Hampshire they are an integral part of sixth-form education, with nine colleges in the county.

I often think that sixth-form colleges are the poor relations of the poor relation, because they are classed neither as technical education nor as continuing education in the more traditional sense. They will not get much assistance, for example, from the proposals to increase investments in technical courses, because most students there are studying for academic qualifications such as A-levels, and their distribution means that it is easy for Whitehall to forget about them entirely.

I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), who criticised the failings of the 16-to-19 education system generally and its funding gaps and discussed the need for review. I fully support the campaign being mounted to close those gaps, but I think that sixth-form colleges need all that and more.

Let me turn to the problems faced by my local sixth-form college in Southampton. It is a first-class college. It certainly does not seek to lose students who do not match an ideal profile, unlike certain places; on the contrary, it welcomes and nurtures students who need some remedial help to pass their A-levels, and it hosts several hundred students in that position. As my hon. Friends have mentioned, that leads to numerous instances, in a three-year sixth-form, in which the college receives not £4,000 per student, insufficient as that is, but £3,300. Nevertheless, the college achieves outstanding results in more than half the Southern Universities Network’s “widening participation” categories, and gets twice the estimated level of university places.

It is, by any reckoning, a great place to study and a caring, nurturing environment in which to do so, but it battles constantly to maintain its standards and curricular opportunity due not only to the per capita funding formula but to a number of other specific disadvantages. I will briefly mention two. Sixth-form colleges, unlike school sixth forms, cannot claim back VAT, as we have heard. That costs my local college in Southampton £300,000 a year, which is absurd. I have been lobbying for that to change for some time. The other issue is that colleges are funding on a rolling basis. That is not a problem if the school can roll out its funding across the years, but in the case of a two-year intake it can be difficult to sustain.

My view of my sixth-form college and its redoubtable principal is that they are miracle workers who battle on to make a deeply flawed system work for the benefit of the students, but something has to change. They desperately need an uplift in per-capita funding. They desperately need to be seen as having a place in the system and a secure future in it. I hope that the Minister will respond positively to that plea.