Education Funding

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. As he said, we are all delighted that more money is going into education, but like the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and my noble friend Lord Addington, I have reservations. Mine focus on the part of the Statement relating to colleges. As we know, our FE colleges are underfunded and unloved and have been for far too long, yet they often not only provide outstanding education but are a community resource and provide community cohesion. I want to ask the Minister about two matters. First, the Statement says:

“Colleges and further education providers will receive an extra £25 million to deliver T-levels”.


T-levels are totally untried and untested, whereas there are a raft of well-established and well-understood vocational qualifications—I declare an interest as a vice-president of City & Guilds—which could continue to do great things if they had better funding behind them. Why is this funding going only to T-levels, which are not yet tried and tested and about which we know very little, and not to all the work-based qualifications which provide the skills that the country desperately needs?

My second question repeats that of my noble friend Lord Addington, which I do not think the Minister replied to. It relates to the pernicious practice of trying to get youngsters repeatedly to resit GCSE English and maths, only for them to fail again and again. All one does is reinforce failure and leave people demoralised and thoroughly fed up about education. Nobody argues with the idea that young people need literacy and maths skills, but GCSE is not the right vehicle for that. Colleges spend an awful lot of time and resource trying to put youngsters through those wretched exams and watching them fail again and again. When will the Government rethink and bring in some functional literacy and maths tests which would be far more appropriate for the youngsters who have to resit?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Baroness raises important points. It may be worth summarising some of the specific funding coming into the FE sector, because I know that she is a passionate supporter of it, as am I. I am very pleased that, under my new Secretary of State, I will have greater involvement in the FE sector and look forward to discussing some of these issues personally with the noble Baroness.

We will invest an extra £400 million in colleges and school sixth forms; there is a 7% uplift of 16 to 19 funding, not including the increase in funding for pensions. The total includes protection of and an increase in the 16 to 19 base of £190 million, with £120 million for colleges and school sixth forms so that they can deliver on subjects which require perhaps more expensive teachers, such as engineering and so on. I hear the noble Baroness’s concerns about T-levels, but we are also adding another £10 million for the advanced maths premium. There will be an additional £20 million to help the sector continue to recruit and retain teachers, and there will be £35 million more for targeted interventions to support the area that the noble Baroness is concerned about; that is, resits. Some of that money will be used to look at different ways of trying to help children who perhaps do not learn in a traditional way. In 2019, more than 46,000 pupils successfully resat their English GCSEs, as did 35,500 maths pupils, to obtain a standard pass. All those children whose careers were blocked by not having maths and English have cleared that hurdle this year. I am one of seven children in my family; only two of us got maths O-level, so I know exactly the frustration faced by children who struggle with these subjects, but we are on the right course and I hope to use some of this additional money to see whether we can find better ways to reach them.