Daniel Zeichner
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Further Education Funding
Daniel Zeichner Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
Recently, Carolyn Fairbairn, the director general of the CBI, spoke at Cambridge Regional College and said that further education colleges have “politically been neglected”, which has led to their historic underfunding. I think that theme will come through in many of the contributions this morning.
I represent an education city, but I see it as my business to speak up just as much for the further education sector as for the famous universities for which Cambridge is known.
When I spoke recently to the director of Cambridge Regional College, Mark Robertson, he detailed many of the funding issues that have been raised this morning. I asked what it would take for him to really make a difference. He smiled ruefully at me and said, “Even a 5% uplift would be absolutely game-changing.” It seems to me that it is important to get that across today: colleges are not asking for a revolutionary change regarding their settlement; they are asking for a relatively small reversal of the damage that has been done over the last decade.
The situation is particularly difficult in areas such as mine, where staff face very high housing costs, there is a lot of churn and a lot of people cannot afford to live and work there. Cambridge is an expensive city and if we compare the pay with that in some schools, we see that colleges are working at a systemic disadvantage.
One key issue is that students are being put through maths and English retakes consistently. I am told by staff that the retakes are very, very difficult. It is very hard to teach people who really do not want to be there and who are almost being set up to fail. I hope that the Minister will consider revisiting that issue, because frankly there are other ways of assessing whether people have the appropriate skills to take them forward. From what I hear, it seems that the retakes process is proving counterproductive. When I speak to Pete Mulligan, a local University and College Union representative, he says that it is really difficult for FE staff who can see ways of taking people forward when those people are being forced down a very narrow route.
I will not repeat the figures that we have heard this morning, but I suspect that the strong message to the Minister from both sides of the Chamber today will be that as we come to the spending review, particularly in the light of the skills challenges around our changing relationship with the European Union, it is really important that we get this matter right. Obviously, there will be an argument about funding and the comprehensive spending review, but the fact there are so many Members here this morning—I have counted at least 20 Members on each side of the Chamber—sends a strong message to the Government that the situation needs to change.