Paul Farrelly
Main Page: Paul Farrelly (Labour - Newcastle-under-Lyme)Department Debates - View all Paul Farrelly's debates with the Department for Education
College Funding
Paul Farrelly Excerpts(5 years, 3 months ago)
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Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)
I did not intend to speak because I was a long time in the main Chamber for the Prime Minister’s Brexit statement, so thank you, Mr Bone, for giving me the opportunity. It is a perfect segue, because the chief executive of Nottingham College, John van de Laarschot, used to be the chief executive of Stoke-on-Trent City Council, next to my area. He is a good man, and I count him as a friend.
The Minister will know well from the correspondence that we have had over the last year that Newcastle-under-Lyme has an excellent college—I hope that she will visit us sometime soon. Its principal, Karen Dobson, was awarded an OBE in the new year’s honours list, in recognition of her efforts and those of her team. I played my part in getting a £5 million contribution from the old Advantage West Midlands to make the construction happen, because there was no better argument for investment in regeneration than investment in people’s futures and in their further education.
I want to make one wider point, with the Chair of the Education Committee here, to the Minister. In Newcastle, since the reorganisation in the 1980s, there is only one school, St John Fisher, a Catholic school, that has a sixth form; everybody else goes to the college, more or less. Therefore, excellent though the college is, this is not simply a matter of choice. My plea to the Minister is that, be it on per-pupil funding or on teachers’ pay, the playing field between school sixth forms and FE colleges simply must be levelled. Not only is the current situation unfair to pupils and teachers; it discriminates against areas like mine in north Staffordshire, Newcastle and Stoke-on-Trent, which have a different school and college structure. I hope that in the coming days, weeks and months, as the Minister goes in to bat in the Treasury, her Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton), will pursue that argument with her vigorously.