Worcester Further Education Colleges

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a real privilege to follow such an important and passionate debate. As a historian and as a parliamentarian, I associate myself with the important points that were made in commemoration of the holocaust.

It is a great pleasure to be able to speak on a subject that is dear to my heart and of enormous importance to my constituents. I am grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to the Minister for staying until the Adjournment to hear it.

In the week when we received job figures showing the lowest number of unemployed people, and young unemployed people, in Worcester since 2008, this matter touches on the skills that young people need to get into work and the opportunities that they have in our colleges. As a county centre for both education and industry, Worcester is fortunate in having a number of excellent educational institutions.

The Minister will be aware of my long-running campaign for fairer funding for our schools. Today, however, I want to focus on our colleges, particularly the two that provide opportunities for thousands of 16 to 18-year-olds in Worcester, the Worcester college of technology and Worcester sixth-form college. Although I appreciate that the debate is focused on further education, and that the college of technology is therefore the prime concern, I hope the House and the Minister will indulge me if I raise issues on behalf of both those important institutions.

There are similarities and differences between the challenges that the two institutions face and the nature of the capital funding that they require, but the illustration of those differences is an important point for the Minister to understand. She will be aware of the deeply lamentable record of the Labour Government on the capital funding of colleges. They presided in this area, as in so many others, over an enormous escalation of hopes and a catastrophic failure to manage and deliver. The sad story of the Learning and Skills Council, and its drive to replace functioning buildings with shiny new ones at enormous expense, is symbolic of much that happened under the previous Administration. Both Worcester colleges were victims of that saga.

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate, and may I add Kidderminster college, where I serve as a governor, to that list of Worcestershire-based colleges? It also had a £40 million promise cruelly yanked away at the last minute after something like £150,000 of important college funds had been invested in feasibility studies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Garnier]

I have finished.

[Mr Walker]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, which was intervened on, and I congratulate him on raising the case of his local college that was so cruelly treated by the last Labour Government.

Our sixth-form college in Worcester was promised a building programme that could have cost more than £30 million. It underwent substantial work in planning what it was told would be a complete rebuild, enabling it to expand its capacity and provide new and better facilities. It incurred costs of more than £200,000 in putting together a bid that would have been successful if the Learning and Skills Council had shown a greater degree of financial continence than the Government who presided over it.

With the collapse of the LSC, the school received not a penny. Not only were hopes dashed and promises broken, but ongoing repairs that should have been started were postponed and important maintenance work put off in the hope that a shiny new building would render it unnecessary. Problems that had helped to justify the need for a new building were made greater by the failure of the last Government to deliver on their promise. In short, it was a fiasco. Fortunately, the college of technology was not so far down the line with its plans and incurred fewer costs—only around £114,000. It, too, was encouraged to believe that at some point a magic pot of money would offer scope for new buildings and a move from a split to a unified site.

I am not sure whether the Minister has visited Worcester recently, but if she has she will have noticed that functional though they may be and although they occupy a magnificent site alongside our Norman cathedral in front of the River Severn, the buildings of the college of technology are far from being the most beautiful on the city’s skyline. I and many of my constituents hope that one day what the architect himself described as “functional concrete blocks” might give way to more elegant buildings, better suited to the role of inspiring minds. The college, recognising that a small up-front investment in bringing together disparate sites could reduce running costs and generate ongoing savings, hoped to make that happen, but such hopes were to be bitterly disappointed by the last Labour Government.

Some FE colleges elsewhere in the country received funding to replace nearly new buildings, but during the last term of the Labour Government, Worcester college of technology received no capital grants at all. Its principal, Stuart Laverick, described to me how

“the last Government’s inept management of the capital budget for the sector made the FE estates playing field very uneven.”

I regret that in his statement Mr Laverick, who is not known for being shy or retiring in defence of his establishment, may have understated his case. Our college of technology plays a huge role in providing skills for young people and adults, and in making people ready for work, yet it was left neglected by the last Government as their recession saw youth unemployment soar. Unemployment rose from 500 in December 2008 when the Labour Government announced the disaster of the collapse of their Building Colleges for the Future programme to a peak of 800 in August 2009—a peak to which, I am glad to say, it has never returned under the coalition Government.

I do not want to focus only on the past and the sad failings of the previous Government, but on what we can do, and what the Minister and her colleagues in the Departments for Business, Innovation and Skills and for Education have already done to help and the further steps they can take. There was good news for FE colleges in the autumn statement and the subsequent FE capital strategy, and a new £550 million investment programme has been announced for the FE estate. When rolling out that programme, I hope the Minister will ensure that lessons are learned from past mistakes.

There has been good news for many sixth-form colleges through the building condition improvement fund, which was wisely introduced to help some of those so let down by the collapse of the LSC. Investment received by Worcester sixth-form college under the coalition can truly be described as transformational. Faced with a crumbling exterior, leaky windows, wildly fluctuating temperatures, water leaks that were beginning to cause structural damage, and visible faults that were at risk of undermining the excellent academic work taking place, the management of the college did not sit idle. It put together well formulated plans to re-clad the building and invest in new windows and a new look over the space of two years.

The management discovered that, by using the approximately £1 million per year available from the building condition improvement fund and by planning carefully, they could cure many of the defects left by Labour neglect. The targeted investment of a reasonable amount of capital has enormously improved the energy efficiency of the building, and I am delighted that that means investment in a new heating system is now a viable option—in the city famed for its production of the best boilers in Britain.

The principal of the sixth-form college, Michael Kitcatt, wrote to me recently to set out some of the improvements. He wrote:

“As you know, the building was constructed in the early 1960s around a concrete frame and over the years, cracks had developed around the rendering which was enclosed by the frame. This was causing rainwater to penetrate into the ceilings and walls of the rooms. However, under the LSC’s capital programme in the middle of the last decade, we were encouraged to work on plans involving the building of a totally new College and demolition of the existing building. As a consequence, no money was spent on addressing the issues of the College building…The BCIF funding has been really valuable and means that, by the end of August we will have entirely overclad the building and replaced all the original windows. As explained above, the project has been undertaken for essential structural reasons in order to make the building sound and watertight for the foreseeable future. In addition, of course, the insulation installed and the modern double glazed windows have hugely enhanced our environmental efficiency. However, the project has also transformed the outside of the building aesthetically and we have had many positive comments from students, staff, parents and visitors about how good the outside of the building now looks, some even being along the lines of its looking like a new building.”

Of course, the principal would not be doing his job if he did not ask for more, and I would be failing in my job as his MP if I did not pass on his request. He goes on to say:

“In terms of continuing to address the issues of the building.... we are now working on [a project] to modernise the Science facilities and remove the temporary classrooms from the site. If we are to take this forward, however, we would probably need a funding scheme with more flexibility than BCIF has had so far, for example, the possibility of a two year allocation, giving greater certainty over the funding allocated and removing the need for all spending to take place in a single financial year.”

I can assure the Minister that if she or a colleague could take time to visit the college, they would see the very great need to upgrade its science labs, and the opportunities in doing that and removing the last remaining temporary classrooms on the site to reduce running costs. That would also raise the profile of science, technology, engineering and maths subjects, which the Government are doing so much to encourage.

As a member of the Business, Innovations and Skills Committee, I applaud the Government’s focus on STEM subjects and on encouraging rigour in the A-level system. Our sixth-form college has increasing numbers of students taking these vital courses. The Minister will be interested to note that enrolments in science and maths courses have risen from 1,074 in 2009-10, to 1,179 in 2010-11 and 1,239 in 2011-12. They reached a record 1,346 in 2012-13.

The college points out that the existing facilities are too small to accommodate the growth in demand and too outdated to maximise the benefits of the welcome increase in STEM enrolments with a commensurate increase in the student experience. I urge the Minister to give serious consideration to its next bid for funding and to look at ways in which the BCIF programme could be made more flexible to allow greater investment over a longer period.

The college of technology has not been eligible for the BCIF, which was focused on the sixth-form college estate and not the further education sector. The college has, however, received a total of almost £400,000 in capital funding over almost three years of the coalition Government from the renewable grant and the capital works grant. That is in stark contrast to the complete lack of capital in the period from 2005 to 2010. It has been allocated a further £120,000 for the current academic year under renewal grant phase 3, and has bid for funding from the Skills Funding Agency’s enhanced renewal grant.

Regrettably the college’s last high-quality bid for phase 3 of the initiative, which I wrote to support, was not successful. The principal has pointed out that, in his own words,

“the feedback we received in relation to our recent bid suggests that officials are still not effectively challenging inflated projections and unrealistic growth assumptions. The information provided during the bidding process suggested that a relevant focused narrative rather than some spurious unsubstantiated inflated figures would be given more weighting. At Worcester we therefore focused on how what we were proposing was aligned to the Worcestershire LEP and Worcester City’s development plans and supporting economic growth while meeting quality, employability, apprenticeship and NEET agendas as well as hitting space saving and energy saving targets…We were informed that the narrative was strong but we scored only 1s rather than 3s because the narrative was not backed by data to show the impact on learner numbers and success rate figures.”

He pointed out that the criteria on which they were judged and awarded scores of 0 to 3 were not transparent, and it was not always possible to get feedback on what data would be required or what figures would hit the scoring thresholds. More worryingly, he went on to say:

“Worse was to come when we were told we scored a zero on the Disability Discrimination Act compliance question because the Worcester proposal did not add to this agenda because we were already fully compliant. So those who rightly committed their own resource to comply with the law get less points than those who have allowed their estate to remain non DDA compliant.”

I am sure that, as a Minister with responsibility for equalities, she will agree with me that it seems ludicrous for the funding criteria to encourage colleges to actually break the law, and that we should support those colleges that have prioritised supporting their most disadvantaged students.

I have written to the Minister with responsibility for FE colleges, the Under-Secretary of State for Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock), with some more detailed feedback from the college of technology. I will not ask the Minister to address each of its points today, but I ask her to take into account the serious concerns it raised about the last round of ERG funding and ensure that future funding is distributed fairly and transparently. The good news is that the Chancellor announced significantly more capital funding for the FE sector in the autumn statement. I know that as we speak the college of technology is working on a new bid. I am also glad that the Government have brought forward the date for resubmissions for round 3 of the ERG, and I hope that if the college submits a revised bid, it can be given a fair hearing. Such a bid would be particularly beneficial in its impact, as the college has now announced its intention to move its remote Barbourne campus into the city centre and thereby consolidate its estate. Not only does that make sound financial sense, but it will benefit the city centre economy by bringing more students into local shops and restaurants, and bring the many vocational students who study there into closer contact with the working world. I recently opened a high street salon owned and operated by the college of technology, which is providing apprenticeships and genuine work experience in a professional setting to young apprentice hairdressers. I have every confidence that its work-focused approach will benefit many of my constituents. The college’s major role in supporting apprenticeships will make a difference to the employment prospects of young people in the county.

I do not ask the Minister to promise the world, as the last Government did. I thank her for the investment that the coalition Government have already made in colleges in Worcester. I ask her to listen to the concerns that I have raised and look kindly on the bids that these two excellent colleges will be putting forward. I ask her to liaise with her fellow Ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Education to ensure that we make a little money go a long way and, after the fiascos of the past, invest in reasonable, high quality, skills-focused projects that will make a real difference. I extend an invitation to her, and any relevant Ministers, to visit these two colleges and to see both the excellent work they have already done and their sensible plans for future investment.