Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department is taking steps to help ensure that increases in Further Education funding are used to (a) address recruitment and retention and (b) support colleges’ abilities to deliver on skills policy.

Colleges and other further education (FE) providers are responsible for setting the pay of their teaching and support staff. The government plays no role in this process.

The department is investing an additional £185 million in the 2023/2024 financial year and £285 million in the 2024/25 financial year to drive forward skills delivery in the further education sector.

This funding is to help colleges and other providers to address their key priorities, particularly tackling recruitment and retention issues in high-value subject areas critical to the economy.

This investment is being delivered via core 16 to 19 funding, including through boosting programme cost weightings for higher-cost subject areas, as well as increasing the per-student funding rate.

This investment is additional to the £125 million of funding the department has made available in the 2023/24 financial year to boost the national 16 to 19 funding rate and subject-specific funding. This means 16 to 19 providers are seeing a larger than expected increase to funding rates.

For the 2023/24 academic year, there is a 8.3% increase in the average 16 to 19 programme funding per student funding compared to the 2022/23 academic year.

The department is also delivering a programme to directly support the sector to recruit excellent staff, which includes a national recruitment campaign. The department is also strengthening and incentivising the uptake of initial teacher education, for example through teacher training bursaries in priority subjects worth up to £29,000 each, tax free for 2023/24.

To boost recruitment and retention of teachers, the department will give early career teachers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and technical shortage subjects, working in disadvantaged schools and colleges, up to £6,000 after tax annually on top of their pay. This will double the existing Levelling Up Premium paid to school teachers, and extend it to all FE colleges for the first time.

The Spending Review 2021 set out an investment of £3.8 billion in skills across this Parliament to enable learners to access the skills and training they need to transform their lives.

Each year, the department holds annual strategic conversations (ASCs) with each college in England where we meet the colleges senior leadership team. ASCs build upon the government’s response to the recommendations made in Dame Mary Ney’s Review of Financial Oversight of FE Colleges and the FE White Paper. Through the regular dialogue of ASCs and termly delivery conversations (TDCs), the department has established effective relationships with each of its statutory FE providers. This has enabled the department to develop a holistic view of each institution. With a clear focus on the priorities for development of skills provision, the ASCs and TDCs are informing both the department’s deployment of advice and practical support to colleges, and its wider policy and decision making.

Investment is also continuing in leadership and management development, which supports retention of staff. The Further Education Commissioner and her team are supporting the sharing of effective practice to enable delivery to be as efficient as possible whilst remaining high quality.