Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government why ornamental horticulture and floristry has been removed from Annex C of the funding regulations for post-16 education.

The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) does not hold the total spend on horticultural education and training for students over 16 years old. This is because the agency cannot disaggregate this information from the data that they hold.

Ornamental horticulture has never been an identified occupational area in the criteria used to assign specialist status; consequently it has not been removed from Annex C. However, the specialist provision group (a group with whom the ESFA consults which includes representatives from land-based colleges) agrees that ornamental/amenity horticulture requires very similar resources to production horticulture (which is an identified occupational area in the criteria), and therefore that the list of land-based occupational areas will be updated so that production horticulture changes to horticulture (thereby including ornamental, amenity and production horticulture).

Floristry was removed from the criteria on the advice of the specialist provision group when the criteria were reviewed in November 2015. It was removed because it does not require exceptionally significant resources that must operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout the year - a fundamental principle in awarding land-based institutions specialist resources.