A traumatic shake-up of community education is being predicted by adult and youth service leaders as the Learning and Skills Council starts to assert its authority.

Plans by local LSCs and education authorities to tighten the way future community education in schools is organised have been strongly criticised.

The “strategic plans” to be published next month will explain why and how responsibility for planning adult learning should be removed from community colleges and schools.

One intention is to ensure that new target groups of disadvantaged people don’t miss out, and that the LSC’s ambitious participation targets are met. Freeing schools to implement Government reforms and gathering evidence of value for money are other motivating factors.

But Phil Street, chief executive officer of the Community Education Development Centre, sees a potential discrepancy. “At a time when ministers are talking about extending schools’ capacity to be the focus for more learning by local communities, this latest strategy is flying completely in the opposite direction.

“If there is no local ownership, then how are the LSCs going to achieve their targets? They are robbing themselves of very important allies.”

Community education, Mr Street claimed, was economically viable; it dovetailed with social policy and made political sense.

The colleges for 14 to 19-year-olds have a long and proud tradition of offering youth training and guidance, plus adult classes and under-fives facilities for parents during the school day, complemented by a comprehensive range of evening and weekend activities.

There is no uniform pattern in England. But in areas such as Somerset, Cambridgeshire, Devon and Leicestershire, community colleges have pioneered adult and youth learning alongside formal secondary and further education. This, they argue, has many mutual benefits for young people and adults, as well as school students.

Principals of Leicestershire’s network of 25 community colleges, long regarded as the model for others to emulate, are now campaigning hard to salvage the service after seeing the LEA’s plan a few weeks ago. Noel Melvin, head of Ibstock Community College, warned: “The local LSC and the LEA don’t realise what they’ve stirred up.

“It’s a complex but successful system that needs to be preserved, not destroyed,” he said.

LEAs will themselves feel the weight of the LSC command from April 1 this year when they will merely become providers of services. Their strategic management of adult education and training will transfer to the 47 local LSCs. The new Connexions initiative is expected to take over most existing youth service provision. A national funding formula is pledged to be introduced from August next year.

Local LSCs want LEAs to create “area teams”. These would report to equally new central teams, enabling local LSCs to have a single point of contact for the entire service, giving them a clearer picture of what is going on.

Expenditure should concentrate more on social inclusion measures in deprived parts of the country, with postcodes a key factor to decide where extra money should be spent.

Yet funding cuts of between 5 and 15 per cent are also envisaged, even though there is no consistent spending on adult and community education across the land. Spending per student ranges from pound;6.01 to just pound;1.91. And local differences emerge too on the numbers of adults attending community education courses.

Enrolments are more than double in some county councils compared with figures for similar areas, where there can be one-third the teaching hours in comparison with the best-performing authorities.

A spokesman for the national LSC denied there would be less money in the system. Overall allocations from this May would mean funding had risen 4.1 per cent since 20012. “This is a considerable gain and means adult and community education has done well compared to the rest of FE,” the spokesman said.

Doug Nicholls, general secretary of the Community and Youth Workers Union, backs a more coherent approach to end “piecemeal provision”. He thought it made sense for greater centralisation in some areas.

“The new arrangements are a positive move in certain circumstances, such as where there is fragmented or little community education,” he said.

“But if the overall objective is to trim costs, then this really does contradict government policy of bringing learning closer to communities.”

According to John Slipper, vice-principal of Countesthorpe Community College, also in Leicestershire, community colleges can deliver the LSC agenda “without having to endure radical and damaging change”.

He added: “The crisis has been triggered by the issue of who has the power. The LEA thinks we have too much and so it wants to undermine our integrated working practices and, at the same time, cut costs,” he claimed.

However David Nelson, executive director of Leicester LSC, said his organisation was not putting undue pressure on the colleges and that the two sides still shared an “excellent relationship”.