So, base rate funding for 16- to 18-year-olds will remain as it is. Again. That’s the seventh year in a row with no increase.

Is anyone really surprised? The annual announcement is now very much like a really bad run-up-to-Christmas tradition. Instead of daft jumpers, Secret Santa, and tinsel, we are bestowed with the gift of bugger-all extra money to carry on a continuously essential, yet increasingly difficult, public service.   

It’s as if, instead of Scrooge having a change of heart and bestowing kindness and coins upon those who sorely need it at the finale, he decides those ghosts were talking a load of old rubbish and he’s keeping it all for himself. The Cratchits will just have to take a few hits. Bah humbug!

‘Quiet resignation’

I don’t know what’s worse: the inevitability of it all, or the quiet resignation in response. Seven years of Father Christmas handing us a package, us tearing the wrapping paper off only to find an empty box inside, and all the sector can usually muster is, “Oh well, better luck next year,” a shrug of the shoulders and a wan smile. What we should be doing is tearing up the box, making Santa eat the damn thing and then rummaging around his sack until we find something half-decent.

Seven years of what is, in reality, cuts to the sector. Seven years of the tightening grip of a shrinking funding pot and the desperate responses to it. Seven years of lost staff, cut courses and the accumulated pressure to provide a decent standard of education on less and less and less and less and less and less and less (that’s seven lesses. One for each year. Goes on a bit, doesn’t it?).

So the sector continues to be boiled in its own pudding and as we wait for Scrooge to have a change of heart, we sit wrapped in our own chains.

Enough is enough

I’ve little power to change the situation. I deal with the effects of the squeeze in the best way that I can, but it’s not my area of expertise to try and ensure that the squeeze stops. But if someone, or a group of someones, come up with a viable plan to change things for the better, I’m there. Seven years is seven years too long for staff and students alike.

So perhaps we could start our own series of Christmas traditions - organised action at all levels, continued campaigns of awareness that push the voice of FE to the front of public consciousness, consistent political pressure. All the trimmings.

Because if these shadows remain unchanged, they’ll be no cause for celebration. Just what we’ve had year after year - less than zero. That’s a present that’s in definite need of returning.

Tom Starkey teaches English at a college in the North of England