Apprenticeships and skills minister Gillian Keegan has said the government’s planned approach to clawing back adult education funding is “fair”. 

Colleges have urged the government to rethink the plans, which would see a clawback of adult education funding for institutions delivering below the 90 per cent threshold. That threshold had previously been at 68 per cent.

Responding to a question from Labour shadow apprenticeships and skills minister Toby Perkins in Parliament today, Ms Keegan said the government had increased funding for the further education sector “quite significantly in many different ways”.

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She added that Mr Perkins’ categorisation of the adult education funding issue was “wrong”. “We have effectively gone from 97 per cent, which is actually the clawback this year, down to 90 per cent, therefore giving colleges some allocation, some leeway,” she said.

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“The honourable gentleman refers to a previous year, which is true that we did reduce to 68 per cent, because that was at the very beginning of the pandemic and what we have asked providers to do is to still keep provision available, to move online, to give learners the experience and we have given them time to do that, and that is a fair approach.”

Mr Perkins had said: “The decision to increase the adult education clawback threshold from 68 per cent last year to 90 per cent this year and to impose it at the last minute will place many colleges in a brutal financial situation, with Leicester College, for example, forecasting they could be as much as £4 million worse off than expected.

“Now, this government can either commit itself to a skills-based revolution, as it claims it wants to, or it can endanger the sector by repeatedly cutting its funding, but it can’t do both. Why is there such a dangerous discrepancy between what the government says it wants on further education and what it does?”

Earlier this month, MPs called on the government to reverse its plans. In a debate on the future of adult education at Westminster Hall, MPs - including Toby Perkins, Peter Aldous, Rachael Maskell and Fleur Anderson - urged the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) to urgently revise the decision to claw back adult education funding from colleges that fall short of a 90 per cent delivery benchmark.

Mr Perkins said it was a “ridiculous and damaging decision”. “For those colleges who don’t offer back-to-work courses or focus solidly on Esol [English for speakers of other languages] work, that target is totally unrealistic and will inevitably cause colleges to cancel provision, and, in many cases, make redundancies,” he warned.

The call came as the Association of Colleges said that institutions might have to scrap T-level courses if the government pushed ahead with its cuts to adult education.

Association of Colleges chief executive David Hughes wrote to both education secretary Gavin Williamson and prime minister Boris Johnson warning of colleges being plunged into financial intervention, or forced to make large numbers of redundancies, if the government stands by its plans.

Mr Hughes said today: “Many MPs are worried about the impact of the AEB clawback on the financial health of their local college because colleges are vital for the Covid-recovery, so it is no surprise that ministers are being questioned about it again and again. Many adult learners were unable to learn online and many practical courses cannot be taught online, so it was always inevitable that some colleges, despite best efforts would struggle to deliver all of their programmes.

“The decision to clawback will force many colleges to reduce capacity right when people will need it most. The best solution, if the government is unwilling to look again at the threshold, would be take a business case approach, as it did successfully last year, and let colleges set out where and why they haven’t been able to deliver 90 per cent of their AEB provision. I very much hope that this can be agreed before it’s too late.”