The chair of the Commons Education Select Committee has said cuts to further education budgets were “not an accident”.
Speaking in the House of Commons this afternoon, Robert Halfon called for FE to be better funded and said the current national funding formula needed reforming.
He added: “I hope the House will forgive me if I take this opportunity to give my strongest support to the plight of further education, which has for far too long been the poor relation between secondary and higher education. By 2020, we will be spending the same amount in real terms to educate and train 16- to 18-year-olds as we were in 1990.
“I was shocked to discover that this was not an accident of history, but in fact the result of a conscious policy choice almost a decade ago. FE is a great example of why a national funding formula in and of itself is not a panacea: without there being enough money to go around, it doesn’t matter.”
Read more: IFS: FE the ‘big loser’ in education funding
Background: Chancellor urged to ‘show colleges some love’
Podcast: Tes FE Podcast: Governors and the insolvency regime
Emma Reynolds, Labour MP for Wolverhampton North East, cited a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that showed FE had faced the largest cuts of any area of education.
She added: “I really think we need to look again at the funding for these colleges because I know there are many of my constituents who may not want to stay at school and may want to study a more vocational subject at college.”
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Conservative MP for the Cotswolds, told the House that Cirencester College had to cut subjects and mental health services because of the lower funding formula for 16- to 18-year-olds.
Ten-year funding plan
On the issue of funding, Mr Halfon called for the Department for Education to be given an NHS-style funding plan.
He added: “Ministers need to take a leaf from the book of the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England in making a bold bid for a 10-year, long-term plan which starts to close the gap between the inputs - broadly in this context, the money - and the outcomes, both at an individual level in the form of emerging from school a well-rounded person with prospects and the wider economic level of having young people ready and able to fulfil the productivity part of the picture.
“We don’t, I would argue, fully recognise the potential value of getting our education system right and the DfE should be making as much as it possibly can of that in its negotiations with the Treasury. We have, as a country, recognised the long-term necessity of funding the NHS but without, it seems, the prior necessity of getting school and college funding right as a vital public service.
“I hope that ministers will use the support for a 10-year, truly long-term plan in this House to secure the best possible deal from the spending review, and I hope that this will be the start of a different sort of planning for schools and colleges.”
