Dame Mary Ney deserves our thanks for her insightful review, which exposes the appalling consequences of a decade of austerity, the failure of the government’s FE reforms and the lack of ministerial awareness of the financial crisis engulfing our crucial FE sector.

Last week, Gavin Williamson without the self-awareness you would expect of someone who had served this government for 10 years, said that "for too long it [FE] may as well have stood for Forgotten Education". 

This report makes clear it was this government’s reforms and budget cuts that led to FE being forgotten. It is also revealing that this report has been published a full nine months after its completion, which hardly suggests a government eager to put right their decade of failure.

News: Ney review on college financial oversight published 

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Ney Review: The government's response

With nine months to consider their response, minister Gillian Keegan’s woefully simplistic summary that Dame Mary’s "principal conclusion is that the government must have a strategic relationship with FE colleges" fails to do justice to the report or to the scale of the issues the report highlights.

The report makes clear that cutting 60 per cent of staff from oversight functions at ESFA has left the organisation under-resourced to the extent that the relationship between it and struggling colleges was insufficiently close to identify problems in an appropriate time.

Dame Mary is forced to recommend measures such as the ESFA incorporating annual conversations with individual colleges that would seem to be such obvious best practice it is remarkable that it needs saying.

Dame Mary is clear that the current mechanisms and reforms are inadequate to address this failing and, for all the government’s rhetoric about the importance of the FE sector, the truth is that colleges are collapsing and young people are being let down by these failings.

A lukewarm response

The Ney review demands urgent government action to address a widespread failure that is allowing our further education sector to drift towards bankruptcy, which makes the lukewarm response from ministers to this report all the more concerning.

In her report, Dame Mary recommends that the approach to further education funding should be streamlined and simplified. This will be music to the ears of every college leader throughout the country, but again is contrary to the current direction of travel, which is a government that has continually added further complications to funding streams.

Since the report was written, Covid-19 has occurred, and its impact has further exposed the effects of 10 years of devasting cuts to the sector. Despite recent announcements, many colleges are set to make redundancies in the next few months, which could leave colleges unable to respond should there be the expected increased demand from students this September.

The government must recognise that the funding situation for FE is increasingly dire and that its mechanisms leave the sector distanced from help. It should also know that its response to the report fails to reassure anyone that the government understands the problems it is facing, much less that it is closing in on solutions.

The secretary of state may have remembered that he forgot about FE but he appears no closer to a plan to revive it.

A great deal of uncertainty remains for the next academic year. Without urgent action to reinforce oversight functions at ESFA, provide clarity about capital funding and provide real-time funding to prevent the funding lag, Hadlow will not be the last college to hit a crisis with origins in Whitehall.

I am pressing the secretary of state to make a statement to parliament imminently to confirm that he will address the failings identified and confirm if he will adopt the recommendations. Our crucial FE sector deserves no less.

Toby Perkins is Labour's shadow apprenticeships and lifelong learning minister