The Mind Has a Reason for Talking Aloud

In 1992 the government of the day decided that Further Education Colleges should be removed from Local Authority control and become independent.  No one is entirely sure if they mean the same thing to happen to sixth form colleges, or whether it was a quirk of the legal definition.  Whichever it was from 1st April 1993 over 100 sixth form colleges became independent and able to strike out on their own.

Initially funding was based on what each College had been given by their Local Authority prior to incorporation, but this was normalised to a standard rate over a period of five years.  Funding systems have been radically overhauled several times in the last 22 years, but they always end up depending on a number of factors.  At NewVIc we did pretty well out of that as Newham Council had been generous to us.

(NewVIc summer 1994 – Jacqui Mace gives Chandannai Bhalla flowers; Peter Kelbrick, Barbara Alexander, Clare Williams and Sid Hughes in the background)

Each time a government minister decides it is too complex and a new system is drawn up that is simpler than the previous one.  Then it is consulted on and it is explained that extra funds are needed for students with Special Educational Needs; more is needed for students from deprived areas; more is needed in London due to the higher salaries (from the higher cost of living); more money is needed for expensive science and engineering courses, and so on.  Inevitably the new formula ends up as complex as the old one by the time everyone has finished.

The terrible thing for post 16 education in the last ten years has that funding has barely increased, it was totally frozen from 2015 to 2020.  Worse than that, for students who were 18 years old at the start of the academic year, funding was cut by 20%.  There was no justifiable reason for this, just that the Department for Education had to save money and the Post 16 sector has less political clout than other parts of education.

We are now in a situation when students between the ages of 16 and 19 are funded at a 24% lower level than those in schools and around 40% lower than those at university.  The result of this has been a reduction in the amount of teaching time for students and in extra-curricular activities. 

Sixth Form Colleges have the added disadvantage of not being able to reclaim VAT, unlike schools and academies.  This quirk of the system was nearly overturned in 2015, but at the last moment the Treasury blocked it.  Conversion to being an Academy would save the average College around £300,000 a year but would mean loss of autonomy and no guarantee that provision would continue to exist.  Schools also have business rates, copyright fees and insurance paid centrally, on top of their funding.  This has meant that since incorporation student numbers matter to Colleges as the provision of services is easier with a bigger cohort.

Another consequence of the funding cuts has been the withdrawal of funds for adult education.  Not just the evening classes “for fun” like pottery and basket weaving, a staple of Colleges in the 1970s and 1980s (famously seen in an episode of The Good Life) but even courses in vocational subjects to enable people have left school with minimal, or no, qualifications to obtain high level employment.  Now these have to be funded by personal loans.

There were a lot of unsavoury funding practices that happened in the 1990s and early 2000s – like subcontracting.  This involved colleges claiming funding and employing private sector companies to deliver the work, skimming a large amount off the top.  This practice was eventually discontinued as so much of the provision was low quality or even non-existent.  Institutional memory at the DfE is short and sub-contracting has returned with the same issues.

After incorporation in the 1990s there were many cases of dubious use of public funds.  Outreach centres being built on the Caribbean; fact finding tours to the Greek Islands by senior managers.  Senior managers staying in expensive hotels, flying first class and indulging in meals that cost over £100 per head.  Sadly this is another thing that has crept back in recent years as the DfE has less resources to oversee the sector.

None of the lessons were learned when the government introduced Academies.  New generations of Civil Servants and SPADS knew better than people working in the sector.  I have worked in Finance as long as anyone in the sector – yet no one at the DFE thinks to ask me, or the others like me, if things have been tried before and what happened.

That is the problem with UK government in general.

In our sixth form Graham Irwin was a big fan of Secret Affair.  No idea what happened to him.

My World