Commenting on the Education Secretary’s speech ‘Further education
will be central to our mission of levelling up the nation’, Geoff
Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and College
Leaders, said:
“We hope the Education Secretary’s warm words about the
importance of further education are backed up with adequate
funding.
“The truth is that colleges have been woefully underfunded by the
government over the last decade. The situation is so serious that
the government itself introduced an insolvency system because of
the risk of them going bust.
“The most recent example of the neglect of further education was
the government’s recent announcement of a £1 billion education
catch-up fund in which it decided that no money should go to the
post-16 sector.
“We are also not sure why the Education Secretary feels it
necessary to denigrate the value of higher education in setting
out his ambition for further education. FE and HE both have a
place in developing the skills landscape and most FE colleges
offer higher level and degree courses, often working in
partnership with HE. Both sectors are of vital importance to our
young people and our economy and already provide a variety of
pathways to skills and careers.
“What does need to happen is an end to the false and pervasive
divide that sees academic routes as superior to technical routes.
The government’s relentless focus on insisting that academic
qualifications in a set of traditional subjects are the gold
standard for all children has helped to reinforce this
perception. We need to provide young people with a wider range of
equally valued academic and technical qualifications.”
