Responding to the government’s announcement in the Queen’s Speech
of a Lifetime Skills Guarantee, Geoff Barton, General Secretary
of the Association of School and College Leaders, said:
“It is great to see this commitment to giving people the
opportunity to train and retrain at any point in their lives. But
where are the policies that are needed to ensure that more people
get the qualifications that they need first time round?
“There is a significant and obdurate attainment gap between
disadvantaged children and their peers which starts right from
the early years and which means that many young people end up
with reduced life chances.
“A concerted effort is needed to tackle this issue by boosting
investment in early years education, providing more support to
schools that serve the most deprived communities, tackling child
poverty, and improving the dire level of government funding for
16-19 education.
“And the qualification system itself also desperately needs to be
reviewed so that it works well for every young person rather than
condemning so many students to a sense of failure.
“The Prime Minister talks about providing the rocket fuel for
levelling up through this legislative programme but we need more
action across education and fewer rhetorical flourishes.
“We note also measures for more government powers to intervene in
colleges that ‘fail to meet local needs’. It is reasonable that
the government should be able to step in if colleges are truly
failing learners.
“However, that rarely happens in practice and if further
education was funded properly in the first place, colleges
wouldn’t be in the financial difficulty that many of them
currently are.”
