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Do 14-19-year-olds really win from the budget?
The dust may be settling on the latest budget and reality bites, but I'm left wondering if education really stands to gain anything. This is particularly true of the 14-19 group, who are supposedly at the core of the present government's drive to push up standards and raise skills.
Alistair Darling announced that there would be £250m this year and £400m in 2010-11 for post-16 education. This, he stated, will create 54,000 extra places in sixth form colleges and further education (FE) colleges, with consequential provisions for the whole of the UK. But if you're in an FE institution in England and have been hit by the farcical financial arrangements that the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) made for capital projects, you'll realise that there are unlikely to be the basic accommodation needs to house the influx of new learners.
Certain colleges are left with campuses that resemble bomb sites rather than bastions of education after the LSC declared that it didn't have the money to honour the contracts it had signed with colleges for replacement, or upgrading of buildings.
To add insult to injury, English colleges and sixth forms had been told by the LSC earlier in the month that they would not be funded in line with their predicted rises in student numbers for the coming academic year. Across England, there was a shortfall of up to 3.7 per cent, which translates to around £200m, although Darling believes that, with the funds being made available for the next two years, he can still create the extra places announced.
If you're an FE lecturer in Wales, you may have been one of the 700 that were threatened with redundancy right up until the day before the budget, when the Wales Assembly backtracked on its proposed cut in teaching staff following efforts by lecturing staff, students and Fforwm, the association of colleges in Wales, to get them to change their minds.
Our educators and learners have enough to do without having to battle for the existence of a provision that ministers said was at the forefront of their drive to bring the UK in line with the rest of Europe and make us truly competitive. The promise that the government made that every 16-17-year-old wanting to stay in education could do so seems some way off.
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