In the News
After a summer which saw record GCSE grades achieved across England, concerns were raised (not for the first time) about funding for 16-19 education and providers’ ability to meet the demand for places. With the Chancellor’s Autumn Budget due later today, education leaders will be holding their breath to see if allocated funding will be enough, even for the next academic year.
The most recent wave of calls to reassess funding for post-16 education came with the release of a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) entitled Further education and sixth form spending in England. It set out that spending per student had fallen by 11 per cent since 2010-11, the share of 16 to 17 year olds in full-time education rose by 85 per cent during the pandemic, and is set to increase by 17 per cent between 2019 and 2024. As early as November 2020, just as the nation’s second lockdown was being enforced, concerns were raised that funding would not be enough, despite the 2020 Autumn spending review seeing 16-19 education received an extra £400 million.
Following this summer’s results, initial estimates suggested that £570 million would be required. However, given the rise in participation from the record summer GCSE results, that number would likely have to increase.
Industry Reaction
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges (AoC) has called for an automatic guarantee of additional funding for extra 16 to 18 year olds recruited each year, and said that the lack of annual pupil projections for the age group would make catering for every student “increasingly difficult”. He summed it up by saying, “The government wants more students to study in colleges but is not providing the funding needed and things will get worse as numbers rise, every year over the next decade.”
Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, called the current system of funding for post-16 education “completely inadequate” and stated that the Government “completely undervalues a sector which is vital to the life chances of young people”.
James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, feels the upcoming spending review is “the ideal opportunity to move… to a multi-year funding model where sixth forms can expand when they need to and provide all young people with a high quality education”.
One key reason offered on top of the rise in numbers attending post-16 education is the decline in apprenticeship places. On this Cheryl Lloyd, education programme head at the Nuffield Foundation, argues that “the wider funding system should be designed to incentivise and support apprenticeship opportunities”, otherwise the decline in apprenticeships take-up “could become permanent”.
Interview
This month, we spoke to Kevin Gilmartin, the post-16 and colleges specialist for the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), who feels that funding is the crux of the matter, not just for places, but for all manner of key aspects of the future of post-16 education.
What do you feel has caused the rise in numbers of students going into post 16 education?
You have got three issues. The main one actually is a demographic one. That’s been predicted for a while and we are just starting to see that. This year is probably the first year we are starting to see the increases. Two years ago it was around 1.1 million 16-19 year olds. We think by 2028/29 you are talking about 1.4 million.
So, it’s a substantial demographic increase. But we are also seeing other kind of stresses on the numbers. One of them is the decrease in 16 and 17 year olds going on to apprenticeships and then you probably have got a slight impact from grade inflation (we don’t like the term grade inflation) but centre-assessed and teacher-assessed grades over the last two years have meant more young people have thought ‘I can now access my college course or my sixth form course and stay on because of that.’
Surely, it’s a positive that more students are choosing to stay on into post-16 education?
Absolutely! We fully support that, it’s the right option for most people. If they are work ready then going on to an apprenticeship or training position is absolutely fine, of course. However the increases in student post-16 becomes a problem if the quantum of funding is not there to support the increased numbers.
Currently, the funding system is ‘per student’, but the promises being made are about more money going into the 16-19 system. The words ‘per student’ aren’t there. In other words, the size of the cake may increase, but with more people the end result could be smaller pieces all round.
There are also some streams of funding e.g. hypothecated pots (the government will give you this if you do something in return for it) that are not built into the funding system and so may not even reappear in this spending review. Areas like the maths premium, increased cost weighting for high value courses, and extra money for STEM subjects
So, per head funding and further funding for STEM subjects need to be set in stone; what else about funding needs to change for post-16 education?
The figure usually used for 16-19 funding is £4,000 per student, which is actually the 2013 figure. It was raised last year to £4,188, so the very minimum is for that £4,188, along with the additional hypothecated pots, and cost of living rises, to become permanent parts of the system. In our views, £4,760 per student is the minimum amount necessary to offer a world class 16-19 experience.
The 16-19 formula is a very clever piece of methodology which works, there just isn’t enough core funding.
My other point concerns the impact of demographic increases on infrastructure. Some institutions are using facilities that aren’t fit for purpose. Increased numbers mean that you start needing to utilise them or rooms that are meant for a different purpose. Take science labs, for example. If you’ve got 20 workstations, having 24 students is a major problem because you have students who haven’t got access to sinks or gas burners or other equipment, diminishing the learning experience.
Capital needs to increase; increasing student numbers cannot continually be kept being squeezed into the same space.
Why is it that we haven’t seen similar rises in numbers going into apprenticeships?
On the one hand there are issues regarding careers advice and guidance, we are naïve if we don’t accept that. Different parts of the education sector blame each other e.g. further education colleges saying schools aren’t letting them in to discuss non-academic options, despite the Baker Clause and other government initiatives which are “big stick” attempts to try and broaden careers information in schools.
Unfortunately schools cannot give the level of advice needed because there aren’t enough careers specialists available. The funding for this was cut in 2012/13 and has not been replaced. There have been various initiatives but no coherent national funding to help schools explain the opportunities that apprenticeships offer.
On the other hand, the employer levy has failed dramatically in terms of the numbers of opportunities available to young people. The levy has resulted in lots of firms trying to reclaim payments by forgetting about 16-17 year olds and focusing on older workers and often at higher levels of training e.g. those doing “apprenticeship MBAs” where firms can reclaim larger sums - that is a real problem.
Unfortunately schools cannot give the level of advice needed because there aren’t enough careers specialists available
Going forward, what will be the impact on post-16 education if these funding issues aren’t addressed?
If you need to take on more students and funding doesn’t increase, two things happen.
Firstly, you can take them and then the class sizes get bigger, or you only run the classes that allow a lot of students, thereby cutting the smaller subjects e.g. foreign languages. You are then directly or indirectly pushing young people to take the subjects that you’ve got available, which might not always be in the young person’s interest. That is the first consequence of not increasing the funding.
Alternatively, some institutions will say “we’re not going to take you”. Without apprenticeships, there is nowhere for those young people to go, and we’ll have an increase in NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). Because of cuts to local authority funding, the wrap-around support services to pick up and work with those NEETs - social care, mental health support, housing and welfare - are often no longer there.
When do you expect the pressure extra numbers of students brings to lift?
Looking at numbers coming through the school system - the numbers appearing in years 7 to 11 - we think it’s a good 5 to 6 years away.
There is no magic solution for sorting this out without extra money. Otherwise we are going to have to just accept very large class sizes in the 16-19 sector, studying a reduced choice of subjects in school sixth forms and colleges.
The only real alternative to this is for the head or college principal to reduce the number of taught hours per student. At the moment on average 16-19 year olds might get 14-15 hours a week (the independent sector is often closer to around 20 hours of contact time). Schools and colleges can cut that to 12 or 13 hours by reducing the time per subject e.g. from 5 hours per subject to 4 hours. But we must remember that we are competing with other high performing jurisdictions with 20-25 hours per week such as Canada, Singapore, Shanghai, Finland etc.
The simple hard reality is that the 16-19 sector needs significantly more funding or these pressures will only get worse.
Opinion
This month, Imran Tahir, Research Economist for the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and co-author of the IFS’ recent research into FE and Sixth Form spending in England, argues that the upcoming Spending Review needs to be judged on how it plans to deal with the challenges FE currently faces, not simply how much money it throws at the sector.
Further Education Funding is in a Critical State
The upcoming Spending Review is likely to provide answers on how much will be available to invest in further education and skills training in the coming years. While the exact details of this year’s changes will no doubt be heavily scrutinised in the coming weeks, it’s essential that we don’t lose sight of what’s happened to funding in the recent past.
In a report with colleagues at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, I looked at how FE funding levels have changed since 2013-14. Across all of the different types of FE providers there have been sharp falls in levels of spending per pupil. As the chart below shows, between 2013–14 and 2019–20 school sixth forms and sixth-form colleges experienced real-terms cuts of around 17–18 per cent, while FE colleges faced a 9 per cent cut to spending.
In an attempt to address this decline in funding, in the 2019 Spending Review the government allocated an additional £400 million to sixth forms and colleges for the 2020-21 financial year. However, given large rises in the number of students participating in FE, this only took per pupil spending levels back to what they were in 2018–19 – leaving in place most of the cuts from the previous decade.
Across all of the different types of FE providers there have been sharp falls in levels of spending per pupil
Of course, there have been cuts across the education sector and indeed other publicly-funded services during the last decade. But it’s worth emphasising that the level of cuts to FE funding mean that colleges and sixth forms have faced the largest fall in per-pupil funding of any sector of the education system since 2010-11.
Unfortunately, there are a number of factors which are likely to increase the pressure on resources in the coming few years. Having fallen over the last decade, population forecasts imply a 17 per cent growth in the number of 16- and 17-year-olds in England between 2019 and 2024 – or an extra 200,000 young people that need to be educated. The pandemic has also thrown up a range of issues for FE providers, not least the need to help students recover from lost learning.
Therefore, when we assess what the Spending Review means for the FE sector, we need to keep in mind the immense resource challenges that colleges and sixth forms are already facing, as well as the range of additional challenges they will need to tackle in the coming years.
For the IFS' analysis of the Budget and Spending Review 2021, including the Skills and FE spending announcements, see here.