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.