Labour conference: The same old promises can’t buy me love

I have just got back from the Labour Party conference. I attended the City & Guilds drinks event at the Beatles museum after 14 hours of events and 13,000 steps in torrential rain (and I don’t drink!).

As I quietly slipped out, I ended up chatting to the museum staff. I had one question: The Beatles’ music is amazing, but doesn’t it drive you crazy after a few months?

That opened the floodgates: the playlist is on a loop, they know every note and every word of every song and the order they’ll play in, back to front. After a while they learn to tune out. It just becomes a slightly irritating white noise.  

And so back to conference. Over three days, I heard how important skills were, how FE is a priority, Skills England, growth and skills levy, curriculum review…

Do you want to know a secret? This political playlist has been on a loop for as long as I’ve been involved in FE. After 30 years, I must be on skills revolution 9 – and it has become white noise.

I accept the sector needs to show a degree of patience, even if it is wearing thin. It’s okay to appeal for prudence and ask us to wait until after the budget for any financial announcements. It’s equally reasonable to say it will take time to reverse the trends, after many years of neglect.

But it’s time to do more than shuffle the playlist. We need to leave the museum.

Value for money (That’s what I want)

For a start, there is no justification for the sector not being given the same 5.5-per-cent pay increase as schools.

Equally there is also no good rationale for colleges in the public sector not to be able to reclaim VAT from the taxman. To be honest, the same is true for ITPs offering the same public service.

Here’s a neat compromise: change the VAT status to fund the pay.

Here, there and everywhere

Skills England has become a handy bucket for all our issues. “Skills England will tackle this.”

However, if government make it part of the DfE structure rather than an arm’s length body that can challenge and work freely across all departments, then it won’t even have baby teeth, let alone adult teeth.

Happy ever after in the marketplace

The prime minister’s announcements were a good start for the growth and skills levy. Degree apprenticeships are an excellent development, but they are an HE offer and should be funded from the HE budget, not from the FE funding pot.

The same goes for 16-18 apprenticeships: these should come from the DfE young person’s budget.

Meanwhile, removing some level 7 apprenticeships from the scope of levy funding is a step, but only a step. Employers won’t like it, but the truth is that it was never their money to spend.

Employers in the UK spend one the lowest proportions of income on training. If that isn’t going to change, then the levy needs to increase to correct the market failure and meet the government’s ambition.

Get back

Foundation apprenticeships sound like a step in the right direction, but the loss of incentive payments with the introduction of the levy caused the main damage. This needs to be reversed.

A hard day’s night

There is so much demand for the adult skills fund, adult and community learning and bootcamps. What’s more, they fully align with the government’s ambitions.

But funding has been eroded or frozen. So at least some of the new levy flexibility should be used to bolster them. This could be done overnight while Skills England get up to speed and determine the new playlist for FE delivery.

Matchbox

Finally, I am amazed that the students of FE are not out on the streets. The sector serves the most disadvantaged students who are woefully underfunded compared to school and university students (who want even more money!). If Labour aren’t going to right this wrong, who is?

Repairing the neglect of decades is obviously going to be a long and winding road. But the sector needs to see things getting better. These early steps would offer hope that, finally, we can work it out.