Solution to college funding crisis lies with Government
The further education funding crisis would appear to be lurching from one shambles to another.
The Learning and Skills Council, already lambasted for the collapse of the national college building programme, is still struggling to get itself out of the mire.
A high-profile report by a former Audit Commission chief executive concluded that management failures at the heart of the LSC helped to bring about the crash that befell the multi-billion-pound scheme to rebuild further education colleges such as Bournville in Birmingham.
The response of the quango, which witnessed the resignation of its chief executive, was to ask the principals of 79 colleges whose projects had already been approved in principle to restate where they were in their development.
And now, surprise, surprise, too many of those colleges have come back to the LSC to say they are, in the words of new senior figure Geoff Russell, ‘shovel ready’ to get started.
That has led to a warning to the understandably concerned principals that many college schemes will now have to be significantly scaled back if the funding is to be stretched sufficiently.
So what are colleges such as Bournville, Sutton Coldfield and Sandwell, which between them have schemes totalling more than £200million in the pipeline, to do?
Surely, they cannot be expected voluntarily to slash millions of pounds off projects that are seen as essential, not only for the academic future of thousands of students but, in a couple of cases, for their role in helping to regenerate a particular area. By requiring the colleges to resubmit their bids, particularly at this protracted stage of the process, and then asking independent consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers to assess the readiness and prioritisation of individual projects, they are surely guilty of dragging things out even further.
One thing is painfully and plainly certain, there is not enough money in the LSC pot to go round, for reasons that still need to be investigated at a higher level.
But unless the colleges have been guilty of over-ambition and stretching themselves too much in terms of their building projects, which is unlikely to be the case, then every penny of the money they are seeking is needed.
The only solution would therefore have to be that the Government meets whatever shortfall still exists in the college building budget.
At a time when MPs are fighting over themselves to repay ill-gotten expenses, it surely represents better value for money.
