Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I am not sure that I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, as regards the funding gap. That was a useful concept when the gap was much larger and it could be seen that it was so substantially unfair that that crude measure could be accepted. Now that it is much closer, we have to move to something finer. We ought to base our assessment not on fairness to colleges, or indeed anyone else, but fairness to students. We ought to assess the student experience of doing the same course in a school or in a college. There should be no reason why a student doing an A-level in a college should suffer markedly worse conditions than a student doing an A-level at school. That is a subtler measure and takes into account—as school funding does—the fact that colleges have economies of scale and the factors that the noble Baroness mentioned about their having to provide for their own capital funding. It would be a better way of approaching this than to say that the unit of funding should be equivalent everywhere. That is not true anywhere else in the education system where the funding takes account of the circumstances of the provider. That is correct elsewhere and in this case. My amendment in this group addresses the logic of Clause 65. It seems to me that the way the subsections of that clause combine mean that a large FE college providing a substantial amount of free education to people under 18 but substantially the same education on commercial terms to people who want their workforce trained, would find, particularly given the wording of subsection (4) but also by the way all the subsections mesh together, that the YPLA was constrained to exercise its funding functions so as to secure that the work that the FE college was doing commercially had to be provided for free. I will go through the logic of that if the noble Lord wishes but I have had the opportunity to sit down with his officials and do that, and they understand what I am on about. Therefore, I am content not to spend the next five minutes trying inadequately to educate your Lordships about that.