May I wish you a happy new year, Mr Deputy Speaker?
We turn to the extremely important part of the Bill, which is one of the reasons why the Bill is in the form it is. I shall deal with that in a moment or two when discussing amendments 2 and 3. First, I wish to focus on the importance of clause 14 and of the Government’s welcome introduction into the Bill of the role of the education administrator. Although we welcome that, we want to probe, as we did in Committee, just how it is going to work in practice, and that is the purpose of amendment 1. It is extremely important to remember the end product we are all aiming at. We hope—and I believe, as I am sure the Minister does—that the number of occasions when the detailed insolvency provisions laid out in the second part of the Bill will be required will be as few as possible. Shortly, I will suggest why I think they are particularly necessary and deal with some of the related issues.
This amendment would ensure that an appropriate assessment is made of any potential impact on students and their education if an education administrator puts a further education body into special administration and takes action such as transferring students to another institution or keeps an insolvent institution open for existing students. It would also require the Secretary of State to specify suitable bodies to perform such assessments. The amendment has been tabled at the urging of the National Society of Apprentices and it touches on an area where the Minister and I have common ground: the importance of understanding what the end product of this new education administrator is all about. He or she is there to provide protections and support that would not be available in a traditional insolvency process. That is extremely important in terms of the position of young people, particularly those who might be at college as part of their apprenticeship or of other training.
I wish to speak particularly to the proposed new subsections 3(c), 3(d) and 3(e) set out in our amendment. One thing that the NSoA’s research has shown—this was in 2014 and the figure may well have increased since—is that apprentices spend, on average, about £24 a week on travel, which equates to a quarter of the salary of an apprentice earning the apprentice national minimum wage. Additional research has indicated that some young people were choosing the apprenticeships they could afford to get to, rather than those they were keen to do. In the light of the area review process in England and the creation of fewer, more resilient colleges, we are concerned about the impact on those potential apprentices in terms of their travel time between provider, employer and home. We have had our disagreements with the Government over that review process and will doubtless continue to probe them strongly on it.
The Opposition believe it is important that the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education takes a clear and early lead role in encouraging local authorities and transport companies to ensure that all young people, including apprentices, are covered by travel concessions. Without a high-profile champion for their needs, apprentices can too often be excluded from such concessions, because apprenticeships are perceived as employment rather than education and are excluded from the relevant definitions. The crux of the amendment is to ensure that the entitlement that the Bill gives to students to continue their education works in practice. The ambitions of the provisions on special administration are noble; the amendment is intended to be a safeguard against any unintended consequences.
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The education administrator will be given four options for supporting students to continue their education if their college becomes insolvent. As discussed in Committee, the options are: a provision to sell assets to keep a college afloat; a provision to bring in another body to take on different functions of the college; a provision to transfer students to another college; and, finally, in slightly ambiguous wording, a provision to keep the college “going until existing students” can finish their courses. Those are all sensible options, and I do not think that anyone present would suggest that they should not be pursued by the education administrator should students’ education be put in jeopardy by insolvency. However, I have tabled the amendment to explore what they would actually mean and to propose an assessment of the impact of the decision on students and the local community. We hope that, through such an assessment, any negative effects could be mitigated appropriately.
I shall give some brief examples. If an administrator keeps a college going for existing students to finish, it would be entirely understandable, and possibly probable, that lecturers and staff at the college might look to leave. The involvement of an education administrator would essentially be a sign of a failed college, and the taking of that option would mean that their employer would be closing in the near future anyway. Any exodus of staff in such circumstances could have untold effects on the quality of education the students received. So we want to know from the Minister—as would students, I am sure—what transitional measures would be put in place to protect the quality of education being received in a college that was being kept open only on life support.
Should the administrator decide to begin to sell off college assets to deal with insolvency issues, what protections will there be so that resources that are integral to a learner’s studies will not be sold off? Computers spring to mind as possible attractive assets that could be sold quickly for a good taking, but selling them off could leave even fewer resources to share between the remaining students of the college and have a negative impact on their experience.
What about circumstances in which students need to be transferred to another college? How close to their homes and their old college would the new college be? How much more expensive would it be to get them there? College attendees spend a lot of money on travel, the cost of which is already risking making education inaccessible for the less well off. What financial support
might be available to help them to access education at the new institution if the costs were considerably higher? Would the new college have the capacity to respond to an influx of new students?
Because of insolvency, some students could find themselves forced to travel longer distances, but there is no reference in the Bill to how they would be compensated. As I have said previously, mergers between colleges could be particularly harmful to the social fabric, and to the mobility of young people in rural and suburban areas. The implications for their being able to maintain their courses, which are, after all, the liability of the colleges, will be significant if issues such as travel are not considered.
When giving evidence to the Bill Committee, the new Further Education Commissioner said that
“provision at levels 1 and 2, in particular, needs to be as local as you can get it to the learners, whether in an urban or rural area.”––[Official Report, Technical and Further Education Public Bill Committee, 22 November 2016; c. 27, Q35.]
He accepted that if people do not have the money to travel, they will not be able to do so.
Shakira Martin of the National Union of Students also gave evidence. She said:
“It is also not clear how the Government will make sure that the education the student receives in the college is kept open and to a high-quality standard.”––[Official Report, Technical and Further Education Public Bill Committee, 22 November 2016; c. 51, Q69.]
Bev Robinson, the principal and chief executive of my local college, Blackpool and The Fylde College, and part of Lord Sainsbury’s panel, said she
“would wish to make sure that learning within a reasonable travel-to-learn pattern was protected as well as students.”––[Official Report, Technical and Further Education Public Bill Committee, 22 November 2016; c. 51, Q70.]
I see nothing in the Bill, and little has been said by Ministers, about where the funding to support the process will come from.
Research released in 2015 by the NUS and the Association of Colleges showed that only 49% of FE students—virtually half—could always afford their travel costs. The average travel time for those surveyed was two hours and 48 minutes a day, with an average distance of 11 miles. Four in 10 young people were relying on financial support from parents or guardians for travel costs. The situation is exacerbated by the lack of a national funding scheme. Even the minority of councils that offered discount travel to young people are unlikely to do so now following continuing Government cuts. This amendment would at least require that such things be considered, so that appropriate measures could be put in place.