I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee and the Liaison Committee for their support in approving this debate.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) on her powerful opening speech on the hugely important topic of adult education, which forms one of the themes that we are debating today. She and I were before the Backbench Business Committee with our respective applications for debates on FE and college funding, and on adult education. We both agreed that, as both applications related to the education estimates, we would be happy to combine them. I share her admiration for the work of FE colleges and the community education sector in this space, as well as the important online work that they do. I echo her comments about the huge importance of adult literacy.
I hope that the House will forgive me if I focus mostly on the 16 to 19 element of this debate. I thank the Education Committee Clerks and members for the huge work that they have put into our report on the future of post-16 qualifications, which I hope we can discuss at some length today. I also thank the House of Commons Library and the Association of Colleges for the valuable briefings that they have provided.
Before delving into the detail, I should say that, as Chair of the Education Committee, I welcome the fact that the overall estimate for the Department for Education has increased, and that we are debating estimates today that see the total amount, across resource and capital, rise from £100 billion to £110 billion. We are spending substantial amounts of money on education. The Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), has been a tireless advocate for the FE sector, which he has often described as the “Cinderella sector” of education. As he has pointed out many times, that reflects not just how much it is asked to do with so little resource, but that there is no limit to its potential. As he has often said, Cinderella herself ended up marrying into royalty.
My right hon. Friend’s campaigning helped to secure extra hours for post-16 students as part of the catch-up programme, and his determination to support lifelong learning is as welcome for the FE sector as it should be for higher education. As Chair of the Education Committee, he recommended that the Department make the case for a three-year funding settlement for community learning at the next spending review, and reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for providers. Part of the reason that I—his successor as Chair of the Committee—wanted to debate the funding for that vital sector, and indeed for wider post-16 education, is that it has been, and still is, facing a very real funding squeeze.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has reported that the FE sector has experienced a prolonged period of reduced funding, and concluded in December 2022 that 16 to 19 funding had experienced the biggest fall in real-terms funding of any education sector, in contrast with real-terms growth in primary and secondary schools, and a rapid and welcome growth in early years investment.