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Meeting of the Parliament 29 September 2011

29 Sep 2011 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Scotland’s Colleges

Macintosh, Ken Lab Eastwood Watch on SPTV

Last week, The Herald contained a disturbing headline, indicating that 1,000 further education jobs have been lost in a year. Although that does not tell the whole story of what is happening in Scotland’s colleges, it gives a little glimpse into what happens when the Scottish National Party cuts 10 per cent from their budget. One thousand jobs have been lost at a time when the country is struggling to get out of recession and when unemployment is at unacceptably high levels; when this Government is supposedly implementing a no compulsory redundancy policy; and in the very area that has most to offer in making our young people more employable. The Scottish Government greeted the news with a decision to cut a further 20 per cent from the colleges’ budget over the next three years.

The impact of last year’s cuts—let alone this year’s cuts—has been felt across the sector by students as well as by those who teach them. Colleges are funded to deliver 21 hours of classroom time per student each week, but the only way in which colleges have been able to keep within their budgets and still keep up their numbers has been by cutting the hours on offer to each student from 21 to 16. Is the cabinet secretary aware that colleges are offering their students less classroom time? If he is, did he approve that decision? If he is not aware of it, what does he intend to do about it? Perhaps he thinks that such a cut will have no effect on the quality of teaching and learning.

The college closure—I am sorry; the college merger—agenda may look good to the SNP on paper, but I am not convinced that it has thought it through. We are not against mergers where they are necessary, but one of the main reasons why colleges offer similar courses in various parts of the country is that the locality matters to many students. It is all very well telling South Lanarkshire College to close its course offering—Margaret McCulloch spoke about that in the chamber last week—and telling students to go to Glasgow instead, but most students cannot afford that round trip and for some that will mean the difference between staying the distance and dropping out before they receive their qualification.

It is not just the students and the communities that they live in that will lose out. The worry is that the vast new impersonal regional groupings could also lose the ability to respond to the local needs and demands of businesses and employers. They could lose the very flexibility that the Scottish Government praised just last year.

There is support for public sector reform—colleges themselves have long embraced reform and the Labour Party has championed and supported reform in and out of office—but the SNP is deliberately confusing and conflating reform with cuts. The new term “positive reform” that Mike Russell has coined appears to be another term for huge cuts.

It is even more worrying that the cabinet secretary appears to be taking a pretty elitist approach to further and higher education. The ancients—the old, established universities—are protected as much as possible and the newer, more accessible red-brick institutions are given thinly veiled threats to merge or else. Liz Smith referred to Lord Sutherland’s reference to “merger by fax” earlier this week. The poor colleges are treated like below-stairs staff. Mr Russell appears to be auditioning for “Downton Abbey”.

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Meeting of the Parliament 29 September 2011

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