Colleges Recruited the Students, but the DfE Didn't Send the Money.

19 hours ago
3 min read

Thirty-two thousand more students enrolled in colleges this year than the DfE had a budget for. This week the department confirmed those students remain unfunded. Colleges carry the cost.

The growth funding shortfall

Wednesday's update says colleges will get 75% of the expected growth payment. That sounds like most of it. It isn't close.

David Hughes at the AoC ran the numbers publicly. Fully covering 32,000 extra students costs roughly £220 million. The formula normally delivers about £110 million of that. Three-quarters of £110 million is around £80 million. Hughes's phrase was unambiguous: colleges end up part-funded at a little over a third of the real cost. His word for the system that produced this: dysfunctional.

Second year in a row. Last year the DfE called the numbers unprecedented and rationed the funding. This year they're bigger, and the response is the same. Hughes flagged what makes it particularly hard to defend: the government has a public target to bring down NEET rates, and colleges are the main route to getting there. Paying for a third of a student place and expecting full delivery isn't a coherent position.

The apprenticeship assessment row

One manufacturer stopped taking on apprentices this week after 20 years. The reason isn't abstract. Skills England's proposed reforms would cut the mandatory knowledge assessment for carpentry and joinery level 2 from 70 elements to 11 and shorten the programme from 24 months to 8. At that compression, CSCS cards in construction may no longer recognise the resulting qualification.

FE Week counted the employer response as a "tsunami". Adult care, food and drink, engineering, and manufacturing: all preparing formal objections. The underlying concern is that mandatory assessment covers only 40% of knowledge and skills under the new model, with the rest sampled. Pass marks, then, don't actually confirm competence in anything that wasn't sampled on the day. If you run a building site or a care home, that's not a theoretical problem.

Skills England has said it isn't diluting standards. The employers aren't persuaded.

City and Guilds members vote for inquiry

Sixty-seven to seventeen. That's the margin at Drapers' Hall on Wednesday, where City and Guilds members voted for an independent inquiry into the PeopleCert sale, covering the deal itself, post-sale bonuses paid to executives, and the conduct of trustees. Trustees had circulated a solicitors' letter the same morning. It didn't shift things.

The inquiry, if the board actually commissions it, would be run by three councillors with a six-month deadline. The Charity Commission already has a statutory inquiry open, launched in January, covering the same ground. Two parallel tracks, one set of concerns.

19 new Technical Excellence Colleges

Durham to Plymouth. Nineteen colleges were named this week as the second wave of Technical Excellence Colleges, backed by £175 million, focused on defence, clean energy, advanced manufacturing and digital.

People working on college finance plans will clock the timing. The same week the DfE can't fully fund students already on roll, it's announcing new capital commitments for specialist infrastructure. Both are real commitments. Whether the two funding streams come from genuinely separate pots, or whether one eventually squeezes the other, is worth tracking.

The City and Guilds board's response to the member vote is the first thing to watch. The Skills England consultation window closes shortly. Given the volume of employer objections, that one may be about to get political.