Owen Jones is quite right (In Britain, young people are having their future stolen, 12 August), sixth-form colleges have been a threat to selective education from the outset. Hugely popular, evidence that the comprehensive ideal could succeed brilliantly, they offered a much wider curriculum than schools; students could be “academic” or given a second chance (the pass rate for “retakes” was almost double); all could escape the constraining regime of schools and be treated as young adults.
This could never be allowed, of course. Colleges should be kept in their place by various tactics: middle-class dinner parties were frequently salted with patronage (“One hears you are amazingly successful with the less able”); they were squeezed between selective schools and fully “open access” FE colleges. In most authorities they were held back from investing in the infrastructure needed for a proper vocational curriculum; little funding tricks were used, just as they clearly are today, in order to protect the establishment fondness for secondary moderns, fee-paying and grammar schools; funding, we were told, should be per student, but schools could cross-subsidise from other years.
Sixth-form colleges have been a notable success story for the past 50 years. Clearly, that can’t be allowed to stand unopposed. People might think they were evidence that a fair, non-selective education can be a great benefit to the country, as well as an enjoyable experience for young people.
Rev Dr Patrick Miller
Former principal, Esher College (1980-98)
• I read with great sadness the article by Owen Jones with reference to sixth-form closures. Our local sixth-form college (Totton College) is now likely to be privatised and taken over by the charity Nacro (National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders) after being approached by the Education Funding Agency (EFA). The secrecy that has surrounded this and the lack of transparency from all concerned led many people to suspect this was more than just a “local issue”. This is a government-led plan and, in this particular instance, aided and abetted by the justice minister, Michael Gove, with his plans to educate the prison population.
As things stand, numbers of new entries to the college in September are drastically down. This leaves the college and its land wide open to either bringing in prisoners from nearby prisons or selling the land for housing, and Nacro benefiting either way. This is a government-led closure of a once-thriving college. Meanwhile local young people have to pay considerable transport costs to attend other colleges further away with no help from the government. To quote Owen Jones: “Doors are being slammed … in the faces of today’s students.”
Bridget Craig
Ashurst, Hampshire
• Owen Jones highlights an unfolding disaster for young people as sixth-form colleges potentially become unviable because of funding cuts. Their chances of survival are further threatened by the recently announced area review process for post-16 provision, which astonishingly does not embrace school sixth forms in the review area. Many small school sixth forms offering a poor quality of provision as measured by subject range and possible combinations will thus not come under scrutiny. Worse, the ability of schools to launch new sixth forms and receive funding from an overall funding provision that is not increasing means less money for everyone. I thought this government prided itself on supporting high-quality provision, not wrecking it.
There are two explanations. First, since ministerial experience of education is largely in independent school sixth forms, they are unable to grasp the concept of a sixth-form college. Or, second, they really couldn’t care less.
Roger Cracknell
Former principal, Birkenhead College (1988-2006)
• It is not only in England that further education – an enduring lifeline for some of our most deprived communities – is having to turn applicants away as cuts begin to bite. Despite rhetoric strategically positioning itself as a progressive alternative to austerity, the Scottish government has over two parliaments chosen to target this most precious of educational resources with a relentless programme of cutbacks, with predictable consequences: tens of thousands of lost students, courses and staff. Successive SNP education ministers have chosen to defer complaints to Westminster, despite education being a devolved issue. The crisis is compounded by a culture of managerialism among senior managers wholly disconnected from the customised needs of FE students and staff.
Should a national remedy not be identified as a matter of urgency, the responsibility for defending the right to an education for all may inevitably fall to staff and student unions, parents and communities.
Mike Cowley
EIS-Fela rep, Edinburgh College
• It is interesting to see that the government’s response to “Sixth-form colleges fear funding cuts put their survival at risk” (11 August) is to suggest greater efficiency is needed. The private sector, which it often claims is so much more efficient than public services, charges, on average, more than three times as much for day students as the £4,000 that many state schools and colleges outside London are given to do the same job. Many government ministers seem happy to pay even more for their own children. Whatever the government says, talk of larger class sizes, reduced curriculum choice and the loss of top-quality staff is not scaremongering – these things are already happening.
Keith Strachan
Lancaster
• The corollary to Danny Dorling’s excellent article (The dash from A-levels into debt, fuelled by a fear of poverty, 11 August) is what is being offered to the non-university students who should be in education or training until the age of 18. Further education colleges, along with sixth-form colleges, are by all accounts being starved of funds, always a Tory sequel to closing something down, like British Rail and probably the health service, in order to let in their donor friends to make fat profits out of the taxpayer. If more attention and money had been given to FE colleges, enough skilled tradesmen could have been trained that would have stemmed the flow of eastern Europeans filling vacancies for many of the building trades. Employers say they cannot expand because of a shortage of skilled workers.
Some months ago the Guardian reported that Vince Cable had been advised by his civil servants that FE colleges could be closed down (Opinion, 19 June) and no one would notice and that the Department for Education apparatchiks had little real understanding of what the colleges provided. Instead the DfE is encouraging schools to grow sixth forms so that they will have recreated their beloved grammar schools in all but name, and this will shortly be followed by some form of selection no doubt, reinforcing the gap between rich and poor that Dorling was alluding to. FE colleges should be expanded, not the universities.
David Selby
Winchester, Hampshire
• What a pity Danny Dorling fails to mention apprenticeships as an alternative to university for young people getting their A-level results this week. They offer a route to excellent qualifications, including degrees, without the young person needing to get into debt.
Mick Farley
Carnforth, Cumbria
