PAC attacks FE funding red tape

23 Mar 12
MPs have slammed the way the government accounts for £7.7bn of further education funding, warning that the system is uncoordinated and provides poor value for taxpayers.
By Richard Johnstone | 23 March 2012

MPs have slammed the way the government accounts for £7.7bn of further education funding, warning that the system is uncoordinated and provides poor value for taxpayers.

The Public Accounts Committee said today that too many funding organisations were involved in further education in England and none of these ‘accepts ultimate responsibility for cutting the bureaucracy that colleges have to deal with’.

More than 1,000 different providers, mainly FE colleges and independent training businesses, receive a total of £7.7bn of funding from either the Skills Funding Agency or the Young People’s Learning Agency.

The source of this cash depends on the age of the student. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills provides cash through the SFA for students aged over 19, while the Department for Education funds those between 16 and 18 through the YPLA.

The PAC’s report highlighted the different ways these agencies deal with colleges and the various funding, qualification and assurance systems that are applied.

These differences create an unnecessary burden for providers and divert money away from learners, the report concluded. To provide value for money, the systems need to be more efficient and avoid unnecessary duplication.

Committee chair Margaret Hodge said that the committee was ‘frustrated that DBIS, which leads on policy for further education and which you would expect to accept overall responsibility, does not believe it should do that job’.

She added: ‘This lack of clear accountability is at the root of many of the issues we highlight in this report. For instance, differences between funding bodies in the information they demand create an unnecessary burden on training providers and divert money away from students.

‘This is not to say that there are no initiatives to simplify the requirements placed on FE providers. But they are not managed together as a single programme with a clear and consistent goal against which progress can be measured.’

Responding to the report, a DBIS spokeswoman said the department took ‘its responsibility to reduce bureaucracy in post-19 further education learning and skills provision very seriously’.

She added: ‘We have already made a great deal of progress, including simplifying systems, removing unnecessary intermediary bodies and getting rid of central targets. Colleges, providers and sector representatives are involved in our work and have welcomed the headway we have made.

‘The NAO report [last December] found that the potential unnecessary bureaucracy that could be removed was less than 1% of a college’s budget.’

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