While the additional funding for schools is welcome, the inequitable distribution of resources is one further reminder of the favourable treatment that free schools receive at the hands of government in comparison to local authority schools.  

And the same can be said of Academies. In his speech the Chancellor praised the Secretary of State for Education for his achievement in getting 1,200 schools to convert to academy status in 18 months. However, a hugely influential factor driving this trend has been the enhanced funding package on offer to schools which commit to becoming an academy.

On a more positive note there has been a general welcome for the announcement that many more 2-year-olds from disadvantaged communities will be eligible for the free childcare entitlement of 15 hours per week currently available to 3- and 4-year-olds. The government is currently consulting on an earlier commitment to extend the entitlement to 140,000 disadvantaged 2-year-olds. Today’s announcement will further extend coverage so that 260,000 (or 40 per cent) of all 2-year-olds will  become eligible. Leading childcare organisations, such as the Daycare Trust, have welcomed this measure but have also warned that the decision to freeze tax credits and to withdraw the promised above-inflation increase in the Child Tax Credit risks excluding many more parents from the labour market.

The skills announcements in the Autumn Statement were largely focused on the role that a further expansion of apprenticeship opportunities can play in combating youth unemployment. An element of the new Youth Contract involves a commitment to make 40,000 apprenticeships available in the first year of the programme by offering employers an additional financial incentive to recruit a young person to be an apprentice. This builds on an earlier announcement by the government setting out a new initiative offering  20,000 firms with up to 50 employees that don’t currently hire apprentices an incentive payment of £1,500 to take on a young apprentice aged 16 to 24.

Supporting unemployed young people to access genuine apprenticeships is of course a positive measure. However, there are dangers of damaging the “apprenticeship brand” and compromising employers and young people if this option is linked to benefit sanctions under the Youth Contract programme.

The Autumn statement also highlights other policy initiatives on apprenticeships, including a review into quality and standards to address ongoing concerns about the poor quality of a significant minority of apprenticeships. In a contribution to a recently published IPPR book – Rethinking Apprenticeships –  the TUC has argued that regulation needs to play a role in building a quality apprenticeship brand by setting some minimum national standards, including a minimum duration, as is the norm in other countries.

Welcome as it is, the further boost to apprenticeships will have relatively little impact on the escalating rate of youth unemployment.  According to Anne Marie Carrie, Barnardo’s Chief Executive, “40,000 apprenticeships are a drop in the ocean [and] the government’s growth budget has left the most disadvantaged young people in the shade”.  There will also undoubtedly be question marks about the willingness of employers to recruit NEETs as apprentices and whether the work experience programme will provide the necessary support and training that such young people will require to prepare them for an apprenticeship.

It was also rather puzzling that the Chancellor claimed in his speech that the coalition government is generating quarter of a million extra apprentices over the next four years.  Only last month – during Apprenticeship Week – the Secretary of State for BIS said that “the Government wanted to work with business to deliver 100,000 more apprentices by 2014”. How the Chancellor has now arrived at a figure of 250,000 extra apprentices over the same period after just announcing an additional increase of 50,000 is anyone’s guess.

In recent weeks there had been indications that the Budget might be used to announce a replacement to the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) which currently provides financial support to 650,000 16-18-year-olds from low income families in order to encourage them to continue in education.  The abolition of EMA, which currently provides a weekly payment of between £10 and £30, was announced last autumn and formalised in January. There has been a widespread campaign against this particular budget cut for obvious reasons – for example, 80% of recipients come from households with an annual household income of less than £20,800.

But research shows that there is also a clear economic case for retaining the EMA.  A letter from a number of eminent economists appeared in the national press only a week ago calling on the Chancellor “to use the opportunity of the budget to reconsider the government’s plans and to continue a programme that not only benefits poorer students, but the economy as a whole”.

A backbench MP, who is also chair of the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party, had intimated last week that there was a strong possibility that there would be an announcement in the Budget about a replacement for EMA.  Alas, this proved not to be the case and existing students halfway through their course and new students about to become 16 continue to face the prospect of not having any financial support in the next academic year.

There is also a more general commitment to fund an increase in all kinds of education and training provision for 16-19 year-olds, which includes those staying on at school and others attending college or taking up apprenticeships.  However, there is a sting in the tail for young people with the announcement that Education Maintenance Allowances, which provide means-tested financial support for 16-19 year-olds, will be replaced with ‘more targeted support’ that will result in a cut of half a billion pounds. 

It is estimated that the FE and skills budget will be cut by around 25% and in light of the commitment to increase spending on young people, it does not take a trained economist to conclude that the over-25s will more than bear the brunt of the cuts. Some of the main cuts include the ending of the so-called “Level 2 entitlement” for those aged over 25 which in recent years supported large numbers of employees to achieve the vocational equivalent of 5 GCSEs.  This entitlement had been largely delivered in the workplace via the Train to Gain programme, which as anticipated will be abolished.

The TUC had been calling on the government to retain this individual entitlement even if Train to Gain was abolished on the grounds that the state had some responsibility to support employees to achieve this skill standard if their employer refused to do so. However, we do recognise that there was evidence that the Train to Gain programme was afflicted by a degree of deadweight (i.e. it was funding some employers who would have delivered this training in any case) and that this had to be tackled.

On a more positive note, it does look like the government remains committed to the principle of providing an entitlement to training for adults lacking basic skills, an area where union learning representatives have played a pioneering role.

Other major announcements in the spending review include requiring all FE students aged 24 and over to pay fees for any level 3 courses (i.e. A-level equivalent) and introducing HE-style student loans to try and deal with the disincentives that would arise out of asking young adults to pay these fees upfront. 

According to the Association of Colleges this radical change to the funding system for college students will not be implemented until around 2013. The clear message in the spending review is that individuals and employers will have to contribute much more for training courses in the future to compensate for cuts to state provision.  However, it is hugely disappointing that there is much less detail about how employers will be forced to make a larger contribution beyond the rather vague proposal that the government will explore “mechanisms to increase employer contributions such as voluntary [our emphasis] training levies”.

The £200M cut to Train to Gain actually involves a refocusing of this expenditure on apprenticeships and college buildings rather than a direct cut. In effect this means that the overall cut to the BIS budget of £836M is in effect scaled back to £636M. Out of the £200M saving from Train to Gain, £150M will go to creating an additional 50,000 apprenticeships. The other £50M will go to supporting capital investment in colleges.

The Treasury press notice says that the additional apprenticeships will be ‘focused on small and medium enterprises’ and David Laws says in his speech that the £150M will be focused on ‘adult apprenticeships’ (which actually refers to people aged over 19).  A related commitment by the Department for Education promising to safeguard education and skills provision for 16-19 year-olds means that the number of young apprenticeships should remain as previously planned.

Whilst it is welcome that there will be more apprenticeship places and improvements to college buildings, there are a number of unanswered questions about the impact of the changes to Train to Gain on the total number of planned training places.  First, the move to divert £50M to FE capital means that an equivalent amount will be cut from the budget for directly training employees.  Secondly, diverting money to apprenticeships will mean taking it away from other priority areas (e.g. training directed at people with few or no qualifications, including basic skills training). It is difficult to tell at this stage what the overall reduction in training places will be as a result, but it is bound to be significant.

The statement by BIS also announced a cut of £11M to the UK vocational reform programme which largely refers to the large scale project to develop a new Qualifications and Credit Framework so that qualifications can be broken down into units and credits.

As widely anticipated, ‘efficiency savings’ will be applied to a number of skills quangos but there is no mention of actual abolishing any at this stage, though doubtless this is still on the cards for some of them.  However, it was announced today that one of the education quangos – BECTA – will be abolished.

The cut to the HE budget of £200M comprises a reduction in the Modernisation Fund of £118M (down from £250m to £132m). This is the funding that had been announced by the previous government to provide 20,000 additional student places in the forthcoming academic year – there will now only be 10,000 additional places. There is also an additional £82m of efficiency savings applied to the HE sector.

Today’s announcement contained  much better news for the schools budget, the budget for education and skills provision for 16-19 year-olds, and the Sure Start budget.  The government has committed to protect these areas from ‘any in-year spending cuts.’  However, according to the BBC website these commitments conceal the fact that there will be reductions to funding in these areas via other means, including cuts to national initiatives to support literacy and numeracy in schools, cuts to local authority funding for schools in some areas, and cuts to the fledgling 14-19 vocational diplomas.

The Chancellor announced that that the Government will be providing additional funding over the next two years (£250M this year and £400M next year) to ensure that it delivers on its guarantee of an education or training place for all 16- and 17-year-olds. This will account for an additional 54,000 places in FE colleges and sixth forms in England over the coming academic year, which will more than compensate for a funding shortfall that had arisen due to a previous under-estimate of the impact of the recession on rising student numbers.

In his speech the Chancellor also announced that the Government will be allocating ‘over £260M of new money’ on training and subsidies to help young people get training and work experience in sectors where there is likely to be strong jobs growth over the longer-term.

There were no substantive announcements in the Budget on new skills initiatives aimed at adult employees. However, this was hardly surprising considering that the Government has recently announced a number of changes to its Train to Gain programme – as a result of this and an extensive marketing campaign the budget for the programme is coming under severe pressure. It is crucial that the importance of safeguarding adult skills remains at the forefront of government policy alongside the new support for young people.

It is also welcome that the Budget included some partial respite for the problems arising out of the major shortfalls in the budgeting of the Government’s college building and renovation programme. An additional £300M has been allocated which will allow the Learning and Skills Council to fund a limited number of the college construction projects that had been mothballed.

Fulfilling the potential of each and every citizen in the new global economy is writ large throughout the document and a quick word search finds 72 instances of the word potential.  Interestingly, the word inequality is only cited seven times!  But for much more on the relationship between social mobility and inequality – and the current political debate – see the two incisive posts today by Richard and Nicola.

The focus on further reforms to education and skills as the answer to driving up social mobility dominates the White Paper. The bulk of the document is dedicated to the four key ‘learning phases’ that can have a significant impact on advancing social mobility – early learning and childcare, schools, immediate post-school destinations, and lifelong learning in the workplace.

Whilst commentators may debate how much education and skills can influence social mobility to the degree argued in the White Paper, one thing is irrefutable – during recent years the Government has put its money where its mouth is in investment terms. And not just for schools and universities (which still tend to come first in the queue for all too evident political reasons).

Early years education and childcare, FE colleges, and workplace training have all benefited from significant boosts in spending over the past 10 years. The big question is what will happen when public spending has to be tightened after the recession and whether these areas will suffer in order the maintain investment in schools and universities over the longer term?

A real challenge facing the reader of the White Paper is to disentangle new education and skills policy initiatives from reiterations of previous ones.  To get a quick summary of the genuinely new initiatives, the best starting point is to read the Cabinet Office press release.

There are many positive announcements in the White Paper, ranging from extending the current trials offering free childcare to two-year olds from disadvantaged families to the introduction of new £500 back-to-work training entitlements for parents and carers. And the recognition of the range and intensity of ‘class barriers’ (my phrase) facing many young people and adults accessing higher education and the professions is no bad thing.  The need to continue expanding high quality vocational training for young people and adults is also quite rightly at the forefront of the policy analysis.

But there are some major challenges that have not been addressed in the White Paper.  For example, there is no reference to the urgent need to tackle the persistent problem of poor pay and working conditions affecting many employees in the early years sector.  As the TUC and Daycare Trust flagged up in a recent joint report, Raising the Bar, continuing with a strategy solely focused on raising skill levels of the workforce is untenable, yet this is what the White Paper proposes.

However, it would be churlish to end on a negative note as overall the White Paper is a further policy boost for education and skills in the Government’s strategy to advance social mobility.  The big question is how much this strategy can deliver in overcoming other entrenched barriers that prevent many individuals from progressing up the learning ladder, whatever the setting. For example, the fact remains that employees without any qualifications are four times less likely to get regular training at work compared to graduate employees and this trend has remained relatively static over the past 10 years.