Further Education and Training Bill [L ords]

Part of Orders of the Day – in the House of Commons at 6:11 pm on 21 May 2007.

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Photo of Angela Smith Angela Smith PPS (Yvette Cooper, Minister of State), Department for Communities and Local Government 6:11, 21 May 2007

If Opposition Members wish to table amendments relating to colleges' accountability to local authorities, I am sure that they will do so. My only point is this: at the moment, when FE colleges start to stray and fail to deliver, very little can be done to bring them to account. When the governing body is too weak or ineffectual to act, very little can be done. In such a situation, a college may start to spiral downwards and its numbers begin to fall, and confidence in that institution will begin to fail. I do not want that to happen again. I have seen it happen in Sheffield, where we are still rebuilding. Indeed, that is being done very well under the current leadership, but I do not want to see Sheffield college go through the process again. From a pragmatic point of view, I am glad to see in the legislation some kind of mechanism for holding colleges to account.

The removal of principals is part and parcel of that argument. We cannot have a situation in which poor performance goes unchecked. Indeed, an earlier speaker referred to a case in which no account was taken of poor performance by a principal. I could give my own example. The lecturer whom I mentioned earlier who was removed from their post went to an appeal panel run by the governing body, which had dismissed him and then recommended an inquiry on the leadership of the college. That inquiry never took place. That is not really good enough. If governing bodies are not robust enough to deliver what we need, something should be in place to ensure that that weakness is remedied.

Just as I welcome the measures relating to the LSC, I welcome the approach taken on another important point that has not received much attention in this debate—the duty placed on the LSC to promote diversity in provision. For me, that is the absolutely critical point with regard to the clauses on the LSC. Training providers of various kinds are already operating at post-16 level, where we have sixth forms, sixth-form colleges and further education. In Sheffield, however, we do not have enough sixth forms. We have just six in a city of 27 secondary schools. All those sixth forms are concentrated in the south-west of the city. I tell a lie, actually: two more sixth forms have opened in the past year in deprived areas because of the opening of two city academies. We now have eight sixth forms, but they are concentrated in one part of the city. In effect, a number of students do not have access to sixth-form education or the choice of pursuing either further education or sixth-form education that many young people have in many other parts of the country.