£800,000 cut in adult education funding at Kirklees College

Mar 12 2010 by Joanne Douglas, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

He added that the college would like to be given the freedom to manage budgets more flexibly in order to help mitigate against the effects.

A new campus is planned by Kirklees College as part of The Waterfront project, off Chapel Hill. Funding for that is not affected by the new announcement.

Nationally, £200m of cuts are proposed in adult education. Colleges, the biggest providers of vocational training in Britain, have been told their ‘adult learner responsive’ budgets will shrink.

Every UK college will be hit by a funding reduction between 10% – 25%.

The Association of Colleges say courses varying from bricklaying, joinery, plastering, plumbing, catering, youth work qualifications IT, engineering and British sign language are among those which could be affected.

Martin Doel, Chief Executive of the Association of Colleges, said: “At a time when colleges are helping Britain beat the recession they are facing the prospect of having to cut courses for adults.

“They understand how tough public finances are, but they don’t want to lose high quality courses that are essential to our economic recovery and make a great deal of difference to people and businesses across Britain.

“We are calling on the government to allow colleges to be more flexible with their funding so that they can help support these courses, where possible, by transferring money between budgets – something they are not allowed to do currently.”

Nationally, colleges face an average cut of 16%. They train around three million students every year and almost half (45%) of vocational courses are provided in colleges.