Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

The figures come from the Government and the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. I entirely associate myself with the words that the Select Committee Chairman has just uttered about the armed forces. I completely agree with him. I want to talk about further education; inevitably, one of the Bill's purposes is to implement reform or change in the FE sector. Further education has been a success for many years, since FE colleges were liberated from local authority control by a previous Conservative Government. Unfortunately, in recent years this Government have piled more bureaucracy on the sector through the Learning and Skills Council. As we all know, participation in further education has diminished. The Government's answer to more bureaucracy is another bureaucratic reorganisation. They are going to replace the Learning and Skills Council with the Skills Funding Agency and its chief executive, and a sub-quango, the National Apprenticeship Service, as well as with another quango, the Young People's Learning Agency. In the Bill and supporting material, the Government described the SFA as ““streamlined”” and the YPLA as ““slim””. We all know that they will never launch a new quango saying, ““This is another bloated bureaucratic behemoth””, but when they go to such trouble to say that it will be slim or streamlined they are clearly desperately worried about the new extent of bureaucratic compliance that they will be placing on all the organisations that have to deal with these quangos. Further education principals will have more bodies to report to, more circulars to read and more meetings to attend.