The answer to that question has to be a resounding no!
indeed it should be a resounding no at any time of year and especially before an election. Certainly the sector as a whole has not adopted its usual tone of phlegmatic resignation. There is an active backlash going on and Nick Boles, our skills minister, is doing quite a bit of meeting local MPs on the subject. The budget this year may contain a surprise in this area. Then again it may not.of course the government claim it is a modest cut given that apprenticeships, English and maths, traineeships and other elements of the adult skills budget are protected from the cut. But this only means a more swingeing cut for the rest of the budget. On some estimates by over 30% - or 24% if you take the Association of Colleges figures.
the result of the cut means there is now a lacuna in funding for many 19-23-year-olds. Treated differently from their university colleagues, who can access loans, this group can either compete for the dwindling state funding available to pursue the vocational qualification they want to, or cough up themselves. Which is the whole point of the exercise. For the government does not believe the public purse should really be supporting a whole range of courses that it believes either employers or individuals should be paying for. Austerity means you can drive through a neat argument. 'We cannot afford it' masks the argument that 'we really do not believe we should be paying for it'.
at edudo, learning is, first and always, about improving life-chances. It's what people do when they want to make sense of the world!
