Adam Gillman, Socialist Students national organiser
Further education is in massive crisis. Teachers and staff leaving, courses cut, high class sizes – the list goes on. Students face a cost-of-living crisis, unable to afford high transport costs and expensive food.
Afterwards, there is the prospect of crisis-ridden university education with mountains of student debt, or low-paid insecure work. Adult college learners have to pay sometimes as much as thousands to study.
Facing what can feel like it’s going to be an increasingly bleak future, stressed from exams, many students face mental health crisis, not helped by the terrible state of mental health services.
Further education has been underfunded for decades. Between 2010 and 2020, per pupil funding fell by 14% in colleges, and 28% in school sixth forms.
Further education faces a shortfall of £400 million. The Labour government has proposed a plan for £300 million, £100 million short, and way less than what’s actually needed for our education.
This is only the beginning. Unless we fight back and win, more attacks will come.
Job cuts
We can’t rule out mass job cuts, like what’s taking place at universities, where uni bosses have already announced over 5,000 job cuts this year.
The University and College Union (UCU), which organises college staff, has launched the ‘New Deal for FE’ campaign, fighting for more funding for further education, and better pay and conditions for staff. UCU is also opposing uni cuts with the ‘Stop the cuts: Fund higher education now’ campaign.
Students and young people should fight alongside the trade unions for properly funded, free education.
FE colleges are typically managed by education trusts, run as if they are businesses, with highly paid executives and board members. Students sit exams run by privatised exam boards too.
Socialist Students calls for colleges, as well as exam boards and all aspects of education, to be brought into democratic public ownership, with elected bodies of staff and students having control.
We fight for every step forward for students to get organised and fight back, including by developing and building student unions in colleges. Existing student unions typically have very limited democratic structures, shackled by college management. But every opportunity should be grasped to put forward what is needed.
The strike wave showed that by fighting back, we can win. When hundreds of thousands of teachers went on strike, they forced the government to give them a pay rise.
And students can fight back too. In London, Pimlico Sixth Form College students went on strike to protest racist uniform rules, and against removing black history month from the curriculum.
Hundreds of thousands of students and young people have come to the streets against the horrific genocidal attacks launched against the Palestinians. This led to the sacking of right-wing racist Tory home secretary Suella Braverman.
We’ve won before
During the Covid crisis, school and college student protests forced the Tories to back down on their plans to downgrade the exam grades for working-class students.
We can fight and win funding for our colleges too. That means fighting for a political alternative to Keir Starmer’s Labour – a democratic trade union-based mass workers’ party that fights for fully funded free education, against all the attacks on young and working-class people.
Funding Not Fees
Socialist Students is organising lobbies of our local MPs, to see where they stand on education funding, and whether they plan to actually represent us against this Labour government.
Will they join our movement for free, fully funded education, demand that big business foots the bill, not students and workers? Or will they stay silent, as this government destroys our lives and futures?
