Post-16 education

That this House expresses concern at the deepening crisis in post-16 education; notes with alarm that universities have cut more than 30,000 jobs over the past three years alongside thousands of courses, restricting student choice and placing unsustainable pressures on staff; believes these pressures are damaging the quality and accessibility of higher education; further expresses solidarity with University and College Union (UCU) members in higher education taking strike action to defend jobs, terms and conditions, and to defend education as a public good; recognises the vital role of further education in delivering opportunities and the skills the country needs; further notes with alarm that further education educators are paid between £7,000 and £9,000 less per year on average than secondary school teachers, contributing to a recruitment and retention crisis; welcomes the Government’s commitment to investing in vocational education but believes this requires sustainable additional funding and action to address the pay disparity; further welcomes UCU’s Education: It’s Ours campaign, which seeks to address the broken further and higher education systems; calls on the Government to deliver immediate and sustainable funding for higher education, to protect university jobs, pay and pensions, to transform the long-term funding model, to adopt a fairer approach to international students and to strengthen sector governance; and further calls on the Government to provide sustainable long-term further education funding, to deliver pay parity with schools across college, prison and adult education, to tackle unsafe and unmanageable workloads and to establish sector-wide standards on pay, terms and conditions.