News Article 23

Four in ten sixth form colleges could close due to education budget cuts?

This is how The Independent represented the story:

A crisis in education funding could see the closure of as many as four in ten sixth-form and further education colleges, according to a new financial analysis. Research by House of Commons library staff shows £1.6billion could be wiped off the budget for colleges next year if the Government goes ahead with 25 per cent cuts to the service. That, according to their analysis, would be the equivalent of closing four in ten colleges - threatening nearly half of England’s sixth-form colleges and one in three further education colleges.

“This is a deeply worrying report and confirms our fears that some sixth-form colleges could be wiped from the map after the spending review,” said James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth-Form Colleges Association said.

Labour’s Shadow Education secretary Lucy Powell - for whom the analysis was carried out, added: “It is simply not possible to build a 21st century on falling investment in education. Yet this Government is putting post-16 education on a cliff edge for the next generation - and holding our young people and our country back.”

Conservative party sources dismissed the figures as “back of a fag packet” calculations and accused Labour of “scaremongering”. However, one sixth-form college which has already had to make cuts is Barrow-in-Furness where A-Levels have already been scrapped in Spanish, religious studies, design and technology and religious studies. David Batten, its principal, said; “We have made many efficiency savings already: we have restructured management, increased workloads ... and have had to say goodbye to many good colleagues. “We are getting to the point where the funding available for sixth-form students, which is less than that available for a school pupil and far less than that available for a university undergraduate, is simply not enough to offer a good education to students and keep a small sixth-form college running.”

My opinion on the news story:

Firstly, The Independent is a centre-left wing paper and I think this is reflected in this report because when talking about the conservative party, they use negative language such as "dismissed" and then go on to immediately make a counter argument. This can therefore be seen as biased because the reader is not getting a balanced view of the events. Regarding the actual news story, I think this is shocking because 4 in 10 sixth forms is a lot and if this many were to close, it would have very negative effects on our education system. For example, the students would have to leave and join new colleges, which will result in an increase in class sizes which could impact the quality of their learning.