Re your editorial on post-16 education (21 October), six months before Labour was swept to power, I wrote in to encourage an incoming government to “create a system of lifelong adult education in what RH Tawney called ‘a broad and generous, humane and liberal spirit’” (Letters, 29 January 2024). Sadly, Labour’s white paper on post-16 education and skills does nothing of the kind.

Its focus is entirely on skills for employment. Post-16 education must be “employer focused”, yet this – the mantra of decades past – has been a highway to failure. The proportion of adults in further education is now at its lowest since the 1940s. The decline began in the 1990s, when meeting the needs of employers – rather than on all-round provision for life – became the obsession. After the Treasury’s 2006 Leitch review called for further “strengthening employer voice” in the system, participation went into freefall.

The white paper says nothing about education for democracy; community, equality and social inclusion receive hardly a mention. Only universities (not further education) are encouraged to develop “civic plans”.

One might have thought that “post-16 education” meant education for adults. But this mixed bag is no radical approach. It is the failed recipe of decades past, with the odd new herb. It has no “broad and generous, humane and liberal spirit”. Tawney and other Labour educationists and politicians of the past must be turning in their graves.
John Holford
Emeritus Robert Peers professor of adult education, University of Nottingham

It was heartening to read your leader on further education colleges. It is a drumbeat that’s rarely given due prominence in the press. When colleges were taken away from local education authority (LEA) control in 1993, they gained much desired freedom but paid heavily by losing any political voice. MPs gave their attention to universities and local authorities listened to school parents.

As an LEA education officer who transferred to be a college manager, I saw how important that political power was to halt the year-on-year cuts to college budgets. We should despair but not be surprised at the burgeoning group of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training (Neet), or the lack of opportunities for adults.

A light-touch piece of research I did 20 years ago demonstrated clearly that for every £1 spent to help a Neet individual, about £1,000 would be saved by the taxpayer in future costs. Every further education college lecturer can provide a host of examples of Neet individuals successfully integrated into education and work. Please keep beating the drum for them.
Iain Strath
Great Gransden, Cambridgeshire

It is no surprise that in my 30-plus years of involvement with changing vocational courses, GCSEs and A-levels have never been renamed. I was truly a man of letters (YTS: youth training scheme; CPVE: certificate of pre-vocational education; GNVQ: general national vocational qualification; and T-levels) – all of which have struggled for acceptance. The erosion of further education colleges reflects the entrenched academic superiority that deprives us of the tradespeople and care workers we so badly need. Post-16 options have to include fully funded and respected vocational alternatives for the long term, not the political short term.
Rob Ellett
Puddletown, Dorset