Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I want to formally move the motion tabled in the name of Paul Davies.

I’m very pleased to be leading this debate on the future of the further education sector in Wales, on behalf of the Welsh Conservatives. We know that education plays a vital role in our national economy, underpinning and ensuring personal success, health and satisfaction, and contributing to economic and social outcomes for our nation. Our FE and vocational providers have been, and continue to be, in this party’s eyes, a very vital part of the national landscape. They make a huge contribution to changing the lives of individuals and communities in Wales, especially in some of our most disadvantaged communities. It’s the vital bridge that links school and work and/or higher education, supporting people to gain the vocational or academic qualifications and skills that they need to secure and progress into employment or into further learning.

But I think there’s strong evidence to demonstrate that they’ve been undervalued and under-resourced by successive Welsh Governments, and we believe that this negligence must change. But before I embark on the journey that will navigate us around some of the fundamental aspects of this debate, I want to briefly address the amendments that have been tabled.

Now, I have to say, I think it’s a real shame that the Government has decided to respond to our debate today by adopting such a negative approach from the very outset. I think there are aspects of its amendment that we could have agreed to, particularly following the statement on Professor Hazelkorn’s review last week, which of course garnered some cross-part support. But I think its unconstructive ‘delete all’ amendment demonstrated the very blinkered approach that the Labour-led Government has taken over the past 18 years with education policy in Wales. Of course, we’ve seen that education policy cause Wales to lose its way and to lose ground compared to our international competitors, and I think that that’s very disappointing.

What makes it all the more disappointing is that we have a new Cabinet Secretary and a new Minister, and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I was hoping for a different sort of style from the new duo, if you like, at the education helm. But, unfortunately, it looks as though you’re going to be standing on the shoulders of your predecessors and continuing to give us more of the same.

In terms of the Plaid Cymru amendments, we can certainly accept amendment 2. But in terms of amendment 3, we cannot accept an amendment that will in any way limit the choice that learners have. As you might expect, we Welsh Conservatives believe that competition is a good thing in our education sector, and that giving learners choices can actually help to drive up standards, so we will certainly not be supporting anything that seeks to limit that.

Deputy Presiding Officer, it’s right that we properly recognise the vital contribution that further education and vocational skills make to Wales. I think there’s long been a propensity for us as politicians, when debating post-16 education, to focus primarily on higher education as a sector, and the funding of HE and its student cohort. But our colleges are also major providers of education here in Wales, and they help to produce some of the best learner outcomes. They are the predominant providers of funded vocational and technical education in Wales, providing around 85 per cent of the total provision. They certainly haven’t shied away from finding positive solutions to some of the critical challenges in recent years.

Wales has gone through a significant transformation of its network of colleges, and we’ve seen the number of FE colleges halve over the past 10 years. We now have larger institutions, with a different size and critical mass, and they’re proving themselves to be genuine anchors for skills provision in Wales’ regional economies. One of the unique selling points of our college network is that they’re so close to the people that they serve, both learners and businesses. They’re embedded in their communities, serving learners from a diverse mix of socioeconomic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Yet we shouldn’t be under the misapprehension that they just provide skills and training to SMEs. Colleges are close to employers of all sizes; they interact with 10,000 employers around Wales as a matter of course, and these are companies of all sizes and all shapes, from small businesses and enterprises right through to large companies such as Airbus, General Electric, EE and British Airways.

The FE sector continues to deliver positive outcomes in the face of a challenging financial climate. The Welsh Government has cut revenue grant funding for the FE sector by £24 million between 2011 and 2016-17, a 7 per cent reduction in cash terms and 13 per cent reduction in real terms. While funding for full-time provision has risen very slightly, funding for part-time courses has been slashed by 71 per cent. This reflects the Welsh Government’s decision, of course, to prioritise its statutory work and to focus on provision for 16 to 19-year-olds. But we believe that that’s the wrong emphasis. There’s a real danger that we’re not allowing people a second-chance opportunity in terms of their study, or to upskill themselves by returning to learning, and I think that that will have a devastating impact socially and economically in the future unless we reverse that trend.

The FE sector plays a huge role in bridging the skills and attainment gap for our young people who have left the compulsory system with few or no qualifications, and many colleges now spend a lot of additional time and resource helping learners to resit their GCSEs in English and maths because of the failures in our school system. Yet, in terms of recognition, it seems to me that, at the very best, second-chance learning has become second best in the eyes of this Government, and we don’t find that at all acceptable. In fact, it suggests that there’s some ageism about when it comes to accessing further education.

So, what can we do to help? Well, we certainly need a proper financial framework. We know that giving colleges the opportunity to plan over a three-year funding cycle has been hugely beneficial to them in the past, but, for whatever reason, the Welsh Government decided to row back on those three-year rolling budgets a number of years ago, and now colleges are having to contend with simple 12-month funding cycles. That’s causing them problems in terms of their planning. It’s causing problems for learners, as well, who can’t guarantee that the courses that they have embarked on in year 1 will be able to be completed by year 2 or 3, because of a potential rollback. So, I think that we need to ensure that there are three-year funding cycles.

We know, also, that there’s some extra resource that has been made available, which could be spent in the FE sector, as a result of the UK Government’s apprenticeship levy—£128 million per annum, roughly. That’s a lot of money, which could go a long way to helping colleges expand their provision and really help to transform the Welsh economy.

In terms of the security of provision, I think it is really very, very important to ensure that that continuity of funding is there, and making sure that these three-year funding cycles are available will transform the opportunities for colleges to plan and invest.

Now, the final point of our motion is a call for the Government to invest a significant proportion of the savings that it expects to make as a result of changes to student support for those in the HE sector, and to take some of those and invest them into our further education sector. We’re not asking for all of the money to be invested into our colleges; we’re simply saying that some of those savings could realistically be invested in order to help our colleges do more. We know that changes to provision, cuts in support for adult learners, and the increasing demands from employers for a higher skilled workforce, necessitate a change in approach to the future funding for both higher and further education.

As I said earlier in my contribution, the issue of student tuition fees and funding arrangements for our universities have occupied a lot of attention in recent years. But FE occupies an equally, if not more, important role in terms of providing skills for our local economies. Colleges also provide education and training for high-level skills, and I think the important role that FE institutions play in delivering those level 4 and level 5 skills and foundation degrees was highlighted in the Welsh Government’s review of higher education and further education in a report that was undertaken back in June 2015. This showed that the pattern of higher education activity that takes place in our colleges throughout Wales was diverse, and not only diverse but also growing.

I think also that we need to expand the availability of Welsh-language courses in our FE colleges. Unfortunately, whilst we’ve got good provision in primary and secondary education, when it comes to doing post-16 education in our colleges, there’s very little support in any way, shape or form whatsoever. I think it’s those two things—that investment in higher level skills and investment in expanding the Welsh-medium education and offer in our FE colleges—that we could rightly invest some of those savings that are going to be realised as a result of Diamond into. Let’s not forget: we’re talking about £0.5 billion-worth of savings, potentially, over a five-year period as a result of the savings that have been identified by Diamond, and, indeed, some of the changes to those upper earning limits that the Cabinet Secretary for Education announced. So, a small slither of that invested in our colleges would go a long way to helping them achieve more for our economy and for the people of Wales.

So, I do hope that you’ll be constructive in the debate this afternoon, and that we will see a positive response to some of the suggestions, albeit that you’ve put this ‘delete all’ amendment down, because we believe that this would help Wales to have the sort of education system in our FE sector that we all want to see. Thank you.