Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:08 pm on 14 March 2017.
Thank you for that answer, leader of the house. There’s been a lot of talk about the need for parity of esteem between higher and further education in this Chamber over the past 10 years, but successive Welsh Labour Governments have failed to deliver on that talk and that ambition. The Wales Audit Office, in fact, has confirmed in a recent report on the oversight of further education colleges’ finances that there has been a significant cut of £22 million to our FE colleges over the past five years and that that has stifled them being able to make some progress. In fact, we now see nearly half of our Welsh colleges carrying large deficits and being forced to eat into their reserves. I wonder, leader of the house, whether you can tell me what action, specifically, the Welsh Government might be able to take as a result of the savings that will be secured through changes to higher education student support in terms of some of that cash being invested into our FE sector in order to rebalance the situation in terms of parity between both forms of education.