Please note that this consultation will run until 10am Wednesday 16th March 2022
Welcome to our annual consultation about the Adult Education Budget and we look forward to hearing from you about our funding and policy changes. We value your time and your views, so thank you for your feedback.
Who is this for? This is an open consultation so anyone can respond. We welcome views from all Adult Education and learning providers, local businesses, employer representative groups, our partner organisations (local councils, public services, health, schools, local charities, and voluntary groups) and citizens of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
Background
In August 2019, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (the ‘Combined Authority’) took responsibility for our sub-region’s share of the Adult Education Budget (AEB). The Combined Authority is led by our elected mayor, Dr Nik Johnson, and the leaders of the other councils in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
The AEB provides us with a recurrent budget of £12m per year to invest in improving the skills of adults aged 19+. As the budget is devolved to us from central government it is a unique opportunity to tailor our adult education and skills provision to ensure residents of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough can learn and develop their skills to succeed in work and/or personal development. We have the power to change the funding rules to improve the courses, enhance the learning experience and make adult education more accessible so that more citizens can participate in learning. In the national adult education funding system, individuals must pay fees for many of the courses that the Combined Authority is fully funding.
In 2021/22, we made some changes to funding policy following an open public consultation, which included:
- Fully funded second Level 3 qualification for the unemployed to reskill into a priority sector
- Increased the low wage threshold from £18,000 to £20,000 before fees become payable
- We introduced the Local Youth Offer – increased funding to colleges and providers by 10% for 19–23-year-olds who haven’t achieved a level 3 qualification, so they can improve the support to enable success
- Providing a 4% funding uplift for the most deprived areas within the Combined Authority to encourage colleges and providers to target and support citizens who live in those areas
- Pilot the funding of certain level 4 qualifications (first year of a degree) for citizens who could not afford to pay the fees
- Providing a bursary of £1200 to encourage Care Leavers, living independently, to continue in education or training funded by the AEB.
We also continued with fully funding a first Level 2 qualification (equivalent to GCSE) for all adults aged 24+ and fully funded English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses to promote integration and access.
We will continuously review the impacts of these policies and have commissioned an independent evaluation to look at the impact of these changes.
Our vision is to make Cambridgeshire and Peterborough a ‘world-class’ region for lifelong learning, and the development of skills in our work-force. We want to increase the participation of adults from 9,000 individuals in 2020/21 to over 10,000 in 2023/24.
The Consultation
The proposed changes are outlined within the following consultation questions, and we welcome any feedback from our providers, stakeholders, businesses and residents to inform our thinking as we continue to develop and shape the delivery of AEB in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
Responses from this consultation will be used to inform our long-term vision for skills, reform the AEB funding rules and improve access to education for adults across the sub-region.