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Blog posted by: Michael Lemin, Policy Leader, Thursday 09 March 2017.

Chancellor Philip Hammond has delivered his first and last Spring Budget. As announced back in November, fiscal events will only take place in the autumn from now on.

The Chancellor’s announcements included investing £320m into new free schools, £216m into the refurbishment of existing schools, and £500m into supporting the Post-16 Skills Plan.

The key points for education and skills from the Budget were as follows: 

• T-Levels will be introduced, with 15 clear routes into employment. This is not a new announcement as such but more of a branding exercise, unveiling the name of the new qualifications in the Post-16 Skills Plan.
• T-Levels will see a 50% increase in the number of hours of training for 16-19 technical learners. This will include a high quality three-month work placement, and will involve a phased £500m investment in 16-19 year olds in support of the Post-16 Skills Plan and delivery of T-Levels.
• Up to £40m investment in pilots to test the effectiveness of different approaches to lifelong learning.
• Maintenance loans will be available for those who undertake higher level technical qualifications at the new institutes for technology and national colleges.
• Commitment to honouring the £1bn of funding promised to support sport in schools.
• £320m one-off payment to create 140 new free schools. Many of these are expected to be selective (grammar) schools or faith schools. This is in addition to the 500 free schools already pledged to be created by 2020. The Chancellor also announced £216m of additional investment into rebuilding or refreshing existing schools. This is a small sum of money, considering the number of schools across the UK. Some school leaders have already criticised the proposals, saying that additional revenue funding is needed to fund existing schools, rather than capital money to build new ones.

With the rest of this year’s Budget being fairly low-key, there was a lot of focus on the announcements relating to education reforms.

Additional investment to support the Post-16 Skills Plan was particularly significant – showing a real commitment to the reforms and to increasing learning hours.

It’s currently unclear how the government will ensure that employers offer the three-month work placements that will be mandatory as part of T-Levels, and what these will look like.

We very much welcome the investment in technical education, and commitment to creating parity of esteem between technical and academic education. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that in the case of the proposed investment in lifelong learning, this is a small amount of funding considering the substantial budget cuts to adult learning since 2010.

We’ll be interested to see what happens with T-Levels and the three-month work placement. We recommend that the government continues to listen to our sector to ensure that their measures and investment are having a positive impact on both learners and employers.

What did you think about the announcements made in the Budget? Leave a comment below!