Published at 10:32, Friday, 30 July 2010

CUMBRIA County Council will no longer be in charge of funding education and training for over-16s following the latest Government move to cut red tape and bureaucracy.

Deputy council leader Stewart Young said the recent announcement by Education Secretary Michael Gove to reverse changes, introduced by the previous Labour administration only three months ago, would have a huge impact on the county.

Mr Gove believes the complex system is too bureaucratic and now wants a new body, the Young People’s Learning Agency (YPLA), to hand out cash to further education (FE) providers, colleges and apprenticeship providers.

He says the move will free up councils to concentrate on their strategic roles and allow them to get involved when they want to. Councils will still be in charge of giving cash to school sixth forms.

But, following recent news that Cumbria missed out on £61.5m to revamp seven secondary schools after Mr Gove scrapped the national Building Schools for the Future scheme, Coun Young said the county council would be left further out of pocket after the decision.

The authority has spent money installing costly IT systems to allow it to make monthly payments to sixth forms, colleges and training providers.

The county council took over control of a £54m annual FE budget in April when the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) was scrapped. It also took on former LSC employees – but Coun Young says it is not yet clear what their future holds.

Coun Young said: “While we were given the responsibility in April, for the first 18 months we would just be making sure the money was being paid every month to give us time to plan.

“From September 2011, we would have been commissioning the provision and so we would have been able to decide what courses were running where.

“We set up a whole structure, including taking on seven staff from the LSC.

“The coalition Government is giving us mixed messages. It wanted to get rid of quangos and now it is taking away the control given to an elected body and giving it back to an unelected group.”

Published by http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk