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Further Education: Finance

Volume 498: debated on Thursday 29 October 2009

To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills what criteria the Learning and Skills Council requested its consultants to apply in evaluating bids by further education colleges for capital funding. (295836)

In line with Sir Andrew Foster’s recommendations, the Learning and Skills Council consulted with the FE sector through a reference panel of college principals convened by the Association of Colleges on the best approach to prioritise projects.

The first stage of prioritisation was ‘readiness’ to identify those projects sufficiently developed to be able to start work immediately in the autumn.

Projects which passed through the readiness gateway were then assessed against the following prioritisation criteria:

Education and skills impact

Contribution to local economic and regeneration priorities

Co-dependency with third parties

Condition of estate

Value for money.

The LSC has published on its website full details of the Lambert Smith Hampton readiness report and the results of the PricewaterhouseCoopers prioritisation exercise. It can be found at:

http://propertyservices.lsc.gov.uk/other/