Sign the petition – here
Book your seat on the coach – here

Following the announcement of cuts to the adult education budget in England a major campaign has been launched to save Further Education Adult Learning and we are calling on everyone to help. The cuts of up to 24% of funding for adult learning courses risk decimating further education provision and will leave thousands of the most vulnerable adults without access to any opportunity to improve their education.

The Skills Funding Letter 2015-16 outlined that £770m of adult skills funding in 2015-16 will be set aside for apprenticeships. This means that the bulk of the overall 11% cut to the Adult Skills Budget will fall on non-apprenticeship provision; the Skills Funding Agency has estimated that this could amount to cuts of up to 24% for non-apprenticeship learning in 2015-16.

These cuts will hit vulnerable learners and the South West economy hardest, with millions of people who missed out on qualifications at school or those who need to retrain missing out if the cuts go ahead in 2015/16.

UCU is working together with its members and members of other unions, employers and employers groups, students and the NUS, professional bodies and those ordinary aspirational members of the community who may now be deprived of their own “life chance” to oppose these cuts which, if implemented, will have a devastating effect on Adult Provision in FE and destroy FE as we currently know it. Educational establishments in the South West also provide an irreplaceable and valuable input into the local economy.

Already in the South West, whilst  only in the first week of the new government, hundreds of jobs in FE have been threatened. UCU is therefore working together with others to organise a Lobby of Parliament on Tuesday 16 June 2015 and you can take part by boarding one of the coaches being organised by the UCU Regional Office in Exeter.