But how do I make funding funny? The colleges’ funding announcement was made on April 24 and I am sure most principals, senior managers and financial folk will have been wrangling with the figures since then, attempting to establish their positions relative to previous years and, perhaps more important, relative to friends, rivals, neighbours, competitors and especially enemies.

Understanding the funding model is not easy - at least I don’t find it easy without spending a reasonable amount of time studying it. And once you have done that, you still encounter other principals at conferences, or perhaps at watering holes (especially in Glasgow).

After a few moments on other topics, you inevitably come round to discussing the size of your allocation, how someone else fared and how you will manage to do with it all that you need to do.

What is really worrying is when you discuss it with someone and you realise that you may have misinterpreted some of the data. The immediate instinct is to phone your college secretary, finance manager or finance director - whoever else has done the calculations - and establish if your colleague is boasting, kidding, lying, deluded, deranged or simply mistaken.

When you have checked the facts and found out that the situation is better for your college, you don’t know whether to be annoyed that you were wrong or grateful that you have got more money. What is really difficult is when you are wrong and you have got less money.

Fortunately it is not as exciting this year as it was in previous years when there was a great deal of volatility in terms of funding increases or decreases, in the sector. In those days there was a cap on how much of an increase any college would be allowed and a safety net for those whose growth was not, as the experts might put it, up to scratch. If using phrases like “safety net” makes it sound like a circus, believe me in previous years it was more like a pantomime.

So let’s be grateful for the fact that the new funding model is a lot more coherent and transparent than the old one. Some of us, however, feel it was just our luck that, after years of being a net subsidiser to colleges which became entangled in the safety net, our particular college fell foul of the system by not achieving its student target last year - which is the year the safety net was removed.

Anyway the volatility is gone, the cap is gone, the safety net is gone, but the one constant is that no one thinks they have enough money. Whether we have enough can only be estimated relative to what we are asked to do. It is notable that the aggregate level of weighted SUMs (a SUM equals 40 hours of student learning) is at 2,208,560, the same level as for the current year. However, the overall increase in funding is 1.5 per cent which, given projected inflation of 2.5 per cent for 2002-03, is a cut of 1 per cent in real terms (or an efficiency saving by another name).

The settlement is, as expected, one of consolidation. This means a tough year for colleges and their staff. What precisely does this mean for my college? I’ll answer that when I have read it all again.

Norman Williamson is principal of Coatbridge College and a member of the Educational Institute of Scotland.