The Association of Colleges’ Labour conference publicity campaign included a piece of rock distributed to delegates with the slogan “Looking after the four million voters in your local colleges”.
The AoC reckons colleges have 3,400,000 18-plus students. There are 300,000 17-year-olds who will be of voting age by the next election, 340,000 staff and 8,000 governors. This makes just over four million.
But I’m not quite sure whether the staff would say they are being “looked after” by the AoC, an employers’ organisation, which wouldn’t claim to represent them.
Even if four million is stretching a point, there are far more FE students than university undergraduates. Something Labour might wish to chew over.