Former cabinet minister Vince Cable has announced he will contest the Liberal Democrats party leadership.
Mr Cable has been an outspoken supporter of FE, claiming he saved the sector in 2010 when, as business secretary, he blocked a move to remove funding from the sector.
At an event three years ago, he reportedly said: “I could have taken the advice we had from the civil servants, who said, ‘well, why don’t you just effectively kill off FE? Nobody will really notice.’
“The easy way out would have been to have taken all the money out of the FE sector and out of training and I said, ‘we are not doing that.’”
Last November, the National Union of Students announced Mr Cable was to head up its research project, Students Shaping Further Education. Along with a series of college visits, the project was set to conclude in a series of recommendations, which the union said would “benefit students, communities and the economy”.
‘I believe in FE’
In a joint interview with then-NUS vice president for FE Shakira Martin, he told Tes: “I believe in FE. My dad was a manual worker who did well and taught himself, and became an FE lecturer and taught builders at York Technical College.
“My mum was a factory worker but became a housewife, as you did in those days. And with postnatal depression, she had a very bad nervous breakdown. What saved her was FE - adult education, actually.”
Mr Cable has also been a governor of Richmond Adult Community College and is a life fellow at City Lit. “I know it’s been through the wringer in recent years with cuts, but that’s mainly because of this combination of deficit problems and ringfencing of large areas of other public spending,” he said.
“FE got squeezed. But I tried, whenever I could in government, to ensure it wasn’t as serious as the Treasury and others wanted it to be, and to give [colleges] new opportunities - particularly apprenticeships.”
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