Budget Helps Ease College Funding Crisis

Ed Balls has had the Treasury go over his head and reallocate money to ease the Sixth Form funding disaster.

In two separate incidents, the quango LSC which funds Colleges managed to press the wrong button on its calculator (see College Building Program Halted and College Funding Balls Up pt 2.), but while the responsible minister, Balls, was unable to plug the gap, the Chancellor announced in yesterday's Budget that £650 million extra was going towards funding student places. A small amount of money is also to be found to allow a few of the most urgent college rebuilding programs to go ahead.

This cash is to come from £650 million of efficiency savings in the 2010/11 DCSF budget, apparently, despite the government's lamentable record on reducing budgets during previous bouts of saving.