Certain figures in the NUS leadership are fond of saying that, while other factions “talk the talk” on Further Education, it is they who have “walked the walk” this year. What they mean is that while other people talk about campaigning on FE issues, they’ve actually done it.

Fair enough, up to a point. It’s true that, under Ellie Russell’s leadership, the FE campaign has existed this year in a realer sense than under previous VP FEUDS. But its key demands (that each college allocates 0.05% of its budget to SU development, for example, and, more centrally, for the implementation of the Foster Report) are less than radical.

The week in which Lambeth College SU (along with Unison and NATFHE) organised a march and rally of several hundred students and workers in protest at £2.3m worth of course cuts and job-losses also saw students at Cambridge Regional College demonstrate against the slashing of A-Level courses. It also saw media students at City & Islington College learn that their course was to be summarily scrapped – without a word of consultation with either students or staff – and replaced with an “e-media” course.

It seems that college bosses don’t quite agree with NUS’s generous interpretation of the Foster Report. Because of some oblique phrases about “embedding the learner voice at the heart of the sector”, NUS has naively hoped that college bosses will now be under obligation to take SU development seriously. After all, what more perfect expression of “the learner voice” is there than a functioning, strong students’ union?

Sadly, the bosses don’t see it like that. They’re much more interested in the other bit of Foster – the bits that talk about the need for a greater role for employers in FE and the bits that positively advocate privatisation in the sector. Far from going against the grain of the Blair government’s policy on education, the Foster Report is an extension of the same policy into the FE sector. It’s a policy based on privatisation and on creating a two-tier education system in Britain; for the working-class majority stuck in the lower tier, schools and colleges will not be places to learn in but places in which we are trained for the McJobs will be getting once we leave.

That’s the dynamic driving the cuts at Lambeth, CRC and City & Islington. Those who claim to have “walked the walk” on FE may well sincerely want to fight these cuts, but while they’re shackled to the vain hope that a bureaucratic government review (which in fact advocates privatisation) will deliver the necessary changes, they’re only going to take very small steps.

Lambeth’s march was just the latest in a series of union-led actions it has organised in protest at the cuts. It also has a fine record of fighting management on other issues, having led a successful campaign against canteen price-hikes last year. NUS’s FE leaders are right in one thing; only strong student unions can meaningfully ensure that the “learner voice” will be heard. But the only way to build such unions is through struggle – something the activists at Lambeth are doing very well.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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