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The National Skills Task Force has been established by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment to assist him in developing a National Skills Agenda. The Task Force was asked to provide advice on the nature, extent and pattern of skill needs and shortages, including associated recruitment difficulties, how these are likely to change and what can be done to ease such problems. This paper is one of a series that has been commissioned to review and evaluate existing literature in a number of skills-related areas.

The aim of this paper is to look at how government funding of post-16 education and training provision works, and to assess the impact that the funding mechanisms have on the skills produced. The two main funding bodies are the Further Education Funding Council for England (FEFC), responsible for allocating resources to the 435 providers of further education, and the 72 Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs), responsible for the government's work-based training programs. Following a brief introduction, Section 2 of the paper looks at how work-based training supplied by TECs is funded, from the allocation to government offices (GOs) for the regions and then passed on to TECs. Section 3 examines the effect that TEC funding arrangements have had on skills delivery, bearing in mind that the complexity of TEC arrangements makes it difficult to compare results across the country. Sections 4 and 5 are concerned with the funding of further education, in particular the financial support to the 435 institutions covered by FEFC and an assessment of the impact of the funding methodology on skills supply. In their conclusion, Felstead and Unwin give eight statements which combine to map how government funding of post-16 education and training provision operates. They then discuss the consequences of this complexity and diversity, highlighting the difficulties faced at all levels, and assert that there is an urgent need for the creation of a single body for post-16 funding to address skill needs and encourage providers to work together to meet the challenges ahead.

Other research reports in this series are indexed from TD/TNC 62.633 to TD/TNC 62.642 and from TD/TNC 62.644 to TD/TNC 62.651. Show less