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Face the Facts: Inside St Patrick's

26/02/2015

Inside St Patrick's

BBC Radio 4 - Face the Facts, Inside St Patrick's

Colleges attracting millions of pounds of public funding are under fire.

MPs criticise a policy to broaden access to further education for a wider range of students, with some colleges accused of abusing the system. Some of the accused deny wrongdoing.

MPs are furious that for-profit, private higher education colleges have had access to hundreds of millions of pounds of public funding with too few checks on how the money is being spent. The Government wanted the new sector to flourish in competition with State provision and since the new system was put in place in 2012, it has. But later there were reports that some students were being registered just to get access to student loan money, then that colleges were recruiting en masse and then that the standard of academic work being produced was inadequate.

John Waite speaks to former staff and students at one college, London's St Patrick's College, who allege a chaotic learning environment with large classes, over-crowding and some students claiming to be motivated mainly by getting access to student loan money. Some student work has been rejected as sub-standard by the examining body on eight separate occasions in the last twelve months - meaning some students have to redo work they thought had been passed. Regulator, the Quality Assurance Agency, is investigating. St Patrick's denies any wrong-doing or failure in standards.

Public money going to these colleges has now been capped, after this Coalition policy designed to widen access to higher education for those who missed out first time round on leaving school, became a drain on public resources. Architect of the policy, former Universities Minister David Willetts, insists it has succeeded in giving thousands of people the funding to study, when it would have been impossible otherwise.

Presenter: John Waite
Producer: Paul Waters
Editor: Andrew Smith".

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