College matters
The decision by the Learning and Skills Council to withdraw funding for housing courses that currently run in more than 30 further education colleges across England is deeply worrying.
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The courses helped more than 2,300 people gain professional qualifications last year. Some colleges, such as Lewisham in south east London, have already made students meet the full cost of their courses and have seen numbers of applicants drop by 50 per cent as a result. This can only be bad news for the housing profession and seems perverse at a time when the demands placed on it are increasing.
The move by the Chartered Institute of Housing to rewrite the courses in an attempt to convince the LSC to include the qualifications on its ‘protected’ list is welcome. In an era of public spending cuts, however, it seems unlikely to work. Not only will housing providers have to dig deeper to invest in training their staff, but potential new recruits are likely to look elsewhere.