Colleges Week 2024: Why colleges are at the heart of public policy prioritiesAs Colleges Week 2024 kicks off, and with a spring budget, mayoral and general elections looming, Lewis Cooper, AoC’s Director of Public Affairs and Campaigns, says it’s never been a more important time to champion the role colleges play for people, employers and communitiesColleges Week 2024 kicks off this week with a focus on influencing, engaging and celebrating. This year, we have the spring budget taking place on 6 March, mayoral elections taking place across England this May, a general election to take place at some point, and a comprehensive spending review also due. It’s an ideal time to champion the role colleges already play for people, employers and communities, and what more they could do, with the right support and resource.Having colleges front and centre of political plans. That’s a lot of political activity that colleges will want to be influencing, and we need to be ensuring that ministers, officials, political parties and candidates have colleges front and centre of their plans as they look to the challenges we face as a country. Significant progress has been made over recent years in terms of the prominence given to colleges within education and skills policy; it’s much rarer today to find an #andcolleges moment, where colleges are forgotten within the wider focus on schools or universities. A key priority for the sector should now be deepening the understanding and thinking about the role colleges can and must play across a range of wider public policy priorities, and the approach that could unlock this. Ultimately, this should mean that when politicians are sat around the cabinet or shadow cabinet table, it’s not just those with an education brief who are advocating for colleges, and that we have better thinking about the linkages across policy areas too.Facing changes and challenges. As a nation, we face a raft of major changes and challenges, and colleges invariably have a role to play in our meeting them. Take the pressures on our health and care system for example – with the NHS long term plan highlighting the risk of a shortfall of between 260,000 and 360,000 NHS staff by 2036 without action, and with currently as many as 152,000 vacancies in the care sector, colleges will have a key role in delivering the workforce of the future, and supporting health and wellbeing for their students and wider communities. It is well understood that access to education and training can be key to supporting health outcomes, but that needs to be better reflected in policy making, with more focus on the preventative role access to education and training can play, and the case for investment as part of wider health strategies. This might also include the college estate genuinely being recognised and used as a community asset – with sport and performing arts facilities for example being used by local organisations and colleges playing an active role with other partners in supporting health and wellbeing strategies.Colleges delivering mental health servicesColleges are also very much at the front line in delivering mental health services, and the pressures they face here are immense. In a recent AoC survey, we found that eight in 10 colleges have made a referral to A&E in the last year related to learner mental health, while more than nine in 10 of colleges say they are aware of attempted suicides by learners in the last 12 months, with 70% of colleges reporting an increase in the frequency of these occurrences. Around 68% of colleges have a counselling service, with the limiting barrier here being funding. There is much more that could be done to strengthen local partnerships between education providers, the NHS and others, and thought should be given to that by any future government. Enabling the green transition. Colleges have a part to play in enabling the green transition, too. Modelling from the LSE suggests that one in five jobs in the...

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