FLUNKED

Colleges are lifelines, they train our future builders, joiners, plumbers, carers. They've been plunged into a crisis.. but it's Swinney and the SNP who have

- Brian Leishman

FURTHER education should be an engine of social mobility - an opportunity to become a skilled worker, to change career and move up the ladder.

But under the SNP, Scotland's college sector has been pushed into terminal decline.

While the likes of Keith Brown MSP will seek to blame Westminster at every turn, the truth is that his government has delivered a 20 per cent real terms cut to colleges over the past five years, as figures from Audit Scotland show.

One cannot escape from this - the SNP have been in charge since 2007.

Yet, colleges are delivering less teaching to fewer students as they grapple with the crisis. Their workforce has shrunk by more than seven per cent since 2023-24, with savings often delivered through voluntary severance schemes.

The SNP has boasted about free university tuition for years but that alone does not guarantee equal opportunities in education.

While they polish that talking point, Scotland's colleges - the backbone of opportunity for working-class communities like mine - are being starved of resources.

This is not an abstract debate. It is about the future of communities like Clackmannanshire, where Forth Valley College's Alloa Campus is under threat of closure because the SNP's funding model is "no longer financially sustainable."