The latest round of cuts to Scotland’s colleges is yet another damning indictment of an education system suffocating under austerity and the failed priorities of both Holyrood and Westminster.
For years, staff and students have warned that the sector was being pushed to breaking point. Now that crisis has fully erupted.
Courses are disappearing, staff numbers are being slashed, and entire colleges are being driven towards effective insolvency, not because Scotland lacks wealth, but because capitalism ensures that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small elite while public services are forced to make do with crumbs.
The 13% top in student numbers and a 9% cut in staff since 2021 are linked to the 20% reduction in funding over the last five years
Colleges remain a vital route for working-class young people, a place to gain skills, apprenticeships and opportunity.
Yet instead of expanding this sector, the Scottish Government continues to impose real-terms cuts that close off opportunities and deepen inequality.
Behind the talk of efficiencies and reform lies the reality of austerity: lecturers exhausted, support staff losing hours or jobs, and students finding courses axed and resources gutted. Meanwhile, the profits of big business surge.
The Scottish National Party (SNP) government insists it is constrained by Westminster. But both institutions operate within the limits of a capitalist system that prioritises the interests of the wealthy over the needs of the majority.
Choosing to pass on cuts rather than challenge this system is a political decision. It is precisely why the labour movement needs a socialist programme that refuses to make working-class communities pay for a crisis they did not create.
Central to that programme must be the fight for no-cuts budgets.
No budget cuts
Socialist Party Scotland and Young Socialists have consistently argued that national and local governments should refuse to implement austerity.
Instead, they should set budgets based on the real needs of education, services and workers: fully funded, democratic, needs-based budgets.
Such an approach would mobilise workers, students and communities in a mass campaign demanding that the necessary resources be provided by taxing the rich, ending giveaways to big business, and bringing key sectors into democratic public ownership. The unions in further education have shown time and again that they are prepared to fight.
A united struggle, linking students, staff and the wider trade-union movement, can force back the cuts. But this must be tied to a broader political alternative: a socialist plan of production and investment that guarantees fully funded colleges run democratically by workers and students.
Socialist Party and Young Socialists members supported and took part in the recent marches and protests across Scotland in November against further education cuts, alongside students and members of several unions – Educational Institute of Scotland – Further Education Lecturers’ Association, GMB, Unite and Unison.
We will continue to give our full support and solidarity to all efforts to defend the sector.
The choice is clear: accept the misery of crisis ridden capitalism, or organise and fight to defend our future.