The UK’s further education sector is utterly fucked. For over a decade, it has been used as a political afterthought, the education of our young people subjected to relentless cuts that have decimated resources and ruined staff morale. Yet the real cost of this underfunding isn’t just seen in our colleges’ failings; students themselves bear it. Manifesting directly in an explosive rise in poor behaviour, panic attacks, and emotional distress, which frequently boils over in the classroom.
But his crisis in FE is not a failure of discipline or teaching; it is the catastrophic symptom of policy failure.
Over a decade of devastation in further education
I worked in safeguarding in a further education college for three years, dealing with poor behaviour and panic attacks every single day, and it gave me a worrying insight into what happens when vital public services are starved. No one goes into education for the money anymore, let’s be honest. They go into it because it’s a noble profession. After all, those who teach and those who support students care for the next generation and the future of the UK. But over the last decade, amid ruthless financial cuts and stagnant funding, those who work in FE were expected to manage the fallout of poverty and instability with fewer and fewer tools.
Real-terms cuts since 2010 and up to 2020 saw funding per student in FE colleges drop by 14%. Even with scraps of funding thrown into the sector between 2022-23, funding per student still remains 11% lower than 2010 according to the Institute for Fiscal studies.
And it isn’t just young people who suffer. Adult education and skills funding cuts have been even more severe, with real-terms funding levels around 40% lower than before 2010. This has led to a massive 60% drop in learner numbers, odd for a nation that prides itself on our educated population.
This lack of consistent funding had created a climate of constant financial stability and as of 2022/23, around 37% of FE colleges reported operating at a deficit.
In short, this translates directly to massive class sizes, ridiculous staff workloads, shite wages resulting in ridiculous staff turnover and, critically, the decimation of pastoral and preventative support. These are the structural conditions that make managing poor behaviour impossible.
The invisible wounds of anxiety, panic, and emotional collapse
We were no longer policing bad actors in the classroom; we were managing a massive cohort overwhelmed by anxiety driven by instability. The core of the behavioural crisis stems from students’ inability to regulate their emotions and manage their stress. Screaming, lashing out, shutting down entirely and irrational arguments are now just a part of every class that the workforce in FE are struggling to deal with.
This rise in aggressive and disruptive behaviour is no longer the wilful defiance of old. It is a physical and psychological reaction to stress and trauma.
The root cause of it all lies in Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Growing up in poverty massively worsened by austerity has led to family stresses, and the closure of early intervention services mean that a large portion of young people enter FE with deep, complex and unaddressed trauma.
Chronic stress and trauma physically alter brain development, particularly on the pre-frontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for impulse control and emotion regulation. So many of the children I knew grew up in homes where they went days and sometimes weeks without electricity, they spent whole winters with no heating and people wonder why they are so fucked up.
I once saw a child throw a chair across a classroom because they were asked to put their phone away. Think! This isn’t calculated defiance, it is a ‘fight or flight’ response. In their broken little brains which have been re-wired by instability and stress, see this simple instruction as a threat. The old behavioural policies, which relied on punitive measures, only intensifies this trauma response. They are acting out of survival and not malice.
A juggling act in the age of anxiety
The young people in further education are in the midst of an unique and confusing combination of pressures, mainly of which can be directly linked to the social landscape.
For many of them, the pressures in their lives aren’t just academic, they are financial. With the removal of essential support such as the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and the rise of the cost-of-living crisis, these kids are forced to choose between study and work. A 2024 survey by the Association of Colleges (AoC) found that poor mental health was the top reason for student absence and prioritising paid work was the third top reason.
I remember one student that broke my heart. He was 17, parents with substance abuse issues and two smaller siblings at home. Crying his eyes out in a toilet, he told me that, because he had finished a night shift that morning and had fallen asleep, he had missed an essential deadline already extended twice. The panic in his voice as he told me how he was convinced he was going to fail, lose his part-time job and be unable to contribute to the rent and help to feed his brothers.
The stakes for these young people are existentially high. How can we expect these kids to focus and show patience when they are constantly juggling academic demands on top of the immediate fears of hunger and homelessness?
The chain reaction of austerity, poverty, and behaviour
Austerity has created a vicious cycle. Simultaneously it has increased student poverty and removed colleges’ capacity to cope with the psychological fallout.
Students who are tired, hungry and stressed out have dramatically reduced capacity for focus and self-regulation. The correlation between poverty and barriers to learning is absolutely undeniable.
UNISON surveys of educational staff reveal the direct impact of poverty on students’ ability to learn and behave. 73% of support staff believe that poverty has a negative impact on education, and 55% believe children are suffering poor mental health as a direct result of rising poverty levels.
Poverty creates so many barriers, be they physical, cognitive or emotional. A child who hasn’t eaten since their state-sponsored lunch the previous day, or has spent the night in a cold, chaotic home is not ready to engage in structured learning. And we are finding that disruptive behaviour, in this context, is often just the silent screams of a body and mind struggling to survive.
When you pull the safety net, further education students will fall
Chronic underfunding has forced colleges to slash non-teaching roles to the bare bone. Support staff such as councillors and learning mentors, extracurricular tutors and activity facilitators – who are on the front lines of mitigating this behavioural crisis simply no longer exist. Or they do, but in a minimal sense that does nothing but put plasters on gaping emotional wounds and drives those in those roles into high stress environments which wreck their own mental health.
These cuts mean that frontline staff, many of whom are represented by UNISON, are left exposed. A 2018 survey by the union highlighted that 56% of support staff felt they didn’t have the time, the space or privacy to speak to students about their issues due to funding-related constraints on hours and workloads.
Couple this with cuts to local services and you get a student meltdown. When youth clubs are closed and CAMHS waiting lists are years long, managing complex social and mental health issues falls entirely onto these FE staff. The college, with its bare-bone support structure, is expected to pick up all the shattered pieces of a fractured social contract.
These cruel cuts have forced teaching and support staff to become de-facto social workers, therapists, crisis mitigators and parents to so many lost children. So many support staff are not trained for this role, leading to a burnout never seen before in the industry and people leaving in droves, causing further instabilities for these anxious kids.
The call to action and reversing the decline in further education
My reality in my role and in my team’s office was a constant crisis. The kids who came to us weren’t naughty, they were fucking terrified. They are deliberate casualties of a state that has systematically withdrawn every single layer of support from them and then chosen to blame their colleges for the resulting chaos. This disruptive behaviour is their last, truly desperate form of communication and we aren’t hearing it.
This isn’t their failure, nor is it the fault of the dedicated staff I was so lucky to work alongside. Further education, an essential engine of social mobility, has been deliberately halted but we can fix it.
We need to start investing in our colleges, not punishing them. The sector needs literally hundreds of millions simply to put the finances back on level ground to what it was a decade ago. This investment must be used to restore non-teaching and pastoral care, putting money into welfare roles that act as an essential buffer between a student’s chaotic home life and learning.
Ultimately though, until the systematic issues of poverty, housing and the cost-of-living crisis are addressed and financial incentives such as EMA are reinstated, FE colleges will continue to be expected to act as a last-resort social service.
The real cost of this industry’s orchestrated decline is not only a deficit on a balance sheet, but the erosion of so many young people’s life chances and access to a safe learning environment.
It is time for the establishment to stop blaming the symptoms and starting healing the fucking source.
Featured image via the Canary
By Antifabot
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