The education secretary has set out a new government strategy for the further education sector.

In a speech to the Learning and Skills Development Agency conference in London, Estelle Morris detailed the latest government thinking on policy for the sector and renewed the government's drive to push up standards.

She also announced one-off funding of £43 million to support the strategy this year, including an average of around £50,000 per college for new equipment and improved classrooms. The money comes from reallocated funds.

Forum Response: Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Gerald Imison, deputy general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, told ePolitix.com: "Lecturers are already totally demoralised. The secretary of state seems to be implicitly blaming them for poor levels of achievement when she has been responsible for the collapse of morale. Her ideas cannot succeed when the basic core funding has been denied to further education colleges.

"We welcome any attempt to co-ordinate the variety of post-16 provision currently available. To move from an assessment of need to delivery will require a significant financial injection. Unless the government is willing to make that investment they cannot expect to gain any reward.

"Criticism of the standards in colleges helps no one. It is a lack of funding to F.E colleges that has created the current position. There seems to be a culture of blaming the infantry when the fault lies with the field marshals closeted in Sanctuary Buildings, far away from the front line."

Forum Response: NATFHE

Paul Mackney, general secretary of NATFHE, told ePolitix.com: "NATFHE is always prepared to engage in discussion to improve the quality of further education on offer to millions of adults and students, but lets be clear that if there has been any slippage in standards, the decline has to be laid at the door of chronic underfunding of the sector.

"FE lecturers certainly have a clear mission. It's to give second and third life chances to a whole range of students who have had poor experiences of education in the past. They perform daily miracles but have been rewarded with lower pay than their colleagues in schools and with ever-increasing workloads.

"College staff are already over-burdened, de-moralised and burnt out with new initiatives. Any plan to address standards in colleges must tackle the massive 12 per cent pay gap between schoolteachers and FE lecturers as a matter of urgency. Teaching staff are now leaving FE in droves to teach in schools. The inability to recruit high quality staff will leave the Education Secretary's pursuit of excellence in FE in tatters.

"FE lecturers welcome further professional development, but demand professional pay. Unless this issue is addressed, there is a real risk that the debate on reform will unfold against a backdrop of an autumn of discontent in FE colleges."