I NOTE with some incredulity that Nicola Sturgeon declared that Scotland's colleges are now “fit for purpose” at the opening of the City of Glasgow College's new building on the Clyde (“Importance of college education in clear focus as Sturgeon opens Glasgow’s £228m supercampus”, The Herald, October 27). The First Minister opened a building which was conceived and planned when the college sector was significantly better funded than it currently is and, unbelievably, it was one which was allowed to proceed, on that basis, after the sector's budget had been cut by almost 25 per cent.

Far from representing a new future for further education, the new buildings at the City of Glasgow College are a real and future danger to the sustainability of other colleges in the city. The city's further education budget has been slashed and student numbers consequently reduced. However, the costs of this unnecessarily large piece of infrastructure will now have to be paid for (almost inevitably by making further even more detrimental cuts to the other two colleges in the city, putting at risk existing buildings and provision in some of Glasgow's poorest communities).

Yet again the SNP, a party which seeks to break links with a centralist UK Government, is demonstrating that in its Scotland, local services are to be deliberately eroded to achieve that aim.

If anyone believes that the SNP's public sector “reforms” offer a glimpse of what things will be like in an independent Scotland then they should ask people employed in those which have had the treatment. A survey of Unison staff in colleges revealed morale at rock bottom and a similar result was obtained from a recent survey of officers in the newly established Police Service of Scotland.

Nobody looking at either of these triumphs of reforming zeal can surely say the quality of service provided has consequently improved.

In the meantime, further evidence of the sector's “fitness for purpose” was again laid bare at Holyrood's public audit committee (“Row deepens over £300,000 payment to college principal”, The Herald, October 27). Surely even Ms Sturgeon's spin cannot absolve her Government from some of the responsibility for these shameful failures all of which happened on her watch.

In the meantime Glasgow Caledonian University's New York venture has, after two years, failed to gain degree awarding status there. Whilst we have been assured that this was funded from the university's own resources it is perhaps yet more evidence that higher education might have been able to have made just a little more of a contribution to the cuts made in post-school education. After all, colleges have been financially slaughtered to protect a sector which seems to have plenty of resources simply to fritter away.

Ian Graham,

6 Lachlan Crescent, Erskine.