Conservatives must currently be thrilled with the state of the English education debate. The fact that tuition fees were such a prominent part of the Labour platform back in May seems to have quietened that issue, and with it, grave concerns about the huge cultural and professional changes sweeping through higher education. For all the opposition to academies and free schools, the election result has re-energised the Tories’ great crusade on that front, and, it seems, wrong-footed Labour anew. When it comes to cuts, meanwhile, the mainstream media reaches for its collective notepad, hears the usual reassurances that the schools budget is protected, and then backs off.

Meanwhile, two huge stories bubble away. One is the crisis in state sixth-form education, which falls outside the department for education’s five-to-15 “ringfence” – and which, contrary to all that chatter about the glories of academic achievement, is really struggling. School sixth-forms are having increasing problems meeting curriculum requirements, but the gravest problems are faced by England’s 93 sixth-form colleges – some of which had lost around a third of their funding by the end of the last parliament, as well as being clobbered by the abolition of the educational maintenance allowance. Now they fear even worse cuts to come.

Those of us who benefited from what they do – and, for what it’s worth, if it hadn’t been for the sixth-form college I went to, I would probably not be writing these words – can attest to what is under threat: the huge contribution of institutions that send a higher proportion of students to university than school sixth-forms, thanks to their talent for giving young people self-respect, and ambition (“aspiration”, you might call it). What’s to blame, perhaps, is a mess of hopelessly traditionalist Tory ideas, whereby all sixth forms should be joined to schools, presumably so as to provide prefects, strapping chaps for the first XV, and more trophies for headteachers’ cabinets.

Worse, though, is being experienced by a sector of education in which both the political and media class are mysteriously uninterested. Since 2009, England and Wales’s Further Education (FE) colleges have been drastically hacked back, and they now face truly hair-raising economies.

Reliable estimates suggest that funding for the vital post-18 courses taken by thousands of people at FE institutions every year is currently being cut by around 24%. Just to really terrify staff (who this week lobbied parliament) and students, the aftermath of the election has seen announcements of two further cuts of £450m – in the DfE’s post-16 budget, and the business department, which funds FE college’s post-18 work. Colleges are already awash with redundancies, hugely increased class sizes, and closed-down campuses, but government – in terms of both ministers, and civil servants – seems to barely care. Indeed, if you want an illustration of the official Whitehall attitude, one anecdote says just about everything: in October 2014, Vince Cable claimed that officials in his department had suggested doing away with FE altogether, claiming that “no one will notice”.

Around 40% of 16-year-olds still leave school without five good GCSEs, and it is the FE sector that usually steps in to help. According to Lynne Sedgmore, a former college principal who now heads the 157 Group of some of the UK’s biggest FE colleges, what the cuts threaten is simple enough: “If those people can’t get support to go through the system, they’ll end up dropping out, and they’ll become Neets.”

From some gilded Westminster cage, it might be easy to scoff at level 1 courses in health and social care, hair and beauty, or childcare, whose requirements include “three GCSEs at Grade E”. But for people who might have reached their late teens and felt a sudden pang of regret and purpose, they are a vital opening to opportunity. The same applies to part-time courses that people use to acquire new skills, or the huge work FE colleges do on Esol courses – English for speakers of other languages, an area which insiders say is under threat as never before. We should also not forget about the wealth of subjects colleges teach at levels 2 and 3, and A-level. Putting all of this in such jeopardy clearly lends a hollow ring to any talk about integration, aspiration, and social mobility – let alone the insistence that a life on benefits is no life at all, and people must ready themselves for a labour market that demands nothing so much as “flexibility”. So shredding FE will also have direct economic effects: a recent independent study of Leeds City College, for example, reckoned that it benefited the local economy to the annual tune of £702m.

The government’s line is that its drive for apprenticeships – funding for which, of course, is now “ringfenced” – must take precedence. But apprenticeships are hardly a like-for-like replacement for the huge array of provision that colleges provide. Besides, as FE staff will tell you, many of the students they help have to prepare for employment in basic ways (“some people won’t even look you in the eye when they first come”) before anyone thinks about introducing them to an employer. In other words, it’s complicated: more complicated, certainly, than yet another sepia-tinted article of Tory faith: that underachievers and miscreants are best served by an instant dose of the 9-5 grind, whatever their readiness.

The issue of FE recently came up at a Westminster Hall debate in parliament, when the skills minister Nick Boles (Winchester, Oxford) parried a question from a Labour MP who once served as an FE principal. Boles told him not to assume that new cuts would fall “entirely” on FE colleges, and rebuffed his concerns about the aforementioned 24% cut, bigging up apprenticeships and apparently claiming that FE represents something of “lower value”. It did little to still the jitters now spreading through towns and cities, nor to dim the prospect that may well define the next five years: being ruled by people who know so little of the ordinary world, yet so blithely lay waste to it.