I SHARE the anger of the town's Liberal Democrat leader, Councillor Gordon Birtwistle, at the disclosure that staff at Burnley College got Christmas-present "profit sharing" handouts worth a total of £60,000.

Not just because, as he says, there are plenty of things in education that need that sort of money, rather than the well-paid lecturers and others who got Marks and Spencer gift vouchers worth up to £150 a time as rewards for helping the college make a surplus.

For what is equally outrageous is the notion that the college is really in the business of business - and doing well.

In fact, it and all the other places like it are about as much engaged in actual commerce as were the collective farms in Soviet Russia - because most of the money they get comes not from out-and-out enterprise, but, in pretence of such, from the public purse.

We hear that "apart from national funding" (by the taxpayer, that means), the ever-so-successful Burnley College, which has a £9 million turnover, "generated its own income from the services it supplied to business (fair enough) and to other education bodies and councils" (that means more money from taxpayers).

This is hardly real business; more a sponge for public finance - which makes the bonus to staff for having collared enough of it to make a 'surplus' hardly the stuff of a true performance-related test. The fact is that many of our colleges of further education are chock-full of revenue-bringing students, many on dubious courses - such as media studies and women's studies - who would not be there at all if they could have gone straight from school into work as most youngsters once did.

And if colleges were paid by results based on them providing the qualifications and learning that helped students get real, useful and decently-paid work, a lot would have to pull their socks up before there were thousands of pounds worth of bonuses being dished out.

I'm all for the commercial stimulants of the real world being introduced to the cloistered world of our colleges, but they ought really to be real.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.