Analysis: Undervalued colleges will need help if the Scottish Government is going to deliver its policy objectives

Ministers will have to make struggling sector a priority to achieve their goals

Colleges in Scotland are the Cinderellas of the nation's education system.

Despite playing a vital role in society and the economy, they remain hugely underappreciated and under-resourced.

The Conservative MSP Stephen Kerr put it more bluntly last month when he said the further education sector had been the victim of a "hatchet job" by the SNP government in recent years.

The Scottish Parliament building

Because when college budgets get squeezed, they have found fairy godmothers in short supply.

Unlike colleagues in the university sector, they are less able to boost their coffers with appeals to affluent alumni or by sending vice-principals jetting off around the world to drum up investment from thousands of fee-paying students from overseas.

Instead, they rely largely on a slice of a government education budget, but usually find themselves behind schools and universities in the pecking order.

The government denies that colleges have been left behind, of course.

"Colleges are very much at the heart of what we are planning for the coming years," Graeme Dey, the higher and further education minister, told MSPs recently.

He was, presumably, referring to an upcoming shake-up of the skills agenda and ongoing initiatives to offer more disadvantaged youngsters a path out of poverty.

But his words would have had more resonance if his government had not just reneged on a £26m funding uplift promised for colleges - worth the equivalent of £1m per college in Scotland - in order to help fund a pay deal for teachers.

Mr Dey said the cost of that agreement with teaching unions had to be found from within the education budget.

But at the end of the day, politics is about priorities and choices.

The government's decision to effectively "deprioritise" colleges has left many fearing for their financial future, with dozens of job losses on the cards.

There is no doubt that ministers face difficult decisions as budgets shrink.

But the government must realise there will be no fairy tale ending for its wider policy objectives unless it enables the further education sector to finally step out of the shadows and flourish.