Tag: #FE

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Why we shouldn’t welcome the FE White Paper

The new Skills for Jobs White Paper put colleges at the centre of an underfunded, narrow, skills-based and business-led plan.

TES article by Sean Vernell

Last week, the secretary of state for education, Gavin Williamson, finally launched the government’s FE White Paper. He said it would bring about a “revolution” in the sector. It will not, of course, do anything of the sort. Not a revolution – not even progressive reform.

Some college leaders have put on a brave face and welcomed the paper; others have gone further and praised it. They suggest that the White Paper puts FE colleges at the heart of change. But should we really welcome this White Paper? 

Should we embrace a proposal that puts FE colleges at the centre of an underfunded, narrow, skills-based and business-led plan, which simultaneously does nothing to address mass unemployment but does saddle more students with debt for the rest of their lives?

The same White Paper gives more powers to government to intervene. Interventions that, will no doubt, make us look back warmly on the universally despised FE commissioner’s supportive interventions. Many expected that the White Paper would loosen the grip of the market over the sector and introduce more collaborative working among colleges. Alas, they have shown that they cannot break from the ideological belief that competition rather than planning will deliver. It hasn’t, it won’t and can’t.

Being at the centre of this “revolution” is not a reason to be cheerful or excited.   

Williamson’s FE White Paper is not only a missed opportunity but, worse, it has the makings of another disaster for the sector and the communities we serve. It is a throwback to a bygone age of the 1950s and ’60s in which technical colleges, during a period of economic boom, provided real apprenticeships for young people and workers for local employers. We do not live in that world today. 

The White Paper reveals a paucity of ideas and a poverty of thought with a worrying lack of understanding of today’s world.

Skills for Jobs White Paper: where is the funding?

Even on its own terms, the White Paper fails. The key test of whether the proposals are serious or not is how much extra funding the government is prepared to provide for a sector that has seen historically high cuts over the past decade. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, government spending on adult education has been cut by 50 per cent since 2010 and annual attendance has nearly halved to 1.5 million. In 2005, there were 4.4 million adult places. 

The additional funding outlined in the White Paper will not even address these cuts, let alone provide a boost to financing. The government has committed to spend £500 million each year on a National Skills Fund. But this will only reverse around one-fifth of the funding that has been slashed since 2010. 

The White Paper calls for an FE teacher recruitment campaign. That’s great, but who will be attracted to the sector when wages are lower in comparison with any part of the education sector? I am old enough to remember when practitioners would move from schools to work in FE. The money was better and there was more freedom to teach in a way that engaged our students. Toda,y you’ll be hard pushed to find a practitioner who has left school to come to teach in FE – the exodus now is in the opposite direction.

Harnessing the collective power of society

The key argument at the centre of the White Paper is that employers should be made central and have predominance in developing “local skills improvement plans”. Trust is placed in the same employers we have seen spend less and less on training and apprenticeships throughout the decade long period of austerity. 

In the White Paper, a case study is given citing the German Chambers of Commerce as a model of good practice. Indeed, the German government is well in advance of the UK investing in real apprenticeship and training programmes. In Germany, the trade unions play a central role, alongside others, in the development of education and training. These two words, “trade unions”, are not mentioned once in the 73-page White Paper. 

The proposals do not attempt to harness the collective power of society. The pandemic has reminded us of the vital role of the public sector and the life-saving role of solidarity in our communities. We face not only a public health and economic crisis but an environmental one, too. All these participants must be part of envisaging and collaborating on the education “revolution” we need to address these crises.

We have yet another minister who fails to understand the demands and challenges of the moment and the needs of our students and their communities. Our students are not one-dimensional human beings. They have multi-layered ambitions, just like the children of government ministers. Yes, they want decent, well-paid jobs with the training and education to go with them. But they also want and need an education that develops critical thinking and creativity. One that acknowledges the scale of the problems our societies face. One that begins to invest and plan to address these and allows young people and adults to be part of providing the solutions. 

This is the education “revolution” FE must be able to deliver if it is to continue to be relevant to society and our communities. The White Paper does not do this or match up to these expectations. 

We are living through extraordinary and challenging times. In the reconstruction of the post-coronavirus world, FE will be vital. Arundhati Roy explains that, “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”.

If we are to pass through this portal and establish an FE sector that is truly at the heart of rebuilding and recovery, we need leaders who are not compliant. And, crucially, the leadership of the sector must not pretend that this White Paper matches up to the demands of the future. We all know it doesn’t. Let’s start saying so: we need a real revolution in FE.

Sean Vernell is the UCU’s further education committee vice chair

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College merger mania has failed. We need a new model.

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Labour has promised to end the historic funding inadequacies and place the sector at the centre of its radical proposals. What will be the future for FE: planning and collaboration or more competition and the market?

‘Merger mania, which has gripped the sector over the past five years, has failed. The leadership of some of these supergroups has slashed and burned, leaving behind hollowed-out shells’

TES article ‘College merger mania has failed. We need a new model’

In just over a week, we will be heading to the polls to vote in this year’s general election. For most of us, never in our lifetimes has there been such a clear difference between the main political parties in how they would approach the economy, society and education.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have offered additional funding for further education, with the Tories committing £1.8 billion on new buildings and the Lib Dems pledging £10,000 per adult for lifelong learning. Labour has promised to end the historic funding inadequacies and place the sector at the centre of its radical proposals to transform Britain, including a pledge to create 80,000 climate change apprenticeships.

Whoever is triumphant on 12 December, change is imminent. But is FE ready for these radical changes?

Extra funding is the starting point without which we can’t begin the transformation necessary to harness the true potential of the sector. But additional funding on its own doesn’t address the crucial issue of leadership.

FE leadership and merger mania

It was a breath of fresh air to read Stuart Rimmer’s article about FE leadership. He describes a situation in which principals are systemically focused on failed models of leadership and make short-term financial decisions that are diametrically opposed to the requirements of quality in education provision.

He writes: “Incorporation has failed to protect the security of colleges, of staff and students. It has failed to protect continued investment, it has failed to protect high standards, it has failed to protect support from those in high government since 1992.”

Finally, a much-needed debate is opening up within the sector about the failed model of incorporation. We need a new model – that much is clear. Merger mania, which has gripped the sector over the past five years, has failed. The leadership of some of these supergroups has slashed and burned, leaving behind hollowed-out shells. The few remaining staff are often demoralised and frustrated with the direction of their college. The fool’s gold of “economies of scale” has been exposed as a huge drain on cash and quality.

This managerial approach, based on an acceptance of the market in education, has made a bad situation worse. Management see themselves as firefighters running around colleges putting out fires – too often it is petrol and not water that is used to douse the flames.

Those who work in the sector will recognise the ridiculous decisions that lead to a race to the bottom within colleges and between colleges.

Timetabling troubles

It starts with timetabling, something that we can all agree is essential to effective teaching. Those outside education couldn’t be judged for assuming that timetabling would be organised coherently and successfully.  And how wrong they’d be. Those working in the sector find this basic aspect of college organisation is regularly a complete shambles.

Timetables are drawn up with cuts in mind. Fears of not reaching internally set recruitment targets mean that managers often timetable the least number of groups and then desperately add more at the last moment to deal with student demand.

At the beginning of term, management insists on telling staff to continue to enrol students even after groups are full, and yet no extra staff are recruited to match demand. This causes total chaos when lessons begin with overcrowded and chaotic classrooms.

This, in turn, results in many students – often those who are confident that their results provide other options – leaving within the first few weeks for other colleges. Millions of pounds of funding flows out of the college, leaving with the students.

Management then resorts to employing agency staff at the last minute to cover the groups without teachers. The use of agency staff is another kind of fool’s gold: organising staffing in this way was meant to control staffing costs by creating a more flexible workforce. But the reality is, it has become the default position in most colleges. It’s a very expensive staffing solution with disastrous effects for those on such contracts – and it ultimately leads to a worsening in the student learning experience, with many more following their peers out the door.

The race is then on to recoup this loss in funding: cutting guided learning hours, reconfiguring the weekly contact time and forcing staff to teach more units. This is usually followed up by redundancy trawls across teaching and support staff – with enhancing the learner experience often cited as the issue.

The danger of competition, not collaboration

Principals do express dissatisfaction with having to make these difficult decisions but the reality is, while some dislike the consequences, they fail to recognise them as the logical outcome of their political and ideological educational world view. I suspect few would accept that competition within the sector is the root of the problem.

Instead, they blindly accept the central ideological trope fostered by every government over the past 40 years or so that without competition there would be no incentive. Managers would feel no pressure to innovate and makes things happen, lecturers would simply dust down the same old tired lesson plans and students would turn up when they wanted to.

Thank heaven that we have competition ensuring these issues are kept in check…

The most inspiring ideas and initiatives come about when there is collaboration. Where lecturers and managers meet together as equals and discuss new teaching methods – what has worked and what has not – in an atmosphere of mutual respect and without fear of failing. And when this is underpinned by a long-term funding commitment from the government and a recognition that FE should be centred around the needs of the communities and society, everyone wins.

This general election has opened up the debate about the role of the market and competition in education. The successful leaders of the future FE sector will be those who understand that planning and collaboration are the key to success and not the outdated 19th-century vagaries of the marketplace.

Sean Vernell is the vice-chair of the University and College Union’s further education committee and branch secretary at Capital City College Group