We’re in the middle of the 8th Colleges Week, organised by the Association of Colleges as an annual opportunity to focus attention on the role of further education colleges. This one is cleverly designed to highlight colleges’ contribution to each of the Labour government’s five missions and has the strapline “Building Brighter Futures”.
So let’s once again celebrate the 218 FE colleges delivering education and training to hundreds of thousands of students and apprentices, including 149 offering higher education –an often overlooked dimension that we explore in our forthcoming report “Taking Higher Education Further”, which is being launched on 25th March. The 39 Sixth Form Colleges include some of the highest-performing A Level providers in the country. Colleges have gone from strength to strength and 86% are currently rated Ofsted Good or Outstanding. This is despite their almost continuous underfunding by successive governments which has led to 37% of them operating in deficit and FE teachers’ pay slipping further and further behind their school counterparts.
FE colleges are not glamorous; they are hard-working and deeply embedded in their communities. Alongside universities they provide direct support to employers of all kinds in every area of the country. But they are also competing on all sides with others in a struggle for student numbers that is driven all too often by internal financial imperatives: schools keen to expand small sixth forms to make them viable, Independent Training Providers striving to make their businesses more profitable, universities desperate to boost their student numbers in the cauldron of a marketised Higher Education sector. Colleges face a continuous struggle for stability in a sector characterised by constant competition and change.
Any developed country trying to grow economically in an era of escalating global rivalry needs an education system with a top-class technical and vocational education and training (TVET) sector producing the skilled workers of the future and upskilling the current workforce as technology rapidly changes skill needs. Report after report and review after review since the 1960s has banged away at the importance of this for the UK, but it has rarely received the political attention it deserves. We remain in at best a mid-table position in comparison to other countries, somewhere just below the OECD average, with countries like Germany, Switzerland, South Korea and Singapore seen as having the best technical education systems. Most frustrating is the fact that in the FE sector we already have the basic building blocks of a world-class TVET system; we just don’t invest in it.
With the Augar Review now approaching its sixth anniversary, it’s worth recalling the vision it put forward for FE: “a national network of FECs that provide high quality technical and professional education…delivered flexibly and aligned to the needs of local economies…will assist in driving productivity…[and] as engines of social mobility and inclusion…will also provide reskilling and upskilling opportunities for adults.”
Yes, yes, yes! But only if it receives proper funding. An increase of at least £200 million a year just to keep up, according to leading expert Imran Tahir of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The forthcoming government Spending Review is therefore critical.
Helpfully, the Education Select Committee has launched an inquiry into the FE sector, which raises all the right questions about funding and qualifications, to which the LEI will be submitting detailed evidence. Let’s hope their intervention will shift the political dial towards giving much greater priority to FE. Colleges need greater stability and a step-change in investment.
Will this finally be FE Colleges’ year? Will we get a positive funding settlement that finally enables the vision of the Augar panel and so many others to become a reality? That would at last give colleges the means to deliver a world-class skills system and more importantly, help the UK get out of the economic doldrums while at the same time helping struggling workers improve their career and earning prospects.
When public finances are so tight and taxpayer money so stretched this will be a difficult decision to make. But the right one.
*Augar Review, Crown Copyright, May 2019, p118)
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