Further education: now the super-college

Having successfully modernised higher education over the past decade, and reformed secondary schools rather less convincingly, government has finally turned its attention to the colleges. Recent reports on sector strategy (Foster) and the national skills base (Leitch), combined with a drive for college specialisation and a retreat from micro-management by the Learning & Skills Council, have paved the way for legislation and a long-overdue shake-up of the further education sector in the coming parliamentary session.

The Further Education and Training Bill, presented to the House in November, picks up where the FE white paper left off last March, but in an altogether more radical and ambitious manner. For the first time ever, further education colleges are offered a genuinely prominent position at the centre of national affairs. Some of the proposals in the Bill will profoundly change the character of post-school education and training for the foreseeable future.

The most eye-catching and without doubt path-breaking proposal is to grant foundation degree-awarding powers to the colleges. This caught many people by surprise, and appears to have caused a difference of opinion between the DfES on the one hand, and both No 10 and No 11 on the other. Unsurprisingly, the latter won, but for absolutely the right reasons.

Foundation degrees are already extensively offered in colleges, but under license from a university. This provides an element of quality assurance for foundation degrees, securing public confidence in the new qualification. But it also allows the universities effective control over the activities of a market competitor, and that is not sustainable. Sensibly therefore, the new Bill takes matters to a logical conclusion, freeing the best colleges to award their own. Now the colleges have a prize to aim for, albeit limited to foundation and not honours degrees, and an incentive to raise quality.

It will have that effect, too. Just as the polytechnics thirty years ago drove up their own quality in pursuit of full degree-awarding powers, and sustained quality thereafter because their reputation depended on it, so colleges will respond to a similar dynamic. It has been disappointing therefore, if rather predictable, to find only one group united in opposition to the proposal — the university vice-chancellors.

Not that they should worry unduly. The DfES letter accompanying the Bill places the slow-moving universities’ Quality Assurance Agency in charge of making any recommendation to the Privy Council, while also dampening excitement within the colleges by indicating that very few should expect degree-awarding powers in the near future.

There may also be a sting in the tail for some colleges too. Foundation degree-awarding status will quickly separate the very best from the rest; a fraction of other colleges will chase to catch up.

And the rest, those that cannot or choose not to make the grade, what will become of them? To understand that aspect of the future, one must turn to the second, less eye-catching yet even more radical, proposal in the Bill. Colleges are being sent to market. Employer and student demand, rather than provider-led supply, will drive the system. Private providers will be able to compete with colleges for public funding to meet employers’ work-based training needs.

And to compete effectively, colleges will have to compete on quality because they are unlikely to do so on price. The CBI has welcomed this as a step in the right direction, but urges government to go further, sooner.

Nevertheless, government has embarked on a most radical reform of the further education sector. This is public policy as ‘tough love’. Colleges that meet high standards of quality, with reputations burnished by foundation degree-awarding status, should survive and thrive; employers and students will flock there.

But colleges that fail to match the demands made of them, or fail to attract the right mix of partners, will be ripe for takeover by a successful college, or even closure. This is no idle threat. Few doubt there are too many ineffective colleges currently; there are definitely too many to survive the next decade under terms proposed by the FE Bill. Prepare therefore for a long overdue quality-led reduction in the number of FE colleges, and the emergence of some business-competent, maybe city-region, ‘super-colleges’ in their place.

The third proposal in the Bill to attract attention gives the LSC powers to remove under-performing college principals, a power hitherto in the gift of a college’s governing board. Presumably government has been unimpressed by the readiness of governors to act in this manner hitherto, and has inserted powers of direct intervention into the legislation. College principals have understandably reacted with alarm.

The trouble with this proposal is that it undermines both governors and principals on the assumption that there is a ready supply of better leaders to call on. Alas, there is not; succession management within the sector is an area of substantial weakness.

Government has also passed up the chance, for now, of improving the quality of governing boards. Too many struggle to attract members of quality and experience, not least because there are too many boards with too little influence.

The Bill also steps around two other items of unfinished business. First, the LSC retains its £6bn role at the centre of funding. A new regional structure is proposed, but that hardly addresses the conflict between a demand-led, market-attuned focus for the colleges and a supply-led planning quango like the LSC. Something has to give sooner or later.

And second, the reform of 14-19 education outlined by the Tomlinson report remains the ghost at the banquet. Without progress there, aspects of the proposed FE reforms will unravel.

On balance though, the FE Bill achieves something remarkable: it contains radical reforms that have been generally welcomed, and it sets in motion a productive transformation of the colleges that has been overdue for nearly a century.

The colleges will of course be challenged. But the FE Bill offers colleges a road map to prosperity and national prominence. My two terms as a college governor are up this year, and I had planned to stand down. But I’ve been asked to stay on. Having read the FE Bill, I’ve agreed; it’s a challenge I’m up for too.

David Robertson is Professor of Public Policy, Liverpool John Moores University, and Governor, Wirral Metropolitan College.