THE year 2001 began with a row about the thing which would continue to dominate lecturers’ minds for the rest of the year - money.

They faced falling even further behind as they discovered their sixth-form college colleagues would be getting a performance-related pay deal similar to schools. In the following months, the pay issue would lead to the sector’s first national strike in 10 years.

If the contents of lecturers’ pay packets made them a little sceptical about the prospects of the lifelong learning revolution, they were not alone.

Such was the lack of certainty in some quarters about the success of the newly-formed Learning and Skills Council in April, that its top crew members were provided with parachutes. Five of the 47 local LSC executive directors who had moved from Government jobs were told they could return to the civil service if their new positions did not work out. They need not have worried. Nearly a year later, the LSC, Britain’s biggest-spending quango, is still airborne.

Serious recruitment problems in the construction and engineering industries were highlighted by Malcolm Wicks, the lifelong learning minister. The Government’s skills task force said both industries needed to improve their image to attract potential apprentices put off by the thought of hard work for little money.

In August the Construction Industry Training Board came up with a solution which had some education types spluttering on their muesli. Its new recruitment poster showed a grinning bricklayer on a beach with a couple of stereotypically-attractive bikini-clad women in the background. “Mark did a lot of laying in Ibiza,” said the caption.

“It might have been better having a woman not a man in the bricklayer’s role,” said Angela Phillips, feminist academic and author of The Trouble with Men.

As if to cool us all down, a cold shower of statistics was laid on by the Employment Service. The craft of using statistics to your own advantage was amply demonstrated by press officers when they were questioned about a cut in the budget for work-based learning for adults. An Employment Service official tried to obscure the 20 per cent reduction by comparing the actual spend with the previous year’s budget, rather than simply stating how much was spent each year. This “paints a better picture”, as he explained in an internal memo accidentally forwarded by email to FE Focus.

Adult learning participation was showing its biggest increase in 20 years, according to the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, but most of the extra take-up was among those already educationally-privileged. The case for “a learning society” was still to be made, it seemed, for those the Government most needed to reach.

One of those to lose out was Jakki Gillett, who found out that lifelong learning stops at 54. She discovered she was too old to get a student loan, despite being accepted at the University of Greenwich. Malcolm Wicks promised that, if re-elected, the Government would end the “scandal” of working-class students getting poor financial support in further education colleges compared with their higher education counterparts. “The real challenge for a second term of a Labour government is how we perceive that class bias in the education system and how we give help to those who want to better themselves,” he said in an interview with FE Focus.

In the summer, the attention was firmly back on colleges as Stephen Grix, head of post-16 at the Office for Standards in Education, issued a sobering health warning that the new joint inspection regime would result in worse grades for many colleges. And so it proved.

Colleges reported that they were experiencing their worst-ever recruitment crisis - with 70 per cent experiencing problems getting teachers, managers and support staff at all levels.

Principals called on John Harwood, the Learning and Skills Council chief executive, to resign after he said that 40 per cent of FE provision was “unacceptable” on BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme. He protested that his remarks were taken out of context by the programme.

Individual learning accounts, the scheme to give pound;150 grants to people over 18, wanting to take up learning, were finally axed on November 23. Department for Education and Employment investigators said they had found evidence of fraud against ILA funds.

The tone and timing of the announcement displeased backbench MPs at the education and skills select committee who accused ministers of using fraud allegations to disguise the fact that the Treasury had ordered the closure of the accounts. The suggestion was roundly denied, as ministers and civil servants insisted the full extent of the fraud would emerge in 2002.

If one thing united the sector - in anger - more than any other in 2001, it was the unrelenting growth in paperwork, red tape and bureaucracy. It all proved too much and, in the run-up to the Association of Colleges’ annual conference in Birmingham, FE Focus and the AOC launched a joint Cut Red Tape campaign.

Ministers and the LSC said they were listening and, in November, Education Secretary Estelle Morris pledged to cut the load when she addressed the AOC conference. Next day, Sir George Sweeney, principal of Knowsley College, was also appointed by the LSC to carry out a national inquiry into college paperwork. The LSC promised that his inquiry would lead rapidly to a 25 per cent cut in paperwork.

Will it happen? As the campaign is set to continue for at least a year, watch this space...

No nudes was bad news for arts and design students at Mid-Cheshire College in Northwich. The local Job Centre refused to accept adverts for nude models on behalf of the college.

Models of all shapes and sizes had found work at the college through the Job Centre for more than 20 years. “We have a duty to protect those who might be offended by such adverts,” said a spokesman for the Employment Service.