As the dust settles after the European Union referendum, one minor item of political news is that further, adult and community education policy is being shifted back to the Department for Education.

We have been out in the cold for nearly a decade and the re-education programme that the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Bis) set out to implement is virtually complete.

From being kept under the stairs as the Cinderella service - which, when it was the case, at least allowed us to operate in the shadows - we’ve been scrutinised, declawed, cleaned up, smoothed out and put to work as an adjunct of Jobcentre Plus. FE has become “the skills sector”, and state-funded community education has almost faded away. It really has been a cultural revolution, and the reprieve of our return to the DfE is not before time.

Painted out of the picture

Why, then, does this not feel more like a homecoming? Perhaps because, while we’ve been gone, our bedroom has been redecorated and there’s no place for us to be. The DfE has not missed us; on the contrary, it has forgotten all about us and repapered the walls. And in the process of setting up the new Chartered College of Teaching, an attempt has been made to change the locks, too.

In October last year, as a founder member of Tutor Voices, I shared a platform at the UKFEchat conference with Angela McFarlane, chief executive of the College of Teaching’s predecessor body. Although her rhetoric was in favour of FE joining the college, the politics of those discussions felt very different to me. It has taken me months to figure out why.

Why does this not feel more like a homecoming? Perhaps because, while we’ve been gone, our bedroom has been redecorated and there’s no place for us to be

The structures we operate within shape our thinking and, in turn, new structures are created that replicate the status quo. From the inception of the College of Teaching, driven by the DfE (and not by Bis), FE was not part of the mindset and was consequently forgotten in the mandate, with the language of schools dominating the written word. I can’t be the only adult-education teacher to have looked at the Claim Your College formal consultation and wondered, “Do they really mean me?”

It’s not about deliberately leaving us out - more a sort of privileged “othering” that leads to FE being, at best, an afterthought. Like the working-class child I used to be, watching television in the 1960s, I cannot see myself reflected in anything the College of Teaching puts out there: not in the language of its media messages, nor the composition of its founding trustees. Even the formal grandness of its language feels alien to someone whose practice is all about equality.

With the move back to the DfE, and with the establishment of not just any old College of Teaching but one backed by a royal charter (if that’s important to you), we find ourselves on a political precipice. As adult educators, of whatever hue, we could turn our individual backs on an organisation that could be trying a lot harder to let us in. We could ignore its presence or talk to one another about our justifiable grievances - the moral high ground is always a seductive place to be when you’re feeling excluded. Or we could collectively raise our voices and bang on the door.

On the edge

In a chapter in Further Education and the Twelve Dancing Princesses, using the fairy-tale metaphor that haunts FE, Rania Hafez talks about the limitations of being on the edge; about how subversion can turn into collusion when we give up our attempts to storm the castle. I was powerfully struck when I first read this, but I wondered where the castle was. I think we’ve found it.

So, College of Teaching, this is an invitation to you. No, we did not step up in our tens of thousands to join your consultation. Your language excluded us and, as our autonomy and job security have atrophied, we have long since lost any sense of our own agency and power. But we are still here, we are beginning to mobilise and we have plenty to say.

Our crisis of identity is giving way to a new, affirmative activism, operating around freely available social media and the unfunded Tutor Voices organisation for FE educators. It’s a movement of energy, possibilities and potential. When you’ve finished constructing your hierarchy, you’ll be tired and we’ll be here. All you need to do is buzz us in.

Lou Mycroft is a teacher educator at Northern College in South Yorkshire
@loumycroft