How do you describe our sector? Do you refer to it as a sector or as a system? Is the term “system” too impersonal, or are you comfortable with the implication of efficiency? I’m in hot water already. For now, let’s just call it our “gang”.
If you refer to our gang as FE, are you just on about colleges or do you include training providers? Or are you thinking of every bit of post-16 education that isn’t school or university - even though some folk in our gang collaborate with schools and universities. I digress…or do I? I need a lie down already.
If you refer to what our gang does as “lifelong learning”, does your brain automatically send you an image of a huddle of crafters in a church hall, or of a maths class in a prison, or of somewhere else entirely? What about apprenticeships - they’re all the rage, aren’t they? How does work-based learning fit into how we define our gang?
In search of clarification, I had a peep at what our gang’s governmental leaders have called themselves over the past 10 years. John Hayes was minister for “FE, skills and lifelong learning”; Matthew Hancock was “skills and enterprise”; Nick Boles was simply “skills” ; Robert Halfon was - and now Anne Milton is - “apprenticeships and skills”.
If “skills” is the only word that keeps on punching through the ever-changing ministerial title, should we settle on The Skills Sector as our gang name? (Although I confess, I can’t say the word skills without privately imagining a “z” on the end, for my own amusement.)
Aiming for a name
The variances in what, where and who we teach are the reasons our gang is so hard to describe and promote as a single idea. But the thing that makes us a ’mare to market is the same thing that makes us fascinating. Does aiming for a name to unite us serve only to undermine?
I’ve been knocking around these parts for a while now and have had a first-hand peep at what lots of people in our gang do. Just as I get confident that I know what we are, another vast area of our work, previously unknown to me, suddenly slides into focus. It’s like exploring a complex network of caves, or falling down a rabbit hole built by an ever-changing rabbit committee.
Recently, I had a perception shift. In a rare moment of clarity, I considered our gang in more abstract terms. I began to see the gang as a curiosity; a complicated crowd of interesting people, teaching other complicated crowds of interesting people. Why reduce our multi-faceted purpose to a neatly packaged commodity just for the sake of concise communication? Complicated is good. We should celebrate complicated.
Of course, giving learners the tools to contribute to society in an economic capacity is an essential aspect of our work, but the bigger picture - the learning - is not a means to an end. There is no end.
So the next time someone asks you what you do, you could tell them that your work gives you the opportunity to explore culture, society, economy and the human condition. Or you could tell ’em you work in skillz. Is that clear? No? Good. It shouldn’t be.
Sarah Simons works in colleges in the East Midlands, and is the director of UKFEchat. She tweets @MrsSarahSimons
