If the government is to achieve its target of getting half our young people into higher education by 2010 - and if we are to prevent universities from becoming middle-class ghettos - then the gulf between further and higher education will have to be bridged.
That is likely to mean a great deal more than franchising a few degree courses out to colleges. It could mean joint campuses, as in Kent (see above) - or it could mean a full merger between a local college and its neighbouring university - quite likely to happen in Bradford.
That’s why the Learning and Skills Council have opened talks with the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
As things stand, according to HEFCE chief executive Sir Howard Newby, “pupils from families in the higher socio-economic group are seven times more likely to enter higher education than those in the lowest group”. Which is why his LSC counterpart, John Harwood, says: “We need to ensure that progression routes are clearly mapped out by developing closer links between curriculum planning in further and higher education.”
“Closer links” is a cautious phrase designed to avoid frightening people. Derby University has already merged with a local FE college.
In Bradford, the college and the university point out that they are neighbours and were once a single institution. In the past two years they have developed a closer relationship, running courses together, merging their print services, and jointly working out a curriculum strategy. Now the HEFCE and the LSC are being asked to fund a feasibility study next year to “analyse the strengths and potentials of the college and the university”.
A report by Herman Ouseley earlier this year noted that once prosperous Bradford has seen its fortunes plummet: “It has struggled to redefine itself as a modern, 21st-century competitive multi-cultural area and has lost its spirit of community togetherness.” Its ethnic diversity, potentially the source of strength and dynamism, is actually, according to a joint Bradford College and Bradford University report, leading to “exclusion, racism and poverty”. The result, according to an Office for Standards in Education report last year, has been that “educational achievement is generally low. Standards are rising but nevertheless poor attainment and the insufficient pace of improvement reflect a poverty of aspirations, both in the schools and in the local authority.”
The government response to the Ofsted report was the usual one: to privatise the education authority. But this does not address the real problem. You can start to address it, says the joint university and college report, by creating a seamless route from further to higher educational qualifications.
But this, it adds, is not helped by the way money is allocated, which means that “both institutions are unhelpfully required to compete with each other in significant areas”. They are now going to explore deeper forms of co-operation, up to and including the merger of the two institutions.
“The result would be an institution rather like what we used to call a polytechnic.”
