Why does the Further Education Development Agency need a single operational centre in London? FEDA says the centre is needed “to ensure efficient and robust support for a strengthened network of regional centres, and to enable increasingly local delivery”. This seems a curious, expensive and unconvincing reply.
Curious, because London is hardly central England. Expensive, because as the Further Education Funding Council has argued so strongly “the London average (salary) was 27 per cent higher than the national average in 1994 but rose to 30 per cent higher in 1995”. It is unconvincing, because if the “hub” of English FE, it describes a strangely shaped wheel of which surely Birmingham should be the centre, while some modernity in terms of computing technology would suggest other HQ venues - even northern ones!
R T NEWELL
Vice principal (resources) Hugh Baird College Bootle
