The team working on the FE White Paper have a real challenge on their hands. Our system is messy and complicated and needs reform, but there is little consensus about what to change or how to change it. And they can’t rely on any of us working in the system to come up with solutions, because despite our enormous collective knowledge and commitment, there is only a thin consensus about what needs to be done, and little consensus at all about how to do it.

The recent collection published by the Campaign for Learning, “Reforms for a Revolutionary Post-16 White Paper”, illustrates this point well. It contains a set of essays which cover nearly all of the issues: technical education needs to be consolidated, we need a properly funded and lifelong adult strategy, we need more options for level 4 and 5 and more flexible options to level 6, apprenticeship funding for 16 to 18s needs to be an entitlement and separate from the levy, funding for SMEs needs resolving, and teaching needs to be recognised and supported as a specialist aspect of the profession. There also seems to be a widespread commitment to “collaboration” rather than “competition” as the ruling ethos of a new system.

However, I suspect that those writing the White Paper know pretty much all of this. Their problem is how to move from where we are to something better. And this means grappling with the extremely difficult issue of institutional arrangements. We have a set of organisations that not only have competing remits, but also, for a variety of reasons, often have rabid mission drift. It is this, which is both a cause and a consequence of the market-led system, which tends to create lowest-common-denominator outcomes. It is at the root of many of the contradictions in post-16 learning, and unless this is recognised and sorted out, efforts at reform are unlikely to be “revolutionary” at all. 

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This is why the paper “Further Consideration”, by Tom Richmond and Andrew Bailey at EDSK, should be welcomed. They bravely put forward proposals to create a different institutional foundation for delivering post-16 learning. They recommend redefining the purpose of further education by designating three types of institutions: community, sixth form and technical, with distinct remits in terms of curriculum and core purpose.

Institutional arrangements in FE

Their paper advocates the brigading of colleges into geographical group structures, under the leadership of a further education director; the use of funding to incentivise this change and to address capital issues; and the creation of a new relationship with higher education, with partnerships to deliver high-quality technical qualifications, including the new levels 4 and 5. To enhance learner choice and improve organisational stability, it supports increased funding rates, individual learner accounts and three-year funding agreements. 

There are some significant advantages in these proposals. Technical colleges and technical qualifications would become specialist within this approach, and would have the opportunity to develop and pursue excellence as a distinct form of learning focussed on the workplace.  It isn’t completely clear how to separate “community” provision from this, or whether it would be sustainable on its own, but there is scope for local variation within the new group structures that are recommended. While individual colleges will have their focus and remit sharpened, they retain a high degree of autonomy, and so can continue to be innovative and inventive, but within a different context. 

There are three aspects of the proposals, however, that need more work. The whole question of how the “further education director” role operates needs further debate. The emphasis, rightly, is that these appointments should be made “by the sector”. This is important because the alternatives - the Department for Education (over-centralised) or a local enterprise partnership/combined authority solution (the mirage of “planning”, insufficient capacity/knowledge) - are not workable. But how would this process happen? Are they independent on the management of the new groups of colleges, in which case, who are they accountable to? What is their relationship to the FE commissioner? Or to LEPS or combined authorities? Isn’t this geographical footprint too big? Wouldn’t a multi-academy trust-style approach, grouping colleges into threes or fours, dependent on local circumstances, be simpler? 

Revolutionary forces

The answer to this might come from closer examination of the other two unresolved questions in the EDSK proposals: the role of employers; and the broader strategic relationship with universities. Both are addressed in “Revolutionary Forces” collection. 

David Hughes, supporting the recommendations of the excellent Commission for the College of the Future, offers the idea of college-based, sector-specific business centres focused on productivity - one of his three priorities for the White Paper.  There is enormous merit in this idea, which brings together the supply of skills with the need to stimulate demand for them, through coordinated employer support, both for larger national bodies such as the NHS and for SMEs in localities. And it injects real purpose into the notion of dedicated, expert technical colleges, working the “two way street” between the educational setting and the workplace, linking workplace and classroom provision into bespoke pathways relevant to specific occupations. 

However, as Ewart Keep points out in the Campaign for Learning collection, the lack of a collective structure “at national, local or sectoral level” for organising employers lies at the root of our national problem with technical skills. It is a key feature of successful European systems of skills formation (I am trying to avoid mentioning Germany or German-style) and the EDSK proposals would need to be augmented by a clear plan for employers to address this “institutional vacuum” if they are to work.

Secondly, as Andy Westwood points out in his contribution (“What does revolutionary really look like?”), there is a need to tie these structures through a more sensitively crafted industrial strategy, and stronger crossovers to housing and communities, to the wider challenges of growth, productivity and regional geography. 

This begs the question of what kind of FE/HE partnerships are needed to achieve this, because it means engaging in the wider debate about science, technology and innovation (which is a real opportunity to restate the primary mission and focus of research universities), rather than the narrower issue of managing the competition between the two sectors around skills supply. This will also mean seeing devolution from a new perspective - with more distributed local leadership, bringing together a reshaped higher and further education system, collaborating with partners and working directly with business to reinvigorate economic activity.  

It may be that the FE White Paper cannot deliver all of this - maybe it should not try to. But it should try to lay the foundations for a new role for further education, and this means addressing the institutional arrangements in our sector. The EDSK team are right to ask us to focus on these. I am not sure they are suggesting that we give that much up. By accepting the need to change, and being willing to engage in and shape the debate, we stand to gain far more than we might lose. 

Alun Francis is the principal and chief executive at Oldham College