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In this week’s Tes Further: How to survive a college merger

In this week’s Tes Further: How to survive a college merger

Also: an interview with Chartered Institution for Further Education founder Lord Lingfield, plus Tom Starkey, David Jones, FErret and much more

31st March 2017, 4:00pm

Will Martin

In this week’s Tes Further, David Jones, chief executive of Coleg Cambria in Wales, writes about his experiences of college mergers (article free for subscribers). Mergers, he says, are more about people than empire-building, and his top tips for fellow leaders include remembering that colleges are people organisations, not empire-building institutions; focusing on your destination; and being prepared for the most inevitable aspect of merging - change.

The Tes FE Awards leader of the year also explains how Coleg Cambria coped with its own merging experiences. The college was formed over four years and three mergers ago - and even after all of that change, Coleg Cambria is now as successful as they come. This year, Yvonne Evans also won the inaugural assessor the year title.

Wedding bells

This week, FErret has scurried down the aisle to witness the blessed union of the Education Funding Agency and the Skills Funding Agency, which have merged - you might have heard - into the new “Education and Skills Funding Agency” (article free for subscribers). Even though this union has been on the cards for as long as FErret can remember, Tuesday 28 March will go down as one of the happiest days in FErret’s life. “It was the day that FE’s two star-cross’d lovers finally became one,” FErret writes.

FE is blessed with diversity

Tech guru and teacher Tom Starkey writes that the FE sector should always appreciate its diversity (article free for subscribers). “If variety is the spice of life, then FE has a whole rackful”, Starkey writes. From teaching soon-to-be rugby players, plumbers and nursery assistants, to working alongside people who have come to teaching after careers playing music for Meatoaf, writing books and playing professional sport, working in an FE college “is like accessing the human version of Google search”, Starkey says - only better, because you can nick a biscuit out of their tin.

The true cost of funding cuts

Jonathan Prest, principal of Barton Peveril Sixth-Form College in Hampshire, assesses the true effects of funding cuts. This year, Prest’s college has received over £500 less per student than in 2009-10 - a fall that represents nearly £1.6 million less in its budget based on current student numbers. And despite consistency and success - the college has a “good” rating from Ofsted, and a high proportion of its students go on to study at university - the threat to the sixth-form phase of education still sits there.

Wanted: the most distinguished providers in the land

Five years on from Lord Lingfield’s influential report on professionalism in the sector, the man behind the extinction of the Institute for Learning tells Tes that he has “no regrets” about his effect on further education (article free for subscribers). At the time of the report’s publication, membership of the institute was compulsory for FE teachers - but the Lingfield report called for it to be mandatory, as well as for the abolition of the requirement that colleges and training providers must ensure that their staff are qualified teachers. His report also called for the creation of an “authoritative and independent” chartered body for the sector. Today, he is its chair.

Last year, the Chartered Institute for Further Education (CIFE) welcomed its first members, and around 100 providers have since expressed an interest in joining. But will the CIFE become FE’s own version of the Russell Group of elite universities? “The answer to that is both yes and no,” Lord Lingfield says. “The reason for that is that every provider in the land, providing that it reaches the institution’s high standards for entry, could become a member.”

Foreign students shun UK

Tes reporter Julia Belgutay reveals that the number of applications for student visas from people outside the EU dropped by more than 8 per cent in 2016. The most dramatic decline, however, was in the number of applications by students wanting to extend their visas to continue college study, which plummeted by 83 per cent (from 4,872 in 2015 to 803 in 2016).

Experts from the sector say that “unfriendly” UK immigration policy is putting off non-EU students. According to Ian Pretty, chief executive of the Collab Group of colleges, the UK has a “world-class vocational and technical education offer” that is attractive to international students. “However, the recent tightening of restrictions in visa regulations and the vote to leave the EU has resulted in the UK being perceived as unfriendly to students from overseas.”

‘Bordering on deceit’

FE editor Stephen Exley writes that despite the Home Office’s insistence “that there is no limit” on the number of students who can come here to study, the fact that Prime Minister Theresa May “is dead-set” on including college students in the overall immigration targets means that, whichever way you want to cut it, there is. “If the government really is serious about demonstrating that ‘Global Britain’ is open for business after Brexit, it has a funny way of showing it,” Exley writes.