The Government is poised to set up a new professional body for further education, a document leaked to FE Week reveals.
The Further Education Guild would act as a “focal point” for ministerial efforts to promote professionalism in the sector, including taking on aspects of the regulation of lecturers through setting professional standards and codes of behaviour.
The Guild would also develop qualifications and support and promote continuing professional development (CPD).
The Guild and an associated proposal to develop a new “Chartered Community College” grade for institutions appear to be part of Government moves to a new professional landscape for FE in which staff will no longer be required to be qualified teachers.
The Guild plan is set out in a paper presented last week to the Further Education and Skills Ministerial Advisory Panel at a meeting chaired by the FE minister John Hayes. The panel makes recommendations to the Government.
“FE Week has now also learned that Lord Lingfield’s final report, initially scheduled for publication this month, has been put back until early autumn.
The document is being seen as a response to Lord Lingfield’s review of professionalism in the sector, which produced an interim report in April recommending the scrapping of compulsory registration with the Institute for Learning and an end to the requirement for lecturers to be qualified teachers.
Sources say it is an attempt to offer something in response to criticism of the deregulation move in Lingfield.
FE Week has now also learned that Lord Lingfield’s final report, initially scheduled for publication this month, has been put back until early autumn.
an overarching body with end to end responsibility for professionalism and vocational education across the sector”
The document, “Developing an FE Guild” was written by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) civil servant Jonathan Yewdall and presented to a meeting of the panel, which includes representatives from stakeholder bodies across FE, on Tuesday last week (10th July).
It says: “Reflecting current thinking about modern guilds, key functions and features of an FE Guild are likely to include:
“Acting as an overarching body with end to end responsibility for professionalism and vocational education across the sector, including to own professional standards and codes of behaviour for members; develop appropriate qualifications for people working in the sector through which people can progress; support individual, subject specific and corporate CPD; [and] support employer recognition of professionalism.”
The Guild would offer institutional and individual membership, says the paper, both of which would be on a voluntary basis.
However, individuals and colleges would be given incentives to join, in that corporate membership of the Guild would be a key criterion for an institution qualifying as a “Chartered Community College” (see separate article).
Individuals would have an incentive to join, too, it says, as the training courses the Guild provided would be linked to higher level qualifications.
The document, which says the Guild would provide a “single, collective focus for raising standards of professionalism and being a custodian of excellence”, would be an “employer-led partnership drawing in employee representative organisations and sector bodies concerned with workforce development”.
The paper also raises questions as to whether the Guild would have any role in lecturers’ pay and conditions and whether it would have any role to play in handling unprofessional conduct complaints by individuals and institutions.
The Hospitality Guild, which was set up last year for the hotel and catering sector with funding from the Government’s £34 million Growth and Innovation Fund, is being seen as a model for the FE version.
The document does not represent finalised Government policy but sources at the meeting said there was no disagreement voiced among attendees. One source said: “There was widespread consensus that it would be worth pursuing both options, and this is something that is being taken forward. It’s very much John Hayes’s baby.”
Another source said, however, that the document raised many questions, including how a Guild would co-exist with current organisations including the Learning and Skills Improvement Service.
Full details are still to be finalised but an announcement is expected in the autumn, possibly at the annual conference of the Association of Colleges in November.
Participants in the meeting did not want to comment on the record.
BIS was also keeping tight-lipped about the proposals. “We don’t comment on leaks,” said a spokeswoman.
The interim Lingfield review said its final report would be published in July 2012, but the spokeswoman said the “evidence gathering for the final report” would be finished this month, with the final Lingfield report itself coming out in “early autumn.”
Good old UCU. Never trust them to keep anything ‘under wraps’, no matter how much they agree to do so.
Oo-er. You seem to be in possession of some intelligence that ‘FE Week’ doesn’t — or hasn’t revealed.
The documents referred-to here have been ‘out there’ in a range of bodies, and indeed colleges at least, for a couple of days, I understand… and others accompanying them, too, in the form of an exchange of letters between BIS and a sector body, regarding how to move all of this (and the Chartered Community College idea) forward, in practical terms, from here. Arguably, they are therefore in the public domain.
So, the ‘leak’ could have come from a number of directions (unless you know for certain about UCU!); and there is more to come.
this could be as effective as the institute of bankers, eh?
what a flippin load of tosh!
I remember Guilds…I think my gamekeeper is a member of one. Got a ring to it, doncha know. These college chaps, bit like hotel staff, what? People coming and going; you gotta look after them, eh? Nice white shirt and good manners, that’s what we need. They could join in the Lord Mayor’s parade and we could make one or two of them aldermen – give them some nice regalia. Make ’em proud, and we’d be proud of ’em!
Ah, the Hospitality Guild ‘is being seen as a model’. No surprise there, given that FE has parallels with the hotel and catering sector in terms of high levels of sessional employment and short-hours contracts. Professionalisation? More like window dressing.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Hayes is a Minister entirely out of step with modern vocational education and training. He patronises the sector with phrases like “I was never clever enough to be practical” when what he actually means is: “I am an academic, my use of Plato, Socrates, Chaucer and Aristophanes underscores my cleverness, I am – in fact – TOO clever to be practical”. He talks about ‘medieval guilds’ in some romanticised way, entirely missing the point. A guild, by definition, cannot be created by government. It is driven by a profession, for a profession. We actually have very few guilds today, most morphed along the way into professional bodies, institutes and learned societies.
But Hayes wants a legacy, at the end of the day it is what all politicians want. He has precious little time to achieve this so he has come up with this half-baked vision of reintroducing guilds. Most professions and vocations reject this because they already exist, so FE must bear the brunt of his ambition. It is almost impossible for such a guild to exist where there are competing forces, can you really see the AoC say “hurrah for Hayes, we have a guild we now no longer need to exist” and then disbanding itself?
I know better than most how the dreams and aspirations of professionals can be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. I have learned that it is impractical to try and forge a sense of professional identity when that identity can be derailed on a whim by a Minister or, more likely, a civil servant with absolutely no cognisance of the further education sector and the consequences of his or her actions on the everyday lives of teachers and trainers. It seems to me that government, any government, is unlikely to let go of the leash and allow further education the freedoms and flexibilities of other sectors; it is the same for schools. Perhaps the hopes I had for a strong professional identity were always flawed simply because government would never allow it to be so. For all the faults of the regulatory regime introduced in 2007, we have a professional body in the IfL. The very best way to respond to this guild is to reject it, reject it because it doesn’t serve the individual needs of professionals in the sector. Free from cumbersome regulation (I’ll add here that regulation is a force for good, but these regs were poorly drafted and not well considered), the IfL can go back to being the professional body the sector so desperately needs
At first glance early indications of an organisation which offers voluntary status, individual support, recognition of professionalism, professional progression, subject specific CPD and appropriate qualifications for people working in the sector are encouraging. But are there strings attached?
Can John Hayes really be serious about FE sector skills councils and professional organisations rebranding themselves as medieval guilds for the 21st century and inspiring a new Arts and Crafts movement?
I would hardly think the title ‘Guild of Further Education’ would “stiffen the sinew and summon up the blood” of anyone I know but that aside, Hayes’ idyllic, 19th century Arts and Craft world of worshipful guilds, “a world in which bakers are proud to be bakers, and to be admired as such by others”; a world in which workers are expected to gratefully accept their lot and presumably smile a lot, are totally out of touch and incompatible with the realities of the 21st century.
Such a world ignores academic potential and the right to personal and/or social progression through education whilst the great and the good thrive and prosper on the ignorance and stoical submission of others.
He can’t be serious can he?
Notwithstanding the above, exactly how would the Guild of Further Education be different from the ancient guilds?
Whilst providing a collective focus for “raising standards of professionalism and being a custodian of excellence”, would the guild, which we must not forget would be “employer-led”, also consider the best interests of FE sector employees?
That being said I wish Lee would stop flogging a dead horse by trying to promote IfL. He has to accept that the majority of FE professionals, unions, employers and government have absolutely no confidence in IfL and that it is now a minority body and therefore in no position to speak on behalf of the profession as a whole. Let’s stick to the main topic and hope more will soon be revealed. Only when we have all the facts can we make an informed opinion, put forward our views and take part in an intelligent discussion.
N.B. ‘Leaks’ of potentially controversial information are a well known ploy. They disseminate potentially controversial information through a process of osmosis, thus allowing fear of the worst to propagate. Such ‘leaks’ are intended to have the effect of softening the blow when the ‘official’ acknowledgement is finally made, in my experience this usually takes about four weeks. Let’s see if I’m proved wrong.
Any organisation with tens of thousands of members is far from a minority body and IfL is the best placed to speak on behalf of the profession. Both employers and unions have led FE to the edge of a precipice where we are confronted with the removal of any teaching qualification requirements. If Lingfield is to be believed there was little opposition to this proposition during the review, so when it comes to the moral high ground I think IfL has as much claim as any other. And it’s not IfL speaking, it is me – feel free to take issue with what I say, but don’t read anything else into it other than my opinion.
Lee is essentially right in his view of the FE Guild. This is a fantasy project by a frustrated medievalist. It needs to remembered that one reason UCU/NATFHE supported the creation of the IfL was the poor commitment of college managements to CPD alongside the perennial issue of declining professional status for FE teachers. It is difficult to see how a management led guild would seriously address the issue of professionalism, particularly in a context of tight funding and privatization. The IfL is another matter. Whatever its initial ambitions, the IfL was unable to build credibility within the sector, and particularly amongst the teachers whose professionalism it wanted to represent. This is still something to explore. I’d be interested to know why Lee thinks the IfL lacked credibility. In the meantime, one of the interesting themes that came out of the IfL ‘debate’ was the difference between a ‘managed’ and a ‘democratic’ professionalism. As educational / social discourse becomes less seduced by market ideology (targets, mission statements, and learning as a commodity) and starts to draw again on notions of community, sustainability, longer-term responsibility and participatory citizenship the idea of a ‘democratic’ professionalism ought to become much more important.