16-19 devolution is a ‘knife-edge policy’, AoC president warns

Devolving 16 to 19 education funding is a “knife-edge policy” that risks creating a postcode lottery unless colleges help shape how it is implemented, the new president of the Association of Colleges has warned.

Gerry McDonald, CEO of New City College, said the reforms have the potential to deliver a long-needed structural shake-up of further education, bringing curriculum and local economic needs closer together and ending “unhealthy duplication and competition”.

But he warned that poorly designed devolution could instead create “hard borders” between neighbouring areas and different rules and entitlements across the country.

Delivering his first speech at the AoC’s annual conference since becoming the organisation’s president last month, McDonald said: “The opportunities ahead of us are considerable, but so too is the peril.

“If it isn’t top of our agenda already, then devolution of funding for young people certainly will be very soon. In my view, it’s a knife-edge policy.

“Devolution could be the structural change we have long needed, strengthening the connection between curriculum and local economy, ending unhealthy duplication and competition, integrating 16 to 18 and adult budgets, creating a new era of local prosperity, with colleges right at the centre, or not.

“It could all too easily go the other way. Hard borders on the central line between London and Essex, different rules and entitlements across Yorkshire’s four strategic authorities. The postcode lottery cliché becomes the description of the system we create.”

Embrace the uncertainty

His warning comes a week after education secretary Lucy Powell told MPs that the transfer of 16 to 19 funding powers to mayoral strategic authorities – a plan announced by prime minister Andy Burnham over the summer – would be gradual rather than a “big bang” across the country.

Powell acknowledged concerns that devolution could create a postcode lottery, saying ministers were working out how to establish clear lines of accountability across a “very patchwork and fragmented” system of local government.

She said the government wanted to link local delivery more closely with employers and labour markets, while maintaining national expectations, outcomes, qualifications and pathways.

Further details on exactly how mayors will be handed control of 16-to-19 funding is expected to be included in the ‘Rewiring the State’ delivery plan, due to be published before the end of the year.

McDonald called on colleges to work collectively with civil servants to design an “adaptive and forward-looking” blueprint for devolution.

“We need to have white papers with green edges,” he said.

“We need to be bold in saying this might work in Havering, but good luck in Kirklees. In other words, we need to embrace the uncertainty that comes with new design. We must have the courage to say we don’t know.”

He said the sector needed to “build slowly”, adding that there “can be beauty in a jigsaw designed by all of us”.

AoC chief executive David Hughes also acknowledged during his conference speech that the prospect of devolving significant powers to local politicians was causing anxiety among college leaders.

He said concerns included the capabilities of mayoral strategic authorities, the risk of parochial decision-making and the possibility of a postcode lottery.

But Hughes urged colleges to view the reforms as an opportunity to secure a stronger strategic role in their local economies.

“There’s such an opportunity for us to secure a much better position for colleges, with better accountability, with much more appropriate oversight than we’ve got at the moment,” he said.

“[We need] to be able to become the very best partner to mayors, a strategic partner, not just a delivery organisation, and give colleges the agency to be able to design and deliver and to get on and lead.”

He added: “We’ve got to see devolution as that opportunity. So when the Milburn report comes out, let’s step in. When the mayors come asking what you can do, let’s step up.”

‘We have ignored adult education to our shame’

McDonald also used his presidential address to call for a renewed focus on adult education, arguing that the country had neglected its national responsibility to adult learners.

He highlighted the role adult learning had played in his own family, revealing that his mother returned to education in her mid-30s after leaving school at 15, studying for O levels in English and maths before going on to complete an Open University degree and master’s.

She then enjoyed a long career as a social worker, he said.

“This is the power of adult education, and we have ignored it to our shame,” McDonald said.

He made a special mention of institutes of adult learning, describing them as “the jewels in the FE system” which should be “cherished” as they are in the “eye of the adult funding storm”.

He called for colleges and providers to work together to design a system built on the sector’s “history of innovation and adaptation”, not “written complete and sufficient by any one of us”, but is “rather a glorious patchwork of ideas from all of us”.