Skip to content
23 April 2026

Bruised but never battered

Adult education has faced constant batterings in the past 20 years, says Alan Tuckett. But, like ground elder, it will continue to pop up through cracks in the system. “There’s no such thing as adult education – it is all further education,” the civil servant charged with the legislation that incorporated colleges once told me. […]

Classrooms play computer catch-up

Incorporation has brought about many changes in FE, but the sector is still being outstripped by the pace of technological change, fears Bob Harrison My first experience of teaching with computers was in the 1980s at Sheffield’s Stannington College with young mechanics. The classroom had 16 BBC computers and the students enjoyed the ping-pong game […]

College future built on chequered past

A surge of optimism over college buildings in 2007 came to a crashing halt just over a year later when it emerged the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) had over-committed and could not fund contracts already signed. With the expectation of approving just £500m in grants, the proposals facing the LSC for first stage approval […]

Colleges ‘still’ need to get in-line online

When Dick Moore (pictured) left Sheffield College to join a dotcom start-up company in the US he had the bright idea of putting his daughter through the GCSE English online course delivered by his old college. “She got a GCSE A grade after one year of study,” he says. “And the crazy thing was that […]

Inspecting the inspectors

Ofsted is just the most recent of the bodies tasked with inspecting further education — but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best says David Sherlock The English FE sector bears the imprint of its local authority past, when our national provision was unplanned and very uneven in quality — but although it remains unplanned, […]

The same old inspection story?

It could have been yesterday with the chief inspector for colleges telling a small gathering: “From here on, satisfactory will be taken to mean unsatisfactory.” The chief inspector in question was Terry Melia and it was the mid-90s. He was telling principals they had been getting off lightly in inspection reports since incorporation and it […]

[download#103]

[download#102]

[download#99]