Changing how we deliver teaching will ease FE’s workforce crisis

The 16-19 capacity issue will not be solved by funding alone; We need excellent teachers to deliver to these learners. We’ve treated FE’s staffing crunch purely as a hiring problem. It isn’t. It’s also a delivery problem that demands a different model.

I joined FE in 1993 and the same subjects still keep leaders awake: construction trades, digital, engineering, English and maths and specialist SEND.

Some areas are perennial shortages, while others spike with the labour market. New industries arrive before we can grow our own teachers. Meanwhile, colleges fight a constant battle to keep classes covered and quality consistent year after year.

A significant share of college staff are not on permanent, full-time contracts; even where posts are filled, replacement churn and variable quality swallow leadership time and budget. Add the 30 per cent pay gap with schools and it’s hard to see how “more of the same” recruitment solves the problem at the scale or speed needed.

The £800 million coming into FE is welcome, but it’s largely about serving more learners, not transforming the unit economics of delivery. The uncomfortable truth is we won’t hire our way out of this. We must change how learning is organised.

What we’ve learned from large-scale online delivery

Over the last few years, we’ve delivered national bootcamps fully online with high-quality, continuously updated resources combined with live online tutoring. It wasn’t painless, but it worked: strong learner feedback and a positive Ofsted outcome. The lessons learnt?

• Specialist and scarce talent become national, not local. We’ve timetabled excellent tutors in the Hebrides with a class in Devon. Many of our tutors would never commute to a college site, but they will teach a day a week online, including evenings or weekends, some alongside their industry roles.
• Quality improves because it’s observable, blended with high-quality resources. Every live session is recorded. Learners can revisit content; quality assurance (QA) teams can dip in any time; targeted coaching becomes normal, not remedial.
• Timetabling flex grows. Online theory can fit to college timetables, be delivered to combined groups, or be undertaken at home to ease student transport, caring or work burdens.
• Data gets granular. Every attendance, click and submitted task is trackable, giving leaders real-time visibility and intervention points.

A practical model: 30 per cent shared, 70 per cent local

This isn’t about turning colleges into remote providers. It’s about using online delivery where it’s better value and easier to staff, so we can protect and grow the on-site learning that only colleges can do.

What it could look like:

1. Shared online theory (30 per cent) delivered through nationally curated resources and vetted online tutors, timetabled to your day.
2. Local practical (70 per cent) kept on campus: workshops, employer projects, assessment, pastoral, enrichment.
3. Elastic capacity. If numbers dip, scale the online element down; if demand surges, scale it up without scrambling for scarce staff.
4. College-owned quality. You still set schemes of work, standards, assessment policy and intervention triggers; recordings and analytics make oversight easier, not harder.

Why it helps immediately:

• Releases on-site staff time
• Reduces agency and supply churn.
• Supports part-time specialists who want to teach but can’t commit to campus or their local college timetables.
• Creates a consistent national core of resources that are continuously improved and aligned to employer needs.

Blended models fail when they’re bolted on. They succeed when three things are designed in from the start – a single scheme of learning, clear roles and non-negotiable quality assurance.

And yes, pay matters and must improve. But even with better pay, FE will always compete with industry for scarce specialists. The fastest way to get consistent expertise in front of every learner is to redesign delivery so we start sharing our scarce talent safely, visibly and at quality across the system.

This isn’t going to happen overnight, but we could start now and the transformation could be rapid. Why not pick a number of components of a course where there are constant workforce challenges and work with us on a timetable and delivery piloting the approach?

If we keep treating FE’s workforce crisis as a recruitment problem, we’ll keep getting the same results. If we treat it as a delivery challenge, we have a chance to change the game.