Every September, colleges register their enrolment numbers and someone, somewhere, is quietly disappointed. Not catastrophically – just a few dozen short of forecast. The same the year before. And the year before that.
The assumption is usually that demand was not there. But increasingly, I suspect the problem is different: the students applied, and then disappeared.
I have spent the last two years speaking to further education colleges about their student recruitment systems – listening to teams who are tracking hundreds of live applications across shared spreadsheets, chasing responses by hand, trying to piece together a picture of where things stand from inboxes and printouts. What I have found is an uncomfortable truth: FE recruitment is running on infrastructure that was never designed for the volume or complexity it now faces.
And the timing could not be more critical. The 16 to 18 population surge that caught the college system unprepared is already is expected to continue rising until 2028, when the number of 16- to 18-year-olds is expected to peak. At the same time, DfE needs T Level enrolments to more than double, with just over 27,000 starts this year already falling short of revised targets, and an ambition of 66,100 by 2029.
The skills white paper spelt out plans that young people who leave school at 16 without an education or training place will be auto-enrolled into provision. I believe this will be challenging to achieve under current registration systems.
FE recently found that councils blamed “data recording pressures” for statistics that suggest thousands of teenagers are not being offered a “guaranteed” place in post-16 education each year after leaving school without a plan.
And FE Week also recently highlighted how the lagged funding model means colleges must absorb the cost of surging student numbers upfront, with no guarantee of in-year growth funding to cover it. Every applicant lost to a broken process is one they cannot afford to lose.
Unlike secondary school recruitment – where local authorities coordinate a digital, trackable process – and unlike higher education, which has UCAS as a central nervous system, FE sits awkwardly in between. Colleges are largely on their own, and what that looks like in practice is a patchwork of disconnected systems that were never designed to talk to each other. An email platform here. An events tool that doesn’t talk to the CRM. An application form that feeds into a spreadsheet. Open days promoted through one system, follow ups and offers sent through another. At every handover between systems – and there are many – there is a gap where a student can quietly disappear. And because no single tool holds the full picture, nobody sees it happen.
This is not a criticism of the people doing the work. Recruitment teams in FE colleges are often small, under-resourced and working incredibly hard. The problem is structural. There is no common standard, no shared visibility, and almost no usable data. If you cannot see where students are dropping out of your recruitment funnel, you cannot fix it. You do not know whether your offer acceptance rate is 60 per cent or 90 per cent. You do not know whether certain programmes are consistently losing students at a higher rate than others. You are, in many cases, flying blind.
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