K College was created from a merger of South Kent College and West Kent College. It is now being broken up and sold off. Interim principal Phil Frier explains why two shouldn’t always become one

I have never been keen on mergers. I have been involved with two and on the edge of another, and they don’t seem to deliver the solution that many hope for.

The problem lies in the assumption that a change in structure and an increase in size will lead not only to more sustainable and financially viable colleges, but also to higher quality teaching and learning, and improved student success rates.

Don’t get me wrong, there is evidence that some merged colleges have done better than their antecedents, but only where there has been an understanding of the need to ensure the ‘human-sized’ elements and underlying educational focus remain.

Mergers have often been the result of the egocentric ambitions of Skills Council chief executives, and, more latterly, principals and chairs of governors, often driven by financial rather than educational motives.

Mergers don’t always bring financial efficiencies — in fact, many have increased costs without improving teaching and learning, as managers are distracted by setting up cross-college systems.

While there is nothing wrong with establishing common core values, standards and expectations, the drive to create the merged college often ignores the difference in local cultures and the need for college campuses to be rooted in their communities.

The need for local leadership is often ignored too, as the commitment to control from the centre takes hold.

Mergers are not the sole choice for failing colleges — new management models should lead to more imaginative solutions. We are a creative sector. Do we really need to fall back on to ageing corporate business models to solve our problems?

Even the word ‘merger’ is not helpful since it implies that the character and personality of the existing colleges will be merged to form a more androgynous corporate body.

The language of ‘merger’ in FE has also been devoid of creativity with its references to ‘type A or type B’ unions.

Come on guys, many of us are supposed to be a reasonably capable, intelligent group of baby boomers. For the sake of the current and, perhaps more importantly, future students, let’s try to find some solutions that are more educationally orientated, and more in harmony with people and with the local communities that colleges serve.

The strength of FE colleges has always been that we are in tune with the heartbeat of our towns and cities. Most technical colleges were developed by the local borough or town councils to serve local industry, facilitate local employment, and to provide opportunities for young people and older generations to discover the life-changing wonder of education and qualifications.

Isn’t it time we developed more innovative federal models of organisation that allow us to keep local contacts while still providing financial capacity, high quality facilities and a learner-centred focus.

In some ways, college merger is a bit like the old adage about money; it makes your life easier, but doesn’t necessarily make it better. An educational organisation should always focus on providing the best learning environment; for me that means learning in a well-resourced, supportive place with good teachers within a human-scale management structure, where locally based managers have the autonomy to make local decisions.

Some of the best organisations in the world recognise that they can be big enough to be financially viable, but small and human enough at the point of contact for the client. I am rather hoping that the dinosaur age of the one-dimensional merger debate is over.

Phil Frier, interim principal at K College, Kent

Want to read more? Chris Henwood looks at the broader picture on college mergers here

FE will continue to lurch from funding crisis to funding crisis until purchasing power is put in the hands of learners and employers, says Tom Bewick

FE budgets are under severe pressure, so what better time to rethink how to protect learners, employers and communities from the cuts. I’m always staggered about how accepting the sector is of the way in which its multi-billion pound budget is carved up.

Savings and efficiencies must be made. But why is there no debate about turning the  whole funding model for FE on its head?

A good way to illustrate the status quo is to think about how things were once centrally planned in the Soviet Union. Production, whether it was bread to put on the supermarket shelves or tractors to bring in the harvest, was organised at the level of the ‘commanding heights of the economy’. These involved bureaucrats whose sole purpose was to concoct ludicrous targets: distribute the roubles via complex funding formulas and generally flatter their immediate bosses with the sheer indispensability of it all.

You could apply the same description to the current world of FE. It has a top-down, rigid, and seemingly indispensable funding model for no other reason than a group of highly paid civil servants telling their ministers that it needs to be so. Why should perestroika come to FE when the people in charge have no Gorbachev to lead them? The sector will lurch from crisis to crisis, until there’s a revolution in how our society puts real purchasing power in the hands of the learner and employers.

The sector will lurch from crisis to crisis, until there’s a revolution in how our society puts real purchasing power in the hands of the learner and employers ”

The government could do three things: attack the massive waste amongst the bureaucracies that serve FE; move to a universal system of skills accounts for all post-16 learners; learn from other countries.

Anyone looking at the accounts of the Education Funding Agency, the Skills Funding Agency (SFA), the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, and the Student Loans Company (SLC) will straight away spot areas for savings. Why do we need so many quangos in this space? The total administration cost for the SFA last year was £131m, and at the UK Commission for Employment and Skills it is more than £6m.

To put this in perspective, the running costs of these bodies alone would fund the opportunities of tens of thousands of young people a year.

Let’s change this so that every young person is given a skills account card when he or she reaches 16. The state would deposit the amount each learner or employer is entitled to, in terms of taxpayer support and according to Parliamentary-agreed funding rates. Unlike the versions of learning accounts that have been trialled to date, these cards would be managed on contract to the private sector. Any fraud or abuse would fall on the card issuer, not the government.

The real point is that purchasing power would be placed in the hands of the consumer of learning. At a stroke, it would get rid of the need for most of the institutions that have grown up around adult education. Indeed, the general public could be issued with shares in the new Learning Bank, bringing common ownership of an apparatus that would be accountable to real people instead of Whitehall’s pen-pushers.

The government also could learn from successful models abroad where the best approaches to vocational education and training are not centrally planned — Germany, Switzerland, South Korea, Singapore, and even India all have decentralised funding models. The US has community colleges, where the local learner and business is sovereign. Perhaps the best thing we could do with the current FE funding ‘system’ in England is not to have one at all.

Tom Bewick ,director and chief economist at the International Skills Standards Organisation