Julian Gravatt remembers the first week of Incorporation. The reforms may be a distant memory, but they still pack a punch to this day

For someone like me, who joined a college in 1992 to help it with self-government, Incorporation was a big deal. All the staff at Lewisham College had a letter to tell them they had a new employer.

Ruth Silver, then principal, held an event for local stakeholders to persuade them the college was on the turn.

Meanwhile, in the finance office, we switched off the council’s computer system.

The college started life with no cash, but a week later a cheque for £1.8m arrived in an envelope from the Further Education Funding Council.

If it hadn’t come, we’d have had to delay the payroll beyond Easter . . . but all’s well that ends well.

Within a year or so, we had survived the bankruptcy of our training and enterprise council, secured an excellent inspection grade and were negotiating a £10m loan to fund a new building.

Twenty years on, Incorporation is a distant memory, but the reforms it brought still have an impact.

Incorporation was a collective experience for colleges that introduced a degree of standardisation to a diverse sector.

If [the cheque] hadn’t come, we’d have had to delay the payroll beyond Easter”

A small and ambitious funding council introduced far-reaching changes that are still with us today: national prices and rules, an emphasis on qualifications, a comprehensive data collection and a process for merging institutions.

In the years that followed, standardisation has allowed other sector organisations to operate and has given the English college sector a strength it might otherwise lack.

Incorporation gave colleges their freedom, but funding realities forced them to make quick changes. After years of relative neglect, they found themselves in a relentless annual cycle of policy and budget reform. Although it is easy to count the costs and the losses, the sector has become more flexible and able to manage change.

Colleges have successfully tackled adult basic skills, worked with employers on apprenticeships and helped millions of young people move from school to work.

One rarely noticed the legacy of Incorporation was charitable status for colleges. The Major government boldly privatised the railways, but when it came to further education it made a large gift to charity.

The 1993 settlement ensured colleges remained non-profit making and gave their governing bodies long-term duties. Competition has forced them to be business-like but they avoided the follies of the UK’s millennial debt binge and retained a local presence in places poorly served by private companies.

The past five years in the UK have been so extraordinary it’s impossible to predict the next 20. If you work in a college, you face a tough present and an uncertain future. But I am confident the progress and experience of the recent past mean that we’re as well-placed as anyone for the next steps.

Julian Gravatt, assistant chief executive Association of Colleges

What did Incorporation do for sixth-form colleges? Well, says David Igoe, few principals and governing bodies would choose to go back to local authority control

In 1992, sixth-form colleges came under schools regulations and were funded and administered through the local authority. Incorporation in 1993 came, therefore, as both a surprise and a shock, not least to find ourselves thrust into the new world of FE, jostling and competing with much larger general FE colleges and their tertiary cousins.

We liked the sound of the freedom and autonomy that came with Incorporation, with new opportunities to expand into the adult market, the ability to borrow and control capital expenditure and manage our own estates. We were less keen on the 5 per cent annual efficiency requirement in the early years, coupled with convergence to the FE mean level of funding. This was harsh for many sixth-form colleges that did not have the economies of scale afforded to general FE and financial collapse reduced our number from 126 at Incorporation to 100 by 2000, with most lost to merger with larger, general FE colleges.

The average sixth-form college had around 800 students in 1993; today it has 1,650 and rising”

Despite the setbacks, most sixth-form colleges prospered and grew through the 1990s. Cutbacks did not affect quality; most colleges ‘resolved’ their financial position by increasing class size and rationalising senior management teams. Paradoxically, performance outcomes rose in inverse proportion to increases in class size that by 2000 were an average of 19 compared with 11 at Incorporation. The greatest change was in size of institution. The average sixth-form college had around 800 students in 1993; today it
has 1,650 and rising.

But sixth-form colleges have never felt entirely at home in the FE sector. This was recognised by Andrew Foster who singled us out in his influential 2005 report into the future of FE. He recommended we be recognised for outstanding quality and protected from further merger. This suggestion found some substance in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act of 2009 that created a new ‘designated’ legal entity for sixth-form colleges. It also placed them under the stewardship of the Department for Education — unlike the rest of FE, which remained with the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

So what did Incorporation do for us? The 94 remaining sixth-form colleges have emerged as a strong, confident sector with an impressive track record of performance and operational management. We still have financial worries and have been hit hard in the current round of cuts and efficiency requirements; but we’ve been through this before.

Incorporation gives us the means to manage our own destiny, a prize we would not want to give up. Few sixth-form college principals and governing bodies would choose to go back to local authority control. We are the true pathfinders for a model of education based on self-managing, autonomous institutions that is now being promoted as the model for all progressive institutions — they happen to be called academies and free schools.

David Igoe, chief executive, Sixth Form Colleges Association

The state-of-the-art Gordon Banks Sports Centre helped win Newcastle-under-Lyme College (NULC) the West Midlands Sports College of the Year award while its new music technology centre has also won plaudits nationally.

The college building strategy is credited with helping more than double the number of 16 to 19-year-old students, from 1,500 to 3,700 (3,300 FTE), in a decade.

Karen Dobson, NULC principal, now has her eyes set on a nearby redundant fire station in the latest phase of a carefully thought-out expansion programme to meet a prediction of even further growth in student numbers.

For someone who comes over as so visionary, however, she is surprisingly cautious when talking estates strategy.

“Be careful what you aim for,” she says.

“If all the lessons since Incorporation have taught us anything, it is to plan for where you ultimately want to be rather than what’s in the current funding pot.”

Four things favour her latest building proposal — healthy financial balances, new learner demands, the capacity to raise the necessary cash privately and confidence that, if necessary, she could make a viable bid under the government’s £270m capital money for FE announced in the Chancellor’s 2012 Autumn Statement.

But Dobson reckons the stop-go strategies, shifts of government policy and inducements to spend regardless have not served the sector as well as they might.

With hindsight, NULC played its cards right, she says, concentrating on its strengths as a substantially 16 to 19 tertiary college with some adult and community learning — £18m versus £4m a year.

“In the late 1990s we built a new cheap and cheerful building for around £2m and shifted our A-level provision there from wooden potable classrooms. It was a bright building and nothing special, but it highlighted how poor the rest of the estate was,” explains Dobson.

And here, she points to the second key lesson since Incorporation.

“Take your staff with you — consult them at every stage,” she says, warning not to get carried away with an architect’s grand plans and in doing so forgetting the people who work and learn in the new environment.

“Staff were involved in considering everything — what things were given space, facilities, size and shape, things like that.

“We tried to give them what they wanted and needed. As a result, because people were given clear explanations, we don’t get moans and groans if there’s disappointment.

“A lot of work was done to make sure the staff and managers were aware of the limitations and they knew why they could not get everything. Our architects were great and had lots of meetings with the curriculum teams.”

The new building was done and dusted by 2008 despite the capital funding fiasco.

But Dobson was appalled to see other colleges “left on a precipice” with delayed maintenances and knocked-down buildings.

“If our finance manger handled it like that we would have been out of business years ago,” she says.

“You would hope a government would have an overall pot size clearly in mind and stick to it” — a third lesson for principals and estates managers.

Will the £270m meet current national building needs?

“There is not enough money, but it might start the ball rolling and spur others on,” she says, bringing her back to the central point about careful planning.

“New freedoms are helping us to go for private funding.

“The problem is there is so much uncertainty — new funding means the government wants us to be more for less. There is the loans issue at 24-plus. Are colleges going to gamble on such growth materialising?

“If you are not financially viable, it’s not sensible to take on more borrowing. The banks are tight with money and colleges are no longer seen as safe customers as they previously were with the economic situation.”

But this is really not so different from the position 20 years ago.

“Now and again people who have not been able to achieve things say you are lucky,” concludes Dobson.

“Yes, true, but even without the lucky bit, it took a hell of a lot of work and was not done overnight.”

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. To prove his point, he designed a programme to limit public funding to certified courses listed in an appendix (schedule 2) of the 1992 bill.

Faced with the end of public support for liberal education for adults, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, working with local government associations and the Women’s Institute (WI), organised a campaign to change the bill. Around 400,000 people signed a petition in three weeks and 9,000 WI branches mobilised members to write to MPs.

Within six weeks the policy was ‘clarified’ — national funding for courses of national priority would go through the new Further Education Funding Council (FEFC); other uncertified classes could be funded by local authorities. FEFC funding expanded, local government was cash-strapped — with the result that French for pleasure classes became level one to qualify for national funding. Local adult services became mini FE providers riding the expansion of the sector — and proving the civil servant’s point. A new industry emerged, offering credit to community-based courses, and provision where learners might negotiate the curriculum reduced in number.

However, in the mid 1990s, finance ministers of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development became intensely interested in lifelong learning as a means to secure economic advantage, and successive Conservative and Labour governments sought to encourage outreach and participation to people turned off by learning the first time round.

Then Education Secretary David Blunkett’s faith in the holistic benefits of adult learning, helped the sector

The Kennedy, Tomlinson and Moser reports, backed by then Education Secretary David Blunkett’s faith in the holistic benefits of adult learning, helped the sector to identify, reach and provide successfully for groups of adults under-represented in FE. The high water mark of public policy for adult learning was reached with the remit letter given to the new Learning and Skills Council (LSC) that took over from the FEFC and the training and enterprise councils in 2002.

But the business people charged with overseeing the LSC had radically different priorities; Blunkett moved off to the Home Office and, before long, utilitarianism became the order of the day as year after year we were exhorted, through yet another skills strategy, to shape up and get qualified. Meanwhile FE funding continued to expand and post-25 funding stalled and shrank — one million adult learners disappeared from publicly-funded provision in three or four years. In came the deadweight funding of the Train to Gain programme where, among other things, the LSC paid the Army for basic skills teaching it was already doing in order to hit targets. Still, Train to Gain did reach people in work in their 40s and 50s.

Late in the decade John Denham, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, put energy — though little cash — into a renovated community learning policy that sought to celebrate and encourage learning outside formal provision, in universities of the third age, libraries, museums, reading groups and voluntary associations.

But the bankers’ excesses and the onset of the recession scuppered any hope of a real renaissance and inhibited John Hayes, the incoming Tory Skills Minister, from financially backing his and Business Secretary Vince Cable’s vision for learning for its own sake.

So, here we are, with post-25 numbers leaking from colleges, a bleak spending round in prospect, and reasons to be cheerful in short supply. Yet adult education, like ground elder is resilient, and pops up through the cracks in the system, whatever the planners may want.

Alan Tuckett, president of the International Council for Adult Education, former chief executive of NIACE and a visiting professor in lifelong learning at Nottingham and Leicester universities

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 as part of their Friday afternoon general studies lesson.

Today, mechanics fix cars run by computers and carry pocket devices with more memory, processing speed, connectivity and capability than all those BBC computers combined.

Incorporation did little to slow the pace of technological change and the break from local authority control did little to ensure the pedagogy kept pace in all but a small number of brave and innovative colleges.

Pioneers included Ray Shuker, who formed the National Information and Learning Technology Alliance, and John Gray, a founder member of the National Council of Education Technology, which later went on to become Becta (formerly the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency).

The biggest change followed the Higginson Report in 1996. It set a framework for Information and Learning Technology development across FE, leading to the establishment of Becta and attempts by the then Department for Education and Skills to develop an e-learning strategy.

But there was little sustained focus on FE until Becta developed a “next generation learning” awards scheme, established an exemplar network and spent more than £1m on an online self-review tool.

Just as this was having an effect, the incoming government in 2010 scrapped more than 100 quangos with Becta and the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency top of the hit list.

A handful of staff transferred to the newly-formed Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) along with online assets and other resources.

Tragically, LSIS didn’t have the understanding, capability, leadership, nor vision to realise the value in those assets and eventually the cessation of its funding was announced.

JISC (formerly Joint Information Systems Committee) continues to provide infrastructure support through Janet (formerly Joint Academic NETwork) and continued professional development, pedagogical and technical support through the Regional Support Centres, but its main eye is on higher education.

So, gone are the days of state interventions such as national strategies, ring-fenced funding and national quangos.

The last Association of Colleges technology survey in 2012 pointed to little progress and indeed suggested colleges “were being hampered from delivering the government’s policy aims because of their inability to use technology effectively”.

Things have taken a turn for the better with Skills Minister Matthew Hancock having taken a personal interest.

He has formed an action group to support colleges’ attempts to use technology.

There is much to be done, however. My grandchildren will leave school in 15 years. They will leave classrooms that have no pens, no paper, no books, no rows of desks, no whiteboards, no printers, no desktops, no ICT suites.

But they will be used to learning analytics, gesture computing, onscreen assessments and instant feedback, speech-to-text and text-to-speech recognition and personalised blended learning programmes accessible every day, all day and night, year round.

I hope they will have the choice of going to an FE college, but if progress made since Incorporation is anything to go by, I am not sure they will.

Bob Harrison, education adviser for Toshiba Information Systems (UK) Ltd, consultant with National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services and chair of the Teaching Schools Technology Advisory Board