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 on returning to the UK her school made her sit GCSE English again.”

He tells the story to illustrate a point about the lack of joined-up thinking in the system. He’s not the only one. Other parents have been angered that their school demands a child resits — particularly if they are bright — because, otherwise, it doesn’t count towards the school’s performance league table figures.

For Moore, trustee of the Association for Learning Technology, whose career has spanned teaching IT, running MIS and supporting learning technology, “it illustrates the inertia in the system at every level.”

He adds: “There is some stunning work going on around the world and in the UK and no area needs it more than FE.”

FE was already making swift strides forward when Incorporation came along, says Moore, and there was every reason to expect a thoroughly coherent national system to emerge around Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

But what emerged was piecemeal and still requires radically new thinking.

“As an educational technologist from the 1980s, I remain convinced of the potential that ICT has to transform the yield of education systems in the same way we have seen significant benefits delivered in health and manufacturing,” he says.

“In 1996–97, I led a consortium of South Yorkshire colleges [Sheffield College, Doncaster College, Northern College, Rotherham College of Art and Technology, Thomas Danby and Barnsley] and put together a bid to connect them all to each other and to the Janet [formerly Joint Academic NETwork] system.”

The move from local authority funding ‘was the pivotal moment when the FE sector had to become computer-literate, including the sector managers'”

Moore realised that to make e-enabled learning happen they needed three things:

• Infrastructure — to communicate

• Skills — to change the pedagogy

• Services — to deliver teaching and learning to the workplace and homes of students and employers

This was radical — before the Mosaic web browser or the WWW service on the internet had been built.

Moore moved to Sheffield College to work with the team that was developing a course to re-skill teachers in the “fabulous” Lettol Course, “which is still delivering 12 years on and in my opinion should have been compulsory for every new FE lecturer six years ago, or do we think the internet as an education medium is a passing fad?”

It is not only in teaching and learning that ICT should have brought more coherence to FE, he says.

The move from local authority funding to a national formula funding scheme and the Individual Student Record “was the pivotal moment when the FE sector had to become computer-literate, including the sector managers.”

The whole debate around “user requirement for management information in further education colleges” and managing resources in FE “pointed at a rationalist view of the world that could incrementally improve the quality of provision across the nation,” he says.

While the idea was very solid and showed great promise, the close coupling of the statistical return and financial return led to “an over-complex bureaucracy that had audit rules published after enrolment was closed, a system that steered the sector by looking in the rear view mirror on volumes that were 18 months out of date.”

Convergence of funding that followed put much pressure on colleges, which helped, but at some cost.

“Colleges spent quite significant sums of money buying systems staff to replace what had been a reasonably accurate statistical return,” says Moore.

“The fact that we don’t have a national web-based system for recording student funding still surprises me.”

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, extreme variations in quality are a thing of the past.

The evening-out and general upgrading of quality was what the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) inspectorate and its successors, the Training Standards Council (TSC), the Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI) and Ofsted, were introduced to achieve.

The person who did more than most to create robust FE colleges was Terry Melia, FEFC’s first chief inspector.

He inveigled people like Janice Shiner and me to join as regional senior inspectors.

Our teams had a stiffening of former HMIs as well as former college principals and vice principals who had the experience essential for credible inspection.

And our associate inspectors worked directly for FEFC and, almost to a man and woman, were current FE staff.

A trawl through the FEFC archive held by the Institute of Education should convince anyone of the liberal and collaborative tone of its inspection framework and the very high standard of its college reports.

They might benefit inspection today. FEFC never attempted to sum up a large institution in a single grade. Melia understood that, like their counterparts in universities, some college departments will always be on the rise, some at the peak of their powers and some on the downward slope.

The trick was to identify which, so that would-be students could make an informed choice of course, not just college.

Equally, he was clear that inspection was a snapshot. Any idea that one could use it to make judgements about ‘failing teachers’ as did his contemporary, Chris Woodhead, in schools, or to gaze into the crystal ball and divine a college’s capacity to improve, were inherently flawed.

As with colleges, so with the rest of the extended FE sector — quality was all over the place, but today private providers are just as well regarded as colleges. They perform just as well and are increasingly seen as playing a complementary role to colleges.

The success of the ALI was, like that of the FEFC inspectorate, due to our convincing providers that we were on their side, acknowledging that education and training were hard.

Nothing contributed more to making that message convincing than ALI’s Provider Development Unit which helped providers that had fared badly at inspection to make the first, difficult, steps towards recovery.

What we have now is an FE sector in which too many providers are too small to be viable”

So what remains to be done today? Not more inspection.

Just as the universities and polytechnics did before it, and on shorter timescales, the FE sector has outgrown inspection and should progress to serious self-assessment independently verified by a sector-owned peer review body.

Higher education’s QAA offers a convincing model of how it should be done, the government’s commitment to deregulation provides the right environment and the proposed Charter award carries the means to do it.

The unfinished business is planning for sustainability.

What we have now is an FE sector in which too many providers are too small to be viable, wholly dependent on public funding and heading for the financial buffers.

Wales is currently in the latter stages of planned rationalisation to create fewer, stronger colleges; perhaps a third of the original number.

The much-admired Australian TAFE institutes were created through multiple mergers of local colleges to create institutions big enough and strong enough to stand on their own feet, in creative consultation with state governments rather than being at the mercy, as John Hayes put it, of “impersonal instructions from a remote bureaucracy”.

A parallel suggests a need for 140 or so FE colleges and a reduced number of private and charitable providers, all working together.

The project for the next 20 years?

We need to work towards a real, viable, autonomy rather than the echo of local authority control which remains at the heart of the incorporated colleges of today.

David Sherlock, director of Beyond Standards