Stop tinkering with FE before another doomed organisation is set up (you only have to look back a few years),
says Anne Nicholls

And so, the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) is to close this August after barely four years, as plans for an FE Guild are put together. David Hughes, chair of the guild’s steering group, has enthusiastically argued the need for a new organisation to unite the learning and skills sector.  But many people with long memories are rolling their eyes and saying: “Not another one.”

Let’s look at the development of some of these sector organisations. The saga reads like a Restoration farce, full of divorces and remarriages, plus a few births.

LSIS was formed from a “marriage” between the Quality Improvement Agency for Lifelong Learning (QIA) and the Centre for Excellence in Leadership, which had been created by the Learning and Skills Development Agency, which was split into two in 2006 – one part becoming the QIA (which then morphed into LSIS) and the other the Learning and Skills Network (LSN) … if you follow my drift.

The story started in 1995 when the Further Education Development Agency (FEDA) was set up as a merger between the Further Education Unit and the Staff College –  a seemingly perfect marriage.

But the relationship went pear shaped in 1997 when FEDA got into financial difficulties. In stepped Chris Hughes as the new chief executive and in 2000 FEDA acquired a new name, the Learning and Skills Development Agency (LSDA). Hughes got the organisation back into solvency with a strategy of winning big government-led contracts.

I joined the LSDA in 2001 as communications manager. It was an organisation that  combined policy and practice, and had people who really understood how to make policies work and how to engage with practitioners such as teachers, trainers and lecturers.

But in 2005 the Department for Education and Skills decided that the “quality landscape” needed rationalising with a new organisation. They wanted the LSDA to carry this forward … the only problem was they wanted a divorce. In other words, they wanted to separate commissioning from delivery.

So in 2006 the LSDA was split in two. One part – the QIA –  became a quango and was, literally, sent to Coventry with a new chief executive.  It lasted just over two years amid murmurings that it was too removed from what was happening on the ground and had failed to win the confidence of people working in the sector.

The rest became the LSN, an independent charity focusing on delivering services to the sector and beyond. That organisation went into administration in November 2011, a consequence of losing large government contracts in the wake of public sector cuts.

Now we have yet another organisation, the brainchild of former Skills Minister John Hayes. Cynics are talking about “a camel looking for a desert”. Others see it as a cost-cutting exercise. The more positive voices see an opportunity for the sector to take charge of its own destiny.

The new guild’s functions are likely to include setting professional standards and codes of behaviour, developing qualifications for those working in the sector, supporting training and strategic planning – tasks that are already being done by other organisations, including the LSIS.

How will it be funded? Will the £48 million from the LSIS budget be transferred, or will it go back into the government’s coffers? Will there be a levy from colleges and training providers? Why is it being called a guild?

A round of consultations is planned this year. If the feedback is positive, the aim is to get things up and running by the summer. Many feel that it is a fait accompli.

Further education has had a poor marital record with organisations lasting, on average, about four years. What’s proposed could be a disastrous ménage a trois (or quatre) between existing bodies. Maybe the movers and shakers should stop tinkering before yet another doomed “marriage” takes place.

Anne Nicholls is a PR/communications consultant and journalist specialising in post-16 education and training. She was communications manager at the LSDA from 2001-2006

A new report highlights the complex task of the vocational teacher and offers important evidence for why FE needs a vocational pedagogy, says Charlynne Pullen

This is a critical time for the UK economy. As it begins to recover, there will be a greater need for skilled individuals, and vocational education has a clear role to play.  But for years, vocational education has been derided or ignored, quality has been questioned, and funding cut.

We believe vocational education needs to be high-status and valued, and for that, we need high quality teaching. Matthew Hancock, Minister for Skills, agrees. In his speech to the Association of Colleges’ conference on November 20 last year, he said: “There is no reason set in stone why technical education should not be seen as on a par with or even more virtuous than university… It will come only when teaching in FE is uniformly high quality… Outstanding education is the route to outstanding acclaim.”

Industries such as care and retail will grow this century; we must better value both as at present low skills, low pay and low status are endemic in both.

People working in these and other vocational sectors need the routine expertise to deal with everyday problems; the resourcefulness to solve trickier problems; the functional literacies to explain their solutions to customers; the business-like attitudes to do so in a way that values the customer; the craftsman’s desire to do a job well; and the wider skills for growth to innovate for future solutions.

These six outcomes of vocational education are set out in ‘How to teach vocational education: A theory of vocational pedagogy’, a newly published research report (written by Professors Bill Lucas, Guy Claxton and Dr Ellen Spencer at the Centre for Real World Learning at the University of Winchester) from the City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development.

We argue that these outcomes are what employers and customers value. If employers value these outcomes, and demand better skilled individuals who have acquired them, then it is on this basis that an economy can grow. So how do we get there?

Clearly, high quality teaching is key.  However, we believe that the role of vocational pedagogy in attaining that quality has been underestimated. The report highlights the complex task of the vocational teacher and offers important evidence for why we need a vocational pedagogy.

Low skills, low pay and low status are endemic in both the care and retail industries”

It also offers a model for vocational teaching that we believe practitioners will find useful, but there are elements which need to be discussed.

For example, if a vocational teacher needs to think carefully about the kind of teaching he or she can use in a workshop versus a classroom, what happens in a workplace?

How can vocational teachers, or indeed those without training in teaching, provide support to learners in a workplace, and what training is needed to support that? What about the role of the assessor?

Previously, the learning and skills sector has talked about the need for a vocational pedagogy but struggled to develop one that everyone agrees to. We believe our outcomes clearly set out what vocational education is for, and offers a framework. Now it’s time to discuss how we can develop a vocational pedagogy that is owned by the sector, rather than one that’s borrowed from general education.

To find out more about the project or to download a copy of the report, visit www.skillsdevelopment.org

Charlynne Pullen is a senior researcher at the City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development

Chartered status must not simply be another quality mark: it should reflect the capacity of an institution to work with all its partners to help to shape what is on offer to its community, says Mick Fletcher

The proposal to develop chartered colleges offers the prospect of underpinning the freedoms and flexibilities that government seems to want for FE, and of signalling a distinct and valued status for FE institutions comparable with HE. But the consultation on the proposal risks vitiating the whole agenda.

The core confusion is that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) seems to see chartered status as another quality mark. Chartered status would be awarded to institutions that score well on a range of indicators, some already in existence and others yet to be invented. The consultation seeks views on which ones. It is doubtful, though, whether the sector itself or those it seeks to serve would benefit from yet another quality indicator; it could become another logo to gather dust in the lobby.

Chartered status should be about something else; about trusting an institution to do the right things, not just to do what it does well. In specific terms it should reflect the fact that an institution can demonstrate genuine accountability to a range of internal and external stakeholders so that it can be trusted to determine what programmes it should offer, where and to whom.

It should reflect the fact that the institution’s internal processes demonstrate integrity in designing its offer, in recruiting its students and reporting their achievement.

In this context the idea that local education partnerships (LEPs) should ‘sign off’ applications for chartered status is profoundly misconceived. LEPs are important partners, but only one of a range of stakeholders whose interests need to be reflected in college plans. Real local accountability is not achieved privileging the views of one actor amongst many.

Chartered status should be about trusting an institution to do the right things”

It is probable that well-run colleges will deliver high quality and demonstrate genuine accountability, but the two are not the same and the one does not follow from the other. Outstanding success rates are no guarantee that an institution is highly responsive to the communities it ought to serve, nor indeed that it plans provision and recruits with integrity. A deep and genuine understanding of local need should not be discounted because of a weakness in some areas of delivery.

The confusion in BIS builds on a more widespread confusion in Whitehall that allowing a degree of local autonomy is a reward for good behaviour, not an outcome in itself with benefits for communities. We need institutions that are committed to researching local needs, and to explaining themselves and their performance to their full range of stakeholders.

The beneficiaries are local employers and communities, not college staff. This is why the Colleges in the Community report called for much greater scope for colleges to determine what they offer; it was why the Lingfield Review argued for colleges to have greater control over the qualifications they deliver.

Chartered status should reflect the capacity of an institution to work with the full range of partners to help to shape the local offer. It could provide the rationale for funding via grant-in-aid rather than by contract; and it should be accompanied by substantial freedom for a college to develop and deliver its own programme rather than choose from a central menu.  Most colleges should achieve the status despite differences in quality, much like HE.

But chartered status will not be appropriate for many training providers, despite their excellent work. A for-profit training company, for example, has to be accountable to its shareholders, not its community.

There may be good grounds for recognising the excellence of its training if it is felt that the Ofsted grading is inadequate, but a different word should be chosen – ‘licensed’ or ‘accredited’ training provider for example; and it should continue to be funded by contract.  If training providers were to become chartered, which should not be ruled out, they would have to look a lot more like FE colleges.

Mick Fletcher is an FE Consultant

It’s early days – and flexibility is essential – but a unique partnership of six FE colleges is determined to bring down costs and improve the service to students, says Alex Richards 

Some people worry about the potential pitfalls of shared services. Others see it as an opportunity to push innovative thinking to its limits. But collaborative working demands exploration, especially when cost reduction remains vital to the financial survival of many FE providers.

After a year of talks, Totton College joined five other sixth-form colleges to become The Solent Colleges Innovation Partnership. Supported by funding from the Association of Colleges (AoC), it is the first (and only) partnership in the country to be made up solely of sixth-form colleges.

Initially created by the six principals, the partnership has the support of each college’s governing body. Geographically the six are close – three (Portsmouth College, St Vincent and Havant) are around the Portsmouth area and three (Richard Taunton Sixth-Form College, Itchen and Totton) around Southampton. This makes meetings easy and yet the distance is enough to ensure competition for students is at a fairly low level.

It is inevitable that there will be some overlap in competing areas of provision, but we all believe that by working together we can cut costs and improve the service to students.

The starting point in a project such as this is to learn to trust one another. To this end, we have established clear protocols to work through any issues that might arise.

From the start, we found that we often shared the same challenges; we now hope that we will all benefit from a common approach where we can. Instead of six colleges spending 10 hours each working on the same business process, two colleges might spend 15 hours developing a procedure that everyone can use. At the moment, for example, we’re exploring attendance tracking, value added and the introduction of new reporting technologies.

Despite having the same systems, we use them differently”

We learnt early on that it’s difficult to expect any college to give up an existing process or system that works well for them.  Instead we are focusing on ‘green field’ activities – developing new systems and processes where all or most of the colleges in the group identify a shared gap. Conversely, there are some areas of current practice that we all are unhappy with and so we’ll collaborate on developing improved common systems.

A ‘development day’ at the start of the project brought senior teams together to build a good understanding of shared goals. The result was the formation of a number of sub-groups, including curriculum, finance, support for learning and HR. Five of the colleges use the same UNIT-e management information system and so an MIS sub-group was also formed, which I currently chair.

As we began looking at how we could use our MIS to work together, we realised that despite having the same systems, we use them differently. For example, one college may call a group of students a class and another a course, with different structures describing them on their database. That means that a report sent from one college’s system to another will have different coding assumptions, and won’t translate properly.

We are now identifying these differences to see if we can find ways to bring things together while still giving each of us the freedom to meet our local needs; this will allow us to continue to work with different data but on equivalent systems.

One important aspect has been to allow each of us to decide our own systems and processes. It is inevitable that some projects will be shared with all of the group, while others might pull in one or two. This flexibility is crucial. Collaborative working must achieve the best possible solutions, as well as save time and money.

Despite being in the early stages, we have high expectations of what we will be able to achieve by working jointly. There is a lot riding on this partnership – for us and the many other colleges who may follow our example.

For more information, please visit www.totton.ac.uk or www.capitafhe.co.uk

Alex Richards is assistant principal, college services, at Totton College