The boss of the Education and Skills Funding Agency has sent a sector-wide letter warning she will take strong action against any provider that does not play by their subcontracting rules, following the Brooklands College scandal.
Eileen Milner has written to all colleges and training providers today to state the agency is continuing to investigate cases where subcontracted provision is not “appropriately controlled, overseen or managed by the lead provider”.
She said there are currently 11 live investigations in this area, with issues underpinning them ranging in seriousness from “complacency and mismanagement”, through to matters of “deliberate and systematic fraud”.
“Whilst these cases vary in degrees of seriousness, they all exhibit features that reflect badly upon the organisations involved and clearly suggest that the sector must do better,” Milner added.
“I want to make it clear that where poor subcontracting practice is evident to us we will act decisively.”
All providers have been told they must confirm they’ve read the letter by no later than 1 November 2019. You can read the full letter here.
There have been a number of high-profile subcontracting scandals in recent years, including the Luis Michael Training case where its owners, which included two former professional footballers, created “ghost learners” and were jailed for over 25 years combined.
The most recent subcontracting scandal, exposed by FE Week, has involved Brooklands College and resulted with the ESFA demanding a £20 million clawback.
Milner said the ESFA will, in future, be “more forensic in our examination of the data and information available to us to hold individuals and organisations to account”.
“We will recover public money where appropriate,” she added.
“In response to the evidence gathered so far, we have tightened our requirements and made it clear that we will take action with lead providers who do not exercise control over subcontracted provision.”
Milner also said she will be seeking evidence later this year from those who have an interest in subcontracted delivery, which will “inform our thinking about the nature and extent of reforms to subcontracting arrangements”.
The review will be concluded this academic year and the ESFA will start to implement the changes at the start of the 2020/21 academic year.
An education minister has admitted the government has no power to preserve Stourbridge College’s site for educational use, heightening concern that it could instead become housing.
Following an announcement in May that cash-strapped Birmingham Metropolitan College would be selling its site in Stourbridge, its local MP Margot James yesterday led a Westminster Hall debate on adult learning and vocational skills in the area.
“The site has been associated with education for many years, and it is the deep wish of our community that the site be protected in future for educational use, at least for the most part, for the generations to come,” was James’ main call.
But she received little reassurance from Michelle Donelan, who is one of three ministers helping with the FE brief in the Department for Education.
“I want to put it on record that I have listened to the proposal mentioned by the hon. Member for Stourbridge for the site to continue as an educational facility with some adult education,” Donelan said.
“Although I do not have jurisdiction over that option, I encourage all local stakeholders to review and explore it.
“It is matter for BMet, however, and its governors will need to demonstrate that they secure the best value from the sale of the asset to satisfy their legal responsibilities as trustees.”
The minister used her speech to express how the closure of the Stourbridge campus “is regrettable” and “I do not want to underestimate the impact that it has had across the community and the ripples that we have seen”.
She added that Stourbridge’s closure “will continue to cast a shadow over the area”, but said it was the “best option” to support BMet’s financial sustainability and, “crucially, to ensure that good-quality provision was available for current and future students”.
BMet is selling off Stourbridge College, which dates back over 100 years, in order to pay back debts which had totalled £8.9 million to the banks and £7.5 million to the Education and Skills Funding Agency by May of this year.
Stourbridge’s learners have been transferred to Dudley or Halesowen colleges, and some staff have also been absorbed by those two.
Donelan announced yesterday that the FE Commissioner’s team, who intervened at BMet earlier this year, is planning to undertake a capacity and capability review to assess the group’s progress since a new leadership team arrived.
The commissioner has come in for criticism from a survey of Stourbridge’s stakeholders conducted by the University and College Union, which said their experience was “symptomatic of a more widespread failure by the FE Commissioner to engage effectively with staff and students”.
Labour’s shadow skills minister Gordon Marsden said at yesterday’s debate this survey showed how: “Flawed and disconnected that intervention system for colleges can become.
“It has become far too casual about how it engages with people in the colleges, and apprenticeships have not been engaged with in any meaningful way.”
Marsden said Stourbridge’s problems were not unique, highlighting how: “In recent weeks, the columns of FE Week have been littered with accounts of problems at other colleges.”
“Stourbridge College was not failing, but it was still put into this situation,” Marsden said.
“It had those buildings, which Margot James is so keen to preserve in another capacity, but that did not save it from being shut down.”
James said staff and students had told her the closure “came as a terrible shock and something of a bereavement”.
“The board of BMet and the ESFA should reflect hard on the fact that there would be huge opposition to selling the Hagley Road site for residential development,” she warned.
In addition to the Ney’s inquiry and the planned FE Commissioner review, the National Audit Office confirmed it will be investigating the management of colleges’ financial sustainability, after James wrote asking them to investigate BMet.
The awarding organisations that will develop, deliver and award the seven T-levels being rolled out from 2021 are NCFE and City & Guilds, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education has announced.
NCFE has been awarded contracts worth a combined total of £16.6 million to develop qualifications for digital business services, digital support and services, health, healthcare science and science.
City & Guilds has won the contract worth £3.7 million for onsite construction and building services engineering.
Education secretary Gavin Williamson said: “It’s really important that we get the delivery of T-levels right.
“City & Guilds and the NCFE have been selected to deliver the second wave of T-levels because of their breadth of knowledge and expertise in the sector. I look forward to seeing our new qualifications become world-leading, ahead of the 2021 roll out, with these two organisations at the helm.”
NCFE also won a contract to help deliver first wave of T-levels from next year, along with Pearson.
Its chief operating officer Stewart Foster said: “We are absolutely delighted that NCFE has been awarded this new contract to be the delivery partner.
“To be at the forefront of this revolution in technical education means we can continue to support thousands of learners across England to progress and succeed.”
City & Guilds will be partnering with engineering and advanced manufacturing awarding organisation EAL to develop and deliver qualifications.
Managing director of City & Guilds Group Kirstie Donnelly said: “The construction sector has been at the heart of City & Guilds since it was founded over 140 years ago and so we are delighted to have been awarded the contract to deliver construction T-levels.
“This a landmark moment within UK education and we look forward to being at the forefront of this new era.”
The 64 providers selected to deliver the second wave of T-levels from 2021 were announced in June.
The roll-out of the flagship qualifications has not been without its troubles; just this week, it was announced Gavin Williamson’s own alma mater, Scarborough Sixth Form College, was pulling out of delivering part of their T-level offer.
Principal Phil Rumsey said: “Due to our geographical location, it is proving difficult to secure sufficient work placements to meet the demands of the digital T-level and it is also difficult recruiting good quality teachers in what is a shortage subject”.
The Secretary of State’s Conservative Party conference speech unveiled an ambition to overtake Germany by 2029 in the technical and vocational education opportunities we offer. His objective is laudable, but what does it mean, and is it achievable?
The first thing to note is that we have been here before. Since at least the 1880s and the Samuelson Commission, we have cast envious glances at overseas vocational systems and witnessed calls to match or better them in pursuit of economic success. Back in 1984, The Institute of Manpower Studies produced Competence and Competition, which benchmarked us against the USA, Germany and Japan. We came out badly. The Leitch Review of skills (2006) demanded that we be in the top 8 for each different level of skill across the OECD by 2020. We are not set to achieve this, except probably in higher education.
Gavin Williamson, wisely, does not seem to be claiming that we should copy the German vocational education and training (VET) system, but that our own arrangements need to match and then better what theirs achieves. This is still a tall order.
Many of the elements upon which successful vocational education systems are founded – in Germany but also in other developed countries – are currently lacking in England. They include policy stability; supportive cultural expectations among employers, young people and parents that have been built up over time; and a consensus around policy objectives and the means to best pursue them based on social partnership models and the sharing of power between government and other stakeholders. None of these has been in evidence here in recent times.
We lack the incentive structures that would power these kinds of behaviours
More importantly, other countries expect a great deal more from their employers than we do, and this is often enshrined in obligations and duties supported by legislation. For example, the quality of German apprenticeships is underpinned by requirements that firms have a qualified trainer to deliver the on-the-job elements. More generally, the German dual system of apprenticeships is based on real employer leadership, and this in turn relies upon time-hallowed forms of collective employer organisation, not least through the local chambers of commerce and handicrafts, (membership of which is mandated by law) that we do not possess. The evidence to date suggests that incentivising English firms to take an active role in VET is by no means simple of easy and will require effort and persistence, as well as a different approach to the collective organisation and representation of employers than that which currently pertains.
Besides re-thinking the deal or balance of responsibilities around skill formation that the state strikes with employers, what else might be needed to deliver on the Secretary of State’s objectives? The first, predictably, is cash. World class VET will not be delivered on the cheap, and besides higher levels of funding the upper-secondary phase may need to be seen as a fully funded three-year entitlement (i.e. 16-19) in order to get far more young people in FE to Level 3 and above, as is the norm elsewhere.
The second covers designing, agreeing and re-engineering incentives to support virtuous behaviour. These have to go beyond public subsidy, and might, for example, include wider support for training through public procurement. We need to engineer a world where employers and a labour market consistently reward skills acquisition. We need firms who will act as partners, co-producers, and providers of workplaces that offer rich, expansive learning environments. We need education and training providers who cooperate in the best interests of the learner, locality and labour market. Most of the successful overseas VET systems are just that – systems that operate with limited levels of competition and which encourage cooperation and seamless pathways. At present, we lack the incentive structures that would power these kinds of behaviours, and we have much to learn from Germany and elsewhere in fashioning these. We also need to accept that spraying a new layer of institutions – like Institutes of Technology – on top of a set of local, regional and sectoral marketplaces is at best a very small part of any solution.
Finally, we need a persistent approach. 2029 offers a sensible timeframe for what is being attempted. Real revolutions are long-term projects not quick fixes, of which we have had far too many in the past.
The education secretary’s former sixth form college has pulled out of offering two T-level pathways ahead of their launch next year, according to the Department for Education.
Officials said today that Scarborough Sixth Form College, where Gavin Williamson studied, will no longer deliver the construction or digital pathways in 2020.
They have will also no longer take part in the T-level transition programme, as they “feel it would not suit its students”. The college still plans to offer the education and child care pathway.
“It is proving difficult to secure sufficient work placements”
Principal Phil Rumsey has contested part of the DfE’s announcement, claiming that his sixth form college had “never planned to offer the construction pathway”.
He told FE Week that Scarborough Sixth Form College has decided not to offer the digital pathway in the first year as, “due to our geographical location, it is proving difficult to secure sufficient work placements to meet the demands of the digital T-level and it is also difficult recruiting good quality teachers in what is a shortage subject”.
“We will continue to only offer courses that allow our students to achieve the best possible results and progress to a high-level destination,” he added.
“We currently have an outstanding level 3 course provision in child care and education, results for which were again in the top 20 per cent nationally this summer so we are completely confident in our ability to offer the equivalent T-level next year.”
The DfE said today that the Grimsby Institute of Further & Higher Education, which was already set to offer the education and child care pathway from next year, will now also deliver the digital pathway.
“We always expected there to be a certain amount of fluctuation of providers, and the pathways they offer, as we progress towards September 2020,” a DfE spokesperson said.
“However, we continue to have an excellent group of high-quality providers offering a variety of pathways across the country.”
Both Grimsby and Scarborough College have been approached for comment.
The changes mean there will still be 50 providers in the first wave of T-levels delivery.
But those set to pilot the transition programme has dropped to 36.
The changes come at an awkward time for Williamson, who studied A-levels in history, British government and politics and economics at Scarborough Sixth Form College, after he pledged yesterday to “supercharge” FE and overtake Germany in technical education over the next 10 years.
Making a success of T-levels will be vital to this plan, but they’re expected to have a difficult rollout.
Senior leaders in FE have long expressed concern that young people, especially in rural areas, will be unable to pass the T-level owing to a lack of local and lengthy placement opportunities.
The DfE added some flexibilities earlier this year, including allowing multiple placements at different employers, but some fear this does not go far enough.
“We always expected there to be a certain amount of fluctuation of providers”
In January, the chief executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, which has taken on responsibility for T-levels, reiterated his concern that the delivery timeline is still “worryingly tight” even though everything is “on schedule”.
T-levels were originally meant to be rolled out from September 2019 but skills minister Anne Milton announced a delay of a year in July 2017.
Williamson’s predecessor, Damian Hinds, then rejected a request from the DfE’s permanent secretary, Jonathan Slater, for another year-long delay rejected in the first ever ministerial direction issued by an education secretary last May.
Today’s changes are not the first to affect the T-levels wave one provider list: Big Creative Training and the London Design and Engineering UTC were removed in February.
And in October 2018, the DfE removed three schools from the first wave after one received a low Ofsted grade and two others “decided not to” take part. It also added Suffolk New College to the list of those delivering T-levels.
“Right from the start, we committed to taking a phased approach to the introduction of T-levels so they can grow in a managed way,” the DfE spokesperson said today.
“This means that young people, parents and employers can be confident that the courses on offer will be high-quality, will provide the skills students need to progress, and provide industry with the workforce it needs for the future.”
The education secretary Gavin Williamson put FE centre stage during an impassioned speech at the Conservative Party Conference today.
While promising to deliver a “revolution” in technical education and pledging to overtake Germany in this area over the next decade, he also unveiled a £120 million boost to open up another eight Institutes of Technology, as well as plans for an expert skills and productivity board.
Leaders from the FE and wider education sector have shared their mixed thoughts on his performance.
“The government’s announcements are a welcome start, but there is so much more to do”
David Hughes, the chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said it was “very encouraging to the see the secretary of state today back up his strong support for colleges with more investment”.
“His speech reinforces the prime minister and chancellor’s commitment to technical and vocational education,” he added. “The second funding announcement in as many months shows the tide, rightly, is changing.
“Colleges have the knowledge, teaching staff and initiative to deliver the ‘revolution in technical education’ Williamson described so passionately.”
Mark Dawe, the chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said his organisation takes “real encouragement from the secretary of state wanting to take a good look at the productivity gains from skills programmes”.
“We’re confident that his group of economists will give him the information he needs about the value of apprenticeships in this respect and why more investment in SME apprenticeships is necessary,” he added.
Chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, Bill Watkin, welcomed the “government’s commitment to the FE sector and the secretary of state’s explicit commitment to both technical and vocational education”.
Matthew Fell, chief UK policy director at the Confederation of British Industry, said: “The CBI has been calling for investment and reform of our skills system to be put centre stage. The education secretary is right to make colleges and further education a top priority.
“What would ‘overtaking Germany in technical education’ even look like?”
“Today’s announcement, coming hot on the heels of further funding announced in the Spending Review, shows the government is rising to the challenge.”
Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute, said it was “good to see” Williamson’s “personal commitment to FE translating into funding and action”.
However, “our research shows improvements in skills have stalled over the last decade with the UK poised to fall further down the international league tables by 2030”.
“We can only improve relative to Germany and other countries with significant and sustained investment alongside a clear lifelong learning strategy – we argued for ten year plan with a £1.9 billion per year boost to adult learning,” Evans added.
“The government’s announcements are a welcome start, but there is so much more to do.”
Sue Pember, former director of FE at the Department for Education and now director of policy at adult education network HOLEX, welcomed Williamson’s “optimism and ambition” but warned that “without better financial support for students, this ambition will not be met”.
“The secretary of state could make immediate changes now and that would help, for example, removing the existing cap on FE post-19 loans and allowing FE students to have access to maintenance loans,” she added.
“The other area that needs immediate action is the progression route into higher level skills – a continuous level two platform in all vocational subjects is needed now – without that rung on the ladder 30 per cent of our young people and adults are barred from taking part.”
University and College Union head of further education Andrew Harden said it is “of course encouraging that further education formed a central plank of speech today”.
“Warm words and a pledge to match Germany are something of a rite of passage for any new minister, but what we desperately needs is proper funding and support,” he added.
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, echoed similar thoughts: “The ambition for Britain to offer better technical education than Germany in ten years’ time will come to nothing if more funding is not found.”
“The second funding announcement in as many months shows the tide, rightly, is changing.”
Commenting specifically on Williamson’s pledge to overtake Germany in technical education, Sam Freedman, the chief executive of the Education Partnerships Group, tweeted: “In a crowded field this is the most meaningless announcement I’ve ever heard from an education secretary. What would ‘overtaking Germany in technical education’ even look like?
“Germany has a completely different economy and an entirely different structural relationship between training institutions and employers. It shows such little understanding of the issues I don’t even know where to start.”
And Tom Richmond, adviser to former skills minister Matt Hancock and founder and director of think-tank EDSK, told FE Week: “Gavin Williamson’s ambition is certainly eye catching. The obvious question is how will his plan be measured?
“The three million apprenticeship starts target was easy to measure and well intentioned, but it was ultimately a disastrous approach that has reduced the quality and credibility of apprenticeships instead of enhancing it.
“Unless this new approach is carefully designed and delivered, ministers could yet again fall into a similar trap.”
A further eight Institutes of Technology are to be created by the government through a new £120 million tender, Gavin Williamson is to announce.
Plans for a second wave of specialist institutes are expected to be unveiled by the education secretary at the Conservative Party conference today.
It comes after the FE Week revealed geographical issues with the first 12 IoTs, which are set to open this year, as there were none planned for the north west and the east of England.
The first wave of IoTs are being created through a £170 million pot of capital funding. A collaboration between colleges, universities and employers, they will specialise in delivering higher level technical training at level 4 and 5 in STEM subjects, including digital, advanced manufacturing and engineering.
Writing in The Guardian, Williamson said he wants “every big city to have at least one great institute of technology that can act as a focus to drive forward technical and vocational qualifications, working closely with industry and higher education institutions”.
He is also expected to announce new 16 to 19 specialist maths colleges, with the intention of opening at least one in every region, following the opening of the Exeter and King’s College London maths schools.
The education secretary, who is leading on the FE and skills brief at the Department for Education, told The Guardian he will also establish a new skills and productivity board to advise him.
“It’s wrong if we are in a situation where we are selling people courses that aren’t going to lead them into employment. The whole purpose of this is to drive up the level and type of courses that people are taking,” Williamson said.
“The reason I am setting up a skills and productivity board is to focus on what the economy needs and how I can best spend money to equip people with those skills, so we are providing the employers of Britain with the people they need for the modern economy.”
He added that prime minister Boris Johnson had been “incredibly supportive” towards vocational and technical education.
The education secretary has promised to deliver a “revolution in technical education”, and announced a target of overtaking Germany in this area over the next 10 years.
Speaking at the Conservative Party Conference this morning, Gavin Williamson said: “I am setting a new target to supercharge further education over the next decade; our aim is to overtake Germany in the opportunities we offer to those studying technical routes by 2029.”
This was part of a promise to “deliver nothing less than a revolution in technical education”, as doing so was “vital for our country and most importantly, vital for all of our children”.
“Apprenticeships, technical and vocational education: these are just as important, and as valuable as going to university and are just as important to our economy to make sure Britain succeeds in the future.”
During his speech, the education secretary announced a new wave of institutes of technology, funded by £120 million in investment, that he said “had the potential to transform high-level technical education” by bringing together further education colleges, universities and employers.
It comes after 12 of the flagship providers were announced earlier this year, with Williamson saying today he wants an institute of technology in every major city of England.
Furthermore, an expert skills and productivity board of leading industrialists and labour market economists will provide strategic advice on skills and qualifications.
He also announced an intention to open at least one new specialist maths 16 to 19 free school in every region in England.
In the first of a series of features exploring the themes raised by the College of the Future Commission, JL Dutaut looks at regionalisation, a Scottish government policy that transformed further education there, and is very much on the commission chair’s mind.
It is five years since Scotland’s policy of rationalising its further education sector came to an end. The three-year roll-out transformed Scotland’s FE landscape, merging 26 colleges along regional lines into ten so-called “super-colleges”.
In remarks at the College of the Future Commission’s first public event last week, chair and Scottish educational grandee Ian Diamond said regionalisation and the merger of the four Edinburgh colleges was a “good thing”.
From March last year to this August, Diamond was chair of the Edinburgh College board of management. He has since stepped down in order to become the UK’s chief statistician. His brief tenure at Edinburgh came six years after it was created from the conglomeration of Jewel & Esk, Stevenson and Telford Colleges, a process that saw the complete regionalisation of the city’s further education offer.
The Scottish experience
Edinburgh College was the last of ten super-colleges created as part of a dramatic realignment of FE provision across Scotland. As of 2018, it had approximately 19,000 students on roll across four campuses.
There is robust evidence on the benefits and drawbacks of the regionalisation agenda, but it includes no numbers for Edinburgh College. The Scottish Funding Council states that “although savings were realised through voluntary severance, the impact of the merger is difficult to separate from the ongoing financial challenges faced by the college post-merger”. Some of these issues, the report adds, are directly related to the merger.
In Edinburgh at least, regionalisation has not been straightforward. Notwithstanding, two years later, the SFC were able to show that the cost of delivery had been £71.6 million over four years. It calculated that annual recurrent savings for the nine new super-colleges for which data was available added up to £52.2 million, or some £210 million over the same period.
At the most basic level, Scotland’s education map has been re-drawn
The bulk of these savings have come from reductions in staff costs delivered through voluntary severance schemes. Others have been achieved through back-office efficiencies, increased purchasing power and estates costs.
The benefits of the policy included more effective leadership and governance, clarity of vision, strategy and objectives, and increased focus on learner needs. Across the merged colleges, a culture of flexibility was seen to be developing, and a major barrier to progress was (and in places remains) the creation and implementation of new working practices that take into account the multi-campus nature of such super-colleges.
Different models. Same challenges?
Of course, mergers and their consequences are not new in the English further education sector. Between 2015 and 2018, a period shaped by a DfE post-16 area review that encouraged colleges to countenance mergers, the Association of Colleges reports that 52 college-to-college mergers took place , peaking at 29 in 2017. Ten further such mergers have taken place this year, and more are planned for 2019-20.
Sir Ian Diamond
In itself, this is simply an acceleration of a process that has been ongoing since 1993, and many of the mergers do represent regional rationalisations. City College Norwich merged with Paston College in 2017, and is currently consulting on a desired merger with Easton College. In FE Week’s last edition, principal Corrienne Peasgood made clear the process there was driven by the needs of the local community. Other mergers had in fact been declined on those grounds.
The slow growth of Cornwall College Group is another example. In 1993, St Austell College was formed from the merger of St Austell Sixth Form and Mid-Cornwall College. By 2015, Bicton College was the latest to join the group that arose from that initial merger. Such absorption of smaller providers accounts for 80 per cent of all mergers, suggesting a relatively predatory market, in which it doesn’t pay to be small. Regionalisation is nothing new to Cornwall, nor to many other regions.
By contrast, those who have created Newcastle College Group have little regard for localism and appear far more driven by the savings described in the SFC report. If regional rationalisation was ostensibly the original intent, its continued growth is testament to something else entirely. Today, NCG stretches from Carlisle to Southwark, via Kidderminster.
Stronger together?
This month, the DfE published its report The Impact of College Mergers in Further Education. Its headline finding was that, “on average, the effect of merging is statistically indistinguishable from zero”. That is to say, mergers led neither to improvement nor deterioration of college performance on average.
Averages easily disguise differences, and the researchers found that the differences in post-merger performance of colleges was large. Unfortunately, their analysis inexplicably lacked crucial information and as a result was not able to conclude which factors made mergers successful or not. Its conclusions are predictably asinine: the best that can be said so far from 26 years of mergers in England is that on average they have done no harm.
Meanwhile, like the DfE’s researchers, the Auditor General for Scotland has also bemoaned a clarity of baseline data against which to judge the regionalisation reforms. Nevertheless, the sector as a whole exceeds its targets for learning.
But regionalisation in Scotland was part of a broader package of reform that also saw further education colleges reclassified as public bodies, brought back national collective bargaining and brought in a new funding model. Regionalisation was not an end in itself, but a means to realising a political vision. It isn’t a silver bullet, and as far as evidence is concerned, it is at best neutral, and at worst entirely unknown.
What regions, exactly?
At the most basic level, Scotland’s educational map has been re-drawn, and that is the kind of policy Karen Spencer might appreciate. In response to Ian Diamond’s comments, the Harlow College and Stansted Airport College executive gave the chair a taste of the English way of things.
Karen Spencer
“I have a 900-year-old boundary, 900 metres from both of my colleges. I have four LEPs, two devolved authorities, one unitary authority, and we also work across Kent and Sussex. My nearest neighbouring college is in Tottenham, north London, not Essex. So when people talk about regionalisation, it’s complex.”
Regionalisation appeals to ideas of localism and community, bringing with it the benefits of a responsive and adaptable curriculum offer to suit the needs of learners and employers alike. But when courses disappear from the college up the road, lecturing jobs are lost and support staff contracts reformed, while executive pay rises and better resources are further away, regionalisation doesn’t carry the connotations Ian Diamond may have had in mind last week.
In Edinburgh at least, regionalisation has not been straightforward
This is the central tension of a policy that has already shaped the FE landscape in England for three decades with its ebbs and flows. Like Scotland, any future of colleges that entails a full and final reckoning with regionalisation will do well to do so as part of a broader and bolder reform agenda, whichever political and economic persuasion determines the vision.
Either way, the policy’s success will hinge on places like Harlow, and the legacy of borders, boundaries and botched policies that hamper its ability to collaborate meaningfully. Supra-regional entities like NCG will likely adapt, and redrawing the map might just be the rationalisation the sector really needs.
