Britain’s economy is anaemic, teetering on the edge of a ‘debt death spiral’. FE colleges should be the engine room of growth through raising national skill levels, but the system isn’t delivering.
In 2025, fewer than 11,000 students in England passed a T Level – the much-heralded technical alternative to A-Levels. Four times as many students sat A Level Sociology than passed every single T Level combined. Apprenticeship enrolments are high, yet four in ten students drop out.
The contrast with schools is striking. Schools were transformed by Gove and Gibb’s standards revolution, which propelled England up the international league tables. Reform embedded rigour into curriculum and qualifications, spread evidence-informed teaching practices, and built an accountability system capable of identifying and correcting failure.
Funding plays a role – FE has always been the poorer sibling. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows per-student funding in colleges fell by 14 per cent in real terms between 2009-10 and 2019-20, compared with a 9 per cent fall in schools. Even after recent uplifts, college funding per student in 2025 is still projected to be 11 per cent below 2010 levels.
But it would be wrong to say FE’s challenges are only about money. School reform succeeded in a tight fiscal climate. The deeper issue is that policymakers have ignored the most powerful lever for improving outcomes: highly skilled teachers teaching ambitious curricula.
The frameworks underpinning teacher training illustrate the point. The Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework for schoolteachers is 16 pages of tightly curated knowledge and practice, grounded in cognitive science, that all new teachers are expected to master. The FE initial teacher education framework, by contrast, is a hodge podge of topics like “getting to know your learners” or adopting a “person-centred approach”.
We’re asking FE teachers to do one of the toughest jobs in education without giving them the support to succeed.
Given a third of FE students come from the 20 per cent most deprived areas of England, nothing less than a skills standards revolution will do. The bizarre decision to shift half of the skills brief into the Department for Work and Pensions only makes this harder. But it is not too late for the government to pick up the mantle.
Five-point plan for change
- End the artificial divide between school and college teachers. These are overlapping workforces with high mobility between them, yet recruitment, retention and training policy is siloed. We need to build a single teaching profession across phases and settings, starting with robust workforce data.
- Give every college teacher access to a ‘golden thread’ of professional development, rooted firmly in evidence. Much of what works in schoolteacher training is transferable, whether a teacher teaches maths or hairdressing. Let’s stimulate new entrants to the training market – organisations that combine cognitive science, technical expertise and a moral mission to serve the most disadvantaged.
- Finish the job on qualifications reform. Improve T Levels and protect their Level 3 status, but accept they won’t suit every student. New Alternative Academic Qualifications need to be based on the same employer-based standards, even if they lack the practical elements of T Levels. Develop a better offer for those not ready for Level 3 study – the most underserved students in our system – learning from organisations like Get Further. Prune the niche apprenticeship standards which have created courses that are unviable or overly narrow.
- Mobilise Oak National Academy to develop exemplar curricula for every T Level, working with top colleges and Institutes of Technology. Curriculum is the foundation of education, and teachers get better when they can see excellence.
- Let’s pilot our strongest school trusts to run struggling colleges. Our fragmented education system creates weak curriculum coherence and poor transitions between phases. Giving leading trust CEOs responsibility for colleges would raise standards and create a more seamless journey from 4 to 19.
These reforms promise a stronger teaching profession and better outcomes for the young people who need them most. The government should publish a skills standards white paper urgently, and the Prime Minister should commit Baroness Smith to stay in post for the remainder of the Parliament as ‘Minister for Skills Standards’ to deliver it.
A government serious about economic growth must prioritise FE. The revolution is overdue.
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