Further education "needs massive reform

Citation

(2003), "Further education "needs massive reform", Education + Training, Vol. 45 No. 8/9. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2003.00445hab.001

Further education "needs massive reform"

Further education "needs massive reform"

It is a national disgrace that further education (FE) is frowned upon, fundamentally mismanaged and, despite the size of its overall funding package, continually starved of resources and political support, says the Work Foundation. Its report, FEUK: Productivity, Social Inclusion and Public-Sector Reform, calls for massive reforms and a better distribution of training and development opportunities. The authors, Andy Westwood and Alexandra Jones, say: “Ministers should be throwing their weight behind further-education colleges if they are serious about increasing UK productivity and achieving their social-inclusion goals. Under the current system, FE colleges have too many, often conflicting priorities. They are a major provider of A levels, vocational training for 14 to 19-year-olds and basic-skills training for adults. But they also have a remit to get closer to business to provide professional qualifications and work-based training”.

The Work Foundation wants colleges to concentrate on the lower-level, intermediate skills which it says could make a real difference to business productivity and an individual’s employability, and let employers pick up the tab for higher skills training. Jones and Westwood point out that managers, professionals and people with degrees are already five times more likely to receive work-based training than people with no qualifications or in unskilled jobs. At the same time, FE colleges are often the only chance many disadvantaged people, including those who have failed at school or been made redundant, have of returning to learning. However, there is a fundamental problem with demand for intermediate skills as employers refuse to pay for what they see as lower-level training. In these circumstances, government must intervene and use FE colleges to fill the gap. Westwood and Jones say: “Government needs to go back to what FE is for and focus its efforts and interventions on those who are not skilled, not at those who are already productive”.

They recognize that concentrating on the hard-to-reach and hard-to-teach sections of society will be no easy task. Such a strategy can only succeed if there is also a turn-around in the way FE colleges are managed and a massive increase the skill levels of FE staff. Andy Westwood says: “We are currently asking our FE colleges to be tin-pot universities, delivering foundation degrees and levels three and four national vocational qualifications (NVQs), when the real economic and social need is for qualifications a level below that. Nine billion pounds of public money is spent on FE each year, but still it is in no really fit state to deliver the lion’s share of UK skill needs”.