Emma Norris: Further education policy gets churned to death

GOVERNMENT has a tendency to recreate policies and organisations on an alarmingly regular basis. New organisations replace old ones; one policy is ended while a remarkably similar one is launched.
Is there too much 'churn' in education policy?Is there too much 'churn' in education policy?
Is there too much 'churn' in education policy?

In the industrial strategy space, there have been at least two industrial strategies in the last decade alone – and we are now moving onto a third. Regional government change happens so frequently it has earned its own academic term: ‘redisorganisation.’

But nowhere is this tendency more acute than in the further education sector. Since the 1980s there have been 28 major pieces of legislation, 48 secretaries of state with relevant responsibilities and no organisation has survived longer than a decade. There are around 13,000 technical qualifications.

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The instability in the sector has created a complex and changeable landscape for students and providers. Currently, 16 to 24-year-olds are presented with pathways and programmes of different lengths and levels, leading to qualifications with different values in the labour market, provided by organisations of varying quality. The degree of choice varies from one geographical area to another.

The costs of all this churn and reinvention are high. As Phil Collins, political columnist for The Times and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Tony Blair (2005–07), wrote in the Institute for Government’s report on the subject: “The vocational sector is an ‘alphabet soup’ of providers, with acronyms that change every year. Students are horribly confused about which programmes are valued by employers, and nobody has any confidence that a qualification will lead to work or pay progression, or even exist in a few years’ time.”

All this is driven by four factors.

First, competing ideas about what further education is for. In general, the Government has prioritised using the sector to develop a competitive workforce to support economic growth; employers are more focused on it providing specific workplace-ready skills; and learners themselves want to increase their employability and their qualifications to compete with those of degree-holders, to progress to higher education and often to ‘learn for learning’s sake’.

Second, unlike our neighbours in Europe, there is only limited use of any shared decision-making between government and other parties such as unions and employers. This means that government has considerable discretion over how FE institutions and provision are designed, configured, managed and measured. More broadly, the FE system is subject to a lower level of public scrutiny than other parts of the education system: debates about its size, shape and objectives tend to happen outside the spotlight of media attention. Indeed, the only subject within FE that receives much attention is apprenticeships.

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Third, organisations are not given time to prove themselves. The sector has undergone five major reorganisations during the last two decades, and no institution has survived for longer than a decade, making it difficult for any of them to build the necessary experience and skills to learn, adapt and become more effective over time. For example, the Learning and Skills Council developed a new performance regime in the mid-2000s that offered the potential to drive improvements in the quality and diversity of technical education. However, by the time it got ready to roll it out at scale, it was abolished.

Finally, evidence about which policies and reforms have worked, and which have not, is in short supply. It is difficult to access information about the initiatives and policies that have been tried before. In fact, consistent churn in the system has created what has been described as a collective amnesia. This weakened memory makes further change more likely.

The landscape looks set to change again – although this time commentators seem hopeful about the possibility of simplification and a stronger link to jobs actually being achieved. During the Budget, the Chancellor confirmed that the Government would be simplifying the 13,000 technical education qualifications into a more coherent offer of 15 clear pathways, with each resulting in a qualification attached to a job.

If this new reform is to be successful in providing simpler, more effective technical education routes for school leavers that equip them to compete in 
the labour market, the cycle of churn must be broken.

Emma Norris is programme director at the Institute for Government.