If we are serious about tackling the challenges posed by the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper, we need to rethink the relationship between our universities, colleges, and local economies.
This is particularly important for institutions located outside the country’s major cities and conurbations – where the devolution agenda is somewhat more complicated.
Beyond the city
We all know that local economies depend on responsive, joined-up skills systems. Together colleges and universities bring proximity to communities and employers, backed up by research, innovation, and regional influence. And this is why meaningful collaboration between them really does matter, whether it is responding to the skills agenda; local devolution; the Lifelong Learning Entitlement; the need for more flexible and inclusive pathways into HE; local innovation ecosystems; and economic regeneration and regional productivity.
There needs to be sector commitment that a better coordinated and more coherent system is required, particularly if we are to deliver on the government’s renewed national ambition for two-thirds of young people to have a higher-level qualification (Level 4 and above) by the age of 25.
The UK government’s Post-16 Education and Skills white paper sets out a transformative vision for how universities and colleges should collaborate to build a more integrated and responsive skills system. FE will be encouraged to offer Level 4 and Level 5 courses targeting our regional priority sectors and needs, as identified with our Strategic Authorities through their Growth and Skills Plans. This has implications for universities, who will need to ensure there are pathways from these new courses into the curriculum, and for Local Skills Improvement Plan (LSIP) partners, with whom links will need to be strengthened. In short, we need to work regionally, and locally, to better align our offering with local employer demand and government Industrial Strategy priorities.
In practical terms this means more employer-responsive co-designed curricula and new flexible pathways to help ensure smoother transitions between FE and HE, perhaps with joint qualifications and credit transfer systems. We must now be co-architects of a skills ecosystem that is agile, inclusive, and economically aligned.
The case of Exeter
The University of Exeter and Exeter College have cultivated a strong collaborative relationship over the past 25 years, deepening our partnership through a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) established nine years ago and now in its second iteration. A fundamental driver for the relationship was the realisation that Exeter is an unusual geography in that it is the only UK city in which post-16 education is served solely by one Russell group university and one outstanding tertiary college. This has enabled us to take an experimental approach.
At the heart of a successful collaboration sits ambition, the need, or even responsibility to drive social mobility and to make a difference to a place. Not just because of a policy, but because when HE and FE collaborate – it creates real synergy and a powerful force for change. The key to success, like most things in life – is people, but not just people, the right people at the right level in both the college and university believing collaboration is important. Dare we say it is also important, as an organisation, to know yourself, and to be clear about the purpose of each organisation – so that competition is minimised or eliminated. If your first thought is to monetise the partnership, it is likely to fail.
Driving innovation
Progress in FE-HE collaboration has often either come from more recent innovations such as degree apprenticeships, or through a need to work in new ways to deliver within regional funding streams. As a starting point, universities need to map and understand their local FE landscape to identify potential complementarities in skills provision, learner demographics, and employer relationships.
This enduring alliance is anchored by high-level commitment and strategic alignment, for example, with senior university leaders actively participating on the college board. Such integration ensures shared vision and governance, shared accountability, and the blurring of traditional boundaries and silos.
Our partnership here in Exeter extends across multiple initiatives, including joint sponsorship of the Ted Wragg Multi Academy Trust and the Exeter Mathematics School, as well as membership of regional initiatives such as the South West Institute of Technology, reflecting a shared commitment to educational innovation and regional development.
A key feature of this collaboration is the development of thematic “escalators” – these are best understood as pathways that connect college and university expertise in areas such as digital, sport, and green technologies. They have led to the establishment of pathways from FE to HE and consistent curricula. New escalator activity is now happening in both civil engineering and health. These benefit students by providing levels of certainty and logical routes for progression and boost the local economy by attracting young people from the Devon community, who are more likely to gain employment in our local businesses after they graduate.
The health escalator is particularly timely, aligning with current government priorities and offering new opportunities for joint programming and research. The sport escalator stands out as a model of success, enabling college HE students (validated by the University of Exeter) to progress athletically by playing for university teams, in partnership with local clubs. These escalators exemplify how the institutions are creating seamless transitions and shared platforms that benefit students, staff, and the wider community.
Locally owned
Our escalators began life as labour market tools developed collaboratively by the university, Exeter College, and Exeter City Council, following representation from local employers who had been unable to source the right skills locally for what were good, well-paid positions. This last point is important because this is not just about satisfying employer needs (which is challenging enough), but supporting social mobility, wealth creation, and retention of talent.
Skills escalators enable FE and HE partners to target existing resources effectively and to identify and fill gaps in provision. Our initial data analytics skills escalator resulted in new FE courses at the college, new postgraduate degrees at the university, and several new degree apprenticeships. So successful was this exercise that we have recently repeated it with two new escalators focused on green skills and social care.
Such skills escalators play to university strengths, especially their research and knowledge exchange. They also play to genuine FE strengths around employer-responsiveness and rapid curriculum change. You can read more about our skills escalators in the new Universities UK and Association of Colleges report – delivering a post-16 skills system.
Getting civic
Given their presence in the Post 16 Skills White paper, it is also worth referencing the role of our civic university agreements (CUAs). These have been around nationally for several years and have even had their own national impact accelerator. But to be truly impactful they need commitment and underlying operational capacity. In Exeter, our CUA brings together the University, Exeter College, the City Council and Royal Devon University Hospital (NHS), with skills, again, as a top priority – helping provide strategic oversight and governance to practical on the ground activity.
We believe that CUAs, supported by FE-HE memoranda of understanding, can provide the strategic framework for tertiary education to succeed, with escalators helping us to deliver tangible change. But ultimately, an effective tertiary landscape will demonstrate responsiveness, progression, and continuity, and in doing so success will need to be measured through different types of metrics and the rewarding of collaborative labour-market driven provision, and not just individual institutional performance.
