FE-HE collaboration needs to be more than pointing both sectors at the same diminishing funding pot

The imminent post-16 education and skills white paper is expected to set out measures to enhance collaboration between higher and further education in England. Or at least pleasant words about the value of such collaboration – we’ll have to see.

Universities UK and the Association of Colleges have this week attempted to scoop the big beats with proposals on delivering a joined-up post-16 skills system, outlining the benefits of getting the whole tertiary system working in harmony and the blockers currently standing in the way.

It’s well worth a read alongside the superb recent report from Josh Patel at the Edge Foundation on how tertiary pathways operate in practice, based on interviews with staff at the coal face of collaborations in both England and Scotland. In particular, it speaks to the perspective, which the Westminster government seems to be leaning towards, that adjustments to regulatory plumbing alongside access to the LLE and a clearly articulated vision can make change on the ground.

The report finds that:

While regulatory frameworks in Scotland were seen to facilitate robust partnerships, English institutions reported that regulatory incoherence contributed to a sense of uncertainty and fragility in collaborative ventures.

That sounds like evidence in favour of a regulatory rethink. But the Edge report overall paints a more complex picture:

Ironically, the collaborations featured were often pursued because of, and as part of, the competitive market. While partner institutions were aligning their developments with local and regional labour market needs and prioritised widening participation agendas, these were often pursued in close association for cultivating student demand in service of institutional survival and growth.

While the Scottish regulatory model might work better, it’s not a panacea when no-one has any cash:

In Scotland, clearer articulations of social aims clearly facilitated partnerships and their associated benefits. However, their influence in conditions of high resource scarcity still facilitated some unintended consequences, including universities encroaching on FE markets.

As Ewart Keep is quoted as saying:

Even in countries where a systems-based approach is dominant, such as Scotland, institutions are sometimes competing for scarce funding, students and prestige. In other words, inside systems there is often an element of contestability and competition.

Overall, the report comes to a conclusion that DfE would do well to keep front-and-centre in developing proper policy out of whatever the white paper proposals sketch out:

Tertiary collaboration, rather than representing a structural shift away from competition, may be considered an adaptive strategy within conditions of resource scarcity.

This issue of Scottish universities “encroaching on FE markets” is one we’ve covered recently, via UHI’s Lydia Rohmer warning to the Holyrood education committee of “whole college cohorts collapsing in Clearing.” And it recurred as a theme in Audit Scotland’s explosive (as far as these things go) analysis last week of the crises facing Scotland’s colleges, which heard from stakeholders that

colleges believe they are increasingly competing with universities for student enrolments.

And, importantly, that

colleges are concerned that as financial pressures on universities increase, competition for student enrolments will heighten.

Audit Scotland called for change to the college funding model – but the observations are also a clear indicator of how stressors elsewhere in the system, in this case the finances of universities, can spread throughout the tertiary space.

Returning to England and the upcoming white paper, what you’d really want to see – aside from a proper funding settlement, but let’s depressingly set that to one side for a moment – is an objective and proactive arbiter of how financial factors are causing problems in both universities and colleges. Part of the issue is that no-one is looking through a wide enough lens, at least not yet.

It could and should be Skills England, for example by doing exactly what UUK and AoC have recommended in their report – conducting a full-scale review of the post-16 system’s capacity:

This should include describing (i) funding challenges (where the cost of delivery is out of step with available funding, or where demand needs to be grown over time) (ii) coordination challenges (where excessive competition and poor alignment drives inefficiencies in the system); and (iii) demand-side challenges (where employers are not recruiting in emerging sectors, or where pay, conditions and progression opportunities are impeding demand from learners).

But – as our colleagues at FE Week have observed in their coverage of the report – the quango appears very reluctant to subsume questions of cash into its remit, either in terms of the diminishing funding the government stumps up as an input or (as I’ve mentioned previously) in thinking about how skills demand in the wider economy is just as much about wages as it is about “mismatch”.