A Generation of Radical Educational Change by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317376071
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

No mention of FE colleges, where most of the new learners were likely to be.

This phenomenon was not new. In 1997 Helena Kennedy wrote in a report for the newly formed Further Education Funding Council (FEFC), ‘There is an appalling ignorance among decision makers and opinion formers about what goes on in further education. It is so alien to their experience’ (Kennedy Report, 1997). And as recently as 2014, a minister claimed that he was advised by civil servants that he should respond to austerity by ‘killing off FE since nobody will really notice’ (Vince Cable, as reported on the BBC, 6 October 2014).1

So, lack of understanding and invisibility create a problem in writing about changes that FE has undergone in my working lifetime. Therefore, what I shall do is focus on a relatively short period when the ability of FE staff to take professional responsibility for what they taught was probably greater than in a secondary school, and to trace some of the factors that resulted in this being reversed, and centrally sponsored turbulence becoming, if anything, greater than for schools and certainly universities.

In doing so I shall be mostly talking about just one of FE’s many client groups. This group shares the invisibility of FE itself. I was recently pleasantly surprised to see them mentioned in an Ofsted Review published in 2015. One of its section headings read ‘Where can young people, who do not have five GCSEs or are undecided about their career pathways, go?’. The report continued:

Inspectors . . . found that this issue was exacerbated by school sixth forms, academies, colleges and providers who set high entry requirements . . . This could prevent many young people, often the most vulnerable, from following career pathways that may well be within their grasp with a little more time and effective learning support.

(Ofsted, 2013/2014, para. 66)

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