It took the second world war to make politicians realise just how valuable a [healthy further education (FE) sector][1] was to the UK. The 1943 white paper, Educational Reconstruction, preceding the 1944 Education Act, blamed some wartime difficulties faced by the armed forces and industry on lack of attention to adequate training of young workers.
Most school-leavers were not taking up any education post-14 (the school leaving age was raised to 15 under the Education Act); just one in six students went on to further training. "It must be remembered," the white paper stated, "that girls largely look to leaving factory, shop or office to get married and set up homes of their own."
**FE provision was chaotic**
Much of pre-war FE provision was disordered. Some teenagers undertook training in skills and crafts, while others ended up in non-progressive ‘blind alley’ jobs that rarely led to adult employment.
Something had to change to enable the UK to recover from six years of conflict. As a result, the new Education Act decreed that attendance in full-time education for 15- to 18-year-olds would no longer be entirely voluntary.
Local education authorities (LEAs), supported by a £12m state injection, were tasked pre-war with providing adequate facilities for technical, commercial and art colleges to offer full or part-time study for anyone over compulsory school leaving age wishing to apply.
However, it was only in 1944 that the policy was resurrected and expanded. LEAs could serve under-18s with attendance notices, meaning teenagers had to attend a county college for around a day a month or eight weeks a year.
**Value of FE colleges slowly sinks in**
The important role of the new technical colleges in training specialised personnel for wartime demands had at last been recognised. Industry was slowly beginning to understand the value of closer cooperation with colleges on skills training and apprenticeships that could be tailored to specific local needs.
The war ended — but not austerity. Aside from government finance received by some colleges that had focused heavily on producing armaments and military equipment during the war, most FE institutions had little help to rebuild infrastructure and produce courses. They relied on local LEAs, whose largesse was influenced by local business needs.
**FE ‘never had it so good’**
This, however, was to change. From the mid ‘50s to the early ‘70s, the economy recovered and boomed. Prime minister Harold MacMillan told Britons they’d “never had it so good” and many FE lecturers found themselves on better terms and conditions than schoolteachers, as well as enjoying the freedom to produce curricula that responded directly to local employers’ needs.
The main catalyst was another major white paper, Technical Education, in 1956, which proposed spending £70m over eight years to build up and promote Colleges of Advanced Technology (CATs) in key urban centres, and regional and local satellite colleges. Centres of excellence were created, offering full-time, part-time and sandwich courses. CATs were the forerunners of polytechnics, large and comprehensive providers of higher education (HE) technical and vocational courses.
**Industry not prepared to support day release**
By the early ‘60s, much of industry was still not prepared to support day release and sandwich courses, even though its own training provision was inadequate. The government responded with the 1964 Industrial Training Bill, setting up Industrial Training Boards, tasked with creating training policies in different industries, working on standards and syllabuses, running tests and providing qualifications.
The early ‘70s saw yet more change. The UK’s strong manufacturing base began to erode with less opportunities for apprenticeship courses. Instead, there was more emphasis on teaching a wider range of courses, including A-levels and BTecs, and a move away from skills training in traditional trades where lifelong jobs were disappearing.
**Are independent colleges better?**
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, increasing youth unemployment, falling student rolls and the collapse of apprenticeship schemes fuelled a government belief that colleges ran better if governed by greater independence and competition. This brought more change. In 1986, national vocational qualifications (NVQs) were introduced, spanning the equivalent of basic level GCSEs through to degrees and doctorates.
John Major’s Conservative government pushed through the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. It ‘incorporated’ colleges the following year by giving them full financial independence, removing them from LEA control. It also opened the floodgates for college mergers. What were then almost 500 colleges in England are now 234 (August 2021).
**When colleges became ‘businesses’**
Funding now came direct from the Further Education Funding Council and was based on output and performance. Colleges became businesses, academic principals became chief executives and, in a major change, college governors were made responsible for financial management and strategic direction.
A network of local Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) was also set up to fund work-based training programmes on a similar basis.
**New Labour kickstarts apprenticeship drive**
In 1997, the incoming Labour government made education one of its main priorities and pledged to “get 250,000 young unemployed off benefit and into work”.
In 1999, it announced major changes to post-16 learning in its white paper ‘Learning to succeed’. This heralded the 2001 launch (via the Learning and Skills Act of 2000) of one national body – the Learning and Skills Council for England (LSC) – to cover all areas of non-HE, post-16 education and training, plus 50 local learning and skills councils.
The new bodies were tasked to encourage FE learning among post-16 teenagers and adults, tailor FE provision more to local needs and boost national economic performance and standards.
**Learning Accounts that came and went**
Various LSC initiatives based on performance-based (16-19s) and employer-based (adult learning) funding models were launched to raise standards by introducing choice and competition into the sector in the years leading up to the recession.
For the 16-19 sector, there were the popular Individual Learning Accounts scheme (2000-2001), short-lived because of the outbreak of fraud by rogue providers.
**Gaining rewards with a quality rating**
This was followed by a framework of excellence (2006), created to assess providers and give them a quality rating — individual ratings earned rewards/penalties and greater/reduced funding and autonomy.
Also in 2006, the government-funded Train to Gain scheme (launched in 2002) went national, providing adult learners with free, work-based training. However, often the skills the government was promoting did not match the needs of local employers and communities.
**U-turn on incentive schemes**
The same year, the Leitch Review recommended that funding should be channelled through employer-led schemes rather than continue along the performance-led route. Despite success in incentive schemes, the government concluded the FE sector was too complex to succeed in incentivising the market.
Adult learning courses came under the spotlight in 2007 following The Learning Age green paper and Baroness Helena Kennedy’s report in 2007 on widening participation, though the recession and later Coalition cuts negatively impacted this area of provision.
**Higher apprenticeships make an entrance**
2009 saw the Apprenticeship, Skills, Children and Learning Act allow for the dissolution of the LSC in 2010, to be replaced by the Young People’s Learning Agency (YPLA) — under the Department for Education quango responsible for 16-19s — and the Skills Funding Agency (19+) overseen by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to fund skills training for FE in England.
There was one ray of sunshine in the grim early days of the recession: the launch in 2009 of Higher Apprenticeships, which led to the award of an HND, or a foundation or ‘ordinary level’ degree and the possibility of taking a full honours degree.
**Conservatives make 3 million apprenticeship pledge**
It was all change on May 6 2010. The new Coalition government wasted no time in closing Train to Gain and in March 2012 replaced the YPLA with a new Education Funding Agency (EFA) responsible for funding education for learners aged 3-19 years.
Labour’s Education and Skills Act (2008) kicked in to oblige teenagers to stay in some form of education or training (in college or workplace environment) until the age of 17 (from 2013) and 18 (from 2015). Most students with D grades in maths and English now had to continue resitting exams to gain a pass until age 18.
**Young people’s apprenticeships back on agenda**
Meanwhile, 16-18 apprenticeships, whose uptake had flagged during the late ‘noughties’, were given a new lease of life. Funding was shifted over from learning in the workplace, with traineeships brought in for 16- to 23-year-olds to help them get an apprenticeship or a job. By, 2015 the Coalition claimed to have created 2.1 million apprenticeship ‘starts’, although critics have questioned the Coalition’s definition of an apprenticeship.
**Conservatives in charge — 2016 and beyond**
Apprenticeships remain top of the current Conservative government’s FE agenda, with a commitment to create a further 3 million by 2020. However, apprenticeship starts were down by 6.9% year-on-year to 253,100 in August-April 2020/21, compared to 271,800 in 2019/20.
April 2017 will see the introduction of the Apprenticeship Levy, a major change in funding of training. Employers with a wage bill of more than £3m (less than 2% of companies in England) have to pay a levy to help support an apprenticeship voucher scheme primarily funded by the government and available to all employers.
**Bye bye to BTecs?**
The Department for Education (DfE)’s plans to scrap most applied general qualifications, such as BTecs, favouring T-levels. The DfE plans to stop funding many BTec courses from 2022, abolishing most of them by 2023. The mooted move has been criticised in some quarters for embedding inequalities and holding young people back.
**Focus on T-levels**
Launching in September 2020, T Levels are 2-year courses which follow GCSEs and are equivalent to 3 A levels. They offer students a combination of classroom learning and ‘on-the-job’ experience through an industry placement of at least 315 hours. Education secretary Gavin Williamson has said he wants T Levels to be a world-beating ‘gold standard’ qualification.
**Challenge, diversity and a lesson in history**
This trawl through its 76-year history shows that if you set your sights on a job in FE, you are entering a world that can offer more diversity and career changes than many other sectors put together. FE is a place for people who relish change and wish to be at the forefront of a national move to create a highly skilled workforce fit for the challenges of the future.
[1]: https://www.aocjobs.com/jobs/further-education/teaching-lecturing
AoCJobs, part of the Association of Colleges, connects teachers and support staff with schools and colleges for online job opportunities.