The Changing Face of Further Education

Lifelong Learning, Inclusion and Community Values in Further Education

Terry Hyland, Barbara Merrill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134496969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What are the values and policies which are driving the development of Further Education institutions?The rapid expansion and development of the post-compulsory sector of education means that further education institutions have to cope with ever-evolving government policies.
This book comprehensively examines the current trends in further education by means of both policy analysis and research in the field. It offers an insightful evaluation of FE colleges today, set against the background of New Labour Lifelong Learning initiatives and, in particular, the links between college and community.
This timely investigation of FE and New Labour policy, takes a unique community education perspective to determine whether the social objectives of current policy can be achieved by policy-makers, managers, staff and students in FE institutions.
For students, lecturers and educators in the post-compulsory sector, in addition to policy-makers and managers, this is an invaluable source of information on a subject which is still largely under-researched.

Chapter 1
Further education –
past and present

The LSS and post-compulsory education and training (PCET) sector in general, and its largest component and chief vehicle – the further education (FE) sector – in particular, has, arguably, witnessed more radical change and development over the last few decades than any other sphere of educational provision. In the then Secretary of State’s speech to the Association of Colleges for Further and Higher Education in 1989, Kenneth Baker was concerned to point out that FE was no longer ‘just the bit between school and higher education’. There was an insistence that the FE sector was:

not just the Cinderella of the education service . . . Over 1,750,000 attend further education colleges . . . taught by the equivalent of 63,000 lecturers. There are some 400 LEA-maintained colleges. The whole thing costs £1 billion a year. It is a big, big enterprise.

(Baker, 1989, p. 3)

Given the sweeping and fundamental changes the sector has experienced since 1989 – the massive expansion of numbers, the growth of the new general and national vocational qualifications (G/NVQs), the incorporation of colleges under the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, the funding and inspection regimes under the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) and the recent re-organisation under the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), changes in staff contracts and conditions of service as well as the financial and management vicissitudes of a significant number of institutions – it could justifiably be said that the ‘bit between school and higher education’ has been changed out of all recognition over the last few decades.

Moreover, trends in FE need to be located against the background of fundamental changes in the PCET sector generally which are driven by New Labour’s ‘lifelong learning’ (DfEE, 1998a) policy (examined in more detail in Chapter 2). The key objectives of lifelong learning are the widening of participation in further and higher education to foster greater social inclusion and cohesion and the raising of skill levels to enhance Britain’s economic competitiveness. Although the economic arguments always seem to have pride of place (Hyland, 2000, 2002), they are invariably twinned with the social inclusion aims which were raised in the Kennedy Report (1997) and officially endorsed in the government’s response to DfEE (1998b). These key aims have been reinforced more recently in the DfEE policy document on the role envisaged for FE institutions after the re-organisation of the sector under the LLSCs in April 2001. The then Secretary of State, David Blunkett, made it clear that although he saw:

further education as playing a key role in the economic agenda, it is also central to meeting the social objectives of our lifelong learning policy. Economic prosperity and social cohesion go hand in hand, and working with partners at local and regional level . . . I therefore look to further education to work with and support partners in the adult and community and the voluntary sectors; to play a key role in the delivery of information, advice and guidance for adults; and crucially to ensure that it is central to addressing the basic skills needs of adults, a task which is critical to both our economic and social agendas.

(DfEE, 2000a, para. 4)

The role of partnerships – between FE colleges, higher education institutions (HEIs), schools, employers, voluntary agencies and other community stakeholder groups – is now a central feature of New Labour policy for the PCET sector as the new Secretary of State, Estelle Morris, noted in welcoming the LSC corporate plan (DfES, 2001a, pp. 1–2). Before examining this new, extended role for FE institutions in the twenty-first century, it is worth looking briefly at the past and recent history which have served to shape the present sector.

FE – origins and development

Pratt (2000) has suggested that it ‘was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that the system of further education as we know it today became established’ (p. 13). In terms of social, economic and educational origins this is correct, though in strictly conceptual terms ‘further education’ did not enter the educational lexicon until it was first used to refer to post-school provision in Section 41 of the 1944 Education Act (Dent, 1968, p. 35) which required local education authorities (LEAs) to secure provision of adequate facilities for:

1. full-time and part-time education for persons over compulsory school age;
2. leisure-time occupation, in such organized cultural training and recreative activities as are suited to their requirements, for any persons over compulsory school age who are able and willing to profit by the facilities provided for that purpose.

In their interesting sketch of the historical development of those activities which have since been subsumed under the FE umbrella, Green and Lucas (1999a) present an outline based on five periods: the nineteenth century, 1900–1944, 1940s to 1970s, 1970s and 1980s and, finally, the 1990s. We intend to use these broad categories and – supplementing existing accounts with philosophical, historical, social and empirical studies, in addition to our own work on the sector (Hyland and Merrill, 1996, 2001; Hyland,1999; Merrill 2000) – to offer a broad outline of the evolution of the sector.

The nineteenth century

The main strands of development prior to the establishment of state systems were working-class ‘self-help’ movements, offering social and cultural enrichment through adult education activities, and the Mechanics Institutes which provided a diversity of technical and vocational education courses (Hall, 1994). The key aims of the former – the various workers and mutual improvement societies which grew out of the labour and cooperative movements – aimed to provide general literacy, scientific, cultural and political education to remedy the absence of state provision for working people in these areas. Clubs and circles were organised by Chartists, Owenites and Christian Socialists, an example of the latter being the establishment of the London Working Men’s College in 1854 (Harrison, 1954). Simon (1969) suggests that many of these early movements were designed to counteract the impact of the more middle-class Mechanics Institutes which were developing apace in all regions throughout the nineteenth century.

The first Mechanics Institute was founded in Edinburgh in 1821, beginning a development which was to lead to the establishment of technical colleges later in the century which, in turn, provided a foundation for the birth of the FE sector. By the mid-nineteenth century there were 610 Institutes with a membership of more than half a million, although, as Green and Lucas (1999b) note, they ‘did not gain credibility as genuinely mass adult education providers’ since their ‘increasingly middle-class ethos alienated potential working-class entrants’ (p. 11). The chief aim of the Institutes was to teach ‘useful knowledge’ but they ‘failed in their purpose primarily due to the lack of literacy among those who needed such knowledge’ (Musgrave, 1970a, p. 65). Moreover, in the development of programmes, the Institutes began a process of separating general, scientific and technical education (Evans, 1975) which – reinforced by the intense political and education debates about technical education later in the century – created divisions between vocational and academic studies that bedevil the system to this day.

The essentially voluntarist, ad hoc and fragmented nature of educational developments in the early nineteenth century was later questioned and criticised when Britain’s position as the ‘foremost industrial nation’ (Musgrave, 1970a, p. 144) was threatened. This position had been displayed for all the world to see at the Great Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in 1851 but – by the time of the Paris Exhibition of 1867 – a member of the Exhibition jury, Dr Lyon Playfair, was moved to write to the Taunton Commission (then considering the state of technical education) urging them to examine the health of ‘scientific instruction’ (ibid.) as part of their remit so as to help the country keep pace with foreign competition.

Following the report of the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction in 1884, a Technical Instruction Act was passed by Parliament in 1889 which legislated for:

instruction in the principles of science and art applicable to industries, and in the application of specific branches of science and art to specific industries or employments. It shall not include the teaching of any trade or industry or employment.

(Musgrave, 1970a, p. 68)

The overt theoretical thrust of the Act reflected – in addition to the dominance of the ideals of liberal education (and distaste for the practical; Coffey, 1992) among leading educators and politicians of the time – both the territorial power of craft guilds to preserve the secrets of their occupations and also the state of the debate about the differences between technical education (principles) and technical instruction (practice). As Musgrave (1970a) notes, ‘technical education for the upper levels of the labour force might still be seen in terms of general principles, but at the lower levels to teach the practice was now becoming the custom’ (p. 69). This division of technical education into different levels and types was later to be reinforced and embedded in the state schooling system.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century the liberal voluntarist creed gave way to active state intervention in both general popular education and the public provision of technical education. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 which effectively established compulsory state provision had ‘primarily an economic purpose’ (Coffey, 1992, p. 50). Introducing the Bill in the House of Commons in February 1970, Forster (author of the 1870 Act) argued that upon ‘the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity . . . if we leave our work-folk any longer unskilled . . . they will be overmatched in the competition of the world’ (Maclure, 1973, pp. 99–100). As Pratt (2000) suggests, the nineteenth-century origins of FE can be located in that ‘burst of state involvement and collectivism that, in contrast to some popular opinion, characterized the late Victorian period’ (p. 13). Reinforcing this line of argument, Sanderson (1999) argues that the ‘British system was so transformed between 1870 and 1914 . . . that it had become an impressive support for industry rather than a liability’ (p. 26). He goes on to elaborate this perspective with the assertion that:

Before 1890 English education was defective, lacking a proper structure of universities, state and local government finance, technical colleges, free and compulsory elementary education or popular secondary education . . . After 1890, however, the situation was transformed with free and compulsory elementary education, the restructuring of the secondary system . . . the elevation of civic university colleges into independent degree granting institutions with state grants from 1889, the spread of the polytechnics, municipal technical colleges and City & Guilds examinations.

(p. 29)

Public examinations and qualifications had been established with the foundation of the Royal Society of Arts in 1856 and the City and Guilds of London Institute in 1879, the latter – in collaboration with the City of London Livery Companies – playing a leading role in establishing the colleges and polytechnics which spread to the regions throughout the 1990s. After the passing of the 1889 Technical Instruction Act, the funding of these new institutions was helped by the so-called ‘whiskey money’ released through the 1890 Local Taxation Act and used specifically to finance the expansion of public technical education (Musgrave, 1970b). However, in spite of all these positive developments, technical education in England at the end of the nineteenth century remained, according to Green and Lucas (1999b):

intellectually narrow and institutionally marooned between school and work, it never acquired a status comparable with that achieved in certain other continental states. Its form became characterised by an historical absence – the lack of any legitimised notion of general culture and general education with which to frame technical skills. FE colleges would find it hard to break out of this mould and to rectify this absence.

(pp. 14–15)

1900 to 1944

Pratt (2000) describes the period from the passing of the 1902 Education Act (giving county boroughs the responsibility for organising technical education) to the 1944 Education Act as ‘one of considerable growth’ when ‘students in technical and commercial education more than doubled, from under 600,000 in 1910–11 to over 1.2 million by 1937–8’ (p. 18). A key factor in this expansion was the establishment of public qualifications in the form of the National Certificates – later to become the mainstay of VET in FE colleges – awarded at ordinary (roughly equivalent to A-level) and higher (comparable to a pass degree) levels. The certificates were organised on a partnership model with colleges, industry and the professions all involved in the design of curricula and assessment (Venables, 1955).

The Fisher Education Act of 1918 made provision for a system of part-time education for all young people up to the age of 18 who were not in full-time education but – mainly because of the hostility of parents and employers to the day-release elements of the system combined with the economic downturn in the 1920s – the original plans were never fully implemented. Junior technical schools providing post-elementary VET did expand to cater for around 30,000 students by 1937, though they never achieved parity of status with academic secondary schooling (no more than the secondary technical schools founded after the 1944 Butler Education Act; McCullough, 1989).

It was during the immediate post-war years that, as Neary (1999, p. 91) expressed it, the ‘modern condition of “youth” was invented . . . as part of the Employment and Training Act (ETA)’ passed in 1948. The ETA 1948 was a ‘significant moment in the history of vocational education and training in Britain, representing the first co-ordinated response by the state to the disequilibrium’ (ibid., p. 92) caused by the economic, social and cultural upheaval of the Second World War. It was a bold attempt at social and economic reconstruction – involving state-funded youth training, national manpower planning and systematic careers and guidance services (TUC, 1947) – and represented perhaps the first official government interest in easing the transition from school to work for young people. The fact that these ambitious goals were frustrated by social and economic developments is both typical of the so-called British malaise in the VET sphere and also a harbinger of subsequent ill-fated state initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s.

1940s to the mid-1970s

There was a large increase in training programmes throughout the war years – particularly linked to engineering, war production and the armed services – and day-release for young workers continued to expand (Evans, 1975). As mentioned earlier, the 1944 Education Act for the first time made it a legal duty for LEAs to provide FE. The so-called ‘day continuation schools’ planned after the Fisher Act were resurrected in the 1944 Act as County Colleges which school leavers would attend part-time up to the age of 18. However, for reasons similar to the historical failure of so many schemes in this sphere, ‘county colleges joined day continuation schools among the might-have beens’ (Maclure, 1991, pp. 7–8) of educational policy-making. This legacy of failure continues to influence the swings and cycles of policy in the PCET sphere as one initiative after another seeks to make up for the inadequacies of voluntarism in vocational education and training (VET) and – of special significance for the FE sector – the absence of a strong work-based learning route in Britain (Richardson and Gumbley, 1995).

By the end of the Second World War there were over 700 LEA maintained technical colleges (Smithers and Robinson, 1993, p. 28), a remarkable achievement in view of the education budget cuts in the inter-war years which – along with factors already mentioned – prevented the development of post-school part-time provision for young people. The Percy Report (Ministry of Education, 1945) – mainly as a response to the low national output of civil, electrical and mechanical engineers – recommended the selection of a number of technical colleges in which new...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Further Education – Past and Present
• Chapter 2: Lifelong Learning and Further Education
• Chapter 3: Who Is Further Education for?
• Chapter 4: Colleges and Staff
• Chapter 5: Colleges and Students
• Chapter 6: Colleges and Their Communities
• Chapter 7: Learning, Teaching and the Curriculum
• Chapter 8: A Philosophy for Further Education In the New Learning and Skills Sector
• Bibliography