I have been going to the annual Association of Colleges conference for almost 25 years now – and they tend to be a curate’s egg experience. This year was no exception. It was also a conference characterised by the emergence of a fashion for referencing personal connections to further education as a means of displaying one’s own credentials, coupled with an untypical biblical flavour to proceedings.
This all started with the shadow minister for skills and universities, Liam Byrne, who reminded us that he is ‘the grandson of a college principal’. He understood the funding ‘pain’ colleges have gone through in the last four years and recognised that the FE sector has worked ‘miracles’. Conference anchorwoman Emily Maitlis continued the theological theme, referring to high-profile newspaper FE Week as the sector’s ‘bible’, and heralding the ‘second (or was it fourth?) coming’ to AoC of the secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, Vince Cable, who proudly proclaimed FE had ‘a friend in him’ (that’s Vince, not in Jesus) but not many other high-level advocates in the media, in business, among employers and with parents.
Three good things in particular struck me about AoC this year.
First, the heavyweight politicians who addressed the main conference – Vince Cable, Tristram Hunt, Chuka Umunna and Liam Byrne ‘get’ FE. So the sector stands a chance after May 2015, if Labour goes into a coalition or minority government with the current Liberal Democrat minister!
These serious political figures acknowledge to a man (yes, they are all still men) the messiness and fragmentation of FE – born of endless responsiveness to successive, short-term political and funding interventions. They all understand its ingrained defensiveness, exacerbated by the continual disappointment that no government over the last 30 years has ever delivered on its promise to take Cinderella to the ball. And they genuinely appreciate FE’s students and its strengths, its work and its weaknesses, its personalities and its potential.
Above all, they do believe that delivery of a world-class, vocational and technical education system, through a high-quality, ‘lifelong learning’ and entrepreneurial college sector, key to the nation’s sustainable economic development.
Their different contributions were all thoughtful, thought-through, and thought-provoking.
In contrast, reactions from delegates to the contribution by new minister at BIS, Nick Boles, his first (and probably his last) appearance at AoC ranged from ‘party political broadcast’ and ‘lightweight’ to ‘this guy didn’t pick up the mood of conference and clearly doesn’t think he’ll be around in his current job post-May 2015’.
The second reason to be cheerful is that if Labour wins the election (and there were some in the AoC audience who anticipate a minority Labour victory in May next year, or are at least hedging their bets) then the country, and the college sector, could at last have a government with a coherent vision of a more joined-up education and skills system underpinned by a set of reforming economic and transforming social policies to deliver this.
This was the message, propounded with clarity and passion, by the shadow secretaries of state for education and business who jointly brought the AoC conference to a positive close with well-received promises of action on information, advice, and careers guidance, greater collaboration between schools, colleges, and universities and a joint BIS DfE white paper on FE, apprenticeships and vocational qualifications to be published in the first 100 days of a Labour government.
‘Without vision the people perish’, the biblical saying goes. Many of us who have devoted our lives to FE are nurtured by the aspiration, ambition and hope in Labour’s pronouncements. Make no mistake about it, however, such a vision will only be delivered if Labour works hard now, in close partnership with the sector, to shape effective implementation over the life on the next government.
And on this front, a healthy dose of scepticism inevitably prevails across FE.
Real action must follow crowd-pleasing conference speeches. If Labour wins, we should have an FE white paper by July 2015 – and seeing this may really begin to help us believe what the Labour politicians consistently at articulated at this conference: ‘FE’s time has come’.
And the third good bit: pure, visceral inspiration from comedian, actor (and Labour supporter) Alan Davies who stole the show and in whom FE has at least another friend.
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Ann Limb is a member of shadow ministerial skills taskforce team, chair of its FE reference group, and chair of Labour’s National Women’s Development Board. She is also a former FE college principal
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