LSN argues that the sector and not the state should primarily drive quality improvement in FE

There's an excellent, recently published report by LSN (better known to many as the Learning and Skills Network, an ex-Government quango turned not-for-profit service provider).

In it they explore the broad-ranging but critical issues of quality improvement within the further education sector. This report can be downloaded for free from here.


But does quality improvement in FE matter that much in the scale of reform priorities for the new Government? Yes it should be a crucial aspect of the Government's public service reform and future growth strategy because as the report points out:

"With around 4.8 million learners publicly funded every year through FE and skills provision in England alone, the sector educates and trains more people than universities and has far more 16–18 year-old learners than school sixth forms".

Also the media often pidgeon-holes FE Colleges as the providers of exclusively vocational qualifications such as BTECs, City and Guilds and generic NVQs, and forget that more A Levels are taken in Further Education Colleges than in schools.

The LSN report traces the recent history of quality improvement in FE, looking in particular at a diverse array of initiatives, programmes and agencies created by the previous Government to drive change. It is implictly critical of the chop and change approach that saw a number of machinery of government changes affecting FE funding, inspection, regulation and performance management in the 2000s:

"A history of institutional instability, a plethora of agencies and the reliance on partnership working that this necessitates, all make it likely that the frontline struggles to really comprehend the basic roles and responsibilities of key national organisations".

Some key highlights from the report's recommendations include:

1. Quality improvement should be owned by institutions within the sector through self-regulation and challenged by inspection and meaningful data, which is understandable and
accessible to a wide range of stakeholders – not led by these (central) mechanisms.

2. A call on Government to revist and change the central-local balance within the FE sector so as to empower providers. The report specifically says there must be a review of the balance between nationally policy-driven quality improvement programmes and those led by the sector, taking account of the readiness of diff erent providers to make eff ective use of available resources, with the presumption being that the ‘default’ responsibility for improvement will lie with providers within the sector where appropriate.

3. There is also a call for Government to recognise, prioritse and provide dedicated resources to support effective partnership working and best practice dissemination through sector networks that will pay dividends in the longer term. Specifically the report argues calls for the establishment of a ‘network of networks’ driven by web-portal that enables providers in the sector to build connections, promote their improvement activities to each other and ensure high-quality network activities.