Review: LSIS policy paper "The New World We're In - strategic implications"

The Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) has been running a series of seminars, roundtables and conferences since the General Election to help FE Colleges and skills providers understand and respond to the policy and funding shifts springing from the Coalition Government's new skills strategy and wider reforms to education and employment policy.

A series of videos, articles from leading figures and links to relevant policies and web-based resources across the learning and skills sector are available on their website.

In addition to this, in late January 2011, LSIS published a policy paper "The New World We're In: Strategic Implications", which is edited by Caroline Mager, the Executive Director of Policy, Research and Communications.

It's a very good read, as it's refreshingly concise and provides useful insight to the changed reality affecting Colleges and training provers in the era of the Coalition Government. Justas importantly it captures observations from leaders within the sector about the opportunities and challenges providers will face as a result of the coalition's policies.


Since his appointment as the Conservative's spokesperson in 2005, John Hayes' central message has been that the further education sector - by which he means not just colleges but private and third sector training providers -must be given greater freedom to deliver high-quality, personalised learning and training services for teenagers and adults, and that a new culture of partnership and trust rather than top-down compulsion is crucial to achieving this.

In Government Mr. Hayes inherited a highly centralised system in terms of regulatory compliance, controls on funding streams, inspection arrangements and quality improvement targets and support frameworks.

The Coalition has since announced a range of measures to streamline reporting mechanisms and give FE Colleges and training providers more flexibility over the usage of funding to design locally relevant programmes that anticipate and respond to the current and future needs of learners and employers.

Like many other public sector professional communities, LSIS are acutely aware that the future prominence and financial sustainability of FE Colleges and other training providers, not to mention its own future stability, is tied to how well the sector is perceived as a solution to the Government's priorities for public service delivery, economic growth and social mobility.

Accordingly a central theme of the report is exploring how the sector can best respond to the Big Society agenda:

"There is a unique opportunity for the sector to engage actively in developing a narrative about its role in the Big Society that builds on the proud traditions of the sector, celebrates the powerful contribution of learning to civic life, and describes the role the sector might play in contributing to addressing the future economic, social and demographic challenges of our times".

The report acknowledges that opinion about the Big Society is very polarised, but feels that it is nonetheless a potential opportunity for the sector to exemplify its qualities:

"Some leaders in our discussions felt that they were being exhorted to do what we do already – for example, to use small public investment to lever private sponsorship; to use volunteers and seek contributions in kind. Others in our discussions felt that we must overcome this ambivalence to the Big Society concept, embrace and shape the concept; explore its implications for our 21st century lives – for example, how it can help us respond to the profound demographic shifts of an ageing society; and use it to showcase and build a more inclusive public understanding of the role of the sector in civil society".

LSIS believes that there has been a genuine shift in the attitude of Government towards the sector , and that efforts to construct a more trust-based relationship provides real potential for Colleges and training providers to forge effective self-regulation and improvement strategies:

"Whereas two years ago the sector was exploring the concept of self-regulation in an unpromising environment where central control and prescription predominated, we are now in a context where the sector is being invited, indeed expected, to become rapidly and increasingly self-regulating, in terms of being responsible for driving its own destiny".

I won't try and summarise the whole report, but a few of its central conculsions include:

• A significant role for FE in delivering the ambition of full participation in learning up to the age of 18;

• A changed outlook from central Government about how quality improvement and regulation in the sector can best be developed in future;

• A renewed recognition in Government that there are wider benefits to learning that simply the accumulation of work-based skills and a real opportunity for colleges and training providers to more pro-actively shape economic, social development and regeneration in their communities;
  

• Greater opportunities for FE providers to deliver higher education in future as a result of the Government's desire for greater flexibility and innovation in the form of two year degrees, distance learning HE, and Level 4 qualifications in the workplace;
  

• A potential risk that as a result of reduced public spending and a greater emphasis on co-funding by learners and employers, some of the most vulnerable individuals and groups in society may lose out from the reforms to funding and access to further education.