Dr Lou Mycroft reflects on the launch event for the Changing Systems of Change report.
This is such a pivotal time for our sector. In the aftermath of a general election, with chaos in the world and much of it playing out in our classrooms, Further Education (FE) and Skills has an opportunity to step into its own power.
After all, what other sector is about skills? What other sector is preparing young people to be citizens of the future in quite the same way? That we are in a climate emergency is beyond scientific doubt. The velocity of change is breathtaking. When decision-makers call for a green future, a fairer and more equitable future, we know that our time has come.
And yet. Recent decades have left FE and Skills with a legacy of infantilisation which means that we are great at compliance, less good at momentum. From the government downwards, we get all the scrutiny and none of the trust and that shapes our culture. This negative feedback loop (or ‘doom loop’ as we have come to think of it) has to be addressed. Trust is vital, at every level of the system. It’s time for a paradigm shift.
Business analyst Peter Drucker famously (sort of) wrote that, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In fact, both falter when the systems are glitching. Whatever metaphor you use in systems thinking – engine, human body, ecosystem – the fact is that our organisations are complex and we are all reliant on each other to bring our purpose home.
Recognising this, ETF invested in a partnership with Oxford Saïd Business School to investigate FE and Skills as a ‘self-improving system’. Initiated by former CEO David Russell and synthesised by ETF’s Vikki Smith and Paul Tully, with Harvey Maylor of Oxford Saïd, ‘Changing Systems of Change’ was recently launched, a clear and coherent systems analysis of FE and Skills.
At its heart is a divided North Star, a split purpose. What is FE and Skills for? Do we exist to serve social justice, enabling citizens of the future to flourish, or do we exist to comply: qualifications, inspection, audit? The truth is…both. As individuals, we may lean towards the former; to ensure due diligence we need to deliver on the latter. And we carry this tension throughout every working day. No wonder we’re tired.
Our power is in facing up to this. At the launch event, there was a collective hush as Vikki and Harvey spelled out what we already knew. The systems thinking lens that laid bare this central, exhausting truth of FE and Skills also showed us where some of the joy and doom loops were in our system, where the wheels were oiled and where the cogs were glitching. We began to discuss which levers we could haul on, to pull the system into shape.
FE and Skills is fundamental to the future of this country, yet we continue to have an image problem not of our making. It’s back to that trust thing again and if we are going to shift perceptions we need to glow up from the inside. That launch day in Oxford left my head spinning with, as the report says, ‘the art of the possible’. There’s no lack of success in FE and Skills. In 2022, 90% of our institutions are inspected as good or outstanding. Yet the negative perception remains stubborn. Dare I suggest that this is not unconnected with the fact that few government ministers in recent decades come from families that have actually experienced FE and Skills (which is, after all, a largely working-class service)? If we’re to change this, we need to use our influence.
And here’s where I made the connection to my own work. Alongside Joss Kang, I work with changemakers in FE and Skills, who help shift their organisations from good intentions to sustainable change. They operationalise their potentia, a specific concept of power that has been lost to the English language – and culture – for a long time. Unlike potestas (power-as-usual), potentia is an affirmative, changemaking power. You might not have heard the word before, but you’ll know what it feels like. It’s the energy of the creative process, the conversation with a colleague that exhilarates you, an event where you come away buzzing. Both potestas and potentia come from the work of long-dead philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who, writing in Latin, had two definitions at his disposal. If potestas means (that good Yorkshire word) ‘clout’, we can see potentia as ‘influence’. And that’s the power we need now in FE and Skills. Collective changemaking power.
Change is coming and instead of waiting to respond, it’s time to take our potentia onto the main stage. And no, we don’t know yet all the ways in which we can do this. We don’t even know who ‘we’ are. But we know how to start. Systems analysis has helped us see our complicated sector more clearly. Our job now – our collective job, whatever our role or rank – is to find and fix the glitches in the system. We can only do that together. We really hope that you will join the conversation, so that we can support one another to co-create FE and Skills’s new future.
Image from Further Education and Skills: Changing Systems of Change report.