In this series of 10 short blogs – which will issue in rapid succession – I will consider in turn the top themes that have emerged from 50 interviews with teachers, leaders, policy-makers, academics and others from across and beyond the English FE system. Each blog will end with a question which I hope will generate debate on LinkedIn, where the blogs are signposted.
The core question considered has been “what might be the features of a self-improving FE system?” Interviewees have also considered the key features of the FE system as it stands, and what is holding it back from being self-improving.
Many of my interviewees felt that a defining characteristic of a self-improving system would be that it adopted collective solutions to collective problems. The most commonly mentioned such problem was staff recruitment, which is either a problem or a crisis depending on where you sit in the system.
Several colleagues noted that we only seem to have one solution to the recruitment crisis, and that is to poach other people’s staff. Obviously this just shuffles the problem around, and in some ways makes it worse as it also creates unplanned churn.
The yearning for collectivism seemed to interact with the desire for higher levels of mutual trust in the system, and also a general dissatisfaction with the degree of competition that the system creates, at least in some parts of the country.
Collectivism also had a very interesting interaction with the existence of self-improving sub-systems. There were several interviewees who felt they were part of a movement, initiative or grouping which was either already a successfully self-improving sub-system (for example the S7 Group of Sixth Form Colleges in Surrey and Sussex) or a working towards being such a sub-system (for example the group of FE Colleges in Greater Manchester). However, they had differing perspectives on collectivism. For some it was an obvious good, and would be mutually empowering as it would mean operating at a level of solution-creation that was unattainable for individual colleges. However, for others it was anathema. One Principal said “we come together, we discuss everything, we share ideas about everything, and then we all go away and do our own thing – and that’s why it works”.
Given that the main driver for collectivism seemed to be the problem of under-recruitment to our sector, it was noticeable that nobody mentioned the current DfE campaign to recruit teachers to FE. It was beyond the scope of my research to discover why this was – whether it was lack of awareness, lack of support for it, or a lack of any evidence of impact.
In the second Symposium at Oxford the groups doing the work naturally gravitated towards not collectivism per se, but two more specific areas of challenge and interest that are related to it. One was a hunger for a “proper FE workforce strategy”; and the other was an excitement about how FE could be rebranded collectively. It seems the theme of collectivism resonates at many levels, and has a lot to offer as a concept and a design feature of a successful, self-improving system.
Question: Given the competitive nature of FE funding where one provider’s growth is won at the expense of another, how can we create mechanisms for collective problem-solving?
David Russell
Executive in Residence at Oxford Saïd Business School
Education and Training Foundation