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 other 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.
A theme widely considered by interviewees was whether we have good alignment between what gets measured in FE and what the true purpose is. This is very important in any system, because if the measures used to judge whether the system is working well are not very close to what the system is actually trying to do there will always be frustration and misunderstanding, as well as perverse incentives and the risk of gaming.
So what is the purpose of the FE system?
This is a question that has been considered many times in erudite papers, government strategies and commission reports: to name three of the best known we have the AoC’s “College of the Future” report from 2020, Vince Cable’s “Dual Mandate” green paper from 2015 and Sir Frank McLoughlin’s CAVTL report “It’s about work” from 2013.
But systems thinking says it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks the purpose is or ought to be; instead you just inspect the system and see what it actually does when it’s working and not broken. This, by definition, is the purpose of the system whether you like it or not.
This is slightly problematic for us when we look at FE, because if we just ask “so what does FE actually do, then?” we risk begging the question, because we might get distracted by the existing metrics used. So instead I asked my interviewees what they thought their purpose was, individually and collectively. The vast majority – all but one – of my interviewees describe the purpose of FE in socio-economic terms. That is to say, they said they were doing a good job when they achieved some or all of these things:
The sticky issue, then, is that the funders of FE (mainly the ESFA, though we must not forget the OfS, the MCAs and the apprenticeships levy) do not measure any of these things when they are working out what to fund or whether FE is doing well. Instead the key success measures are participation, qualification achievements and quality of education as judged by Ofsted.
None of my interviewees thought these measures were irrelevant. But none of them thought they really got at the heart of what FE is all about. And so the actors in the system are constantly being stressed by the fact that what they are judged on is a very partial and incomplete view of what they are trying to achieve in the world. And this in turn means that any efforts to create a self-improving system will always be pulled apart by the competing gravities of the two stars: the metrics and the purpose.
Question: Could we co-design a better set of metrics that is a more faithful representation of the purpose of the FE system? Or would this inevitably become another set of heavy manacles on leaders in the system, and we should accept that all measures are proxies and leave it alone?
David Russell
Executive in Residence at Oxford Saïd Business School
Education and Training Foundation