training subsidies, and for what:
1. One or more accreditation agencies, which approve institutions as competent to offer courses and qualifications (including, should they so wish, the institution’s own qualifications). Such agencies would award licences for a given period of years and would also be able to respond to complaints, and intervene before the end of the licensed period, if there were good grounds for doing so. Models for such an accreditation agency include the Council for National Academic Awards, the Quality Assurance Agency, the US regional accrediting agencies, and business school accreditation agencies such as EQUIS, AMBA or FIBAA.
2. A regulatory agency that undertakes some of the current tasks allocated to Ofqual by providing formal approval to external awarding bodies. Licensed institutions would not need to have
22 ADULTS LEARNING APRIL 2010
their own awards separately accredited in this way; their institutional accreditation would subsume this process. Unlicensed institutions could only offer qualifications from awarding bodies which have been accredited by Ofqual: this process would itself include monitoring and regulation of the procedures by which awarding bodies accredited providers of their qualifications.
3. A system of easily accessible online information on institutional capacity and performance, whose accuracy is subject to audit as part of the licensing process. This might be a free-standing facility, maintained on a national basis, or a set of requirements imposed on institutions that can receive subsidised students.
The current system of further education and training increasingly revolves around detailed contracts, issued by government to providers. This is creating a non-competitive system for
FE funding, where colleges and training providers are more motivated to respond to government mandates than learners’ needs. Trainers agree to ‘deliver’ qualifications, designed to government specifications, at the levels, in the quantities, and in the sectors the government thinks we need. In other words, government knows what the economy of today and the future needs. Only they don’t. Many of these qualifications bring no financial benefit to the people who obtain them; and the government’s own surveys find an oversupply of qualifications in most of the labour market.
Central planning never works – this time is no different. Let individuals decide what learning might serve them best, now and for the future. They will do a far better job.
Alison Wolf is the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at Kings College, London.
Her new monograph, How to shift power to
learners, on which this article draws, is published by the LSN’s Centre of Innovation in Learning (
http://www.lsnlearning.org.uk/)
Richard Olivier
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