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inVIEW


A new sense of political purpose must not be squandered


By David Russell


The new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has delivered his first Budget. As expected, it did not deliver any big news for FE; it probably never was going to, even before Coronavirus muscled in on the scene. The coming three-year Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), however, is a different and much more promising proposition. I was lucky enough to be closely involved in the first CSR in 1998/9. I moved from teaching into the Civil Service in 1998, to be part of the wave of optimism that was sweeping Britain that we could change things for the better after years of political stagnation. The then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, famously said his top three priorities were “education, education, education”. However, looking back on that time, it’s fair to say that none of these three was further education. In an explicit echo of that famous phrase, the current


Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, has said that this is precisely his priority – “further education, further education, further education”. And there are many reasons why I think he is well-placed to deliver on this and, as he says, back up his “warm words” with “cold hard cash”. The first reason is a very positive one. It is that many


years of noise from the sector itself have finally got the attention of Whitehall, and made decision-makers look at what the FE sector does and realise how brilliantly placed it is to change lives and transform communities. But there are many other reasons, as is usually the case when a political agenda shifts: to take on new priorities, old priorities must fall down the list. The schools reform agenda has largely run out of steam. Academisation has passed the tipping point of no return, and the reforming zeal has gone out of it. A new bell curve of school performance has settled into being, with local authority maintained schools and academies pretty evenly scattered across it. Nobody really believes any more that further structural reform will deliver significant system-wide improvements for pupils. And equally, nobody who is paying attention to the facts believes that a reversal of academisation would achieve anything worthwhile for teachers or learners (that doesn’t mean it won’t feature as a policy, for ideological reasons). The national curriculum, GCSEs and A Levels have all


been reformed very considerably, and the Government quite rightly has committed to no new changes for the


6 ISSUE 39 • SPRING 2020 inTUITION


foreseeable future. There is a rare period of relative calm where policy attention can turn to FE. At the other end of the educational spectrum, higher education is also not enjoying time in the sun. The large hikes in student fees are seen to have delivered dubious returns for the national good. The funding model may be progressive in structure, but the public have lost a lot of faith in the idea that university for all is the smartest way to succeed as a nation. Again, the focus swings back to further education, and in particular the vital importance of higher-level technical education, where the UK lags behind so many countries in volume, if not in quality. And finally, of course, there is the fact that we have left the EU, and so movement of skilled and semi-skilled labour into the UK is likely to change, and possibly reduce. Again, this creates a call for our own education and training system to rise to the challenge of meeting the economy’s needs; step forward FE, to do what it does so brilliantly, out of the political shadows and into the limelight. And what does all of this mean for the teachers and


trainers in our system? Well, again I believe there is good news here. The Secretary of State seems genuinely committed to investing in the professional development of FE teachers. He spoke to me last year with passion about the need to not only recruit excellent people from industry, but also motivate, retain and develop the professionals already in the sector. And at the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) we see concrete manifestation of that, through large national programmes such as Taking Teaching Further, which recruits and trains high-calibre people from industry into hard-to-fill vacancies in FE; and also the T Level Professional Development Programme, which the ETF will be rolling out over the next four years, giving high-end, bespoke technical CPD for a sector crying out for investment in its professionalism. I hope the Spending Review this summer will build on these positive early developments, and that the FE workforce will see the public investment it so richly deserves to help it do its job brilliantly up and down the country for learners, their employers and their communities. There is good reason to be optimistic that it will.


David Russell is chief executive of the Education and Training Foundation and the Society for Education and Training.


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