Professionalism and the English Further Education Practitioner – continuity and change
Mark Goodrham and Phil Hodkinson
Draft – working paper please do not cite
Comments welcome –
Mark Goodrham
Calderdale College
Francis Street
Halifax
West Yorkshire
HX1 3UZ
Paper presented to annual conference British Educational Research Association, UMIST 16th – 18th September 2004
Abstract
The incorporation of English Further Education (FE) Colleges in 1993 has been repeatedly described as radically altering working conditions and dramatically reducing the status of teaching staff. We argue that FE professionalism has always been contested. Also, the basic nature of that contest, which lies between external and largely instrumental pressures and internal beliefs about education and the practice of teaching, endures both pre and post college incorporation, in 1993. However, there have been two significant changes. Prior to 1993, the main external pressures came from the demands of employers and the local educational market place. Since 1993, though such pressures remain, they have been added to and arguably eclipsed by additional pressures from government policies towards governance, funding, inspection and curriculum. Though these new pressures result in similar tensions with internal views of professional performance, the pressures are more all pervasive and less stable than in previous times.
Introduction
‘FE has no past and no future. Only a present.’ (Tony Scaife, personal communication)
Tony Scaife is an FE practitioner, who has been seconded for two days a week to work on the Transforming Learning cultures in FE (TLC) project. He made this comment when some of us were discussing the ways in which colleges cope with key events, such as a major external inspection of college provision, a significant change in funding regulations, or in examination or assessment requirements. What he meant by this is that FE colleges and many of their staff survive by reacting to each new situation, largely bracketing off even the recent past, and working as if the new conditions will continue indefinitely, even if many people know or suspect that further changes will soon overtake them.
This comment exemplifies the issues we examine in this paper. It broadly fits with a common view in the literature, that English FE is somehow completely different now from its earlier conditions. There is a past, but it has little to do with the present. The statement can also be taken as an indicator of the apparent loss of professional autonomy and control that some commentators see as typifying English FE since about 1993. In re-examining these issues, we have focussed on analysing the ways in which FE professionalism or professionality have been researched and written about both pre and post the 1993 watershed. In so doing, we have attempted to integrate professional experience and academic expertise – adopting both insider and outsider perspectives.[1] From this hopefully integrated perspective, we first briefly describe the current nature of FE, and the significance of incorporation for those readers who are unfamiliar with it. Next, we analyse the ways in which post-incorporation professionalism has been addressed in the literature. This is followed by an analysis of arguably the only major study of FE professionalism from the pre-1993 era, by Gleeson and Mardle (1980). We then develop and explore the value of Stronach et al’s (2002) concepts of ‘economies of performance’ and ‘ecologies of practice’ as a means of making sense of the current and past situations. We conclude that tensions between what could be termed economies of performance and ecologies of practice have formed an enduring and ever-present feature of that professionalism. However, the post-1993 introduction of particular forms of tight government regulation has further intensified the external pressures and added greater instability. For these reasons, FE professionalism is indeed, as many other commentators suggest, more difficult to sustain than was the case in earlier times.
English Further Education, since 1993
There are just over 300 FE colleges in England. They cater for large numbers of full and part-time students, aged between 14 and 90, though with a preponderance of those between about 16 and 25. Many of the courses offered are vocational, and FE is arguably the main location of vocational education and training (VET) in England. However, colleges also teach many academic courses, such as A levels. They teach all levels and abilities, from those with special educational needs through to higher education. However, if we exclude specialist sixth form colleges, the bulk of the students in FE are taking some form of second chance. That is, they have left school dissatisfied or even demoralised, and see FE as an alternative way back into education and learning. FE colleges also respond to the education and training needs of local and national employers.
Before the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, FE colleges were owned and controlled by Local Education Authorities (LEAs). These were elected bodies, responsible for public educational provision in their local area. Though most of their funding and efforts focussed on schools, LEAs saw FE colleges and also polytechnics (regionally based largely vocational higher education providers) as key parts of their provision. As has been explained elsewhere (Avis et al, 1996; Ainley and Bailey, 1997) the then Conservative government introduced radical changes to the ownership and management of FE. The twin drivers were a belief in market forces as the best means of driving up quality and efficiency of educational provision, and a political determination to reduce the power and influence of LEAs, many of which were then controlled by either Labour or the Liberal Democrats. The result was what is commonly referred to as ‘incorporation’. The 1992 Act freed colleges from LEA control. They became independent institutions, funded by a government created quango, the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC). In this new era, there were three prime control mechanisms. Firstly, there came a plethora of often detailed and prescriptive government regulations. Secondly, the FEFC and its more recent successor, The Learning and Skills Council (LSC), established complex and frequently changing financial and funding mechanisms, which directly linked almost all college funding to the recruitment, retention and achievement of students. Thirdly, there was an imposed external inspection system, which has also changed several times in the last 10 years. There have been parallel changes in college management approaches, resulting, amongst other things, in dramatic and significant changes on conditions of service of almost all FE staff. This is the context, then, in which changing FE professionalism has been discussed, in the academic literature.
The ongoing reconstruction of FE practitioner identity is inextricably linked to the development of the sector in relation to a dominant social and political discourse of audit (Power, 1997, Strahern, 2000) underpinning this increasing state intervention. A host of agencies have been involved, including: the FEFC, the National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ), the Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs), the Further Education National Training Organisation (FENTO) and, more recently, LSC, the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTD) and the Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI). The mechanisms of these bodies and the imposition of accountability technologies to measure professional performance and achievement are inextricably linked. Shifting relationships between regulatory/funding bodies, competition and the marketisation of FE have redefined and extended the focus of practitioner responsibilities.
More recent developments in FE professionalism mirror correspondingly contemporary shifts towards an increasingly widening interventionist policy development across public services (Exworthy and Halford 1999). Similarly, unchallenged New Right assumptions prioritising consumerism, market hegemony and managerialism in educational reform have underpinned the policy context of FE practice (Avis 1997). Notional dimensions of inclusion and community have been tagged on since the arrival of New Labour to government (Hyland 2002) but ‘a particular understanding of global economic relations’ (Avis 1997: 243) gives precedence to the market. This is true even with respect to aspects of post-compulsory education and training (PCET) apparently grounded in social justice (Avis 1997: 246). The conditions and status of FE practitioner professionalism must then be understood with reference to policy rhetoric and discourse that legitimises the direction of that intervention. In a real sense, however, the most vital function of the FE practitioner remains intact. Teaching students probably still constitutes the major part of professional responsibility for most FE staff.
Inevitably, conditions of employment across education have also been widely affected by such policy intervention and the impact of market driven economic priorities, in ways that have also been documented with respect to higher education.
The number of core, full-time and permanent jobs has declined, while the
periphery of short-term contract employees and freelance sub-contractors
has expanded.
(Scott 1995:100)
Since the educational reforms implemented in 1993 FE staff have become increasingly located within similarly flexible, high risk and individually competitive sets of workforce relations (Ainley and Bailey 1997; Hyland and Merrill 2003). Widening participation initiatives, curricula reforms and revised employment conditions for staff are all defined in the same language of individual flexibility and performance. Policy intervention and the increasing application of commercial principles and discourse have increased simultaneously in FE. But then further education has always been shaped by factors outside of its direct control, most importantly by wider socio-economic priorities.
Incorporation placed a compulsion upon individual college senior management teams to secure and develop new sources of finance, in order to remain solvent and compete on a commercial basis with other colleges and providers. Public funding for colleges was reduced through a policy of convergence whereby all providers were forced to work towards a standard unit value of funding for students, which was lower than that previously experienced in many colleges. The introduction of standard units directly allocated funding to individual student performance. By extension, practitioner success became measurable against the recruitment, retention and achievement of students on their programmes (Ainley and Bailey 1997). The FEFC, also responsible for inspecting quality of provision, could retrieve monies not auditable against recruitment, retention and achievement performance criteria. Consequently, practitioners’ work quickly became focused upon meeting the requirements of the new funding arrangements. In order to ensure that programmes could satisfy the external bureaucratic requirements of centrally administered funding, organisational quality tracking systems were introduced. Practitioners’ performance became measured by colleges against these systems, as well as against national benchmark statistics. Wider social/policy trends prioritising accountability and audit culture have been observed and in this sense the mechanistic character of FE emerging after incorporation is not unique in relation to the wider public sector (Power 1997).
Ainley and Bailey (1997) present the impact of educational reform on FE with reference to two FE colleges that are presented as being, if not actually ‘representative’ of the sector’s diversity, at least ‘indicative’ of it (Ainley and Bailey 1997: xii). Interviews were conducted with managers, students and teachers shortly after incorporation, exploring the critical impact of the reformed funding mechanism. This is argued to be at the core of every level of transformation across the sector (Ainley and Bailey 1997: ix). Conflicting versions of the nature and consequences of the process are presented as divided between ordinary practitioners on the one hand and students and managers on the other. Generally speaking, lecturing staff describe negative views of both the process and detail of reform. Conversely, managers and students indicate significant improvements in the quality and efficiency of provision. Organisationally, college management structures were streamlined, with fewer managerial positions remaining at higher levels. Such positions that remained functioned to address the business priorities of new corporate college expansion. This also included management of the increased demands for academic and vocational programme information collected through management information systems (MIS) to meet FEFC and other stage agencies’ requirements. The day-to-day management of teaching and learning with respect to internal performance criteria, course review and evaluation at programme level, became increasingly incorporated into lecturer scale workloads. This was in spite of a general increase in student on-programme numbers and expanded curricula and assessment demands for lecturers (Ainley and Bailey 1997).
Perhaps most importantly with respect to lecturers’ professional status, in spite of the extension to their workloads, previously established national agreements in relation to pay, annual leave and working conditions were no longer necessarily applicable. Institutions were free to abandon old conditions of service in favour of their own revised employment contract frameworks (Ainley and Bailey 1997). Such developments and the subsequent period of ongoing industrial conflict generated by these reforms cannot easily be separated from the mechanics of funding and cost cutting.
The Pre-Incorporation Professional Landscape of FE
The impact of these reforms is hard to exaggerate with respect to the day-to-day responsibilities of professionals and the conditions of staff employment. However, before its impact on professionalism is properly evaluated, we need to briefly examine the nature of that professionalism in earlier times. To do that, we turn to a significant study of that period, conducted by Gleeson and Mardle, in 1980.
Gleeson and Mardle (1980: vii) describe their study as an attempt to 'understand the relationship between a college of further education and its local industrial environment'. The research explores FE colleges' traditional association with technical education and apprenticeship style industrial training by focusing upon a single institution and distinguishing between the conflicting interests of education, training and work. Ultimately the study proposes that an uncomfortable 'co-existence' (Gleeson and Mardle 1980: viii) is observable. Compromise is nevertheless characterised by departmental competition and conflict with respect to pedagogical values. The authors contend that one of the major functions of further education for craft apprentices is with regard to its structural role in reinforcing and maintaining 'the existing social relations of production' (Gleeson and Mardle 1980: 146). Thus FE disguised the reality of employer/ apprentice relations (Gleeson and Mardle 1980: 146-147).
Apprenticeship emerges in the research as a controlling structure. Learners appeared to have been commodified. Further education did not simply facilitate this process but arguably attempted to legitimise the process, in spite of any apparent contradiction with regard to some practitioners' declared educational objectives' (Gleeson and Mardle 1980: 151). In fact practitioners’ accounts revealed quite pragmatic attitudes towards teaching and even their vocational identification with respect to the craft area (mining) served by the college.