A chief with a challenge

There's a new champion on the way for further and sixth-form colleges. He or she will have a tough task helping them to tackle a dearth of funding and information, says Nicholas Pyke

On Monday the Association of Colleges gets a new chief executive. Most people have never heard of the AoC, an organisation representing the 666 further education and sixth form colleges in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But the Government has big plans for further education, and the AoC's new boss will play a crucial part in making sure that further education colleges actually work.

First on the agenda is higher education. If ministers are to hit their target of attracting 50 per cent of young people to higher education then they will have to make sure that degrees and part-degrees are taught at local FE colleges. This already happens through franchise arrangements, where the teaching is done on behalf of a local university – and through the new two-year Foundation Degrees, pitched at HND level. FE already delivers 11 per cent of all higher education. Even so, the number of students is set to increase greatly.

The second challenge for the new chief executive lies at the other end of the academic scale, where colleges are braced for an influx of 14-year-olds on vocational programmes, part of the Government's reform of education for 14 to 19-year-olds. They may not be the best-motivated individuals and will, in any case, be notably less mature than the 16 and 17-year-olds the colleges are used to taking on. Such young students will also bring with them a range of additional legal and insurance complications.

No-one has told the colleges how many students there will be, who will pay for them, or how much cash will be involved. Negotiating these basic issues with ministers will be the first major task for the new AoC regime – a task which can, quite fairly, be said to affect the life chances of millions.

Colleges know all about duff financial deals, of course. Further education has been heavily squeezed since the sector was cut free from local authority control in 1993. "We were the only part of the education service to make one per cent economy savings year on year," says David Gibson, the outgoing chief executive who retires in October. "It seriously depleted investment in FE."

The AoC and the unions have together successfully lobbied for a 19.2 per cent increase in funding over the next three years. But without knowing how many extra students the sector must handle, the true value of this is difficult to gauge.

Add to this the expectation that colleges will play a central role in the Government's "skills for all" drive to match employers' needs with training, and the increasing pressure on teaching standards (the chief inspector of schools recently warned that one in five colleges would fail if judged as schools) and it is apparent that the new head man or woman has their work cut out.

There are also some internal questions. Some smaller colleges, for example, feel the AoC has been high-handed, particularly over the recent pay negotiations, believing they are now saddled with an agreement they cannot afford. Observers also suggest the association is far too dependent on the financial analysis skills of just one man – Dr John Brennan, director of further education development.

Even so, David Gibson says the AoC has come a long way since 1993 and is proud of the fact that, in tight circumstances, the colleges now teach nearly 40 per cent more students. Others point out that it is a much more stable institution than in the days when champagne-swilling college bosses felt free to engage in risky foreign ventures such as, famously, the importation of Russian champagne.

"The then government did nothing about training," says Mr Gibson. "That's what they should have done. It's essential that the colleges are given the right training and support for the changes ahead."