In 1993 a new breed of hero was born. In moving to a national further education system, the Further Education Funding Council for England discovered that a college like Sandwell was getting four times the funding per student from its local authority as a college like Barnfield. 

Principals at the Sandwell end of the spectrum, who were clearly excellent resource gatherers with strong political skills, were required to suddenly become fierce cost-cutters.  In contrast, those at the Barnfield end became overnight value-for-money heroes and their inability to influence their local authorities was forgotten.

This new heroism resulted from the most fundamental change in further education, the notion that “funding will follow the learner” using funding algorithms that pre-date Google and Facebook. It may not seem radical now, but it was revolutionary at the time and changed the relationship between providers, funders and students.

Income is down to student numbers

Since 1993 the income of my college has depended not on the whim of government, but on how many students and apprentices we enrol and keep. They are the ultimate customer, not government, not the employer. The public is in control. Government can tweak at the edges: the funding rate, the courses eligible for funding, but otherwise funding has been devolved to the individual.

Government wants more people to be educated, and more to achieve at a higher level. This is the right policy goal for the country. If funding follows the learner it requires our courses and programmes to be incredibly attractive and useful. They need to fly off the shelf in huge numbers. You cannot force people over the age of 16 to do things they don’t want to do. Even employers find it difficult to require staff to do as they are told in the modern world. Work performance is usually about discretionary effort.

Often governments (national and local) do not like this form of “retail” devolution. They like the power to decide who gets what. Some of the debate around skills devolution seems designed to take power away from individuals on the assumption that government knows best, and a case can be made for that, though let’s be clear: it is centralisation not devolution.

In general, though, the concept of funding following the learner seems to be accepted, and a national formula now applies in schools, too. That forces governments wanting to intervene to find different tools. In further education that has meant tinkering with league tables, funding recipients and qualifications. But unless government pays close attention to the ultimate customer, things go badly wrong. 

League tables are based on the premise that customers (parents and students) will use the information to make choices, and providers will change behaviour to reflect the key measures. There is some evidence that this works with schools, though measures that are not intuitively easy to comprehend by a typical parent (like Progress 8) will not affect choices and may lead to less general accountability.  For example, have you noticed there is far less national media coverage of GCSE results since the “five good GCSE” measure was dropped?

Different choices

Tables tend to work in schools because people choose a school. Post-16 people choose an area of study followed by a decision on institution. In other words, a young person will regard themselves as studying construction at Bedford College, not the other way round. A table that talks about the performance of the whole college is not relevant.

Similarly, government seeks more control over delivery by linking funding to new bodies like national colleges or institutes of technology (IoTs), organisations that by definition have no track record and have to compete with well-established brands like colleges and private training companies. The failure of so many studio schools and UTCs should be instructive.

Almost all national colleges do the same courses as a regular college, and their numbers are tiny. There is no unique selling point and their title is deeply misleading. You can’t fool customers that way. IoTs have to be new entities competing with established university and college brands. Students may well be attracted by something new but novelty soon wears off. The new programmes could just as easily be developed through highly regarded existing entities, and probably will be.

Finally, government is designing new qualifications like T levels, and reforming apprenticeships. One of the key lessons from project management is to not attempt too much change at once. On apprenticeships, we’ve moved from frameworks to standards, opened up to new, untested providers, changed the funding arrangements, introduced a levy, set up a new responsible body, new en- point assessment and more. It confuses the providers let alone the customer. It is no surprise we are going backwards on recruitment rather than forwards.

T levels could be very important, though I suspect any success will be due to the increased funding attached allowing us to deliver more education to every individual. They will succeed only if they are attractive to students. So far they have come out of work with employers.  Employers have a terrible track record when it comes to designing attractive qualifications that last. 

A level 3 T-level qualification needs to attract students who could equally choose A levels or a high-level apprenticeship with a salary attached. Most students achieving at that level also want a university experience or a degree. The comparison with A levels is concerning. Would you swap two years being with friends studying subjects you love for one where you might be given work experience 20 miles away with an employer you dislike, and if that dislike is reciprocated you fail your whole qualification? Take into account the fact that the top universities may also not be interested in those taking T levels and the attraction lessens further. 

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the league tables, funded organisations or qualifications are better technically and intellectually. Sony’s Betamax might have been the superior format but it lost out to the more customer-savvy JVC VHS. If we want T levels, apprenticeships and IoTs to succeed, government must hear the voice of students in addition to that of employers and prize it more highly.        

Ian Pryce is chief executive of Bedford College