Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This is the opening sentence of Anna Karenina and is known as the Anna Karenina Principle, which describes an endeavour in which a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms it to failure. FE is a sort of family and, like most families, it has its troubles.
The problem is that those underlying troubles manifest themselves in a wide array of symptoms and it is often these symptoms which catch the attention of people in FE, and of the various agencies and bodies which surround it as an extended dysfunctional family. This extended FE family majors in inconsistency, judgement and punishment (and yes, I am thinking of Ofsted, but not just them) and for many in the sector, that makes it an unhappy place to be.
But unhappiness is just a set symptoms, and to treat those individually and palliatively is as effective as trying to kiss them better. Staff in FE are adept at spotting the grazed knee or the cut finger, or having them pointed out, and forming a Kiss it Better Working Group to deal with it when perhaps they should be asking themselves “why does this keep happening to us?”.
Radical changes
The Policy Consortium national survey of FE is now in its fourth year and we have made some radical changes to our approach. In previous years we have canvassed opinion about the way the sector feels about itself and its many concerns. The results have varied a bit from year to year as the ground has shifted beneath our feet. We have tried to discourage whingeing and, to be fair, respondents have constantly sought to find scraps of encouragement, just as real families do when Dad’s out of work, the cat’s died and the house is on fire but little Maisie still manages to get 4 A*s at A level.
This year, and in partnership with Tes, we want to take a long hard look at the roots of the family sadness. We are really interested to know what conditions which you think are essential for success. And, in part, that means a diagnosis of those things that militate against that success: success for our students above all, but success for the collective enterprise and for the reputation of the sector as a whole.
Instead of focussing on all those things that keep popping up and make the FE family unhappy we want to dig down and find the root causes of the trouble and see if we can reach a collective viewpoint on what the conditions are which lead to dysfunctionality and take a long hard look at how they can be mitigated, if not eradicated. It’s a type of family therapy in which the first stage of recovery is to analyse the sources of the problem.
We’d love you to contribute to this national debate.
The National FE Survey launches today and is open until 16 June 2017.
Nick Warren is a senior Policy Consortium member.
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