The funding constraints on the further education sector have led to staffing difficulties that have marred the creation of the government’s flagship £120 million National Colleges, a report has found.

The National Colleges process evaluation, published by the Department for Education this morning, highlights that the ambition for the National Colleges opened between 2016 and 2018 had been to meet the shortfall of higher level technical skills in key growth sectors and support the delivery of critical infrastructure projects.

However, since the five employer-led national colleges were set up with £80 million in government funding in May 2016, the project has been hit by delays and low student numbers. Lessons should be learned for the government’s new Institutes of Technology, the report states.

Background: £120m national colleges beset by low recruitment and delays

More: Government invests £80m in national colleges

News: National College with 24 students criticised by Ofsted

Low student numbers

On top of the government investment, the National Colleges, which are aligned with five key growth areas - creative and cultural (NCCI), digital skills (Ada College), nuclear (NCFN), high-speed rail (NCHSR) and oil and gas, also attracted substantial funding from local authorities, local enterprise partnerships (LEPs), industry bodies and businesses.

Today’s research, which took place between February and April 2019, finds that although in most cases the initial staffing requirements set out by the colleges in their business plans had been broadly achieved, “attracting candidates to their teaching faculties with a combination of relevant teaching qualifications, teaching and industry experience was a key challenge for national colleges, as it is for the further education sector more widely”. 

“NCFN and Ada in particular reported that they could not meet the salary expectations of senior teaching staff who fulfilled these criteria,” the report says.

“In some cases, when colleges were not able to recruit staff either due to affordability or lack of suitable applicants, they used temporary contractors from industry to address immediate staffing needs.

“Although this approach tackled short-term staffing issues, it resulted in some concerns about quality (eg lack of feedback and consistency for learners). Issues with staff retention differed between institutions.”

A consistent message from the national colleges had been that the current funding environment in the further education sector does not enable them to offer competitive wages, the report states.

“Some consideration therefore needs to be given to how IoTs can attract quality teaching staff to meet their delivery ambitions. One suggestion from the National Colleges was that employer contributions could be explicitly sought to co-fund salaries for senior teaching positions in order to bring them closer in line with the industry average.”

Financial pressures

Teaching staff were generally positive about working in the national colleges, feeling that the industry-focused curriculum was benefiting learners, and reflected the realities of the workplace. “However, financial pressures and the need to keep staffing levels low have resulted in large workloads for staff, which are hard to manage and create significant pressures.”

The staffing issues were also noted by students and employers, who commented on multiple changes to timetables which they perceived to be due to staffing constraints.

Only just over three-fifths of survey respondents of learners were satisfied with their course content and the subjects covered. In addition, “some learners perceived that insufficient numbers of teaching staff had affected the quality of their learning experience and led to disorganised delivery of classes or teachers without the right skills”.

The research also highlights the “varying levels of progress in relation to their capital build projects” at national colleges. While the NCHSR and NCFN capital build projects were delivered on time and according to the original plans, there have been significant delays to Ada’s capital build timescales, and the DfE made the decision to place the NCCI capital build on indefinite hold due to a lack of progress, escalating costs and a lack of clear direction for the project.

According to the report, “college staff, employers and sector bodies were largely positive about the curriculum development process”.

“Employers generally noted the flexible approach of colleges and their willingness to respond to industry feedback. Many commented that the resulting curriculum offer was aligned to their needs and providing them with necessary skills, though some employers stated that they would like to see the colleges broaden their curriculum offer going forward and offer a greater range of courses.”

The continued challenge around recruiting students also features in the report: “Across all national colleges, learner numbers are lower than initially forecast in their original business plans and the colleges are not yet national in their scope. Key challenges have included delays to large infrastructure projects that were intended to support the creation of new apprenticeship vacancies and lack of approval to be apprenticeship providers for non-levy paying employers, which has meant that for NCHSR and NCCI in particular, there are significant markets they intended to work with that have not been accessible (ie SMEs in their respective industries).

“Stakeholders within DfE also considered that the narrow definition of colleges as highly specialist institutions has further impeded the achievement of their learner number targets.”

The report recommends that lessons should be learned from the National Colleges project, particularly for future policy initiatives such as the new Institutes of Technology. These include:

• Establishing new educational institutions without start-up investment and grants and relying instead on working capital loans and employer investment is not standard practice within DfE and initially impeded the colleges’ ability to meet learner targets and grow.
• The NCFN has experienced fewer challenges than the other colleges because it was built on two strong existing colleges that have been able to provide much of the wider infrastructure required in setting up a new institution. This lesson, the researchers say, “appears to have been applied to the design of the IoTs, which will be created from existing FE colleges and higher education Institutions”.
• An inherent risk with a specialist institution is that the scope is so narrow that learner numbers will be too low to achieve a broad base and achieve financial sustainability.
• In order to successfully establish a new employer-led institution, the expertise of industry representatives needs to be combined with that of educational specialists with knowledge and experience of the FE sector and its funding systems.
• The success of new institutions in part relies on existing educational policies, funding streams and systems creating an enabling environment. More work could have been undertaken at the early design stage of the policy to understand adjustments required 20 to existing processes to accommodate the new National Colleges.
• High-quality teaching staff with industry experience can be difficult to obtain in buoyant and/or specialist sectors of the UK economy where salary expectations are high.