Biologically, when you mix incompatible genes, you risk creating an impossible hybrid: incompatible genes produce an infertile organism. A liger, created from a lion and a tiger, is not a beast that has a viable reproductive future. FE is a hybrid animal, too. Traditionally it offered lifelong learning alongside teaching skills to support the local economy, but higher education was added to this mix in 2012.

I would not describe myself as an elitist – more of a pragmatist. I believe FE and HE cultures that co-exist within FE colleges need to be individually respected. The line between them should not be blurred – doing so creates instabilities. Unfortunately, many FE managers appear not to understand this.

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My own honeymoon period as an HE lecturer in an FE college lasted about three days. To be honest, I am surprised it lasted even that long. I knew from the off that my part-time contract meant that spending time preparing materials and holding tutorials with students would be limited. But I figured that an existing bank of materials must already exist and I could supplement these over time while focusing on getting to know the students and their needs. Sadly, this was not the case.

HE in FE 'creates unsustainable workload'

Producing HE teaching materials is different to creating FE materials. There is no national syllabus to follow or lesson-friendly text books that students can access on a unit-by-unit basis. HE courses have to be designed in-house and objectives have to be identified as well as reading lists compiled. And this takes time. My college had not factored all of these things into its calculation of my contracted working hours. In the first term, I worked 40 hours a week for 18 hours of paid salary. This was mainly because there were no materials in place and whole courses had to be created from zero. This workload soon proved unsustainable.

Fellow teachers at the college advised me to reduce my preparation and use flipped methods. In this way, I could prepare less and get students to bear the workload by doing the reading themselves and creating PowerPoint presentations to display their newly gained knowledge to their peers. In an FE context this can work well. But in an HE context, college students often miss the nuances of key ideas and they lack awareness of historical context. In short, their narratives are inevitably more impoverished than that of a specialist teacher. 

Both HE and FE teachers need preparation time, but in HE they need a bit more. They need time to read around their subject and even undertake professional development by attending conferences or undertaking research. Such notions are alien to FE culture. Unions, too, have a problem recognising this difference because they are afraid of dividing their membership base by supporting any HE versus FE lecturer distinction within a college environment. My union rep was not very sympathetic to this particular worker's cause. He was right to point out that all lecturers need better pay and conditions and not just a particular group. But he was wrong to assume that teachers in FE colleges are a homogeneous group in terms of what their roles demand.

The funding mechanisms

FE and HE courses are different in terms of the funding mechanisms, too. Students on FE courses are valued according to a government grant. However, HE students must take out a loan in most cases and the cost of tuition is directly transferred to the college account. Where I work, HE tuition fees are around £7,000 per year and in theory should be spent on things such as staff salaries, books, equipment and promoting professional staff development, from which students also benefit. 

However, the hybrid FE beast again shows genetic flaws. None of this cash is ring-fenced and little of it appears to be going towards the people who will one day have to pay the student debt back. I have seen no expansion of the library and have even experienced rigid management resistance to the idea that lecturers on part-time contracts could be given more paid hours for extra direct student contact time. Instead, it would appear that money is transferred to other areas of the college budget. What is more, with HE students as consumers – who expect something back from their educational investment – complaints have been rising. These often relate to feeling unsupported and in some cases that the quality of teaching is poor. Too often FE colleges, wishing to save money, are unwilling to hire appropriately qualified HE subject specialists but prefer to use teachers who do not hold an appropriate qualification. In this way, we are not only letting down our students but also creating stress through the ranks.

So the FE/HE animal, as things currently stand, appears to be a sick beast and many predict that without changes to the way colleges run, more FE colleges will fail to maintain their status as an HE institution. Maybe some form of extinction is the price to be paid for creating long-term and sustainable HE provision. 

Perhaps only that way can FE and HE courses acquire managers who recognise that hybridisation of provision is fundamentally flawed.

Rufus Reich is a pseudonym. The writer is a FE lecturer in England