There’s a lot that goes on in college. Different subject areas, different accreditation, different types of students. It’s a veritable myriad of difference (often within the same campus). First-year voc-eders rub shoulders with final-year degree students. AP learners walk the corridors alongside mainstream. In my opinion, I think colleges are better for it. The diversity within reflects the communities that they serve and caters for a wide range of learners.

However, I have noticed that this does lead to certain tensions in regard to teaching and learning and how standards are monitored. In large organisations such as colleges there is an understandable desire for parity in regards to the process of teaching, as it is perceived to be one of the ways that standards can be kept high. In fact, many institutions employ in-house teams whose responsibility it is to ensure that the quality of teaching and learning (and the way that this is achieved) are the best that they can be, often resulting in the pursuit of a uniformity in approach. The view that there can be a best way to teach is assumed and applied across the board.

Breadth and depth in colleges

Now, I can understand this thought process when it comes to schools, as there is a greater homogeneity of student and subject. Yet in colleges this need to follow a formula in teaching and learning that encompasses everyone, is, in my opinion, slightly more problematic. Recently, with colleges branching out even further into different areas of education, the desire for uniformity is perhaps less to do with quality and more to do with wanting an easy-to-apply yardstick for learning. It’s certainly a viable option if a college wants to present a narrative of improvement to outside agencies in broad brushstrokes, but it’s one that does not allow for the diversity and nuance of education that takes place in FE.

An all-encompassing set of specific standards (and ways to achieve those standards) does not take into account the huge breadth and depth of difference found in colleges. It is a frame that not everyone will fit into and, perhaps, a misrepresentation of the various challenges faced in regards to providing the best education for all that come through the doors.

Now this is not a call to do away with standards or the monitoring of quality - we would be remiss in our responsibility to do the best for those whom we teach. But it is a plea to understand that a policy of wide-ranging prescriptive practice within an FE setting (although perhaps the easiest way of doing things) may do a disservice to those within a college who are faced with situations that are less than prescriptive.

We all want the best for those that we teach - it’s just that sometimes “the best” is not the same for everyone. With a little trust and flexibility when it comes to teaching and learning, perhaps we can find what is.  

Tom Starkey teaches at a college in the North of England