It was clearly a move designed to happen quietly. Last week, without so much as a tweet or a press release, the web presence of Colleges NI disappeared. It was the first visible sign of what Tes then went on to reveal yesterday: the fact that the umbrella body for Northern Ireland’s six FE colleges will cease to trade by the end of this month.

You could argue that maybe, this isn’t too big a deal. Six colleges in a relatively small nation should, you would imagine, still be able to make themselves heard with their political leaders, and organise among themselves things like lobbying priorities. In other words, maybe they didn’t ever actually need a representative body?

But this is more than that. Just take a look at the colleges’ reasoning for closing down Colleges NI. According to the letter CNI’s chair sent to stakeholders last week, the organisation was facing reclassification as a non-departmental public body, which would have impacted the way it would have been able to lobby and engage politically on behalf of colleges.

Voice of the sector

It would no longer have been able to be the voice of its members. And if there is one thing the FE sector desperately needs, it is that. Colleges need a voice. Northern Irish FE institutions will be able to access training from the Association of Colleges, and they will still be able to speak to policymakers and stakeholders - maybe even together and as a group.

But quietly and without much furore, this month they are losing their collective voice - the organ whose job it was to shout about them and their work and represent them nationally and within the wider UK FE landscape and beyond. And the fact that this happened without a much more audible outcry is something we should all be concerned about.

Only last week, I wrote about the fact that colleges, particularly those in England, are much more in the political spotlight, is a great opportunity for the sector. The same applies elsewhere in the UK - anyone who has heard the Scottish FE, HE and science minister Shirley-Anne Somerville speak would not doubt her passion for the college sector. But this is something the sector can only capitalise on, in my view, if it can speak with a united voice.

A powerful voice

That is not to say they need to agree on everything. In fact, I am sure if they had to, no college representative body would ever be able to come out with any kind of a statement on anything. Colleges are too diverse for that, and so are their leaders. But when colleges unite to have one strong voice, it is an incredibly powerful thing to witness.

Today, I attended the first ever College Development Network Expo in Edinburgh. Although the first event of its kind, the two-day event of almost 100 workshops has managed to bring together what will be nearly 1,000 people from the 13 college regions of Scotland. The buzz around the place is one that I have previously only experienced at the Association of Colleges conference. That passion and enthusiasm for what colleges do needs to be channeled and heard much more often than once a year.

And every time it loses in strength, as it will this month with the death of Colleges NI, that task becomes slightly more of a challenge.