Given the obsession government and its agencies have with satisfaction surveys you could be forgiven for thinking the E in FE now stands for entertainment rather than education.  The recently published Office for Students survey of satisfaction with higher education providers showed the results are pretty meaningless and tell us only about the size of the institution.

Very small providers occupied all the top and bottom positions, with the major players all concentrated in the middle. The idea that you would use this data to make decisions on resource allocation or restricting fee levels is ludicrous.

I once worked for a gifted and successful retailer who asked me how I would judge whether a new product would sell.  When I proposed we survey the target audience, he laughed. “People will tell you they like it because they don’t want to upset you, and even if they do it doesn’t ever mean they’ll buy it. No, instead you put some on display and if they fly off the shelves you make thousands quickly then count your profits. Act on what people do, not what they say”.  It is sound advice, the model adopted by that most successful fashion house Zara.

Do people enrol and stay?

If we want to know about a college’s popularity, just look at whether people actually enrol and stay. The numbers never lie.  Even if you have a geographic monopoly an upward trend would suggest you are doing a good job.  From day one, we at Bedford College tell our students we want them to be tough customers, constantly challenging us to improve.  As a result, we have massively increased our market share of 16-18 students in the last two decades; significantly grown apprenticeships and higher education, and even seen a 7 per cent increase in our adult numbers.

On the preferred measure for student destinations we rank higher than every college judged outstanding in the last five years. The public comes to us ahead of others and students do well.  However, as a result we have modest satisfaction scores. You can’t tell students to be tough on us and then ask them to change for an external survey. I even describe myself at work as positively dissatisfied; very positive about all we have achieved, but always wanting us to do even more.

The minute you use surveys as a measure they cease to be useful. Internal surveys can alert you to potential issues but at a government and policy level you can simply look at enrolments. External surveys are all about managing a result.  You can always get higher scores by asking popular teachers to stand at the front, say how fantastic everything is, and then ask students to complete a survey in front of them, but what is the point of that?

Student satisfaction doesn’t mean quality

Why does government conclude high satisfaction scores imply high quality anyway? If satisfaction is high but a college is shrinking, that probably means the more discriminating students have stayed away. We don’t measure the dissatisfaction of those who choose not to enrol, a much better indicator.

Having said that, a quick glance at the learner satisfaction scores for 2016-17 shows that colleges graded outstanding are heavily represented in the top 50. But many poorly graded colleges also make that list, and there are some outstanding colleges at the bottom of the table too. If there is a relationship it looks pretty weak.  Not a single one of the 10 best colleges for positive student progression (which must surely matter more?) features in the top 25 for satisfaction.  

And why does it matter to government whether students are satisfied? They should be more interested in whether the country is getting the educated people and skilled workforce it wants from its investment. It is even at odds with government policy.  Colleges are constantly told to put on the courses employers want rather than those our students choose: “We need engineers, not hairdressers”.  We are told to satisfy the jobs market and to stop allowing students to do the things they want.

Stop the survey overload

There is plenty of research evidence that the better-educated are richer, happier and live longer. There is plenty of evidence that the higher you progress through educational levels the more likely you are to be employed and well paid.

If we truly want people to be happy and satisfied, our job is therefore to get as many students educated to as high a level as we can, without distractions. That is a task the whole sector can unite behind. Let’s stop the survey overload and get on with it, then judge us on our real popularity in getting people to choose us and stay. Judge what our students do not what they say. 

Ian Pryce is principal of Bedford College