Further education commissioner Richard Atkins has said he is more optimistic about the sector as he prepares to leave the job than he was when he started in 2016. Speaking to Tes weeks before he hands over the role to a successor, Mr Atkins said he was “feeling some of the positivity” around the Skills for Jobs White Paper published last month, and the changes in the sector he had seen in his time in post.
“There is no doubt we are getting fewer colleges ringing up and saying ‘I can’t make the payroll next month’ or ‘we are going to run out of money in the next two, three, four weeks’. Those colleges that have come forward in the last year or more tend to be months and months ahead, saying ‘can we talk to the ESFA, can we talk to you about this problem we have got coming’. It is a much more grown up and more sensible relationship. And we get fewer grade 4 Ofsted inspections. I am encouraged by all of that. You take that improving picture and you take the FE White Paper, which I see as generally positive. What is exciting to someone like me is further education colleges lie at the heart of this. Even someone of my lengthy service can get excited about seeing FE colleges in the limelight like that.”
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The role of the FE commissioner had changed significantly in the over four years he had been in post, he said. Having taken up the job in the midst of area-based reviews, he had assumed that once those were completed, “I would go part time and there would just be a few colleges that would get into serious trouble occasionally”. The job had then been “reshaped”, with the introduction of diagnostic assessments and a range of schemes, such as the National Leaders of FE. “I liked that, because it built a different relationship with a lot of colleges and it also meant we were getting into places earlier.”
The FE commissioner’s team had not only been involved in interventions with colleges in serious difficulty, but had also carried out 95 diagnostic assessments in his time in post, said Mr Atkins. “I think [the diagnostic assessments] are more comfortable for many colleges, we can all speak more freely,” he said - and the fact they brought the commissioner and his team in contact with colleges earlier than in the case of formal interventions was helpful, he said. “Naming and shaming” should be a “last resort”, said the commissioner.
“I am not going to pretend every single one is well received, but the majority are. The sector understands they are unpublished and private. I am sure they are not perfect, but many principals and governing bodies find the dialogue with my team over a couple of days helpful.”
The most difficult part of the job, he said, was “turning up on day one of a very difficult intervention when the college is on the cusp of - or has already completely run out of money, has recently had a grade 4 [Ofsted inspection] and the college itself either is in denial or doesn’t recognise the scale. That is the most difficult.
“If you walk in and the college says ‘hands up, we have got a series of major problems here, can we work with you to solve them’ - that makes life much easier. If you are in denial, if it is all somebody else’s fault, that is the first part of the challenge and the problem. We don’t have too many of those - less than half were of that nature.”
People were “never delighted” over visits from the commissioner, he said, but “I want them to get something out of the conversations, particularly out of the verbal feedback, the written report and the written recommendations in that”. “A small and declining number [of colleges] remain in denial, in a sense. They believe they have got the answers themselves and they see us then as an arm of the DfE.”
He said the most important thing he brought to the role were his 40 years in the sector - 21 years as a principal and many years as a teacher.
“I believe the purpose of the role is to make sure we have a sustainable, good quality network of colleges. Now, what I can’t do is define what a college looks like because we have got all sorts of successful models.”
“There will be failures but where there are failures we need to work together to get things back on track as quickly as we can. It is in the sector’s mutual interest to minimise failure and to get involved and improve colleges, because every difficult case is a stain on the whole sector, really.”
Mr Atkins said he supported plans by the government, set out in the White Paper, that would allow the education secretary more intervention powers where colleges were in serious difficulty.
“There are pockets of England,” said Mr Atkins, “where there are structural problems that can only be solved in one of two ways. Either the colleges in that area can find a solution collaboratively and collectively quite quickly, or it needs to be a degree of direction beyond a single institution. Because in those areas, the number of institutions means that one failing seriously involves the others. Having that collective responsibility is a challenge for the sector. So the secretary of state does need reserved powers which he or she I hope will barely ever or never have to use - because sometimes simply having those powers embodied in statute is enough to encourage people to comply.”
He said he also supported the suggestions in the White Paper of developing the role of FE governors further. Chairs should be paid, he said, and colleges should review their governance “certainly every three years”. He had come across one governor who had been there since 1968, and was coming across those in post for 20 years or more.
Approaching the end of his tenure, he said he not only left the job optimistic about the sector, but also with a sense of privilege. “It has been a privilege and a pleasure to visit 150 colleges,” he said. “That is the large part of the sector in England, and I love the diversity.”
