The Skills for Jobs White Paper majors on the future role of employers, and focuses on colleges meeting employer needs. In my experience, needs go unmet but desires usually get their way. I’m sure I’m not alone in having been told by my parents “I want doesn’t get” as a child, but in the real world that doesn’t appear to be true.

To achieve real change and produce powerful colleges of the future, it is imperative we turn anaemic needs into desperate wants, or we simply won’t succeed. Research tells us most resolutions fail because they are framed negatively (“I need to lose weight”) rather than positively (“I want to be fitter and healthier”).

One way to start is to frame decisions in the honest language of wanting or not wanting something. In our college, we forbid managers from using the phrase “we can’t afford it”. Our annual income is £54 million and staff rarely request spending of more than 0.1 per cent of that. Clearly, we can afford any individual request; the reality is we simply don’t want to. This should be the honest explanation: we don’t want to do X because we prefer to spend our money on Y.

News: Colleges to receive 16-19 funding boost 

Long read: Meet Jon Richards, the man speaking up for support staff

Skills for Jobs White Paper: The FE sector reacts

Governments are especially guilty here. When we hear “we can’t afford to spend more money on colleges”, it really means “we don’t want to, we’d rather spend it on something else” or “we don’t want to raise taxes”. As former DfE adviser Sam Freedman tweeted recently, “if politicians care about something, they always find a way to pay for it. When they don’t, it tells you about their priorities”.

One of the biggest political projects of my lifetime has been German reunification, a project so vastly expensive that it couldn’t possibly have happened without the active desire for it among the population. Was there a need for it? Most other communist states just wanted, and therefore achieved, independence. Germans wanted reunification and didn’t baulk at the special 5.5 per cent solidarity tax levy to pay for it, a tax that is only ending this year. In contrast, UK studies show that while most people want higher public spending, they do not want to pay for it themselves.

Do employers want their needs met?

So, do we actively want to address employer need? The first question might be to ask employers if they want them met. Given that there is a functioning labour market, surely any unmet need means the company does not want to meet the cost of solving the problem? There may be valid reasons. For example, schools often lament that they can’t attract maths teachers, but what they mean is that they don’t want to pay the price they’d have to pay, perhaps because it could be divisive. Their desire for a happy staffroom trumps their desire for students to get great maths tuition.

And do we want a system that produces people to the orders of employers?

For me, the education and skills system is primarily about giving people agency, helping them lead personally fulfilling lives. In most cases, that means equipping them with knowledge and skills that makes them attractive to employers, but that’s just first base. If we stop there, employers might be pleased and they will be able to extract significant profit from their labours. There is little reciprocity or joy in such a transactional approach.

Surely we want to educate people so they have the skills to navigate successfully in the real world, to have more choice about who they work for, to outgrow their employer, to extract a fair share of those profits they help create, to negotiate a balance between work and other areas of their life, to realise their ambitions?

Who is ever going to jump out of bed and say excitedly, “All I want is to be a good employee”? The White Paper is badly wrong on this: people, not employers, should always be central to everything we do. We provide a valuable service to employers and want to form valuable relationships with them. As the experts in technical education, we want to make sure our programmes give employers access to people with the skills they say they need. But first and foremost, we serve people as unique individuals.

The college of the future must be there to liberate people to achieve what they want. Ultimately, that will force employers to up their game to match what their employees want rather than the other way around. That’s how we excite people. After all, I’m pretty sure Queen would have sold far fewer records, and never achieved their aim, if Freddie had sung I Need to Break Free.

Ian Pryce is principal and CEO of the Bedford College Group