Frank Coffield retired in 2007. Not that anyone noticed, since the emeritus professor of education at the UCL Institute of Education continued to be the bane of officialdom in the fight for a fairer deal for FE. Now, aged 73, he says: “I really am retiring.”

His output over the past decade or so would be considered formidable for a much younger man, let alone a retiree. It includes eight publications, drawing on meticulous research, that take a scalpel to education policy - not least in further education - exposing much official and ministerial thinking over that period as crass, counterproductive and illogical.

This is not the work of the usual suspects, the perennial opponents of government policy. Coffield has had the ear of countless leading thinkers and strategists responsible for implementing policy. Indeed, there are two much-cited areas where Coffield has had particular success. First, in getting Ofsted to refocus attention more on teaching as a priority in FE and less on colleges as businesses. Second was his clinical and well-researched drubbing and demolition of the worst excesses of the “learning styles” fad post-2004.

“I still get emails from up and down the country thanking me for the work criticising the imposition by the establishment of learning styles,” Coffield says. “They were invalid and had no impact on practice. So I am pleased we did the report, Should We Be Using Learning Styles?, effectively putting an end to the nonsense.”

I still get emails from up and down the country thanking me for the work criticising the imposition by the establishment of learning styles

Like so much in Coffield’s canon of published work, both of these successes started with bouts of public sparring and sword crossing. He is more than an academic - he is a showman and raconteur who attracts crowds. In 2006, at the Association of Colleges (AoC) annual conference in Birmingham, he clashed with John Stone, the head of the Learning and Skills Network (LSN), which has since closed, who demanded he justify criticisms of colleges being run as businesses.

On the side of the excluded

The result was a dialogue that stunned the AoC gathering and led to the LSN commissioning Coffield’s 2008 report, Just Suppose Teaching and Learning Became the First Priority… “This has been reprinted more times than any other of my publications apart from my first book, A Glasgow Gang Observed,” he notes.

As a teacher, academic and trained psychologist, he has for 50 years fought the corner of every excluded and marginalised group, and came to see the FE college as the hub of a broad lifelong-learning entitlement for everyone, particularly the disadvantaged.

After the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, he became both fascinated and dismayed by the growing emphasis on colleges as businesses, and increasingly focused his attentions on the changing FE scene.

“At the 2002 AoC conference, I told them all, ‘There is nothing about teaching and learning in this whole conference; it’s all about finance, business and estates’,” Coffield recalls. It was the start of a love affair with the sector that deepened his annoyance with politicians and their apparatchiks.

“Problems we face throughout education are mirrored in Anthony King and Ivor Crewe’s excellent book The Blunders of Our Governments,” he says. The 2013 book has been widely praised for its unrivalled political savvy, savagery and keen sense of irony. The distinguished political scientists behind it suggest that it is the blundering inability of politicians to avoid repeating mistakes that too often drives policy.

While King and Crewe focus on big issues across three decades, such as the poll tax, Coffield says their critiques of college incorporation, failed fiscal policy around apprenticeships, and marginalisation of teachers and tutors when setting the FE agenda are equally - if not more - damaging.

“The question is, how do we get out of the pattern of complete blundering?” the book asks. “Our education system needs to be revitalised by democracy. We haven’t got it in schools, colleges or universities.”

The essentials of such an argument were, however, captured well before this and can be traced back to Coffield’s inaugural professorial work in 2007, Running Ever Faster down the Wrong Road: an alternative future for education and skills.

Drawing on decades of research, he concluded that, despite significant investments and some successes, the programme of reform contained so many serious weaknesses that it was doing more harm than good.

It is perhaps fitting that his swansong this summer was as co-editor of a book of essays, John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: a British tribute. In 1916, the US educational philosopher Dewey argued in his seminal work against the separation in modern society of skills and knowledge, and the exclusion of practitioners from researching and shaping education. Education policy, then, failed to see the need for lifelong learning as “a general training of the mind”.

“I make the point in the book that, if Dewey were to look at our system, he would be horrified at what we have failed to learn in the sector,” Coffield explains. But the academic has no intention of giving up the fight: 18 months ago, he helped to create the Tutor Voices movement, which is pressing for more democratisation in education.

In 2015, on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, he wrote the association’s 10-point manifesto, calling for “a new settlement with government” and reduction of decision-making control at the centre.

“What FE needs is evidence that it can change government policy and direction,” he argues. Here, Coffield cites the success of the English for speakers of other languages (Esol) lobby in producing the evidence, backed by student voices, to overturn coalition government plans to cut funding.

Bane of Ofsted

Coffield has a canny knack of getting straight to the heart of issues, as anyone hearing him on the conference circuit would testify. There is always irony: the title of one of his talks “Resistance is Fertile”, is a case in point.

At a gathering organised by the training group Newbubbles, he argued that Ofsted’s “much-vaunted independence” was a “joke” and the watchdog was a waste of its £156 million budget.

At a gathering organised by the training group Newbubbles, he argued that Ofsted’s ‘much-vaunted independence’ was a ‘joke’ 

At the end of his presentation, Coffield asked the audience what grade they would give to Ofsted and wider government policy on FE. Much to the disapproval of Paul Joyce, Ofsted’s deputy director for FE and skills, who looked on in stunned silence, the majority judged it to be inadequate.

There have been many tributes to Coffield ahead of his pending retirement, and the one that sums them up best is from Paul Tully, principal consultant for Newbubbles.

“Explosive in delivery, but generous in spirit, Newbubbles adored having Coffield to speak at our events,” he says. “Never was it more apt to call someone a ‘gentleman and a scholar’. He could be idiosyncratic, and sometimes exacting in his details and requirements, but why not? He was, after all, one of the most eminent FE scholars ever to grace our libraries.”

So, what will Coffield do with his new-found freedom? “When not thinking about education, I read history, from Salamis to the Somme,” he says. “I run three times a week, swim in between times and like organising long walks, like the South Downs Way from Eastbourne to Winchester. And I try in vain to store bottles of high-quality wine.”

Many in the FE sector would be more than happy to raise a glass in Coffield’s honour.

Ian Nash is a journalist, author and media consultant, and former assistant editor of TES