From the graveyard of technical education initiatives, we anticipate soon - with something between a thrill and a shudder - the rise of a new creature: the Institute of Technology.
Through the dry ice of vague and contradictory policy announcements, we can’t yet see what these new mutants look like. Maybe they are shape-shifters.
According to last year’s Industrial Strategy, they would “grow out of high-quality provision…specialise in technical disciplines…at levels 3, 4 and 5” and have “flexibility to adopt different models suited to their local needs”. In this year’s Conservative manifesto, they had morphed into “new institutes…linked to leading universities…providing courses at degree-level and above.”
New or old? HE or FE? Local or national? In her end-of-term letter to colleges in July, the new skills minister, Anne Milton, was tantalisingly vague, saying only: “prestigious Institutes of Technology will be developed to deliver the higher-level technical skills that employers need.”
The problem is that these new entities will inhabit the twilight zone that has been created by successive government policies. Higher technical education has been undermined by the Quatermass-like growth of full-time degree courses. Universities have been given no incentive to invest in costly technical subjects, or to offer the sort of sub-degree, part-time courses working adults need. Meanwhile, FE colleges have retreated in the face of fragile funding and falling demand. The life-blood has been sucked out of technical education by a vampire system, bloated on a limitless flow of student-loan funding. It’s far more lucrative for institutions to offer classroom-based subjects than to offer expensive technical courses.
A new vision
So in the face of all this, what is the new vision for England’s technical education sector? A review published in July by the Department for Education reminds us how far we are behind our international neighbours. Professor David Greatbatch compared five European countries - including France and Germany - and found that all of them invest much more in post-16 vocational education than in academic pathways. Students receive far more hours of teaching - almost double the UK norm - and spending per head is twice as high. In Germany it’s nearly three times as much.
The new Institutes of Technology, will be the first real test of how serious the government really is about reanimating our zombie technical education sector. IoTs need to be as well-funded as universities, if not better. They need to offer qualifications as simple and recognisable as A levels. They need to focus on making their graduates as attractive to employers as the brightest products of the sixth form and university system. They need to have ambition, aspiration and excellence.
Otherwise, they will join the legions of the undead in the Technical Education twilight zone…
Andy Forbes is principal of the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London
