Over the past decade and a half, the staff who teach in our colleges have seen their pay decline compared with similar staff in other educational settings. They have seen no significant real-term rise in pay. On top of that, their jobs have become more precarious. A college in financial trouble soon becomes a college making redundancies.

Most will argue that this is a direct result of poor government funding settlements. But my contention is that, paradoxically, it was the move to professionalise the teaching profession in the sector that allowed this treatment to be meted out. At the heart of this is the rise of the term “teacher” - and the decline of the “lecturer”.

Before colleges were incorporated in the early 1990s, the teaching hierarchy was well established. University lecturers were better paid than lecturers in polytechnics. College lecturers were next in line, followed by secondary, then primary, teachers. Private trainers were even further down the pecking order, other than a few sharp-suited corporate consultant types.

The hierarchy was therefore one based on perceived knowledge and experience. Those super-brainy experts in their university ivory towers were clearly a cut above their polytechnic counterparts with their applied knowledge and expertise. Understandably, when the polytechnics became the new universities, they sought to ape the university model and claim better pay as a result.

College lecturers had far more expertise, knowledge and real-world experience than school teachers, but couldn’t claim a research premium. Overall, your status and pay came from your assumed cleverness and was completely unrelated to your ability to teach.

Inside a college, there was another hierarchy: principal lecturer, senior lecturer, lecturer. Again, teaching skill was often irrelevant in assigning an individual to one of these roles. You got on by knowing stuff - often very difficult technical stuff - and being able to teach at a higher level.

The early years after the incorporation of colleges were much like the past seven years. It was the era of the “convergence of the ALF” (average level of funding). Colleges started with very different funding levels that needed to be managed to a standard national rate. Growth was funded, but at an even lower rate.

As a result, colleges generally saw their income decline in real terms, but the freedoms we enjoyed meant that courses could be structured differently - reduced course hours, shorter years - so that pay levels could be broadly maintained.

The years of Blair largesse that followed resulted in college incomes rising sharply. Even though it was billed as “something for something” - in return for this extra funding, colleges were expected to deliver on raising standards, widening participation and tackling the skills agenda - there was enough flexibility to raise pay levels, too.

There were two real changes which, in my view, led to the status of college teachers beginning to decline. First, when colleges started to be described as “providers” of further education - an important, damaging word. Second, when the importance of teaching qualifications started to be elevated.

Once colleges became providers, it was inevitable that our teaching staff would begin to be seen as expensive versions of private trainers, overpaid and over-pensioned.

We had already moved to a position where most of our income was earned via guided learning hours and in combination with provider status. This meant teaching in colleges became a commodity. Once something becomes a commodity, it becomes reduced and depersonalised, and the emphasis is on keeping the cost of it down. Inevitably, given that private providers paid less well, college pay was pulled by that gravitational force towards the lowest common denominator.

Getting the badge

The final act of submission, perhaps counter intuitively, was the push for teacher professionalism. The motives were genuine and right: students should expect to be taught well.

But it had a more problematic knock-on effect. The sector could not afford to lose the huge numbers of teaching staff who were non-graduates - skilled plumbers, builders, hairdressers. This meant that the compulsory qualifications introduced had to be incredibly easy to pass. You didn’t need to learn anything, just get the badge.

Teaching qualifications generally tend to have extraordinary pass rates in comparison with other professions and have no daunting exams. It is no wonder that teacher pay is now generally compared with that of nurses rather than doctors. Imagine lawyers, accountants or surgeons never having to demonstrate knowledge by passing tough exams. FE teaching qualifications were, therefore, inevitably seen as inferior to those taken in schools. Even now, you have to do something extra if you want to move from college to school - but not if you make the reverse move.

The move towards the apparent professionalisation of college teachers actually served to compare college lecturers to school teachers. And the comparison was not a positive one for colleges: far more of our staff were lowly qualified (non-graduates), and far too many non-teacher-qualified. So, of course, how could you possibly think college staff deserved to be paid anywhere near as well as school staff?

This comparison persists and has become a national narrative, and it is wrong.

Like many principals, I occasionally hear from staff about school heads who tell their secondary-aged children how much better their sixth form is compared with the local college because the students will be taught by proper teachers. Whenever I meet those heads, I attempt to turn this argument on its head: I point out how few of their staff are dual professionals, how so many of our staff are clever enough to teach not only at levels 2 and 3 (like their teachers) but right up to higher education level.

The problems with the status of college teachers are deep-rooted. I am not blameless here: as a principal for 20 years, I have made many bad mistakes. One of my biggest regrets was mimicking the elevation of teaching qualifications by changing very quickly our teaching scales to reinforce their importance. At a stroke, many of our principal and senior lecturers lost their internal status, while watching a new breed of younger advanced practitioners rise up through the ranks. Their salaries trod water; many felt understandably angry that after a lifetime of teaching they now had to prove that they could get a qualification. Many left, taking their expertise with them.

There have been attempts to fight back. The ever-impressive Sir Frank McLoughlin has been a key part of the moves to address the loss of status. The Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning that he led highlighted the importance of dual professionalism.

In his role as director of leadership at the Education and Training Foundation, Sir Frank’s crusade has continued. He has been part of the creation of a suite of leadership training programmes for the FE sector delivered in partnership with the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

The contrast with leadership training on offer in schools is striking. For school leaders, there is a very internally focused headship accreditation, covering the most basic management skills, such as finance, that you simply don’t pick up as a junior manager in a school. For college leaders, there is a set of top-notch programmes for current and future principals run by the world’s oldest university offering our top leaders access to the world’s best brains in leadership and management.

Dual aspect

It seems obvious to me that staff in colleges should be paid far more than staff in schools, given our dual professionalism, the breadth of our offer and the extent of the educational challenges we take on. To me, calling our staff “teachers” diminishes them, and will make it harder to address the pay gap.

So how should we proceed? We need to make a concerted effort to properly assert our skill set, to get proper recognition that we are the only sector that can boast so many dual professionals.

We need to make absolutely sure that college teaching stops being a commodity, which means ending our obsession with contact hours (our most unprofessional habit). Most importantly, we need to make sure that we give our staff titles that properly reflect that superior skill set and thus avoid comparison with the inferior skill set of many teachers in schools.

Reversing this narrative will take time, but we can learn from universities. It is very striking how many university courses focus on who will be delivering them, the individual expertise and experience of the lecturers concerned. Most conferences are also sold that way. In FE, we invariably focus on what you will study or learn, not who will teach you.

Universities stress individual talent, so university delivery is not seen as a commodity. If Cristiano Ronaldo and Peter Crouch played for FE, they would be described equally as strikers. In HE, they would be billed as two very different people. Ronaldo would be wheeled out sparingly to deliver brilliant masterclasses. Crouch would be the enjoyable maverick professor with a populist appeal.

We have to be clear that our best-paid staff are worth the premium and are not the same as lesser-paid teachers. We need to stress how talented our teams are, and how different our individuals.

We must also stop measuring teaching by volume. The move a few years ago to fund programmes of study freed colleges from the tyranny of guided learning (contact) hours, but has the sector significantly changed its behaviour?

In theory, a programme prescribes no teaching (or teachers) whatsoever, yet colleges are still fixated on making sure everyone is “up to hours”. Treating staff as individual talents can usefully incentivise them to concentrate on overall productivity and encourage them to increase their value to the organisation (and thereby argue for a bigger personal reward).

If we effectively prefer someone teaching classes of 10 for 800 hours per year rather than someone teaching classes of 40 for 400 hours when both turn out equally skilled students, we are going to end up with low pay and low productivity.

Individual teachers also have a role to play in protecting their own professional status: they should refuse to teach courses they are overqualified to deliver. Talent should be used where it has most impact. Chartered accountants, for example, shouldn’t touch bookkeeping courses. Specialists are meant to be special.

The key change, though, is to focus on what we call our teaching staff. Our staff themselves, when they have the choice, seem to prefer the title “lecturer” to “teacher”.

Bedford College’s own Sam Jones, winner of the teacher of the year title at the Tes FE Awards 2019, uses the Twitter handle @FE_Lecturer; when I looked on LinkedIn, most college-based teachers described themselves as lecturers rather than teachers. It is a powerful word.

We must recognise that the world shapes the meaning of words, rather than vice versa. It could be argued in theory that lecturing is a smaller thing than teaching, a subset of teaching, which would imply a teacher should be viewed as a bigger job than a lecturer.

In reality, this isn’t how the world sees it. If you google “How is a teacher different from a lecturer?”, the top hits say that teachers work in schools and the compulsory environment, whereas lecturers work in post-compulsory and university settings.

Given that university lecturers (with no teaching qualifications) tend to start on salaries well above those for school teachers and are seen as more highly qualified, being clear that our teaching staff are “lecturers” should be very important. It positions our staff closer to their university counterparts and emphasises the qualities they share that have the most economic value. In general, “compulsory” education settings are less valued because the normal customer service relationships (required in post-compulsory education) aren’t required and pay is therefore based on what society is prepared to (usually grudgingly) allow.

The title “lecturer” implies that the holder has knowledge, skills and experience that the student does not have. It can also imply a powerful position; to lecture can also mean to admonish, it denotes a high degree of authority, and authority has always paid well.

In contrast, the word “teacher” is heavily associated with school and so should, in my view, be avoided. The 2017 school workforce study showed that teachers were getting younger, and 25 per cent were below the age of 30. For me, this suggests that teachers are generally low in any real experience of the world outside education. You are unlikely to find a young geography teacher with meaningful experience in planning, waste management or mining.

Rather, they usually have level 6 knowledge in a specialist subject - making them akin to a mini-Google. In contrast, a college lecturer sounds like someone with practical nous who knows their way around the operating system, and has more real-world contacts; a Google, Microsoft and Facebook, all in one.

At a time when college teachers are earning an average of barely £31,000 a year, we need all the help we can get to achieve a better deal for them. If the world sees “lecturers” as more specialist and worth more than mere “teachers”, then we should make sure we use that title to emphasise their worth.

Ian Pryce is chief executive of Bedford College

This article originally appeared in the 17 May 2019 issue under the headline “We’re lecturers, not teachers”