Sometimes momentum builds in the classroom. Something happens (planned or no) to really get things going and there’s an electricity of excitement and focus that, as a lecturer, you wish you could bottle. It could be a key insight or a surprising exchange or often-longed-for-but-rarely-seen enthusiasm for a task, but when it happens you do your best to keep it going, to keep those wheels spinning, because it enlivens learners and you can use that underlying crackle to guide them towards bigger and better outcomes.

I’ve had the same sort of feeling this week in relation to the many events surrounding the Love Our Colleges campaign for Colleges week including a Westminster rally, a petition for fairer funding for FE (which you can sign here - please, please do) and a plethora of events to highlight the fantastic work that goes on in FE all over the country.

United front for further education

For a sector that has often lacked a voice, it’s great to see this level of organisation and commitment from so many in an attempt to be heard. And as someone who has been on the ground in FE for 10 years now, and has been affected personally by the constant tightening of budgets and what that has entailed, it’s also extremely heartening to see that there’s direct focus on funding being the key to success. It’s great to show the positives of what we do but now the underlying unfairness of what FE has had to put up with up until this point is being openly and widely discussed, and if you ask me, it’s about time.

So what I’m feeling is a gathering of momentum in the sector and the same sort of underlying crackle of electricity that when it appears in my classroom, it signals that there’s a real opportunity for something special. So the question is: how do we grab the lightning?

Real change for colleges?

This new momentum in the sector has to be built on for it to become a conduit for real change. In the classroom I try to keep things moving, ask questions, direct students, encourage, argue and do anything I can to try to ensure that the buzz doesn’t fade away to nothing and now the sector has to take this fantastic start it’s built for itself and augment it to a point where it can be used to transform the things that are so obviously wrong. If we don’t, we risk losing a critical opportunity to make things better for the lives of so many.

So let’s make this College Week more than that. Let’s use the momentum and carry on until the sector gets what it needs and deserves. Let’s gather up that electricity and throw it like a lightning bolt for everyone FE represents or will represent in the future. It’s a great start. Let’s use it.  

Tom Starkey teaches English at a college in the North of England