Hold my hand, ladies and gentlemen, as I take you through the mirror and down the rabbit hole and try to clarify my thoughts through this here blog post as to the skills minister’s recent proclamation at the Association of Colleges’ Annual Conference that college leaders need to be able to show improvement in the sector for the Treasury to release funding.

Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that funding (I’m not going to call it “additional funding”, as further education has been underfunded for years - they can get knotted, using that kind of terminology) likely act as a catalyst for improvement?

Basically, what we have is a situation where you can only receive funding by showing the improvement that funding would bring.

But without the funding.

‘Do more for less’

Then what happens if you do show improvement? Wouldn’t that justify NOT giving the funding (the sector has shown that it can improve without the funding it needs to improve)?

Tell you what, if FE can improve without the funding that would help it improve then maybe the current level of funding is a little too high and needs reducing? Can’t have the sector getting complacent with its big fat bundle of no funding, can we now? 

Consideration of FE’s latest equivalent of Catch-22 with extra added obtuse thinking regarding causation and causality (which comes first, the improvement or the money to improve? HINT: IT’S THE MONEY) is enough to give anyone a Kafkaesque headache on its own terms, but when you look past the doublespeak and stop even attempting to apply any type of logic, what you’re left with is that old familiar tune of the song we all know and love: Do More for Less.

‘The same old noise’

But this time it’s the hardcore dance remix Do More for Less (or there Won’t Be Any More) feat DJ Blameshift.

It’s a simple variation on the theme that has become so familiar in FE just with a bit of extra bass chucked in with the suggestion that mismanagement is one of the reasons behind the complete lack of unforthcomingness of money for the past god-knows-how-long.

I, for one, am not buying it. Not on download or vinyl. It’s just the same old noise.

‘A stretch of logic’

You can only work with what you have. Asking anything more of finite resources isn’t a call to improve governance and leadership, it’s a call to continue to stretch, cut corners, and pull things so tight that they tear.

You can dress it up however you like, twist reality round and about as much as you think you can get away with, but ultimately that’s just a way to, once again, divert attention away from the stark reality of what a continuing legacy of under-funding has wrought on the sector.

Framing that under-funding as some sort of motivational aim for a sector that has been systematically devalued is, in my opinion, a bit too much of a stretch of logic.

But after this week, logic seems to be the last thing the powers-that-be are concerned with.

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