There are many challenges facing colleges as they strive to meet the post-16 education and training, skills and employment, inclusive economic growth and community-building needs of the places they are located in. But colleges are not alone in wanting to improve the places they operate in: local government, health and social care organisations, national government, employers, schools, universities and a plethora of third-sector and community organisations will all be working hard on overlapping agendas.

Last week I spent 24 hours with college leaders and government officials discussing and debating the role of colleges in all of this. We were joined by Sir Ian Diamond, chair of the independent commission on the College of the Future, and some of the commissioners. We covered a lot of ground, but one issue kept emerging: the need to take a systems leadership approach.

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For me, systems leadership is about taking responsibility for things outside of your direct control or management. It’s important at every level. Within the Association of Colleges, we foster a culture in which every member of staff is supported and encouraged to think about the whole organisation, working across silos and contributing to organisation-wide projects and goals. We want to utilise the talents, expertise, experience, energy and resources of everybody and anybody who can contribute. To achieve this, we have to work hard to recognise that managers and leaders don’t have a monopoly on wisdom and that opening space for others to lead is a powerful way to make things happen.

At a much wider level, in England we are unlikely to resolve properly the emerging tensions and problems in the apprenticeship programme without positioning it within the wider post-16 education offer. For too long, apprenticeships reforms have largely ignored higher education and 16 to 18 programmes as well as disregarding pre-existing employer-funded training and workforce development. To continue that narrowness will always result in further perverse outcomes and missed opportunities, which our economy can barely afford.

For colleges, there are three key dimensions to systems leadership that will become even more important as the government looks to invest and to reform.

Working with other colleges

The first is how colleges work together. Since colleges were incorporated, they have been tasked with competing with each other, in a quasi-market (or probably more accurately a set of inter-connected quasi-markets), to grow student numbers and to better their neighbour. Little surprise then that working together is often fraught with difficulties and that sharing, joint working, learning from each other and mutual support happen less than might be hoped. Turning that picture into one of collaboration and shared destiny for mutual gain is a big task, but the gains would be enormous. Imagine more curriculum development done once and shared, peer support for new leaders (at all levels) from those at their peak, seasoned governors from one college moving to be a governor at a neighbour, colleges working together to agree who specialises at higher levels in all sectors.

Collaboration with other education providers

The second is working with other education providers and stakeholders locally and regionally. The quasi-market approach operates across post-16, with schools, private providers and universities often competing for the same students. Our analysis shows that in areas with more providers, breadth of offer for students is reduced and quality is lower. The high costs of entry and in maintaining vitally important curriculum areas such as engineering and construction simply don’t benefit from a competitive environment with scarce resources and extremely narrow margins. Why take the risk? A systems approach would allow institutions to play to their respective strengths, signpost students through to each other and celebrate the successes of each other.

Closer links to government

The third dimension is with government - national, local and increasingly with the mayoral combined authorities. With an English devolution White Paper on the cards soon, this part of systems thinking might take a step forward, although things do look messy currently. What’s for certain is that the new government’s focus on left behind people and places and on levelling up will require a new attempt to link economic development with skills as well as health, housing and transport. Alongside the industrial strategy, we need a much more explicit skills strategy, which helps to plan the specialised facilities and resources that will drive employer demand for skills and ultimately address our stubborn productivity challenges.

Given the 10-year horizon for the Commission on the College of the Future, I’d add a fourth dimension. Because surely the most important systems thinking needs to understand and appreciate the views, needs, aspirations and opportunities of citizens/users/customers? It would be an enormous step forward if these three dimensions of systems thinking and leadership were to drive post-16 education policy and delivery, but it would not be sufficient. It’s only by viewing the ‘system’ from a user/customer/citizen perspective that we can really test out whether it is the best we can envisage. Their views, needs, aspirations and opportunities need to be understood and used to inform how things get delivered.

The ingredients are all before us to achieve these changes. A government with a five- or even 10-year horizon, a summer spending review, a devolution White Paper and perhaps a post-16 education White Paper offer opportunities. Poor productivity growth, regional inequalities, left behind places and people, concerns about the unfettered costs of higher education growth and a tight revenue position for the chancellor all require radical systems change. I’m hopeful that things will shift for the better.

David Hughes is chief executive of the Association of Colleges.