One of the hardest challenges in running any organisation is to overcome the inevitable silos in thinking, policy, staffing, cultures and implementation that emerge. The problem is that silos are a natural outcome of organisational structures and strategic plans. As soon as you establish a set of aims and objectives or a number of departments and teams, it gets harder to join things up between them. And yet we know, instinctively, as well as from experience, that it is often in addressing those testing and tricky cross-cutting issues that real progress is made, and the best things happen.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this in recent months in our work on the Commission on the College of the Future, which is a little ironic given the singular focus that it has on the role of colleges. The commission was asking a simple question about what we want and need the college of the future to do and be. As soon as you start to paint a future vision for colleges, it becomes clear that silo-working is a major impediment to progress.

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The commission’s vision is for a new bold and ambitious strategic remit for colleges to empower people with opportunities for lifelong learning and support, to boost productivity and to strengthen every community’s sense of place.

What really hit home for me was when we spent some time with commissioners looking at the current regulatory and accountability regime that colleges operate under in light of this vision. We realised that almost all of the accountability and funding of a college is for the work it does in the people silo of this vision; with four bodies - the Education and Skills Funding Agency, the Department for Education, the Office for Students and Ofsted (as well as with mayoral combined authorities where they exist).

College partnerships with different sectors

Putting to one side for now why colleges are accountable to so many bodies within the people silo, we started to worry about this imbalance. It’s clearly correct that a major part of what colleges do is about helping students (people) to progress in learning, work and life, but to do that effectively colleges have to work beyond education. If the commission’s vision is to be realised in England, then we need the forthcoming White Paper to address this issue. Regulation, accountability and a funding mechanism that fit the full mission, purpose and roles we want colleges to fulfil are a must.

Colleges do well on the current accountability measures - student satisfaction of their college experience is very high; achievement rates are very good; the number of colleges achieving “good” or “outstanding” Ofsted inspection outcomes has steadily risen. Despite that, colleges are often criticised for “delivering the wrong skills”, for “not helping businesses get the people they need” or for failing to work with other agencies including those in health, housing, transport and policing.

That’s why I was so pleased to see the commission launch Creating the Workforce of the Future - A new collaborative approach for the NHS and colleges in England. This is a great example of how colleges want the system to recognise the work they do more widely - this time the work they do on helping the NHS to have the skilled workforce it needs. This is an enormous challenge, with over 90,000 vacancies now. It is about widening traditional access to those roles as well as to emerging roles in a more integrated health and care system.

The work on the report brought out into the open multiple examples of colleges working hard to build partnerships with NHS employers, despite the lack of support from a system that mainly measures numbers of students, hours of teaching and numbers achieving qualifications. Not what the qualifications are, how they fit with people’s lives and work, how they support the labour market, what impact they have on the place in terms of prosperity, wellbeing, tolerance and inclusion.

As well as for the NHS, we need to see systems reform to support the work that colleges do to help in the construction, digital, cyber, carbon net-zero, infrastructure, logistics and other sectors of the economy. The commission’s report will provide clear recommendations for the White Paper in England that can help with this, but we will need to see better joined-up thinking across Whitehall, between colleges, between colleges and other institutions and with employers.

Take the construction sector as another example. It’s a sector that has been heavily reliant on skilled EU nationals for many years. Those numbers will fall because of Brexit and the pandemic. Construction investment will rise next year - it always does in recessions as governments seek to stimulate growth. Skills shortages and gaps will widen, and employers will find it difficult to recruit the people they need to deliver. A national and place-based approach to this could involve colleges working in partnership with employers to set out long-term plans. To achieve that, though, will require specific funding, joint work between the DfE and other departments (the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government; the Department for Transport; and the Department for Work and Pensions) and a new focus on job outcomes.

There are other examples like this that need joining up across silos nationally and locally. I think this is understood in Whitehall, but it’s hard to achieve. That’s why the White Paper is such a great opportunity to reset the system, join things up and help colleges to deliver solutions.

David Hughes is chief executive of the Association of Colleges