Integrating English higher and further education institutions is not a “quick fix” to current financial pressures, according to a vice-chancellor who has built one of the sector’s few tertiary models.
David Phoenix, vice-chancellor of London South Bank University, said the institution’s takeover of Lambeth College and creation of a new technical college, school and sixth form in London had been “complex” and “won’t be a model that suits everyone”.
The LSBU strategy has been held up as an example as attention in the UK turns again to integration between the two sectors, driven in part by political pressure from the Labour government and the financial challenges facing both universities and colleges.
Professor Phoenix told a webinar hosted by Lifelong Education Institute that although all the institutions in the group share the same back-office functions, he felt the efficiencies that could be achieved by such a model had been “overplayed”.
On the plus side, Lambeth College – now a wholly owned subsidiary of the university – had seen increased turnover by 20 per cent year-on-year, Professor Phoenix said, and the group was starting to see students progressing through the various levels of education it now offers.
But the challenge of maintaining the distinctive cultures within the different sectors while at the same time trying to get institutions to work together “requires a lot of joint leadership”, he said, with having to be accountable to multiple regulatory organisations another issue.
Peter John, the vice-chancellor of the University of West London – which took over the adult learning provider Ruskin College in Oxford in 2021 – said the “unbelievably poor” funding available for further education meant that its activities had to be cross subsidised.
Attrition had also been a major issue, said Professor John, as had dealing with governments and the ever-changing policy landscape.
But he felt that in Ruskin – which offers courses across the levels 1-7 spectrum of qualifications, was functioning as a “test bed” for what a stand-alone tertiary institution could look like.
“It is different, but it is trying to adapt to a tertiary world that may be upon us soon,” he said.
Professor Phoenix said a lot of FE-HE mergers had failed and previous attempts at forming partnerships had fallen apart under a change of leadership or government.
“The scale and weight of the university means they often move away from some of the other work they were doing as colleges,” he said.
Professor John said the failure of a previous University of West London merger with Reading College had shown him that overcoming “deep cultural differences” was the key barrier to more systematic integration on a larger scale.
