Ministers urged to end ‘Hunger Games’ fight between FE and HE

“Aggressive competition” has widened the disconnect between further and higher education in England, and the government must avoid deepening the divide through an “ideologically fuelled educational version of The Hunger Games”, a report from the Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank warns.

The report, titled Study Buddies? Competition and Collaboration between Higher Education and Further Education, published on 17 March, looks at the relationship between the sectors by drawing on interviews with 22 college principals, vice-chancellors and sector experts.

The report comes with the government still working on its long-awaited final response to the Augar review of post-18 education. Ministers have been voicing increased support for further education colleges – which saw huge cuts in funding after the Conservatives entered government in 2010 – and criticism of universities, as Conservative electoral support shifts towards non-graduates.

In calling for a closer relationship between further and higher education, the report – written by the SMF’s Aveek Bhattacharya and Amy Norman – notes that links can play key roles in “creating pathways for generally less advantaged college students to progress onto university degrees”.

And they could also work together on “addressing local skill needs: by pooling resources and expertise, universities and colleges may be able to deliver courses they could not offer alone” and could “exert more political influence on skills policy and benefit from one another’s relationships with employers”, the report says.

“To a significant extent, the reason that the benefits of collaboration have not been realised is because of unproductive and excessively aggressive competition between universities and colleges,” the report argues.

This competition has “encouraged institutions to focus on courses that are cheaper and easier to deliver, and leads to inefficient duplication”, while also acting to “disincentivise and undermine the goodwill necessary for effective collaboration”, it continues.

The report’s recommendations for college principals and vice-chancellors include that they should “think creatively about ways to deepen partnerships: look beyond validation and articulation and consider ways to share resources, facilities and services”; and “formalise the relationship between institutions so that they are less dependent on individual relationships, considering options from memoranda of understanding up to and including forms of merger”.

Recommendations for policymakers in England include calls to “fix FE funding: address under-resourcing and financial insecurity with a three-year settlement and higher per student funding”; appoint a “referee” to decide “where the overlap in provision between universities and colleges is likely to cause unhealthy competition”; and “increase financial incentives for collaboration”.

“A more effective approach to tertiary education would consider both sectors together as part of a single educational system and set the inherited institutional legacy aside in determining what the best division of labour between universities and colleges might be in the interests of learners,” the report continues.

“This would require policymakers to ask fundamental questions regarding the benefits of specialisation, the relationship between research and teaching, the importance of geography and the value of selection.”

In a foreword to the report, Dame Ruth Silver, president of the Further Education Trust for Leadership, criticises the government’s further education and skills White Paper for what she says is a failure to articulate a vision for closer links with universities.

She argues that “in a properly functioning tertiary education system, HE and FE must be united, not pitted against one another, as per our usual habit”.

The roles of further and higher education “are complementary – their respective institutions should not be obliged to fight it out in some ideologically fuelled educational version of The Hunger Games”, Dame Ruth continues.

She would have liked the Augar review to “begin with what we need to do with education to help create a fair, prosperous society in which opportunity is evenly shared out, rather with an artificially narrow funding envelope that demanded freezes in investment in HE to pay for increases in FE funding”.

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com