Joining the Dots Between Schools and Further Education
Lessons to learn
The schools and further education systems have so much in common, and yet too often they’re considered quite distinctly by policymakers, commentators and the sectors themselves. That means they don’t learn all the lessons they might from one another.
That fragmentation has long been a challenge. Different funding models, accountability regimes, cultural histories and representative bodies, all mean that schools and further education have often been treated as parallel universes rather than adjacent parts of the same journey. Nowhere is this felt more acutely than at 16-19, where, even where learners are sometimes literally in the same classrooms with the same teachers as they were pre-16, policymaking has too often failed to join the dots.
The two white papers published by DfE in the past year suggest something is shifting. The Schools White Paper and the Skills White Paper together signal a more holistic intent from government. And the Skills White Paper in particular, alongside the wider curriculum and assessment review and the ongoing qualifications reform programme, puts the 16-19 phase at the centre of the picture in a way that feels genuinely different.
That focus creates the opportunity to think about what the two sectors can learn from one another, and how 16-19 education can take the best of both worlds. Seizing that opportunity requires asking not just what works in one sector, but why, and what it would actually take to effectively translate.
What FE can borrow from schools
The Skills White Paper is fairly explicit that it wants to import good practice from schools into colleges, and there are areas where that instinct is right.
Teacher professional development is the clearest example. The schools sector has made substantial strides over the past decade in building an evidence-based culture around what makes great teaching, drawing on evidence from EEF and powered by the ‘golden thread’ programmes. FE has not always had access to the same infrastructure, but as the EEF extends its reach into the 16-19 space and, working with bodies like the Gatsby Foundation as they think about the nuances of CPD for technical teachers, there is real scope to close that gap.
Attendance is another. The incentives and levers do genuinely differ for older learners. But the use of data-driven early intervention approaches, the kind that have become embedded in the schools system, has significant potential in FE settings, where patterns of disengagement can be an early warning of students drifting away from education and training altogether.
But importing a practice is not the same as importing its results. The gains schools have made in professional development didn’t happen by magic simply because the evidence base was robust. They happened because the approach was developed with the sector, by people who understood the realities of the classroom. Any equivalent effort in FE will need to be built on an equally deep understanding of technical and vocational pedagogy and of the different learner cohorts that colleges serve.
What schools can borrow from FE
DfE has historically been comfortable importing successful policy interventions from schools into the other sectors it stewards. But the flow of learning shouldn’t only run one way, and in some areas schools have rather more to learn from FE than policymakers have traditionally acknowledged.
SEND and inclusion is one. Many colleges have built genuinely inclusive environments from which secondary schools in particular can learn. Whether that reflects curriculum breadth, institutional culture or something about the transition to a more adult environment is worth exploring carefully. But the question of what schools might learn from how colleges approach difference and diversity in their student bodies is one that deserves more serious attention than it typically receives.
Leadership and governance is another. Colleges are often, by their nature, larger and more complex institutions than most schools, and they have generally become more comfortable importing leadership expertise from beyond education: business, finance, the wider public sector. College governance has also tended to be more outward-facing, more commercially literate, less dependent on the goodwill of local volunteers. As schools, and particularly multi-academy trusts, grapple with how to build professional, sustainable governance at scale, these are valuable experiences to draw on.
Learning from another sector always sounds simpler than it is. Ministers who have seen something work well on a colleague’s patch have a natural enthusiasm for replication that doesn’t always survive contact with implementation. But the answer to that is not to abandon cross-sector learning but to do it properly.
That means investing in understanding why something works, not just that it does. It means building the mechanisms for genuine exchange rather than one-way transfer. And it means recognising that the two sectors, for all their differences, are, about much the same endeavour and serving the same people.
