Abstract
John Widdowson CBE is principal and chief executive of New College Durham. He chairs the Mixed Economy Group (a working group of 40 colleges that offer higher education courses in addition to their FE provision) and was a member of the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) board for six years, chairing its’ widening participation committee for four of those years. In 2010 he was awarded a CBE for Services to Local and National Further and Higher Education. Here he talks to
How did you become involved in FE as I believe that you trained as a lawyer?
Yes, my first job was working in local government, but after three or four years I decided that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I took a postgraduate business course and then to be honest I needed a job –I saw a job advertised in an FE College and even though I didn’t know much about FE I applied – that was 38 years ago and I’ve been there ever since.
To give some background to the rest of the interview, can you outline the key features of HE in FE (college based higher education)?
In England over 200 colleges deliver HE courses in addition to their FE offer, with a total of roughly 160,000 students representing around 10% of the HE student body; but there’s also an unknown number of students studying other higher level qualifications NVQs (National Vocational Qualifications) etc. so there are many more on top of the 160,000 figure.
The key feature of HE in FE is that it’s predominantly vocational/professional/technical and you’ll find a higher proportion of part-time and mature students compared to universities. These part-time students play a great role in solving a lot of the skills gaps and if you look at some of the OECD and the UK Skills Commission reports they all say that if you want a job done around higher level technical skills give it to colleges (OECD 2016, Skills Commission 2016).
In addition, the regular reports that come out of HEFCE and the Office for Students confirm that as a sector we are better at attracting widening participation (WP) students than the university sector is.
What do you see as the key strategic issues facing senior leaders/managers tasked with developing HE in an FE college environment?
The fundamental question is why it do at all? You need a good solid rationale; otherwise you are probably not going to do it well or successfully. To make the HE in FE strategy work you’ve got to have a really clear vision and purpose about why you’re going to do it. That could be in response to what HEFCE used to call ‘cold spots’: geographical areas where universities don’t actually have or want a presence because it’s difficult, or in curriculum terms where the nature of the course is such that the local university is not equipped to deliver it – a good example would be construction. It could also be in response to student demand for local progression opportunities in a familiar environment.
The key issue is that leaders (including governors) should not be beguiled into delivering HE for its prestige value. That can lead to mission drift. HE is not cheap to deliver. It has to be resourced adequately and a key issue is recruiting staff from industry with the necessary vocational expertise, because FE salary scales are falling behind the equivalent in industry.
Also, I think there are bigger challenges for smaller providers. One is to provide a different HE experience within the institution; getting the ‘HEness’ right can be very difficult. We’ve tried various ways to manage this starting with the curriculum, with more student based research projects. We’ve also changed HE induction, so it’s no longer departmental, but across college. This provides new entrants with opportunities to meet other HE students. They could become quite isolated otherwise. We’ve also created some separate HE spaces – but that requires an investment which might not be possible for a small provider.
Also, thinking about performance data, governors are predominantly alert to OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) rather than QAA (Quality Assurance Agency). So at governor level we have one committee that looks at quality issues for FE and apprenticeships and another that looks at HE so we can focus the efforts of a couple of governors and they understand, can ask the right questions and provide the right challenge.
So thinking about middle management are there any particular issues?
If you’ve FE and HE people in the same team there can be tensions. To put it bluntly, how do you actually give people this reassurance that teaching HE isn’t the soft option? For example in teaching level 2 there are issues of classroom management and control, but In HE there’s a need for much more up to date subject knowledge and awareness of what the parent industry is doing. The two balance out, but it’s a difficult discussion, because there is no right answer or formula for it.
Our answer is to introduce a system of market related supplements, so we pay more money to people in shortage subject areas – but that isn’t just for HE it applies to FE as well. In addition we have formulae which acknowledge different aspects of HE teaching such as dissertation supervision, teacher training observations etc. I’ve always adopted the approach that you’ve got to be open and transparent – there’s no point in sending a middle manager in to defend the indefensible and I say to the team if you can think of a better way let me know. I’ve been saying that for over 20 years and I’ve not had an answer.
Also, because the majority of our HE students are mature students they may have caring responsibilities, work responsibilities etc. and there’s a management issue there - how do you adjust your timetabling? You need to be very focused. Quite a number of our full-time courses are now timetabled over two and a half days a week, because we know that more than half of our students have got part-time jobs which they rely on to help them pay their way. On the other hand our part-time students just want the intensity of teaching and learning while they are there. They’re only in for around 6/7 hours per week and others come in very rarely e.g. our level 4 apprentices in health and social care are so busy managing care environments our staff go out to them. So the other thing for managers is to think about full and part-time as really different entities and most colleges are pricing their full and part-time courses differently because the markets are different.
How long is it since New College achieved foundation degree awarding powers (FDAP)?
We are now in our seventh year. We’re the only college that has had the powers renewed. So the original award was in 2011 and we applied to the Privy Council to have them renewed last year.
So how long was it from deciding that you would pursue FDAP to achieving the award?
Oh too long, it was about two years. The problem was that the criteria were really based on taught degree awarding powers (TDAP). The review team admitted that the standard of what we did was as good as that of a university (otherwise we wouldn’t have got the powers). But they couldn’t quite work out why - because we were challenging all these norms about research and scholarship - while we were emphasizing teaching skills and relevance to work. I remember that one of the reports that said that very few staff have written a book or a chapter in a book – well why would they? And how would my part-time practicing social workers and podiatrists have the time to do that? But I would argue that they are the best people to bring on the next generation of professionals.
So given those type of comments did it actually change anything that the college was doing or did you just argue your case?
I think we looked at what we meant by research and scholarship a bit more closely. However, I still think if you’re going to enter a profession, in addition to all that academic knowledge you have professional standards and professional norms that need to be explored. So for our staff whilst we don’t do research, we do undertake scholarly activity and industrial updating and one way to do this is by applied projects in the workplace where staff and students work and learn together.
What is the advantage of having degree awarding powers?
It means you’re not beholden to universities. In the past we’ve suffered from changes of vice chancellor - from one who was very keen on partnership and outreach to another who wants to change the character of the university and dissolves the validating partnership. This happened to us twice and means re-writing degree programmes. Now with FDAP we have greater certainty over the future direction of our degree offer and we can co-design courses with employers without having to take them to a university validation panel.
That’s been fascinating John – in conclusion if you could sum up your personal approach to leading/managing HE in FE – what would it be?
Pick the right team and give people the space to actually manage and lead because the environment is really complicated for middle and senior leaders and it’ s also very complicated for the very senior leadership group and the governors as well . People need space because of the pace of change and having that space gives flexibility to generate ideas and achieve something. You can make all sorts of arguments that this is just too difficult and there’s lots of other stuff to do but in the HE world you’ve just got to keep one eye ahead – in Darwinian terms we’re the small furry mammals running round the feet of the dinosaurs - so we’ve got to be quick and nimble and find our gap.
Thank you John. To continue the Darwinian analogy, I am sure we’ll see the small furry mammals evolving new strategies in the future!
A more detailed analysis of the role of college based higher education can be found in: FETL, Widdowson, J. and King, M. (2017) Higher Education in Further Education: Leading the Challenge, Accessed: http://fetl.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2241-Monograph-textpages-web.pdf