Abstract
This article discusses the implications of continuing to support the delivery of higher education (HE) in further education (FE) settings. Although a critical mass of students studying HE in Further Education Colleges (FECs) is significant in sustaining the viability of the provision, we argue that the qualitative dimensions to ‘capturing HEness’ are in need of further critical scrutiny. This is undertaken by highlighting the importance of institutional and individual autonomy in maintaining an HE culture, with specific reference to the curriculum, pedagogy, and research. Throughout, some key similarities and differences between HE and FE organisational practices and cultures are identified, and the various pressures which are simultaneously pulling the two apart, and together, are analysed. The article concludes by arguing that there are some grounds for cautious optimism but we must be mindful that both FE and HE need to retain practices and a culture, without which the essence of HEness could be compromised in both settings.
Highlights
In the UK FECs (Further Education Colleges) have provided higher education in a variety of forms since the 1950s (Parry and Thompson 2002)
There has been terminological confusion as a result of legislative change; different policy drivers for the different sectors; changes to the quality assurance arrangements; and confusion over who funds what: ‘HE [higher education] in FECs operates at a funding and administrative boundary, which has meant that neither HEFCE [the Higher Education Funding Council for England] nor the LSC [Learning and Skills Council] have taken the strategic overview of the provision that is warranted’ (HEFCE 2006, 11; see Parry 2009, 35; Scott 2009, 2010; Stanton 2009)
We have argued that institutional and individual autonomy linked to the contestability of knowledge are the core characteristics of HE, and have analysed how this is manifested in the curriculum, in pedagogy, and in research
Summary
In the UK FECs (Further Education Colleges) have provided higher education in a variety of forms since the 1950s (Parry and Thompson 2002). In the last 20 years, universities’ autonomy has been circumscribed by a number of new external requirements, such as the introduction of a funding council and the inspection of quality through the Teaching Quality Assessment, transformed into Institutional Audit, definitions of graduateness, and the Research Assessment Exercise (and its replacement, the Research Evaluation Framework – REF) From this circumscribed autonomy flow a range of new differences between HEIs and FECs. One of the more distinctive can be explored through the different quality assurance regimes which operate in both sectors (Underwood and Connell 2000; Davies 2007; Stanton 2009). While the tightness of that curtailment waxes and wanes under different political and cultural conditions, the core value and the need to protect autonomy do not disappear
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