Increased success rates in an FE college: the product of a rational or a performative college culture?

Abstract

Ethnographic research between 2000 and 2005 in the Business Department of a Further Education (FE) college (College X) was designed to uncover the validity of achievement and success rates as proxy measures for the meeting of New Labour’s skills and egalitarian agenda. Whilst the general view of senior managers was that improved success rates within the department was the result of top-down internal policy and procedure the dominant lecturer and middle manager view suggested it was the product of a culture of performativity and student commodification. Such a culture was seemingly driven by the need to meet national benchmarks on achievement and success rates in the face of the rationalisation agenda of the Learning and Skills Council and the need to achieve a good Ofsted inspection grade. The relevance of such research, for the shaping of FE policy by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2013, relates to the possible perverse consequences of the use of performance indicators within FE colleges. In particular, research in College X suggests that the continued policy of national benchmarking in the FE sector may encourage gaming behaviours in those colleges with disadvantaged vocational students unable to achieve at the level of the average student. To limit this perverse incentive, Ofsted should recognise the heterogeneous nature of colleges and, in particular, differences in the nature of student cohorts in terms of advantage or disadvantage.