How Much Further, Education?

I think its fair to say that those tasked with running the post-16 education sector in England and Wales have, quite quickly, started to notice the wheels coming off the policy train. Since the May election, a raft of statements, reports and reforms have been issued by the departments of both Education (DfE) and Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) that call into question the efficacy of colleges and training providers.

The conversations about effectiveness and quality are not new and are obviously important; Alison Wolf sounded klaxons about vocational education back in 2011 resulting in a significant new funding regime and Ofsted produced a very luke warm annual evaluation on the sector last December. The tone does seem to have shifted in 2015, with a hurried air of concern, now that it is clear that continual drip-feed cuts to the further education (FE) and skills budget over the last decade have resulted in a big shrinking of sixth form college capacity across the board and the recent news from the National Audit Office that 70 out of the UK's 382 FE colleges are just staving off bankruptcy. Whatever your view on the academy and free school plan, it has dented the existing education infrastructure exposing Westminster hindsight rather than forethought.

For those of you who exist outside of the FE bubble, it can seem like a strange and complicated cocktail of provision and public funding (to be fair, you don’t have to be outside of it to feel that).

Secondary schools can have built-in sixth-form colleges, now competing more than ever with standalone sixth forms - both are the traditional home of A Levels and pre-university academia, but are increasingly offering GCSE re-takes, vocational study and engagement support for the low attaining in order to boost numbers (and cash).

General FE colleges now often have sprawling campuses across big towns or counties, with offers of everything for everyone - A Levels, BTECs, NVQs, Apprenticeships, Traineeships, Study Programmes, adult & community learning, GCSEs, English for foreigners, commercial business training, evening classes - with a number of income streams from the DFE, BIS, DWP, local authorities and the European Union.

And then, you have over 400 independent training providers - usually private businesses or charities - that draw down over well over £1billion of government funding to offer competition to the colleges with more niche and specialist provision, smaller classes and more bespoke, industry-led training. Over 70% of Apprenticeships are delivered by private providers, and this is the only part of the post-16 education budget not expected to bear the £900million of cuts over the next 5 years.

Last week, the government announced a 'major reform’ review process, that will seek to move across the country region-by-region auditing college provision and impact. Some expected outcomes of the review seem to have been pre-determined with expected "fewer, often larger, more resilient and efficient providers” that might be centres of “greater specialisation” and “expertise” (a thinly-veiled criticism of the generalist nature that colleges have tended to foster in recent years). It is hard to know what conversations are happening behind closed doors, but at a recent conference of independent training providers, Skills Minister Nick Boles made it clear that the current model for FE colleges is not something favoured by him or colleagues.

I’ve worked in post-16 vocational and work-based learning for nearly 6 years, as a frontline and strategic manager - and more recently developing leadership training resources for managers in the sector and as a project consultant with a trade body representing nearly 100 colleges and providers. In my view, the inevitable forthcoming changes are huge. We could well see colleges merging to form giant, regional conglomerates delivering provision for over 40,000 students - potentially bigger than most universities. My prediction is that leadership will be ever-concentrated and increasingly political, with ‘specialisation’ being decided by national agendas or by the Local Enterprise Partnerships (who are playing an increasingly bigger role in devolved spending). More learning will move into the digital space, and vocational skills level courses will go higher and higher to compete with degrees. Those that could stand to lose the most are the young people who leave school with very little and are not yet ready for the workplace; all providers will have a duty to ensure engagement provision is fought for.

It will be an interesting time for the independent providers, who do serve a very real need in offering smaller-scale, responsive provision that can often be more personalised and more suitable for learner who need more support - if the colleges are going to become specialists in particular industry areas what will that do to the historical specialisms of the providers who are there to teach skills in plumbing, hairdressing, childcare, digital media, flood-defense etc?

They are not kidding when they state the need for resilience. FE leaders might often feel at the whim of many different masters (students, parents, employers, 3+ government departments, Ofsted, auditors, local authority), delivering more for less. The message from the government is that, currently, colleges are too big to fail but many are failing financial stress-tests. Obviously not seen quite as business critical as the banks, there are only small bailouts on the cards for the ones crashing hardest, so it is in an interesting answer to propose making them into study behemoths. The inevitable centralisation of merged college operations will be the money-saver, but could harm innovation and the bolder, broader moves that the better leaders can take. Independent providers have the flexibility to fill gaps, but often lack scalability or financial security to offer provision that won’t have maximum take-up.

This is one to watch at the moment, but the shape of post-16 education is being squished and reformatted now and for the foreseeable future. It won’t garner the news headlines anything like if similar reform were to happen to schools or universities, because there is still the cultural attitude that college beyond school is optional anyway, but as of September 2015, it will be technically illegal not to be in at least 15 hours of training, college or work (with accredited training) per week if you’re 16 or 17.

I’m watching the leaders, the movers and the shakers - looking for the values, the integrity and the professional will to steer these organisations through choppy waters. In times of crisis, behaviors need to be in-tune, with trust and accountability at the fore (definitely different to the banking sector) - working in collaboration with other providers to continue to innovate in delivery and quality.


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Richard Freeman is Director and Lead Consultant at always possible.

For information about getting support with organisational development, educational policy, leadership & resilience, please visit alwayspossible.co.uk or email blog@alwayspossible.co.uk

Leading by BOAT

I saw some great examples of pro-active ‘doing’ today; not waiting around for the right ducks to line up, but daring to march ahead.

It was my first visit to the Brighton Open Air Theatre (known locally as BOAT) - a purpose-built amphitheatre tucked away at the back of Dyke Road Park on the Brighton/Hove border. The concept, design, funding and management is a true story of community, and even richer because of the legacy of its instigator - the late Adrian Bunting. The full story is here. Creating a space like this, and keeping it important, is a difficult and undoubtedly tiring thing to do, but it is a beautiful and authentic performance arena. Actors will see the whites of 420 pairs of eyes with every show, and the space commands respect for simple story-telling without hiding behind spectacle. And if it rains, everyone gets wet.

I went along today, with always possible associate James Turnbull, to discuss the idea of an outdoor theatre festival for children and young people from 2016. The concept is that of Naomi Alexander, community theatre specialist at Battersea Arts Centre and the Old Vic, who has a simple ambition to produce theatre that is accessible and vital to the 92% of the UK who never go to the theatre. 

It is early days, but around 40 people turned up to contribute ideas. Some ideas are brilliant, some rubbish, some will ferment over time. The conversations anchored around inclusion, quality, funding, community, scale, age, audience, ethos. There is expertise available and a will to action - but what Naomi is demonstrating is that good leadership does not need to wait for an opportunity; good leadership makes opportunities and invites the right people in to give it critical mass.

Curating The Noise

I've been thinking a lot this week about curation, and the art of filtering/editing in a world full of noise. 

If you're anything like me, then you'll struggle to be satisfied that you're ever reading or doing or involving yourself in enough, conscious that you're missing out on something somewhere, not part of an essential conversation happening around the corner. For people like me, social media is both the best and worst possible thing to get hooked onto.

We now lead personal and professional lives anchored in an overwhelming everness of information - there is no stimulus that isn't available immediately in some form, but we are left to rely on piecemeal or amateur curation (or worse still, we have to rely on ourselves as editors). Who, on earth, can we rely on to vet the noise, to steer us to the genuinely good stuff and to stop us wasting time?

Yesterday morning I had a long catch-up with always possible associate, Chris Middleton, an entrepreneurial journalist and magazine editor with whom I have worked for a few years. He insists that print media is far from dying, and - like vinyl records - is enjoying a role as a product that fights the endless noise; beautiful magazines are being produced about incredibly niche areas of thought, standing up as something carefully curated, assembled and informed. 

For me, the element of trust is vital and the most successful platforms on and offline are those that you know will filter the content that is useful to you. There is a great, rebellious power in being a good curator in a time when the accepted norm for media consumption is that we want everything, everywhere, from everyone, all the time. But who decides who should curate, filter and edit - if we follow a particular blog, hashtag, LinkedIn group or individual how do we know that they are not missing out on some of the vital conversations too? Does it matter? How informed do we need to be to still lead and create in our respective fields?

It might be a cliche to cling onto, but it's hard to deny that the last 5 years has overthrown traditional ideas of communication spaces and has democratised the voice of the individual - anyone can be a creator and commentator of content, and magnificent online collaborations can lead to more innovative inquiry amongst communities of people who want to make a difference. In the noise there are definitely wonderful ideas, but how do we ensure they get to supersede the awful ones? For those working in education, the possibilities are limitless, and the advent of online learning will become the single biggest tool for affecting global change - but limitless is a very daunting place to start. I want to say to my 6 year old, here is the whole universe, for you, and there is nothing you can't do within it - but by doing that, I've disabled her before she's even started. Everyone needs a curator to help guide them through it.

After my meeting pondering this, I was privileged enough to spend the sunny afternoon hanging out at Charleston, the East Sussex farmstead once inhabited by the Bloomsbury group. I shall hopefully be working as a consultant with the trust that now diligently owns and runs the site, so after my meeting with directors I snuck onto a guided tour of the house as - despite spending 4 years of dissertation writing on British modernism, Woolf and 1920s art, I had never been before. 

The place is astonishing, deceptively big although the individual rooms are small - almost every surface, wall, furniture piece, fireplace painted or stencilled with striking patterns and once bold colours. A whole building curated by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant for themselves and their friends and unorthodox families; a different kind of libertarian noise to that of the Internet age, perhaps antithetical to it as it was really by invite only. There is a mixture of the slapdash (paintstrokes on plaster on the wrong type of paint etc) and of the utterly precise, with contributions to the interior design evolving from 1916 through to the late 70s. The challenge for the trust is to capture the history, spirit and energy of style - a bit like a living, well-designed art magazine - whilst protecting a fragile infrastructure and making it accessible and relevant within a digital universe. 

There is a question for all of us about what role we want in the noise. And as I build my consultancy business, my own curation of advice and guidance for clients will naturally become increasingly acute, as a trusted adviser of mainstream policy and thinking, but also sniffing out the more curious and less visible conversations that may be ultimately more exciting. A goal for the next year is to come to terms with the noise, own it, distill it, filter it, make it palatable for others without over diluting it. Wish me luck.

Dear Nicky. You're Wrong.

Dear Nicky Morgan,

We’ve not met, but I follow your words and actions carefully since you are the most senior policy-maker in the UK when it comes to education and inclusion - two things very dear to my heart and my professional life.

It is clear that you care about them too. And that you are keen not to be quite as reductive and needlessly adversarial in your deeds as your predecessor. Good stuff. 

So, I had a bit of a head-in-my-hands moment over my crumpets this morning, when I read your comments about young people who choose to study arts or humanities subjects. Studying ideas that are not explicitly linked to science, technology, engineering and maths could "hold them back for the rest of their lives” you said, that these subjects could be useful “couldn’t be further from the truth”. You even seem to imply that anyone who studied such ridiculous and unimportant areas of inquiry in the past, such as English or history or fine art, had probably been conned.

I’m not going to defend the study of arts and humanities subjects. It has been done by people far more eloquent than I here, here, here and many other places. It also seems equivalent to arguing that human rights are simply a cultural luxury. Oh, wait...

Nicky, you see, the proposition that one area of thought, of the brain, of industry should have more value to a 14 year old choosing their GCSEs than others is morally contemptible when you are in such a position of influence. The STEM agenda is important, as is the drive to encourage more young people to study formula subjects - but only these? Really?

It is utterly anathema to cling to the myth that employers are purely looking for technical skills. Of course an A Level in maths would be a fantastic platform for anyone looking to make waves in life; but wouldn't it be even more exciting if more teenagers were choosing to also extend their critical thinking capacity, performance skills, engagement with ideas about human behaviour. Wouldn't it be fantastic for someone to have A Levels in maths, Spanish, drama and biology? - and not to think that they have to choose one thing or another, or that they have to be one thing or another. Nicky, you chose an event called 'Your Life' to suggest that it would be actually wrong to choose non-STEM subjects.

I would argue that how someone studies is infinitely more important than what they study, yet this has been radically ignored by politicians who have to be seen to be fixing 'failure'. There has been no qualified, or even remotely experienced, person in your post since 2002 which might play a part in this. I am also not a qualified teacher, but I have an ongoing professional interest in how learning works. Do you? 

The best teaching, learning & assessment will include opportunities for students to develop technical skills whilst challenging the status quo, to collaborate with peers on projects, to know where to go to find out more. There are the skills with which to comprehend, process and apply technical methodology - but also the skills with which to critically analyse, to create, to fail properly, to share, to understand and tell the story of something. Why are only half of these skills something you value?

Your thesis is that to choose to study arts subjects at GCSE, A Level or degree level is to put a cap on ambition. Someone studying these will be of less practical use to the world, and by that we know you mean to the bottom line of the private sector.

I am biased because I have pursued creative learning all my life, and I have no formula maths or science credentials (on paper) beyond compulsory schooling. But I was careful about how I studied; I read around subjects, I understood the broader personal skills I was developing, I was disciplined. Because of what I studied, I chose to look carefully at how people interact, behave and how they construct themselves in times of crisis; it led me to want to get under the skin of how values are used in business and education and regeneration. I have a good career that has a social and economic return for the UK, but you would discourage anyone in the future from following suit?

As you’ll know, the creative industries are growing very, very fast. Current forecasts are that 1.2 million jobs in this sector will be created by 2020 in order to meet demand. DCMS data from January showed a consistent 3.9% growth in creative jobs since 1997 (compared to 0.6% growth in the whole economy). £76.9billion contribution to GDP. So, arts and humanities graduates are joining a sector with demand, are best equipped to transfer their skills to other sectors, and are also highly represented amongst self-employment and start-up enterprise figures - they are good at making their own work. But you’re worried that anyone choosing this route will be held back, disadvantaged. That’s a powerful and really mixed set of signals for your government to send.

A couple of days ago, I had the privilege of spending an afternoon advising and planning with a much-admired entrepreneur. He is the director of a couple of small businesses that turn over 7-figure sums between them, he provides employment for over 30 people each year and provides a rare service that travels around the whole UK and Ireland and is accessed by many hundreds of thousands of people. He is celebrating his 10th year of doing this. Oh, but his business is touring theatre and he studied drama, so really we should warn future students against this useless work, right?

The same day I attended the retirement party for a headteacher, celebrating her 38 years as a professional educator. She leaves on a high, having transformed 3 schools as head, bestowing an enormous legacy across the city in which she works. But she studied arts and humanities subjects, from which she has built over three decades of imaginative, creative curricula that have met the needs of every child in her care. I don’t think it is an accident that the school is winning awards nationally for its inclusion practice, and internationally for the way in which children’s attainment improves through collaborative working. Perhaps that’s by-the-by? Perhaps this isn’t as important as if the school was winning awards for technological innovation? Or perhaps there would be room for both? 

I genuinely can’t see how your argument - even if well-intentioned - is useful or appropriate. You studied the law, your predecessor studied English. Most of your colleagues get into their roles studying philosophy and political theory. Is it that Oxbridge degrees are different? If you’re clever enough to get to the Russell group, then the concerns about what you study don’t matter so much? I'm genuinely curious, as I think it it is down to personal achievement and ambition.

What is clear to me is that higher-level vocational education should be equivalent to academic study. What is clear is that young people should think very carefully about what, how and where they focus their education and that they should listen to as wide a range of people as possible, weigh up the cost/value, do their homework and do something that makes them feel alive. What is also clear is that they probably shouldn’t just listen to you.

If you're worried that employers don't yet see the value of creative study, then contact me at the address below and I'd love to work with you on changing that. I'd be there in a heartbeat.

Yours, with respect,

Richard Freeman

richard@alwayspossible.co.uk

Budget Roundup

A selection of articles, comment and analysis from national and trade press - summarising the impact of the 2015 budget on education, the arts & the charity sector.

Education

• Funding agency unable to approve growth requests after Budget — despite assurances

• This is a budget that turned its back on young graduates

• The Budget — a quick checklist for colleges

• Budget: surprise fees increase and grants to loans switch

• Teachers’ pay rises limited to 1 per cent for four years

• Fees can rise for universities with ‘high-quality teaching’

Arts & Culture

• Welcomed support for the arts and cultural sector in 2015 Budget

• Summer Budget 2015: The fringe theatre perspective

• Film industry set to benefit from historic budget announcement 

Charities & 3rd Sector

• Summer Budget 2015 – Charities Tax

• Chancellor must work hand-in-glove with Third Sector to deliver devolution push and NHS plan 

The Drama Triangle

Being a parent of two young, restless children on these hot, light nights tests my emotional and physical resilience to an extreme. They have both slept in the car on the way home earlier, of course, so have already enjoyed a 45 minute deep sleep. The calming-down effects of the usual food, bath, story routines are undermined by the intense sunshine and sticky skin under even the lightest of pyjamas. 

I know we don't live in a sub-saharan hot-spot, but it is well-documented that the Brits aren't particularly prepared for hot days and nights. And our Sussex home near the coast is built to insulate, which it does very well.

The children don't go to sleep until gone 10pm, and for the 3 hours prior to this there is a merry-go-round of irritability: tantrums, frustrated stomping about, apologies, hot cuddles, pleading, blackmail, angry outbursts, platitudes etc etc. It is a buffet of ill-advised behaviours.

But it is only ever later on, when everyone's defeated, that you properly start to reflect on what could have happened differently (clue: I am getting the car seats fitted with dashboard-controlled spikes so that they can't fall asleep in the back unless I say so). You think about the behaviours the children use to gain control of the situation in their different ways - and the behaviours my wife and I use to strive for firm fairness yet quickly lose ground to sheer exasperation. We are caught in Karpman's drama triangle and the only way out of it is someone eventually falling asleep. Probably the grown ups.

Dr Stephen Karpman's 1968 idea, was that conflict needs players and players need roles. The consequential objective of each role is just to have its own needs met - even if temporarily - in order to feel justified in its rationale/behaviour/feeling.

Karpman suggests that in each conflict there are three main roles:

1. The Persecutor: happy to allocate blame and to ensure that other players know they are in the wrong. They are probably angry, accusative, inflexible and feeling very righteous. In order to have their needs met, they require The Victim; someone onto whom they can project their irritation.
2. The Victim: The Victim takes the brunt of The Persecutor's wrath. The Victim feels hard-done-by, got-at, powerless, ashamed, unable to do anything. This is obviously a position of anxiety for most, but psychologically it can actually often bring some comfort. You know where you are when you are The Victim, and it's easy to seek the pity of others. If The Victim role feels natural to you, then you need to seek out The Persecutor (if you haven't already got one) but also The Rescuer.
3. The Rescuer: a big ball of guilt, who needs someone to help, because when you're the hero to others then you don't have to deal with your own feelings of anxiety or displacement. The Rescuer appears to be The Victim's saviour from The Persecutor, but actually cements the others in their negative behaviours - almost giving them permission to stay as the bully or the bullied as it makes everyone feel that they have a purpose.

The important things about these roles, is that they are not fixed to an individual. In the course of a conflict, the players will move around the three corners of the triangle - first shouting the odds, then feeling got-at when they are challenged, and then rescuing their former adversaries when they then go on to feel vulnerable. It is a rotating pattern of behaviours that, ultimately, serves no-one. Even when the conflict is finished, everyone of those players is likely to harbour some resentment - even if their short-term emotional needs feel sated.

What does this have to do with always possible, I hear you grumble - and is this just a parent-child thing?

Well, it has everything to do with everyday organisational behaviours, with corporate, community and collaborative development and - in a way - it is to do with parent/child relationships, but often metaphorically.

In some leadership workshops that I co-ran in March with managers from the FE and skills sector, we explored the drama triangle and whether it had any impact on the behaviours of those running education institutions. Of course! The lists kept coming:

Classic persecutors: Ofsted, awarding bodies, DfE, angry parents, angry learners, disgruntled staff, pissed-off neighbours, local authority, politicians, social workers...

Victims: teachers, Headteachers, learners (again), disgruntled staff (again), neighbours (again), politicians (don't blame us, we've got books to balance)

Rescuers: teachers (again), counsellors, social workers (again), local authority (we really do understand...), colleagues, Headteachers, Ofsted, whiskey...

You get it.

This theory has been around for nearly 50 years and is used daily in the fields of 'transactional analysis', and the study and understanding of social and professional behaviours. But, it is one of the simple ideas that I think makes a lot of sense, and to understand where you are on in the cycle during any given 'drama' enables you to get yourself out of it.

As a manager, leader and consultant, I will always be very mindful about the sorts of drama triangles that are sapping my clients' energies - and situations don't often look or feel like a theoretical diagram can neatly sum them up - but dig a little and patterns emerge. The obvious examples are where company leaders feel that they have absolutely no control over the future of their organisation - because of cuts in funding, because customers are more demanding, because you can't get the staff, because the competition are just that bit bigger - and the sensitive conversation to have is about how long this feeling has been going on and whether actually it is easier to be The Victim because the narrative it provides displaces the need to do something about it. The belief that The Rescuer will be along soon (a grant windfall, a good bit of publicity, a stay of execution from the landlord/taxman/whoever, some good results) is sometimes enough to keep people going.

When you write it down, it sounds a bit irrational (I think) - but I would guess that 80% of small values-led organisations, schools, arts organisations, SMEs, charities, have this mindset for a big chunk of their developmental years.

Is there an answer? Well, self-awareness can bring some different ways of looking at things.

Much of the follow-up work to Karpman has focused on the idea of ridding the parent-child power games in favour of more adult-adult conversation. If one part of the triangle ceases to play along (much like if you remove one of the elements needed to maintain a fire), then the drama collapses. It takes one party to speak above the noise and call for a bit of perspective.

The idea is then that the energy given out in perpetuating the drama could actually be used for the long-game, reframing the action towards problem-solving behaviours rather than the emotional quick-wins. Of course, much easier said than done, but that's where some outside perspective can often help.

If it works, then The Persecutors become Challengers. They might still have a bee in their bonnet, and they might have a thing or two to say - but it moves from bullying to a more collaborative approach that relies on accountability and transparency. Most importantly, they are clear about what behaviours from others will enable them to feel less angry or critical - and to have realistic expectations about how these can be achieved.

The Victims become Survivors, understanding that purely to seek the validation of feeling vulnerable means it can never move beyond that point. The key is to identify, and then take, some action - still often with the help of others, but without the co-dependency. This may mean letting go of some strings.

The Rescuers become Coaches. Having some synergy with the Challengers, this role helps others to identify the behaviours they need to exhibit in order to get themselves out of their rut. The better the coach, the less direct rescuing they need to do.

Of course, this is just a framework, but it can help foster a dialogue within teams - especially when the proverbial starts to hit the fan. There are people who won't buy-in to it, and there a organisations who feel their natural harmony and problem-solving is the glue which binds them - which, if true, will lead to a thriving company much quicker than others. But it is rare that no-one ever finds themselves in this trap.

I will still blame my role as grumpy daddy on the car-journey sleeps and the fact that British houses are poorly designed for hot days. It's nothing to do with me, guv. Not my fault.