Universities Safeguard Foundation Degrees

By Malcolm McVicar

With the Further Education and Training Bill receiving its third reading in the House of Lords this week, the Government has raised the prospect of further education colleges being allowed to award their own foundation degrees.

This is by no means the first time that such a scheme has been proposed, and it suggests that the DfES simply does not understand the nature of most higher-education programme delivery in further education colleges. Similar models have been suggested before, but have been dropped following consultation with the sector. This time, in the absence of any consultation whatsoever, the Government’s proposals have reached a bill – despite being fundamentally flawed. If enacted, they will inflict damage on the provision of both higher and further education.

As is usually the case in instances of ill-conceived education projects, the most severely affected group would be students. The bill has the potential to erode standards in foundation degrees. This would also have serious implications for employers at a time when we are all striving to further UK competitiveness in the global marketplace.

Currently, in the great majority of cases, universities retain overall responsibility for the quality of foundation degrees studied in further education colleges. The college is, essentially, delivering the uni-versity’s course on a collaborative basis. Provision of high-quality teaching for students requires the partnership between a university and college to be very strong. This can be difficult to achieve, and relationships must therefore be managed with a great deal of expense, time and expertise.

Universities have, on occasion, been forced to suspend or remove provision from a further education college where concerns about quality could not be resolved. The fact that universities are able to take such action demonstrates how this arrangement serves to safeguard the quality that is a hallmark of higher education in the UK. We must not, therefore, leave students, and our global competitiveness, exposed to less stringent quality-assurance systems.

If the current arrangements are threatened by a move towards further education colleges awarding foundation degrees, the colleges will move from a position of partnership to one of competition. This can do nothing but damage the relationships between them and universities, a relationship that has served foundation-degree students well in the five years since the courses were launched, and continues to work to the benefit of the nearly 50,000 students now pursuing this form of study. Many of these students are unable to attend the parent university full time but, while universities retain overall responsibility for standards, they have no reason to fear for the quality of their education and qualification.

The bill also comes at a time when the guarantees of quality in higher education have never been so vital. A young person starting employment in 2006-7 can expect to work for the next 40 to 50 years. With constantly evolving local and global economies, it is impossible to predict what the working landscape will look like in 10 or 20 years, let alone for the full duration of a person’s career. It is vital, therefore, that those entering the labour market do so with full confidence that their time in education has given them both the knowledge and competence to survive, and thrive, in a global economy. In the same vein, we must ensure that employers do not lose trust in our increasingly inclusive higher education system.

Is giving further education colleges the power to award their own foundation degrees the first step to something bigger? Will it eventually lead to further degree-awarding powers for further education colleges? It is suggested that the Government would like to have gone that far but backed off, deciding on foundation degree- awarding capabilities as a first step.

Further education colleges are not universities. Working in partnership with universities, they have a very valuable role to play in delivering higher education, particularly in geographical areas where there is no university provision.

Yet further education colleges do not engage in research and, very often, they cannot provide the full range of facilities (including well-stocked libraries) that would be expected in a university. Thus, outside a university’s quality-assurance framework, a further education college cannot provide an equivalent experience to a university, and to give that impression would be to damage the prospects of thousands of young people.

The writer is the vice-chancellor of the University of Central Lancashire

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