How are further education colleges (FECs) responding to academic reviews?
Direct and indirect funding is an issue for many colleges. For some, their directly funded provision is relatively small but they may have a lot of HE activity, franchised from HEIs, which isn’t subject to the same level of review. Our relationship with FECs is a critical issue at the moment, partly due to the debate about our role in relation to Ofsted and the Adult Learning Inspectorate for inspecting FECs and whether we can work more collaboratively with them. FECs are not part of the HE sector, although they provide HE programmes. I believe FECs would like more of an audit approach to their complete HE provision. For some colleges this would reflect the growing maturity of their internal systems. The conference that we’re holding in November is part of the debate and discussion that’s been going on. We’ve also tried to provide opportunities to promote the security of standards and quality in FECs. What have been the key findings about higher education in further education (HE in FE
