‘FURTHER THAN WHERE? THE PLACE OF FE UNDER THE LEARNING AND SKILLS COUNCIL’

Patrick Ainley

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Cardiff University, September 7-10 2000

Main conference

Individual paper for the BERA Special Interest Group on Lifelong Learning/ Post-Compulsory Education and Training

200 word abstractThis paper examines the likely place of Further Education Colleges under the new Learning and Skills Council due to come into operation in England on April 1st 2001. The ‘Learning to Succeed’ White Paper proposing the new administrative arrangements was widely welcomed by the FE sector. However, a description of the new funding, standards and inspection agencies being set up will bear out the prediction of Professor Melville, Chief Executive of the Further Education Funding Council, that ‘The Learning and Skills Council will represent a much broader provider sector. [and] While we do not expect FE to disappear, it will not be so identifiable’(TES 12/11/99). The description given of the new administrative arrangements will make clear the contractual principles upon which the new system will operate and, while welcoming proposals to ‘level up’ funding between school sixth forms, FE and training, cautions that the main effect of the measures proposed in the White Paper will be to drive a wedge between further and higher education, as well as to further widen the gap between vocational training and academic education despite the partial reforms of Curriculum 2000. This is likely to hinder rather than help aspirations for widening participation and lifelong learning.

Additional information: The paper will be complemented by a paper to the Society for Research into Higher Education annual conference at Warwick University in December 2000. Entitled ‘Higher than what?’, this will focus more specifically in the place of HE in the new dispensation. The title of both papers derives from Sir Toby Weaver’s 1974 Rotherham College speech ‘Further than where? Higher than what?’. The author is convenor of the FE-HE Network of the SRHE.

Key words: FE (Further Education), LSC (Learning and Skills Council), HE (Higher Education).

Name: Dr. Patrick Ainley, Reader in Learning Policy,

Address: School of Post-Compulsory Education and Training, University of Greenwich, Queen Ann Court, 30 Park Row, London SE10 9LS.

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Telephone: 0208 331 9755

Fax: 0208 331 9235 e-mail: p.ainley@greenwich.ac.uk

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‘FURTHER THAN WHERE? THE PLACE OF FE UNDER THE LEARNING AND SKILLS COUNCIL’

Falling between two stoolsIt can no longer be assumed, as College Principal Vince Hall did in his 1990 survey of Maintained Further Education in the United Kingdom that FE has a natural place in the order of things so that ‘further education is rather like a country, in the middle of a large land mass, which is not bounded by a coastline, a mountain range or a major river’. As such, it has been ‘at times partitioned by its large neighbours’, but nevertheless, ‘has bounced back with a spirit of independence and a will to survive’ (p. ). It is true that the Poland of FE has always been threatened, not only by the German Empire of schools and the Russian bear of higher education, but also by the Austria-Hungary of training. In the 1980s under state sponsorship, this last made incursions into the colleges that attempted to wrest ‘non-advanced further education’ from them. Even though this invasion was eventually repulsed and the state-subsidised but technically private Training and Enterprise Councils are to be abolished, the new Learning and Skills Council may represent their recreation in a new and more powerful form to preside over what Professor Melville, Chief Executive of the Further Education Funding Council, called ‘a much broader provider sector’ in which ‘While we do not expect FE to disappear, it will not be so identifiable’ (TES 12/11/99). This is ironic given that David Melville later argued (in TES College Manager July 2000) that the endemic ‘identity crisis’ of FE had been resolved by the incorporation of the colleges into a unique sector from 1993 – 2001.

However, the underlying and determining factor weakening the position of the colleges extends beyond this recent period in their perpetually precarious history since their earliest origins in the Mechanics Institutes. It is that from the 1970s onwards, as the indefatigable Colin Waugh put it in General Educator in 1996, ‘the partial de-industrialisation of the UK economy has excluded broad sections of traditionally working-class young people from the labour market and has thus undermined the traditional rationale for FE, namely provision of a non-academic route into skilled jobs’. Traditional technical further education, which was the backbone of the old FE, appears more than ever a relic of the country’s ancient industrial past and its steady decline has necessitated an expansion of FE into new areas and its repeated reinvention as a ‘new FE’.

Helena Kennedy’s 1997 Report on Widening Participation in Further Education implicitly accepted without fully explaining why FE was losing the competition with school sixth forms for 16-19 year-olds (though with many regional and, particularly rural-urban variations – see Glanville forthcoming). Thus the Kennedy Report can be read as rejigging FE towards ‘widening participation’ for a new constituency of adult learners. This anticipated the 1998 Moser recommendations for adult basic skills and recognised the collapse into FE of much of former-LEA adult education. Kennedy also accepted that numbers remaining in school and college had peaked in 1993 at 73% - leaving approximately two thirds of 16-19 year olds in some sort of FE or training -dropping in England to 69% since.

Kennedy’s recommendation of a new adult constituency for FE recognised that the majority of FE students have always been adults. Part-time adults have not in the past gained equivalent funding to mainly full-time youngsters however. An adult further

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education also fitted with Dearing’s recommendation for more sub-degree level HE to be delivered in FE. Yet whether this could offer a lifeline to FE was doubtful given that it was unclear from Dearing how HE in FE would be funded. Subsequent proposals for Foundation Degrees (DfEE 2000a) and the ‘lifelong learning’ envisaged by the Learning and Skills Bill (below) made clear these would remain with the Higher Education Funding Councils and were not the ‘signature qualification’ that many in FE had been looking for to cement their new-found identity as a distinct sector. A new National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (NAGCELL) was then announced. This, it seemed, was to add the expertise in continuing education of its joint chairs, Bob Fryer and Alan Tuckett, to the reports by Kennedy and Dearing on FE and HE respectively to provide the basis for a White Paper covering the entire field of post-compulsory education from FE and HE to adult education. The NAGCELL reported in November under Professor Fryer's sole authorship but the response in the form of the promised White Paper was repeatedly postponed and eventually rejected - reportedly, on the highest authority - on the grounds that it failed sufficiently to address the problem of exam standards in further education (TES 13/2/98). Instead of a White Paper, the Green Paper, The Learning Age, was issued in February 1998 (DfEE 1998a).

The final abandonment of the repeatedly postponed White Paper on Lifelong Learning in February 1998 indicated that post-compulsory education would remain in the state bequeathed by the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. Similarly, the structures of compulsory schooling are fixed by the 1988 Education Act. This is indeed a ‘new settlement’ of education and training, one characterised by the fact that it unites what government calls Foundation with Lifelong Learning and is not ‘front-loaded’ as was the old post-war welfare state settlement (see Ainley 2000).

Higher education, where the existing market may soon be further augmented by the introduction of full-cost fees, provided a model for the type of differentiated market that Conservative governments intended to replicate in independently competing schools and colleges of further education. Only minor changes were necessary to produce such a result in the higher education sector as an elaborate hierarchy of universities already existed in which independent, self-governing institutions competed with their various specialised course offerings in an academic market place for state-subsidised students. The removal of the binary division between universities and polytechnics in 1992 completed this differentiated hierarchy at the same time as it removed the last vestiges of local accountability and democratic control over higher education. By taking the former polytechnics and colleges, together with FE and sixth-form colleges, away from administration by the local state, the hierarchy of HEIs competing in the academic market place also provided an example of the new organisation of state agencies in what has been called ‘The Contracting State’ (Harden 1992) run on the franchise or contract principle (see below). This complements the state-subsidisation of the private sector in the new mixed economy of state-subsidised private and semi-privatised state sectors.

It is predictable that there will be a new binary divide within HE as the new (and some not so new) universities at the bottom of the pile become desperately recruiting, teaching-only institutions. This worst of both worlds in which a mass HE is combined with an elite one can only be confirmed by Dearing’s recommendation for research to be concentrated in ‘centres of excellence’ - predictably in the researching and selecting Ivy

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League. These elite HEIs see themselves as national if not international institutions, recruiting ‘oven-ready’ students from the private and better state schools to graduate to a national if not international graduate labour market. This produces the readily observable general result that the older the university, the younger, whiter and more traditionally middle-class its students. Such institutions have little to gain from associating themselves with their localities and regions. By contrast, the teaching and recruiting universities seek association with local FE from whom they draw many of their locally resident and often adult and part-time students and with local and regional economic development agencies who represent a source of funds for them.

The result of this heightening differentiation in higher education for the rest of post-compulsory education and training, ie. for the new ‘lifelong learning’ sector under the Learning and Skills Council, is the ‘Significant variations of participation at different levels and by different groups of students.. particularly in relation to ethnicity and gender’ that were detected in contrasted sub-regional North-South and inner-city study areas reported by Ainley et al in 2000. These divisions both between and within regions have not yet become so entrenched that they are plainly apparent to all who are involved or to outside observers. They may become more so at the sub-regional local LSC level with the discretion local LSCs may be given to vary tariffs locally and they are becoming marked in the national regions of Wales and Scotland, especially the latter which was always differently administered anyway. Such divergences are instances of what has been called ‘glocalisation’, or the ‘new regionalism’ (see below).

This research, reported to last year’s BERA SIG by my colleague Judith Watson, pioneered the use of the FEFC’s Individualised Student Record for research purposes by dividing students on different courses into broad descriptions, such as ‘three or more A-Levels’, ‘vocational course with an A-Level’, or ‘course at introductory level’. The ‘pathways’ which were thus distinguished and indeed the whole pathways metaphor, leading as it did to further metaphors of ‘creaming’ and churning’ raised at last year’s BERA SIG, may not have been appropriate however. For possibly the ‘tertiary tripartism’ first identified by Ranson (1984) is now augmented by the divisions detectable for example in the Final Report of the National Skills Task Force (DfEE 2000b) between adult basic skills and formerly statemented school students in FE, vocational courses in colleges and some school sixth forms, academic courses in sixth forms or academic centres in colleges leading to elite or mass HE. Together with resuscitated Modern Apprenticeships and Traineeships, alongside the various New Deals, administered separately through the Employment Service integrated with the Benefits Agency, this might add up to a quadri- or quinque-partite tertiary system rather than a tripartite one.

Widening the gap between vocational training and academic education despite the partial reforms of Curriculum 2000, another effect of the Learning and Skills Bill – alongside the competition with other education and training providers public and private eligible for funding by the LSC - will be to drive a wedge between further and higher education. This is likely to hinder rather than help aspirations for widening participation and lifelong learning. In particular, it will make it harder to meet the Prime Minister’s target of having half of all 18-21 year-olds in higher education by 2002 which would have to rely upon HE franchising ‘Foundation Degrees’ and other sub-degree qualifications to FE.

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In any case, ‘Lifelong Learning’ without one third of the 18-21 age range now in some form of higher education, together with numerically many more adults (21-plus), cannot be considered as ‘Lifelong’ at all. Similarly, government designates Malcolm Wicks ‘Minister for Lifelong Learning’ whilst Baroness Blackstone remains the ‘Minister for Higher Education’. Clearly, Wicks is what the Conservatives used to call the FE Minister, who covered also training and adult education. ‘Lifelong Learning’ without higher education merely leaves non-advanced FE synonymous with ‘retraining under another name’ as Duveen and Harari (2000) remark. This is not a welcome prospect for further education in the new learning and skills sector although the 400 or so colleges have 70 per cent of students and trainees within it and account for £4.5b out of the total £6b to be spent on it. It is doubtful that such disadvantages can be overcome by cultural reforms such as those of Curriculum 2000, already vitiated by the introduction of Advanced Extension Awards and the predictable predelictions of the Ivy League for selecting top grade A-level achievers. This pessimistic prognostication is justified by structural considerations.

The structure and administrative principle of the new Learning and Skills SectorThe structures of the new system are however extremely opaque. This is not only because they are still being introduced – cobbled together as we speak, but because they are designed to be ‘flexible’, ‘responsive’ and, of course, ‘unbureaucratic’ (in contrast to the old national system of education locally administered, which the previous education Minister, Kenneth Baker, described as ‘maverick, eccentric and muddled’). Faced with an uncertain future in a fast-changing global market place, a clear advantage of the ‘government by quango’ which Ainley and Corney (1990) described as being introduced through the pioneering agency of the Manpower Services Commission, is that ‘government can retain firm control of policy development but distance itself from the detailed day to day management of programmes. Civil service bureaucracies can thus be expanded and disbanded “to task”, according to the circumstances that arise’(1990, 128). Therefore the present shape of the emerging system is not necessarily the final one. Indeed, there may be no final end state to this post-modern form of ‘governance’ (Rhodes 1995).

The contracting principle of its administration - that power contracts to the centre whilst responsibility is contracted out (Ainley and Vickerstaff 1993) - has been institutionalised to the highest level by the Public Service Agreements or ‘Contracts’ between individual government departments and the Treasury introduced by the July 1998 Comprehensive Public Spending Review. The ‘contract culture’ thus permeates the whole of the new Contracting State. Instead of former attempts at an equitable and universal distribution of resources, there is competitive tendering in the new bidding culture with the money going to those who write the best bids. This is obviously more ‘flexible’, ‘responsive’, ‘dynamic’ and - in another overused word - ‘modern’ than the old ‘maverick’ system of administration of education and training it has succeeded. This can clearly be seen if the elements of the new system are represented diagrammatically.

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TREASURY

Public Service Agreements

DfEE

National HEFC LSC Local LSCs

LEAs

PRIVATE AND STATE SCHOOLS COLLEGES UNIVERSITIES andnursery primary secondary (tertiary and sixth form) FE other HE Colleges ‘diversity sixth forms opportunity Connexions training agents of’ and to 14+ adult education

At the bottom of such a diagram, the basic institutions of learning – the schools, colleges and universities - are still in place, though their situation as specialist organisations segregating children from the rest of society, as the schools have done since the industrial revolution, has been challenged, in theory at least. Further and higher education in particular are supposed to integrate themselves much more closely with the wider society and are urged to adopt, though have not yet achieved, a US-style of responsiveness to student-consumers by providing modularised ‘learning on demand’ outwith archaic academic terms (even if nominally divided into semesters) still based upon the church calendar.

Competition for pupils under Local Management has semi-privatised state schools to the extent of introducing a highly competitive ‘quasi-market’. Meanwhile state-subsidisation of private schools did not end with the termination of the Assisted Places Scheme by the New Labour government but took new forms of ‘partnership’ between state and private sectors. Registered as independent schools, ten predominantly state-funded City Academies are opening this month owned by partnerships that will acquire all land and buildings transferred to them by LEAs. This exemplifies the institutional differentiation of the new learning system with 320 specialist schools with selection procedures for ‘gifted pupils’ announced by David Blunkett, the Education Secretary, on 26 February 1998 and more selection within inner city schools on 19 March. The Prime Minister later announced that by 2003 one in four state secondary schools in England will be turned into ‘specialist colleges’ in creative arts, sport, languages or technology (Guardian 17/1/00). As said, the variety of competing colleges and universities already existing in the hierarchy of further and higher education provides a model for schools. Thus, it is the government’s intention for one in seven of all state schools to be selective and specialised by the next election, with selection by aptitude for 10 per cent of

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admissions to all state schools already proposed in the Schools Standards and Framework Bill. While still to produce the ‘diversity’ and range of parental choice that New Labour hope for in schooling, the modernist uniformity of the supposedly comprehensively monolithic past has been interrupted by some variety at least of reborn technical and other specialist schools and colleges. Supported by an ideology of ‘the politics of difference’, ‘individualisation theory’, ‘reflexivity’ and ‘risk’, such old-fashioned universalist aspirations as comprehensive schooling for all are derided as ‘sameness’ rather than equality, transforming Old Labour’s old slogan of ‘equal opportunities’ into the more modern (if not ‘modernist’) ‘opportunities to be unequal’.

This albeit so far limited variety of schools have been joined by privately and voluntary sector-run but almost exclusively state-funded training agencies administering the succession of programs that have culminated in the New Deal. The age of transition to these various options has been raised to 14 with selection to differentiated GCSE examinations and/or disapplication of the National Curriculum in favour of vocational options for those for whom they are relevant. Perhaps though, this age of selection is not so final as was selection at 11+ under the unreformed tripartite system of schooling that was the immediate consequence of the 1944 Act since there are now some possibilities for transfer up, down or across the various ‘pathways’ indicated above.

However, the first and most striking difference in the new dispensation as compared with the old is the increased power contracted to the national centre DfEE and the concomitant much reduced role of the Local Education Authorities and hence of locally elected government over the administration of education. In this sense, the move from a national system of education locally administered to a national system nationally administered is nearly complete. It exemplifies what Glennerster et al (1991) remarked as ‘One of the most important common elements’ of the new dispensation: ‘the reduction in the powers of local government and in the presumption that local authorities should be the main providers of social welfare outside the social security system’.

Most obvious in the form of OfSTED’s policing of the National Curriculum, LEA discretion over the employment as well as the activities of its local teaching force will be totally removed as payment by results is imposed on classroom teachers by national assessment undertaken by private accountants of teachers’ performance thresholds. Already, threshold payments for so-called ‘superteachers’ and central selection of headteachers via a National College for School Leadership are being removed to the national level. Attention is also being drawn to discrepancies in funding per pupil in primary and secondary schools in various (often neighbouring) LEAs (eg. in The TES 28/1/2000) in the same way that a ‘fair and transparent’ funding system for FE was advocated to justify the creation of the FEFC (see Ainley and Bailey 1997, 17). Indeed, a Green Paper on school funding is currently in preparation. The polytechnics in 1988 and the FE colleges five years later were previously lost to the LEAs on the same grounds. At present however, a piecemeal approach to contracting out LEA functions and whole ‘failing’ LEAs is still being taken, unlike the ‘big bang’ approach to council house privatisation apparently being advocated within the Department of the Environment Transport and the Regions (Guardian 27/1/2000. See also Ginsburg 2000 on ‘The Demunicipalization of Council Housing’ and – in relation to ‘The Fall Of The Local Authority Social Services Department?’ – Hill 2000. Also Cope et al 2000: ‘the Labour Government is considering removing housing and social services (plus schools) from local authority control.’)

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LEAs still retain responsibility for their nursery, primary and secondary schools but local management of these schools means that funds are delegated to them from the DfEE on a formula per head so that former control is lost. The same is proposed for the surviving remnants of Adult and Community Education under the latest proposals for implementing the 1999 ‘Learning to Succeed’ White Paper. At least however the unsustainable distinction between vocational, Schedule 2, FEFC-funded and non-vocational, non-schedule 2, LEA-funded adult education is to be abolished, although ‘Adult and Community Learning’ should now ‘focus on their key work with adult basic skills’, as the first technical consultation paper on Learning to Succeed advises (para 5.9, p.24) and ‘priority of funding support will still be given to those adults working towards a nationally recognised qualification’. LEA youth services are also merged with the various careers services through the ‘Connexions’ strategy being implemented by a public-private partnership in the mentoring youth support Connexions Service. This follows the ‘Bridging the Gap’ suggestions to ‘give particular priority to those who are most at risk of disadvantage’(Darling et al 2000). Together with the agencies managing training, they will be administered by the Learning and Skills Council from April 2001. The LSC as a contracting agency of the DfEE amalgamates the FEFC and the TEC National Council into one super-quango funding all post-compulsory education and training less HE from 2001 through the intermediation of the local LSCs.

Local LSCs will also ‘steer the distribution of funds for school sixth form provision’ (technical consultation, para 4.13, p.22) that LEAs will hand on accordingly (with promised levelling up of funding to school levels, rather than levelling down to training ones). The intention is that ‘FE colleges should benefit from the greater adjustment of the LSC and Education systems as well as through the incorporation of the existing FEFC and TEC-funded routes into a single system. The simplification of the funding arrangements for young people will also result in a less bureaucratic system to administer’ (point 5.4 of ‘Learning to Succeed Post-16 Funding and Allocations, First Technical Consultation Paper, January 2000). It is doubtful though that any of the looked for savings will accrue, as Julian Gravatt ‘Figured it out’ in The Guardian 6/6/00. The LSC’s 47 local arms are reminiscent of the 50 MSC Area Manpower Boards and are often based on existing TEC offices. Each employs between 55 and 150 staff under the direction of chief executives, half of whom so far appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment are former TEC Chairs, only six being women, none from ethnic minorities. Each is paid between £50-80k to spend budgets typically over £100 million to fund on average more than100,000 learners. Yet these local LSCs could fill what Glennerster et al called ‘the problem of the excluded middle in the hierarchy of political power’. They do not make inevitable the development suggested by Peter Kingston in The Guardian on the 29/2/00 that local LSCs will take over the local education authority of elected local councils but they make it structurally feasible.

Including these contractual relations in the picture would not complete it however, for the DfEE is subdivided into further agencies also acting on a contractual basis and contracting in their turn, like the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the HEFCE, alongside the new LSC in England. Most prominent amongst these agencies, although it is not a funding body, is the Office for Standards in Education that has taken over and expanded the role of the formerly independent HMI. As well as schools, OfSTED of course also inspects LEAs themselves, contracting them out in turn to alternative private-sector bidders should they ‘fail’. OfSTED now reaches

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from inspecting registered child-minders up to training to 19 to divide the remit of the Adult Learning Inspectorate (the old TEC national inspectorate) which retains responsibility for those over 19. The Adult Learning Inspectorate will liase in a manner still to be imagined with the Training Standards Council in relation to the sectoral National Training Organisations. The TSC will apparently be phased out as a separate entity, along with the formerly target-setting National Advisory Council for Education and Training Targets. National targets will in future be set through the LSC plus Connexions, which the local LSCs have some discretion to vary locally.

Higher Education – with the exception of the mistrusted Schools of Education inspected through the Teacher Training Agency - (as yet) sorts out its own inspection arrangements through its own Quality Assurance Agency. In a curious continuity with the previous 1944 settlement of education, though no longer funded by the Treasury completely separately through the University Grants Committee but still funded by its own HEFCs on a basic block grant for students, HE remains outside the rest of so-called ‘Lifelong Learning’.

Clearly, it can be seen at a glance that this is a much more flexible, responsive and modern arrangement than the old fashioned, bureaucratic and maverick system of administration it replaces!

TREASURY

Public Service Agreements

DfEE Connexions Service National Unit

OfSTED QCA Adult Learning Training (exam boards) Inspectorate Standards Council

National HEFCE LSC QAA National Training TTA Local LSCs Organisations Connexions LEAs Partnerships

PRIVATE AND STATE SCHOOLS COLLEGES UNIVERSITIES andnursery primary secondary (tertiary and sixth form) FE other HE Collegesand child- ‘diversity sixth forms minders opportunity Connexions training agents of’ and Community to 14+ and Adult Learning

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Only plainly partial opposition spokespersons could describe the new system as a ‘confused spaghetti’ (Teresa May quoted in The TES 21/1/2000). Although Catherine and Hugh Bochel in a paper on the social policy dimension of New Labour’s modernisation of UK Government point out that ‘This has created multiple networks of organisations and as a result a complex network of relationships, one aspect of which is the extent to which they are dependent upon one another. The more complex these relationships the greater the potential for communication failure and/or on-co-operation and partial or full implementation deficit.’ The Bochels relate this new governance of the self- and inter-organisation of these networks to non-state actors outwith the normal remit of government to New Labour initiatives in ‘joined-up government’, evidence-based policy and E-government to create what the 1999 Cabinet Office White Paper Modernising Government called ‘information-age government’ (Bochel and Bochel 2000).

Meanwhile in relation specifically to the Learning and Skills proposals, the Eighth Report of the Select Committee on Education and Employment recorded its ‘concern’ that ‘the different geographical coverage of, for example, the Careers Service, RDAs, the proposed LSCs, the UfI, the proposed Youth Support Service and the New Deal Delivery Units.. are likely to create new obstacles to the delivery of a seamless service, both vertically, across different age groups, and horizontally, within specific age groups, across a range of policy challenges’ (DfEE 2000b, para 72 and in conclusion). It therefore advised that ‘careful attention’ (para 68) will have to be paid if the ‘duplication, confusion and bureaucracy’ that the 1999 White Paper ‘Learning to Succeed’ noted resulted in ‘an absence of effective co-ordination or strategic planning’ (as quoted in para 57 of the Report) was to result in the ‘seamless service’ that the White Paper aspired to. The Final Report of the National Skills Task Force offers similar warnings (DfEE 2000c, pp. 65 and 66).

Still the picture, while complex, would not be complete without adding the employers’ nominees who hold a 40 per cent representation on the LSCs local and national, as well as on college corporations and elsewhere. Also the Local Learning Partnerships, seen as ‘the key vehicle for bring [sic] providers in local communities together to avoid unhelpful aspects of competition’ in the Final Report of the National Skills Task Force (ibid). These have been set up by employers and others with colleges and the already existing Education and Business Partnerships with schools. Also of course, the other Ministries playing a part in the administration of education and the allocation of funding should be included. The Home Office, for example, plays a prominent role in the Connexions Strategy through its Youth Offending Teams (YOTs). The Department of the Environment, Regions and Transport will also be vital as it implements Regional Development Agencies in relation to the existing Government Offices. Meanwhile, the Benefits Agency has been integrated since March 2000 with the Employment Service in the delivery of Welfare to Work and the various New Deals, upon participation in which benefits are conditional for many unemployed people and now to be a permanent feature. A new Working Age Agency (whose title is yet to be determined) will take over the work of the Employment Service and the Benefits Agency for clients of working age during 2001. The Department of Trade and Industry for its part also joined with the DfEE in summer 1999 to create a new agency called British Trade International (BTI) to produce the second version of the implementation plan for ‘Learning to Succeed’ and emphasise

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boosting British exports as an explicit goal of the overall proposals. The Department of Health has been excluded, even though its contracting out of nurse training affords a prime example of the contracting principle (Francis and Humphreys 1999). However, supra-national government is included in the diagram given the importance of European funding for the regions.

Finally, the Cabinet Office should be added as it is home to the ‘joined-up government’ linking all these disparate and interrelated agencies together. The Cabinet Office is also Kremlin to the various ‘Tsars’ who co-ordinate the efforts of the disparate Ministries and their agencies to focus on particular problems of the moment. This increasingly Presidential aspect of the new administration also hosts the more than 100 ‘task forces’ (variously labelled ‘ministerial’, ‘advisory’, ‘regional’ etc.), ‘stakeholder panels’, ‘advisory bodies’, ‘reviews’ (‘strategic’, ‘comprehensive’ etc.), and other ‘working parties’, ‘forums’, ‘commissions’, ‘audits’, ‘groups’ (‘working’, ‘action’, ‘advisory’ etc.) and ‘units’ (likewise) that were set up within a year of the new government taking office, according to a written answer in the Lords' Hansard for 12 February 1998 (cc. 231-244). Particularly relevant for aspiring towards the ‘seamless web’ of provision across education and training, Foundation and Lifelong, is the Social Exclusion Unit.

Other layers of responsiveness could be added with the addition of Parliamentary Select Committees and the Audit Commission. (This latter, Holloway argues, ‘has undoubtedly had considerable influence’ in FE partly because of ‘the weak professional identity of staff’ (1998, 53-4) and, in the opinion of Cope et al, may ‘become the key regulatory agency in joining-up local governance’. It already monitors the Best Value Inspectorate of local government and relates similarly to other inspectorates such as OfSTED and the Social Services Inspectorate.) The DfEE’s Small Business Service with its 45 local arms shadowing the 47 local LSCs has also been omitted, as has its Employment Service which administers the various New Deals along with work-based learning for adults (transferred to it from the TECs). As the Select Committee on Education and Employment’s eighth report says, ‘Learning to Succeed says nothing about the relationship between local LSCs and New Deal Delivery arrangements. It is not clear to us whether this is an oversight or whether it indicates some conceptual distinction between the generally very broad understanding of “learning” in the White Paper on the one hand, and the New Deal on the other’ (para 89). An indicatively complete picture of the present arrangements under the DfEE in relation to other Ministries and ‘stakeholders’ would therefore look something as follows:

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EUROPEAN FUNDING Head of State (charters)

TREASURY PRIME MINISTER CABINET OFFICE Public Service Agreements HOME OFFICE DSS YOTsDETR DfEE Welfare to Work Benefits Agency DTI Connexions BTI Research Councils Govt.Offs for OfSTED QCA Adult Learning Training the (exam boards) Inspectorate Standards Regions Council

National HEFCE LSC QAARegional NationalDevelopment Training TTAAgencies Local LSCs Organisations Connexions Employers’ LEAs Partnerships Organisations

PRIVATE AND STATE SCHOOLS COLLEGES UNIVERSITIES and (chartered) nursery primary secondary (tertiary and sixth form) FE other HE Collegesand child- ‘diversity sixth forms minders opportunity Connexions training agents of’ and Community to 14+ and Adult Learning

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Concluding discussionThis paper has described the new settlement of ‘lifelong learning’ marked by the 1988 Education Act and the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act and completed by this year’s Learning and Skills Act. It concurs with Glennerster et al in seeing the new settlement as marking ‘the most decisive break in British social policy since the period between 1944 and 1948’. The new settlement is being deepened and extended by the New Labour government. Echoing Mrs.Thatcher in 1987, one of its education advisers, Michael Barber, told The Times Education Supplement (26/6/98), ‘The Government.. is explicitly going much further than any previous government in encouraging diversity.. to provide a wide range of opportunities to meet the diverse aspirations of individuals and communities.’ While then-Standards Minister, Stephen Byers, declared the new Education Action Zones, intended to involve private sector partners for the first time in mainstream public education, ‘The test bed for the education system of the twenty-first century’ (in Ainley 1999, 157). This repeated Barber’s description of them in The Daily Mail (7/1/98) as ‘test-beds for innovation in a post-modern world’. The May 1998 announcement effectively to opt-out all LEA schools from direct control by their authorities showed ‘government moving as close as it possibly can to making all schools quasi-grant maintained’, as David Hart, General Secretary of the National Association of Headteachers told his annual conference (TES 14/7/00), though not (yet?) under their own funding agency or the LSC, like the FE and sixth-form colleges. It backed up Byers’ warning to that year’s North of England Conference that ‘LEAs have no God-given right to run schools’. Democratically elected local councils are associated as much by New Labour as by the previous Conservative governments with the old corruption of Old Labour.

The new national system of schools and colleges nationally administered seeks to replace the local variety that there once was under the former system locally administered through the LEAs. Yet, despite tight central control, the new settlement also seeks local variety in a deliberately differentiated and selective system. This replaces the modernist aspiration to basic universal provision that there was in the classic welfare state settlement of the 1944 Education Act, especially as it developed towards comprehensive reform. Instead, the education system of the new settlement aims to be individually differentiated and flexibly available throughout lifelong learning, not merely a ‘front-loaded’ foundation. Universal entitlement within rigid structures is replaced by provision ‘targeted’ at particular localities and their specific economic needs, also at individuals and problem groups within them, each with their own set of demands to be flexibly responded to. As Rustin and Rex commented, ‘One can view this change more generally as the obsolescence of a “Fordist” concept of “mass welfare”, committed to basic but uniform standards, and its intended replacement by a “Post-Fordist” system, adapted to consumer choice, mobility and the management of “risk”’ (Rustin and Rex 1997, 21).

The new system thus appears fluid and changing with successive new initiatives for particular groups and individuals at different times and in different places. It is also, like the new Contracting State of which it is a part, inherently unstable and internally competitive despite the New Labour government emphasis upon ‘partnership’. In addition, various personalities, bureaucracies and other interest groups (‘packs and sects of great ones,/ That ebb and flow by the moon’) are jockeying for power in battles for influence and control still to be resolved. For instance, disagreements between OfSTED and the nascent LSC over the new inspection proposals for FE resulted in the untidy

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compromise adversely commented on by Stanton (2000). OfSTED would take clear ‘editorial responsibility’ Chief HMI, Chris Woodhead, ominously promised in TES College Manager in March 2000. Already, the ‘glare of Ofsted’ has ‘turned on the colleges’, as The TES FE Section reported on 30/6/00, inspecting all subject areas instead of sampling about half and with only two months warning of inspections rather than two years. The implicit privileging of the academic progression route favoured by OfSTED to higher education via sixth forms in or out of consortia, centres or colleges, shadows the way that HE was altogether omitted from the Learning and Skills Review of non-advanced further education that preceded the White Paper.

Beyond the Education and Employment arena, interdepartmental conflicts and rivalries dispute the boundaries of social security (already, as seen, closely collaborating with Employment Services foreshadowing a possible merger, as in New Zealand. Merger of the ES and Benefits Agency would explain the divorce remarked by the Select Committee of New Deal from the broader learning system). The Department of Trade and Industry has claimed enterprise support and the research councils from the DfEE (knowledge production as opposed to its reproduction by education and training), reverting to the dominance of the nineteenth century Board of Trade. While amalgamations into such super-ministries as the DETR - like the DfEE itself (see Aldrich et al 2000) - appears to be the order of the day, there is also the overarching question of the contractual relations of the various government departments to the Treasury, which becomes even more powerful in this new Contracting State.

Competition, inherited from the Conservatives who set up the new system, is built into it and intended to drive up standards of services for their consumers. The aim is for provision of education and training, as of other services, to be responsive both to the changing demands of the economy and to individual demand dependent upon reading the market signals of ‘employability’. Individuals may be ‘empowered’ by a basic voucher entitlement through Individual Learning Accounts administered by the Learning and Skills Council and not the University for Industry as was originally intended. The UfI – not mentioned in the Learning and Skills Bill - has been relegated to a phone-line brokerage service called ‘learndirect’, although still aspiring as ‘a driver of virtual learning’ - as it describes itself - and funded to the tune of more than £84m this year to franchise to a target of one million learners by 2004 in a thousand ‘learning centres’ and a hundred ‘learning hubs’ in FE colleges, on employers’ premises and in ‘lifestyle centres’ such as libraries, community centres, supermarkets and pubs, also approving its own modular qualifications. ILAs may optimistically be topped-up with financial investment or loans and could be tied in with ISAs and even pensions in a totally voucherised welfare system.

Individual Learning and Savings Accounts would ensure that responsiveness to consumer demand replaced the rigidities of universal provision as an entitlement of citizenship. For, as suggested above, universal principles are dismissed by the New Labour government, as by postmodernists, as ‘totalising’ and therefore totalitarian. In their place, New Labour proposes to ‘modernise’ such classic welfare state measures into the individually and locally customised services of a ‘postmodern’ society. Significantly, the government proposes to begin with changing the national and uniform terms and conditions of school teachers - a feature of the bids accepted for Educational Action Zones, which, in this respect as in others, differ profoundly from the Educational Priority Areas and Community Development Programmes of the Wilson era (see

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Hatcher, Nixon, Ranson and Rikowski forthcoming). As in FE, where a prolonged dispute saw the eventual deregulation of the former ‘Silver Book’ agreement in favour of local negotiation of pay and hours by individual college corporations, staffing is the most expensive area of expenditure where the most savings can be made. The removal of security of tenure for academics in HE had the same deregulating effect (Ainley 1994).

Existing quangos have been preserved, merely some regional co-ordination of their activities being allowed in order to take advantage of European regional funding. There have likewise been some concessions to national and regional feelings through devolution and promised regional assemblies - the London mayor, for instance. The changes to and prunings of the local state made by Mrs.Thatcher remain firmly in place, however. Arguably they will be taken further under the ‘new regionalism’, which echoes the ‘new federalism’ of Reagan and Bush and shadows that of the EU and existing Government Offices. For the surviving democratically elected councils have already had their role recast by central government from being responsible to their local electorates towards becoming boards of managing directors under directly elected mayoral Chief Executives seeking tenders, issuing contracts and monitoring the performance of separate sub-contractors (see Cochrane, 1993). Such so-called ‘enabling’ local authorities, endorsed by all three main electoral parties, mirror the ‘contracting’ or ‘franchising’ that has occurred in the central state, again with a parallel loss of democratic accountability. Meanwhile, headteachers act similarly to buy-in the cheapest private or public services under ‘Fair Funding’ for their schools. Thus, the contracting principle permeates all levels and areas of the new state form.

Financially, the only way out offered by central government to hard-pressed public services, like education and health, is through partnerships with the private sector. Like the continuing state-subsidised privatisations of nationalised industries, investment of business interests (and money) in the running of formerly (and formally) public sector services is taken much further by the Private Finance Initiative by which private capital is invested in public services. This was limited under the Conservatives who launched it but New Labour is determinedly committed to it despite the reluctance of private companies to invest their capital on the terms they were initially offered. These have, therefore, been drastically improved, especially in the Health Service.

Handing over ‘failing’ public services to be run for private profit is the form of modernisation (if not ‘modernism’ since it is confusingly presented as ‘postmodernism’) that was chosen, or rather, was fortuitously stumbled upon, by the Thatcher governments of the 1980s following the lead of Reagonomics in the US. It was pioneered in England and Wales by the Manpower Services Commission. Perhaps what Rustin (1998) calls this ‘Perverse Modernisation’ is better described, as he says, as no more than ‘marketisation’ or state-sponsored privatisation. While it contributed to the temporary and relative economic recovery from which the New Labour government benefited in its initial years, this new market modernisation has not afforded a way out of the intractable social and cultural malaise that is the legacy of Britain’s long decline from industrial primacy and imperial past. Instead, it has aggravated the increasing fragmentation between individual consumers which builds upon and heightens existing cultural differences between social groups. In conditions of pre-existing monopolies, the outcome of competition for what were previously universal services available to all citizens is a two-tier health, education, transport, housing, whatever, system. This may not be immediately apparent as public services are differentiated into their diverse parts,

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much as the public utilities like gas and water have been split up to compete against one and another. Two tiers of provision become obvious once the initial competition shakes down into new cartels and monopolies with large companies holding multiple outlets.

The new form of public administration reconstructs the state along the lines of a holding company producing an inherently unstable system. Holding companies suffer particular organisational dysfunctions, managing at arm’s length a complex range of diverse organisations to which self-management has been devolved. Subcontracting can be a way of reducing the price of a product or service by squeezing the contract, but it typically involves loss of detailed control, although financial control is increased. The relationship between contractor and subcontractor is one of mutual dependency. Another effect is fragmentation, for it is difficult to maintain and enforce national standards or public goods without considerable interference in the activities of the subcontractor.

The ‘new public management’, borrowing from the ‘new managerialism’ pioneered in the private sector, is also potentiated by new technology (‘management by e-mail’) using indirect quality indicators as performance targets of outputs (‘management by objectives’). A contracting core of management no longer in direct contact with the work being undertaken comes to rely on such indirect indicators of performance. And, as Pollitt (1987) remarks, ‘all performance indicators distort performance’. This leads to the well-known ‘All Pigs Flying’ scenario (Ainley, 1997). As well as new divisions between core management and a periphery of contract workers, this makes it difficult to determine which are real indicators and which are virtual ones. As well as being ‘The Audit Society’ described by Power (1997) with its ‘Rituals of Verification’ run by accountants, the contracting, post-welfare or workfare state may therefore also become the Virtual State. Virtual though the new state form may be, its powers of central control are very real. This is indeed a New Leviathan rather than a New Enlightenment.

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