Marking the course: Realising the ambitions of the post-16 white paper

Labour came into power with an offer to business, industry, and civil society: work with us to turn the challenging conditions we have inherited into a future we have reason to feel optimistic about. The Labour government’s plan for post-16 education and skills draws on two of the party’s fundamental purposes in government: growth and opportunity.

These are not merely abstract terms; they are about people, and the degree of confidence they can have that if they put their mind to it, they can achieve a bright future for themselves and their families. Inclusive economic growth raises living standards, it increases the amount of secure and fulfilling work available, and it extends people’s opportunities to be part of the new ideas, creativity and innovation that are making exciting things happen around the country.

The Prime Minister’s eye-catching pledge to work towards two-thirds of young people under 25 participating in some form of higher level learning is emblematic of the government’s efforts to work towards a wider distribution of education opportunity across social classes and the country as a whole.

These are values and goals that are (in a non-partisan way) shared with much of the post-18 sector, grounded, in many cases, in direct and deep experience of serving educationally disadvantaged groups.

On a very practical level, leveraging the transformative power of education equates to individuals developing the relevant knowledge and skills to secure good work and careers. But it also means building personal confidence, new social ties and capability to shape the world around them – preparing them to solve problems, and create novel ideas of their own. These aspects of higher education transformation are not in opposition to each other; in the best kinds of education settings they are mutually reinforcing.

As we explored in Tooling Up, long term policy incoherence across FE and HE over the years, combined with policy efforts over the last two decades to drive greater competition in the higher education market, leaves the government with two critical problems: a fragmented post-18 sector with low trust in government and its regulator, and a lack of positive incentives it can offer, beyond further regulation, to unite the sector around its agenda, thanks to the economic conditions it has inherited.

Conscious, perhaps, of the weak hand the government has to play, from the outset Labour ministers have been by turns emollient and combative with the HE sector: sympathetic to the financial pressures facing institutions, supportive of the goals and aspirations of higher education, while being clear that the government expects the sector to fall in with its plans for a tertiary post-16 skills-led system – with a deeply unpopular planned levy on international fees thrown in for good measure.

Even so, as Post-18 Project fellow Debbie McVitty has argued, the sector should be seeing the Prime Minister’s two-thirds participation target as a win – not only because the government has made its aims explicit and trusted higher education institutions to find ways to fall in behind, but also because the priorities the government has chosen are areas in which many heads of institution feel they have much to offer.

The government’s skills agenda is ambitious: a coherent post-16 skills system, spanning everything from young people whose prior educational experience have already left them at high risk of NEET status, to aspiring postgraduates and PhDs, that delivers on national industrial priorities, and makes the UK as a whole more secure, but is rooted in the specific needs and challenges of places and coordinated through strategic (mayoral) authorities.

This new system involves several critical changes in how post-18 education is currently configured:

1. Collaboration between institutions whether “vertical” FE-HE collaborations or “horizontal” collaborations among post-18 institutions (some of which are, of course, FE colleges) are to be considered desirable where there are opportunities to capture efficiencies, enhance the offer to the region, or realise economies of scale.
2. Greater specialisation combined with active coordination within regions around defined skills gaps and future skills needs, supported with data and insight from Skills England, and grounded in the presumption that it will in most cases be clear which institution(s) are best placed to meet those needs.
3. A gradual pivot towards a “building block” approach to education and training, with short courses, skills bootcamps and standalone modules, and defined degree “exit” points at levels four and five, as well as “apprenticeship units,” primarily funded through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement and Growth and Skills Levy offering greater notional flexibility to students and employers on accessing post-18 education opportunity and acquiring skills.

Colleges and universities via the Association of Colleges and Universities UK have signalled to government that they are open to this shift from a competitive framework to a more coordinated one, showcasing in advance of the publication of the white paper various existing FE-HE collaborations and analysing the barriers to building these kinds of collaborative partnerships across the whole system. But an institutional openness to working with government to enact this shift can only ever be the first step – both government and institutions need a detailed understanding and grasp of the material and practical implications of this shift and how that change can be supported.

The post-16 white paper should, then, be the government’s roadmap for the sector, outlining the steps it will take to incentivise or otherwise enable higher education institutions to support and deliver the government’s agenda. As it stands, though, it’s not clear that the government has fully got to grips with the scale of realignment that this might involve, or how this realignment might be incentivised.

Much activity will arise from the measures outlined in the white paper – taskforces, consultations, and even (“when parliamentary time allows”) legislation. Many of these initiatives are undoubtedly desirable in the abstract, such as a taskforce on tackling HE cold spots, the creation of a postgraduate access resource hub, or work to improve the quality of public information for prospective students. But without a systematic route towards systemic change, many of these activities will remain sector busywork, unlikely to deliver material impact – and some of the measures discussed are equally likely to serve to distract from the government’s core agenda.

The policy critique is one thing; but there is arguably a larger issue with the white paper’s technocratic approach in that while it bristles with statistics and evidence, it does not read as being meaningfully grounded in the real concerns of students, communities, or employers as these manifest in lived experience, or introduce significant measures to explore how those concerns might inform the development of post-16 provision on an ongoing basis, for example, through strengthening learner and student voice, community engagement in institutional governance, or incentivising further employer investment in training.

This matters because in difficult economic times, especially for a sector treated, in the words of Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson, as a “political football” by the last government, and now bruised by the international levy proposals, as wrangling commences over the policy detail of the government’s proposals government and sector will need to return to a common sense of the most critical problems holding back individuals, communities, and businesses, and agree a shared mission to tackle these.

Our analysis of the white paper focuses on the most significant policy challenges, requiring the deepest thinking and toughest conversations in the coming months. These are the areas we’ll be focusing on as part of The Post-18 Project in our mission to introduce new thinking, ideas and policy solutions to the post-18 education policy debate.

“The government’s vision is that providers will be able to leverage their individual comparative advantage whilst working more closely together to create a compelling regional offer that supports students and drives growth, building on existing good practice across the sector. This could be as simple as providers that are based in the same city sharing back-office functions and estates. More importantly, it could also extend to allowing groupings to emerge which will support more structured regional offers across research, skills, teaching, and research and development.”

The white paper makes no distinction between collaboration and coordination, though both are absolutely material to the delivery of the government’s objectives in different ways.

The choice to collaborate, to coordinate and/or to “specialise” is ultimately, as the white paper observes, a strategic choice on the part of individual institutions guided primarily by a combination of mission and market analysis.

It is not, as the white paper points out, for government to direct the actions of autonomous institutions – though many would argue the government or a designated actor on behalf of government needs to play a much more explicit role in brokering outcomes if an autonomous institution becomes insolvent, thus placing public money and public assets at risk as well as leaving students without recourse. But even outside these extreme cases, there is still more the government could do, or cause to be done, to drive forward these agendas.

For our purposes, we take “collaboration” to specifically mean two or more institutions working together to create a jointly owned resource, service, or product, or a new corporate entity. The drivers for collaboration are typically efficiency but the conversations currently live in the sector are also focused on the opportunities for realising value from collaboration. This policy agenda is making progress under the auspices of the transformation and efficiency taskforce which is well-positioned to delineate the limits of what can be achieved within the current landscape and the conditions under which this agenda could move further and faster, though the government may wish to consider how the scale of collaborative activity could be monitored to determine whether it is actually happening and if not, why not.

Coordinating is a potentially different case, and could be defined as two or more institutions making decisions about their market offer – specifically what is offered or how it is positioned – in light of what the others around them are doing. This could happen to some extent without active inter-institutional communication, with, for example, an internal portfolio review taking a decision to withdraw from offering certain subjects on the grounds that these are not competitive in the current market.

It could also happen in ways that are not obviously anti-competitive, for example, in efforts to create regional curriculum mapping demonstrating pathways from one institution to another to build pathways of opportunity in particular subject areas – though purists might view some activity of this nature as market collusion or restrictions to student choice.

In the Labour imaginary, however, there seems to be an expectation for institutions to go even further to, under the auspices of their strategic authority and Local Skills Improvement Plans, broker collective approaches to tackling skills gaps and addressing future skills needs. We’d argue that activity of this nature is absolutely necessary where the market has failed to deliver the necessary provision or there is insufficient student demand to support multiple providers to offer provision in specific areas, but that there will need to be much more clarity from government and regulators about the contexts in which active market coordination of this nature is permitted and deeper thinking about how it can be incentivised.

Institutions cannot realistically be expected to act against their own interests – and yet it is the institutional pursuit of market share that to some extent has created the instability we currently see in the sector. The government has a role, therefore, not only in removing barriers to collaboration, or coordination, where they are shown to exist – the white paper pledges, for example, to seek clarification from the Competition and Markets Authority on what lawful collaboration means in the post-16 context – but to consider where there are prospective policy interventions to support innovative collaborative efforts to grow the market – particularly in areas of defined skills need. There is also a corollary need for monitoring of provision across regions and the equality impact assessment – while the notion of specialisation may create space for diverse institutions and diverse educational offers to flourish, not every institution is ready to accept every student. There are already subjects that are very hard to study outside the research-intensive part of the sector, and there is always a risk that even with multiple institutions involved none is prepared to add difficult, expensive, or hard to recruit to subjects in their portfolio. It is very hard to see how to sustain a broad portfolio across a group of institutions without some degree of coordination or planning.

Beyond the core question of lawfulness, there are questions of whose interests are served in regional coordination, and what expertise and knowledge is available to inform strategic decision-making. The FE case is instructive here: FE colleges have a duty to have due regard to local skills improvement plans in making decisions about the provision they will offer. But in practice, if a college does not see how it can sustain demand for provision from students it is not in a position to offer it. Knowing there is a skills gap based on labour market intelligence is not necessarily sufficient to cause a response. Providers working together may be able to find ways to share costs, risk, teaching staff or even students through a joint offer. That coordination work will be strengthened still further by involving relevant industry and employer representatives in the oversight of these joint arrangements.

The principle extends to general governance: institutional boards of governors, as the white paper argues, need to be able to have the strategic capability to secure institutional financial sustainability, which may include collaborative ventures and/or coordination with other providers. For individual institutional boards of governors to have due regard for regional needs they arguably need direct engagement and representation from regional stakeholders who are empowered to advocate for the strategic execution of the institutions’ regional development mission, as well as a reasonably well developed knowledge of how regional economic development works in order to understand the material and non-material risks and potential rewards attached to innovation.

“Specialising” appears in the white paper as a corollary to the potential for collaboration and coordination – the assumption being that regional and national needs are better served by diverse institutions doing fewer things to a high standard. The white paper signals that government intends to exercise its prerogative to allocate public funding in line with a revised definition of excellence (in the case of research funding) and strategic imperative (in the case of the Strategic Priorities Grant) that is likely to have material impacts on the sustainability of some research or education provision in particular institutions, which leaders will have to take into consideration in their financial planning.

However, beyond this ominous prospect, this notion of “specialisation” is offered only at the conceptual and speculative level, with some text wondering whether some institutions may “specialise” in a specific type of research, in particular subject areas, or in teaching, while still protecting “important links between research and teaching.” Seen from one perspective these proposals simply describe the system we have already – different kinds of institutions managing a diverse portfolio of research and teaching with, undoubtedly, some provision subsiding other parts. It is also worth noting that institutions that are specialist can face distinctive challenges especially if the costs of delivery exceed the unit of resource – cross subsidy can in some cases make it possible for broad-based institutions to sustain high-quality specialist provision.

If, however, the white paper is pointing towards a more radical reframing of the post-18 ecosystem then there needs to be reckoning with the incentives in which HE providers operate – particularly the dominance of league tables as perceived indicators of institutional prestige and quality and the role of research outputs and reputation in driving the league table positions on which institutions depend to support their recruitment of international students. Government has no direct control over league tables, but if it wants to move towards a more distinctively mixed economy in institutional mission and offer then it will need to offer alternative incentives to balance their powerful draw.

A further undercooked element of this notion of specialisation is the relative homogeneity of the academic contract, specifically in universities, and – as the white paper lightly acknowledges – the narrowness of recognition and reward frameworks for academic performance, which can prioritise research publications at the expense of wider, albeit less easily measurable, impacts. This is a long standing challenge, and is not one that institutions can tackle individually – it requires some level of collective assessment of the changing conditions of academic work, and collective action on future workforce planning to effect systemic change.

Finally, the market effects of private sector provision need to be more fully understood – there is undoubtedly much good quality private provision, including highly specialist and innovative provision, but there is also the observable phenomenon of private providers offering the kind of generic provision on which they can realise significant margins for shareholders, without having to contend with the broader mission-led costs that face providers in the public sector, such as civic engagement. Plans in the white paper are restricted to tackling low quality (in whatever part of the sector that it manifests) through applying restrictions to growth and fee uplifts, and requiring providers of franchised higher education to register with the regulator, but these measures do not really address the ways that the private sector can substantially invest in capturing particular parts of the HE market while not sharing the costs of delivering an HE system that is attuned to public policy objectives.

“We will expect providers to offer more flexible, modular provision and strengthen progression routes from further education into higher education, supported by transferable credits. We will consult on making student support for level 6 degrees conditional on the inclusion of break points in degree programmes. This marks a significant shift towards a more inclusive and adaptable model of learning, empowering individuals to tailor their educational journey.”

This, it hardly needs pointing out, is not the first time a government has confidently set the ball rolling on credit portability, only to watch that ball swiftly disappear down a rabbit hole of principle-based and practical issues. The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 tasks OfS with a duty to monitor and report on provision for student transfers and the extent to which this provision is used. Additionally, OfS “may” facilitate, encourage, or promote awareness of provisions to enable student transfers. While OfS’ annual reporting has accordingly included available data on the numbers of students who transfer to another provider within a year of starting their course – 1.7 per cent on the last annual count – OfS has not made facilitation of transfer a priority since its inception.

What is now the Lifelong Learning Entitlement provision for flexible student finance was originally proposed in the Augar review of post-18 education and funding – which also recommended the automatic award of level 4 and 5 qualifications for those pursuing a full level 6 degree, noting that this would support credit transfer. The 2021 Skills for Jobs white paper which sought to implement the planned student finance reform included an announcement that the government would “determine how we can best stimulate credit transfer between institutions and courses” – without, ultimately, delivering on that intention, possibly because the operational arrangements for delivering a student finance system organised around credit rather than elapsed time has been the main area of focus ever since.

In that time, however, the financial situation of higher education providers has materially worsened, meaning that the appetite to take a gamble on offering courses in a chunked-up form for lower guaranteed income is likely to be low, especially as early signals suggest the student demand for this kind of modular provision may not be especially high, increasing the risks to institutions. It is wise, therefore, to roll out the LLE over a number of years, focusing on priority areas where there is an appetite to innovate on a smaller scale.

The saga of policy efforts to facilitate “credit transfer” fail, in our view, because “credit” functions admirably to validate the comparability of awards at different levels, but has almost no value as educational currency in the UK system when it comes to determining whether a student has the prior educational attainment that would prepare them to take up a course of study at the next level.

Simultaneously, the notion of breaking higher education programmes into discrete “chunks” of value goes against the pedagogic grain to some extent. Current thinking on best practice in learning design tends towards taking a programme-based approach – this allows for a reduction in the overall volume of assessment, the distribution of critical skills development provision across programmes (rather than trying to cram a wider range of skills into every single module) and the use of synoptic assessments that can allow students to demonstrate accumulated learning across different programme elements.

Increasingly, education leaders tell us, their thinking is that offering a plethora of module choices can create a fragmented experience, increasing the likelihood that students struggle to form connections, both with each other, and between their various learning opportunities. Streamlining the programme – perhaps in tandem with offering greater opportunity for exercising of choices and pursuing interests within particular programme elements – increases the experience of studying as a cohort, ensures students have a more consistent experience, and gives programme leaders a much greater degree of confidence that students are developing the skills and knowledge they were promised.

None of this is a reason to abandon the notion of building a flexible lifelong offer based on discrete but stackable elements across the whole of level 4 and above provision, but it requires much more than simply building the funding infrastructure, complex though that is, and assuming that institutions and students will rally round. To move such provision from the margin to the centre of provision across level 4 and above requires creative thinking about programme design, curriculum, and assessment, as well as integrating flexible modular provision fairly and robustly into arrangements for assessing quality and standards – not to mention tackling the various complexities involved in student data collection and reporting, managing admissions, and logging of awards.

Additionally, as Jim Dickinson has argued in Doing better, getting better a mass higher education system has to be prepared to accommodate the lived realities of diverse students’ learning experience. This principle appears throughout the white paper in discussions on access, inclusion, and general opportunity, but it does not show up in any meaningful sense in a coherent policy agenda to reimagine the full-time student experience to align with the kind of higher education ecosystem the white paper envisages. Paid work, health (not only mental health), academic support for navigating education choices, and designing meaningful learning communities in which students can develop critical self-efficacy, agency, and interpersonal and intercultural skills are all part of a high-quality system, and need to be collectively taken on as an accountability to the nation’s young people.

Whether there needs to be an independent review of higher education, or post-16 education, is now a moot point, but there would be a strong case for convening an independent expert panel on curriculum, assessment, quality, and student experience in a “stackable” post-18 system, not only to work through some of the knottier issues but to cause the kind of productive, creative conversation across the FE and HE sectors that can build real support for executing the shift.

“The Office for Students will act as a primary regulator for all higher education providers, including Further Education Colleges delivering higher education…We will support the Office for Students in developing a reformed regulatory framework that focuses on driving out pockets of poor performance, strives to continue to improve quality and safeguards the financial health of the system in a balanced and proportionate way…We will empower the Office for Students and UK Research and Innovation to work together to develop a risk-based, coherent approach between the Office for Students’ regulatory and UK Research Innovation’s research responsibilities that delivers the strategic aims and ambitions set out in this paper.”

When it comes to executing the provisions of the white paper for higher education provision all roads lead to OfS. Actions the regulator will need to take as a result of the white paper include:

• Reviewing degree awarding powers, including developing new higher technical qualification awarding powers
• Consulting on a new framework for registration incorporating FE colleges offering provision at level 4 and above
• Implementing new high-level regulatory objectives around supporting beneficial collaboration
• Creating a more robust process for market entry
• Strengthening management and governance conditions of registration
• Strengthening financial monitoring and data collection processes
• Joining the task and finish group to tackle HE cold spots
• Reforming regulation of equality of opportunity, including extending access work to postgraduate taught and research provision and otherwise becoming more risk-based
• Exercising new powers to conduct quality investigations and intervene in cases of low quality
• Implement tougher standards for franchised provision
• Work with UCAS and the sector to improve the quality of information available to students
• Working with government to develop measures of progress in higher education (ie education gain)
• Assessing the impact of generative artificial intelligence on maintenance of degree standards

Additionally, the OfS quality regime will become toothier, with material impacts on provider finances in the form of recruitment limits and restrictions to inflationary fee uplifts.

This shopping list of regulatory actions is unlikely to raise the spirits of the HE sector, which generally has low trust in the regulator and is deeply sceptical in particular of the legitimacy of using the proposed new integrated quality regime as a basis for determining fee levels.

OfS is clearly on a journey in its efforts to demonstrate regulation that is reasonable, transparent, fair, and proportionate. It is not, in the final analysis, obliged to take the regulatory approach that the sector might prefer, though there is a strong practical case for introducing a greater degree of formal co-regulation in areas where OfS is likely to struggle to sustain the capacity to act at the pace and scale required, or produce regulatory guidance at the level of sophistication that the sector would find valuable.

However, the wider risk for government is arguably less from sector cavilling at aspects of the regulatory regime, than that OfS in focusing on developing and strengthening direct regulation, fails to support the wider sector change and transformation the white paper has set out.

To achieve some of the core objectives of the white paper requires a body that can convene development activity around collaboration and innovative provision, as well as define and enforce regulatory expectations. Much of OfS’ current output actually already exists in the broad “development” space, offering insight and guidance to inform the sector in developing good practice, though it may not be having the impact it could have if OfS had a better relationship with the sector in general.

The white paper seems to indicate that if the only body available to do that developmental work is a regulator then it should be the regulator’s objective to do that work, and proposes to reframe the general objectives of the regulator to accommodate that approach. If that is the case, then government and OfS should jointly consider how OfS can more actively and visibly differentiate between its oversight and accountability functions, and its development and insight functions. This could potentially create space for the sector to engage in shaping the latter, put forward ideas, and frame significant developmental structural challenges without fear of triggering unwarranted regulatory attention or coming up against existing regulatory shibboleths.

The Labour government is facing significant political and economic headwinds and any optimism that a return to a technocratic approach to policymaking will reassure the public has long since dissipated.

If Labour is looking for a compelling story to tell it could do worse than embracing the potential of its post-16 sector to make a real difference in the lives of individuals, communities and regions.

The government has offered an ambitious agenda in the post-16 white paper. But for those changes to manifest in people’s lives it will need to enlist the support of the sector to tackle the longstanding and deep challenges that have stymied policymakers with similar ambitions in the past.