By Dame Ruth Silver
In setting up the Further Education Trust for Leadership (FETL), the resolve of the board was to establish not an organisation but what might be termed an “organ of possibility”. The idea was to support people already working in the sector, whether at colleges, independent training providers, third-sector learning providers or in industry, to think about the things they wanted to think about in pursuit of intelligent development. We invited people to reflect on whatever they were curious about in further education (FE) and skills, knowing that this would give us, and our colleagues and collaborators, critical insight into the state of the system. The preoccupations of those working in the sector are not trivial. They matter and deserve to be taken seriously and explored. By stimulating, feeding and creating opportunities for thinking in and by the sector, and by exploring new dimensions and enabling fresh insight, sometimes from beyond the sector, our aim was to make it stronger, more self-assured and better prepared to tackle the challenges ahead.
After three years of experimentation, FETL is on the cusp of change. While we continue to turn a listening ear to the preoccupations and curiosities of the sector — they are, after all, the things that fuel our work — FETL will look increasingly to harvest what we have learned from the sector, through our grants and Fellowships and our events, as well as by less formal means, to commission new creative and collaborative spaces for thinking. These spaces, identified by FETL’s board, on the basis of reflection on what has gone before, as critical sites for further learning, are at the heart of our second phase of operation. We want to live the kind of leadership we would like to see across the sector — leadership characterised by creativity, trust, enterprise and agency — and encourage generative collaboration with relevant partners, some within the sector, some on the fringes of it, and others still some distance away from it. This publication, the result of FETL’s partnership with the RSA, represents the first substantial fruit of this approach.
Possibility Thinking is a collection of essays which look forward to radical possibilities as to how the sector might move over the next two decades, among other things through the further development and exploitation of artificial intelligence, a growing focus on vocational pedagogy or greater attention to creative capacities in apprenticeships. While grounded firmly in present reality — the current challenges facing the sector are the taking-off point for a number of the contributors — the eight essays are unashamedly bold in looking to the future. The essays have been debated at three leadership summits, which I chaired, in Glasgow, Manchester and London, and we hope their publication will lead to further, wider debate, within and outwith the FE and skills sector. Securing that diversity of opinion, being both open-minded and inclusive, is a critical part of the process. The ultimate aim is for this project to support leaders in FE and skills in becoming creative agents of policy and professional change, both in their responses to current challenges and in their longer-term planning.
Some of the contributions cover themes familiar to readers from our sector, although often they come from another, less familiar place. Some focus on matters which are emerging new into our world. Others still concern areas that are not from our world at all, such as artificial intelligence, which I find particularly exciting. I am also excited to see further education identified as an important driver of wider change, for example through the Cities of Learning movement, discussed by Anthony Painter, and to find authors, such as Bill Lucas, prepared to take their thinking, in his case on pedagogy, a generation further. While many FETL Fellows have engaged with key issues such as risk, creativity and inclusion in their research, the essays take this thinking further, creating new connections and opening up new territory in which subsequent generations of thinking can form.
This tendency in the essays reflects a broader generativity within the sector, as new relationships and thinking emerge, and the system’s independent ability to effect change in itself grows. This is what we, in this work and in the work that will follow it, want to stimulate and encourage. It is telling that a number of papers highlight the need for further education and skills to be ‘bold and daring’, self-confident and collaborative in its thinking and for sector leaders to act as ‘agitators for change’ rather than its frequently anguished object. Localism and skills devolution and the growing role of technology in learning, even the area review process, for all its faults, represent new opportunities for the further development of this agenda. As Pauline Tambling notes, versatility, curiosity, creativity and a willingness to continue learning are now essential expectations in the changing world of work, and this applies as much to leaders in further education as it does to our students. It is important that the key themes of these essays — highly practical themes such as risk, inclusion, creativity, interiority, ethics, governance and austerity — are not only talked about but thought about. Only by doing so will we learn to do what we do better.
In FETL’s predecessor publication in this growing series, Remembered Thinking, I identified “loyalty to the future” as the phrase that, for me, best locates the sector. It is in the nature of further education to change and adapt, to scan emergent agendas and contexts in order to move forward. While it is important that we continue to interrogate the past, it should not stand in the way of our making a future. Too many of us within the sector have failed to be loyal to the future, unprepared to play a full and active role in shaping change and building the future. However, as Paul Little, principal of Glasgow College describes, a positive attitude to change in college leadership can have a transformative effect on FE’s position in local education ecologies. I want to see further education firmly on the front foot, not only prepared to change, as we have always been, but exercising agency in driving that change forward. It is to that end, ultimately, that this “incitement to thought” aspires.
Dame Ruth Silver is Founding President of FETL. She served as principal of Lewisham College for 17 years until 2009 and became chair of the Learning and Skills Improvement Service in 2010. She is co-chair of the Skills Commission.
This article appears in the RSA / FETL publication ‘Possibility Thinking’.
Download ‘Possibility Thinking’ from the RSA website for full references.
