January 2003

Colleges’ individual targets should be negotiated locally on the basis of the full range of contextual factors. Judgements about colleges’ success should be made against these targets rather than national targets. This is not in contradiction with a national target to which the aggregate of individual providers contribute, but it is more sensible than judging individual institutions against a single national figure that can take no account of particular local circumstances. On the one hand some colleges may fall short of the national target for justifiable reasons, but it is still important for them to have an individual target to aspire to. On the other hand one would expect excellent colleges to aspire well above the national target and for their individual target to reflect that.

It is essential that targets are not a disincentive to widening participation. The best mechanism for dealing with this important issue would be to develop a national set of measures which calculate value added. Neither ACM nor any college seeks to justify poor service to learners, nevertheless it is well evidenced that the starting point of a learner will be a major factor in determining their eventual achievement. It is important therefore to develop distance travelled measures if providers are not to be deterred from reaching out to disadvantaged learners who have a low starting point. For example colleges that take learners on to level 3 courses with minimal qualifications (e.g. 4 grade Cs at GCSE) may add more value to these learners’ achievements than a sixth form that generally deals with learners with 6 or 7 GCSEs at grades A and B, even where the final level 3 grades of the college students are lower than those of the school student. The present measures would imply that the school has been more successful with its students, and mask the college’s success. We are very concerned that there are no robust proposals in this document for such an initiative.

World class outcomes require world class inputs: more resources to improve pay to staff are essential for improving quality. (response written prior to recent announcements of increases in resources)

ACM has consistently argued that excessive bureaucracy distracts managers’ energy and time from the core business of learning. College managers universally accept the need for accountability. However accountability should be based on just that much bureaucracy as is needed to deliver an excellent service efficiently. Beyond that, bureaucracy is a waste of the public purse and suggests that the author organisation is led by its own systems rather than by the needs of the service and the principle of value for money.

ACM strongly endorses the Sweeney proposal of the importance of building trust between the different players in the Learning and Skills sector.

Colleges will develop their own tailor made quality improvement plans, supported by staff training programmes and wide knowledge of good practice. One of the aims of the training programmes is likely to be an increase in the proportion of staff with relevant and good qualifications. It is on these activities that colleges need to be allowed to concentrate. Thus of this long list of delivery mechanisms identified in the paper ACM would emphasise:

• Dissemination of good practice
• Training and professional development
• Self assessment and development plans

Area wide strategic planning must be led at the highest level in the LSC, in partnership with the senior managers of colleges and other providers.

New providers should only be encouraged where there is clear demand for provision that cannot be met by growing existing providers.

The quality framework and processes for learning and skills providers is currently incoherent due to too many agencies (LSC, inspectorate, DfES et al) jostling with each other to define their role, functions and procedures in relation to the quality agenda. It is vitally important that the LSC is led by the interests of learners, and of the service, rather than by the need to augment its own role in the quality agenda of the sector. To do the latter is to be led by its own organisational interests at the expense of the learner.

Colleges are committed to being accountable for spending the public purse, but transparent accountability will not be achieved until value added measures have been developed. · We fully support the need for LSC staff to be trained in modern quality philosophies and processes, since the emphasis to date has been on an old fashioned tick box approach. Not everything that is valuable can be measured and not everything that can be measured is valuable.