A good lesson for ministers

A rosy glow emanates from Cambridge Regional College just now; even Government talk of mission drift and mediocrity can't dispel it. The reason? The college's annual Festival of Achievement.

Pick any success story from the festival evening, say the college's teachers and managers. The blind woman who qualified in massage and aromatherapy. The nursing-home carers who set up their own creativity class. The 16-year-old girl who came top in aircraft engineering. The two middle-aged damp-course fitters who conquered their limitations in literacy and maths. All of them, says the college, are what further education is really about – and it doesn't look mediocre from here.

Cambridge Regional College is a large, general further-education (FE) college. It teaches 2,700 full-time and 16,000 part-time students in every imaginable subject – science, construction, art and design, hotel and catering, health and community care, business, engineering, built environment, humanities – and at almost every level, from pre-GCSE to degree.

Such a range exposes even a relatively successful college – 98 per cent of teaching satisfactory or above in its most recent 1998 inspection; above-average student retention and pass rates – to the Government argument that colleges should focus on their strengths and not try to do everything.

Yet the principal, Rick Dearing, insists he would resist any rationalising planners' attempts to shut down his A-level and degree courses, even in a city with two sixth-form colleges and two universities. The students who do these courses will not set foot in higher-flying institutions, he argues: they come into FE, often with a difficult educational history, because they feel safe. For the sake of access and social inclusion – also high on the Government agenda – they need a smooth pathway for as far as they can go.

FE's critics, within and out the Government, would observe that, with less than 50 per cent of students successfully completing their courses in some colleges, the pathway is not necessarily that smooth. Hence the talk of curriculum advice, targets and improving teaching quality. Cambridge Regional College is all for the first. "It would be great to have ideas; we're ready to try anything," says Michael Wright, head of the public services department, which trains police, firefighters and paramedics.

Targets they already have, says James Hampton, college director of learning and achievement: the college, as do the top quarter of colleges nationally, sets its own target of performing and loses money from the Learning and Skills Council for any student who fails to complete a course.

Talk of improving teaching quality is what causes hackles to rise. Eighty per cent of teaching staff have a teaching qualification; only the newest part-time tutors and a handful of long-serving lecturers do not, says Mr Dearing. Within a couple of years he expects the figure to be 100 per cent. All staff are observed teaching by colleagues and managers at least three times a year; every new member is assigned a teaching mentor. Far from having unqualified staff, he argues, his teachers are awash with professional qualifications. Study childcare and you will be taught by qualified midwives, health visitors and nursery nurses, all with teaching qualifications too, he points out. Take a health and social-care course in a school, and your teacher is unlikely to have that professional expertise.

The threat to teaching quality is not from the teachers, he adds; it is financial. FE lecturers earn 12 per cent less than teachers in schools. Also, they earn much less than the professions on which they draw.

Mr Dearing is sceptical about local Learning and Skills Councils' ability to direct colleges to provide more courses to meet skills shortages. Courses need to arise as demand stimulates them, he argues, pointing to the huge rise in the college's part-time art and design provision for local crafts people, and the 1,200 residential home carers who took short courses that the college supplied for their employers this year.

So alongside talk of quality and targets – and Cambridge Regional College admits that, like many colleges whose students were forced to pass mandatory key skills courses for the first time in 2001, its retention and achievement figures do not look good on paper this year – he would have liked to see two things from the Government's proposals for FE. One is acknowledgement that his college does have a clear vision, which matches what at other times the Government pressed as its own. "We have a very clear mission: we focus on the delivery of excellent vocational and occupational programmes, so we can provide people into the workforce and facilitate the Government's inclusion agenda."

And the other? Why, the money to pay for it, of course.

education@independent.co.uk

Time to get tough: how the Government plans to improve further education

National targets will be set for all colleges, and every individual college will be set targets for student recruitment numbers and pass rates under the new get-tough regime for further education, announced last week by the Secretary of State for Education, Estelle Morris.

Further education contains some poor and much mediocre provision, according to Ms Morris. One in seven colleges has been revealed to be inadequate in recent inspections.

Indicating that a tight rein will accompany extra money coming from the Chancellor's spending review, she outlined a series of measures to be introduced by a new FE standards unit in Whitehall. They include: guidelines for classroom teaching, following the example of schools' literacy and numeracy hours, with science, maths, hospitality, leisure, care and agriculture likely to be the first subjects to receive attention; pressure on colleges to improve staff training, with a hint that the requirement that all new lecturers possess a teaching qualification may be extended to all teaching staff; a move to specialisation, with colleges to be urged – and sometimes ordered – by local Learning and Skills Councils to close down weak courses and concentrate on their strengths; "rigorous review" of provision for 16- to 19-year-olds in general colleges, but drawing back from insisting that they should be taught in separate and costly sixth-form centres.

Details of the Government's plans have been published in a discussion document, "Success for All: Reforming Further Education and Training", which is available at www.dfes.gov.uk.