Green fingers turn to gold

The thunder of a thousand lorries can be heard on the nearby M25. But on the northern fringes of Greater London, where city collides with country, Capel Manor, in Enfield, still manages to create a bucolic heaven with its 30 acres of flowers and plants, fashioned, thanks in part to the renaissance in garden design, into 60 beautiful contemporary gardens.

Capel, a major tourist attraction, is also a college with 3,000 part-time and full-time students. Last month, Capel Manor College was delighted to win coveted Cove (Centre of Vocational Excellence) status for its Horticulture, Landscaping and Garden Design courses, becoming one of 85 further education (FE) colleges to become Coves in the past nine months. Capel is now part of a "network of excellence" that the Government expects to lead the renaissance of Britain's vocational education system.

Capel's principal, Dr Steven Dowbiggin, still can't wipe the smile off his face. Cove status will bring in £500,000 of extra funds – a ninth of the college's annual budget – for Capel over the next three years. The Government wants half the country's FE colleges – the main providers of vocational education in Britain – to boast a Cove in a subject it excels in by 2004. The Coves – 50 more will be created later this month – are then expected to play local, regional and even national leadership roles in the provision of that subject.

The aim is to produce more students with National Vocational Qualifications at level three (the equivalent of two A-levels). According to Phil Head, assistant director of the Learning and Skills Council, the body created last year to oversee 16-plus education and training, there is a dire shortage of higher vocational skills in many areas of industry including electronics, engineering, construction and horticulture. The Government, like others before it, warns that Britain's international economic competitiveness is suffering as a result.

Previous governments have attempted to transform the FE sector – the Cinderella of education – but we remain wedded to the idea that academic qualifications are all that matters, and vocational ones are somehow second best. The education minister Estelle Morris and the Prime Minister Tony Blair have both warned that such snobbishness is preventing children who are not traditionally considered academic from developing other talents.

Dowbiggin is optimistic about the latest attempts to elevate vocational qualifications. He insists it's not just another hoop to jump through for funding. "It is more than spin," he says. "It is not just about making the sector look professional but actually making it professional."

Dowbiggin thinks we are watching the start of FE rationalisation, to fix the unplanned expansion of the sector that took place in the early Nineties. "There has been a degree of mission drift," he says. Too many colleges have been trying to provide too many subjects. Capel has already been involved in a little pre-Cove rationalisation. It recently took over the small horticultural department at Ealing Tertiary College in west London. "I think Estelle Morris is saying, 'Concentrate on what you do best'," says Dowbiggin. "'And if you don't get together to do this, we will do it for you'."

In a recent speech, Morris certainly spoke tough, promising an "overhaul of weak curriculum areas", new targets for each college and "firm intervention to address failure". Further education and training served six million learners, she said, and weak accountability had allowed too many colleges to coast for too long. "There is not enough good quality overall," she said, adding that only teaching of excellent quality, needed by the local community and not duplicated elsewhere, would now be considered viable. Phil Head insists that while Coves might bring about some rationalisation, their primary aim is to create co-operative networks of colleges under Cove leadership. Few colleges will be reassured by that.

Taking a more strategic role is something Dowbiggin is clearly looking forward to. He says Capel already has closer links with the industry it serves than most general FE colleges. One immediate problem are the thousands of unfilled amenity gardening posts across London. As well as upgrading existing workers' skills, more youngsters need to be attracted into horticulture to fill the vacancies. "We have big problems with school careers teachers," says Dowbiggin. "Land-based industries have huge potential, but careers people are out of touch." Dowbiggin says schools ignore the knowledge, skill and technological talent now needed in horticultural work.

Heather Barrett-Mold, vice-principal of Pershore College near Worcester, which has also just been given Cove status, agrees. "That awful attitude to vocational studies prevails," she says. "It is a case of, 'He's not very academic, just stick him over there, digging gardens'."

According to Dowbiggin, too many FE students are ending up in the wrong college courses, struggling for low-level business studies skills, when they could be thriving in a skills-shortage area such as horticulture. "Skilled gardeners don't earn £60,000 a year but they do earn a good, steady wage," says Dowbiggin. Skilled parks gardeners actually earn £16,000-£18,000 a year – a salary Dowbiggin admits is hard to set up a home in London on, but isn't a bad wage if you already live there.

But then Capel is an atypical college in terms of students. Its specialisation means it gets students with a strong sense of vocation, for whom horticulture is a positive choice, not a disappointing fall-back position. The average age of students is unusually high – 35 – and many have already taken a successful stroll down the "academic" route and see a gardening qualification as much a change of lifestyle as a career. Capel has attracted former diamond dealers, City workers, accountants, architects and even pop stars (Kim Wilde studied garden design here), many of whom have gone on to set up their own businesses – taking advantage of gardening's current sexiness -– which earn them far more than £18,000 a year.

Dan Taubman, national education officer of Natfe, which represents further education lecturers, says that unlike the example of Capel, most FE colleges are dealing with working-class teenagers and adults who didn't like school, or were low achievers. Many arrive feeling like failures. "It is the working class that goes to college," he says. "That is why they don't get the attention they deserve."

He suggests the sector will remain a Cinderella as long as it is underfunded and lecturers are paid 12 per cent less than high school teachers.

Taubman says that many colleges, while they may share the Government's analysis about the drift of FE, feel "insecure" about Coves. Whatever the LSC says, rationalisation is what many colleges expect. Taubman also suggests that while Capel claims to know the industry it is feeding, most general FE colleges are far less certain. Industry – more fragmented and complex since the death of old giant employers such as coal and steel – is harder to gauge these days, he argues. And while the criticism is often that colleges don't feed the right skills into industry, Taubman says British industry often does not know what it wants to be fed.

education@independent.co.uk