Sunday thoughts: Can we make ‘Voxbridge’ work?

After a couple of weeks off (illness, holiday, general all round political chaos), it’s nice to be back writing about education, and to see the new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak [note to self: check for accuracy at time publication] declare that if there’s one silver bullet in public policy, it’s education; and specifically, skills and workforce training. (As an aside, I really hope he’s paying a little homage here with a nod to the 90s political geeks)

This isn’t new territory for him — as colleagues and I have been saying ever since he gave it, his Mais lecture is a really good summary of the way in which he sees growth and productivity in the UK; and that has skills at the heart of it.

He also spoke a lot about education during the first leadership campaign, and put out a very detailed set of commitments which got overshadowed because by then it was clear which way the wind was blowing. Some of this was classic reforming Govian Conservatism — best expressed in this oped from the once-and-future-king Nick Gibb, rightly now restored to his permanent office in Sanctuary Buildings. And it also included two flagship commitments, one on a British Baccalaureate (a subject of another piece) and one on a proposed new Voxbridge — which was brought up again in the Times splash from a few days ago.

It’s been met, I’m afraid, mostly with the usual dash of cynicism from the sector, which I think is a mistake. As I wrote a few weeks ago

Yes, it’s a stupid name. But the idea that we could create one or two large institutions, well-funded, which would draw in external investment and drive growth, isn’t a stupid idea — especially if it offers things which other FE colleges can’t. The argument should be around where they get placed, and how it links in with the rest of the sector — and why there can’t be four or five or a dozen of them — rather than “please just fund us all better” which is both irrelevant (given that Voxbridge funds, if spread around, would be totally insignificant) and counterproductive, if objections are dismissed because Ministers have heard them endlessly before. It’s time for some new tunes.

The best counter argument I’ve read was in this week’s FE Week from Bedford College Principal Ian Pryce — whose argument is not (just) that it’s a bad idea, but that on a very practical basis, it’s hard to see these fitting into the ecosystem, which is necessary for something to succeed in the long run. I think this is a very fair objection, and it’s why I worry about the long term success of maths schools, once they lose their original advocates and their funding is in danger of being chopped.

I also agree that you can’t simply create something high status by declaring it to be so (see, for instance, years of declaring teaching to be a high status profession, when all the evidence is that it not perceived as such in most countries around the world)

But here’s why I think it can work — and how I’d design it.

I think there are six key features which new ‘Voxbridge’ institution(s) would need to have. In no particular order:

• It needs to be attractive to, and able to access, R+D funding — from private and public sources. There’s nothing stopping FE colleges doing the former now, but often times they don’t have the scale of facilities to compete with universities for that; and research council rules are incredibly bureaucratic around eligibility but, to simplify massively, exclude FE colleges and most institutions in the public or independent sectors that aren’t specifically named as being eligible. Research funding is important because it provides a revenue stream for an institution, it attracts high quality staff who want to advance their discipline as well as teach, and (in the HE sector at least) tends to correlate with greater levels of attraction from students, and commercial partners as well, forming a virtuous circle. So our Voxbridge institution definitely needs to be able to bid for funding from UKRI and its constituent bodies
• It needs to be able to award its own qualifications — probably only at Level 4 and 5, as well as degree Apprenticeships. Three FE colleges can currently do this, and all universities (obviously) can. Otherwise, institutions can teach the courses, with the qualification awarded either by a partner university or by an awarding body. The reason that awarding powers for the institution is important is that for the institution to have status, the qualification it teaches and awards needs to have status, but also scarcity. Although I wouldn’t be opposed in principle to this awarding powers including Bachelors’ degrees in time, I worry that moving here immediately would just push the institution straight to awarding those and becoming a university. If government and employers agree, as they seem to, that the gap in the labour market is around high quality technical qualifications at Levels 4 and 5, plus degrees that are carefully aligned to the labour market via apprenticeship status, then let’s have our new institutions focusing just on these.
• It needs to have the space and capability to incubate, spin out, and scale companies. Again, some universities do this brilliantly. FE colleges can play a strong role in providing CPD for institutions, but tend not to have the scale or ability to literally incubate and grow new organisations. The reason this is important is that again it attracts commercial money, and ambitious students, and blurs the line between entrepreneurs, students, employees and employers. If the Sunak administration wants to have employers take training seriously, then this blurring is a good thing.
• Students attending the institution need to be eligible for some form of maintenance support, as well as tuition support. This is absolutely critical. All the polling and research work on pathways at 18 suggest that young people are faced with two choices: one is funded via the SLC for tuition and maintenance; and one is not. Guess which one more people choose. For adults (19+), the financial support is bewilderingly complex. The LLE will hopefully resolve this when it comes to tuition costs, but tuition without maintenance support is 100% guaranteed to under supply the number of people who would benefit from retraining. Exactly how you’d design a package of financial support needs careful thinking — would a full time employee studying part time and supported by their employer still get subsidised maintenance support at this institution? Would an apprentice? — but the principle must be that for students who need it, they can access it — and hence opening this institution to a much wider group of people
• It must have cutting edge facilities. Traditionally, government has been more willing to provide capital to FE than revenue funding, because it’s cheaper and easier. The upcoming Budget statement may nix this. But these new institutions will need to be well resourced from the off in order to attract commercial and student partners. This will, understandably, grate with some existing providers. The best way of handling this is to be clear that Voxbridge institutions need to have outreach and partnership built into their mission from the start, including sharing of facilities.
• It must offer accommodation. David Hughes wrote a very thoughtful reflection on Voxbridge in which he made the point that most FE is local, and that in order to break that, FE colleges would benefit from residential accommodation to open their catchments nationally. He’s spot on (and he’s also correct that this would have significant knock on benefit in supporting the growth of T Levels by allowing students to move around to access the necessary work placements for that qualification). So let’s have accommodation available at Voxbridge, and a national recruitment offer for students and employers to come to this centre of excellence.

We have — of course — bits of all of these already in the system, but nothing which covers all of the elements for success I’ve outlined above.

The closest to what the Sunak team think of as Voxbridge, and quite possible the inspiration for it, is the AMRC, much beloved of all governments, which has R+D capability from a huge number of business partners, supports scaling, and offers some elements of training — it offers CPD (including that which is delivered via the University of Sheffield), and acts as a base and a portal for apprenticeships with partners. But it doesn’t offer apprenticeships itself, and it can’t award qualifications itself. I’d happily look to AMRC (and other catapult centres) becoming one of the first of these Voxbridges.

The UK also has employer funded training centres for their own staff and indeed the wider industry where there’s a sector wide shortage of skills— for example, most energy companies have physical facilities or partnerships for training existing staff in green skills and bringing in new staff. But again, these are limited to CPD and in house training and don’t have any element of R+D, which sits in a different bit of the companies and is often spent at universities not linked to the formal staff training offer.

We have every university in the country doing teaching, providing accommodation, some doing a lot of Level 4 and 5 provision as well as degree Apprenticeships, and manysupporting to a greater or lesser extent spin outs and research. But because of the economics, university teaching and awarding is predominantly at Level 6 and above; and although high status and elite providers like at Imperial are interested in looking at broader Voxbridge style lifelong training, structural barriers (lab space) and costs can get in the way.

And we have other ‘centres of excellence’ in FE, some of whom have the potential to work (Institutes of Technology, which in reality would be great candidates to morph into Voxbridge institutions), and some of which haven’t worked (National Colleges, studio schools, UTCs). But some of those don’t work because they are fundamentally flawed in design (starting at age 14) and some haven’t worked because they haven’t got all the elements listed above, so have rapidly become white elephants.

If we can introduce all of these criteria I’ve listed above, I think new (or remodelled) Voxbridge institutions could succeed. Would they be FE Colleges? Or would they be technical universities? Would they be modern polytechnics? Would they be employer training institutions? Yes. To all of them. Or maybe none of them. But that’s the point. If we genuinely want an integrated tertiary education system that blends training, research, business growth, academic study and vocational and technical excellence, then we need a bit of everything together.