Leadership Development in Further Education

As a result of reduced government funding and the pressures of the current economic climate, many further education colleges are facing significant challenges and changes. I envisage that the likely impact of these challenges is that there will be:

* Job cuts
* Programme losses.
* Requirements for further efficiency savings and increases in productivity.
* Potential college merges and takeovers, with the emergence of national providers.

At the same time as managing the funding challenges, I know that many colleges will also be striving to improve their quality and student outcomes.

I believe that these pressures will require colleges to change the way they design and deliver their programmes and services. They will need to provide high quality programmes that have a much lower level of affordability and services that are leaner and cost less to provide.

Having discussed these issues with a number of senior managers in FE colleges, many recognise the need for their managers and staff to:

* Drive up quality, deal with poor performance and hold people to account.
* Be much more financially and commercially aware.
* Develop creative and innovative solutions to reduced funding.
* Breakdown academic ‘silos’ and improve team work across the college.

I believe that a key factor in delivering these changes will be the ability of senior managers within colleges to lead, inspire and influence their staff to be engaged and committed to change. This means that many colleges will have an urgent need to:

* Understand in detail the strengths and development needs of their key managers.
* Prepare and deliver appropriate leadership and management development interventions to up skill key managers to enable them to successfully lead and deliver change, drive up quality and improve performance.

The long term potential implication for individual colleges is that if managers and staff do not change and step up to the challenge, there is a real risk of further cuts in funding or the college being merged with or taken over by another college.

It is therefore vital that further education colleges recognise these needs and invest in the appropriate development of their leaders and managers. This of course will be very difficult when colleges are under such difficult financial pressures, and their development partners will need to be able to demonstrate that they can and will delver a fair and reasonable return for the investment made with them.