The bureaucracy busters

Red tape is the bane of further education colleges. Today, at a national conference, they will learn the outcome of an inquiry into the paperwork overload. Neil Merrick reports

College principal Lynne Sedgmore spent part of last week helping to set targets for her staff and students. To reach the internal targets, which are obligatory for all colleges, it was necessary to assess the expected levels of achievement by students at Guildford College as well as the number that would attend courses.

Without accurate data, Guildford could not hope to set, let alone reach, its targets. "We have to ascertain what targets you set for every course in the college," she explains.

In addition to setting targets, Ms Sedgmore was busy completing student returns for Surrey Learning and Skills Council. The college is also in the process of a performance review for the local LSC, and had just said farewell to auditors who had been in the college the week before.

Like most college principals, Ms Sedgmore often works 14 hours a day. "The only way you can keep up with the paperwork is by spending hours and hours on it inside and outside college," she says.

But later today John Harwood, the chief executive of the national Learning and Skills Council, should have important news for Ms Sedgmore and her hard-pressed colleagues around the country. It is exactly 12 months since Mr Harwood promised colleges that the bureaucracy they face would be cut by 25 per cent. At the same time, he announced the setting up of a bureaucracy-busting task force, of which Ms Sedgmore was a member, to advise the LSC on how it should cut unnecessary administration.

Most people envisaged that the task force would come up with a list of things to be cut from the workload. But instead of adopting a checklist approach, the task force, which published its report yesterday at the annual conference of the Association of Colleges, has come up with a more radical solution.

In effect, it has thrown the problem back at the LSC by telling it to simplify a new funding system that is due to come into force next year for all providers of post-16 learning, including school sixth-forms and private trainers. It has also appealed for local LSCs to treat FE colleges as grown-ups by demanding fewer audits and allowing them to plan what they are going to spend three years ahead without being required to keep reporting back to their funder.

When the LSC inherited responsibility for funding colleges from the Further Education Funding Council in April 2001, it promised to make funding and regulation simpler by doing away with complex FEFC terminology, such as units and tariffs. But within weeks there was severe scepticism over whether it was succeeding.

When Mr Harwood stands up to speak at the AoC conference today, he will be under strong pressure to accept the task force's recommendations and promise that next year's funding system, which is already being drawn up by the LSC, will be simpler than what has gone before.

Sir George Sweeney, the principal of Knowsley College, who chairs the task force, says an audit culture has developed in FE that simply feeds upon itself. "We've had audits piled upon audits," he says. "The LSC should commit itself to fundamentally reforming the funding system."

Rather than go for a speedy 25 per cent reduction in bureaucracy that might not have had a lasting impact, the task force concluded that it was more important to treat "the cause, not the symptoms, of the malaise". However, it does make some specific recommendations, including ending the system of "clawback" under which colleges that do not recruit as many students as expected have to return money to their local LSC.

According to Sir George, colleges that come into this category could have their targets adjusted in future years rather than lose money straight away. "Colleges should develop a level of trust with their local LSC and make realistic judgements about the students coming in," he adds. "We have got to develop a system that is based on that level of trust."

When colleges left local authority control in 1993, they were pretty much allowed to raise money as they liked. When financial scandals broke at colleges such as Halton and Wirral, the government began to tighten the system by insisting on more and more checks. According to John Brennan, the director of FE development at the AoC, these have now increased to the stage where the Government is practically micro-managing further education.

As another member of the task force, he welcomes the fact that it wants to do more than just tinker with the system, but stresses that this may mean the changes colleges wish to see take longer to achieve. "There will not be changes overnight," he says. "We are trying to change the culture of the system, which means the pay-off should come over a period of time."

Peter Pendle, the chief executive of the Association for College Management, is fairly impressed by the task force's work, but it remains to be seen how other organisations react, including the Department for Education and Skills and the National Audit Office. Ministers, Mr Pendle says, are sometimes distrustful of colleges and do not treat them with the same respect as, say, universities. "Colleges must demonstrate that they should have this relationship of trust."

The LSC claims already to have taken some steps to reduce bureaucracy, including simplifying the way colleges apply for money from the standards fund and cutting the number of performance reviews they must complete each year from three to two. But Mr Pendle and others remain to be convinced. "The perception of college principals is that, since the task force got under way, the situation has got worse, not better," he says.

Back at Guildford College, Lynne Sedgmore estimates about one-quarter of the college's 660 staff are involved in some form of administration. But such staff are vital to avoid a greater burden falling on principals, who would rather oversee teaching and learning. "The physical amount of paperwork we need to read, fill in and check on a daily basis is absolutely phenomenal," Ms Sedgmore says. "I used to be the sort of person whose desk was clear at the end of the day, but that isn't possible any more."

education@independent.co.uk