ABSTRACT
The LSS and post-compulsory education and training (PCET) sector in general, and its largest component and chief vehicle – the further education (FE) sector – in particular, has, arguably, witnessed more radical change and development over the last few decades than any other sphere of educational provision. In the then Secretary of State’s speech to the Association of Colleges for Further and Higher Education in 1989, Kenneth Baker was concerned to point out that FE was no longer ‘just the bit between school and higher education’. There was an insistence that the FE sector was:
not just the Cinderella of the education service . . . Over 1,750,000 attend further education colleges . . . taught by the equivalent of 63,000 lecturers. There are some 400 LEA-maintained colleges. The whole thing costs £1 billion a year. It is a big, big enterprise.
