ABSTRACT
Unlike the growth of mass schooling, further education has taken a highly individualistic path, its expansion depending much on the patronage of industry, business and commerce and the ability to attract greater student numbers. Yet despite its resilience and resourcefulness in the market, post-16 provision has, over the past thirty years, been patchy, operating against a national backdrop of under-funding, low participation and policy neglect (Gleeson 1996: 87)
The further education (FE) colleges of England and Wales are unique in Europe. Some colleges have their roots in the Mechanics Institutes of the mid-nineteenth century; others were built with ‘whisky money’, duty levied in the late nineteenth century on beer and spirit and passed to local councils to be used for ‘suitable’ purposes, including the provision of ‘technical instruction’. Other colleges were built more recently, as part of the general expansion of FE within the 1960s. Some colleges later became polytechnics and ‘drifted’ towards higher education. But whatever the origins, in 1993, as a result of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, all FE colleges became autonomous corporations, outside the control of their local education authorities; for the first time the FE sector had its own funding body, the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC), and was to become subject to a new funding regime. In addition it was to become further exposed to the education and training market.
