ABSTRACT
Franchising1 is an arrangement ‘where a college makes an agreement with another organization to deliver on behalf of the college provision funded by the [Fu rther Education] Funding Council. The college retains the responsibility for the transfer of funds to the franchised organization’ (FEFC, 1994). Its essence is the transfer of funds out of the college sector to another organization. Franchising does not include distance teaching, where a college instructs people off its main premises by providing textual or electronic teaching materials backed by tuition (for example by a marking service or telephonic or video links); it does not include outreach work, whereby college staff go into locations not owned by the college to teach there. However, the practice of franchising has sometimes been defended (by Kennedy, 1997, for example, and in a letter to me by Baroness Blackstone, Minister of State for Higher Education) as including outreach and distance teaching.
