ABSTRACT
On 1 April 1993, a new sector of education was born. Under the provisions of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, 465 colleges were taken out of local authority control in England (there were parallel arrangements in Wales, but Scotland and Northern Ireland continued to handle things differently) and given a Funding Council of their own. In future, this would be their main channel of public financial support. The reasons for the profound change are not wholly clear. On an optimistic interpretation, it was to bring the colleges out of the shadows to take their rightful place, along with schools and universities, as one of the three great pillars of the educational system. But there were hints too of darker motives. The then Conservative government’s great embarrassment over the poll tax and its urgent need to reduce local authority spending come to mind. Removing the colleges was, in any case, part of the gradual stripping away of local authority functions which had also seen the polytechnics transferred and the attempt made to encourage schools to opt out. Behind this attrition, one suspects, was the unrequited hope that the LEAs (often thought troublesome by central government) might just wither away.
