Why FE is more Schrödinger's Cat than a Cinderella sector

By Gary Husband, Professor Gary Husband, Professor of Professional Education at the University of Sunderland

I’ll start this piece with a plea that any physicist out there happening upon this short blog is going to have to forgive me. The use of Schrödinger’s thought experiment, devised in the 1930s in correspondence with Albert Einstein to explore what Schrödinger saw as the problems of quantum mechanics has become synonymous with describing something that exists in two states simultaneously. As a metaphor, it has been widely misappropriated and my treatment of it here is no more sophisticated.

In recent conversations with a colleague, we were both having a rant about a number of things, complaints about rising council tax, closing public amenities (who needs libraries, village halls and swimming pools anyway!), public sector funding and the general ridiculous state of international politics.

Where we landed on the nature, purpose and state of education is likely to be of most interest here, so that is the line I’ll pursue. So what about Schrodinger’s famous cat and the loosely fitting metaphor? We decided that the further education system and general FE colleges are the Schrödinger’s Cats of the UK education system as they manage to exists in several states simultaneously (yes yes, physicists sit down, I know that’s not quite how it goes…) Colleges across the UK are lauded to be the very beating heart of the economy and vital to the skills agenda and central to a return to economic prosperity: “The priority for this government is to build a skills system that will drive forward opportunity and deliver the growth that our economy needs.” (Janet Derby, Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Education, 12 December 2024)

To be fair to the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Education, she was setting out a vision for the new Labour government, but you’ll forgive us all for not leaping up in unison and celebrating as, this has been repeated previously on many occasions (as an example): “Our FE and technical colleges are not just places of learning, they are vital engines of both social mobility and of economic prosperity; training the next generation and helping deliver our modern industrial strategy.” (Prime Minister Theresa May at the launch of the Augar report, 2019)

I’m not going to be fair to the previous Prime Minister as, at the same time, (according to the IFS) between 2010 and 2024 total adult skills spending dropped to 23% below the levels recorded at the start of that period, classroom-based adult education faired even worse with a near 40% recorded drop.

The further education and adult skills sector appears to do what the fabled cat managed to do and exist in two states at once: important enough for it to be thought of as the rock upon which the economy will be built - and simultaneously, not important enough to properly fund.

In January 2025, the Labour government launched a new review of further education in England with the aim of making it ‘fit for the future’. Whilst the aims of the review are laudable and could have potential for impact, it remains to be seen if the downward trend in funding and resource is reversed.

It is normally at around this point in such blogs where the writer takes a deep breath and begins to make some moves towards a grand finale and some insightfully enlightening nuggets of wisdom. These normally start with a tired metaphor about FE being the ‘Cinderella sector’ (it isn’t - Cinders did eventually go the ball and marry the prince), or being something akin to the ‘Swiss army knife of sectors’ (I like that one better) or FE is the ‘engine room’ of the economy (anyone who has ever been in an engine room knows they are loud, dirty, smelly, greasy, unpleasant places full of problems that need to be fixed).

Sadly, none of these metaphors help. If we’re honest with ourselves, as a nation, we know what FE and colleges do, we know by and large how they do it and also, what they are needed for. The problem is more related to how all this is framed and positioned.

Increasingly, the FE sector’s existence is justified in terms of value for money for the tax payer, how much the economy can expect to gain from the investment and how good a job people who get some further education can secure. And yes, before you all shout at me, I know, that is quite important but, it’s not the whole picture (queue bad metaphor), and we shouldn’t get caught up in looking at the colour of the wall and the tatty frame and forget the masterpiece that’s hanging in plane sight.

If we allow the entire sector to be framed only by its value to economy and not it’s value to people and communities then (dramatic pause as I build to the finale…) we are never going to get away from fiscal calculations focusing on investment returns.

I have had the pleasure of spending a great deal of my life with educators working in FE (I still do) and I have never yet met anyone who, when asked about their motivations for becoming a teacher/lecturer responded with, “it’s my deep and unending love for economic growth that drives my pedagogical values”. It’s always about people, or learning, or knowledge, or a subject, or all of them.

So, when you’re asked about where you work, be sure to tell the whole story and let’s get on with continuing to share why FE is actually so important. In the meantime, we can wait with baited breath to see if the cat in the box is indeed, dead - or alive and kicking.