Who
is FE
Guild

David Hughes started his career in the voluntary sector because he wanted to try and make a positive difference to the world around him.

Throughout his career he has been heavily involved in adult education, including working at The Learning and Skills Council for around a decade. He is currently chief executive at NIACE and chair of the FE Guild Steering group.

What is FE Guild?

The FE Guild is an organisation which is currently being set up at the request of UK government but the development is being led by the sector. They hope to create an organisation that can guide and support the development of the FE education system, although key roles and remits are still being decided. The Association of Colleges, supported by a broad Steering Group, are managing the creation of FE Guild, which is due to launch in August 2013.

What are David’s hopes for FE Guild?

“I chair the partnership of organisations who are passionately interested in what this guild looks like, what it does, what it doesn’t do, what it gets involved in, what it focuses on, how it does it,” David says. Many of the organisations on the steering group represent the FE Guild's customers. David explains: “One of the things you have to take into account is that the group does not want to presume that they know what their members or stakeholders or constituencies want. So one of the things we’ve tried to do is go beyond the groups of representative bodies to reach out to employers and practitioners across the whole of the learning and skills sector.

“There are lots and lots of very passionate views about what the Guild should be, and then there are equally passionate views about what it shouldn’t be, and it is almost impossible to get everybody to get what they want from it. So it’s one of those wonderful situations where you have to try to not hit the lowest common denominator, but hit something that most people I hope will in the end say, ‘Yeah that’s actually quite good’.”

Although development of what FE Guild does and how it operates will continue, the steering group are aiming to have an implementation plan in place at the end of March 2013. David tells us more: “I want to come up with realistic aims and objectives. I don’t think it’s just this sector, but there is a tendency in setting up these sorts of organisations to be too aspirational about what can be achieved in the next couple of years: we do want further education or the learning and skills sector to be brilliant – of course we do – but we’re not going to deliver that on 1 August 2013.”

David believes there is a lot of national level activity which a properly supported FE Guild could facilitate. This includes:

Encouraging ongoing continuing professional development (CPD)

Setting standards for employers on how to support staff to improve their skills

Commissioning research that could be led by, supported by, advocated for by FE Guild

Leading debate and discussion for the sector, in a more centralised way

Taking a leadership role on how FE learning should look in the future

Supporting qualifications to allow people to enter the teaching profession

Recruiting the best candidates into the teaching profession and supporting them to carry on learning.

 

Use of technology in the FE sector

David was recently on the judging panel for the TES awards and one of the categories was Use of Technology in Learning. “I thought the applications in that category were quite basic, such as ‘we’re innovative because students put their homework in online’ or, ‘they can see what they’ve achieved online’ or, ‘they can enrol online’. I’m thinking well that’s good, but isn’t that pretty common practice across lots of sectors and industries?”.

David is a strong believer in the benefits technology can bring to learning: “I’ve got some fairly strong views on the use of technology in the FE sector. I think there hasn’t been enough need for the proper embedding of technology in learning generally. There are all sorts of examples of where its use is fantastic and superb, but I think for the majority technology is things like whiteboards and basic virtual learning environments (VLE), which are important, but a lot of them are being used in a very simple way, so there’s a lot of opportunity being missed.”

Although it is great that this basic embedding is becoming common practice David believes that the benefits of technology could be utilised much more widely. The NIACE conference before Christmas on use of technology in learning had a lot of examples, such as using technology to develop course materials – where the current learners are developing the course materials that will be available to next year’s learners. This is a great way of using technology to widen the learner experience and demonstrates how technology can allow you to gather knowledge from a variety of sources rather than just one place. This practice also encourages students and teachers to test learning resources and gain feedback so that they can continue to develop and improve them. David comments: “The teacher isn’t the be all and end all, the font of all knowledge, because that’s just nonsense, isn’t it, in today’s worldwide web and when you are working with adults who bring rich experience into the learning.”

Technology, almost by definition, empowers the learner and that can be threatening to some people. “A lot of teachers, lecturers, trainers – a lot, I don’t know whether it’s a majority or a minority – have been taught to be presenters, so their teacher training or their training as a lecturer has been about how to use somebody else’s curriculum and materials and present them. And they might be brilliant at that, but if you start to then equalise the relationship between teacher and learner a bit more, maybe that’s threatening to people because instead of them being one step ahead they are almost on the same page as the learner”, says David.

Using technology can open up opportunities that people don’t know they have. FE Guild wants to unleash the potential of digital and David believes we all need to raise awareness of these opportunities to practitioners, teachers, lecturers, trainers. “Once you start to open up how technology can be used and support them to have the tools, they’ll start to think of all sorts of ways to use them that I can’t even begin to think of. And that’s the approach we want to take – give people skills and capacity and get them to unleash their creativity.”

Online learning and the future of further education

David believes face to face time and social interaction should be part of any learning experience but sees potential in the development of online learning. It can open up access for learners and allows more flexibility. It also provides an opportunity to reach a wider audience and get more people involved. It is David’s belief that the use of technology and accessible education will help to change the way further education will work in the future. He hopes that we will eventually move away from the more structured ‘chalk and talk classroom broadcast’ and offer a more interactive learning experience.

Changes from more traditional methods can often make people feel threatened. There is often the concern that they will be replaced by a computer in the corner. David comments: “I don’t think anyone’s advocating that, so I think it’s one of those mythologies really, but it’s a mythology that could get in the way. For me there are all sorts of things that need to happen. Some of which is about leadership, so the way we discuss and talk about technology. We need to describe it as benefiting learning rather than replacing teaching, and that’s really, really important.”

David thinks it’s important for organisations such as Jisc and NIACE to describe how people are using technology to enhance the experience of the teacher, as well as the learning experience. If you look at the enthusiasm of teachers and lecturers who are creative about the way they teach and their use of technology you will see it doesn’t diminish their position, it enhances the enjoyment of what they’re doing because they can see a greater impact.