This is my penultimate blog for the Self-Improving System project. A great deal has changed since I embarked on this project in May 2022. We have had very considerable political turmoil, of course, that has hit the education department harder than most. Probably more significantly, we have had the ONS reclassification of colleges as public sector.
Without implying any criticism or blame towards any official – very sincerely – I consider the reclassification process to be a symptom of collective incompetence in Whitehall. It is a classic example of why it is wrong to imagine that all that needs to happen to improve the lot of FE is for some key powerful individuals to ‘get it’ – a minister, perhaps, or the officials at Treasury in the education spending team. Nobody particularly wanted the ONS decision, and nobody intended for it to be a key driver of change in the sector. And yet this is now happening, because being a system does not imply being a controlled system.
Many of my interlocutors have misunderstood this point, saying things like “FE isn’t a system because it isn’t managed as a system”. This is a failure of insight. The planet earth is a system but isn’t managed. My house has a heating system, but I’m not managing it; I have certain inputs into it, but I don’t understand how the whole system works and I’m not managing the whole thing, I’m simply influencing it, sometimes intentionally and sometimes in ways I don’t intend and with consequences I don’t want. And so it is with FE – it is a system that we must map and understand as a system if we are then to collectively make the changes to system design that will lead to better, more sustainable and self-improving behaviour and outcomes.
But in the wider world there have been bigger changes. Obviously international events continue to have powerful and complex knock-on effects for FE. But we have also seen the arrival of the first of a new generation of completely open and accessible AI tools in ChatGPT. We are all still grappling with how this changes the worlds of work and education, but it has a direct and surprising effect on my own project.
