Since their incorporation, further education colleges have been charities, a status which could and should have a profound impact on how they see their purpose and role. Perhaps because they were exempt from registration with the Charity Commission, their charitable status was a largely ignored factor when I first started advising them in the mid-1990s. Despite greater attention on demonstrating compliance with charity law over recent years, there still seems to be little consideration to how this core feature of their establishment could shape their strategies and their contribution to public benefit as comparatively powerful, autonomous local actors, in the circumstances that the United Kingdom finds itself in in the 2020s: a shortage of key skills, a worrying productivity gap, and unacceptable and dangerous levels of inequality.
The charitable purpose of colleges is the advancement of education, which includes vocational training, community education, the development of individual competences and skills, and research and adding to collective knowledge. Under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, the charitable objects of colleges are to provide further, higher, and in certain circumstances secondary education, and goods and services connected to those educational activities. Colleges have the power to do anything they consider necessary or expedient in connection with these activities.
