Further Education is a triumph. It has become a space that promotes the inclusivity of all, across ethnic groups, academic and creative ability, race, gender, age and class to create an environment where the reality of the social needs of individuals and communities is amalgamated into a space for all. It presents to us the vulnerability of our society in a way that schools and universities don’t.
I would argue, not at the behest of A level routes, that the college art space represents the best space to learn about art post-16. Art departments provide you with increasingly personalised spaces and freedom to access facilities across a range of media as you specialise and develop skills, developing a precedent of what students can expect as they envision strategies of being within an art practice.
But colleges are challenging institutions to work within, as aging workforces, cost saving narratives and the awareness of increasingly complex individual student need collide with “market forces”. Managers focus on economic narratives to justify the decommissioning of creative facilities often taking generations to establish with generational knowledge built into its fabric, lost because they are inefficient.
