In the last week I’ve hit a rich vein of reports and resources on ‘HE in FE’. Here’s a summary of what I’ve come across so far:
The first one has catchy title ‘Further education and the delivery of higher-level qualifications: understanding the contribution of further education to the delivery of Level 4 (higher) and professional qualifications – final report‘. This report was commissioned by the Learning Skills Council (LSC) to provide an overview of the contribution Further Education Colleges (FECs) in England make to the provision at Level 4 and above. The report concludes that "FECs make a significant contribution to higher level provision, especially for learners who might otherwise find HE difficult to access because of lack of prior academic attainment, inadequate funding, geographical location, or lack of confidence." Looking at the data in the report it was interesting to note that while the total number of students taking Level 4 and above has increased by 10% between 2002/03 and 2005/06 the proportion choosing to study degrees at FECs has decreased slightly from 12% to 11%.
We are also just over half way through the JISC funded HE in FE projects. A number of projects have been funded which are implementing, piloting and evaluating a range of technologies with learners in the HE in FE context. These projects have been piloting existing technologies capturing the learner experience. The full list of projects is available from the JISC HE in FE site.
The Higher Education Academy (HEA) is also currently running a HE in FE enhancement programme. Of note is the monthly e-briefing which you can subscribe to or download from the main HEA – HE in FE page. They also have a comprehensive list of the Subject Centres which have pages devoted to HE in FE on the Subject Centre Work page.
One final report which is in my ‘to read’ pile is the QAA ‘Learning from Academic review of higher education in further education colleges in England 2005-07‘. This report was recently highlighted by a Times Higher Education article.
UPDATE: If you are interested in the reports above you may also like:
- Higher Education in West London Further Education Colleges Report, West London Lifelong Learning Network, 2008
- The Role of the Regional Further Education Colleges in Delivering Higher Education in the East of England, East of England Development Agency, 2007
kevin brace
This reminds me of another blog posting of mine where I discussed the methods of how the Colchester Institute had used a content management system (Microsoft Sharepoint) to map evidence to the IQER process. My original post on that subject in this here :
http://he.rscwmsystems.org.uk/wordpress/?p=201