CEL

The Centre for Excellence in Leadership had its farewell bash on the terraces at the House of Lords this week. Many of the great and good in FE gathered to hear eulogies to the magnificent achievements of an organisation which, in its four-year life, had transformed the face of management and leadership in colleges.

Past “learners” on its courses gushed with praise for the organisation. Paul Head, Principal of the College of North East London, said that so “transforming” were CEL’s offerings, he spent £500,000 hard-won cash sending managers on its improvement programmes. “And worth every penny it was too.”

Lynne Sedgmore, the irrepressibly cheerful CEL chief executive, read out testimony after testimony from her staff saying this was their best ever job - in an organisation with an astonishing 97% “customer satisfaction” rate. And everyone’s favourite FHE and lifelong learning minister, Bill Rammell, spoke of it having a “most significant” impact on the quality of college management.

It was as though Antony had come to praise Caesar not to bury him. Which all begs the question: If it’s so damned good, why the hell is the Government closing it down?

“We’re not losing it down!” ministers insist. What they are doing is “combining” the best of CEL with the best of the Quality Improvement Agency in a new organisation from April 1. This should not be mistaken with a merger, since everyone knows there is no such thing as a merger, only a takeover of the weak by the strong. To say “merger”, therefore, would suggest that the QIA in its all too brief two-to-three-year life had been a failure.

Well. Some say. But there were notable successes: QIA helped improve relations between colleges and training providers; it promoted a better model of college self-improvement and launched the Excellence Gateway – a web resource to promote best practice. But it wasn’t tough enough for ministers. Moreover, it ventured into other domains, not least CEL’s area of leadership and management training.

The absence of QIA folk from this week’s gathering was noted by many. Then, why should they be there since this was a CEL party? Even if it had more the feel of a launch party. So, not a merger, more a renaissance, a rebirth, a phoenix rising.

Er…Not really that either. As moods mellowed and tongues loosened with the aid of the finest Claret supplied by the Gathering’s sponsor, The Baroness Wall of New Barnet, some of the great and the good proffered their views – the “facts” as they knew them. Off the record and strictly not for quoting, you understand.

It was a story of too much caution on the one hand and too much zealotry on the other. And to the mix was added a large measure of the usual political interference. Both organisations were born to be “owned and run by the sector”. At least, that’s what the politicians said at the time. They even wound-up the all-controlling Department for Education and Skills Standards Unit as “redundant” in the process to prove the point when QIA was launched.

The result was the worst of all possible worlds, said one government adviser at the CEL bash. “Civil servants never felt they had proper control over the QIA. But at the same time people in the colleges never felt they really owned it. It was neither one thing nor the other.”

So what does this mean for the new “combined” (not merged, remember) phoenix, under chairmanship of the formidable Ruth Silver? Well, it doesn’t bode well, according to several at the gathering. To get a feel of the way things are going, you need to answer the question: Why did the entrepreneurial and fiercely independent minded Ioan Morgan quit the six-figure salary post before he even started?

Did he mean it when he said he simply decided he did not wish to quit as the highly successful principal of Warwickshire College? Well, yes and no. As another government adviser put it: “He took one look at the policy side of the job and the level of interference there would be and decided against it.”

This of course all came out of alcohol fuelled revelations at a party. But as the old saying goes: in vino veritas.

It begs the question of whether politicians and civil servants can ever really let go. If they can’t what hope is there for the much bigger question of self-regulation, the work of the Single Voice organisation and the politicians’ pledge to trust FE?