In English Higher Education (H.E), there has been a long tradition of partnership arrangements which enable the franchising of university awards by Further Education Colleges (FECs). Amidst an increasingly marketised environment  (Brown, 2011), the established contextual framework on which many of these long standing partnership arrangements are based, is challenged. The research in this paper gives an overview of the emerging partnership context which is developing within this context.

As colleges and universities compete for student numbers they are also expected to continue in collaborative arrangements, although the parameters of these arrangements will be subject to a considerable shift. The nature of this shift will naturally be dependent on a number of factors from high policy, to organisational mission and finances, but also the nature of existing partnership arrangements and the ways in which change is conceptualised and managed on a local level.

The entrenched distinctions that historically divide HE from FE persist, despite global trends in the development of elite systems of HE to mass or universal systems and a ‘fuzzying’ of this divide (Garrod & Macfarlane, 2009). Dougherty (2009) identifies key similarities between U.S community colleges and English FECs; in particular, their role as comprehensive institutions that resist pressures of specialisation. Robertson (2002) in a report to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) outlined the policy drivers for the development of intermediate level qualifications through a comparison of the U.S and French post-compulsory systems. In consideration of the national models for consideration he noted the evidence indicating that where the university sector ‘owns’ intermediate level qualifications these are less successful than when owned by the wider tertiary sector. Such considerations of ownership were treated with caution in the 2003 White Paper (Department for Education and Skills, 2003) which sounded a cautious approach on the role of colleges in relation to the development of the Foundation Degree, a vocationally orientated short cycle qualification on a par with the US and Australian Associate Degree’s:

Foundation degrees will often be delivered in Further Education colleges.          

Universities were clearly placed in the driving seat with a focus on partnerships with FECs as the mechanism for policy delivery. In the subsequent period of growth and in HE, the colleges were to become the major providers of Foundation Degrees (FD), enabled by partnership and consortium arrangements with universities.

Theoretical framing

The research draws on the bottom-up policy implementation (Bevir & Richards, 2009; Lipsky, 2010) tradition to provide analysis of the effects on partnerships of a quasi-marketised environment. Within the New Labour era (1997 – 2010) emphasis was placed on networks of governance based around inclusive dialogue and partnership between community based stakeholders (Freedon, 1999; Le-Grand, 1998) including the private sector. The coalition years have refocused on conceptions of the market and the need for organisations including education providers to be responsive to needs of consumers (Brown & Carasso, 2013). Despite the rhetoric of marketisation there is substantial debate on the nature and capacity for marketisation across HE provision (Hemsley-Brown, 2011). In providing explicit focus on partnership as policy implementation, assumptions on relational power between partners are scrutinised and theorised and reworked within the current debates on the marketisation of HE.

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