Across Europe, lifelong learning policies have developed in support of the Lisbon strategy to create ‘sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ (European Parliament 2000: 11) and produce ‘a dynamic economy to fuel our wider social and environmental ambitions’ (European Commission, 2005: 5). They have therefore been directed towards increasing skill levels, and accrediting non-formal learning in the workplace.  In particular, they have attempted to link vocational learning more closely to employers’ needs.  One of the ways in which this has been pursued in UK policies on vocational education and training has been by developing new vocational pathways into higher education (HE), often through part-time programmes for those already in craft, technical or associate professional levels of employment.  A key feature of most such programmes is that they are delivered not by universities directly, but in further education (FE) colleges in partnership with higher education institutions (HEIs).  They are therefore referred to generally as ‘HE in FE’, which has now become commonplace in the UK.

Given that HEIs enjoy higher status than FE colleges in the broad field of education, and that both are based on very different traditions, such partnerships inevitably entail the interaction of different sector-specific cultures, and this is the focus of this paper.  Far from the mutual and equitable partnerships suggested by Trim (2001), FE-HE relations continue to appear hierarchical, and student progression in particular has been shown to remain problematic (Parry et al, 2008).  But how, at the micro-level of practice, do such partnerships evolve?  How do they invoke and mediate sectoral and institutional cultures as they develop?  What contestation takes place between different sectoral cultures, and to what extent are they reconciled or reinforced in the process?  And what impact do these have on the learners’ experiences?

The theoretical framework deployed is a Bourdieusian one (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999).  The notions of field (education) and sub-fields (HE and FE) are helpful in understanding the respective positionings and competition for advantage of different types of institution.  ‘Institutional habitus’ (Reay et al, 2001) allows a further refinement of understanding in relation to different cultures in each sector, and their interaction through collaboration and contestation.  The notion of habitus is also applied to understand the positioning (in both active and passive senses) of tutors from different institutions and students from different social backgrounds. 

Colley, H. (2010) 'THere is no golden key': overcoming problems with data anal