I was glad to see further education has finally been put on the agenda for consideration by the recently elected Labour government. I hope many people involved in this sphere across a range of roles, including students, respond to its call for evidence. However, I believe there is a significant omission in the list of designated topics – a thorough review of management and funding.
When public goes private
I started my teaching career in further education in the early 1990s, from a community education perspective. This was the kiln in which my perspectives on teaching and learning were forged, and the platform for a later career in both school and higher education.
At that time, there had recently been a major change in funding for, and management of, the further education sector. It was introduced by the Conservative government under John Major; the so called ‘incorporation’ of further education. It was Britain’s first venture into removing local authority control and directly funding private corporations to manage state education: the process of ‘corporatisation.’
In my own experience, the experiment rapidly became a disaster (described in my article Dancing to the Algorithm written in 2021). This was why I despaired at the Conservative government’s handover of publicly funded state schools to private enterprise – their policy of academisation, active from 2010 to 2024.
As I have documented in articles in Yorkshire Bylines over the past five years, and just as I feared, very similar issues to those that had previously arisen at Barnsley College (recounted below) recurred in the academy/ multi academy trusts that Michael Gove later unleashed upon England’s state schooling.
Barnsley: a warning ignored
The basic facts of what happened at Barnsley College, eventually validated in a criminal court of law, are documented in a Guardian article of 2007.
Between 1998 and 2000, I was teaching at Barnsley College. During that time, an anonymous whistleblower messaged David (Dave) Gibson, the NATFHE (union) convenor at the college, informing him that Progress Training, a subsidiary company set up by the principal of Barnsley College to help it “achieve its target for boosting student numbers through franchising,” was “basically creaming off most of the [Further Education Funding Council] income generated”.
Stuart Spacey, a lecturer, had been promoted by David Eade, the principal of the college, to the post of Progress Training company secretary.
The Guardian reported that the whistleblower had “made detailed allegations of other linked companies and the falsifying of minutes of meetings, reports, inspections, contracts, student achievements, learning agreements and other franchising documents. Some were bizarre”.
In 1996/7, for example, the inordinately large number of 32,000 students had apparently been enrolled through “off-site collaborative provision”, that is, franchising.
Additionally: “[Progress Training] was accused of making a £21,000 loan to Frontline UK Ltd, a company for which Eade was company secretary and his stepchildren were directors. Its main activity was to produce a magazine about surfing… Photocopies of documents backed up the allegations.”
The College Board of Governors – which the incorporation legislation had made sole managers of the college – denied all the allegations.
£1.5mn water investment
At this point, Dave Gibson and some other union members decided to embark upon an in-depth investigation to unearth the truth of the matter. A notable red flag was that South Yorkshire had been in receipt of significant sums of European Union funding during the 1980s and 90s, due to its level of disadvantage.
There had long been speculation among the lecturing staff as to whether any of this money had ever reached the college and if so, how it had been spent, because this had never been made clear to us. Gibson could find no specific information.
What he did find was that the college was in financial crisis, owing the central Further Education Funding Council £6mn that it had overclaimed. One of the college managers disclosed that Progress Training had invested about £1.5mn in Sheldale Water, a company that boasted it would bottle 77 million litres a year from a well underneath Barnsley – nothing to do with education.
Enter the Serious Fraud Office
In 2001, the Serious Fraud Office began an investigation into the college finances that resulted, six years later, in the criminal prosecution of Progress Training company secretary Stuart Spacey, who was jailed for 18 months in February 2007. The Guardian reported:
“The court was told that Eade, 62, was the brains and prime mover in a fraud that involved creaming off up to £940,000 in public money through a web of companies.”
However, 69-year-old Spacey had been left to “face the music alone” when an earlier court hearing accepted that Eade was unfit to stand trial on medical grounds. Spacey admitted taking around £184,000 and being involved in appropriating £328,000. At his sentencing, the judge remarked:
“Never were you the principal player or main beneficiary… Because of the serious ill-health of your former co-accused and the discontinuance of the proceedings against him, you are now in the dock alone, shouldering the inevitable penal consequences.”
‘Glaring flaws’ exposed
David Eade died in 2024, and Dave Gibson died in 2017. His obituary states: “His record on fighting racism and fascism, from beating back the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s, the BNP in the 1990s or the EDL more recently, was second to none.”
At the end of the Barnsley College fraud court case, Gibson said “the case should not fade from collective memory, because it has exposed glaring flaws… [in] the process for dealing with serious criminal allegations in colleges and the fitness of governors for dealing with them”.
Pawns trapped in a maze
I vividly remember the days in early 2000 when it became clear that something was most definitely ‘up’ at Barnsley College. The principal had abruptly gone on sick leave; management was in disarray. Programme meetings were no longer being held and expenses went unpaid. Outreach ventures that had been vital in such a deprived area were shuddering to a halt. The teaching staff began to feel like pawns trapped in a maze.
Rumours of all types of financial shenanigans began leaking into the lecturers’ staffrooms, with assertions that the police had arrested the principal, and that some very expensive artwork allegedly purchased for the college had been found in someone’s private house.
Gibson called a union meeting to clarify what was actually known. His main aim, he said, was to ask us to keep the work of the college going for the sake of the students, even if payment of salaries was delayed – we all willingly complied. Luckily, this never occurred.
Aftermath
A gut-wrenching moment was when one of the support staff asked me to explain what was going on, and when I did, replied: “Oh, well, that will all be sorted out when Mr Eade is back, won’t it.” I have been poignantly reminded of this recently, reading of Trump voters in the USA insisting that it cannot be because of “Mr Trump” that their health benefits have been cancelled, or their friend is being expelled from the country…
I also had a disturbing thought that I might personally have been used to funnel money into Progress Training by signing up for an in-house staff development programme in 1998 that mysteriously closed with no explanation two weeks after it was initiated. I still have no idea if this was the case.
I left Barnsley College in autumn 2000 to work across South Yorkshire on a community education collaborative project undertaken by local universities. I often revisited the college in the course of that initiative and over the next three years was relieved to observe it bouncing back, under established new management.
Corporatisation’s bitter legacy
Nearly two decades later, in September 2017, I was horrified when the Wakefield City Academies Trust collapsed amidst rumours very similar to those that had swirled around Barnsley College.
In November 2019, Schools Week reported that it had been announced that the DFE had given the trust a sum in the region of £500,000 and that “Annual accounts previously revealed the trust had breached rules over payments of more than £430,000 to a firm connected to… its former interim chief executive.”
No prosecutions were ever pursued.
The TES commented: “The imminent closure of the trust marks the end of a troubled three years, in which WCAT went from being one of the government’s most trusted sponsors – and being given extra funding to raise standards in the North – to being mired in scandal.”
Yet another episode of costly mismanagement in state education in a deprived area of Yorkshire.
There are other stories of financial abuses within multi academy trusts that began leaking into the public arena over the early 2020s. The high costs of their central teams are also an issue, given the UK’s precarious financial position in an increasingly uncertain world. At the end of 2024, the current Labour government finally announced some initial steps to deal with the problem, more than thirty years after the incorporation of further education.
A public enquiry and transparency
I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to know how much public money has been paid to private education corporations in which individuals have used public money to enrich themselves, their friends and their own business interests.
Over the early 2000s, through my connections to the FE community, I heard of many cases similar to the one that arose in Barnsley College that never reached public attention, and a few that did.
This issue now extends well beyond schools and colleges to other areas of children’s, health and social care services. I welcome Labour’s first foray, The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill, into dealing with this situation.
But I would urge them, in an era where Britain is desperately short of funds, to create a full commission to investigate past misuses of public monies in this way, and to advise on a more transparent system for the allocation and control of the money we pay in tax to fund public services in the future.
Given the body of evidence now stacking up, nearly a third of a century to reach this point is quite long enough.
