Against the drive towards defence, and the commodification of skills, we must establish what future we want for Further Education, writes Dan Holland.
In late 2025, the further education lecturers’ branch of the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS-FELA) released its first ever formal report into the state of Scottish Further Education.1 The report uncovered a sector in crisis,2 with years of underfunding and cuts reducing staffing by 7% and students by 12% according to the Scottish Funding Council’s own figures.3 These cuts have caused course closures disproportionately affecting the education of the most vulnerable. Colleges seem to have lost their sense of civic and social purpose. Former institutions of lifelong learning, community anchors, and ‘centres of working-class confidence’,4 have been indentured to the needs of employers for whom education is a commodity, a factory producing compliant workforces rather than critically minded students and community wellbeing. The marketisation already embedded in our sister sector of Higher Education has started to erode community education as a social good.5 The report documents the increasing privatisation of services and commercial ventures with opaque financial reporting. These trends raise questions about whether governance structures within the sector are robust enough, given private companies’ access to public money without proper scrutiny. FE truly risks becoming a fragmented system focused purely on short-term goals, and a just-in-time ethos undermining the people colleges were created for.
On 12th March 2026,6 the UK government announced funding for two ‘Defence Technical Excellence Colleges’ in Scotland if the Scottish Government match-funds them. Of course, this piqued the interest of established Scottish colleges, who must have seen their continual thirst for funding in the desert of flat-cash settlements about to be quenched by an oasis of weapons manufacture. The sector is already awash with defence contracts; Leonardo, BAE Systems and Balfour Beatty all utilise the substantial talents of FE lecturers to upskill their workforces through apprentice and day-release teaching programmes. This pivot by the UK government, in response to US foreign policy, is a characteristic of a lack of vision and imagination about how to spend public money for public good. The EIS-FELA report states:
EIS-FELA believe in the intrinsic value of education; if there’s political will to invest then it should not be predicated on the arms industries but in transferring these skills to a Just Transition and allowing academic freedoms and the ability of colleges to genuinely meet their local and regional needs.
This is a better starting point for any institution of learning.
On same day as the UK Government’s announcement, somewhat ironically, the Scottish Government launched a “college sector of the future workstream”.7 There is a sharp contrast between the defence-centred vision of the UK Government and this separate Scottish Government announcement, which acknowledged the role colleges play in their communities. The F&HE Minister rightly talked of how “a thriving college sector is vital for our shared prosperity and collective wellbeing”, as well as the importance of colleges in the transition to net-zero.
Still, such government rhetoric must be met with careful scrutiny, and a degree of cynicism. We remember, in the face of post-Covid mental-health crisis, that the National Union of Students had to campaign hard for £20m from the Scottish Government to reinstate on-campus counsellors. Furthermore, the Scottish Government promised that redundant workers at Grangemouth would have access to funds for retraining in the clean energy sector, but while highly skilled workers managed to access some training a year ago, there has been little joined up progress in making a skills transition part of a wider industrial strategy. Meanwhile the UK energy minster recognises the skills of Grangemouth workers and does not want them left behind; so why then is there no talk of a Just Transition Technical Excellence College?
During the last year, the Forth Valley College Branch of EIS-FELA has fought tirelessly alongside central belt communities against the closure of the Alloa campus,8 finally winning a 12-month reprieve. The EIS-FELA report argues for a more community-anchored direction, that would fill Alloa campus with redundant Grangemouth workers retraining into clean energy professions. There are around 42,000 clean energy professionals in Scotland who provide a vital public service and improve our environmental future. This is the kind of coherent strategy that we should expect: one which improves our capacity for socially useful shared prosperity.
The Workers of the Future
The ‘workstreams of the future’ might provide opportunities, but only if used correctly. With stakeholder meetings that report directly to government, trade unions can carve out space to directly influence the process if they coordinate effectively. College trade unions need to develop a shared vision of how they see the sector, building on the EIS-FELA report. College leaders have already gained the initiative by participating in the Tripartite Alignment Group, which currently sidelines the staff voice. The EIS-FELA Executive has therefore passed a motion to organise a trades union-led conference to articulate our collective vision for Scotland’s colleges. This needs to be enacted with haste following the election of a new government in Holyrood, and the STUC is well-placed to navigate and coordinate this with its affiliates. The movement and workforce must coalesce around this idea, setting out collective demands of the workstream.
EIS-FELA is concerned at the direction of travel if unions do not influence policymakers more effectively. The potential £20 million towards new defence colleges is simply not enough to create and sustain long-term educational goals, yet the workstream may tilt towards a focus on defence. Likewise, continually filling gaps with short-term private provision and industry-led skills programmes does not provide a sound industrial and educational strategy. It merely sticks a plaster on open community wounds whilst transferring public sector money into private hands. The Scottish Funding Council broadly agrees with EIS-FELA on direct funding,9 but the EIS-FELA report opposes outsourcing, including key areas such as Learning Support; the drive for commercial income, including through competing with private providers as well as partnering with them; and the growing use of agency workers.
EIS-FELA recognise the role that businesses play in our communities. We are part of our communities and we use those businesses. However, we must be clear about what drives good quality education. Our priority is that education and skills are available to all, building learner confidence and benefiting Scotland’s economy holistically. When I started as a college lecturer, it was continually reinforced that your average worker has around 12 different jobs across 7 different careers in their lifetime, which is why Further Education is so important. We should not defer to the priorities of a single business or industry. That approach is simply not rooted in our students’ reality. It equally ignores the emancipatory value of education for our English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and students with Additional Support Needs (ASN); not to mention the critical analysis we all need as western society flails beneath a sea of misinformation, disinformation and AI slop that is scaffolding the worst elements of the populist right.
The EIS-FELA report argues for well-resourced provisions in other industries outside the traditional manual skills context. Health and social care are desperately short of workers. We must also preserve access to all areas of the creative industries for our working-class communities so that cultural pursuits do not become exclusive. Should we really be saying to our young people that working in events, beauty therapy or social sciences are avenues now closed off to them? These are industries of the present and future, so must be protected at all costs.
The current framing of the skills economy commodifies education, exclusively driven by Key Performance Indicators. To see students as future economic units of output breeds a dehumanising approach to our learners and a demoralising managerial culture for our staff. The Community Wealth Building Act 2026 offers a potential way out.10 There must be genuine consultation with our communities, which absolutely must include our colleges. Public bodies now have a duty to embed CWB principles, including fair work and sustainability. Colleges are ideally placed to move a Just Transition agenda forward, utilising government industrial strategies which must include a trade union vision of the future skills pipeline to end eleventh hour attitudes. This should include radical ideas like bringing college lecturers into business workplaces so that we can see for ourselves what is needed, and use our expertise to co-design curricula, or speak directly to workforces about upskilling. Nurturing peer-to-peer networks rather than management-driven cultures in workplaces is a profound community-based principle, connecting workers across industries. Businesses could even meet with college union affiliates to establish and consolidate these networks.
To summarise, EIS-FELA are looking for a trade union led conference on Further Education and skills in order to influence the direction of the sector, setting out our collective vision of the best possible opportunities for staff and students. The skills pipeline conversation is clearly missing a critical part: how do we educate workers of the future in the areas in which society needs them? How do we make these future jobs sustainable and fair? And how do we use further education to work towards a Just Transition? If we make insufficient demands under the Community Wealth Building Act and the workstreams of the future initiative, then the direction will be set for us. That money is currently being funnelled into defence spending and short-term initiatives exclusively benefitting business. I question the value of community wealth building if those initiatives are used to train our young people to effectively destroy other communities.
Common threads run through this vision, which the STUC must coordinate. Fair Work, Just Transition and Community Wealth Building are the key ones. The college unions and the wider movement must come together and unite around ideas that benefit us all, setting out an industrial vision which incorporates Further Education. We must positively establish what we want to see in the sector, rather than what we don’t want to see. There is a fight for the very heart of Further Education in Scotland, but our vision is narrowed by the coin slots through which we are forced to peer. EIS-FELA is committed to widening those horizons.
Dan Holland is EIS-FELA National Representative, EIS-FELA Executive Member and Edinburgh College EIS Branch Secretary.
This article was written on behalf of EIS-FELA National Representatives.
- https://www.eis.org.uk/fighting-for-the-future-of-further-education/furthereducationreport25 ↩︎
- https://www.holyrood.com/news/view,scottish-colleges-on-the-brink-as-budget-cuts-force-student-numbers-down ↩︎
- https://www.sfc.ac.uk/?news=latest-college-staffing-data-published ↩︎
- https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/colleges-centres-of-working-class-confidence ↩︎
- https://www.ucu.org.uk/challengingthemarket ↩︎
- https://www.gov.uk/government/news/scotland-set-for-skills-and-innovation-boost-as-50-million-defence-growth-deal-unveiled ↩︎
- https://www.sfc.ac.uk/?news=college-sector-of-the-future-workstream-launched ↩︎
- https://www.alloaadvertiser.com/news/25878184.march-save-forth-valley-college-campus-alloa/ ↩︎
- https://www.sfc.ac.uk/publications/college-indicative-funding-allocations-2026-27 ↩︎
- https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2026/7/contents ↩︎