Scaling up: a hindsight-laden reflection on the launch of the Ufi Charitable Trust

The Ufi Charitable Trust launched on Wednesday of this week. The Trust has an endowment of ~£50m. Its mission is to "to achieve a step change in learning and employability for all adults in the UK, through the adoption of 21st century technologies".

The original University for Industry (Ufi) has played a varying part in my working life for the last 15 years. So attending the launch of the independent charitable trust that is now Ufi got me thinking about the origins of the organisation and about whether well over £1.5 billion of public funding could have been better used.

In around 1994 - a couple of years before getting a job as The Sheffield College's Learning Technology Development Manager - I went to a workshop (was it in Leeds?) at which I heard David Miliband - then with IPPR - and a TGWU shop-steward from Ford's Dagenham plant - talking about the value of what were then known as Employee Development and Participation (or EDAP) schemes. I believe, but am not certain, that Josh Hillman also spoke at the event, about the idea of a "University for Industry". Hillman, who coined the Ufi term and who was later the Head of BBC Education Policy, wrote the rightly very influential IPPR report University for Industry: Creating a national learning network. The proposal to establish a University for Industry was written into the Labour Party's 1997 Election Manifesto.

After Labour's election landslide, Ufi was duly established, and Sheffield (where I live) won the competition to host the new organisation. Several senior civil servants were seconded into the new organisation to get it started, and Anne Wright, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sunderland, was recruited in 1998 as Ufi's Chief Executive.

That summer I remember buying a suit in a sale in London, thinking that I might need it for job interviews with Ufi (the salary levels then on offer were hard to resist). I got short-listed for a job which I did not get. At that time I was already sold on web-based learning, knowing it would be the future of online learning. I clearly remember the points I made about this going down badly with Anne Wright during the interview. She was adamant that Ufi's courses would mainly be distributed in the post on CD and on paper. By the time Ufi was ready to roll about 18 months later, web-based delivery was a big part of its operations.

Ufi adopted the brand name learndirect. A recommendation from some consultants that Ufi trade with the name "@chieva" or "achiev@" reportedly got short shrift, David Blunkett having apparently said something like "no, that sounds like a brand of dog food". (In any case, as branding people didn't know in 1999, you can't put an @ in a URL.)

Over the next several years, an enormous amount of funding poured into and through Ufi. According to the National Audit Office, by July 2005 Ufi and learndirect had received £930 million of education funding, consuming, in that year over 2.5% of the English expenditure on the entire FE sector. £218 million - of which £54.2 million (think about it!) was spent on management and marketing in academic year 2004/2005. By now the total amount of public funding received by Ufi must have far exceeded £1.5 billion.

Ufi gradually established itself successfully as a very large scale provider of online distance learning for adults, and to date over 3 million people - including a good proportion who would be classed "hard to reach" - are reported to have benefited from its courses.

The relationship between Ufi and the post-16 sector was somewhat fraught. In the early days efforts were made to get colleges to make use of Ufi content. And many colleges, including my own, worked as "Ufi hubs", which involved supporting Ufi provision in parallel with standard provision. It was messy and time consuming, with Ufi tending to think that colleges lacked commitment to and effectiveness in the work, and colleges tending to think that they were cross-subsidising Ufi. The feeling I had was that we were getting in the way of Ufi achieving really big economies of scale in things like the enrolment process. The planned simplification of Ufi's structure highlighted in the 2005 National Audit Office report greatly reduced colleges from involvement in Ufi.

Fast forward to 2011. In October, advised by the Rothschild Group, the Ufi Charitable Trust - the registered charity established by the Government to host Ufi - sold learndirect and its IPR (which was not Crown Copyright, I think because from its inception the Government thought that Ufi would be a money-spinner) for ~£50m in a management buy-out to private equity house LDC, part of the Lloyds Banking Group.

As an independent charity, the Trust rightly chose not to return the proceeds of the sale to the Treasury.

On Wednesday 23 May the Trust unveiled its strategic vision and investment plans. Over the last five months I've had the luck - with Adrian Perry, Clive Shepherd and Dick Moore - to work on a commission from the Trust to research and write Scaling up - achieving a breakthrough in adult learning with technology.

The work forced us to think carefully about the how and why of technology supported learning; and as part of the study we had the privilege of interviewing a wide range of interesting and influential figures drawn from the learning technology field and more widely. The report is obviously the result of some compromises - between team members, between the team and Ufi, and with the immovable deadline of the Trust's launch. For sure it will not please everyone - because of things not covered, for oversimplifications, and possibly for being technologically deterministic. But, in advance of any feedback, I'm glad to have had the chance to help frame a discussion about how to achieve the scaling up that the Trust seeks.

One question concerns me. As I indicate above, a very large amount of public funding flowed though Ufi between its inception in 1998 and its privatisation 13 years later. The Trust's £50m endowment is substantial enough, if it is as well targeted as the Trust obviously intends, to get a lot to happen.

But I am left wondering what could have been achieved if the funds the Government lavished on Ufi (and in the early days there is no question that the term "lavished" is appropriate) had been used to support the Trust's current mission, but within the existing system rather than alongside it.

Stumbling blocks would have included the extreme complexity of the English vocational education system, and the resistance in the system to changes in its ways of working. (We cover both of these in the report.)

But I believe that despite these problems the funds could have been used systematically to bring change into the existing system.

Let's do some very rough and ready calculations.

Let's assume that Ufi has had £1.5 billion of FE funding over 13 years: we'll round that down to £100 million per year; and that it has reached 3 million mostly disadvantaged adult learners, mostly on short courses, during the same period. (That's about £500 per enrolment - the typical cost per learner in FE on a 30 hour course would be, at the very most, £180.)

If the £1.5 billion had been spread across the sector on a straight line basis, pro-rata to college size, a typical large college's share of the £1.5 billion would have been about £0.75 million per year, with a parallel requirement to run technology-supported short courses for, say, 1500 mostly disadvantaged adults per year.

For some colleges it would have been a stretch; but with the right oversight, and control - which would have had some non-trivial costs and which are not discussed above - most could have achieved it. And there would have been scope to lever a great deal of change at large scale, including shared learning materials, shared technical platforms, shared data-systems, shared staff-development. Furthermore, a proportion of the funds could have been earmarked for particular thematic interventions, for example in work-based learning, or in mathematics. I have no doubt that a system-wide breakthrough in adult learning with technology, perhaps a bit overly focused on formal learning, could by now have been achieved.

In contrast what is left of well over £1.5 billion of public funding is:

• learndirect as a privately owned going concern;
• 3 million learners who have benefited during the last 13 years;
• a ~£50m endowment.

Though I do not doubt the importance of the work the Ufi Charitable Trust will now be supporting, I believe the overall impact of over £1.5 billion of public funding has been much less than it should have been. 

Note. Inevitably, this is a personal, hindsight-laden reflection. Readers who were more directly involved - for example in the UK Online Centres which at one point were run by Ufi - may wish to comment. And I will gladly correct the inevitable factual errors if any are pointed out to me.

Comments

[Liz Perry]

Very interesting reflections Seb. I wonder how the impact of the eCPD programme compares. I guess it's too early to estimate how many NEW learners, if any have been engaged but perhaps the number and quality of learning outcomes can be evidenced.
Absolutely agree with you that Ufi was/is a missed strategy to power up existing colleges and training providers.

Liz Perry

[Bob Harrison]

Great and accurate analysis Seb. One does wonder whether that investment could have had a more transformative impact?

[Ian Chowcat]

Interesting perspective, Seb, but as you say this is laden with hindsight - or perhaps you should say wishful thinking. I well remember working for Ufi in the early 2000s and visiting resentful and distrusting colleges who wanted the resources but weren't at all interested in new ways of working. As for the level of sharing you propose, who was seriously proposing this 10-15 years ago, and where was the technical infrastructure to make it work? We can all indulge in what-ifs but it is a bit pointless if these things weren't live options at the time. There are paths not taken, which we can speculate about, and paths that never existed about which we can only have pipe-dreams.

[Seb Schmoller]

Thanks for commenting Ian.

> Interesting perspective, Seb, but as you say this is laden with
> hindsight - or perhaps you should say wishful thinking. I well
> remember working for Ufi in the early 2000s and visiting resentful
> and distrusting colleges who wanted the resources but weren't at all
> interested in new ways of working.

I do not doubt that this was often the case though I do not think it adequately describes the range of responses. An issue for some colleges was the largely accurate perception that "FE funds" were being used to fund Ufi to commission content which could then only be used by learners enrolled on learndirect courses. Other colleges, my own included, put a lot of unfunded effort into collaboration with learndirect to get it onto a viable footing.

> As for the level of sharing you propose, who was seriously proposing
> this 10-15 years ago?

Several college consortia were. For example the ones covering the South
Yorkshire colleges, the colleges in the North of England. There was also a big EU part-funded collaboration involving colleges in London, the South West, the Midlands, the East Midlands, and South Yorkshire.

Meanwhile David Wiley's Open Content licence was live from 1998 (the South Yorkshire FE Consortium used it on LeTTOL). MIT began to pilot OpenCourseWare in 2002.

> and where was the technical infrastructure to make it work?

It was being put in place in parallel with the establishment of Ufi, for example under the auspices of the geographical consortia mentioned above. In Sheffield there was Citinet, which was initiated under The Sheffield College's auspices in 1998, and had network and learning centre infrastructure organised by 2000. Without this infrastructure Ufi would have struggled to get its "stuff" out into learning centres.

> We can all indulge in what-ifs but it is a bit pointless if these
> things weren't live options at the time. There are paths not taken,
> which we can speculate about, and paths that never existed about
> which we can only have pipe-dreams.

We'll not agree on this point, Ian. I'd forgotten, when I wrote the original post, that the original conception for Ufi was as an organisation that would connect learners and providers together in a new way, rather than being a separate entity in competition with providers, as this diagram in Josh Hillman's University for Industry: Creating a national learning network indicates. I've now ordered Josh's book with a view to checking this properly, something which is not feasible using the incomplete Google books version.

[Andy Wynne]

I do think that models like Citinet highlighted that it was possible to deliver the model Seb highlights and this approach was available in places like Sheffield from an early stage. There were a few other examples around the country. I managed the Citinet project for just two and a half years from September 1998 and there was real momentum generated on a very thin initial resource commitment - each of the three founding partner put in £13k per year of funding and the network pulled in around £1.5 million, much of it going to places and organisations outside FE or Local Authority.

Bidding to operate a UfI hub in 1999 seemed a natural thing to do - we hoped it would provide a funding stream and a more coherent learning offer, though in the end it also became a bit of a distortion for Citinet, which was unable for a variety of reasons to establish a new role beyond that of hub operator and it finally was wound up in 2003. I'd also say that the UfI involvement did create some tensions between the college and some of the voluntary sector organisations (in part due to the franchise funding model), though in the main most still felt that it was still definitely worthwhile being involved.

I do think that the Citinet model offered an option for a new way of adult & FE learning providers working together to achieve some sensible coherence across providers - the set of shared services that Seb describes is a useful one. Of course in 1999 we didn't have the web tools that we have now so some bits of that would definitely be much easier now.

Interestingly the new situation in schools in which Local Authorities are handing over responsibility for 'system leadership' to schools raises a number of challenges: so a Citinet-style approach to collaboration might be even more relevant in the future.

[Bob Banks]

A really useful piece of history, Seb. The history of initiatives in education is so often forgotten, apart from in the heads of those few who were there at the time. This means that we are condemned to repeat our mistakes. (And don't learn from our successes.) It would be really interesting to see more - and more perspectives.

[Peter Trethewey]

I attended the London launch of Ufi and was excited at the propect of e-learning receiving a huge boost in the UK – I still have the bag! We ran a very successful pilot in a deprived area of SE London where the locals were almost queuing up to get free access to mediocre American IT learning materials. It was an exciting time where were able to give IT access to new clients. There was definitely a buzz in the air.
On the strength of the pilot we became a hub but bureaucracy slowly crept in and from my point of view seemed to take the life out of learndirect. About this time I set up a mailing list called ufi-lifelonglearning which became very popular very quickly with up to 600 members. My intention was to support learndirect but the list became a public sounding-board for frustrations in the post-16 sector. The list was regular reading for learndirect staff although they never contributed.
Slowly it dawned on me that this was not an initiative for FE but a commercial enterprise that used FE. Someone in government saw the whole enterprise as a money-making opportunity rather than a boost to e-learning in FE. A missed opportunity for FE and post-16 at large? Excellent materials were produced which we couldn’t use in mainstream.
What a disappointment.
Peter Trethewey

[Seb Schmoller]

Peter - oh yes, I remember that. I seem to recall providing the list with a Google Search form for the Ufi site because at that time Ufi had not thought fit to put a search feature on its web site. They were not alone in that. Looking at the JISCmail archives I can find this your initiating email from January 2000 (there does not seem to be an archive of the list itself):

Subject: ufi-lifelonglearning mailing list
From: Peter Trethewey
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 15:07:12 -0000
TO ANYONE THAT WANTS TO SHARE EXPERIENCES OF UFI/LEARNDIRECT
There is a need for colleges, libraries, private trainers, development centres, hubs and UFI and others to communicate problems and solutions associated with the implementation of Learndirect - hence the mailing list.
I have included the phrase "lifelonglearning" to reflect the new wider
definition of FE that DFEE is working towards and to encourage possible
synergy across this wide sector to include developments taking place in schools and public libraries.
Please join this mailing list ASAP.