Chapter 10: Picturing Places in the Assemblage of Flexibility in Further Education

The picture in ⁰⁰¹ tells us about the places where Jane, cleaning supervisor at Shiptown College in South East England, spends her working day. When Jane starts work at five o’clock in the morning, “I’m the one who puts off the alarms and everything ... that’s rny office in the corner ... and attached to that is the store cupboard with all my cleaning materials. Every cleaner has to have a key, so I issue the keys out as they come in, and they sign in the book.” This drawing was produced in the course of research into the ways in which notions of flexibility are “worked” or “played out” in the lives of people who work and study in two further education colleges in Southern England. Embedded in a history of Craft Guilds, Mechanics Institutes and Technical Colleges, the boundaries of Further Education (FE) have been stretched since the early 1990s to incorporate adult, community and workplace learning in diverse locations. In England, FE colleges have now been subsumed within the Learning and Skills Sector, which encompasses all non-university vocational training and adult continuing education. By the end of the 1990s, further education colleges were a central focus for the UK government’s agenda of widening participation in lifelong learning. National and international policy documents for post-school education and training in the 1990s abounded with calls for flexible forms of learning and assessment, for the development of flexible skills for work and flexible responses to rapid and unpredictable change (OECD, 1997; DfEE, 1998; Edwards et al., 1999).