Collaborative Partnerships

University of Huddersfield

The Education and Training Consortium (ETC) was formally constituted in 2001 as the (then) Consortium for Post-Compulsory Education and Training (CPCET), a pioneering collaborative partnership between FE and the University of Huddersfield focusing on teacher education awards for the ‘Lifelong Learning Sector’. The scale and complexity of the collaboration is unusual (some 21 partners mainly, but not exclusively, situated in the North of England). Geographically, ETC members are dispersed across the north of England from Hull to Liverpool, but there are member institutions as far afield as Northumberland, Norfolk and Essex. They include large urban general FE colleges as well as smaller FE institutions. The open nature of the relationships between partners is a key characteristic. In the field of Lifelong Learning teacher education the rationale for close partnership underpins curriculum design and development, research, and human resource planning. The colleges partners are the key sites of practice and offer a huge store of knowledge and expertise. The University of Huddersfield retains responsibility for academic standards and quality assurance; however, the Consortium arrangement was designed to maximise partner college involvement in managing the development and delivery of provision. The distribution of new knowledge and innovation in teaching and learning constitutes a considerable challenge within the context of large distributed learning networks, but the ETC demonstrates that effective collaboration between HE and FE can be of great benefit financially, strategically, academically, and culturally to both sides of the arrangement. Key beneficiaries are the students who, in this case, are both in-service and pre-service trainee teachers – beyond whom are the thousands of FE learners they teach.