“You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems” (Clear, 2018). Further education (FE) and skills is a complex system, under acute and enduring strain. Our 2024 report identified patterns of strain that are self-reinforcing (for example, low resourcing leading to high strain on staff, resulting in higher absence and lower retention, which in turn contributes to lower resourcing), requiring systemic changes. Simply urging local or increased effort was nugatory. Failing to change will hurt the entire sector, the economy and the achievement of inclusive growth and social mobility.  

Leadership that moves the system forward

We concluded that ‘system leadership’ was needed. Specifically, FE and skills needs leaders who can move the system from surviving negative cycles to becoming a ‘sustainably self-improving system’. Institutions become a better place to work and study, facilitating innovation and feeding a confident and positive narrative about the sector and its achievements. This attracts improved funding, right touch regulation and improved staff and learner recruitment and retention. Any change needs to start somewhere; in this case we suggested with advocacy and the narrative of the sector, at both individual college and collective levels. 

System leadership requires leaders to both step back from the immediate and step up from the local. Its purpose is to create the conditions in which progress can be made by the members of that system towards a shared goal. We proposed the shared goal of ‘making FE and skills a sustainably self-improving system’, but it doesn’t have to be this. Whatever the goal, it focuses integrative and collective action today to create positive change tomorrow.  

Assumptions about stakeholders in the system need to be tested, and the diversity of their perspectives understood. The next stage is designing the future, identifying what needs to happen at multiple levels (from local to societal) in the FE and skills ecosystem to demonstrably move the level of system attainment upwards.  

Continued efforts and adaptation

System leadership is firmly part of the language of public service reform. Yet in FE and skills it remains an imprecise and inconsistently understood idea that risks becoming rhetorical rather than transformational. It will run counter to incentives that focus on local rather than systemic achievement.  

And the dynamics of the context (from funding to technology) mean it is not a ‘fire and forget’ device. It requires ongoing effort, including on the part of the leader, to continually adapt their own thinking. It is demanding work. It requires leaders to share power, accept trade-offs and act in the interests of learners and communities beyond their own organisational perimeter. It requires comfort with ambiguity and persistence in the face of slow returns. Motivation will come not from enactment of edict, but from caring passionately about FE and skills and its future. And until it becomes established, it will remain an individual moral choice rather than a collectively supported way of working. 

Together, not alone

The Education Training Foundation (2024) builds on this by emphasising that systems change is enacted by people, not structures alone, foregrounding the importance of agency, shared purpose and the conditions that enable leaders to act differently – particularly psychological safety, professional trust and clarity of role within the system.  

If FE and skills is to realise its potential to contribute to the transformation of our economy and society, system leadership must become more than a fashionable phrase. It is a practice that must be understood, supported and enacted as a shared way of leading change across the system.  

Following Clear’s logic in the context of the FE and skills ecosystem, the only way to rise to the level of the goals is to raise the performance of the systems at many levels. The future of FE and skills will not be secured by isolated excellence.