Further Education workforce data
for England
Analysis of the 2013-2014 Staff Individualised
Record (SIR) data
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Contents
Foreword .......................................................................................................................................................... 4
Executive Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 5
1.
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 7
2.
Our approach to the analysis ............................................................................................................... 9
3.
2.1
The data............................................................................................................................................ 9
2.2
Data processing and definitions ............................................................................................... 10
Profile of the English FE workforce, 2013-14.............................................................................. 13
3.1
Occupation types ......................................................................................................................... 13
3.2
Contract types .............................................................................................................................. 13
3.3
Staff turnover ............................................................................................................................... 16
3.4
Gender ........................................................................................................................................... 18
3.5
Age.................................................................................................................................................. 19
3.6
Ethnicity ........................................................................................................................................ 21
3.7
Sexual orientation ....................................................................................................................... 22
3.8
Disability ....................................................................................................................................... 23
3.9
Region ............................................................................................................................................ 24
3.10
4.
5.
Profile of teaching staff, 2013-14 ..................................................................................................... 28
4.1
Overview of characteristics in comparison to all FE staff ................................................. 28
4.2
Overview of characteristics in comparison to the school workforce in England ......... 28
4.3
Subjects taught by FE teaching staff ...................................................................................... 29
4.3.1
Subjects by college and teacher numbers .......................................................................... 29
4.3.2
Number of teachers per college offering each subject .................................................... 30
4.3.3
Turnover rates by subject ..................................................................................................... 31
Differences between General Further Education and other FE colleges .............................. 34
5.1
All staff .......................................................................................................................................... 35
5.1.1
Occupation types ..................................................................................................................... 35
5.1.2
Gender ....................................................................................................................................... 38
5.1.3
Age ............................................................................................................................................. 39
5.1.4
Staff turnover ........................................................................................................................... 40
5.2
6
Annual pay ................................................................................................................................ 25
Teaching staff............................................................................................................................... 41
Trends in the General Further Education College workforce ................................................. 44
6.1
All GFEC staff ............................................................................................................................. 44
6.1.1
Occupation type ....................................................................................................................... 44
6.1.2
Gender ....................................................................................................................................... 46
6.1.3
Age ............................................................................................................................................. 47
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6.1.4
Ethnicity.................................................................................................................................... 48
6.1.5
Staff turnover ........................................................................................................................... 48
6.1.6
Pay .............................................................................................................................................. 49
6.2
7
8
Teaching staff............................................................................................................................... 50
Inferences on the total workforce population ............................................................................... 51
7.1
Representativeness of the SIR 22 sample .............................................................................. 51
7.2
Estimates of the total workforce population......................................................................... 52
Conclusions ........................................................................................................................................... 54
Annex 1: Additional tables ........................................................................................................................ 55
Annex 2: Representativeness of the SIR 22 sample ............................................................................. 57
Annex 3: Further Education colleges in England ................................................................................ 59
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Foreword
A college’s workforce is fundamental to how learners experience the college, how the local community
see the college, how employers and other stakeholders perceive the college and ultimately fundamental
to the college’s culture. As Governors, we’re not in the college every day, but we still need to
understand the profile and characteristics of staff working in our college, and what that might mean for
the college in the present and the future.
This report shows me what the college workforce looks like across the country, and some of the trends.
Charts and tables showing me the national and regional picture on staffing help me and my governor
colleagues to better understand how our college compares against others. This report prompts us to
consider and discuss whether our colleges have the right skills for the future; do we have the right
profile of staff in the right roles to deliver our strategic ambitions? If we are downsizing or expanding,
are we ensuring we are continuing to invest in the right profile of staff?
Are we creating new roles fit for the future? How is the shape of our college workforce changing to
manage the challenges we are facing across the sector?
It doesn’t surprise me to see that teachers are now making up more of the workforce in colleges, as this
report shows. While pay is slightly higher than last year, staff numbers in general are down. Although
not much has changed since last year, there are some areas in the detail that I’m keen to compare to our
college.
There are more teachers on part-time contracts, and the age of new teachers is getting older, along
with the rest of the workforce. Staff aged over 60 are a growing group. This report makes me want to
see what the situation is in my college and in others.
Sample sizes are down on last year, with fewer colleges making returns to the Staff Individualised
Record. Smaller sample sizes make the data less reliable, and I hope we’ll see more colleges using the
data and making returns next year.
The data in this report is invaluable, not just for governors and senior managers in colleges, but for
government departments making decisions about how to support the maths and English workforce in
future, and for membership bodies like the Association of Colleges who lobby on our behalf. I would
urge every college to complete it next year, so that together we can get the best available data on the
workforce across the sector.
The Education and Training Foundation is changing the way they collect workforce data over the next
eighteen months, and are keen to make sure the data is as useful as possible to colleges. I want to make
sure our college data is there, so I and other governors will be able to see a dashboard of trends when it
comes out from the Foundation. I’m asking you to join me and make sure your college data is there too.
Carol Jones
Chair of the Corporation, Stoke on Trent College
National Leader in Governance, Education and Training Foundation and Association of Colleges
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Executive Summary
Frontier Economics was commissioned by the Education and Training Foundation to carry out an
analysis of information on the Further Education (FE) workforce in England from the 2013-14 Staff
Individualised Record (SIR) dataset. The SIR dataset holds information on standard contracts of
employment between FE colleges and their members of staff, including information on the contract and
on the demographic characteristics of the employee.
This report provides a descriptive account of the staff working in English FE colleges in 2013-14, and
draws out comparisons of the workforce across different types of FE college and with the results from
2012-13.1 Comparisons across college types focus on differences between General FE Colleges
(GFECs, which account for the large majority of the sector in terms of number of providers and
number of students), and all other institutions.2
In practice, our ability to draw comparisons over time and across college types was affected by data
availability. SIR data are supplied by FE colleges for each academic year on a voluntary basis, and
response rates have been declining over time. In 2013-14, 84 colleges, approximately one quarter of all
FE colleges in England, supplied up-to-date information representing 61,524 employment contracts.
This compares with around one-third of colleges responding in 2012-13.
The decline in the response rate compared to 2012-13 was particularly marked for Sixth Form colleges
(SFCs): less than 15% of all SFCs in England returned information as part of the 2013-14 SIR
collection. This low response rate limited the scope to use SIR data to describe the characteristics of
SFCs in isolation, and also meant we were most confident only to draw comparisons between 2012-13
and 2013-14 for the GFECs rather than across the whole FE sector.
Despite the limitations of the data our results provide an accurate picture of the characteristics of the
FE workforce. A statistical analysis suggests that colleges in SIR are reasonably representative of the
characteristics of the wider population of FE colleges in England.
The key findings from our analysis of 2013-14 SIR data provided by all college types are the following:






Teachers represent nearly half of the FE workforce, making up the largest occupational group
in FE. After teaching staff, the next largest occupational groups are service staff; word
processing, clerical, and secretarial staff; administrative and professional staff; technical staff;
managers; and assessors and verifiers.
Over half (58%) of contracts in FE are part-time. Part-time contracts are considerably more
frequent than in the general UK workforce where only one in four people works part-time.
63% of FE staff are women, a larger proportion than the general UK workforce, but a smaller
proportion than the school workforce.
The median pay band for full-time staff across all occupational categories is £25,000 to
£25,999.
Our analysis of contracts starting and ending in 2013-14 suggests that the size of the FE
workforce is declining, with a net employment change3 of -1.7%. This change is less marked for
teachers (-0.7%) and more marked for other (non-senior) managers (-5.5%).
The availability of information on the ethnicity of FE staff has increased compared to 2012-13.
Ethnicity was reported for 86% of contracts in 2013-14, a sizeable increase compared to 76% in
2012-13.
“Further Education Workforce Data for England – Analysis of the 2012-13 Staff Individualised Record Data”, September 2014, Frontier
Economics.
1
Our analysis excludes National Specialist Colleges, which tend to be very different in nature from other providers. See Section 1 and Annex 2
for further detail on the definition of the Further Education sector adopted in this report.
2
Net employment change is defined as the number of contracts starting in the teaching year less the number of contracts ending, as a
proportion of all contracts. A negative figure implies that more contracts ended than started.
3
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
The most common subject areas, taught in at least 90% of FE colleges in our sample, are:
Business Administration, Management, and Professional; Health, Social Care and Public
Services; Hospitality, Sports, Leisure and Travel; English, Languages and Communication;
Science and Mathematics; and Visual and Performing Arts and Media.
Our comparative analysis of GFECs and other FE colleges shows that:





A “typical” GFEC holds 650 contracts with members of staff (402 in FTE terms), of which 315
are teachers.
It provides courses in 13 distinct subject areas, and employs 41 English, Languages and
Communication and 24 Science and Mathematics teachers.
GFECs tend to be larger than other colleges: they offer more subjects and employ more
teachers per subject offered.
Staff employed in GFECs tend to be older, with a median age of 50 compared to 48 in other
colleges.
There is little difference between GFECs and other colleges in terms of other employee
characteristics.
Comparing information returned by GFECs in 2012-13 and 2013-14, we found that:




As a proportion of FTE staff, teachers have increased from 43.5% to 44.1%, while the
proportion of technical staff and of other managers has decreased (from 6.9% to 6.2% and from
8.9% to 7.6%, respectively).
The mean age of GFEC staff increased from 44 years in 2012-13 to 45 year in 2013-14. The
median age for contracts starting in 2013-14 is 42, considerably higher than the median age for
teaching contracts with earlier start dates, 39.
The share of women in FTE staff has increased slightly, from 61.8% to 62.1%. The increase is
larger for teachers, where the share of female staff has gone up from 54.6% to 55.9%.
The median annual pay for full-time teaching staff has gone up by one pay band: from £30,000
- £30,999 in 2012-13 to £31,000 - £31,999 in 2013-14.
As in the 2012-13 report we also provide indicative estimates of the total size of the FE workforce. This
estimation remains a challenging task, particularly given the decline in the response rate. However,
statistical comparison of the sample of colleges in SIR against the overall population of FE colleges
suggests that scaling up the SIR data to match the number of colleges overall gives a reasonable way to
estimate the size of the overall workforce in England.
Based on this approach, we estimate the FE workforce to consist of approximately 250,000 contracts
(155,000 FTEs), of which approximately 123,000 (71,000 FTE) are teachers.4
A note of caution on these estimates is in order. These figures are not easily comparable to the estimates we provided in the 2012-13 report.
This is primarily because we are scaling up to a different number of colleges, due to the adoption of a new definition of the FE sector
considered for this analysis, as described in Section 1 and Annex 3. Moreover, we are working with a different – and smaller – sample than in
2012-13. Our 2012-13 and 2013-14 figures should not therefore be compared to infer growth or decline of the FE workforce as a whole. The
net employment change provides a more accurate estimate of the changing size of the FE sector workforce.
4
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1. Introduction
This report presents the findings from an analysis of workforce data from the Staff Individualised
Record (SIR) dataset for Further Education (FE) colleges in England for 2013-2014.
This is the eleventh publication in the series of annual SIR reports on the English FE workforce, and
the second to be produced by the Education and Training Foundation.
There are four types of colleges included in our analysis: general FE (including tertiary education)
colleges (GFECs), sixth form colleges (SFCs), special colleges (Agriculture and Horticulture Colleges;
Performing Arts Colleges) and specialist designated colleges (SDCs).5 We do not include national
specialist colleges (NSCs), which focus specifically on providing young people with learning difficulties
or disabilities with valuable skills for living independently. NSCs tend to be much smaller than other
colleges in the sector, and none made returns to the SIR. Throughout the report, we have used
information from the Association of Colleges (AoC), whose members are GFECs, SFCs, special colleges
and SDCs, to help validate our data.
The data contain information on all staff – teaching and not teaching – covering staff demographics
(such as age, gender, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation), staff occupation and pay, subjects
taught and geographical location.
This report provides a descriptive account of the staff working in colleges in 2013-2014 covering all
aspects of the data (demographics, pay, subjects taught, etc.).
The vast majority of FE providers in England (and of the SIR sample) are GFECs. However, it is
important to recognise that other types of FE institutions may have different characteristics. The
report therefore also makes explicit comparisons (as far as possible) between the characteristics of staff
in GFECs and other types of college to understand better any differences between them.
The report also comments on trends over time, by comparing the findings from the 2013-14 data with
those in the 2012-13 report. Since this report follows the same analytical methodology used in the
previous report,6 we are able to make more direct comparisons of changes over time than has been
possible previously. To make as like-for-like a comparison as possible, we focus on comparisons within
GFECs, which make up the vast majority of responses in both years.
The rest of the report is organised as follows:

Section 2 discusses our overall approach to the work including methodology and a detailed
description of the data processing we have carried out.

Section 3 contains the main description of the FE workforce in England in 2013-14.

Section 4 describes the characteristics of the teaching workforce in English FE in 2013-14.

Section 5 contains our analysis comparing GFECs to other types of FE institutions.

Section 6 investigates trends in the characteristics of the FE workforce (within GFECs) over
time, based on comparing 2013-14 results with those from 2012-13.
Note that among special colleges, the SIR data used for this analysis do not contain any records from Performing Arts Colleges. We have
taken the broadest understanding of FE colleges excluding only NSCs and any institutions covered by the World-Based Learning (WBL) or
the Adult and Community Learning (ACL) Surveys. This ensures we have the broadest coverage of the education and training system across
all the workforce data reports. Separate analysis comparing the findings from the SIR to those of the WBL and ACL surveys is provided in an
accompanying report, “Workforce composition in different segments of the Further Education sector”, 2015, Frontier Economics.
5
6
“Further Education Workforce Data for England – Analysis of the 2012-13 Staff Individualised Record Data”, September 2014, Frontier
Economics.
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
Section 7 contains our estimates of the total workforce numbers (derived by scaling up the up
the SIR 22 data).

Section 8 contains our conclusions.
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2. Our approach to the analysis
2.1 The data
The SIR data for 2013-14 are based on responses from 84 FE colleges in England, which equates to
approximately one-quarter of colleges. As shown in Table 1, on aggregate the colleges supplying
2013-14 data make up around a quarter of one measure of the college population in terms of number of
colleges, total expenditure, full-time staff and number of students. This is reassuring – if the sample of
colleges were very unrepresentative of the overall college population, we might expect to see these
proportions vary across different measures. We provide more comparisons of our sample to wider
population measures of English FE colleges in Section 7 and Annex 3.
Table 1. Characteristics of SIR 22 data return
Colleges in SIR 22
AoC colleges
Colleges in SIR 22 as % of
AoC total
Number
84
338
25%
Spending
£1.93bn
£7.56bn
26%
FTE staff
32,273
129,528
25%
Students
469,291
1,872,816
25%
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 and AoC data. Note AoC data are for 2012-13, the last year for which data are currently available.
One way in which we know our sample of colleges is somewhat different from the wider population is
college type (see Table 2). In particular, our sample contains far fewer SFCs relative to wider college
population measures, reflecting a lower tendency for SFCs to complete the SIR return. We return to
this in more detail in Section 7 in terms of our ability to make inference about the total FE workforce
from the SIR sample. This relatively poor response rate from SFCs also informs our decision to focus
our comparative analysis between SIR 22 and SIR 21 data (see Section 6) on GFECs only.
The 2013-2014 SIR dataset contains 61,524 records, each relating to a standard contract of
employment between a college and an individual. In some cases, two or more distinct contracts may in
fact relate to the same individual. However, it is not possible to identify where this is the case within
SIR. For ease of presentation, throughout the report we may refer to ‘members of staff’ or ‘teachers’.
However, technically speaking, the underlying data are always at the level of ‘contracts’ or ‘teaching
contracts’.
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Table 2. Types of Further Education institutions in SIR 22 and AoC data
Number of
colleges
% of colleges
(SIR 22)
Number of
colleges
(AoC)
% of colleges
(AoC)
(SIR 22)
GFECs
62
77%
217
65%
SFCs
12
15%
92
27%
Special colleges
5
6%
18
5%
SDCs
2
2%
8
2%
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 and AoC data. Note AoC data are for 2012-13, the last year for which data are currently available. SIR
column includes only those colleges we were able to map into the 2012-13 AoC data, and so do not add up to the 84 colleges in the full SIR 22
sample.
2.2 Data processing and definitions
The original dataset we received from Texuna Technologies Ltd. included data from 138 colleges, for a
total of 65,534 records.
In contrast to previous years’ data, the dataset did not include any ‘backfilled’ records (observations
from earlier years). This was to allow a more straightforward comparison with the approach taken in
last year’s report which relied only on those colleges providing current year data for analysis.
For consistency with the approach taken last year, we also wanted to include in our analysis only
colleges providing a complete record of contracts for 2013-14. This required additional cleaning.
In particular, records in the original dataset come from two sources. The large majority of records
(57,266 or 87%) have been submitted by colleges. The remaining 8,268 records (13%) were provided by
a staffing agency, Protocol. For 54 of the 138 colleges initially included (“Protocol colleges”), none of
the records had been submitted by the college itself.
Although records submitted by Protocol are up to date, it was not clear whether we could consider the
records in the data for these 54 colleges to be comprehensive of all the contracts held by those
institutions with members of staff. We then performed a number of checks to verify whether the
information on any of these 54 could be considered complete:

We first checked whether the total number of records we had for each of these 54 institutions
was comparable to the number of records submitted directly by colleges. Among Protocol
colleges, the number of contracts in the dataset was often very low (in 15 cases, three or fewer
records). All Protocol colleges had a low number of records (in the bottom 5% colleges by total
records received).

It may be that Protocol colleges happened to be small, which could account for this finding. We
used information from the Association of Colleges (AoC) on the total number of students in 338
AoC member institutions to compute the number of records per student for the institutions in
our initial dataset. The number of records per student in Protocol colleges was again low
compared to all other institutions in our initial dataset. This suggested that Protocol colleges
also submitted fewer records than would be expected given the number of students they have.

Finally, we checked whether we had information on Protocol colleges on at least one teacher,
one manager, and one administrative member of staff. This was not the case for any of the 54
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colleges.
The results of these checks suggested that the information included in our sample for the 54 Protocol
colleges does not provide a complete picture of the colleges’ staff. The 54 colleges were therefore not
included in our analysis.
The final dataset used for our analysis includes 84 colleges and 61,524 records.7
SIR 22 data includes information on:


FE colleges:
o
College name;
o
College location; and
o
UK provider number.
Members of staff
o
Personal characteristics: gender, date of birth, age, ethnicity, disability, sexual
orientation; and
o
Contracts with FE colleges: terms of employment (full-time or part-time), fraction of
full-time worked, proportion of time worked providing teaching and promoting
learning, proportion of time worked supporting teaching and learning, proportion
providing other support, date of appointment, date of leaving (if any), category of work,
annual pay, main subject taught (for teachers).
Within this set of variables, it is important to note the following definitions, outlined in the data
specification and used throughout this report:

‘Annual pay’ is the gross pay for work during the 2013-14 tax year (6 April 2013 to 5 April
2014).

‘Date of leaving’ is the date at which a contract terminates, unless (in the case of fixed-term and
casual staff), the learning provider does not expect to renew the contract in the period
immediately following.

‘Fraction of full-time’ is defined as the hours that a member of staff is contracted to work over a
year, as a proportion of the institution’s own definition of full-time for that position. This
variable can take on values larger than 100%.
A number of variables required some manipulation to obtain categories consistent with previous
reports:
7

The ‘Category of work’ variable reports detailed categories that we have aggregated into
broader occupational groups. Specifically, we define as a teacher or a teaching contract a record
where the occupational category is either recorded as ‘Trainer’ or as ‘Lecturer/Tutor’.

Similarly, the ‘Ethnicity’ variable also required some aggregation into categories consistent
with the 2013 report. Moreover, records previously reported as ‘White – Other European’ have
been recoded to ‘White – Any other’, in line with the SIR 22 specification.

Because of the smaller number of colleges in the SIR 22 dataset compared with the SIR 21
We carried out additional checks for college mergers or name changes, which did not require any further changes to the data.
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dataset, we were not able to replicate regional pay analysis at the full Government Office
Region (GOR) level of disaggregation.8 We aggregated regions into four broader areas
(Greater London, North England, Midlands, South England). Comparisons of pay by college
type and between SIR 21 and SIR 22 (in GFECs) are provided at this level in this report.
Having defined the final dataset in terms of records and variables included, we performed a number of
checks to ensure consistency with the specification:

For SIR fields reported as categories (e.g. ethnicity, disability), we verified that values reported
were consistent with the list of admissible values from the data specification.

SIR fields 16, 17, 18, and 24 should all be proportions - with values between 0 and 100. No
adjustments were necessary as a result of this check.

In a number of cases, the ‘Age’ variable had been recorded as less than 15 – often 0. We have
changed the value to missing in these instances (and these are not included in any analysis
pertaining to the age of FE staff).
8
See Figure 8 of the 2012-13 SIR report, “Further Education Workforce Data for England – Analysis of the 2012-13 Staff Individualised
Record Data”, September 2014, Frontier Economics.
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3. Profile of the English FE workforce, 201314
This Section provides a description of the FE workforce in England based on the sample of colleges
responding to the SIR 22 data return. We examine occupation, contract type, staff turnover, gender,
age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, location (by region) and pay.
3.1 Occupation types
The 2013-14 data consist of 61,524 contracts from 84 Further Education colleges. The largest
occupational group within this sample is teaching staff with 48.5% of all contracts (see Table 3).
Service staff represent the second largest group (15.8%) followed by word processing, clerical and
secretarial staff (10.2%). Senior managers are the smallest group, making up less than 0.1% of all
contracts.
Table 3. Staff breakdown by occupational group in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
Occupational group
Proportion of contracts
Administrative and professional staff
5.9%
Technical staff
5.4%
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
10.2%
Service staff
15.8%
Teaching staff
48.5%
Assessors and verifiers
2.8%
Senior managers
0.05%
Other managers
5.4%
Unknown
5.3%
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size: 84 colleges; 61,524 contracts.
3.2 Contract types
A breakdown of contract types (full-time or part-time) by occupational staff group is shown in Table 4.
The majority of staff (58%) in FE colleges are employed on a part-time basis, although this varies
considerably between occupational groups. Service staff have the highest share of part-time employees
(71.6%) followed by teaching staff (60.3%). Senior managers (10.5%) and other managers (25.4%), on
the other hand, have the lowest share of part-time employees.
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Table 4. Staff breakdown by occupational group and contract type in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
Occupational group
Proportion of part-time staff
Proportion of full-time staff
Administrative and professional staff
42.4%
57.6%
Technical staff
46.1%
53.9%
Word processing, clerical and
secretarial staff
56.8%
42.6%
Service staff
71.6%
28.4%
Teaching staff
60.3%
39.7%
Assessors and verifiers
59.2%
40.8%
Senior managers
10.5%
89.5%
Other managers
25.4%
74.6%
All contracts
57.5%
42.5%
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size: 84 colleges; 61,524 contracts.
The prevalence of part-time contracts in FE is considerably higher than in the general UK workforce,
where only about one in four contracts are part-time.9
“Part-time” is defined as a contract at less than 1.0 full-time equivalent (FTE), as defined by each FE
institution, and so there is clearly variation in what is meant by part-time at the individual contract
level. Figure 1 shows the distribution of part-time contracts by the fraction of full-time hours worked.
The single most frequent value is 0.5, which indicates that the hours contracted are 50% of a standard
full-time contract. However, when broken into bands of FTE the most common band is contracts that
are less than 10% FTE, which account for around 20% of all part-time contracts.
26.8% as of June 2014 in the UK workforce. Source: Office for National Statistics, UK Labour Market, August 2014 Statistical Bulletin,
available at http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_372372.pdf
9
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Figure 1. Part-time contracts by proportion of full-time worked
Proportion of part-time contracts in SIR22 (%)
25
19.9
20
15.7
15
13.3
10.6
10.6
10
7.6
6.6
5.5
5.8
4.4
5
0
Fraction of full-time hours worked
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size: 84 colleges, 35,372 part-time contracts.
This picture varies by occupation type:

Among senior managers on part-time contracts 40% are on 0.8 FTE or more, suggesting that
part-time contracts are much closer to full-time for this group than among all FE staff;

Groups with the highest prevalence of very short part-time contracts (below 0.1 FTE) are
word processing, clerical and secretarial staff; teaching staff; and assessors and verifiers. For
these occupational groups between 15% and 30% of part-time contracts are below 0.1 FTE.
Among senior managers, other managers, technical staff, service staff and
administrative/professional staff, fewer than 10% of part-time contracts are below 0.1 FTE.
Given the high incidence of part-time working in the sector we examined what the occupational
distribution in the sector looks like in terms of FTE (see Table 5). In FTE terms, the FE workforce
consists of a total of 39,035 contracts spread over the 84 colleges. Teaching staff make up 44.8% of
FTE contracts compared with 48.5% of all contracts, reflecting a relatively higher incidence of parttime staff and low FTE contracts among part-time teaching staff.
Managers and assessors are still the smallest occupational groups on an FTE basis, although the
proportions of senior managers increases from 0.05% of all contracts to 0.8% of FTE contracts, and of
other managers from 5.4% to 7.5%. This reflects the relatively high proportion of full-time staff in these
occupations and longer FTE contracts among part-time managerial staff.
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Table 5. Proportions of FTE staff by occupational group in FE colleges, 2013-14
Occupational group
Proportion of FTE contracts
Administrative and professional staff
7.5%
Technical staff
6.4%
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
10.7%
Service staff
14.8%
Teaching staff
44.8%
Assessors and verifiers
2.6%
Senior managers
0.8%
Other managers
7.5%
Unknown
4.0%
Undefined
1.2%
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data Sample size: 84 colleges; 39,035 FTE contracts.
3.3 Staff turnover
SIR data includes information on the leaving date for individual contracts, which can be used to
compute measures of turnover.
We focus on two measures:

The turnover rate is the number of contracts ending within the 2013-14 teaching year,
expressed as a proportion of all contracts observed that year.

The net employment change is the number of contracts starting in the teaching year, less the
number of contracts ending, again expressed as a proportion of all contracts. A negative figure
implies that more contracts ended than started, suggesting a declining workforce.
A note of caution on the interpretation of these data is in order. A contract ending does not necessarily
imply that a member of staff is leaving the college (or the FE sector altogether). Some members of staff
may be moving on from an old to a new contract. Limitations of the SIR data prevent us from
disentangling these two components of turnover with confidence. The main issue with the data is that
it is at the contract level – it allows us to identify contracts in FE institutions, but not to attribute these
to individuals.
A breakdown of these measures by occupational category is shown in Table 6. Across all occupation
categories, around 15% of the contracts we observe in SIR 22 report a leaving date within 2013-14.
This proportion is higher for assessors and verifiers; teaching staff; and word processing, clerical, and
secretarial staff.10
10
Turnover rates are also markedly higher where the occupation category was explicitly reported as ‘unknown’ or left blank.
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Turnover rates were lower, between 11 and 12%, among senior managers; administrative and
professional staff; and technical staff.
Table 6. Turnover and net employment change rates by occupational group in FE colleges in England,
2013-14
Turnover Rate
Net employment
change
Total number of contracts in
SIR 22
Other Managers
13.2%
-5.5%
3,347
Senior Manager
11.5%
-1.9%
323
Administrative and professional staff
11.4%
-1.2%
3,645
Technical staff
11.5%
-1.7%
3,304
Word processing, clerical and secretarial
staff
16.6%
-2.6%
6,307
Service staff
13.2%
-3.0%
9,745
Teaching staff
15.4%
-0.7%
29,846
Assessors and verifiers
16.2%
0.9%
1,727
Unknown
21.7%
-5.4%
2,336
Blank
18.5%
6.3%
944
All staff
15.0%
-1.7%
61,524
84
84
84
Occupation
Number of colleges
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
A sizeable group of contracts with a leaving date in 2013-14 are short-term contracts that also report a
start date within the same teaching year. These contracts account for around 4% of all teaching
contracts in SIR 22, suggesting that recurring short-term contracts could account for part of the
turnover rate identified. However, even if these contracts are excluded from this analysis, turnover
rates would still remain between 10% and 15% for all occupational categories.
In terms of net employment change, we see a negative figure for all (known) occupation groups except
for assessors and verifiers where the figure is modestly positive (+0.6%). Note however that turnover
figures for this category, as well as for senior managers, should be interpreted with care given the
relatively low number of contracts (1,727 and 323 respectively). Across all categories, net employment
change was -1.7%, with the largest fall amongst other managers (-5.5%) and service staff (-3.0%).
Another way to look at changes in employment levels is to compare the number of active contracts in
the 47 FE colleges who are included in SIR21 (2012-13) and in SIR 22 (2013-14) at the start of the
teaching year. Consistent with the findings above, this analysis also shows fewer active contracts in
these colleges in 2013-14 than in 2012-13.
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3.4 Gender
The share of women in the FE workforce is 63.3% among all staff (see Figure 2). With the exception of
technical staff (39.4%) women are in the majority in all occupation groups. This is more pronounced
among word processing, clerical and secretarial staff (81.1%), administrative and professional staff
(76.6%) and service staff (70.0%). For teachers the share of female staff is slightly below the average, at
58.8%. The findings are even more pronounced when restricting the sample to part-time contracts
only: 72.0% of part-time contracts are held by women, and even among technical staff, women hold well
over half (59.8%) of part-time contracts.
Figure 2. Proportion of female staff in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
90
84.7
84.7
All staff
81.1
Proportion of female staff by category (%)
80
77.1
70
67.6
70
Part-time staff
78.6
76.6
64.9
61.4
59.8
60
72
69.2
62.6
63.3
58.8
51.1
50
40
39.4
30
20
10
0
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data Sample size: 84 colleges; 61,524 contracts
Even adjusting for the fact that women are more likely to hold part-time contracts, female staff still
make up the majority of the FE workforce on an FTE basis (see Figure 3). Across all staff, women
make up 61.8% of the FTE workforce in English FE, compared with 63.3% of all contracts.
Female staff also account for the majority of the workforce in schools, where they make up 80% of
staff.11 This is in contrast to the general UK workforce, where the proportion of women is only 46%.12
However, the difference in the prevalence of part-time by gender among FE staff is considerably less
pronounced than in the general UK workforce, where women are over three times as likely as men to
be working part-time.13
11
Source:
Department
for
Education,
School
Workforce
in
England:
November
2013,
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335413/sfr11_2014_updated_july.pdf.
available
at
Source: ONS, Labour Market Statistics, August 2014, available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/august2014/index.html.
12
Source: ONS, Labour Market Statistics, August 2014, available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/august2014/index.html.
13
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Figure 3. Proportion of FTE female staff in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
90
82.2
Proportion of female FTE staff by category (%)
80
75.6
70
63.7
60
60.4
59.6
61.8
55.8
51
50
40
33.1
30
20
10
0
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data Sample size: 84 colleges; 61,524 contracts.
3.5 Age
The median age of FE staff in 2013-14 is 46 years. The median age for men (46) is slightly higher than
the median age among women (45).
Almost 22% of staff are aged 34 or younger and the highest concentration of staff is in the age groups
45 to 54, which together account for almost 30% of contracts observed. More than a quarter of staff are
aged 55 or over (see Figure 4).
Part-time staff tend to be slightly older (median 46 years) than full-time staff (45). This is explained by
the higher proportion of part-time staff among those aged 60 and older (see Figure 5).
FE staff also tend to be older than the general UK workforce: 34% of FE staff are aged 50-64, compared
to 26% across all sectors in the UK; by contrast 21.8% of FE staff are under 35, compared to 35% of the
general UK workforce.14
Source: Office for National Statistics (2014),
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_372372.pdf.
14
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UK
Labour
Market,
Page 19 of 60
August
2014
Statistical
Bulletin,
available
at
08/04/2015
Figure 4. Proportion of staff by age bands in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
16
15
14.4
14
Proportion of total FE staff in each age band (%)
12.9
13.1
12.1
12
10
9.5
9.8
8
7
6
5.3
4
2
0.9
0
Under 25
25 - 29
30 - 34
35 - 39
40 - 44
45 - 49
50 - 54
55 - 59
60 and over Undefined
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size: 84 colleges; 61,524 contracts.
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Figure 5. Proportion of part-time staff by age bands, 2013-14
80
68.5
Proportion of part-time staff in each age band (%)
70
59.3
60
54.3
54.3
54.1
57.3
55.1
55.1
56.0
50
43.5
40
30
20
10
0
Under 25
25 - 29
30 - 34
35 - 39
40 - 44
45 - 49
50 - 54
55 - 59
60 and over Undefined
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data Sample size: 84 colleges; 61,524 contracts.
3.6 Ethnicity
The workforce in the Further Education sector is predominantly White – British (84.9% of all
contracts where ethnicity is reported).15 The proportion of White – British staff is slightly higher
among senior managers (91.0%); among teaching staff the proportion (84.4%) is similar to the wider FE
workforce (see Table 7).
The ethnic profile of FE staff is in line with the composition of the UK population as of the latest
Census data, although White (British and other) is a slightly larger group in FE, with over 88% of the
FE workforce as opposed to just over 87% of the UK population.16
15
Ethnicity is not reported in 14% of cases.
Sources: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data, 2011 Census tables, available at http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/keystatistics-and-quick-statistics-for-local-authorities-in-the-united-kingdom---part-1/rft-ks201uk.xls.
16
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Table 7. Ethnicity of staff in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
Ethnicity group
All staff
Teaching staff
Senior managers
White – British
84.9%
84.4%
91.0%
White – other
4.6%
5.4%
3.8%
Mixed
1.3%
1.2%
0.7%
Asian/Asian British
4.5%
4.2%
2.4%
Black/African/Caribbean/Black British
3.5%
3.5%
1.7%
Any other
1.0%
1.3%
0.3%
Number of contracts where ethnicity has
been reported
53,065
25,185
290
Number of colleges where ethnicity has
been reported for at least one member of
staff in each category
83
82
6517
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
3.7 Sexual orientation
Similar to 2012-13, sexual orientation is largely unknown in the SIR 22 dataset because no information
was reported (67.8%) or staff members preferred not to disclose their sexual orientation (7.2%).
Among the staff that chose to indicate their sexual orientation, heterosexuals constitute the largest
group (24.4% of all records). 0.5% of staff reported they were gay male or lesbian, and 0.1% of staff
reported they were bisexual (see Figure 6).
Ethnicity has been reported for at least one senior manager in 65 colleges, compared to 83 for all staff. This difference is partly explained by
the fact
that each college will only have a small number of senior managers (4 in the median GFE college, also see section 5 of this report).
17
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Figure 6. Sexual orientation of FE staff in England, 2013-14
70
67.8
Proportion of total FE staff by sexual orientation (%)
60
50
40
30
24.4
20
10
7.2
0.3
0.2
0.1
Gay
Lesbian
Bisexual
0
Heterosexual
Prefer not to say
Unknown
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data Sample size: 84 colleges; 61,524 contracts.
3.8 Disability
Around 4.4% of the FE workforce reported having some form of disability. The specific type of
disability is not reported in the majority of cases. Among staff where the type of disability is known,
physical impairment is most prevalent, followed by learning difficulty and mental illness (see Figure 7).
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Figure 7. Disability of FE staff in England, 2013-14
90
81.1
80
Porportion of the FE workforce (%)
70
60
50
40
30
20
12.9
10
2.3
1.4
0.6
0.2
Yes - rather not
say
Yes - physical
impairment
Yes - learning
difficulty
Yes - mental ill
health
1.6
0
No
Prefer not to say
Unknown
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size: 84 colleges; 61,524 contracts.
3.9 Region
Table 8 shows the distribution of FE staff across different broad geographical regions of England.18
Roughly a third (32.9%) of contracts are in the Midlands, just larger than North England (30.2%).
South England makes up just under a quarter (24.9%) of contracts and Greater London around 12.0%
of contracts.
Note that our data come from a relatively small sample of 84 colleges across the country and so analysis of contracts is inevitably influenced
by where those colleges are located. Given the relatively small number of colleges, any regional analysis in this report is aggregated into
broader geographies than the standard Government Office Regions – in particular, we consider North England (North East, North West,
Yorkshire and the Humber), the Midlands (East Midlands, West Midlands, East of England), South England (South East, South West) and
Greater London. Among our sample of colleges (all colleges listed on the Association of Colleges website), 32% (32%) are in North England,
27% (29%) are in the Midlands, 23% (26%) in South England and 18% (14%) in Greater London. These appear broadly comparable, also
giving additional weight to our analysis in Section 7 and Annex 2 which suggest that our sample of colleges (in particular GFECs) is broadly
comparable to the wider population of FE colleges in England.
18
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Table 8. Distribution of FE staff in SIR 22 across regions in England, 2013-14
Region
Number of contracts
Proportion of contracts
Number of colleges
North England
18,610
30.2%
27
Midlands and East of
England
20,218
32.9%
23
Greater London
7,361
12.0%
15
South England
15,335
24.9%
19
Total
61,524
100%
84
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
3.10 Annual pay
In this section we examine how remuneration in FE colleges varies by occupational category and
region. We focus on annual pay for full-time staff only.
SIR data do not include information on the exact salary of FE staff, but they do report granular pay
bands, starting from £0 to £1,999, and progressing in £1,000 increments up to the highest category £100,000 or more. Although the quality of the pay data is generally good, close inspection revealed a
considerable increase in the number of cases where the smallest pay band (£0 to £1,999) was reported
compared to SIR 21. Our view is that this increase is driven more by sampling variation or the way
particular colleges may have reported their data than any genuine increase in the number of very low
paid workers; this group is therefore excluded from our analysis.
In this and other sections related to pay, we focus on medians, rather than means, in part because
information on pay is only available in bands, and in part because medians are less easily influenced by
outliers.
Median pay in FE in England is £25,000 to £25,999 (compared with median pay across all sectors in
the UK workforce of around £27,000). 19 This varies by occupational group (see Table 9). Median pay
is highest for senior managers at £68,000 to £68,999, and lowest for word processing, clerical and
secretarial staff at £17,000 to £17,999. For teaching staff, median pay in FE colleges in 2013-14 stood
at £31,000 to £31,999.
Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_385428.pdf.
19
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Hours
and
Page 25 of 60
Earnings
2014
Provisional
Results,
available
at
08/04/2015
Table 9. Median pay band by occupation group, full-time staff, English FE colleges 2013-14
Occupational group
Median pay band (£)
Number of contracts
Administrative and professional staff
22,000 – 22,999
1,975
Technical staff
19,000 – 19,999
1,621
Word processing, clerical and
secretarial staff
17,000 – 17,999
2,276
Service staff
18,000 – 18,999
2,218
Teaching staff
31,000 – 31,999
10,068
Assessors and verifiers
24,000 – 24,999
581
Senior managers
68,000 – 68,999
278
Other managers
35,000 – 35,999
2,310
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size: 83 colleges.
Median pay for service staff seems to be broadly in line with the median pay for elementary occupations
across the entire UK workforce, which was £17,500 for the year ending April 5 2013.20 FE teachers, on
the other hand, appear to be paid less than teachers in the school workforce. Average (mean) pay for FE
teaching staff in England in 2013-14 is £29,400,21 compared to £38,100 across all school teachers and
£34,600 for classroom teachers specifically.22
Comparing pay for other occupation categories is challenging, due to differing definitions across
sectors. For example, average (mean) pay for English FE senior managers is £69,600, while school
leaders (heads, deputies, assistant heads) are paid £56,100 on average. However, average pay for other
managers in FE is £36,000. This suggests that school leaders are not entirely comparable to either of
the two categories of FE managers.
Pay is considerably higher in Greater London than the other regions of England, whereas outside of
London there appears to be relatively little variation in median pay, at least at these broad regional
levels (see Figure 8).
Source: Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2013 provisional results, available at
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_335027.pdf.
20
This is slightly lower than the mean teacher pay reported in the 2012-13 report, £29,647. However, as discussed above, we recommend
focusing on medians to compare pay across teaching staff between years. This change in mean pay is not reflected in a change in medians, and
could be due either to mere variation in the composition of the sample, or to a decrease in the extent to which pay is concentrated around the
median. The very small drop in mean pay is also unlikely to be statistically significant. See Section 6.2 for further detail on variation of teacher
pay in FE over time.
21
Department for Education, School Workforce in England: November 2013, available at
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335413/sfr11_2014_updated_july.pdf.
22
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Figure 8. Median pay bands for full-time FE staff by broad region, 2013-14
Yorkshire and North
England:
£26,000 – 26,999
Midlands and East
England:
£23,000 – 23,999
Greater London:
£31,000 – 31,999
South England:
£25,000 – 25,999
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size across all regions: 84 colleges, 23,062 full-time contracts. See Table 8 above for sample
size by region.
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4. Profile of teaching staff, 2013-14
In this section, we focus our analysis on the characteristics of teaching staff in FE colleges. As shown in
Table 3 and Table 5, teaching staff made up around 48.5% of contracts and 44.8% of FTE contracts in
the SIR 22 sample.
We first look at some of the contract-level information analysed in Section 3, with respect to all FE
staff: gender, age, ethnicity and annual pay. We highlight any differences between teachers and the FE
staff overall and, as far as possible, with the schools workforce. We then analyse subjects taught in FE
colleges by teaching staff.
4.1 Overview of characteristics in comparison to all FE staff

As with all FE staff, women are more prevalent in teaching staff than men, although the
difference is less pronounced (58.8% compared to 63.3% women across all FE staff).

We find teaching staff have an age distribution very similar to that of all FE staff. The median
age of both groups is 46.

The distribution of ethnicity is the same for teachers as for the FE workforce. Ethnicity is
known for 76% of teaching staff. 90% of contracts are held by white (British and other) staff, 4%
by Asian staff, 3% by black staff and 1% by staff of mixed ethnicity.

Annual pay is higher for teaching staff than among all FE staff. The median annual pay band is
£31,000 to £31,999 for full-time teachers compared to £25,000 to £25,999 for all (full-time)
FE staff.

Consistent with our findings in Section 3.10, annual pay of teaching staff varies significantly by
region. Annual pay is highest in Greater London (£35,000 to £35,999) and lowest in South
England (£28,000 to £28,999).
4.2 Overview of characteristics in comparison to the school
workforce in England
Figures in this sub-Section are largely based on comparisons from the Department for Education,
School Workforce in England: November 2013 publication23. Relatively few direct comparisons can be
made on the characteristics of the two workforces. However our analysis suggests that:

Both in the FE and in the school workforce, teachers are predominantly female, but less so in
FE: 59% of FE teaching staff are women, compared to 74% of the school workforce. However,
both in the FE and in the school workforce, the proportion of female staff is lower among
teachers than across all occupational categories.

Teaching contracts in FE tend to be part-time more often than contracts in the school
workforce. Only one in four school teachers works part-time, compared to nearly two in three
FE teachers.

Teachers in FE tend to be paid less on average than school teachers. The average annual pay
23https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335413/sfr11_2014_updated_july.pdf.
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for a full-time FE teacher in 2013-14 was £29,400, compared to £38,100 for all school
teachers and £34,600 for classroom teachers only.
4.3 Subjects taught by FE teaching staff
4.3.1 Subjects by college and teacher numbers
Most FE institutions have a varied offer of subjects taught: 90% of colleges in our sample offered eight
subjects or more. However, the SIR also includes information on more specialist institutions, such as
Agriculture and Horticulture Colleges, and Performing Arts Colleges. We explore variation in subjects
taught by college type in more detail in Section 5.2.
Table 10 ranks all subjects taught in FE colleges in England in 2013-14 by the number of institutions
where the course is offered. The most common subjects, provided by at least 90% of colleges in our
sample, are:

Business Administration, Management, and Professional;

Health, Social Care, and Public Services;

Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel;

English, Languages, and Communication;

Science and Mathematics;

Visual and Performing Arts and Media.
Table 10 also shows the number of staff teaching each subject, both in absolute terms and as a
proportion of the total number of teachers. Visual and Performing Arts and Media teachers are the
largest group, representing just over 12% of all teaching staff. Although Science and Mathematics and
ICT courses are provided in 93% and 88% of colleges, respectively, the number of staff teaching these
subjects is small compared to other commonly offered courses. ICT teachers make up just under 5% of
the teacher workforce, for example, and Science and Mathematics teachers just under 7%. This is
consistent with our findings from the 2012-13 SIR data.
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Table 10. Subjects provided in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
Number of colleges
providing subject
Proportion of colleges
providing subject
Proportion of
teachers teaching
subject24
Business Administration, Management, and
Professional
79
95%
8.5%
Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel
78
94%
8.1%
Health, Social Care, and Public Services
78
94%
10.4%
English, Languages, and Communication
77
93%
10.5%
Science and Mathematics
76
92%
6.9%
Visual and Performing Arts and Media
76
92%
12.3%
ICT
73
88%
4.9%
Foundation Programmes
70
84%
9.9%
Humanities
70
84%
5.5%
Engineering, Technology, and
Manufacturing
67
81%
7.0%
Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy
60
72%
4.8%
Construction
56
67%
5.5%
Retailing, Customer Service, and
Transportation
41
49%
1.7%
Land Based Provision
38
46%
4.1%
Subject
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size: 83 colleges, 26,095 contracts where subject taught is known.
4.3.2 Number of teachers per college offering each subject
This variation between provision of subject by college and teacher numbers is reflected in the average
number of teachers per college by subject offered, shown in Figure 9. ICT and Science and
Mathematics fall within the bottom five subject areas on this measure.
24
As a proportion of teaching staff contracts where the main subject taught is known.
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45
42
40
37
36
All contracts
35
35
28
30
25
22
28
27
27
25
20
21
20
18
16
16
18
FTE
24
23
20
18
20
17
16
15
13
12
11
11
10
5
2
Retailing, Customer Service, and
Transportation
ICT
Humanities
Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy
Science and Mathematics
Construction
Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel
Engineering, Technology, and
Manufacturing
Land Based Provision
Business Administration, Management,
and Professional
Health, Social Care, and Public
Services
English, Languages, and
Communication
Foundation Programmes
0
Visual and Performing Arts and Media
Average number of teachers in an FE college
Figure 9. Teachers per college by subject offered, 2013-14
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size: 83 colleges, 26,095 teaching contracts where subject taught is known.
Variation in teachers per college by subject may be partly explained by two factors:

The nature of the subject taught: some courses may require smaller class sizes – this may be
the case for Visual and Performing Arts and Media;

The nature of the institutions in our sample. For example, Land Based Provision ranks high in
number of teachers per college, compared to how many colleges provide it. This is largely
explained by the fact that our sample includes Agriculture and Horticulture Colleges, which
focus heavily – but not exclusively - on Land Based Provision. Similar findings for Visual and
Performing Arts may be similarly explained by the presence of specialist Arts colleges.
4.3.3 Turnover rates by subject
Turnover rates for teaching staff by subject area are in line with the overall profile of FE staff described
in Table 11. Among the most commonly taught subject areas turnover rates vary from 10% for
Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy teachers to 22% for Engineering, Technology, and Manufacturing.
Retailing, Customer Service, and Transportation has a 47% turnover rate; however, this figure is based
on a very small number of contracts compared to all other subjects.
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Table 11. Turnover rates and net employment changes by subject, 2013-14
Turnover rate
Net employment
change
Total number of
contracts
English, Languages, and Communication
11.6%
-2.3%
2,752
Business Administration, Management, and
Professional
17.3%
-1.3%
2,225
Science and Mathematics
16.9%
-0.3%
1,810
Visual and Performing Arts and Media
14.6%
-0.3%
3,211
Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel
14.4%
-1.2%
2,110
Health, Social Care & Public Services
12.8%
-0.7%
2,705
ICT
14.7%
-0.9%
1,270
12%
-4.5%
2,584
Engineering, Technology & Manufacturing
22.2%
-2.3%
1,822
Humanities
14.3%
-1.1%
1,424
Construction
16.3%
0.4%
1,426
Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy
10.2%
-3.6%
1,249
Retailing, Customer Service, and Transportation
47.1%
-20.4%
437
Land Based Provision
10.9%
2.6%
1,070
All teaching staff
15.4%
-0.7%
29,846
Region
Foundation Programmes
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
Also in line with other occupational categories net employment changes are negative for nearly all
subjects, with the exception of Land Based Provision and Construction, implying a net employment
change of -0.7% for all teaching staff.
As reported in Table 9, median pay for full-time teachers is between £31,000 and £31,999. There is
some variation around this value depending on subject (see Table 12), with the median pay band for
Business Administration, Management and Professional, ICT, and Humanities teachers being higher,
at £33,000 to £33,999. However, this result may be driven by regional differences in pay. This is at
least in part the reason why median pay for Land Based Provision teachers appears to be considerably
lower, at £26,000 to £26,999: the two biggest Agriculture and Horticulture colleges in our sample are
based in the South and in the Midlands regions where overall pay for FE staff is lower than in Greater
London and in the North.
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Table 12. Annual pay for full-time teaching staff by subject, 2013-14
Subject
Median pay band (£)
Science and Mathematics
32,000 - 32,999
Land Based Provision
26,000 - 26,999
Construction
30,000 - 30,999
Engineering, Technology, and Manufacturing
31,000 - 31,999
Business Administration, Management, and Professional
33,000 - 33,999
ICT
33,000 - 33,999
Retailing, Customer Service, and Transportation
29,000 - 29,999
Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel
31,000 - 31,999
Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy
31,000 - 31,999
Health, Social Care, and Public Services
31,000 - 31,999
Visual and Performing Arts and Media
32,000 - 32,999
Humanities
33,000 - 33,999
English, Languages, and Communication
32,000 - 32,999
Foundation Programmes
30,000 - 30,999
All teachers
31,000 - 31,999
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Sample size: 83 colleges, 10,068 full-time teaching contracts.
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5. Differences between General Further
Education and other FE colleges
In this section we investigate to what degree GFECs differ from other colleges within our sample and
report the most important findings. Because of the relatively small number of FE institutions other
than GFECs in our sample, we group together SFCs, special colleges and SDCs into a generic group of
“other colleges”, totalling just 20 colleges in our SIR 22 sample.
Given this very low sample size of other colleges, considerable care should be given to the findings in
this Section, which could easily be influenced by the particular composition of the 20 institutions that
responded to SIR 22. However, a number of interesting differences emerge. We have used statistical
tests to check the likelihood that these results may have arisen only by chance sampling variation.
Where our tests provide us with confidence that a particular result does reflect genuine variation in the
characteristics of our two groups of colleges, we report a difference as “statistically significant”.25
In Figure 10, we illustrate the profile of a “typical” General Further Education College, constructed
using the characteristics of the median college in SIR 22 data in terms of the size of its workforce and
the characteristics of its teachers.
Figure 10. Illustration of a typical General Further Education College in 2013-14
41 English, Languages
and Communication
teachers
24 Science and
Mathematics teachers
13 subject areas offered
315 teachers
4 senior managers
650 contracts, 402 FTEs
Typical General Further Education College
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
A typical GFEC is considerably larger than other types of FE colleges:

The median GFEC holds over twice as many contracts as the median college in the “Other”
group. The median number of contracts held by a college is approximately 650 in GFECs,
compared to 290 in other colleges. Specifically, there are 315 teaching contracts in the median
GFEC, compared to 145 working in the median college in the “Other” group.
We used Wald tests for the equality of proportions (e.g. of the proportion of part-time among all contracts) or of means (e.g. of
mean age) between GFE and non-GFE colleges. We report a statistically significant difference when the Wald test rejected the
hypothesis of equality of means or proportions between the two groups at the 95% confidence level. Where we perform tests at the
contract level, we account for the fact that certain characteristics (e.g. pay) are largely defined at the college level by using standard
errors clustered by college.
25
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
This difference is partly driven by a greater use of part-time contracts in GFE colleges. The
difference in size between GFECs and other colleges is smaller in terms of FTEs: 402 in the
median GFEC, compared to 227 in other colleges.

The difference in size between GFECs and other colleges is partly due to GFECs offering
courses in more subject areas. The median GFEC employs at least one member of staff teaching
in 13 different subject areas, compared to 9 in other colleges.

However, GFECs do not only offer more subject areas, but they also employ more staff per
subject offered. In the median GFEC, there are 22 teaching contracts per subject taught,
compared to 12 in other colleges.
GFECs differ from other colleges in the size of some occupational groups, as described in section 5.1.1
below, although the distribution of occupations is broadly similar across college types. In both GFECs
and other colleges, teachers are nearly 50% of FE staff, and Service staff and Technical staff are
respectively the second and the third largest group.
We also compared contract-level characteristics of staff between GFECs and other colleges:

GFEC staff tends to be older, with a median age of 50 compared to 48 in other colleges;

The gender composition of staff is broadly similar across college types;

We found little difference between GFECs and other colleges in annual pay for full-time staff
and turnover.
Sections 5.1.2 to 5.1.4 below provide further detail on contract-level comparisons between GFECs and
other colleges.
5.1 All staff
5.1.1 Occupation types
Table 13 compares the proportion of contracts by occupational group in GFECs and other colleges.
The two distributions are similar, with teachers making up nearly half of staff in each group and service
staff being the second largest group, followed by Word processing, clerical, and secretarial staff. The
proportion of senior and other managers is also similar across the two groups of institutions. However,
GFECs employ relatively more Assessors and verifiers, less Service staff, and less Technical staff.
These differences are statistically significant. GFECs tend to employ relatively more teachers, but this
difference is not statistically significant.
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Table 13. Staff breakdown by occupational group in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
Proportion of
contracts
in GFECs
Proportion of
contracts in other
colleges
Other Managers
5.4%
5.5%
Senior Manager
0.5%
0.7%
Administrative and professional staff
6.1%
4.8%
Technical staff
5.1%
7.8%
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
10.4%
8.8%
Service staff
15.2%
21.1%
Teaching staff
48.7%
46.9%
Assessors and verifiers
3.0%
0.9%
Unknown or Undefined
5.6%
3.5%
Total number of contracts
54,538
6,986
Total number of colleges
64
20
Occupational group
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
GFECs have a higher proportion of part-time staff than other colleges. As shown in Figure 11, 58% of
contracts in GFECs are part-time contracts, compared to 50% in other colleges. This difference is
statistically significant. This difference is mainly driven by teaching staff (62.3% part-time in GFECs
compared to 43.7% in other colleges) and service staff. However, we find a larger proportion of parttime staff in other colleges for word processing, clerical and secretarial staff and assessors and verifiers.
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Figure 11. Proportion of part-time staff by occupational group in FE colleges, 2013-14
Other Managers
GFE colleges, 2013-14
Senior Manager
Other colleges, 2013-14
Administrative and professional staff
Technical staff
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
Service staff
Teaching staff
Assessors and verifiers
All staff
0
20
40
60
80
Proportion of part-time staff by occupational category (%)
100
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
Figure 11 suggests that the relatively greater number of teaching staff for GFECs observed in Table
12 could be driven in part by the greater proportion of part-time contracts. Indeed, when we compare
the distribution of occupations in terms of FTEs (see Figure 12), the proportion of teachers is actually
lower in GFE colleges than in other institutions.
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Figure 12. Proportion of FTE staff by occupational group in General FE Colleges in England, 2012-13 and
2013-14
Other Managers
Senior Manager
Administrative and professional staff
Technical staff
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
GFE colleges, 2013-14
Service staff
Other colleges, 2013-14
Teaching staff
Assessors and verifiers
Unknown
Undefined
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Proportion of FTE staff by occupational category (%)
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
5.1.2 Gender
GFECs have a marginally higher proportion of female FTE staff (GFECs: 63.4%, other colleges:
62.7%). Technical staff is the only occupational group where women are less than 50% FTE staff in
GFECs. In other colleges this holds for technical staff as well as senior managers (see Figure 13).
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Figure 13. Proportion of FTE female staff in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
Other Managers
Senior Manager
Administrative and professional staff
Technical staff
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
GFE colleges, 2013-14
Service staff
Other colleges, 2013-14
Teaching staff
Assessors and verifiers
Unknown
All staff
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
Proportion of female FTE staff by occupational category (%)
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
5.1.3 Age
As illustrated in Figure 14, on average, GFECs have an older workforce, and this difference is
statistically significant. While about 40% of staff in other colleges are below 40, the same age group
constitutes only about 30% of contracts in GFECs.
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Figure 14. Proportion of age groups in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
16
15.2
14.5
14
Proportion of age groups in FE colleges (%)
14
13.2
12.1
13.4
13.2
12.1
12
11.4
11.2
10.5
9.9
10
10.5
9.7
9.1
8
7.1
6.6
6
5.1
4
2
1.1
0
Under 25
25 - 29
30 - 34
35 - 39
40 - 44
GFE colleges, 2013-14
45 - 49
50 - 54
55 - 59
60 and over Undefined
Other colleges, 2013-14
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
5.1.4 Staff turnover
Table 14Table 16 shows turnover rates and net employment changes for GFECs and other colleges
by occupation group. Turnover rates are systematically higher for GFECs across occupations, except
for technical staff, meaning a higher fraction of contracts ending in 2013-14. As noted in Section 3.3
above, the higher turnover rates in GFECs convert into a net employment decrease across occupations
while other colleges have no overall net employment change. Note that sample sizes vary by cell (see
Annex 1), with turnover and net employment change figures being based on a relatively small number
of contracts for Senior Managers and Assessors and Verifiers, particularly for other colleges.
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Table 14. Turnover and net employment change rates by occupational group in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
Net
employment
change
in GFE
colleges,
2013-14
Net
employment
change
in other
colleges,
2013-14
8.9%
-5.9%
-2.1%
11.4%
11.8%
-1.8%
-2.0%
Administrative & professional staff
11.6%
9.9%
-1.5%
1.5%
Technical staff
11.3%
12.5%
-2.1%
0.0%
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
16.9%
13.5%
-3.3%
3.9%
Service staff
13.5%
11.8%
-3.3%
-1.8%
Teaching staff
15.9%
11.7%
-0.8%
-0.5%
Assessors and verifiers
16.7%
3.0%
0.5%
12.1%
Unknown
21.7%
0.0%
-5.4%
0.0%
Blank
17.5%
21.4%
6.1%
6.6%
All staff
17.5%
21.4%
-1.9%
0.0%
Number of contracts
54,538
6,986
54,538
6,986
Number of colleges
64
20
64
20
Turnover Rate
in GFE
colleges,
Turnover Rate
in other
colleges,
2013-14
2013-14
Other Managers
13.8%
Senior Manager
Occupation
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. See Annex 1 for sample sizes by cell.
5.2 Teaching staff
Teachers in GFECs do not appear to differ significantly from teaching staff in other colleges in terms
of their demographic characteristics (gender, age), being full- or part-time, or their pay.
The offer of subjects taught in FE colleges, however, does differ – not surprisingly, also given that
GFECs tend to be larger institutions – by college type. There are a number of subjects offered by a
large majority of both institution types, including Science and Mathematics, Business Administration,
Management, and Professional, Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel, Health, Social Care and Public
Services, Visual and Performing Arts and Media, and English, Languages, and Communication (see
Table 15). However while almost 90% of GFECs offer Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy, and over
80% offer Construction, only 20% of other colleges offer these subjects. Similarly over half of GFECs
offer Land Based Provision compared with 30% of other colleges.
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Table 15. Subjects taught in General and other Further Education colleges, 2013-14
Proportion of GFE
colleges
providing subject,
2013-14
Proportion of other
colleges
providing subject,
2013-14
Science and Mathematics
94%
85%
Land Based Provision
51%
30%
Construction
83%
20%
Engineering, Technology, and Manufacturing
92%
45%
Business Administration, Management, and Professional
95%
95%
ICT
90%
80%
Retailing, Customer Service, and Transportation
57%
25%
Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel
97%
85%
Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy
89%
20%
Health, Social Care, and Public Services
95%
90%
Visual and Performing Arts and Media
92%
90%
Humanities
87%
75%
English, Languages, and Communication
94%
90%
Foundation Programmes
92%
60%
63
20
Main subject taught
Number of colleges
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Please see Annex 1 for sample sizes by cell.
The difference in size between GFECs and other colleges is reflected not only in the number of subjects
typically offered, but also in the number of teachers per college offering each subject. As shown in
Table 16, a GFE college tends to employ more staff teaching all subjects commonly offered, from
Science and Mathematics to ICT and Visual and Performing Arts and Media. However, the number of
teachers per college is higher in other colleges for Humanities, Construction, and Land Based
Provision. This is partly driven by the diverse composition of other colleges, and in particular by the
presence of six Agriculture and Horticulture Colleges (AHCs) in our sample. Among other colleges in
our sample, only AHCs offer Land Based Provision and Construction. Five of the AHCs in our sample
held over 30 Land Based Provision teaching contracts, which explains the large number of teachers per
college shown in Table 16. The relatively high number of Construction teachers per college is largely
due to one AHC holding 94 Construction teaching contracts. Figures in Table 16 on less common
subjects should be interpreted with caution given the small number of colleges and contracts involved,
particularly for the “other colleges” group. See Annex 1 for further details on the sample sizes on which
the figures in Table 16 are based.
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Table 16. Number of teachers by subject taught in General and Other Further Education Colleges, 2013-14
Average number of
contracts in GFE colleges
providing subject, 2013-14
Average number of
contracts in other colleges
providing subject, 2013-14
English, Languages, and Communication
41
18
Business Administration, Management, and Professional
34
10
Science and Mathematics
24
24
Visual and Performing Arts and Media
50
18
Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel
31
14
Health, Social Care, and Public Services
42
10
ICT
20
7
Foundation Programmes
42
13
Engineering, Technology, and Manufacturing
31
5
Humanities
20
21
Construction
25
27
Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy
21
12
Retailing, Customer Service, and Transportation
12
2
Land Based Provision
12
11426
22,957
3,138
63
20
Main subject taught
Total teaching contracts where subject is known
Number of colleges
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
Note that this figure is highly influenced by the six Agriculture and Horticulture specialist colleges in our sample, three of which employ
over 100 teachers.
26
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6 Trends in the General Further Education
College workforce
Since the underlying methodology used to construct the data for this analysis of SIR 22 data is the
same as used to analyse SIR 21, we are able, at least in principle, to make direct comparisons between
our findings this year and last year to assess changes in the FE workforce.
However, in practice, our ability to perform a meaningful analysis of the evolution of the overall FE
workforce over time has been hindered by a change in the size and composition of the sample of
colleges reporting information in SIR 22, compared to SIR 21. Not only do we have a much smaller
sample this year than last year, we also have a particularly small sample of FE colleges other than
GFECs. As a result, our comparative analysis is focused entirely on the GFEC sector, where we can be
confident we have sufficiently large samples to make meaningful comparisons and that the underlying
composition of the sample in the two years is at least broadly similar.
As in Section 5, we used statistical tests to check for the significance of any differences between 201213 (SIR 21) and 2013-14 (SIR 22), and comment on this significance.27 However even where individual
results are statistically significant it is worth exercising some caution: there are a large number of
individual comparisons we are making across years, and so even by ‘chance’ we would expect to find
some differences which are significant. Given we only have two years of data, it would be too soon to
determine any general trends in workforce composition which would require more years of data
analysed on a similar basis.
6.1 All GFEC staff
6.1.1
Occupation type
The distribution of FE staff across occupational categories has remained broadly constant since 201213, both in terms of number of contracts and in terms of FTE staff (shown in Figure 15).
We used Wald tests for the equality of proportions (e.g. of the proportion of part-time among all contracts) or of means (e.g. of mean age)
between GFE and non-GFE colleges. We report a statistically significant difference when the Wald test rejected the hypothesis of equality of
means or proportions between the two groups at the 95% confidence level. Where we perform tests at the contract level, we account for the
fact that certain characteristics (e.g. pay) are largely defined at the college level by using standard errors clustered by college.
27
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Figure 15. Proportion of FTE staff by occupational group in General FE Colleges in England, 2012-13 and
2013-14
Other Managers
Senior Manager
Administrative and professional staff
Technical staff
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
GFE colleges, 2013-14
Service staff
GFE colleges, 2012-13
Teaching staff
Assessors and verifiers
Unknown
Undefined
0
5
10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
Proportion of FTE staff by occupational category (%)
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 21 and SIR 22 data.
Part-time contracts are still the majority of contracts in GFE colleges, but the proportion of part-time
has decreased slightly, from 59.4% to 58.4%. This is consistent across all occupational categories, with
the exception of service staff, as shown in Figure 16.
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Figure 16. Proportion of part-time staff by occupational group in General FE Colleges in England, 2012-13 and
2013-14
Other Managers
GFE colleges, 2013-14
GFE colleges, 2012-13
Senior Manager
Administrative and professional staff
Technical staff
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
Service staff
Teaching staff
Assessors and verifiers
All staff
0
20
40
60
80
Proportion of part-time staff by occupational category (%)
100
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 21 and SIR 22 data.
6.1.2
Gender
Figure 17 shows that the share of female staff in GFECs has increased slightly since last year (62.1%
in 2013-14 compared to 61.8% in 2012-13), although this change is not statistically significant. In
particular, now over half of senior managers are women – although results on senior managers are
particularly difficult to interpret given the small number of senior managers in our sample (only 272
contracts in SIR 22, about 0.05% of the total).
Overall, the main driver of this increase seems to be a change in the proportion of women among
teaching staff (55.9% in 2013-14 compared to 54.6% in 2012-13).
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Figure 17. Proportion of FTE female staff in General FE Colleges in England, 2012-13 and 2013-14
Other Managers
Senior Manager
Administrative and professional staff
Technical staff
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
GFE colleges, 2013-14
Service staff
GFE colleges, 2012-13
Teaching staff
Assessors and verifiers
Unknown
All staff
0
20
40
60
80
100
Proportion of female FTE staff by occupational category (%)
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 21 and SIR 22 data.
6.1.3
Age
Staff employed in GFECs are older in 2013-14 than in 2012-13. As illustrated in Figure 18, the
proportion of staff in age bands over 50 has increased, at the expense of those under 25 and between 45
and 49. Median age has increased from 45 to 46 years.
The ageing of the GFE workforce is also reflected in the mean age of staff, which is now 45 years,
compared to 44 in 2012-13. This change in the mean age is statistically significant.
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Figure 18. Proportion of age groups of staff in General FE Colleges in England, 2012-13 and 2013-14
16
15.2
14.5 14.6
14.9
14
13.2 13
Proportion of age groups in GFE colleges (%)
12.7
12.1
11.7
12
9.6
10
13.4
9.7 9.6
9.1
8
7.3
6.6
5.6
6
5.1
4
2
1.1
1
0
Under 25
25 - 29
30 - 34
35 - 39
40 - 44
GFE colleges, 2013-14
45 - 49
50 - 54
55 - 59
60 and over Undefined
GFE colleges, 2012-13
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 21 and SIR 22 data.
6.1.4
Ethnicity
The ethnic composition of the GFE workforce in 2013-14 mirrors closely the mix observed in 2012-13:
white (British and other) members of staff make up nearly 90% of the FE workforce, with the second
largest group being Asian staff (approximately 4% of the workforce) and
Black/African/Caribbean/Black British staff (approximately 3% of the workforce). Information on the
ethnicity of staff in 2013-14 is available for 87% of staff, noticeably more than in 2012-13, when
ethnicity was known for only 76% of the GFE workforce in SIR 21.
6.1.5
Staff turnover
Staff turnover in GFE colleges (the proportion of contracts ending in the teaching year relative to all
contracts observed) has decreased from 16.9% in 2012-13 to 15% in 2013-14. This decrease is
consistent across occupational categories, and it is particularly marked for teaching staff, where
turnover rates fell from 18.8% in 2012-13 to 15.9% in 2013-14.
However, year-on-year net employment change for GFE staff continues to be negative, unchanged in
2013-14 compared to 2012-13 at -1.9%.
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Table 17. Turnover and net employment change rates by occupational group in FE colleges in England, 2013-14
Net employment
change in GFE
colleges, 2013-14
Net
employment
change in GFE
colleges, 201213
Total number of
contracts in SIR in
GFE colleges, 201314
Total number of
contracts in SIR in
GFE colleges, 201213
Other Managers
-5.9%
-5.7%
2,965
4,178
Senior Manager
-1.8%
-5.0%
272
361
Administrative and professional
staff
-1.5%
0.6%
3,312
4,494
Technical staff
-2.1%
-0.7%
2,758
3,893
Word processing, clerical and
secretarial staff
-3.3%
-1.7%
5,694
7,114
Service staff
-3.3%
-0.1%
8,271
10,939
Teaching staff
-0.8%
-2.6%
26,571
33,015
Assessors and verifiers
0.5%
-1.7%
1,661
2,236
Unknown
-5.4%
-2.5%
2,333
1,487
Blank
6.1%
2.3%
701
514
All staff
-1.9%
-1.9%
54,538
68,231
64
89
64
89
Occupation
Number of colleges
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 and SIR 21 data.
By occupation type, there is a difference in the sign of the net employment change rates for
administrative and professional staff (from positive in 2012-13 to negative in 2013-14) and assessors
and verifiers (from negative in 2012-13 to positive in 2013-14). However, as noted in Sections 3.3 and
5.1.4, findings on turnover rates for assessors and verifiers should be taken with caution, given the
small number of contracts in this occupational group observed in SIR data.
6.1.6
Pay
Median pay for full-time staff across all regions and occupational categories is constant between 201213 and 2013-14, at £25,000 to £25,999. As described in Section 3.10, we have excluded the lowest pay
band (£0 to £1,999) when computing median pay estimates provided in this report. Moreover, as
explained in Section 2.2, due to the size of our sample, we have only analysed pay variation across four
broad geographical regions of England rather than across the nine Government Office Regions. Given
these adjustments, and the lower number of colleges in the 2013-14 sample, we could not be confident
that any change in median pay at the regional level – even the broad regions defined in Section 2.2 –
would not be merely due to sampling variation, rather than to actual changes in pay.
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6.2 Teaching staff
In this section, we perform two sets of comparisons with the aim to assess whether the characteristics
of teaching staff specifically in GFEs have changed over time:
1. We compare characteristics of GFE teachers observed in SIR data in 2012-13 to 2013-14.
2. We compare teachers having a contract starting date within 2013-14 with staff whose contracts
have started earlier as a way to explore whether “new” staff have any systematically different
characteristics to those who have longer-standing contracts28.
Some of the key findings from our analysis are:

The size of teaching staff as a proportion of the overall GFE workforce has increased slightly
compared to 2012-13, but remains broadly consistent over time at just under 45%.

The proportion of women among all teaching contracts is virtually unchanged, at 59%. The
proportion of part-time contracts, instead, has decreased from 64 to 62%, as also shown in
Figure 16 above, but this change is not statistically significant.

Similarly, there is a change in the age profile of teachers – with median age increasing slightly
in 2013-14. However, this is not reflected in a statistically significant difference in the mean age
of teaching staff between 2012-13 and 2013-14.

The median pay band of full-time GFE teaching staff in 2013-14 is £31,000 to £31,999,
£1,000 higher than the median in 2012-13, £30,000 to £30,999. Analysis of variation in pay
by main subject taught suggests that this increase may not be uniform across all subjects.
However, given that pay is at least in part determined at the college level, and that our sample
of colleges is smaller than in 2012-13, we could not be confident that a subject-level comparison
of changes in median pay for teachers would be robust.

Consistent with our findings from the SIR 21 report, staff joining in 2013-14 tended to be older
(at start time) than staff whose contracts started before August 2013. The median age for GFE
teaching contracts starting in 2013-14 is 42, higher than all GFE teachers starting before
2013-14 where median age at contract start was 39.

Also consistent with the SIR 21 report, GFE teaching contracts starting in 2013-14 were more
male-concentrated than contracts with earlier start dates: 53% of contracts starting in 2013-14
are held by women, compared to nearly 60% for contracts with earlier start dates.
As noted elsewhere in this report, a weakness of this analysis is that SIR does not allow us to identify individuals. Some of the contracts
starting in 2013-14 will therefore not relate to teachers who are new to the GFE workforce, but will rather simply be new contracts of
teachers who were already employed in GFE colleges prior to 2013-14.
28
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7 Inferences on the total workforce
population
Although all FE colleges are requested to provide data on contracts with their members of staff as part
of the SIR collection, in practice only some do. Within SIR 22, we have information on staff from 84
colleges, or 25% of FE colleges in England. This is a lower sample size compared to previous SIR
collections.29
The decline in sample size means we need to be particularly careful when trying to make inferences on
the size and composition of the workforce in all colleges based on the observed SIR sample. If colleges
reporting SIR data are systematically different from other colleges (for example, if only larger colleges
respond to SIR), then we would be at risk of producing biased estimates (in this example,
overestimating the size of the workforce). However, as explained in Section 7.2, we believe that colleges
in our sample are, on average, representative of the population of FE colleges in England along a
number of dimensions. This gives us confidence in the feasibility of estimating the total size of the FE
workforce by scaling up the workforce observed in SIR 22 data. Without being able to find ways to
encourage more FE colleges to respond to the SIR data request or to obtain data on total workforce
population in other ways, this ‘scaling’ approach based on limited SIR returns remains the best way to
obtain estimates of the total workforce.
7.1 Representativeness of the SIR 22 sample
Comparing the distribution of college types in the SIR 22 sample with the distribution of colleges in
our best estimate of the whole “population” of FE colleges in England in 2013-14,30 we find that SFCs
are significantly under-represented. While SFCs constitute roughly one third of the population, they
only make up 14% of the SIR 22 sample. For GFE colleges the picture looks different. They make up
about 75% of the SIR 22 which is higher than the proportion of GFECs in the population (65%). This
reflects the relatively larger response rates to SIR 22 among GFECs compared with SFCs. However,
the relative under-representation of Sixth Form Colleges is not necessarily an issue, if our goal is to
estimate the total size of the FE workforce, regardless of college type.
In order to be confident that our sample is similar enough to the population of FE colleges for our
purposes, we used data from the Association of Colleges (AoC),31 comparing colleges in the SIR 22
sample to other AoC member colleges in terms of total income, total expenditure, total EFA/SFA
student numbers, total FTE staff numbers, total net salary costs and region.
Full details of our analysis are given in Annex 2. Broadly, we found that very large and very small
colleges are under-represented in SIR 22, but on “average” SIR 22 colleges were not statistically
different on these dimensions from other AoC member colleges. In terms of looking at staffing, the
under-representation of very large and very small institutions would only be a cause for concern for
our inferences if both were systematically different from medium-sized colleges in staff composition. As
seen in Section 5 of this report, the composition of GFECs and of other colleges in terms of occupation
categories is broadly similar: while we found some statistically significant differences they tended to be
small in absolute magnitude. This gives us confidence that our estimates of the size of a specific
occupation category for the whole FE sector are going to be relatively good from straightforward
scaling up of the SIR sample to match the number of colleges in the entire English FE sector.
29
In 2012-13, we had data from 123 colleges, roughly one third of all FE colleges in England.
This population consists of 341 colleges, of which: 220 General Further Education Colleges; 94 Sixth Form Colleges; 9 Specialist
Designated Colleges; 15 Agriculture and Horticulture Colleges; 3 Art, Design and Performing Arts Colleges. Please see Annex 3 for a more
detailed description of these institutions.
30
The latest data available to us relate to the 2012-13 teaching year. Although these data have not been updated for the 2013-14 teaching
year, we believe they are sufficiently up to date for our tests: we are only using the data to compare two groups of colleges along
characteristics that are unlikely to vary year on year enough to influence the results of our comparisons.
31
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7.2 Estimates of the total workforce population
The results of our checks and statistical tests reassure us that FE colleges in SIR are, on average,
representative of FE colleges in England. This provides us with confidence that it is possible to
produce indicative estimates of the total size of the FE workforce by scaling up the number of contracts
and of FTE staff observed in the SIR 22 data. This involved multiplying the average number of staff
per college by the total number of English FE colleges, 341.32 We adopted this approach to estimate
both total staff count, and total FTE members of staff.
Table 18 shows the results of our simple estimation. Figures are rounded to avoid giving the
impression of too much precision from this scaling exercise.
We estimate the FE workforce to consist of approximately 250,000 individuals, or 155,000 Full-Time
Equivalents. Note that this is likely to be an upper bound for the true number of FE members of
staff. This is because, for this estimate, we are considering contracts as equivalent to individuals.
However, an individual may hold multiple contracts with an FE college – past SIR reports
estimated that up to 15% of staff hold multiple contracts.33 It is important to note that these figures
are not straightforwardly comparable to the estimates we provided in the 2012-13 SIR report. This is
primarily because we are scaling up to a different number of colleges, due to the adoption of a new list
as the population of FE colleges in England considered for this analysis. Moreover, although the checks
and tests described above and similarly conducted last year reassured us that the SIR sample is broadly
representative of the population in both years, we are still working with a limited number of colleges,
and this number has declined in 2013/14. Changes in the estimates of the total size of the workforce
should not be compared to infer growth or decline of the FE workforce as a whole.
Table 18. Estimated total FE staff in England, 2013-14
Occupational group
Staff per college
FTE staff per
college
Total estimated
staff count
Total estimated FTEs
Administrative and professional staff
44
35
15,000
11,800
Technical staff
40
30
13,600
10,200
Word processing, clerical and
secretarial staff
76
50
25,900
17,100
Service staff
117
68
40,000
23,200
Teaching staff
360
208
122,600
70,900
Assessors and verifiers
21
12
7,100
3,900
Senior Manager
4
4
1,300
1,200
Other Managers
40
35
13,700
12,000
732
459
249,800
156,600
Total
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data. Note: the total number of staff per college has been estimated including contracts where the
occupation was unknown (3,280 contracts), and it is therefore greater than the sum of the rows relating to each occupational category.
The number of FTE workers is considerably lower than the total number of staff, in line with the
prevalence of part-time contracts in the FE workforce.
32
Please see Annex 3 for further information on the derivation of this number.
33
“Further Education College Workforce Data for England: An analysis of the Staff Individualised Record Data 2011-2012”, June 2013, LSIS.
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We also estimate the total number of teaching contracts and of FTE teachers in 2013-14 by main
subject taught. Visual and Performing Arts and Media is the largest group with 13,000 members of
staff. Table 19 presents estimates of the number of teachers in the FE workforce by subject taught. As
with the estimates presented in Table 18, our estimate of the total size of FE teaching staff (122,600
contracts and 70,900 FTEs) is likely to be an upper bound for the true number of teachers, because
individual teachers may hold multiple contracts. However, our estimates of the number of teachers for
specific subjects are not necessarily upper bounds, since main subject is not known for all contracts.34
However, we found no evidence of obvious variation in the likelihood of reporting an unknown subject
across different types of college, at least suggesting no clear systematic under-reporting of particular
subject areas among the sample.
Table 19. Estimated total FE teachers in England, 2013-14
Subject
Teachers per
college35
FTE teachers per
college
Estimated number of
teachers
Estimated FTE
teachers
English, Languages, and Communication
33
18
11,200
6,100
Business Administration, Management,
and Professional
26
15
9,000
5,000
Science and Mathematics
21
15
7,300
5,000
Visual and Performing Arts and Media
38
20
13,000
6,700
Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel
25
16
8,600
5,500
Health, Social Care, and Public Services
32
18
10,900
6,300
ICT
15
9
5,200
3,100
Foundation Programmes
31
19
10,500
6,400
Engineering, Technology, and
Manufacturing
22
14
7, 400
4,900
Humanities
17
10
5,800
3,500
Construction
17
12
5,800
4,100
Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy
15
9
5,000
3,000
Retailing, Customer Service, and
Transportation
5
1
1,800
400
Land Based Provision
13
7
4,300
2,400
Unknown
45
22
15,200
7,500
379
205
122,600
70,900
Total
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
34
Main subject taught is blank or unknown for 3,751 teaching contracts, nearly 10% of all teaching contracts in SIR 22.
Note: these figures may differ from those presented in section 4 above. In 4, we present the number of teachers for a certain subject divided
by the number of colleges providing that subject. Here, instead, we define teachers per college as the number of teachers for a certain subject
divided by the total number of colleges in our sample.
35
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8 Conclusions
The 2013-14 Staff Individualised Record (SIR) dataset includes up-to-date information on 61,524
standard contracts of employment between a Further Education (FE) college and a member of staff.
The data were provided by 84 colleges, or around one quarter of all 341 FE colleges in England. This
represents a significant drop in response rates from 2012-13, when around one-third of colleges
supplied up to date data, although statistical analysis suggests that on average the sample of
respondents is broadly comparable to the wider population of FE colleges in England. Given this, we
use the data to construct an estimate of the overall size of the FE workforce in England, of
approximately 249,800 individuals, or 156,600 Full-Time Equivalents. Teaching staff make up the
largest group (122,600 contracts, 79,600 FTEs). Senior managers make up around 1,300 contracts
(1,200 FTEs). The overall decline in the response rate does mean that there is less confidence in these
figures than previously, and continued declines in response to the SIR record would hamper
significantly our ability to estimate the overall size of the workforce in future years.
The drop in response was particularly marked outside the General FE College sector, which made it
impossible to provide any robust, disaggregated analysis of variation in workforce characteristics by
college type, other than a broad comparison between GFECs and other colleges. Similarly, our ability
to draw out trends in the workforce between 2013-14 and 2014-15 (which in principle is possible
because the methodology used for this year’s report is identical to that employed last year) was
hampered by the poor return outside the GFEC sector; as a result, we were limited to looking at trends
within GFECs to ensure that our samples across the two years were at least broadly comparable.
Increased responsiveness to the SIR data return for 2014-15, particularly outside GFECs, would allow
for a much more disaggregated comparison to be made in future and a fuller look at trends in workforce
composition to be carried out.
Our analysis of the 2013-14 workforce suggests that the FE sector in England is characterised by
substantially more part-time working than other sectors. Almost 60% of contracts in FE are part-time,
compared to around one in four workers being part-time across the wider economy. The FE sector is
also predominantly female: 63% of contracts are held by women; while this is larger than the female
share of total employment, it is a smaller proportion than in the schools workforce.
We find evidence that the FE workforce is shrinking: our best estimate is that net employment changes
are around -1.7% across the sector as a whole. This change is less marked for teachers (-0.7%) and more
marked for other (non-senior) managers (-5.5%). This meant that as a proportion of the overall
workforce in GFECs, comparing 2012-13 and 2013-14 data, we found an increase in the share of
teachers and a reduction in the share of managers. As a proportion of FTE staff, teachers have
increased from 43.5% to 44.1%, while the proportion of other managers has decreased (from 8.9% to
7.6%). Senior managers make up a very small proportion of FTE staff in the GFEC sector.
Comparing 2012-13 and 2013-14 data, we also find some evidence of a slight increase in the mean age
of GFEC staff, from 44 to 45 years. This is reflected in the age of those with new contracts in 2013-14
being above the overall workforce. We also find an increase in the share of women among FTE staff in
GFECs, from 61.8% to 62.1%. The increase is more pronounced among teaching staff in GFECs, where
the share of female staff rose from 54.6% to 55.9%. We also find some slight increase in median pay for
full-time staff in GFECs, from £30,000 - £30,999 in 2012-13 to £31,000 - £31,999 in 2013-14.
Our comparisons between the GFEC sector and other parts of the FE sector in England found little
evidence of difference in the composition of staff, other than a slightly older workforce (median age 50
in GFECs compared with 48 in other colleges). In terms of size and subject areas offered, GFECs are
larger and more diverse than other colleges on average. A “typical” GFEC holds 650 contracts with
members of staff (402 in FTE terms), of which 315 are teachers. It provides courses in 13 distinct
subject areas, and employs 41 English, Languages and Communication and 24 Science and
Mathematics teachers.
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Annex 1: Additional tables
Table 20. Number of contracts in SIR 22 by occupational group and college type
Number of contracts
in GFE colleges,
2013-14
Number of contracts
in other colleges,
2013-14
Other Managers
2,965
382
Senior Manager
272
51
Administrative & professional staff
3,312
333
Technical staff
2,758
546
Word processing, clerical and secretarial staff
5,694
613
Service staff
8,271
1,474
Teaching staff
26,571
3,275
Assessors and verifiers
1,661
66
Unknown
2,333
3
Blank
701
243
Total
54,538
6,986
64
20
Occupation
Number of colleges
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
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Table 21. Number of colleges and teachers by subject taught in General and Other Further Education Colleges,
2013-14
Number of GFE
colleges where
subject is taught
Number of other
colleges where
subject is taught
Number of
contracts in
GFE colleges
Number of
contracts in
other colleges
English, Languages, and Communication
59
18
2,424
328
Business Administration, Management, and
Professional
60
19
2,040
185
Science and Mathematics
59
17
1,408
402
Visual and Performing Arts and Media
58
18
2,892
319
Hospitality, Sports, Leisure, and Travel
61
17
1,874
236
Health, Social Care, and Public Services
60
18
2,526
179
ICT
57
16
2,040
115
Foundation Programmes
58
12
2,426
158
Engineering, Technology, and
Manufacturing
58
9
1,776
46
Humanities
55
15
1,102
322
Construction
52
4
1,319
107
Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy
56
4
1,203
46
Retailing, Customer Service, and
Transportation
36
5
428
9
Land Based Provision
32
6
384
686
Blank and unknown
-
-
3,614
137
Total contracts
-
-
26,571
3,275
64
20
64
20
Main subject taught
Number of colleges
Source: Frontier analysis of SIR 22 data.
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Annex 2: Representativeness of the SIR 22
sample
This Annex provides a detailed description of our assessment of the extent to which colleges in SIR 22
are representative of the 341 institutions in the population of FE colleges in England. We carried out
some tests of the representativeness of our sample for two reasons:

To ensure that the information on FE staff obtained from SIR data provides an accurate picture
of the characteristics of the entire FE staff;

To check that it is possible to estimate the total size of the FE workforce by simply scaling up
the numbers in our sample.
In order to do this, we used data from the Association of Colleges (AoC) on 338 of their member
institutions. The AoC data included information on the following characteristics of those 338 colleges,
as of 2012/201336:

Total income

Total expenditure

Total EFA/SFA student numbers

Total FTE staff numbers

Total net salary costs
There were six of the colleges in our population for which data from AoC was not available:

General FE colleges: Cambridge Regional College, K College, Marine Society College of the
Sea

Sixth form colleges: Gateway College, St Mary's College, Middlesbrough

Specialist Designated Colleges: The College of Animal Welfare
We were then able to compare 81 of the colleges in our sample to 254 colleges in the rest of the
population, testing whether they are statistically different in terms of the characteristics listed above.
This was done performing a two-sample t-test (for the means) and a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (for the
distributions). The two-sample t-test is a statistical tool to check whether the mean value of a certain
variable is statistically different between two groups. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test looks at
distributions rather than means and checks whether those are statistically different for a certain
variable between two groups. Performing these tests we found that:

the mean values for all respective variables do not differ significantly between our sample and
the rest of the population.

the distributions differed significantly between the sample and the population. This suggests
that, although the sample on average is not different from the rest of the population, there are
differences across the two in how often certain ranges of values are found.
Further inspection of the data revealed that the population includes more extreme values (both high
and low) than the sample. In other words, in our sample we do not observe very small and very large
36
This was the latest version of this dataset available to us.
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colleges, as can be seen by comparing the two histograms in figure below.
Figure 19. Distribution of income in 2012-13 in FE colleges
Proportion of colleges in each group
Colleges in SIR 22
Other colleges
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Total annual income (2012/13)
Source: Frontier analysis of AoC and SIR 22 data.
The chart on the left shows the distribution of income perceived by FE colleges that are in the
population but not in our sample. The chart on the right shows the distribution in the sample. The
picture is similar for the other variables we analysed.
However, these differences between the sample and the rest of the population need not be a cause for
concern:

The picture of the characteristics of FE staff based on SIR would only be skewed if members of
staff of both very small and very large colleges had significantly different characteristics
compared to staff in other institutions. In particular we would be concerned if very small and
very large colleges were both different from the rest of the population, in the same direction. For
example, the mean salary of staff in SIR would be lower than the mean in the population if both
staff in small and in large colleges were paid less than the rest of the workforce.

Estimates of the total size of the college workforce based on scaling up the numbers in our
sample are going to be accurate as long as our sample is on average not different from the
entire population. This has been confirmed by the results of the t-tests on the mean values of
colleges’ expenditure, income, student and staff numbers, and net salary costs.
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Annex 3: Further Education colleges in
England
This Annex provides a detailed explanation of our approach to defining a list of Further Education
institutions in England that can be considered the population from which the sample of colleges
responding to SIR is drawn from (“the population”). This list aims to reflect the state of the Further
Education (FE) sector in England as of the end of the 2013-14 teaching year, that is, as of July 31,
201437.
This list of colleges in the population was compiled through the following steps.
We started from the list of colleges that have been requested to provide a return as part of the SIR 22
data collection process. This list was provided by Texuna Technologies Ltd (the “Texuna list”). The
Texuna list included 353 FE institutions:

222 General Further Education Colleges (GFECs);

91 Sixth Form Colleges (SFCs);

16 Agriculture and Horticulture Colleges (AHCs);

3 Art, Design and Performing Arts Colleges (Arts colleges);

9 Specialist Designated Colleges (SDCs);

12 National Specialist Colleges (NSCs).
No returns were received from NSCs, so we excluded all 12 NSCs, in order to ensure a certain degree
of homogeneity in the population. National Specialist Colleges differ from the other types of
institutions above in that they focus specifically on providing young people with learning difficulties or
disabilities with valuable skills for living independently. NSCs are associated under Natspec, a separate
organisation from the Association of Colleges (AoC), whose members are GFECs, SFCs, AHCs, Arts
Colleges, and SDCs.
We then accounted for mergers and name changes that occurred before the end of the 2013/14
academic year but that were not reflected in the Texuna list.
The Texuna list was therefore reduced by two GFEC and one SFC. The respective mergers were:

GFECs:
o
o

Stroud College and Filton College merged to South Gloucestershire and Stroud
College February 2012
Lewisham College and Southwark College merged to Lewisham College (August 2012)
and changed name to LeSoCo (April 2013)
AHCs:
o
Easton College and Otley College merged to Easton and Otley College (July 2012).
We also removed from the list Leek College, formerly a GFEC, which merged with the University of
Derby and therefore left the FE sector in August 2012.
Then, we accounted for several name changes that occurred before the academic year 2013/2014 and
37
We use the definition of teaching year specified in the SIR 22 data specification.
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were not yet reflected in the Texuna list. Namely this was done for:

East Kent College (formerly Thanet College)

Central College Nottingham (formerly South Nottingham College)

City of Liverpool College (formerly Liverpool Community College)

Richard Taunton Sixth Form College (formerly Taunton’s College)
However, these name changes did neither affect the composition nor the number of colleges in the
Texuna list.
Finally, we extended our list to include GFECs and SFCs that were not included in the Texuna list
although they are recognized as part of the FE sector by Ofsted38:

GFECs:
o West Kent and Ashford College

SFCs:
o Longley Park Sixth Form College
o Rochdale Sixth Form College
o Lowestoft Sixth Form College
The number of GFECs was therefore increased by one, the number of SFCs by three. The population
resulting from these steps includes 341 institutions in total, of which:
38

220 GFECs

94 SFCs

9 SDCs

15 AHCs

3 Arts Colleges.
Ofsted Official Statistical Release of December 2, 2014, “Further education and skills inspections and outcomes”.
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