Whilst attending a local autumn fayre on Sunday, I passed by the stand of the local FE college and chatted to the ladies, as I taught a bit of maths and Spanish there a while back. They gave me a newspaper with the sad remains of that used to be Evening Classes. I used to love them. I did psychology, 'simple cooking for men' (quite gory that one. Lots of gashes and spurting blood - they would better have called it 'cooking for simple men'), wine tasting (local lush club), even my first pasitos in Spanish were at Evening Classes. Others that I can't recall, but always enjoyed and found interesting. The costs was reasonable, maybe £45 or £50 for 10 lessons and they just used the vacated and empty classrooms of the college. It was a nice community thing. We were most fortunate here because we got retired professors from Oxford university taking the classes sometimes, so really good for everyone. There us nothing remaining now. Everything is geared towards work and business and 'skills' and enterprise points and so on. And expensive....whoooo. (whistles through teeth and shakes hand). £172 for the course. More even some of them. There was next to nothing of leisure interest, except some ladies' stuff like weaving, dress making and cutting children's hair. I thought it was really disappointing in its range of subjects and inaccessible in its prices. Who would you complain to about that and what's the chances of it having any effect?
You stand no chance, as FE colleges ceased to be part of local authority provision and are all now geared to be self supporting. My brother was for years a print, art and photography technician supporting A level and HND courses. Made redundant three times moving from Watford to Harrow to Stanmore. Each time due to college management chasing income by switching courses toward those that gathered in fees from potential full time students. As a result FEs are probably awash with courses geared toward web design and to support vocational courses for trades from hair and beauty to electricians. All worthy but anything that does not gather in the dosh gets culled. Even the Workers Education Association is chasing the skills agency pieces of silver.
FE colleges used to be brilliant for trying out all sorts of esoteric activity and for meeting new people. Variously in years gone by I learned finger style guitar, did a song writing course, stand up comedy (I wasn’t funny), years of astronomy and astrophysics, years of French and learned masses of photographic and dark room skills just in time for digital photography to make them redundant. There were always dozens of courses in Floodlight that I wanted to try. Shame to think the choice isn’t there now.
