bokonon, why not?
good luck dazzlinboy, been thinking about it myself, although i was leaning more toward FE
As has been noted above – the money is crap, even in education terms, and there is zero job security – given that FE shrank during the boom years, the current government are doing it no favours and colleges are making significant cuts to departments all the time – I worked in FE for 6 years and was put at risk of redundancy 3 times, and I felt my self lucky to get only that. I’d guess that in any one year, 25% of FE colleges are putting staff at risk of redundancy.
Morale tends to be very low, with directorate coming in with little or no understanding of education – the person who made 90% of the decisions and did all the negotiating with the union where I worked was an accountant, was very good at it, but knew the square root of F all about standing in a class room – how long it takes to prepare a lesson, do some marking etc.
FE is, broadly, a testing round for the rest of the education sector, if you look at the incorporation process of the early 90’s, it’s almost a mirror for the free school/academy changes we get now – except FE lecturers were less well organised and less able to take on the changes – because they were nationally implemented.
School head teachers do tend to have a better idea about what it takes to do the job, which helps generally – although it’s no bed of roses by any means – they are being squeezed just like everything else – but FE has been getting it in the neck through the good times, so the bad times are that little bit worse, more precarious, more bullying management, more obtrusive micromanagement strategies.
(I was on the National Exec of the FE lecturers union (UCU) for a while and got to see a pretty good cross section of what was going on, and it wasn’t pretty.)