Further education colleges have traditionally competed with one another for learners, for funding, for reputation. In construction skills provision, that competitive instinct is increasingly at odds with what the sector actually needs.
Regional infrastructure and housing targets are too large, and the skills gap too deep, for any single college to close alone. Collaboration between providers is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s becoming the only credible route to the scale and consistency the sector requires.
What collaboration is and isn’t
Genuine collaboration between FE providers goes well beyond informal information- sharing or occasional joint events. It typically involves shared facilities, pooled specialist staff, standardised curriculum modules and coordinated employer engagement and arrangements that require real trust and, often, formal governance structures to sustain.
It’s worth being equally clear about what collaboration isn’t. It isn’t a merger of identity or a dilution of what makes individual colleges distinctive to their communities. The strongest collaborative models preserve each provider’s local relationships and specialisms while pooling resource and expertise in the areas where scale genuinely helps such as high-cost equipment, niche specialisms, or curriculum development that no single college can justify alone.
Where joint delivery adds the most value
Not every area of the construction curriculum benefits equally from collaborative delivery. The areas of greatest demand tend to be exactly the ones where collaboration adds the most value: digital construction, MMC and retrofit training all require specialist equipment and expertise that is expensive and hard to source, making them natural candidates for shared delivery models.
By contrast, foundational trade skills like bricklaying, carpentry, plumbing often remain more efficiently delivered locally, close to where learners live and where employer relationships are already established. The most effective collaborative frameworks recognise this distinction rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach to joint delivery.
Governance and funding: the real barriers
Where collaboration stalls, the cause is rarely lack of goodwill between providers, it’s governance and funding structures that weren’t designed with collaboration in mind. Funding models built around individual institutional performance can actively discourage colleges from sharing learners, staff or facilities, even when doing so would produce a better outcome for the sector as a whole.
Samantha Egan, Group Director of CTEC at The Bedford College Group, points to funding as one of the most persistent practical obstacles providers face:
“We have some of the challenges around funding and capital funding space to deliver those qualifications is a real challenge for us. There’s a variability in funding approaches through devolution that we’re trying to grapple with, to make sure that funding is being channelled in the right way.”
Samantha Egan
Group Director of CTEC at The Bedford College Group
It’s a reminder that structural barriers to collaboration aren’t abstract, they show up directly in what a provider can and can’t commit to.
Overcoming this requires deliberate structural choices: formal partnership agreements that set out shared goals and cost arrangements, funding mechanisms that recognise and reward collaborative delivery rather than penalising it, and governance models with enough clarity to prevent disputes over resource or credit as partnerships mature.
Building toward national impact
Regional collaboration between FE colleges is where most of these benefits are realised in practice, but the same principles scale further. National collaboration mechanisms, shared standards bodies, cross-regional curriculum development, coordinated advocacy all could accelerate innovation and standardisation well beyond what any single regional partnership can achieve alone.
The Bedford College’s own role illustrates what this can look like in practice. As Samantha Egan explains:
“We are developing this at the moment through our Construction Technical Excellence Colleges programme, which Bedford College leads.”
Samantha Egan
Group Director of CTEC at The Bedford College Group
Leading a national programme rather than simply participating in one gives a provider a direct stake in shaping how collaboration works at scale, not just benefiting from it locally.
The sector’s biggest challenges which include a deep skills gap, fast-changing technology, tight capital budgets are all shared challenges. Providers that recognise this and build genuine collaborative capacity rather than defaulting to institutional competition, are the ones best placed to deliver the scale of workforce the construction sector actually needs.
