The question the Skills White Paper should have asked and what Gallup’s latest data tells us about why it matters.
The government’s post-16 Skills White Paper, published last October, included a proposal that turned more than a few heads. Ministers want to legislate to bar “unsuitable people” from FE leadership. The rationale? To “protect staff, individuals, and public money” and ensure that leaders of FE providers are “the right people to lead their institutions.”
I’m not arguing with the principle. There have been enough high-profile cases of mismanagement in this sector over the years to make the case. But when I read that language ‘unsuitable leaders’, ‘highest standards of leadership and governance’, I found myself asking a question that the white paper doesn’t really answer: what does good leadership in FE actually look like, and are we creating the conditions for it?
Because here’s what’s happening globally at the same time. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, published in April, found that only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025 – the lowest figure since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. The sharpest drop? Manager engagement. Between 2024 and 2025, it fell five percentage points – from 27% to 22%. The people we rely on to lead teams, hold culture together, and keep institutions functioning are, in record numbers, disengaging.
This is not a side issue. It sits right at the heart of everything we are trying to do in FE right now.
The leadership layer that holds everything else up
If you’ve spent any time working in FE, or consulting across it, you’ll know that middle and senior leaders are the glue. They translate strategy into practice. They hold staff through change. They set the tone for how people experience their work every day. When they disengage, it doesn’t stay contained to them. It ripples.
According to Gallup, best-practice organisations record manager engagement of 79%, nearly four times the global average. That gap doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because those organisations invest deliberately in the conditions that let leaders lead well: clarity of purpose, autonomy, recognition, development, and genuine voice in decisions that affect them.
In FE, where college teachers already earn on average 15% less than their school counterparts (as Parliament’s education select committee highlighted in its September 2025 report on the future of FE), where the MPs themselves said the sector’s engine is “running on fumes,” what are the real conditions our leaders are working in? And if we legislate to remove the ones deemed unsuitable, without addressing the environment that’s grinding good people down, are we solving the right problem?
Engagement isn’t soft – it’s structural
One of the things I find myself saying repeatedly when I work with providers is this: culture isn’t something that happens alongside the work. It IS the work. The engagement of your leaders, your teachers, your support staff – that’s not a wellbeing nice-to-have, it’s a performance lever.
When I map this against the 8 Levers of Culture by Design, what strikes me about FE right now is that several of the most critical levers are under strain simultaneously. Leadership Behaviours are being called into question through the white paper. Systems and Structures are being redesigned through Skills England and the 16-19 funding formula review. Recognition and Reward remain chronically underfunded compared to schools. Professional Growth and Development is patchy at best, despite promising commitments in the white paper around teacher CPD.
Any one of those levers under strain is a problem. All of them at once? That’s a culture under serious pressure and culture under pressure produces exactly the kind of disengaged leadership Gallup is now measuring.
What “suitable” really means
The Skills White Paper is right that leadership quality matters in FE. Of course it does. But suitability isn’t just about weeding out the bad actors. It’s about whether our systems, our funding, our professional development infrastructure and our organisational cultures are set up to produce and sustain great leaders – at every level.
The government can legislate to bar unsuitable leaders. That’s a necessary floor. But what I’d want to see alongside it is serious investment in what sits above the floor: the conditions in which good leaders can actually thrive. Career-long professional development. A funding settlement that doesn’t make every appointment feel like a compromise. Cultures where leaders feel heard, not just held to account.
Gallup’s data is a warning. When manager engagement collapses, everything else follows. In a sector already running on fumes, we cannot afford to ignore it.
So here’s the question I’d put to every FE leader and board member reading this: what are you doing – right now – to actively support the leaders in your organisation? Not just performance-manage them. *Support* them. Because that’s the conversation that needs to be happening in every staff room and every senior leadership team, not just in Parliament.
Amy Fowles is a leadership and culture consultant specialising in the FE and skills sector. She works with providers, leaders and teams through Elev8, using the Culture by Design framework.
Sources
Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026 (gallup.com)
FE Week — Skills England annual skills report June 2026 (feweek.co.uk)