Here’s a line I say to almost every leadership team I work with in FE and skills: if the only evidence you can point to for your culture is the evidence you’d show an inspector, you don’t have a culture. You have a performance.
I don’t say that to be provocative. I say it because I’ve sat in enough SLT meetings to watch it happen in real time: the conversation shifts, without anyone quite noticing, from “how are our people actually doing” to “how would this look in the SAR.” Those are not the same question. And the gap between them is where culture quietly rots while everyone’s attention is on the paperwork.
Compliance is not the same as care
FE and skills providers live under more scrutiny than almost any other part of education: Ofsted, DfE funding rules, AO verification, subcontracting audits. I understand why compliance eats the agenda. The consequences of getting it wrong are real and immediate. But I’ve watched too many good leaders confuse “we can evidence it” with “we’ve actually done it.”
You can have a beautifully documented CPD calendar and a staffroom that’s exhausted and cynical. You can have a wellbeing policy on the shared space and a curriculum team working every weekend to hit a deadline nobody sanity-checked. The paperwork isn’t lying, exactly – it’s just answering a different question than the one that determines whether people stay, whether they bring their best thinking, whether they trust their leaders. Systems & Structures is one of my 8 Levers precisely because systems shape behaviour, but only the leaders who ask “what is this system actually doing to my people” get the lever working for them instead of against them.
The tell is always workload
If you want to know whether a provider’s culture is real or performed, don’t read the self-assessment. Watch what happens to workload in the six weeks before an inspection window opens, or a QAR submission is due. In healthy cultures, leaders protect their people through that crunch, they absorb pressure, they make trade-offs visible, they say no to something so the team can say yes to what matters. In performed cultures, the crunch just gets pushed downward until it lands on whoever has the least power to push back, usually your best, most conscientious staff, because they’re the ones who won’t let a deadline slip.
That’s not a training issue. It’s not fixed by a workshop on resilience. It’s a Wellbeing & Workload Balance problem sitting directly on top of a Leadership Behaviours problem, and no amount of compliance evidence will paper over it for long. Staff know the difference between being led and being managed toward a grade.
What actually changes it
The providers I’ve seen turn this around don’t do it by working harder at compliance, they do it by asking a different question in the room where decisions get made. Not “does this satisfy the framework” but “does this reflect what we actually believe about how people should be treated here.” Sometimes the answers align. Often they don’t, and that gap is the most useful diagnostic tool you have.
Practically, that means separating your quality assurance conversations from your culture conversations, different meetings, different questions, and crucially, different measures of success. It means leaders being honest with themselves about which system was built to protect learners and staff, and which was built to protect the organisation from an inspector. Both are legitimate. Only one of them is culture.
A question worth sitting with
Next time you’re in a leadership meeting where the SAR, the QAR, or the inspection prep dominates the agenda, ask yourself: when did we last spend this much focused time on what it actually feels like to work here? If you can’t remember, that’s not a scheduling problem. That’s your answer.
Amy Fowles has spent two decades leading in FE and skills — as a curriculum manager, director and now as a culture and leadership consultant through ELEV8. She’s also a wife and mum, which means she’s usually writing this between a school run and a missing PE kit. She writes about culture the way she leads it: honestly, and with the volume turned down on the jargon.