Voices of the isle: Towards a research utopia for FE

This chapter shares the perspectives of practitioners from the Further Education (FE) sector, including College Higher Education (CHE) and Sixth Form Colleges (SFC). Crucially, these perspectives are diverse and sometimes dissonant. Taken together they represent a powerful argument that FE voices, although rarely heard, are complex and, perhaps because of their diversity, have valuable insights to offer. We open with a discussion of the tensions between FE lecturers and leaders in creating the space, agency, and harmony to conduct small scale practitioner research. This is followed by an argument that the inclusion of data from small projects alongside larger data sets creates more nuanced decision making. Subsequently, from a college leader’s perspective, a more agentic view of practitioner-research is developed to argue for the facilitation and dissemination of this work between institutions and agencies. We close with an exploration of the potential for small scale research projects to enable creative problem seeking and problem solving and a wider utopian version for FE research.