Love Our Colleges Week

Love Our Colleges Week took place between Monday 3 March and Friday 7 March 2025, which celebrated the role of further education colleges in educating the nation and developing their local communities.

The week of celebrations was based on building brighter futures and focussed on the government’s five missions, attributing a day to each mission. The missions highlight the fundamental roles that colleges have in building brighter futures for their students, staff and the government, and how they deliver to further each aspect of the missions and support their local communities.

During the week, the Association of Colleges hosted a series of free webinars celebrating the central role colleges across the country must play in all five of the government’s missions. You can catch up on all the presentations and recordings here.

We explore the government’s five missions and the ways colleges are supporting them—now and in the future—to build brighter futures.

The government’s five missions

1. Kickstart the economy

We cannot achieve any goals as a nation without the required skills to do so and without a skilled workforce. For example, we cannot run our NHS without skills, and we cannot build new homes for our expanding population without skilled construction workers to do so.

Further education colleges are central in convening, coordinating, and providing teaching of the skills required to achieve our goals in kickstarting the economy. Colleges are also key to transferring knowledge to employees whilst also equipping them with the opportunities to develop new skills and achieve goals in new and efficient ways.

Poor productivity is one of the barriers to much needed growth and it can seriously impact the wider resilience of the UK economy. Both public and private organisations work closely with colleges to ensure that individuals have the right technical skills and are matched with employers that are desperate for more skilled workers in any field. Colleges are therefore the catalyst to boosting productivity and seizing opportunities in each individual workforce.

2. Become a green energy superpower

As above, colleges are crucial in providing skilled workforces and this applies in terms of embedding a net zero and nature consideration into skills and education frameworks. This will be fundamental to the UK achieving climate and biodiversity commitments whilst also contributing to a successful economic future and development opportunities across the country.

Colleges are at the heart of communities which also gives them strengths in terms of green energy as they will be able to support a fair transition to a green economy for people and employers by educating and training people of all ages for key low carbon sectors. Colleges can also upskill and retain those workers already working in the low carbon sectors into other jobs as well as acting as a stepping stone for individuals to progress into higher education and other training relevant for the green economy (for example, construction, energy, agriculture, and sport).

By taking advantage of their close partnerships with this industry, colleges will be able to create courses and qualifications which train learners on the skills needed as well as guide workers on workplace behaviours and attitudes needed for successful in achieving net zero.

3. Take back our streets

Colleges can provide additional partnerships with third parties to build a culture of inclusion and a place where everybody, no matter their background, is welcome. Colleges are also working on mentors being trained as trusted adults to provide consistent guidance in and out of the classroom and create a sense of belonging and safety. This is important for taking back our streets and encouraging more young adults, who are currently out of employment or education, off the streets and back into developing their futures.

Colleges often work with external agencies such as violent reduction units and youth offending teams. Being at a college is safer than being out on the streets and the expanding offering at colleges is encouraging more young people to join. Some further education colleges are also able to offer prison education and offender rehabilitation to decrease the likelihood of reoffending and improve futures of those in prison or young offending establishments.

Further education offerings do not stop there as colleges also often have sessions on educating their learners to stay safe outside of college such as charity talks on the danger of drugs, addition, and domestic abuse. There are also initiatives to help students build their trust and confidence in the police which in turn brings the community together with a common purpose.

4. Break down barriers to opportunity

The most common destination for disadvantaged students at the end of secondary school is a further education college which can provide a range of pathways tailored to those who would not otherwise be in education, employment, or training. Therefore, colleges are able to play a part in increasing individual aspirations across their communities and regions and open the doors to more opportunities.

Colleges also have the scope to provide evening classes, to bridge the skills gap in adult workers and further expand job prospects for individuals later on in life. This also means recruiting and adequately training teachers that can cater for adult classes in their required field to ensure that education is distributed more evenly across the population where there is a demand for it.

5. Build an NHS fit for the future

In many ways, further education colleges are the main link for the NHS to recruit in the communities it serves. Embedding colleges into the core NHS workforce and using local recruitment and training power can help to ensure we have a sustainable, agile, and innovative future health and care workforce.

Colleges provide several routes into health and social care to ensure individuals with a range of skills have the opportunity to work within the NHS. Helping students gain the skills and knowledge to support them into secure work within the NHS is key to supporting peoples’ health and wellbeing. It is also important for the NHS to be able to promote their services to the students at colleges as a career path option further encouraging more individuals to provide their skills to benefit their local communities and sustaining a healthy population.

How we support colleges

We are proud to support a vast range of further education colleges and recognise their vital role to play in the local community and the work that they undertake every day to support the government’s missions.

Colleges delivering on these missions have the expertise to carry on doing so, and excel further, and they deserve full recognition within national and local systems to allow them to continue to do so and build on their work to date.

We are delighted to be able to support colleges furthering the government’s missions. Our expertise ranges from work such as providing employment advice to help recruit and retain the best teachers in colleges, providing training to college staff to improve their practices and efficiency, advising on college policies to assist in meeting compliance benchmarks, supporting with student issues, assisting with the management of college property to provide the best facilities possible, providing advice on corporate education governance and much more.