Foundation Degrees to be awarded by FE Colleges

After having made a lot of fuss about the government's ELQ policy, I now read with surprise that there is a cunning plan afooot, indeed encouraged by legislation that the Further Education Colleges should now award their own foundation degrees.

That would mean that the Further Education Colleges would have access to the very HE funding that universities were told would be theirs if they changed course and started verifying foundation degrees.

The question is whether the further education colleges are capable of verifying their own degrees and whether they have the technical, academic and pedagogic backgrounds so to do. Certainly, my own anecdotal evidence is that they do not. I speak of an incident ten or so years ago when I was teaching HND Business Studies at a further education college. Now this would be, one supposes, an equivalent thing to the foundation degrees of 2008. I was told that my efforts were no longer required and that it was not quite their thing. Even though I offered to get my own university (of which I am a graduate) to franchise the said HND.

What was their thing; health and beauty, cookery? Whither foundation degrees in those subjects. Of course they are needed but hardly to be verified by Universities.

What is being said is that there is a market, shall we call it sub-prime, in more vocational subjects, such as the ones I have mentioned and lets allow the FE colleges to do foundation degrees in these subjects and verify the degrees to the level of that required by the QAA.

This still takes much needed money away from the Universities. Am I being snobby; I would really like to know because I understood that the pot of money available was available for institutions of Higher Education to do higher education learning and not go do degrees in cookery at FE and thus divert even more funds away from Higher Education.

This government seems to have such a distrust of learning. I can see that they would pay out the Queen's shilling to FE to allow them to verify foundation degrees in toast making and basket weaving. But I am seriously asking, is this the way that our much vaunted educational system should be going?