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• Official governance guidelines set out prescriptive claims about 'accountability', e.g.,
for governing boards to hold college managers to account and to be accountable for
stewardship. Sometimes these distinct forms of accountability are conflated.
• Three different forms of accountability exist in the 2020s:
• Inward-facing - holding CEOs and senior teams to account.
• Outward-facing - collective responses to demands made by funders, government
departments and agencies, quality assessment and assurance regimes, organisations
with various accreditation interests and awarding bodies, etc.
• Lateral - where different governors or different elements of the governing board structure
are accountable to each other within a concept of shared collective responsibility.
• The distinction and relationship between these forms of accountability is important. If official
expectations of what college governing boards are supposed to do seek more 'inward-facing'
accountability, this might not be realistic, given how conceptually different the other two
have to be.
• Understandings of accountability thus need to be reappraised, both by national bodies and
government departments charged with managing FE, and by FE Colleges themselves.
Key points