In this paper, I check the ethical pulse of further education (FE) at the moment of its coming of age. Using a philosophical lens, I select and review post-2010 literature, to argue that FE colleges persist in a diminished form within a learning economy. In response to the managerial onslaught, the sector has adopted an ethics of survival, a necessary response to austerity and deregulation. Twenty-one years after incorporation, ethical fading has purged ethical desire from educational discourse, while the endless banality of college life has corroded the language with which it might be possible to speak about educational purpose, value, utopia, democracy, equity, and vision.

In “Measuring quality: framing what we know” I offer a critique of Success in Adult Literacy, Numeracy and ESOL provision (Success in ALNE) – a contextualised reworking of the common inspection framework. This document offers a government‐sponsored account of what quality means when applied to the teaching of adult language, literacy and numeracy. The paper draws on critical discourse analysis to argue that the writers of Success in ALNE imagine an ideal reader, inviting the actual reader to fall in with the characteristics ascribed to this positioning. I argue that Success in ALNE adopts a series of positionings regarding quality, practitioners, learners and learning, each of which require the actual reader to adopt a relational stance. Central to the argument developed is that government‐sponsored discourses around quality in adult literacy have effectively marginalised or silenced other discourses. The artefacts associated with quality – the individual learning plan – are argued to exert an agentic power; they are invested with the capacity, indeed they are required, to redefine literacy learning. Compliant with the requirements of the quality regime, they co‐opt practitioners in an act of translation and an act of betrayal in which the actuality of literacy learning is fitted to prescribed lexical categories until it coheres with the abstractions of what quality requires.

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This paper explores the meaning and implications of a policy-driven professionalisation of adult basic skills practice. Written amidst competing theoretical conceptualisations of professionalism, the paper focuses on a particular policy moment in Adult Language, Literacy and Numeracy (ALLN) practice in England: Skills for Life. The paper argues that the possibility of implementation of this policy is limited. The policy is filtered through the fragmented nature of the field, the embeddedness of literacy and what this paper calls an 'anti-professional' stance of ALLN practice. For policy makers, professionalisation is desirable, and its impact is far-reaching. It enables control of a key aspect of the service sector implicated in the supply of flexi-workers required by a globalised economy. In discussing the inevitability of professionalisation the paper draws on a small-scale research project to locate a space for the professional imagination, a space in which ALLN practitioners express motivations at odds with policy imperatives and enact professionalisation in ways that arguably hijack the momentum and resource that the policy provides.