With the jaws of the firefighters' union clamped around its neck, the government was hardly going to notice a midge's nip in the backside on Tuesday when the further education sector held a one-day strike.
The action by five unions, in pursuit of pay parity with schoolteachers so far as lecturers are concerned and of an improvement on current salaries for other staff, was unprecedented. For the first time it united the two further education teaching unions - the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, and the Association of University Teachers - in going on strike over a pay gap with their school counterparts which has widened to 12% and which this year's national offer of 2.3% (schoolteachers got 3.5%) was only going to extend.
It provoked Unison, representing 25,000 classroom support staff, to launch its first industrial action in the sector. It even won the tacit support of the employers. Despite launching an abortive 11th-hour bid in the high court to stymie Unison's involvement in Tuesday's action, the Association of Colleges - representing about 400 further education institutions - declared its continued support of the workforce's case for better pay.
Unless the government comes up with significantly better funding for the sector, employers and unions have argued in joint delegations to Whitehall, the accelerating exodus of staff to better-paid school jobs and the growing difficulties in recruiting replacements will fatally disable it. Teaching vacancies are up 25% on last year, and support staff and manager vacancies up 44%.
But the strike, however unprecedented a display of united discontent, carried a big "so-what?" factor. What would scare a government more: a firefighters' strike with the possibility of a disaster wreaking multiple casualties, or a one-day stoppage by lecturers and classroom support staff with students enjoying some unscheduled free periods?
For all this, the industrial action should be no less embarrassing for Labour if it believes frequent assertions by ministers and advisers that Britain's survival as a prosperous nation depends on boosting the skills of its workforce, and if it believes their declarations that further education must play a crucial role in this.
The creation of the country's biggest quango, the learning and skills council and its 47 local branches, with a budget of £7bn, is some proof of the government's commitment to its vision of a "skills/knowledge" economy. But after a rocky decade since mass incorporation in 1993, when the Major government cut further education colleges loose from local education authorities, they are still awaiting more secure times. Not just financially, although this is the predominant concern, but in having a clearly defined role, which is recognised and appreciated by the government and in which they are not continually pummelled by central initiatives.
Their freedom has been largely illusory. Though encouraged to pursue other funding and to exploit a number of schemes which were subsequently curtailed - most notably "franchising" of courses - they remained dependent on the public purse. Currently, a fifth of colleges are officially categorised as in a poor financial state.
Though some principals and senior managers were undoubtedly dazzled by the notion of joining the corporate zeitgeist which the Tories encouraged, most hoped that Labour would bring relief. They are still waiting. More money has come to the sector, but most of it has been parcelled into ever smaller amounts for specific purposes. According to the Association of Colleges, the real level of core funding for colleges - money without conditions which would enable, for instance, pay improvements - is no higher than it was before Labour came to power in 1997. That leaves its own leaders officially describing further education as the "Cinderella" sector, forever locked below stairs by universities and schools as they vie for government and media attention.
Like reunions of Burma campaign veterans, no gathering of principals of the sector's 350 or so colleges can be deemed properly to have got going until someone has stood up and drawn attention to their forgotten status. There is justification in this complaint. To the estimated 4 million students going through further education, their local colleges are concrete realities; but to the national media they are practically invisible.
When Estelle Morris threw in the towel recently, there was no mention of the major reform programme she announced in the summer and whose results she was due to have unveiled in two weeks' time. Nor is this attitude peculiar to the media. Labour education ministers often proclaim the vital role of further education, but their honeyed words are invariably uttered at get-togethers within the sector; they never reach the outside world.
This is hardly the politicians' fault. But they know what it would really take - in the absence of Prince Harry's picking a further education college to resit A-levels or pursue a vocational course - to lift the profile. When the prime minister makes his big set-piece speeches and reiterates that triple-E slogan, perhaps he should stress that one of them refers to further education, and is as vital as the other two.
· Peter Kingston is the Guardian's further education editor.
