The college has a policy. It's in the staff handbook. It references values, sets out expectations, and probably includes something about mutual respect and professional conduct.
Ask a lecturer in the engineering block what happens when a student won't put their phone away. Then ask someone in catering. Then ask the person covering in the business suite.
You'll get different answers. Wildly different answers.
That's Wishcipline.
Wishcipline is the gap between what a policy says and what actually happens — on a Wednesday afternoon in J block, when a part-time lecturer is covering a session, when nobody senior is watching.
In schools, Wishcipline is bad enough. In FE, the conditions that produce it are almost built into the structure.
FE colleges are not schools. There is no single timetable, no year group, no shared form period where expectations are reinforced. Students move between departments with completely different cultures. A student who knows exactly what's expected in their motor vehicle sessions walks into a GCSE Maths resit class and finds nobody has agreed on anything. The expectations reset every time they walk through a different door.
The staff have the same problem in reverse. A lecturer who's built a strong culture in their department has no idea what's happening two corridors away, and no mechanism for finding out. When a student says "my other teachers don't care about this," they're often telling the truth.
This is not a reason to give up on consistency. It's a reason to get precise about where consistency is possible.
You cannot build whole-college expectations in an FE setting with any real depth. The qualifications are too different, the timetables too fragmented, the student journeys too varied. A blanket policy that covers every department equally covers none of them properly.
But you can build department-wide expectations. And that's where the work should go.
Within a department, it is entirely reasonable — and entirely achievable — to agree on shared expectations around phones, lesson start times, equipment, and where relevant, uniform or personal protective equipment. These are not whole-college asks. They are professional standards that every lecturer in a department can apply, explain, and maintain consistently.
The Green Wig Test applies here just as much as it does in any college: ask a randomly selected student what happens in your department when someone won't put their phone away. Then ask another. Then ask a member of support staff. If the answers are broadly similar, you have a system. If they're not, you have Wishcipline. (The Green Wig Test is explained in full in this article.)
The fix is not a new policy. Policies are how Wishcipline starts. The fix is a shared practice: a set of agreements, made at department level, that every adult in that department understands well enough to use on a Monday morning without checking the handbook.
That's harder than writing a policy. It takes conversations, training, and follow-through. But it's the only version that works.