Twerky with Trimmings

I'm now back from yesterday's learner technology conference on big data where we learnt, amongst other things such as how the concept of learner analytics and big data can be used in educational contexts, what the country thinks is this year's best Christmas cracker joke.
Apparently its: "What does Miley Cyrus have for Christmas?" Answer "Twerky!"

Not withstanding that most of us are getting very bored with the whole twerking thing, especially those of us who live in Yorkshire (e.g. multiple hearings of the very unfunny "where does a Yorkshire man go every day?" "T'werk"), we should at the very least be pleased that cracker humour is at last reaching the 21st century, even if we have a government that with regards to Higher Education is still in the 1950s.

It's now been a week since our Chancellor announced the removal of the cap on student numbers by saying that “this year we have the highest proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds applying to university ever” and that the cap will be removed “at publicly-funded higher education institutions in England by 2015-16”, with "alternative providers also being freed in a similar manner that year". Note that there's no mention of colleges. And still nothing to explain where they fit in. They're not HEIs, so are they "alternative"? The impact on franchised provision we work out (or guess), but what about directly-funded numbers? How can FECs plan for the next three years? What consideration do they need to give to validation agreements?

Fifty plus years of HE delivery in non-HE institutions and it's still some sort of governmental blind spot despite Vince Cable claiming to know all about Higher Nationals because his brother has got one (no, not a joke, I was at the conference where he said it).
Maybe nobody in the treasury consulted him.

Or maybe the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills was too busy considering the devastating effect that a nation singing Jingle Bells might have on the two-horse open sleigh industry...