The call by MPs for an ombudsman for further education, who would consider complaints about corruption or unfair management practices is a reflection of the further education sector's unhappy reputation for sleaze.

While a report from the House of Commons Education Select Committee wants more students to be taught in further education colleges, it wants an ombudsman to make sure that the stories of macho management, missing millions and sudden resignations that have haunted the sector will come to a close.

The rapid expansion of the further education sector and its release from local authority control under the previous government saw an equally rapid change in culture, with college principals being encouraged to consider themselves as much business managers as leaders of academic institutions.

Student numbers at colleges will rise, but MPs want an ombudsman to tackle corruption

Among college lecturers, who unsuccessfully campaigned against redundancies and changes to their working conditions in a prolonged industrial dispute, this new style of management was often caricatured as being over aggressive and deliberately aimed at union-busting.

There were also allegations that the enthusiasm for education as business was pushing colleges beyond the boundaries of good practice into corruption and sleaze.

The most dramatic example of the problems in the further education sector came in the rise and fall of Roger Ward, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, the body representing college employers.

Once wanting to be known as Mr FE UK plc, he ended as the man at the centre of "Rogergate", a series of increasingly damaging allegations about financial irregularities that led to his resignation earlier this year.

Mr Ward, who had to apologise for giving wrong evidence to the Education Select Committee's investigations into his association's financial affairs, was brought down amid a tangle of claims about his relationship with an employment agency for lecturers.

Before the demise of Roger Ward's ostentatious champagne-and-Jaguar style of management, a series of other scandals had dogged further education since colleges achieved financial independence.

In 1994, Wilmorton College, Derby, became embroiled in allegations about a bullying management style and dubious financial arrangements, which prompted a damning official inquiry and a series of management resignations.

Scandals have dogged sector

Last year, Stoke-on-Trent College, Staffordshire, received an unprecedented bottom grade for management from inspectors, official confirmation of a long-running series of scandals at the college that led to an £8m cash crisis and the dismissal of a principal accused of bullying staff and of running a pub in Wales while on prolonged sick leave from the college.

Gwent Tertiary College in Usk last year was faced with a deficit of £7m, a crisis that saw the suspension and resignation of the principal.

This year, the principal and financial directors of Cricklade College, Hampshire, were suspended following a police investigation into trading arrangements. And in Halton College, Cheshire, the principal and vice principal were suspended pending investigations into the college's finances. Wakefield College, West Yorkshire, was also criticised by an industrial tribunal for unfairly sacking 51 lecturers.

Both college employers and lecturers' unions have recently expressed an ambition for a break with the past, hoping to put damaging scandals into the background.

The message from the Select Committee seems to be that if the sector is to receive extra funds and students, it will indeed need to clean up its act.