The 157 Group is a group of 30 colleges of further education in the United Kingdom. The group was established in 2006 with an aim of promoting and maintaining high standards of education and management for this type of college. The group whose creation was announced at the 2006 Association of Colleges (AoC) annual conference chaired by the then Secretary of State for Education, Alan Johnson, aims to raise the profile and reputation of Further Education through policy influence. The group takes its name from paragraph No.157 of a British government paper on education, The Foster Report (formally the Review of the future role of FE colleges]'), published a year previously.