FE Week Reporter | FE Week

Journalism students interview Prime Minister

Two journalism students at Harlow College got a major scoop when they interviewed Prime Minister David Cameron. Elliott Mees and Amina Ahmed, aged 19, who are studying for a National Council for the Training of Journalists diploma in journalism, grilled Mr Cameron on subjects ranging from his views on UKIP to his policies on the national minimum wage when he visited the college. Elliott Mees said: […]

Minister rejects calls to scrap apprenticeship fees at AELP conference

Skills Minister Matthew Hancock has rejected calls for in-kind contributions towards apprenticeships to count as part of employers’ mandatory cash payments. Mr Hancock re-affirmed his preference for mandatory cash contributions from employers after calls from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) for other elements to be […]

High stakes in principal’s sirloin ‘thank you’ meal

City College Norwich principal Corrienne Peasgood pulled on chef whites to cook dinner for staff who raised £15,000 for the student hardship fund through trekking up mountains. Ms Peasgood and eight other members of the college management team prepared chargrilled watermelon with crispy bacon, sirloin beef, and rhubarb crumble sorbet for 80 guests. A further seven college managers were front-of-house service waiting on […]

New jobs, new skills needs

With the economy growing, the number of people in a job rose 283,000 in just the last three months – that’s the largest quarterly rise since records began in 1971. This means there are a record 30.43m people now in work and the unemployment rate has fallen again to a new five-year low. Youth unemployment, […]

Edition 104: Guy Adams and Andy Welsh

Somerset sixth form college governors’ chair has been made a National Leader of Governance. Guy Adams was given the two-year role with the National College for Teaching and Leadership, which is an executive agency of the Department for Education, in honour of his work at the Ofsted grade one-rated Richard Huish College. He has been […]

Leadership group fulfils ‘specific’ need for female bosses in FE

The workplace remains subject to male dominance and as such, says Carol Taylor, there is need for a space for female leaders to share ideas where they are in the greater number. More than 100 delegates went to the Women’s Leadership Network (WLN) annual conference, in London, run in partnership with College Leadership Services. While […]

Taking the FE sector forward with new teaching standards

With the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) having recently launched the first new FE teaching standards in seven years, Andrew Morris looks at how they have been received and how they might best be embedded. It is just as important to create the right conditions for teachers to learn as it is for their students […]

Taking apprenticeships further

The AELP does a remarkable job of bringing together an otherwise disparate group of providers. It has created unity and delivered joined-up thinking in a sector that’s been battered and broken over the last few years — a sector that has been completely deprived of anything close to a long-term strategy from this government. At […]

New apprentice funding model ‘no simple system’

The newly-announced apprenticeship funding system in which employers will contribute 33 per cent of the cash has been described by Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Stewart Segal as “no simple system”. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) had described the employer-led pilot model for the first Trailblazers’ group — made […]