FE Week Reporter | FE Week

On location at the Skills Show – FE Week team out and about

From Birmingham in 2013 to Brazil in 2015 Around 700 talented young people competed to be crowned the best in the UK at this year’s Skills Show. The event, in its second year, plays host to a series of sector competitions to find the UK’s best young craftsmen and women with the aim of getting […]

Carpenter swaps sawdust for massage oil after losing his sight

Brave ex-carpenter Sam Appleton has gone back to Basingstoke College of Technology to retrain as a masseuse having gone blind just three months after he was diagnosed with a devastating eye disease, writes Paul Offord. When Sam Appleton (pictured above) qualified as a carpenter from Basingstoke College of Technology, he never imagined cruel fate would soon […]

Defending colleges and their ‘realistic’ workplace offer

Traineeships are the latest example of the myth that colleges cannot provide a true-to-life working environment for learners, says Lynne Sedgmore. There is a strange policy gap that English politicians of all parties fall into when thinking about vocational education. They present choices for young people in terms of either going to university or taking […]

Making vocational education the ‘envy of the world’

After a year in office, Skills Minister Matthew Hancock provides an update on his four priorities for vocational education. It’s one year since I spoke last at the Association of Colleges (AoC) annual conference. I’d been a minister for about a month at that point, and I laid out my priorities for vocational education. […]

Do colleges train too many hairdressers?

Plenty of apprenticeship starts and a high public spend on training would suggest a wealth of hairdressers, but an employer survey has indicated a lack of trained staff. Michael Davis investigates the apparent “disconnect”. Our company intranet recently saw a lively discussion about the acceptable price of a man’s haircut. A rift sharper than a […]

The taxing issue of future funding in a world of cuts

With government spending on adult skills set to fall over the coming years, Mark Corney tries to find a way through the narrowing funding options. The very existence of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) sharpens up the competition for resources between adult skills and higher education. The highly-respected Institute for Fiscal Studies […]

Employers prepare to take wheel of new Career Colleges

Career Colleges will set their 14-year-old learners off on the path of a career with the aim of getting them into a job anywhere from the ages of 16 to 19, explains Ruth Gilbert. As a previous college principal who has spent the last ten years working on quality improvement and business turnaround in […]

College has seen many changes…just like these ‘old boys’

Leyton Sixth Form College hosted a 50-year reunion for former grammar school students. The building now used for the sixth form college used to be home to Leyton County High School for Boys, a grammar school for 11 to 18-year-olds. It became Leyton Senior High School for Boys in 1968, catering for 14 to 18-year-old […]

Keeping apprentice assessment and commercial interests apart

How do you judge whether apprentices are truly prepared to qualify, and who decides? Iain Macdonald puts the case for an independent body. Much has been said about apprenticeships over the last year and the debate came to a head last month with publication of the government’s Future of Apprenticeships in England: Implementation Plan. What […]