FE Week Reporter | FE Week

‘Our education system should be an enabler and not a blocker’

Dame Asha Khemka issues an impassioned plea for FE and the benefits it can bring as the countdown to voting day nears its end. There has been something quite worrying about the discourse in this General Election campaign. Aside from the usual political point-scoring, we’ve seen something more sinister — an undercurrent of fear. Fear […]

Sandra McNally, director, Centre for Vocational Education Research

They’re questions that will have kept many others in the FE sector awake at night. They include how do you guarantee good quality vocational education? How do you measure success when there’s no simple FE outcome measure? How are the steps to address low levels of literacy and numeracy working? And then there’s how do […]

There’s more to FE and skills on Twitter than apprenticeship vacancies

It’s more than five years since Ruth Sparkes first applied her FE and skills marketing knowledge to the sector’s use of Twitter — so what has changed since then? I wrote my first article on colleges and Twitter in 2009, so I’m guessing that by now every college and independent learning provider (ILP) must be […]

Bank fines to fund 50k apprenticeships and traineeships for unemployed 22 to 24-year-olds under Tories

A Conservative-led government would use a £200m fund from bank fines issued in the wake of the Libor scandal to create 50,000 apprenticeships and traineeships specifically for unemployed 22 to 24-year-olds, David Cameron will announce today. The Prime Minister is expected to say that the money from the fines, which were issued to those banks […]

What makes FE political

I read a blog the other day that talked about how there was so much political consensus around in our sector at the moment and how this was a ‘job done’ for the sector’s PR and lobbying efforts. The evidence for this was a skills hustings event where representatives from the Conservatives, Labour and the […]

Education and Training Foundation workforce survey highlights Functional Skills teacher recruitment problem

A third of work-based learning providers are finding it difficult to recruit Functional Skills (FS) teachers, a survey by the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) suggests. The ETF has published the results of its latest annual workforce survey, which is based on responses from 186 work-based learning providers, showing that 16 per cent of respondents found […]

General Election 2015: Education, Education, Education

Extra freedoms for FE ‘limited’, claims 157 Group report

Delivery of extra freedoms for the FE sector has been “limited” despite being central to government policy for years, a report commissioned by the 157 Group has said. The consortium of colleges worked with law firm Eversheds LLP on the report, which is a result of interviews with sector leaders including Business Secretary Vince Cable […]

Third of Intraining workforce hit as 450 jobs set for axe

More than a third of the workforce at NCG’s 1,200-worker Intraining division were today facing redundancy following one of the biggest job loss announcements to have hit the sector. The loss of a major Department for Work and Pensions training contract and “uncertainty” over the renewal of European Social Fund (ESF) programmes, along with fewer […]