FE Week Reporter | FE Week

Timely advice on FE for the incoming Government

With notable past experience advising those in the corridors of power on FE, Roger Dawe outlines what he’d be saying if called upon for his views today. Bromley College has been doing relatively well and has been diversifying into new areas — a Career College for hospitality, food and enterprise, the recruitment of 14 to […]

Workplace complexity requires careers guidance and skills provision overview

Anthony Mann looks at the issue of careers advice with the demands of employers for workers with certain skills becoming ever-more complex. Two elements of education and skills policy have, of late, attracted particularly intense controversy. Both are Cinderellas of their sectors and the two are related: careers education and adult skills provision. What connects […]

Employers back skills pilot after damning review

Businesses have called on the government to keep faith with its employer ownership of skills pilot despite a damning review of the project having revealed the first stage had resulted in less than 40 per cent of desired starts. A review (pictured below right) of the £340m pilot, which aimed to involve employers in the design of […]

Indy Scene Edition 133

A round 30 days to go and we may know who the next government will be and the damage these ‘wannabe’ leaders are inflicting on the apprenticeship vision might be over. It’s the time of the year when we are talking to this summer’s school-leavers who want to become an apprentice and already several are […]

Lindsey Noble, interim principal, Greenwich Community College

A sailboat cannot travel forward with the wind blowing straight towards it — instead, the boat must zig-zag, travelling diagonally across the path it wants to take. So even if the boat has travelled three miles in total, it may only have progressed two miles in its intended direction — in sailing parlance, only some […]

Putting the college at the heart of devolution

Sheffield City Region recently signed a devolution agreement that included skills funding. Heather Smith discusses the implications. Those of us who lead colleges often talk about distributed leadership — how to get the best from our staff and for our students to secure discretionary effort, improve quality and increase efficiency. Indeed, to get the ownership […]

Labour plan face-to-face careers advice for all teenagers to include ‘high quality apprenticeship’ guidance

Sector leaders have welcomed Labour plans announced today to give every teenager face-to-face careers advice — including guidance on “high quality apprenticeships and technical degrees”. Party leader Ed Miliband announced the proposals to improve careers advice as part of Labour’s education manifesto, A better plan for education, unveiled this morning. A Labour spokesperson said it […]

Slapped wrists for Ucas after breach of electronic marketing rules by ‘wrongly’ signing college learners up for advertising

Learners who used the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) to apply for higher education courses at FE colleges were wrongly signed up to advertising, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ruled. The ICO has told the organisation to change its application form following an investigation sparked by a story in the Guardian in March […]

New Bubbles’s Learning Revolution conference

Creative teaching and the role of research were discussed at the New Bubbles Learning Revolution Conference, which also saw calls for Ofsted to be abolished. Delegates heard from TV scientist Professor Robert Winston, a range of academics and principals as well as current and former Ofsted inspectors at the lively conference near Heathrow, London. Among […]