Author: Alix Robertson

City and Islington and Westminster Kingsway Colleges have announced that they plan to “merge” from August next year. But while the move is likely to lead to services such as human resources, marketing, finance and IT being shared, governors from both colleges confirmed that the separate identities of the two colleges will be maintained — […]

Weymouth College has jumped from an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted rating to ‘good’ following intervention from the FE Commissioner. The latest Ofsted report on the college was published this morning (December 15), with inspectors rating it ‘good’ across-the-board. It represented a significant improvement on the ‘requires improvement’ rating handed out by the inspectorate in June 2013, and […]

The second wave of invitations to tender for long-awaited European Social Fund (ESF) cash — this time totalling £16.2m — were published today (December 14). The Skills Funding Agency (SFA) and ESF announced today that the four local enterprise partnership areas involved were Swindon and Wiltshire, Greater Manchester, West of England, and Cornwall and Isles […]

Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw has called on employer groups to “take ownership” over localised apprenticeship recruitment as the Government pushes to create 3m apprenticeship starts by 2020. He spoke of his support for the apprenticeship levy and said that a clearer structure for delivering apprenticeships at a local level was needed, in a speech […]

Post-16 education area reviews “haven’t been set up in order to save money,” Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (pictured above) claimed in an evidence session with the House of Lords Social Mobility Committee. Ms Morgan was grilled about the influence of FE funding issues on the post-16 education area review process by former Labour Education Secretary […]

Providers have hit back at claims that establishing new learner ventures in Saudi Arabia as part of the Colleges of Excellence (CoE) scheme might lead to “bankruptcy”. It was reported last week in Education Investor and by FE Week that bosses of the scheme were struggling to get the number of learners they expected after […]

A third sector umbrella body has written to Skills Minister Nick Boles calling for charity representation on the new Institute of Apprenticeships board — and for an exemption to the large employers’ levy. The Charity Finance Group (CFG), which works to improve financial management in the voluntary sector, wrote to highlight challenges the government’s apprenticeship […]

Colleges hit by a nationwide cyber attack on FE and higher education providers were today told that “blocks” had been put in place to prevent further problems. Janet (formerly the Joint Academic Network), which provides more than 18m users in the UK research and education community with high speed connections to the internet, suffered distributed […]

The Committee on Education, Skills and the Economy has today launched an inquiry into careers advice, information and guidance. It will look at issues such as the quality of current careers advice, the effectiveness of careers advice in supporting people into apprenticeships, and how careers advice in schools and college can help match skills with the […]