Author: Billy Camden

The government is expected to announce which regulator will inspect the quality of learning for level 6 and 7 apprenticeships without a prescribed HE qualification, such as a degree, in the coming days. FE Week was first to expose the lack of oversight for thousands of these apprenticeships in November, which are currently not the […]

The government should raise the funding rate for 16 to 19-year-olds by a “significant amount” in the upcoming spending review, the Social Mobility Commission has said, piling yet more pressure on the Treasury. The commission’s 2018-19 State of the Nation report says funding for the age group has “fallen 12 per cent since 2011-2012 and […]

The Careers and Enterprise Company will continue to be reliant on government handouts after ministers dropped their ambition for the quango to become self-sustaining. Announcing the creation of the company in 2014, former education secretary Nicky Morgan, said that “in the longer term the company will sustain itself”. But CEC’s new sustainability plan, seen by […]

Plans for PhD-level apprenticeships have been thrown into doubt after the Institute for Apprenticeships raised concerns they were not in the “spirit” of the programme. In December the IfA’s approval funding committee had deferred approving the first PhD-level apprenticeship “in order to seek further guidance from the board and the Department for Education on whether […]

The cash-strapped Hull College Group is to offload one of its three colleges later this year. Harrogate College, which currently makes up the group along with Goole and Hull College, will join the Leeds City College Group on August 1, after plans were signed off by the FE Commissioner and ESFA. The move is part […]

The government has said it may tender for more Institutes of Technology after FE Week shared concerns that there were none planned in the north west and the east of England. Just two of the 12 flagship institutes being taken forward after a two-stage tender process are in the north, with the north west being […]

An independent provider that is part of the country’s largest college group has had its first Ofsted monitoring report published since receiving a grade three last year, and it returned stinging criticism. It follows an FE Week report from last month that warned the watchdog had found no signs of improvement at the provider, which […]

Union officials at two London colleges have written to the FE Commissioner requesting that he urgently investigates whether they should de-merge from the country’s largest college group. Members of the University and College Union at Lewisham and Southwark colleges have been contesting their pay and conditions for years but claim matters have deteriorated even further […]

Employers used 22 per cent of their apprenticeship levy funds in the 12 months to the end of January 2019 – a huge fourfold increase from the 5 per cent drawn down in the first nine months of the policy. The skills minister Anne Milton revealed in a parliamentary answer yesterday that between May 2017 […]