Author: Billy Camden

Training providers can now bid to deliver T-levels in the second year of their rollout, the Education and Skills Funding Agency has announced. Guidance, published today, invites expressions of interest from providers who want to deliver the new technical qualifications in 2021/22, and sets out the criteria they will need to meet. The ESFA has […]

The skills minister Anne Milton delivered a keynote speech to the Sixth Form Colleges Association winter conference this morning, in which she spoke about the Raise the Rate campaign among other hot topics in FE. Here’s her planned speech in full.   Thank you Bill for that kind introduction and for inviting me back this […]

The Department for Education is consulting on plans to provide extra funding to cover the estimated £80 million rise in pension contributions for FE colleges in 2019-20. It was announced last year that the amount colleges and other public-funded FE training providers must contribute to staff pensions is to rise from the current rate of […]

A London college previously at the centre of controversy involving the Grenfell Tower has received its fifth consecutive grade three rating from Ofsted. Kensington and Chelsea College was inspected in November and was considered to require improvement. The inspectors wrote in their report: “A recent period of uncertainty in the college’s history led to a […]

A top government academies official has been appointed as the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s new director of funding. Kate Josephs (pictured), currently director of national operations for academies and regional delivery at the Department of Education, will start in the new role in April. She will head up a new funding “operations centre of […]

A college has called in the lawyers to recover a long-running £1.4 million debt held up in Nigeria, after a secretive technical education project in the country went pear-shaped. Highbury College, which recently sold one of its prime learning centres in Portsmouth for a hugely reduced price to balance the books, has launched a number […]

A college in financial difficulty has ended the use of corporate cards for senior staff after its former high-profile principal claimed more than £40,000 in expenses over the last five years. The “lavish” spending by Dame Asha Khemka at West Nottinghamshire College included numerous visits to fine-dining restaurants, five-star hotels and a private members’ club. […]

The Department for Education has published new guidance on the controversial 20 per cent off-the-job training rule for apprentices, which attempts to bust certain “myths”. The policy, which requires apprentices to spend a fifth of their week on activities related to their course that are different to their normal working duties, has split the FE […]

The government has revealed plans for its first ever FE workforce survey exclusively for non-colleges to better understand the challenges they face, including new policy areas such as T-levels. A tender was launched by the Department for Education on Monday, which seeks a contractor to design, test and deliver a “nationally representative” survey of teaching […]