Author: Billy Camden

A consortium lead by Milton Keynes College has bid for £18 million-worth of funding to launch an Institute of Technology at England’s famous wartime codebreaking centre, Bletchley Park. The group, which includes as partners Microsoft, City & Guilds and the Bletchley Park Trust, has unveiled details of the proposed Institute of Digital Technology. As many […]

The regional winners of the inaugural Annual Apprenticeship Awards have been announced at a special ceremony in the House of Commons today. The categories included ‘apprentice employer’, ‘apprenticeship provider’ and ‘promoting apprenticeships campaign’, and winners will now head to the national finals on March 22. The event was sponsored by the chair of the education […]

A high-level advisory group made up of top government officials and industry and union leaders has met for the first time today to begin their work in developing a “historic” national retraining scheme. The first meeting of the National Retraining Partnership was hosted by the chancellor Philip Hammond (pictured above) and joined by such luminaries […]

HMRC has launched a major investigation into subcontracting that could result in tens of millions in fees and fines after it discovered many colleges and training providers are ignoring VAT rules on management fees. FE Week understands that the tax office has put together a team of around 20 special investigators, who will find out […]

University technical colleges have continued to struggle as two more received grade threes this week, while one FE college got its third ‘inadequate’ rating in five years. South Devon and Buckinghamshire UTCs both had unfavourable reports published on February 26. It was the second ‘requires improvement’ rating in a row for Buckinghamshire which had just […]

The boss of the organisation that will be responsible for T-levels has admitted he has deep concerns at the “worryingly tight” delivery timeline. Sir Gerry Berragan, the chief executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships, made his fears known during a keynote speech at an Ofqual conference for vocational education awarding organisations in Birmingham this week. […]

The Public Accounts Committee has today published its report into the monitoring, inspection and funding of Learndirect. Members of the committee grilled the organisations who’ve been closest to the saga involving the nation’s biggest FE provider during a hearing in January. Learndirect was given an ‘inadequate’ rating by Ofsted in a report published in August, […]

Learndirect was indeed given special treatment because the government considered it too big to fail, the Public Accounts Committee has concluded in its final report on the saga. The scandal engulfing the nation’s biggest FE provider has engrossed the sector for nearly a year, and the PAC’s round-up asserts that it still “holds the whip-hand” […]