Author: FE Week Reporter

Adult education has faced constant batterings in the past 20 years, says Alan Tuckett. But, like ground elder, it will continue to pop up through cracks in the system. “There’s no such thing as adult education – it is all further education,” the civil servant charged with the legislation that incorporated colleges once told me. […]

Incorporation has brought about many changes in FE, but the sector is still being outstripped by the pace of technological change, fears Bob Harrison My first experience of teaching with computers was in the 1980s at Sheffield’s Stannington College with young mechanics. The classroom had 16 BBC computers and the students enjoyed the ping-pong game […]

When Dick Moore (pictured) left Sheffield College to join a dotcom start-up company in the US he had the bright idea of putting his daughter through the GCSE English online course delivered by his old college. “She got a GCSE A grade after one year of study,” he says. “And the crazy thing was that […]

Ofsted is just the most recent of the bodies tasked with inspecting further education — but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best says David Sherlock The English FE sector bears the imprint of its local authority past, when our national provision was unplanned and very uneven in quality — but although it remains unplanned, […]