Author: Fraser Whieldon

A college has warned it will have to hand back over £4 million under the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s “spiteful” adult education budget claw back plans. Leicester College told FE Week it has forecast to spend 53 per cent of its £11 million allocation for 2020/21 – meaning it could have to hand back […]

Colleges that deliver less than 90 per cent of their national adult education budget allocation this year face having their unspent funds clawed back, the Education and Skills Funding Agency announced today. The agency said this new threshold, much higher than the 68 per cent set for last year, is a “fair representation of grant-funded […]

The public sector apprenticeship target is to continue for an extra year as the majority of bodies in scope struggle to hit the 2.3 per cent starts aim. The Department for Education revealed on Friday it will be amending legislation to set a new one-year target from 1 April 2021 to 31 March 2022. The […]

FE Week tells the inside story of the cyber attack that shut down one of Birmingham’s major colleges, and finds out what others can do to protect themselves from similar threats. At around 3am last Saturday, an alert rang out around South and City College Birmingham’s key staff and managers that the server had crashed. […]

The lack of jobs in England which require a licence to practice shows the country does not place a high value on skills, a leading academic has said. Lorna Unwin, professor emerita in vocational education at the UCL’s Institute of Education, called for a “cultural shift” on the licences during an FE Week webcast on […]

A Birmingham college has closed all its campuses to students for a week following a “major” ransomware cyber attack that disabled its core IT systems. The eight sites of South and City College Birmingham will be shut and revert to online teaching from today while computer forensic specialists work to fix the problem. The college […]