Author: Fraser Whieldon

A college representative body has marked the start of an annual celebration of the sector with a survey highlighting the plight of small-to-medium enterprises trying to access skilled personnel and training for employees. A survey of 503 such businesses by the Association of Colleges (AoC) comes ahead of Colleges Week on Monday, and as education […]

The skills minister has said she is “hopeful” the list of free, first, full level 3 qualifications being funded as part of the Lifetime Skills Guarantee will be published next month.  Speaking at an FE Week roundtable today, Gillian Keegan was asked when providers and learners can find out which courses they could start from […]

A former college principal who championed further education and skills as a member of Parliament has been knighted in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours.  Nic Dakin, who represented Scunthorpe from 2010 to 2019 after having run Sir John Leggott College in the city, is one of 20 FE and skills figures to have been recognised.  […]

A college group is planning on providing festive relief to families in need this Christmas by bringing back its hugely successful foodbank project. London South East Colleges (LSEC), in partnership with 30 other colleges, including Boston College, Central Bedfordshire College and Chichester College, raised £43,800 for their local foodbanks after launching #FEFoodBankFriday when the UK […]

Labour has castigated the Conservatives for their “pitiful” investment in college estates, after a minister revealed that the average annual spend fell by £244 million between 2010 and 2016. Skills minister Gillian Keegan this week released data showing that, while funding for capital improvements in FE colleges under the previous Labour government stood at £3.6 […]

The EuroSkills 2020 competition, in which the UK was due to compete in January, has been postponed indefinitely due to the “worsening Covid-19 situation in Europe”. Having originally been scheduled to take place in the Austrian city of Graz last month, EuroSkills was pushed back to January 2021 while the Austrian authorities re-organised to mitigate […]

Not a single apprentice started work at the Department for International Development in 2019-20. That’s according to the latest data on how the government is progressing towards the public sector target of employing at least 2.3 per cent of their total staff as new apprentices between 2018 and 2021. The Department for International Development’s failure […]

Ofsted inspection results for the college sector at the end of last year fell for the first time in three years after a substantial number of merged colleges received a grade three. FE Week’s annual analysis of inspection grades shows that 76 per cent of general FE colleges have been placed in the top two […]