Jude Burke | FE Week

Wave three of area reviews produces four merger proposals

Just five mergers have been proposed in the latest area reviews to have completed – and with one of them already off the cards, parts of the sector are beginning to voice concerns. Five of the seven wave-three review reports were published by the Department for Education on Tuesday (January 10). However, the recommendations for […]

Misleading marketing of ‘industry-approved’ provider schemes exposed

Providers are at risk of being duped into believing they need to pay thousands to become “industry-approved” before they can deliver new apprenticeships for the food and drink industry, FE Week has learned. A body called the National Skills Academy for Food and Drink has been accused by industry figures of “misleading” the sector with […]

Gazelle Group on its last legs after its director and most members quit

The Gazelle Colleges Group is on life support following a precipitous drop in membership, months of inactivity and the departure of its executive director. At its peak, the group, formed in 2011 to promote enterprise in colleges, had 23 members – each of which paid many thousands of pounds in annual membership fees. But FE […]

Sir David Collins earned £0.5m in three years as FE commissioner

The former FE commissioner Sir David Collins earned just under £500,000 for doing the job part-time, it has been revealed, though he also did twice as much work than had originally been planned. The role was advertised in 2013 with a rate of £800 a day for an average of two days’ work a week. […]

Revealed at last: Government sets aside £726m for area review restructuring

The government has set aside almost three quarters of a billion pounds to cover restructuring costs emerging from the area reviews, FE Week can exclusively reveal. The Department for Education has finally come clean on the figure after we made repeated attempts to get it to reveal the size of the restructuring facility pot via […]

‘Incredibly unfair’ funding quirk riles colleges

Colleges have hit out at an “incredibly unfair” flaw in the notorious English and maths condition-of-funding rule – which makes it impossible to achieve 100 percent compliance, and could cost them funding. An Education Funding Agency rule states that any study-programme learners who don’t already have at least a C in English and maths must […]

SFA extends data return deadline as Hub crashes

The Skills Funding Agency has extended its deadline for a key data collection, after the Hub suffered another breakdown. The online data collection service is understood to have crashed last night (December 5), less than 24 hours before providers were due to submit their Individualised Learner Record (ILR) R04 (fourth return of the academic year) […]

Reports of discrimination at SFA double in a year

Levels of reported discrimination in a key FE government agency have doubled in a year, an annual staff survey has revealed. Ten per cent of respondents from the Skills Funding Agency to this year’s Civil Service People Survey said they had personally experienced discrimination at work in the previous 12 months. This compares with just […]

EFA funding falls by over 20% for three colleges

Three colleges have seen the funding they receive for 16- to 19-year-old learners drop by more than 20 per cent since last year, according to the latest figures. The Education Funding Agency 2016/17 allocations, published in November, shows that funding has fallen by 2.2 per cent across the sector as a whole compared with 2015/16. […]