Author: Jude Burke

Students protested today outside Burton and South Derbyshire College over plans to axe their courses. The college confirmed to FE Week that all performing arts, painting and decorating, animal care, brickwork (excluding apprenticeships), and entry level three motor vehicle courses for 2016/17 could be scrapped next academic year, under plans now being consulted on. The college blamed […]

An FE Week Twitter poll on the opening day of the AELP conference asked whether Skills Minister Nick Boles should announce that apprenticeship reforms would continue or not post-Brexit. Of the choices available, most opted for scrapping them — which was not a view shared by the delegates we spoke to (see below). Mr Boles […]

Post-16 education and skills area reviews have so far gone “surprisingly well”, according to Nick Boles, who has admitted he expected them to be “more painful, more quickly”. The skills minister’s positive comments to the Association of Employment and Learning Providers conference on Monday however contrasted with his plea two weeks earlier, for colleges to […]

The FE sector could be facing a “fire sale” of FE colleges, according to shadow skills minister Gordon Marsden, after a leaked government report indicated that they could be sold off to the private sector. A draft document seen by FE Week, called ‘Framework for due diligence in the FE sector following area reviews’, looks […]

A college that recently tumbled from good to inadequate has become the first to have a clean sweep of notices of concern since the Skills Funding Agency went public with its intervention process. An ‘inspection notice’ has been handed out to Telford College of Arts and Technology, following its grade four Oftsed report published on […]

The government risks “failing” a generation by mishandling its traineeship scheme, shadow skills minister Gordon Marsden, (pictured) has said. He clashed with skills minister Nick Boles in parliament over the “terrible” rates of progression from traineeships to apprenticeships last week, which FE Week first uncovered with a freedom of information request in June. Progression figures […]

Key sector figures have urged the government to continue with its apprenticeship reforms following Thursday’s Brexit vote – and warned of the consequences if it doesn’t. The vote by the British public to leave the European Union came after a speech by skills minister Nick Boles on June 13 raised concerns that such a verdict […]

Learning providers should “push their foot through the door” with local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) and not be “downhearted”, the chair of one LEP told conference delegates on Monday morning. Ann Limb, chair of South East Midlands LEP also urged members of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) not to worry about LEP board […]

All “credible cases” from the latest round of growth requests for apprenticeships and traineeships have been funded, the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) announced today. This is the result of the agency’s recent “targeted growth exercise”, which also included increases in providers’ 2016-17 allocations “where there is evidence of increased performance”. It comes after the SFA […]