Nick Linford | FE Week

Independent training providers to compete for funding after EU law change

Independent training providers (ITPs) will have to compete for Skills Funding Agency (SFA) contracts following changes to European Union law. The document, Adult Education Budget: Changing context and arrangements for 2016 to 2017, published on January 28, said that contract arrangements would stay the same for the next academic year. But it warned: “In advance […]

Cost of college bailouts as high as £100m

The Government is propping up colleges to the tune of £100m, the Association of Employment and Learning Providers’ (AELP) has revealed. AELP chief executive, Stewart Segal, said he was looking forward to college finances improving significantly through the Government’s post-16 area reviews. He added that he hoped “we can save much of that £100m going […]

List of notices of concern and serious breach of contract published for first time

The Skills Funding Agency (SFA) has published a list of live notices of concern and serious breach of contract for the first time. The information contained in a table unveiled today on the agency’s website features 62 providers in total. That number includes 47 general FE colleges, nine local authorities, five independent learning providers and […]

College area review rerun

Five FE and sixth form colleges involved in a pilot review of post-16 provision in Norfolk and Suffolk last year will be revisited in November, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has confirmed. The news of the revisit as part of the region’s planned area review comes as 11 colleges in Norfolk and […]

Promote FE loans yourself, BIS tells providers

The responsibility for telling learners about new FE loans will lie with providers after the government admitted it had no budget to promote them. Meanwhile, it remained tight-lipped on how much it will be spending on its latest apprenticeships campaign, despite repeated enquiries from FE Week. Loans for learners aged 19 and older are due […]

Why can’t politicians just give a straight answer?

It’s a naïve and age-old question, but one that really vexed my newshounds at FE towers this week. The buck-passing we have experienced from the Treasury, BIS, and Conservative Party, up to Number 10, then back again to the Treasury was bewildering to say the least. We tried couching the question in various ways to […]

College surges from ‘inadequate’ to ‘good’ in Ofsted report praising 100 per cent GCSE English pass rate

“Outstanding” GCSE English results have helped a formerly ‘inadequate’ sixth form college surge to ‘good’ in less than 18 months. A hundred per cent of Hartlepool Sixth Form College learners entered for GCSE English achieved a grade C or above in the most recent exams, according to its Ofsted report published today (February 5). The […]

Joint strike action in FE colleges will be taken by Unison and UCU members on February 24

Joint strike action will be taken by members of the University and College Union (UCU) and Unison working in FE colleges on February 24 in response to an ongoing row over pay. The industrial action is set to follow an earlier rejection of a pay freeze for 2015/16, proposed by national employers the Association of […]

Almost 90 per cent of ethnic minority FE staff have faced promotion ‘barriers’

Almost 90 per cent of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) FE staff members have ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ faced barriers when seeking promotion, a new survey by the University and College Union (UCU) has found. A total of 185 BAME members of the union who work in the sector responded to the survey between March […]