Author: Pippa Allen-Kinross

The Department for Education has wasted more than £2.3 million over the last five years on studio schools, UTCs and post-16 free schools that never even opened. Figures obtained by FE Week’s sister paper FE Week reveal a staggering £2,331,888 has been written off for nine planned providers cancelled between May 2013 and January 2018. […]

The government has insisted “quality” was a factor in choosing 21 colleges to share £40 million funding as maths centres of excellence after concerns over their achievement rates. The centres for excellence will test and disseminate new ways to improve the teaching of maths to learners who are resitting maths GCSEs, and will share the […]

The first colleges to train 80 industry experts as teachers for part of the £5 million Taking Teaching Further scheme have been announced. The programme seeks to recruit industry specialists and retrain them to work in the post-16 and FE workforce, in an attempt to bring in more “diverse experiences and skills”. The scheme was […]

Northumberland College has undergone a “cash flow crisis” and could see its finances plummet further, according to an intervention report from the FE Commissioner. The report, published today, also revealed declining learner recruitment, inadequate apprenticeship delivery, low achievement and “last minute negotiations” to defer loan repayments at the college, and warned that it may yet […]

A former schools minister has called for the admission age at university technical colleges to change to 16, after damning new research faulted their academic progress and ability to recruit and retain learners. The latest report from the Education Policy Institute has laid bare the major issues at the 14-19 providers, including high drop-out rates […]

The Sixth Form Colleges Association is preparing to launch a campaign calling for a huge increase in the 16 to 18 base rate, just a week after the Association of Colleges will demand an initially smaller rise in their own campaign. The Raise the Rate campaign will call for the funding base rate for all […]

Allowing employers and apprentices to give “smiley faces” as reviews of training providers is a better indicator of quality than “tick box” inspections, according to the skills minister. Anne Milton was speaking in favour of the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s new service, which will allow employers to score training providers in an online review […]

Three providers have been criticised for making ‘insufficient progress’ in the latest series of monitoring reports from Ofsted, including a recently merged college. But it was ‘good’ news for one independent specialist college, which retained a grade two. Coventry College, which was formed in August last year out of a merger of the grade three […]