Opinion

How the sums don’t add up in recruitment of maths staff

It can be a struggle to recruit suitable maths staff – and it won’t get any easier as numbers...

Expert Contributor
DIANE DALBY
Opinion

College restructuring is complex, costly and shrouded in secrecy

Julian Gravatt analyses the finances of colleges and explains why the restructuring fund will be nowhere near adequate in...

Expert Contributor
JULIAN GRAVATT
Opinion

Ofsted’s focus on new providers should be an extra, not an instead

The Ofsted annual state-of-the-nation report is due for publication next month and I’ve spent much of this week crunching...

Pippa Allen-Kinross
NICK LINFORD
Opinion

Governance structures must evolve for a college to survive

Good governance is essential to the effective running of any business, with an ineffective board being the most likely...

Expert Contributor
STEPHEN HOWLETT
Opinion

Why colleges should be wary of university mergers

Merging with a peer in further education is now the most sensible option for colleges wanting to cut costs,...

Expert Contributor
MARTIN VINCENT
Opinion

What to do if your college is running into financial problems

Skills minister Anne Milton explains what the government is doing to support colleges in financial difficulty   A college...

Expert Contributor
ANNE MILTON
Opinion

Quality of apprenticeship policy suffers from ‘insufficient progress’

Two years ago FE Week exposed thousands of apprentices on standards without any approved end-point-assessment organisations. At the time,...

Nick Linford
NICK LINFORD
Opinion

Functional skills is more relevant to the workplace than scraping a GCSE

It is vital that functional skills count towards the 20 per cent of time required to be learning off...

Mark Dawe
MARK DAWE
Opinion

Bonfire of the qualifications – is that what’s next?

Take the politics out of funding vocational qualifications and trust in the technical expertise of the bodies that have...

Expert Contributor
TOM BEWICK