Seeing ministers use the fanfare of National Apprenticeship Week to announce the removal of the English and maths exit requirement for adult apprentices, I could only assume DfE officials had advised that the move would be universally applauded. Given the thousands of functional skills tutors with suddenly uncertain careers, plus those working for awarding bodies with qualifications that are now unviable – and not forgetting the apprentices now denied vital qualifications – the reality was in fact brutal.
I have talked before about education policy being driven by non-teacher lobbyists whispering to non-teacher civil servants and the accuracy of it couldn’t be more perfectly illustrated than in the CEO of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers winkingly acknowledging the DfE officials “you know who you are” dancing on strings for him.
Meanwhile, front-line educators urged empathy for staff, mourned the lowering of standards, and began to report redundancies.
Optimistically, we might hope there is a strategy to redeploy the thousands of apprenticeship functional skills tutors this affects, to support with the growing 16-19 resit population.
Actually, that would be wildly optimistic. FE workforce planning doesn’t seem to happen. But there is an opportunity here for DfE to learn from past mistakes.
Lockdown learning
In the first week of Covid lockdown, I got calls and messages from college resits teachers around the country. Whole teams were being opportunistically let go. Although in fairness to DfE they later increased the funding stream linked to English and maths precisely to avoid mass lay-offs, its unshakeable habit of putting leaders ahead of learners meant no ringfencing so mass English and maths lay-offs happened anyway. Even a rabid anti-resit lobbyist confided that they realised these redundancies had been “shortsighted” when the rising demographics of 2023 came around.
The 16-19 tuition fund ended last year without government having done any thinking ahead about retaining and retraining staff. All while, the same demographic climb was causing a recruitment nightmare for FE English and maths. Based on the £80 million a year tuition fund spend, there must have been well over a thousand FTE English and maths tutors delivering it nationally. How many staff, experienced and interested in delivering essential skills to learners, did we lose from the sector? It was DfE’s responsibility to make the case for the tuition fund. As the Education Endowment Foundation is confident of the evidence that both small-group and one-to-one tuition “are particularly likely to benefit” lower attainers, it shouldn’t have been an especially hard case to make.
When they failed anyway, DfE had a responsibility to colleges and those on the frontline to have some support in place. It failed them twice. You know who you are.
Hanlon’s razor
The shock immediacy of the woeful policy decision on apprenticeships at least did show that the civil service is able to move uncharacteristically rapidly on occasion – but perhaps only when the race is to the bottom. The same urgency should have been put to delivering a workforce solution for affected English and maths tutors. For those needing to polish up their teaching qualifications, an accelerated version of the new teaching apprenticeship could have been coordinated, ready to transition staff into 16-19 classrooms. There would then have been a more natural synergy in announcing eight-month apprenticeships in the same breath as binning jobs.
It’s possible that there actually is a grand strategy at work here. Labour inherited a shortage of maths teachers and has since legitimised off-rolling poor and black students from resits, and cut the additional funded hour of maths in 16-19, the Multiply adult maths programme, adult education budgets and the advanced maths support programme which was meant to increase level three maths numbers. Now, rather than simply converting the apprenticeship exit requirement to a study requirement, they’ve ditched it altogether. If you can’t meet supply of maths teachers, cut demand, right?
I need to remind myself of Hanlon’s Razor: Don’t assume conspiracy as an explanation when ineptitude will suffice.
Good to see some thoughtful push back on the very one sided AELP position.
Andrew. You lost your job. It happens A there ways to get through it. Therapy. A nice walk. Monthly rants (with bitter emphasis on people who bother to call you out) is probably not the healthiest!
Well said! The government has not acted in the interest of staff. The immediate effect has caused stress and uncertainty.
The learners have been let down too. The opportunity for the learners to gain Wnglish and maths qualifications to help with their careers going forward has been belittled.
This was a poorly thought through move. How could the government have the audacity to celebrate such a negative and backward thinking action?
The Removal of Functional Skills Requirements in Apprenticeships: A Fool’s Folly
The recent decision to remove the requirement for English and maths qualifications in adult apprenticeships is a significant step backwards in adult education. As someone who has spent over 20 years teaching adults—more than a decade of that in Functional Skills—I have seen first-hand how mathematics and English serve as fundamental pillars in developing confidence, resilience, and critical thinking.
Many adult learners come to Functional Skills with deeply ingrained educational trauma, often stemming from their compulsory schooling years. They carry the scars of ridicule, humiliation, and marginalisation, having been labelled as “failures” simply because they did not develop the ability to learn effectively. Functional Skills has played a transformative role in giving these individuals the opportunity to rewrite their educational narratives, enabling them to face their fears and develop lifelong learning habits.
Mathematics, in particular, has long been a barrier to success, but it is also a gateway to self-belief. Once an adult learner grasps a complex mathematical concept, they begin to see themselves as capable, intelligent individuals. This shift in self-perception is a powerful catalyst for growth, propelling them toward academic achievements, career progression, and financial independence. More importantly, an educated workforce does not just benefit the individual—families thrive when parents and grandparents can support their children’s education, and society gains productive, engaged citizens instead of individuals reliant on state benefits.
Removing Functional Skills from apprenticeships sends a damaging message: that these essential skills do not matter, that adults should be left to struggle with literacy and numeracy, and that breaking the cycle of poor education is no longer a priority. This is an inept solution to the sector’s challenges. Instead of removing the requirement, we should be investing in better support, more accessible learning opportunities, and a more tailored approach to adult education.
Functional Skills was never just about passing a test; it was about empowering individuals to believe in their own potential. To abandon this now is not just a disservice to learners but a grave misstep for the future of our workforce and society as a whole.
Nigel Hooson
Functional Skills Tutor & Researcher in Adult Transformative Learning.
Professional Education Doctorate Candidate