As each day of the first half-term passes, I hear the knell of a ship’s bell.
It marks the students dropping out of their college study programmes. 30,000 won’t make it to day 43.
Needless to say, they are more likely to be from economically-disadvantaged backgrounds.
This is thanks to incoherent policy and regulation that seems unable to remember that compulsory education in England does not end at 16, and which systematically pushes older teenagers overboard.
Education Policy Institute has done some excellent work charting the plight of disadvantaged students in 16-19 education, arbitrarily stripped of their Pupil Premium support two years before the end of childhood.
They highlight the mismatch between what every teacher, leader, policy wonk, and Treasury official knows to be the definition of 16-19 disadvantage (having been eligible for free school meals in the six years prior to finishing secondary school) versus the jokers within the Department for Education who keep making up different definitions.
And yet, when it comes to college accountability measures, disadvantage is still based on the ‘proper’ definition of FSM6, perfectly illustrating the disconnect within DfE.
Meanwhile, 16-19 bursaries are very narrowly linked to benefits, for Tuition Fund (RIP) it was being “from the 27 per cent most economically deprived areas of the country”, and for the core blocks of 16-19 disadvantage funding it’s either postcodes or prior English and maths attainment.
Amid such chaos and confusion, it’s little surprise that EPI has also found that only 36 per cent of colleges are using the government’s data tool to identify who their FSM6 disadvantaged students are.
But I’m a ‘glass 78% full’ kind of guy (that’s a resits joke, teehee) so I think that 36 per cent represents a good-news story, driven by FE wanting to do the right thing in spite of any incentives or support to do so.
Let’s smash last year’s 36 per cent
You see, in 2021 it was 25 per cent, then 30 per cent in 2022, and 36 per cent in 2023.
I’m pretty confident DfE has done little, perhaps nothing at all, to promote the tool or train colleges in how to use it. (Although there is an urban myth about a rogue civil servant who kept trying to write it into grant agreements.)
In fact, in some years DfE’s tool for colleges to identify their new disadvantaged learners has not actually been up and running before day 42.
And it’s certainly not Ofsted driving improvement either. Its FE inspection framework explicitly and frequently mentions disadvantage in its ‘Good’ and ‘Outstanding’ criteria, but they have been merrily handing out those grades to providers whether they had any idea which learners it referred to or not.
Wouldn’t it be poetic if there could be an unannounced inspection of Ofsted offices tomorrow to check how many FE inspectors actually know how to identify disadvantaged students?
No, this is a story of individuals within FE guided by their own moral compass and then sharing good practice with peers. Others have talked at length about FE as a self-improving system, but while they were busy navel gazing, these visionaries on the ground have been pro-actively doing something for their learners and for social justice that really matters.
Assuming DfE has the ‘Get Information About Pupils’ tool working before census day this year (it should be within your DfE provider portal), and we smash last year’s 36 per cent of colleges using it, then it could be life-changing for our otherwise-lost 30,000 young people.
And if you are about to withdraw a student and see they are flagged as disadvantaged, don’t cut them loose just yet. Try one more thing first.
Whether it’s one last phone call, one more one-to-one, or one more timetable adjustment to fit around whatever burden they are carrying, that disadvantage data empowers us to target our interventions on those who most need a helping hand to day 43.
Yes, they will almost certainly still need that help on day 44, and probably on day 144 too, but they will be safely in the lifeboat of FE, with a brighter future on the horizon.
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