FE colleges, universities and training providers will have all four sub-judgments displayed alongside overall effectiveness grades on Ofsted’s website for the first time, following an update to schools’ profiles earlier this year.
As of today, sub-judgments like quality of education, leadership and management and apprenticeships are now visible for further education settings for all graded inspections from September 2019.
Until now, only overall effectiveness was visible on the front page of an organisation’s page on Ofsted’s website.
The move comes four months after the watchdog made the same change to schools’ profiles, in new chief inspector Martyn Oliver’s bid to give parents a more “rounded, contextual picture” Ofsted’s evaluation of performance.
At the time, Ofsted said it excluded post-16 providers from the move because updating every education providers’ profile at once was a large and complex technical change.
Provider profiles on the watchdog’s website now show sub-judgments below the overall outcome
The announcement also comes shortly after Ofsted responded to its “Big Listen” consultation, which confirmed it will scrap single-phrase headline grades with immediate effect for schools.
However, this change will also exclude FE and training providers until a future date due to the “time and capacity” needed.
It is likely that overall headline grades will not be removed for the FE sector until Labour’s proposed “report cards” replace them in September 205.
Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Ben Rowland had a lukewarm reaction to the scrapping of Ofsted’s single-phrase judgments in his newsletter to members this week.
He said that while the change lifts the threat of a “professionally stigmatising over-simplified ‘label’,” the Department for Education and mayoral combined authorities will continue to use Ofsted grades as trigger points for “snap or (even worse) automated decisions” for all types of training providers.
Rowland called Ofsted’s future introduction of report cards and inspection frameworks that would be specific to FE and skills “a potentially much more positive development”.
An Ofsted spokesperson said: “We are pleased to now be able to display the sub-judgments for all [further education and skills] providers who have had a graded inspection since September 2019.
“It will allow parents and learners to see a broader picture of the provision at first glance on our website.”
Vice Principal: Curriculum and Skills, Luminate Education Group
Start date: August 2024
Previous Job: Director of Client Services, Firebrand Training
Interesting fact: Natalie is a proud former apprentice at Park Lane College (now part of Luminate), started her career at British Gas and progressing from level 2 through to degree level study
James McIntosh
Managing Director, Cogent Skills Apprenticeship Training
Start date: July 2024
Previous Job: Chief Operating Officer (Director of Skills), CATCH
Interesting fact: James is an avid rugby league fan – when he isn’t championing apprenticeships he can be found cheering on his beloved Hull KR, travelling home and away each week (and even as far as France) to support his team
Jon Ridley
Principal, Newcastle College
Start date: August 2024
Previous Job: Deputy Principal, Newcastle College
Interesting fact: On a Saturday and Sunday, you’ll also find Jon on the side-lines of football pitches across the North East of England coaching his son’s football team
Can the new quango really fix our broken skills system when so many previous attempts at national skills bodies have failed?
The new Labour government says Skills England will bring together the “fractured skills landscape” of employers, unions, providers, universities and local government to boost the nation’s skills.
You’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve heard all this before.
Skills England’s oversight of the skills system is tipped to have a much broader remit than the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) which it’s replacing. Skills needs “will be aligned” with the government’s industrial strategy and it will identify training the new growth and skills levy will pay for.
But there’s still a lot we don’t know. Legislation to form Skills England, announced in the King’s Speech, is expected to be debated in parliament soon.
What lessons can Skills England learn from previous incarnations to ensure it isn’t just rearranging deckchairs on a sinking skills ship?
Tom Bewick
Cut the red tape
Since the Manpower Services Commission was created in 1974 to manage training schemes, Tom Bewick, who is researching the history of skills policies for his upcoming book Skills Policy in Britain, says we’ve “always had a very strong, centrally directed national quango of one sort or another”.
What united them all, “regardless what the plaque on the wall says”, was “bureaucratic market centralisation”, he adds.
While in the 1990s the average college principal only dealt with one quango – the Further Education Funding Council – now they must deal with around five, as well as the Department for Education directly.
Bewick says: “Skills England will have to demonstrate that it isn’t just another part of the furniture getting in the way of a sector that already feels quite overburdened.”
The seven-year itch
Like marriages, skills quangos often succumb to a seven-year itch.
So says Lesley Giles, who was commissioned last year by the Association of Colleges (AoC) to draw up a blueprint for a new arms-length skills body.
She knows all about their short shelf life, having worked for two formed by the previous Labour government: the Sector Skills Development Agency, and then the body it morphed into, the UK Commission for Employment & Skills where she was deputy director.
Neither lasted more than eight years; IfATE has been around for seven.
Giles believes the rise and fall of recent quangos has meant the loss of “a lot of institutional memory”. UKCES conducted “regular, robust analysis of the labour market” (including a 2015 survey of 91,000 employers), which “we just don’t do anymore”.
Sue Pember, policy director of adult education body HOLEX, had to close several quangos as a senior civil servant under the coalition government.
She recalls how these quangos often suffered from “mission drift”. Their chief executives “wanted to do other things than what they were set up for, and often fell out with ministers”.
She believes therefore that Skills England needs to have an “understanding right at the beginning of how the organisation will be successful, to prevent fallouts… otherwise, you’ve got a short lifespan”.
Power and influence
There is broad enthusiasm for a skills body with powers to influence policy and delivery across government.
AoC’s public affairs and campaigns director Lewis Cooper believes that how Skills England contributes to Labour’s cross-government missions on economic growth and immigration is a “key governance question” which is “complicated, but critical”.
Sue Pember, policy director of Holex
He warns of a “real risk that Skills England collapses into being just a body sitting within the DfE, without that real clout across government”.
To avoid this, Skills England’s new chief needs the authority to speak directly to secretaries of state and “raise the red flags” – to warn the health secretary if the NHS workforce plan isn’t deliverable because of a lack of college staff to train them, for example.
A source close to the DfE claims it is looking at ranking the new Skills England chief as a director-level position rather than as a director general. Their status will be a “key bellwether on the degree of freedom and power they’ll enjoy”.
“Influential permanent secretaries from other departments won’t see directors, they see them as being too junior.”
The source believes a clipping of their wings in this way may be a deliberate ploy by officials to “contain” the new body. “They’re worried it could get out of control, it may well be critical of the DfE. Senior civil servants would prefer to have it boxed in.”
The DfE says the seniority of the chief’s role is yet to be decided.
But Robert West, head of education and skills at the Confederation of British Industry, dismisses such concerns.
He believes Skills England’s “clout” will come from the “secretary of state talking to other secretaries of state about their skills plans, and offering Skills England as an opportunity to help”.
There are also signs that Skills England will simply undertake much of the work the DfE does already.
The DfE’s Unit for Future Skills, formed in 2022, has already been transferred to Skills England, along with a number of other existing DfE and IfATE officials.
This worries Pember. “Where are they going to bring in new people with new ideas and new ways of working if they’re just transferring in existing staff?”
Long arms
Skills England’s influence is also limited by the simultaneous creation within the Department for Work and Pensions of the Labour Market Advisory Board. It will, among other things, advise the DWP around the establishment of its ‘youth guarantee’ to offer training, an apprenticeship, or help finding work to all those aged 18 to 21.
Ben Rowland, AELP chief executive
And a new Industrial Strategy Council (the previous one being dormant since 2021) could potentially also tread on Skills England’s toes when highlighting the skills gaps required to deliver the government’s promised house-building boom and green energy transition.
Ben Rowland, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP), says he is “nervous that the requirement for better coordination across the system has been met by the creation of not one, but three new potentially competing coordinating bodies”.
The DfE is currently said to be seeking to make £1 billion of savings, which may reduce Skills England’s headcount and “further chip away at the edifice of independence”, says FE Week’s source.
“Will it become just another division of DfE’s skills directorate, with a Skills England sign on the door?”
They pointed out how “different arm’s-length bodies have different lengths of arm”, with Ofqual’s arms being “eight miles long” and IfATE’s “eight inches”.
“There’s real discussion needed about how long its arms are. I hope the vision is for something that works across government, really brings people together, and has the authority to decide which horses we’re backing in the economy.”
Core functions
The core functions of Skills England, Cooper says, should be intelligence, coordination and oversight, informing and working across different arms of government, key agencies and mayoral combined authorities.
He says oversight is currently lacking when it comes to the local skills improvement plans, which have “input in working out individual areas’ future skills needs, but not the oversight to ensure those gaps are being addressed”.
Bewick believes Skills England offers the English system a chance to “end the binary divide between FE and HE”. How Skills England interacts with (or against) the powerful HE regulator, the Office for Students, remains to be seen.
Pember says Skills England also needs to consult with students themselves, because “motivating the learner is something we’ve forgotten completely about in the last 20 years”.
Running the show
The government has yet to announce who Skills England’s chief executive will be.
While Giles believes they should have “standing” with the business community, she warns of having seen chiefs brought in from the private sector who were “like bunnies in the headlights” when grappling with the inner workings of the public sector.
“It will require a senior leadership team with a combination of education, public service and some industry skills,” says Bewick.
Cooper believes that leaders from across colleges, universities, trade unions and employers should all be given seats on its board, which are currently being advertised. Doing so would, he says, give credence to education secretary Bridget Phillipson’s multiple recent comments about reforming the government’s relationship with sector leaders, and “could reshape a partnership of ‘doing with’ rather than ‘being done to’”.
But there will be “huge pressure on civil servants and ambitious ministers to move quickly” which “sometimes means we don’t work as effectively in co-constructing. There’s a massive risk they get off on the wrong foot by not working really seriously in partnership with the sector.”
The CBI has attended recent roundtables on Skills England and been “assured” it would not just be “IfATE in disguise”, says West. He is therefore feeling “quite positive” about it.
But there is concern within the training sector over a lack of consultation around Skills England’s remit.
Our source claims the DfE has a “fixed view” on what the new body should look at, which is “very much a DfE-generated impression”.
The DfE is not planning a formal consultation, but sector engagement will follow the publication of Skills England’s first report in the autumn.
Distraction from funding
Cooper says current government funding constraints makes the role of Skills England all the more important in helping decide where to prioritise spending, to fill the biggest gaps.
Rob Nitsch
Rob Nitsch, former director of skills delivery at IfATE and now chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, believes a significant opportunity will be missed if there is a failure to eliminate overlaps between the activities and functions of IfATE and other institutional bodies, including the DfE.
But Pember sees the new body as a “red herring”, “distracting” the sector from the real issue of a general lack of funding.
“We’ve got a billion less funding in the adult world, even without the mess that we’re in at 16 to 18. We now haven’t got enough staff to actually educate the people who want to be educated.”
Giles believes that the first step for Skills England should be to “grasp the nettle” with a consensus on what the shared national skills priorities are, aligned to the industrial strategy, how they will play out regionally and, crucially, include a sector perspective which is currently lacking.
Another source expressed concern that by making colleges “much more influential” the new body would “drag us back to being a supplier-led system”.
“We used that playbook previously and ended up with a skill system which was not giving people skills that were wanted in the workplace.”
Despite some reservations, the overall mood about the potential of Skills England is one of optimism.
Cooper is “hopeful” it will lead to a “step change”, despite “risks of status quo-ism”.
Giles hopes that the body will be “apolitical and not attached to a particular government administration”, because its missions will be “hard and take a long time”.
“If you’re endlessly closing down and setting up institutions, things won’t ever really change,” she warns.
Ministers have refused to share the terms of reference for a “short review” into controversial level-3 qualification defunding plans.
Announced by education secretary Bridget Phillipson in late July, the review will examine the Conservatives’ planned cull of BTECs and other vocational courses, which aimed to shift students towards studying T Levels.
But since the announcement, the government has not confirmed who is conducting the review or published terms of reference, leaving the exact aims and scope a mystery. Despite this, findings are expected by the end of the year.
In contrast, the government published details of its longer-running curriculum and assessment review, including its chair and terms of reference, in late July.
‘Safe space for policymaking’
The Department for Education refused to share details of the level 3 short review with FE Week following a freedom of information request.
Officials in the technical education and qualifications reform division cited section 35 of the FOI Act, which is designed to “protect good government” by providing a “safe space for policymaking”.
They argue the government needs a “self-contained space” to consider its options and that sharing the review’s terms would “have a potentially corrosive effect”.
They also refused to confirm which staff in the department were responsible for the review, arguing this is “third-party personal data”.
FE Week has asked the DfE to carry out an internal review of its FOI response, arguing that releasing details would enhance public understanding without undermining the government’s ability to govern well.
In a recent letter, skills minister Jacqui Smith said the short review would assess “how best to improve” the qualifications landscape and ensure learners have “high quality options”.
The DfE has told FE Week it will shortly begin engaging with a “representative sample” of providers, awarding organisations and other key stakeholders as part of the review.
Withholding review terms ‘unusual’
Maurice Frankel, director of the UK Campaign for Freedom of Information, said it was “unusual” for a government to withhold the terms of reference of a policy review, which may indicate the options the short review will consider are “constrained”.
He added: “By announcing the review, the case for disclosing the terms of reference may have been strengthened.
“It’s also not clear that identifying who is carrying out the review will be unfair to the individuals involved.
“Disclosure might not be unfair if the individuals are senior or if they hold publicly facing roles.”
‘Half of students affected’
Campaigners say BTECs and other level-3 qualifications play an “invaluable” role in helping young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education or employment.
James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, which has led the Protect Student Choice campaign, said the review should be conducted in a “transparent way” given its impact on an estimated 54 per cent of students in England.
“That might at least help to dispel the widespread perception that the objective of the review is to boost T Level numbers at any cost, rather than ensure that every young person has access to an appropriate, high-quality qualification in the future,” he added.
“Government decision-making in this area has been dysfunctional precisely because it has taken place in a ‘self-contained space’ and has ignored the views of students, colleges and schools, and employers.”
Colleges hamstrung by delay
An urgent concern for campaigners is the timing, which makes it difficult for colleges and schools to plan what vocational qualifications they can offer in the next academic year.
“No government would decide the future of A Levels by conducting a four-month internal DfE review and this approach should be considered equally unacceptable for applied general and other qualifications,” Kewin said.
“Providing this information in December is far too late, and that’s why the plan to conduct a rapid review without a pause is so unhelpful.”
Refusal to budge ‘disrespectful’
The public debate over the qualifications cull has become increasingly heated in recent weeks.
The government’s refusal to budge in response to a last-ditch public plea from more than 450 school and college leaders backing the Protect Student Choice campaign was described as “disrespectful” by Kewin this week.
When in opposition, the Labour party promised to “pause and review” the Conservative government’s plan to scrap applied general qualification (AGQ) courses.
But in July, the Labour said it would only pause the defunding of a limited number of level-3 qualifications set to be scrapped from August this year – which had minimal enrolments and were already removed from most school and college rosters.
Campaigners have called this a “betrayal” of Labour’s commitment.
Phillipson has said pausing future defunding of qualifications at this stage could “prejudice the findings” of the short review.
A DfE spokesperson said: “Too many young people leave education without the qualifications they need to get into high-quality apprenticeships, higher level education and good jobs, and the post-16 skills system is confusing for everyone involved.
“Our short, focused review along with other measures like the curriculum and assessment review and the creation of Skills England, will allow the government to improve skills training, unlock opportunities for young people and harness their talents to drive growth and fulfil the government’s missions.”
While WorldSkills UK chief executive Ben Blackledge is hoping for medal glory in Lyon next week, his broader aim is for sustainable excellence in the skills sector
As Team UK’s 31 WorldSkills competitors prepare to do battle next week, the group’s chief executive Ben Blackledge must juggle another challenge.
When we spoke, Blackledge’s wife was just days away from giving birth to a new member of their young family.
And now their baby son has arrived, he must support him, his spouse, his daughter and a global skills competition. So how is he managing?
“It’s the joy of balancing,” he laughs. “I’m manifesting that he’s going to be a good sleeper. That’s the plan.”
Blackledge tells me he started his two-decade journey to his current job after landing a temporary job at the Learning and Skills Council.
He doesn’t have a Starmer-esque vocational claim to fame. His mother was a primary school teacher at his school in Essex, which he says was “completely humiliating” at the time.
Young Ben Blackledge
Meanwhile, his father was a salesman who sold smoking sundries and lighters, then made a “slightly surreal career choice” when Blackledge was a teenager and set up a business importing tree ferns. Blackledge and his friends would spend their summers doing back-breaking work hauling 12-foot plants.
“You used to find the dust from tree ferns everywhere, so you have it in your nails and your ears and your nose,” he says. “The smell of tree ferns still brings back memories.”
Going to Cardiff University to read business, he says, is one of Blackledge’s “biggest” regrets. Whilst he enjoyed debating the merits of the European Union he now wishes he had a “verifiable” skill set such as engineering, medicine, or law.
But his degree choice allowed him the time to enjoy a proper university experience, a “game changer” for his confidence. He also spent time volunteering through his church which would include organising weekend trips for people from deprived backgrounds.
His temp job at the Learning and Skills Council (before it became the Skills Funding Agency and subsequently the Education and Skills Funding Agency) involved carrying out admin for its prison offender team in the south east of England.
He says: “The repetition of learning was an issue when I was involved. We were looking to make sure if someone did a learning course and was moved from a prison, how did that follow them?”
Finding his future
After a couple of years, Blackledge moved on to working for the Learning and Skills Council’s individual learner accounts pilot, a New Labour policy that gave purchasing power to learners.
Then aged 24, his task included talking providers into adopting a new digital solution.
He says: “I got some fairly hostile responses from people. Some of that was completely justified because individual learner accounts had been a bit of a nightmare before.
Young Ben Blackledge
“And I was this 24-year-old kid coming in and telling them how this was going to help them and their learners. They were like, ‘You don’t know anything’, and they were right.”
Blackledge moved into careers policy after a few years, and that’s where he got his first experience of WorldSkills – then called Find a Future – although he didn’t realise the significance at the time.
Working at the National Careers Service, he helped set up careers advice hubs in London’s Excel centre at WorldSkills 2011 when the global competition was staged there.
“When I went for an interview for my first job at Find a Future, that was my pitch. You’ve got these competitions, I was there for four days, and I didn’t even really know about them.”
For the last decade, Blackledge has been at the forefront of recalibrating WorldSkills UK towards showcasing and benchmarking technical training standards through competitions.
He says: “We want to make sure that we are benchmarking the UK and showing the level of skills that we’ve got across the UK and internationally,” he says. “The Olympic Games are a very visual example of how you do that through these kind of events.”
WorldSkills UK has been around since 1953 – that’s over 70 years of experience of what world-class quality can look like.
Blackledge joined Find a Future in 2014 to run the flagship Skills Show, the organisation’s annual careers event in Birmingham.
“I realised there was so much more to the work of the organisation,” he says. “Getting to know the large network of people we work with, and who are passionate supporters of our programmes, has given me a greater insight into the sector.”
Climbing the career ladder
Blackledge rose through the ranks, running its national competitions and working with industry and government to expand and embed the charity’s remit into FE, eventually becoming deputy chief executive in 2019 before taking the top job last year.
So how is he finding life at the top?
“I do feel very lucky to be working with so many passionate and talented people both in WorldSkills UK and across the sector, it makes the job that much easier and a lot more fun.”
He adds the chief executive position is “always challenging”, partly because the organisation has received a shrinking budget from the government for several years.
Blackledge says for many years WorldSkills UK has urged the government to view its grant funding as a “must-have”, not a “nice to have” for the sector. Yet its government grants have fallen by a third in the last nine years to £8.3 million in 2022-23.
Under Labour, the Department of Education appears to be maintaining a policy commitment to WorldSkills, proved by the skills minister Jacqui Smith flying out to Lyon to see the competition next week. But WorldSkills UK only has grant funding secured from the DfE until 2024-25.
As a result, the organisation has sought commercial backing and has partnerships with NCFE, Pearson, Autodesk, BAE Systems and Skills and Education Group.
“We can demonstrate that if you invest in us, we can see an increased level of employability of young people, or an increased wage earning of young people,” Blackledge says. “That’s obviously beneficial for the individual and the economy as well.”
Boosting college involvement
Looking at recent UK team cohorts, just a handful of colleges consistently send students to competitions – they include Northern Regional College in Northern Ireland, Coleg Gwent in south-east Wales and Trafford & Stockport College Group in Greater Manchester.
So how can WorldSkills UK drive up involvement from within the sector?
“I do think it is a leadership issue within the sector, not that it’s an issue with leaders, but that they need to grasp this and examine how they look at quality,” Blackledge says.
Talk of excellence isn’t about being elitist
Large college groups such as NCG, he adds, are beginning to think about excellence and competitions in a big way.
Additionally, WorldSkills UK has seen a “big uptake” in registrations for national finals from English colleges. Around 70 per cent of English colleges are now involved.
The byproduct should be a wider geographical spread of competitors who make up Team UK and Squad UK. But it will take time to feed through.
“For the first time we are laying a sustainable approach to develop excellence more broadly across the sector,” Blackledge says.
It’s clear the chief executive is passionate about the word ‘excellence’ and what it means to young people and their education.
“There’s a misunderstanding about when we talk about excellence, and it’s not about being elitist,” he says.
“Excellence isn’t restricted to certain people. If you are an entry-level learner or a level 7 learner, or have special education needs or an academic background, what does excellence look like for you in that space?”
Hosting WorldSkills ‘not ruled out’
Turning to Team UK, Blackledge hopes the UK will rank in the top 10 league table at WorldSkills Lyon next week and bring home plenty of medals.
“I think we’ve got some really strong competitors,” he says. “I think we’ve got some good medal hopes. It’s one of those things that I’m always nervous about, because you never know how things will play out.”
Behind the scenes at Lyon, the WorldSkills general assembly will vote on a host for the 2027 event – which is between Japan and Canada.
Blackledge hasn’t ruled out bidding for the UK to host sometime in the future, but it must “form part of a longer-term plan”, with the government, employers and education providers backing a pitch.
“The time is possibly now, though I’m not sure with the conversations about austerity – talking about an 80-nation event in London might not land quite yet,” he says.
“I wouldn’t rule it out, but it’s not something that we’re actively pursuing at the moment.”
So for now, Blackledge’s focus is on supporting the UK’s competitors in Lyon. Their areas of expertise include auto paint spraying, hairdressing, cyber-security and cooking.
And if things go well he hopes the country’s winners will receive a hero’s welcome similar to those given to our Olympic and Paralympic champions.
He says: “Do I want them to be celebrated and recognised on the BBC Breakfast sofa with their medals? Absolutely.”
FE Week is the media partner for WorldSkills UK. Follow our coverage of WorldSkills Lyon next week.
As Ofsted unveils a raft of reforms following the biggest consultation in its history, FE Week deputy editor Billy Camden seeks insights beyond the headlines with the watchdog’s chief operating officer Matthew Coffey.
We saw Labour’s manifesto commitment in the run-up to the general election, and once the result was known, Martyn [Ofsted’s chief inspector] met with the secretary of state, and they explored this [removing single-phrase judgments].
We were asked to see what was the art of the possible. Everything in Ofsted is built around systems and we’ve had the overall effectiveness judgment for many, many years.
These systems are old and creaky. They work, but it takes a lot of people underneath the bonnet to keep them going. It’s every letter, every report has got to be changed, and all the templates needed to do that is a huge, mammoth task.
So the question was, what could we really do to unpick this really quite quickly? And we came back and said we can do all reports in all sectors together for September 2025. If the education secretary wanted to do it now, we could only do schools. We responded openly, and the decision rested with the education secretary.
The Big Listen response talks about creating a “better tailored” inspection regime for the diverse range of provision in FE. Is Ofsted admitting that inspections are currently not tailored to different skills provision?
The public is telling us that the EIF [education inspection framework] doesn’t feel fit for purpose. I haven’t heard the strength of feeling previously that I heard in the Big Listen about it. So, I don’t think we’re admitting that it’s wrong. We didn’t hear people say this doesn’t look like it’s going to fit for us [during the EIF consultation in 2019]. If they had, we might have stopped and had a look, but we’re hearing it now. If you want something tailored, let’s have a look at how we achieve that as we start to consult. It will be massively helpful for FE people to engage in the upcoming consultation.
Will there continue to be a unified education inspection framework across all remits, or will each remit get its own inspection framework?
I can’t predict the future, but what we’ve heard very clearly in the Big Listen is that people really do want us to focus on the things that make their type of provision unique and in a way that they clearly believe the EIF doesn’t.
We’ve committed to listen to that and consult fully as we move forward. So, it’s an important question, but we haven’t got that far yet. The aim is to introduce the reformed framework by September 2025.
Does Ofsted have enough inspectors, and can it recruit enough inspectors with specialist knowledge of the skills provision they’re sent to inspect?
We’ve got about 70 His Majesty’s Inspectors (HMIs) who come from a range of backgrounds including colleges and independent learning providers. We’ve got another 13 or 14 senior HMIs that oversee and manage them. We then have another 350 contracted Ofsted inspectors (OIs), and three-quarters of them are serving practitioners. They are people that work in the sector, they do their day job, and then they engage with us. This is how we get the specialisms.
We’ve got a lot of people that are specialists. The challenge is getting them released from their day job. One of the big jobs of the Ofsted Academy here is to embrace that world of seeing the serving practitioners more fulsomely than we do now.
So in terms of just sheer numbers of people against the number of inspections, the answer is yes, there are enough. If it’s about wanting to get more and more, you know, kind of engagement with the specialist OIs and the precise nature of what they’re inspecting… that’s the issues that we grapple with.
The Big Listen response states that report cards will also be ‘tailored’ for FE and skills. Could we see unique-looking report cards for each remit Ofsted reports on?
I see a lot of commonality with different types of education providers, but I could see the opportunity for there to be, two or three areas where there’s some real difference.
We’ve talked about classroom-based versus on-the-job training, there’s a big difference there. I’ve not seen any designs yet, but my deep knowledge of inspection frameworks tells me that while there’s a lot that’s common, I can see some space for there to be some differences.
Ofsted plans to introduce an area insights service, dubbed as an online portal that ‘captures the complexity of providers’ quality and performance’. Will this feature on Ofsted’s website and/or report cards?
It is ambitious but it probably will. I want to see NEET figures in a local area, for example, which can lead to questions about whether there is a problem with careers advice in that particular area. Is there an insufficiency of provision of independent learning providers? Whatever it might be, I think it will help us to have a more grown-up conversation about the market, about the sector.
I hope the service is going to be designed to help providers in some of the decisions that they’re making about where there are gaps, where they could fill them, and where they could work more effectively.
Ofsted has five-day notice periods for ‘large and complex’ FE providers. Will the watchdog introduce this for all providers and colleges regardless of size?
We will consult on the right notice period. I remember when I was on a pilot inspection team at Exeter College, piloting no-notice inspections, and they all said it was wonderful because it just took the stress out. So we’ve got to get it right. It’s not as simple as giving all providers more notice. I’m long enough in the tooth to know that you can’t change your provision in five days. We’ve got to act with courtesy, empathy, respect, and think about people’s well-being, and giving more notice isn’t necessarily compatible with that.
So I don’t know what the right answer is, but we’ve got different approaches within the organisation that give us the opportunity to really help find the right answer.
You’re asking the government to allow you to inspect higher technical qualifications – why? Is this linked to what might soon see funded via Labour’s new growth and skills levy?
That’s not what’s driving our thinking here [the levy], it’s quite a separate thing.
HTQs are an important move introduced by the last government and we need to keep our eyes on them. When anything new, big and important is introduced, there’s every opportunity that it will either succeed or falter and potentially fail. If you’ve got an independent inspectorate that’s able to look at lots of other programmes that are similar in nature, we can tell government what is working well and what isn’t. We look at T Levels, we look at degree-level apprenticeships. We think it’s important to be able to look at HTQs as well.
College student suspensions have doubled since the Covid pandemic and exclusions are up 50 per cent, new data reveals.
The figures obtained by FE Week shine a light on worsening behaviour in post-16 education – with sexual harassment, drug abuse, revenge porn and the killing of a sheep among the reasons for expulsions.
FE Week submitted a freedom of information request to around 200 colleges for annual suspension and exclusion figures since the pandemic began.
Of the 134 responses received, the data showed suspensions soared from 2,104 in 2019-20 to 4,173 in 2023-24.
Exclusions ballooned from 981 to 1,526 during the same period (see table).
While the Department for Education collects and publishes suspension and exclusions data for schools it does not collect figures from FE colleges.
Colleges get tough
FE Week’s probe found that colleges had proactively strengthened policies to manage misconduct on campus in recent years.
The scale of issues including bullying, alcohol and drug abuse and racism in colleges across England has sparked concern from FE leaders who have pleaded for more investment to improve access to social care and mental health support.
It has also prompted calls for the government to collect official figures from colleges so issues can be monitored.
Responding to FE Week’s figures, the DfE said: “The number of suspensions and permanent exclusions puts into sharp focus the massive scale of disruptive behaviour that has developed in schools and colleges across the country in recent years – harming the life chances of our young people.”
The department said there were no plans to extend suspension and exclusions data collection to colleges.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the government must work to tackle soaring suspension and exclusion levels.
He added young people “are less likely to achieve good educational outcomes and to progress through education and into fulfilling careers – it is vital that we do everything possible to prevent this downward spiral”.
The most common reason for suspensions stated by colleges in their FOI responses was violent or inappropriate behaviour, violence or assault, and drugs use and possession.
Ben Beer, director of The Safeguarding Group which regularly audits colleges’ safeguarding data, told FE Week that colleges were being more “proactive” on issues such as misogyny, sexual harassment, assault and misconduct, and as a result bad behaviour now had “serious consequences”.
He said: “Of course, with the wake of the pandemic still very present, and FE seeing young people entering their colleges who spent some of their very formative years in lockdown, it is no surprise this continues to be a challenge.”
Earlier this year FE Week investigated the rise of bad behaviour in colleges.
Behaviour concerns were underlined by research out this week from the Institute for Public Policy and Research and The Difference, which found 90 per cent of excluded secondary school pupils do not pass GCSE maths or English.
A recent report from the Education Policy Institute also warned there was a “strong association” between suspensions during secondary school and young people not being in sustained education, employment or training (NEET).
College leaders have maintained that suspensions are a “neutral act” and merely a “cooling off-period” pending investigation into a student’s conduct.
Blackpool & The Fylde College, which suspended 93 students last year, said learners were given online learning materials whilst suspended for usually up to five days and were expected to reintegrate into college upon return “ideally with their behaviour changed”.
A spokesperson added: “It is unlikely that suspensions cause poor outcomes. It is much more likely that underlying behaviours, if not effectively challenged and supported, lead to poor outcomes in school and afterwards.”
‘Last resort’ exclusions
Permanent exclusions are typically seen as a “last resort” and colleges have multiple stages of disciplinary procedures in place – including a right of appeal for students – before they are expelled.
In serious cases of gross misconduct, cases are accelerated. For example, last year Plumpton College in East Sussex expelled two students who were arrested after a sheep was attacked and killed on the South Downs. Two others treated as significant witnesses were “withdrawn from their course”.
Colleges said exclusions were recorded as withdrawals on their system, many of which were due to non-attendance.
Eddie Playfair, senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges, said: “Post-16 college students commit to college attendance and behaviour policies which are based on an expectation of high attendance, safe, respectful and responsible behaviours. Withdrawal is absolutely a last resort.”
Local authorities are required to find alternative education for excluded students under the age of 18 but have no obligation for over-18s. Excluded students are able to reapply to the same college in the next academic year.
Holistic help needed
Playfair said colleges would “definitely welcome” more data on exclusions and suspensions in FE from the DfE to allow them to see the “full picture and respond accordingly”.
He added: “There is always clearly more that can be done, and it does require a collective approach from organisations across the further education landscape.”
The DfE said that while it did not apply the same pupil information regulations to FE as schools, the department was “committed to supporting colleges in managing these challenges effectively”.
Some colleges have strengthened policies and support teams to manage behaviour and promote student wellbeing.
Nottingham College, for example, said it invested in a “strong wraparound network” including a wellbeing and behaviour team which the Association of Colleges recognised as a model of best practice.
Last year the number of exclusions at the college doubled from 20 to 40 cases due to low attendance and unacceptable behaviour.
Meanwhile, Lincoln College revealed it saw a large jump in exclusions in 2022-23, from two to 40, due to a combination of a “zero-tolerance approach”, a rise in student numbers and an increase in incidents on campus.
It said: “In recent years the group has focused staff on the rigorous application of our disciplinary policies, particularly in relation to incidents like physical altercations, intimidating behaviour and malicious communications.”
At Hopwood Hall College, in Rochdale and Middleton, Greater Manchester, the number of suspensions shot up from 95 in 2022-23 to 217 last year.
The college, like many others, has adopted trauma-informed practices to holistically improve behaviour and implemented a free breakfast club and mental health access to address the potential causes of bad behaviour.
It also carried out a transition project in 2019 which targeted 200 young people at risk of being NEET who is said ended up “thriving” in education.
Beer added that college leaders shouldn’t lose sight of low-level disruptive behaviours, such as vaping, using phones in class and not wearing lanyards, as it could “chip away at the resilience and wellbeing of staff”.
Millions in capital funds invested into an independent training provider to help grow one of the government’s flagship Institutes of Technology have been lost following its bankruptcy earlier this year.
NA College (NAC), in Washington, Co Durham, fell into administration in June, four years after winning a £3 million grant to build a ‘smart factory’ extension and buy specialist equipment for apprentices.
NAC was a key partner in the local North East Institute of Technology (IoT) and responsible for training around 270 apprentices working at Nissan’s Sunderland car factory.
Thanks to its links to Nissan the company was one of only five private providers in England to win a share of £300 million in IoT capital funding provided by the Department for Education.
The DfE did not respond when asked why it took the rare step of gifting capital funding to a private training company without securing any guarantee to recover its investment if the firm went bust.
NAC’s property was auctioned off soon after its collapse and the company’s newly upgraded training centre, which was secured by a 20-year lease, is now available to let.
Nissan is understood to have moved its apprentices to nearby Sunderland College, which is not part of the IoT.
Scrabbling for capital funds
The NAC failure, and the loss of its taxpayer-funded property, raises questions about the safety of investing capital funds into private businesses to deliver further education.
FE private training providers frequently call for “fair access to capital funding”, arguing this could help solve capacity issues in post-16 education.
But capital funding pots, such as the £1.5 billion FE capital transformation fund and the £230 million post-16 capacity fund, were only available to public education institutions such as general FE colleges.
Ben Rowland, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP), which represents hundreds of training bodies, said: “It is always sad to see an independent provider cease trading, especially for the learners and staff affected.
“NAC was not an AELP member and we are yet to know all the facts. What we do know is that there are so many independent training providers carrying out fantastic work right across the country delivering for hundreds of thousands of learners and employers.
“As a result, we shouldn’t allow government policy to be determined by what happens in one or two cases – especially as we don’t yet know what happened to this particular provider.”
What has been lost?
With £3 million of IoT of funding, NAC built a new 390 square-metre “smart factory” extension for its training centre – reportedly completed in 2022 – and spent £1 million on specialist equipment.
According to a freedom of information response, obtained following months of wrangling by FE Week after the DfE attempted to suppress details, the equipment included £400,000 for “internet of things” connectivity infrastructure, £249,000 of integrated assembly process kit, £160,000 of automated warehousing equipment and £34,000 in augmented reality technology.
All this grant-funded equipment – which has an “uncertain” re-sale value – was owned by NAC at the time of its bankruptcy, the DfE confirmed.
Neither the DfE nor court-appointed liquidator Begbies Traynor would comment on the fate of the publicly funded equipment, claiming the ongoing bankruptcy process prevented them from responding to questions about the case.
Neither the DfE nor Begbies Traynor directed FE Week to a website that reveals the centre’s equipment was sold off at auction in late June.
It is unclear how much was paid for hundreds of items including machinery, tools, teaching equipment and specific items that the DfE confirmed it funded, such as 3D printers and augmented technology headsets.
New College Durham, the licence holder and accountable body for the North East Institute of Technology, declined to respond to questions about NAC, including whether any funding or equipment was recoverable.
What happened?
NAC was part of the North East Institute of Technology, one of 21 ‘institutes’ in England created through regional collaborations between 77 colleges, 35 universities and 99 employers.
Set up in 2005, NAC had close links to Nissan, training hundreds of apprentices from the automotive giant’s huge factory in Sunderland each year. It received a ‘good’ Ofsted rating in 2022.
In May, several shocked employees of the company took to social media to appeal for work after NAC abruptly closed its doors.
According to Begbies Traynor the business had debts totalling £13.5 million.
In its assessment of the financial difficulties, the liquidator said the company experienced “cashflow difficulties” in January, when one of its 15 subsidiaries tried to buy equipment but discovered there were “insufficient funds”.
It then emerged NAC owed “several credit notes” to Nissan, which decided to move its apprentices elsewhere shortly afterwards.
The report concluded: “Despite cost savings being implemented by the group, including a number of staff redundancies, due to the significant reduction in revenue as a result of the loss of the Nissan contract the company was unable to trade.”
A new round of next-generation T Level contracts could be worth more than double what was previously available when offered to awarding organisations early next year.
A market engagement notice was published by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) this week giving awarding bodies advanced notice of a tender to take over the six qualifications that formed wave 3 of the T Level roll-out.
The notice states the so-called “Gen-2” contracts to run three T Levels in engineering in manufacturing, as well as T Levels in management and administration, finance and accounting, are collectively worth an estimated £40.8 million – a near 150 per cent increase on Gen-1.
Contracts to run wave-3 T Levels were first awarded in 2020 and totalled £16.5 million. City & Guilds won £12.5 million to develop qualifications in engineering, manufacturing, processing and control; maintenance, installation and repair for engineering and manufacturing; design and development for engineering and manufacturing; and management and administration.
Pearson was awarded £4 million for T Levels in finance and accounting.
Awarding organisations will be invited to bid to take over contracts in spring with deals being awarded in the autumn. First teaching of the new Gen-2 wave-3 T Levels will then take place in September 2027.
Ahead of the full invitation to tender, IfATE told interested awarding organisations they would be required to update the qualifications’ content and assessment materials and develop training for teachers, assessors and exams officers.
They will also be expected to quality control the qualifications, including running a complaints service, and promote the qualifications through marketing.
IfATE hasn’t yet provided estimates for anticipated learner numbers but said they would be provided in the full invitation to tender and be based on existing volumes.
Just under 2,472 students started one of the engineering and manufacturing T Levels in September 2023, and 1,747 started the management and administration qualification. 548 students started a T Level in the legal and finance route, which includes finance and accounting, but also includes the legal services T Level introduced last year which isn’t yet up for re-tendering.
Interested awarding organisations have also been informed that “when IfATE ceases to exist” its functions as the contracting authority will transfer to a “new organisation.” It’s not clear whether this means Labour’s new quango, Skills England, will take over responsibility for T Level contracts, or whether this will be brought in-house within the Department for Education.
First T Level relicensing winners
This wave-3 relicensing round follows the awarding of Gen-2 contracts for waves 1 and 2 T Levels over the summer.
NCFE was successful in retaining the licence to run the T Level in education and early years. It did not bid to keep two licences for digital T Levels, which went to Pearson.
Similarly, City & Guilds chose not to re-tender for the two construction T Level licences it held. These were awarded to WJEC.
Pearson also retained its licence for T Levels in design, surveying and planning for construction and digital production, development and design.
These Gen-2 contracts were also worth substantially more than generation 1, which is believed to be in response to concern in the sector that the flagship qualifications have not been profitable.
For example, the onsite construction contract increased by 96 per cent to £7.64 million from Gen-1 to Gen-2. Similarly, education and early years rose by 65 per cent and building services engineering for construction was up by 58 per cent.
A separate procurement round took place for the T Levels in health, healthcare science and science, though the results have not yet been released.
