NewVIc becomes only ‘inadequate’ sixth form college

A troubled London sixth form college is pursuing a merger after a damning ‘inadequate’ Ofsted verdict.

Newham Sixth Form College (NewVIc) yesterday became the only sixth form college in the country to hold the watchdog’s lowest possible judgment and was put into formal intervention by the government. It is now in talks to dissolve and transfer its staff, assets and liabilities to Newham College.

The proposal follows a tumultuous period which disrupted students’ experience and led to many leaving without a qualification last year.

Staff previously told FE Week they planned to strike for 30 days in 2023 during the busy exam period amid a toxic battle with leaders over staff cuts and high workloads.

Ofsted reported that NewVIc’s 2,400 learners were “keen to study, but for too many, their time at the college does not match their expectations”.

Students “experience disruption to their education due to staffing issues, ineffective teaching and administrative errors regarding their examinations”, inspectors said. In the previous academic year, this “led to a significant proportion of learners not achieving their qualifications and making poor progress relative to their prior knowledge and attainment”.

Learners’ attendance and punctuality are also “not good enough”, too few participate in good work experience or work-related learning activities, and “until recently, leaders and managers have not been considerate enough of staff workload and well-being”.

The college was also criticised for making a “limited” contribution to skills needs, with governors singled out for lacking a “good enough understanding of the skills agenda”.

NewVIc has been run by interim principal Susanne Davies since October after former boss Mandeep Gill went on sick leave. His employment officially ended earlier this month. The sixth form also has an interim chair after the leader of the governing body, Martin Rosner, stepped down in March.

Various other senior leaders also currently hold interim posts.

The college told FE Week it is now exploring a merger with neighbouring Newham College, rated ‘good’ by Ofsted, as it has “demonstrable strengths in the areas Ofsted identified as areas for development at NewVIc”.

If it gets the go ahead, the merger would be a “type B”, meaning NewVIc would be dissolved and its staff, assets and liabilities transferred to Newham College. Leaders are aiming for a merger by the end of the calendar year.

Jayne Dickinson, interim chair of NewVIc, said: “Over the past two months I’ve witnessed the enormous potential of NewVIc and the real progress the college is already making in the areas for improvement highlighted in the Ofsted report.

“A merger between the two organisations [Newham College] will accelerate this progress and expand opportunities for local young people, ensuring a skills pipeline for our employers. This is an exciting prospect that plays to the strengths of both colleges.”

Ofsted said until recently, governors and senior leaders at NewVIc have “not done enough to tackle the poor quality of education that learners experience”.

They presided over a “decline in standards resulting in the proportion of learners who achieve their qualifications being low on too many courses”.

Inspectors said leaders had “poor oversight” of key functions, such as the administration of examinations, for which they “failed to put in place effective or rapid enough improvements”.

Leaders have also “not made sure that there are adequate learning resources, such as computers, to meet the needs of learners”.

Inspectors found that a “characteristic” of the quality of learners’ experiences is the “wide variability across different subjects, depending on the skill and expertise of teachers and the level of disruption due to staff shortages or changes”.

However, Ofsted said the current senior leaders have “accurately identified the urgent areas for improvement” and have an “extensive range of suitable plans to improve the quality of education for learners”.

The watchdog also recognised that learners at NewVIc are respectful of each other and the wider college community. The “strong visibility” of staff around the campus, particularly the security and youth workers, creates a “calm and positive environment where learners feel safe and supported”.

Learners are also “very aware about how to manage their mental health and where to get support”.

Furthermore, inspectors found good delivery of provision for NewVIc’s 90 learners with special educational needs and disabilities.

Interim principal Davies said: “I am pleased that Ofsted acknowledge the progress made in the current academic year to get the college back on track. We fully recognise the challenges we face and have a clear plan for the road ahead.”

Paul Jackson, chair of Newham College, added that he was “pleased to be working with” NewVIc towards creating an “exciting option for post-16 education in Newham”.

Kaplan knocks Lifetime Training off apprenticeship levy top spot

Kaplan has become the highest-earning training provider in the apprenticeship levy market despite recording less than half the number of starts of its closest competitor.

The finance giant knocked Lifetime Training off the top spot after raking in over £45 million from big levy-paying businesses in 2021/22, according to FE Week analysis of government data published this week.

Kaplan Financial Ltd, which delivers high numbers of expensive apprenticeships, such as the £21,000 level-7 accountancy or taxation professional course to employers including Microsoft, Cisco and HSBC, saw its overall starts numbers soar by more than third from 4,620 in 2020/21 to 6,240.

This fuelled a growth in income from levy-payers by almost a quarter from £36.5 million to £45 million.

Lifetime Training, which had earned the most levy income each year since the policy launched in 2017, increased its starts by 30 per cent from 12,910 in 2020/21 to 16,720 in 2021/22 but levy-payer income remained at just over £43 million over the period.

Unlike Kaplan, Lifetime’s delivery is mostly in sectors that attract lower apprenticeship funding bands, including hospitality, retail and adult care. Its customer base includes the NHS, McDonald’s and B&Q.

Both providers are judged ‘requires improvement’ by Ofsted. Kaplan’s current overall apprenticeship achievement rate is 55.9 per cent while Lifetime’s is 35 per cent.

Apprenticeships are just one arm of Kaplan Financial Ltd’s business, but its accounts state that “revenue has remained strong since the introduction of the apprenticeship levy”. The firm recorded profit after tax of £9.4 million in the year ending December 2022, up from £8.7 million the year before.

Lifetime Training’s accounts for the year ending January 2022 show a loss of £9.2 million, compared to a profit of £6.8 million in 2020.

Stacey Fitzsimmons, chief operating officer of Kaplan Financial, said: “Our apprenticeships are in high-growth sectors – professional and financial services and data and tech – and our clients recruit apprentices, often in their very first job, in high numbers.

“We work with forward-thinking clients who understand the power of apprenticeships and the benefits they can bring to addressing skills and recruitment gaps. Many of our large employers increased the number of new roles in accounting and finance for learners coming out of education and into apprenticeships during this period.”

Multiverse joins the top 10

FE Week identified the shift by analysing the final funding allocations for training providers in 2021/22, published this week by the Education and Skills Funding Agency, which included values for how much each provider was paid by apprenticeship levy-paying employers. 

The agency first published levy allocations four years ago for the 2018/19 education year. At the time, Lifetime Training topped the list after it was paid £51.5 million – almost double the next closest provider, QA Limited, on £26 million.

Other notable changes in the latest figures include Multiverse Group’s rise into the top 10 highest earners from the levy market (full table below). It placed sixth overall, up from 13th the year before, after more than doubling its income from £12.3 million to £27.5 million over the period.

Multiverse, owned by former prime minister Tony Blair’s son Euan Blair, recorded a 62 per cent rise in starts between those years, growing from 3,045 to 4,940. It mostly delivers high-priced standards such as the £15,000 level-4 data analyst and the £12,000 level-3 data technician.

BPP Professional Ltd, which, like Kaplan, also mostly delivers the £21,000 level-7 accountancy or taxation professional standard, remained the fourth-biggest levy provider, while IT provider QA Ltd stayed at fifth.

Corndel Ltd, which mostly delivers leadership and management apprenticeships, remained the seventh biggest levy earner, while Babcock Training, which has since offloaded most of its apprenticeships arm, dropped to eighth. 

The British Army dropped to the third biggest apprenticeship levy training provider, while the Royal Navy remained in ninth place and the Royal Air Force fell to 10th.

Staffordshire University in 13th place replaced Manchester Metropolitan University (14th) as the highest-ranking university in terms of levy-payer income, earning £14.2 million in 2021/22 compared to £9.9 million the year before.

Bridgwater & Taunton College remained the highest earning college with £6.3 million in 2021/22, up from £5.5 million the previous year, but dropped down to 46th place overall.

The total amount of levy funding handed out in 2020/21 was £1.3 billion, shared between 1,355 apprenticeship providers.   

This increased to £1.5 billion in 2021/22, but the overall provider base shrunk slightly to 1,315.

Weston College finally appoints permanent principal

Weston College has appointed a new principal who will assume office 21 months after the post was first advertised. 

Pat Jones, currently deputy chief executive for finance at Bedford College Group, will lead the college from July following multiple failed attempts by Weston’s governors to appoint a permanent successor to Paul Phillips.

“I am delighted to be joining Weston College as their new principal and CEO at this exciting time,” Jones said.

“Weston has achieved so much, and I look forward to leading the dedicated and talented team, building upon the many successes.”

Weston College, in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, has been led by acting principal Jacqui Ford since the retirement of England’s then-highest-paid college chief executive Paul Phillips in the summer of 2023.

Ford’s instalment as interim followed multiple failed attempts by the college’s governors to appoint a permanent successor. Weston had offered the role to Cornwall College Group deputy principal Kate Wills but then mysteriously withdrew the offer.

Phillips’ retirement wasn’t clear-cut to begin with.

Weston’s board had told college staff that Phillips would be kept on in an “absolutely key” role as “president” last year, but this was later scrapped after sector criticism. Phillips’ son, Joe Phillips, was Ford’s de-facto deputy as the college’s chief operating officer, but was one of two other college senior managers to have left their roles since September.

New boss Jones is credited with “playing a critical role” in the merger of Tresham College and Bedford College in 2017, and securing over £43 million in successful bids for funding according to Bedford College Group’s website.

She is working towards a doctorate in further education financial leadership from the University of Oxford with a thesis titled, ‘Sustainable financial health: Is it possible for colleges to maintain good financial health, free of intervention?’ The work was one of the first 11 funded research projects run by the joint Association of Colleges and NCFE ‘research further’ programme.

FE Commissioner Shelagh Legrave appointed Jones as one of two national leaders of further education financial specialists in 2022.

Andrew Leighton-Price, Weston College chair of governors, said: “Pat has held a distinguished career in education of over 20 years and is an innovative national leader of further education.

“More importantly she has the inclusive learning ethos that we champion so strongly here at Weston, with experience of working across all our learner groups.

“Combining this with her impressive financial acumen as a global management accountant, and strong background in community and employer partnerships, made Pat a very obvious choice, in what was already a strong field of candidates, from a diverse range of backgrounds.”

Applications to become Weston College’s £120,000-a-year deputy principal closed on Monday.

How we’re putting research at the heart of staff training and development

The issue of a poor research base in further education is one FE Week has returned to many times since Nigel Ecclesfield wrote about it in 2013. At East Coast College, we have taken that issue to heart.

It started with change. Change of qualification. Change of staff. Change of approach.

Three years ago, the Initial Teacher Education programme at East Coast College was rebuilt. We formed a partnership with Suffolk New College and now deliver our teaching qualifications through the University of Suffolk.

At a similar time, we transformed our approach to quality assurance. From management observation of teachers, we moved towards experimenting with delivery and resources in teams of three or four colleagues.

We are now working in an exciting educational environment in which teachers collaborate and celebrate their successes and discoveries. There is a fever about practitioner research that is gaining momentum and, with three years behind us, we have the opportunity to reflect and consider how this phenomenon has grown.

The first key factor was the removal of performance management from lesson observations. Teachers were bound by fear of failure, being reduced to a number or grade that carried a potential threat to their employment. These were the wrong conditions for creativity and innovation.

So we adopted the RED system designed by Tony Davis of CCQI which liberated teachers to work together, empowered them to identify a problem relevant to their contexts, and gave them the opportunity to research and plan before inviting their colleagues to visit.

No managers are involved in this process; it’s a safe place to experiment and fail. The consequence is that teachers have grown in confidence, feeling valued and respected. At the end of each year, we hold a conference in which the teams share their experiences. This has created an interest in research, led to bonds forming among colleagues, fostered pride in our achievements and in turn led to a natural engagement in professional discussion.

No managers are involved; it’s a safe place to experiment and fail

Combining our approach to research and reflective practice with our initiative to re-invent teacher education, we have created the perfect conditions for teacher growth. We offer a level 5 certificate in education alongside a level 6 professional graduate qualification. All new East Coast College teachers are required to undertake this two-year programme.

And beyond serving our teachers (and learners) this model is feeding back into the research itself. The second year of the programme is predominantly focused on practitioner research, and what has become increasingly clear to us is that the canon of learning theories is often directed at primary and secondary education and written by educational psychologists working in universities.

Our ever-increasing band of researchers have become more aware of how barren the landscape is for FE practitioner researchers.  We don’t see enough research into FE practice done by FE practitioners.  Nor do we think that theorists really understand our context on the east coast of England. 

Our sector is unique and our practitioner research should reflect this. At East Coast College, our home-grown practitioners become the experts because of their insight and their dual professionalism. 

But it is crucial to ask why research is still so invisible in further education. Surely we aren’t the only college connecting teacher development and research development.

If your college isn’t, then we can highly recommend our two-pronged approach: the RED quality process for all teaching staff, and teacher training qualifications that nurture new members of staff in the habit of evidence-based research and collaboration.

Last July, we held a conference about research in local colleges titled ‘Voices from the East’, where we shared all the papers our staff had produced. We’re planning to build on its success by holding a second event later this year, so if you’re curious about the impact of our approach, you can come and see for yourself the enthusiasm and impact of our researcher practitioners.

If we can spread this fever, we know there’s a platform in FE Week to share the results so that, in another ten years, we won’t still be revisiting this issue.

FE reform is a surer way to a healthier nation and fewer sick notes

As more people think about their health following the pandemic, a recent UK Fitness Report conducted by PureGym highlighted upward trends of the fitness and physical activity industry. However, a lack of workforce training is holding the sector back from delivering the economic and social benefits the government clearly desires.

Despite barriers such as the cost-of-living crisis, almost a quarter (24 per cent) of the population increased their spending on exercise in the past year. As a result, gym membership has also grown by 2 per cent in the past 12 months so that 16 per cent of the population are now gym members. One in four of us also choose to work out from home.

As with any sector, an increase in demand requires the workforce to meet it. But despite its growth, the number of certifications is decreasing and organisations within the sport and physical activity sector are finding it difficult to source the skilled staff they need. For example, 42 per cent of gyms and leisure centres are struggling to fill fitness instructor roles.

In The Road to the 2024 Election Manifesto by The Sports Think Tank, I wrote that perceptions of careers within the physical activity sector as unstructured or lacking clear pathways for development don’t match reality. Government and industry alike must re-align their narratives accordingly, ensuring the sector is seen as an attractive choice.

As the Prime Minister calls out what he calls the nation’s ‘sick note culture’, it’s important to note that filling current gaps with skilled and motivated employees can help drive the UK towards the goals set out in the recent Get Active Strategy, providing considerable economic and social benefits.

According to the government’s latest figures, 63.8 per cent of adults are overweight or living with obesity and over one-quarter are classed as inactive (averaging less than five minutes of activity a day).

Meanwhile, the government estimates that every £1 spent on sport and physical activity generates almost £4 in return across health and wellbeing, strengthening communities and the economy. Each year, active lifestyles prevent 900,000 cases of diabetes and 93,000 cases of dementia, a combined saving of £7 billion to the UK economy.

Every £1 spent on physical activity generates almost £4 in returns

As well as easing the strain on the NHS, physical activity helps tackle a range of social challenges, from loneliness and community division to unemployment and crime.

In summary, if the government wants to reduce sickness absence in the wider workforce, it’s never been more important for the fitness sector to be taken seriously.

Government could, for example, expand current employability programmes to include the sport and physical activity sector. Take the National Skills Fund, which help adults to train and improve their job prospects. It focuses entirely on meeting ‘current and emerging skills needs’, but sport and physical activity are excluded from it.

Additionally, the rules set by regulators mean there are strict guidelines for how qualifications are designed. A funding moratorium in place for the past three years has prevented the redevelopment of many qualifications. The new reforms, which do give significant weight to the employer voice, are restricted by pre-defined standards and additional skills set by IfATE.

Coupled with this, the approval process for new qualifications is lengthy, which means they could potentially be out of date before learners can complete them. This current system doesn’t allow for flexibility, innovation or the ability to react to demand.

Government should allow greater flexibility for sector qualifications to be designed in a way that meets the needs of employers and shorten the approvals process to ensure they are relevant and up-to-date.

This would allow all sectors to address workforce skills gaps in a more responsive way. And for the sport and fitness sector specifically, this could have a significant impact on its ability to deliver the economic and social benefits the nation needs and we can deliver.

Reforming eligibility criteria for time off work may or may not be part of the solution, but tackling the current skills gap is essential to meeting the goals set out in the government’s Get Active strategy, and that’s a sure way to make the nation healthier in the long run.

When it comes to apprenticeships, this government can bring receipts

I was delighted to be appointed minister for skills, apprenticeships and higher education last month.

My passion for skills and apprenticeships comes from my own working life. Before politics, I was in retail. At 16 I joined Asda, and then Lidl at 18. I worked my way up from the shop floor to manage Lidl in my constituency, before running a group of stores there and then running Farmfoods stores across the southwest.

I know, like so many colleagues in retail, that good training and opportunities reap great rewards. I passionately want more of these career routes available to young people across the country.

The government has backed skills training for over a decade, raising the quality of technical qualifications so that learners and employers can build businesses and careers on them. This includes £3.8 billion of investment to strengthen higher and further education over the course of this parliament.

Like my predecessor Robert Halfon and the education secretary Gillian Keegan, I am a huge advocate of apprenticeships. I have been part of running apprenticeship schemes in retail and know the benefit they can offer school-leavers – earning a wage while getting industry-approved training.

It’s pleasing that many in my former sector are making the most of apprenticeships, with the big retail chains now using them to train staff across their business. Lidl, for example, now offers apprenticeships in retail, HR, project management, warehouse operations and property maintenance.

The apprenticeship levy has empowered big businesses to invest in training and enrich their employees’ skills. It means that in 2024-25, we are increasing investment in high-quality apprenticeships to over £2.7 billion.

Like my predecessor, I am a huge advocate of apprenticeships

Our Institutes of Technology have also had a huge impact on the skills landscape, and I saw this myself at Yorkshire and Humber Institute of Technology. These regional trailblazers bring colleges, universities and businesses together to boost skills for key sectors like healthcare, digital technology and manufacturing.

Seventy-seven FE colleges are now linked to an IoT, alongside businesses like Rolls Royce, Siemens, Nissan, Microsoft and Babcock. We’re supporting 21 of these pioneering institutions across England.

IoTs are helping colleges to deliver Higher Technical Qualifications, which were rolled-out in 2022. These qualifications are developed with employers and can lead to prestigious, sustainable jobs in software development, quantity surveying and healthcare – jobs employers are crying out to be filled.

Introducing T Levels for 16-19 year-olds was also about filling a clear gap. This qualification prepares young people to start a job in the real world, as well as providing a firm foundation for further study or training. Launching the qualification in 2020 was considered a gamble, but T Level students have already proved their worth.

The first two cohorts achieved an impressive overall pass rate of over 90 per cent. And our Technical Education Learner Survey for 2023 tells a really positive story about the longer-term outcomes of the first T Levels cohort (2020-2022).

Almost all T Level completers were in education or employment 9-10 months after their course, with 75 per cent progressing to education or employment in their general T Level field. Almost a third of those who progressed to employment and apprenticeships did so with their industry placement host, showing the value of T Level placements to employers and young people.

I know there’s plenty more to do to ensure that opportunities to thrive in technical education reach every part of the country. We want more providers to offer T Levels, and we need to work with apprentices, employers, assessment organisations and training providers to drive-up apprenticeship achievements.

I will be taking my passion for improving skills from the shop floor in retail, to the floor of the House of Commons as skills minister. Whatever career path people want to take, we will back them with high quality courses. I can’t wait to work with FE providers and employers across the country to deliver the skills Britain needs.

ITPs choose small provider reps on AELP board

Two training provider chief executives have been elected to join the board of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP). 

The trade body announced Debbie Gardener, managing director of Learn Plus Us and Nick Smith, chief executive of TTE Training Limited, topped the ballot to fill two board places reserved for small independent training providers. 

The pair saw off competition from five other candidates. 

Gardiner returns to the AELP board after a nine-year stint that ended in 2022. 

She has led Learn Plus Us as managing director since May last year, having previously worked as the provider’s chief commercial officer and, before that, its non-executive chair. 

In her nomination statement, she pledged to “champion transparency, collaboration and innovation, striving to address the evolving needs of members”.

“I’m passionate about addressing the inequalities within FE and skills and feel sure that many of you will feel the same,” Gardiner wrote. 

Smith has led TTE Training, a small training provider based in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, for 16 years. It offers level 3 apprenticeships in construction, engineering and retail and has been judged ‘outstanding’ twice on his watch. 

Outside of TTE Training, Smith chairs the Chartered Management Institute’s west midlands and north west regional board, co-chairs the Cheshire and Warrington Provider Network and is a director of the Northern Skills Network. 

Asking for AELP members’ votes, Smith wrote: “I am passionate about educational outcomes for learners, apprentices, employers and obviously providers, particularly for small specialist training providers such as TTE. 

“In a time of great change and uncertainty, I believe that the depth and breadth of my education and training experience can add value to the great work that the AELP is doing already on behalf of its members.”

Both new board members begin a four-year term of office immediately. 

Ben Rowland, AELP chief executive, said he was “delighted to welcome” the new board members. 

“Adding Debbie and Nick to an already experienced board providing oversight of our day-to-day work means AELP will be in an even stronger position to deliver even more for its members across the skills sector.”

Gardiner and Smith are the latest additions to the AELP board following the election of Remit Training’s Sue Pittock and and JTL’s Chris Claydon earlier this year.

DfE launch T Level reviews amid ‘worrying’ drop-out rates

Just 16,000 young people started a T Level in the fourth year of their rollout, according to new government data that also confirms a “worrying” dropout rate for the flagship qualification.

Officials are now undertaking a “route-by-route” review of T Level content and assessment in a bid to boost recruitment and retention and to ensure the courses are “manageable at scale”.

But campaigners lobbying to stop cuts to competitor courses such as BTECs have said “very low” student interest in T Level leaves the government’s level 3 qualification reforms “dead in the water”.

A new T Level action plan was published on Thursday and revealed starts figures for the 2023/24 academic year.

Student numbers for the qualifications, designed as the new technical equivalent to A Levels, grew by 58 per cent from 10,200 in September 2022 to 16,085 in September 2023.

Two extra T Levels were on offer in 2023, bringing the total to 18, offered across 254 providers, up from 164. Since their introduction in 2020 more than 30,000 students have started a T Level.

Close to £1.8 billion has been spent on the T Level programme to date, yet they have reached less than 3 per cent of the 16-to-19 population.

T Level under-recruitment has been widely reported. Earlier this year, FE Week revealed how lower-than-expected enrolments had cost NCFE, a major T Level awarding organisation, £2.5 million so far. Several colleges told FE Week they had canned some T Level courses last year due to low take-up.

Government officials are now taking steps to make T Levels “more commercially attractive” to awarding organisations by introducing higher entry fees for providers if numbers are low.  

T Level courses in agriculture, land management and production were introduced in September 2023, alongside legal services. A total of 270 students enrolled for agriculture, land management and production, which is the first T Level to be available under the agriculture and animal care route. 

The DfE publishes T Level entry data by route, rather than specific T Levels, so it’s not possible to determine how many started on the new legal services course. Just less than 550 students started a T Level in the legal and finance route, which includes legal services and the finance and accounting T Levels launched in 2022.

Despite the low recruitment, the government is ploughing ahead with controversial plans to remove funding for competing level-3 applied general qualifications from August.

James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said “very low” take-up of T Levels leaves “plans to scrap applied general qualifications like BTECs dead in the water”.

According to Kewin, who leads the Protect Student Choice campaign, around 280,000 students are studying applied general qualifications compared to around 26,000 studying a T Level.

“Even if the plan to replace the former with the latter was the right one, the numbers simply do not stack up (particularly as BTECs will start to be scrapped from next year) and will leave an enormous qualifications gap that tens of thousands of students will fall through,” he added.

Both the Labour party and Liberal Democrats have made a commitment to pause and review the plan to scrap most BTECs if either win the next general election.

‘Worrying’ drop-out rate confirmed

Figures released alongside the action plan confirm that one in three T Level students in wave two dropped out, as previously reported by FE Week. These students enrolled on a T Level in 2021 and were due to complete in 2023. 

Of the 5,321 students in the cohort, 3,510 – 66 per cent – completed the course and assessment. But 1,086 dropped T Levels for another course and a further 682 withdrew from education altogether.

Most students who dropped T Levels for another course chose a different level-3 qualification. The next most popular choice was a level-3 apprenticeship. 

DfE data shows students taking T Levels are more likely to drop out than for other level-3 qualifications. 

One in five students taking large vocational or technical qualifications other than T Levels in 2021 withdrew, compared to one in three T Level students. Just one in 10 students dropped out of A-levels in that year.

Anne Murdoch, senior adviser in college leadership at the Association of School and College Leaders, said T Level retention was “worrying low”.

She added: “Implementing a brand-new qualifications system is not simple, and the difficulties the Department for Education are having are understandable to some extent. What is unforgivable is the rush to dispense with tried-and-tested BTECs and other qualifications before T Levels have been properly embedded. There is a risk that many students will be left without a viable post-16 pathway.”

Route-and-branch reviews

Every T Level will be reviewed by DfE agencies over the next 12 months following complaints from providers over “volume of content” and “unduly burdensome” assessment.

The updated T Level action plan commits the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education and Ofqual to review the content and specifications of each of the eight T Level routes. 

The DfE said “breadth of content” and “burden of assessment” could be changed as a result of the reviews, but “without compromising the rigour” of T Levels. The government will also explore allowing awarding organisations to plan for core exams to be taken at different times over the two years.

“We are aware that, in some T Levels, providers have indicated that the volume of content and assessment may lead to challenges in delivering T Levels at scale.

“Providers have told us that the administration associated with some assessment can be unduly burdensome and presents a barrier to delivery at scale.”

The quangos, who are themselves responsible for content and assessment regulations of T Levels, have been told to “explore opportunities” to reduce assessment admin burdens on providers.

As well as input from IfATE and Ofqual, new “curriculum reference groups” made up of T Level teachers and industry experts will “suggest improvements” to the qualifications and provide feedback on proposed changes. 

Cath Sezen, director of education policy at the Association of Colleges, said: “For some students, T Levels are absolutely the right qualification to take, and colleges have reported great success on student pathways into industry and higher education. 

“However, we have been clear that T Levels are not for every student wanting to study a level-3 vocational or technical qualification, and that the speed at which they are being rolled out alongside the scrapping of BTECs and other applied general qualifications is misguided.”

Reviews will take place in the order the routes were introduced, beginning with T Levels in education, digital, construction and health and science. They will conclude by the summer with a view to introducing changes from next year. 

Transition year woes

Entry rates on the T Level foundation year, previously known as the T Level transition programme, increased to 7,000 in 2023, up from 5,200 the year before. 

The programme is a one-year post-GCSE study course aimed at students who would like to do a T Level but are not ready for its academic and technical demands. The programme’s primary purpose is to move students on to a full T Level.  

While starts are increasing, new data reveals completions and progression are decreasing. 

DfE figures show 85 per cent of participants completed the foundation year in 2021/22, down from 90 per cent the year before. 

But while half of completers progressed to a level-3 course or apprenticeship, just 8 per cent of T Level foundation-year students progressed to a T Level. 

DfE said the transition year’s 51 per cent progression rate to level 3 was higher than other classroom-based level-2 courses (44 per cent). 

“A key priority for us is to understand how we and providers can support more students to progress to T Levels as their level-3 choice,” the action plan stated.

The DfE is introducing a new “certificate of participation” this year for anyone who completes the course.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: EDITION 459

Heather Marks

Principal, Buxton and Leek College and Director of FE and Skills, University of Derby

Start date: July 2024

Previous Job: Deputy Principal, Boston College

Interesting fact: Heather is pursuing a PhD in Trauma-Informed Learning in Further Education and Skills and is an active member of the American Educational Research Association. In her spare time, she’s a keen skydiver and is training to complete her skydiving license.

Oliver Symons

Principal and CEO, Moulton College

Start date: July 2024

Previous Job: Deputy Principal (Curriculum and Quality), Wiltshire College and University Centre

Interesting fact: In his early career Oliver developed his leadership skills running expeditions and extreme activities in remote locations around the world. In one of these roles his daily commute involved leaping off a 160m bridge secured only by a massive rubber band!