Former student Samantha Harvey has returned to Derby College as the first head gardener at its Broomfield Hall land-based studies campus.
Ms Harvey’s role will involve supporting students in work experience programmes
and leading work to open the grounds to
more visitors.
She studied horticulture at the college 15 years ago, before training and working at London’s Royal Botanic Kew Gardens, where she won a number of awards including top practical student, best vegetable plot, and top student at plant identification.
Ms Harvey then worked as head gardener on private estates in Yorkshire and Warwickshire and also volunteered at the Botanic Garden in Belize, where she managed the orchid nursery and trained staff to look after the delicate plants.
Speaking as the college announced her appointment earlier this month, Ms Harvey said: “It is wonderful to be back at
Broomfield Hall.
“As head gardener, I will be using my experience at Kew and the private estates to re-establish and expand the borders and shrubs in key parts of the grounds, including the walled gardens.
“This will provide horticulture students with valuable work experience for their future careers and also create a wonderful visitor attraction.”
Meanwhile, Cambridge Regional College (CRC) has appointed Paul Skitt as assistant principal, to head employer engagement.
The former head of business development at the College of North West London, who started in his new role last month, will focus on increasing the college’s work with regional employers, offering specialised training to support their growth.
“Cambridge is a great city with a vibrant, growing economy and I’m looking forward to working with employers here and inviting them into the college to see our fantastic training facilities and meet the students
who could be part of their future workforce,” he said.
“As a college, we want to continue making sure we meet the skills needs of local and regional employers through apprenticeships and staff development, as well as training our students for jobs in the local economy.
“There is a huge opportunity to work with regional employers and support their growth and CRC is well placed to meet their needs for more skilled staff.”
Sean Harford has also started in his role as national director of education at Ofsted, taking on responsibilities for early years and FE and skills in addition to schools.
Lorna Fitzjohn, who had been national director for FE and skills since April 2014, will now focus solely on her position as Ofsted regional director for the West Midlands.
Mr Harford, who started in his role last month, said: “Now that we are working on the shared basis of the common inspection framework, this is the right moment to draw together all that Ofsted does in these areas [early years, schools and FE and skills] and to ensure comparability and consistency across Ofsted’s inspection of these sectors.”
Mr Harford joined Ofsted in 2003 as an inspector and has since worked in school improvement, school inspection policy,
and organisational restructuring.
Before joining the inspectorate, he was a teacher and senior leader in a secondary school in the East of England, as well as associate adviser for Cambridgeshire
County Council.
Former Labour deputy leadership candidate Stella Creasy has spoken out in defence of “innocent young people” after reports that college learners in her constituency had been involved in a mass street brawl.
The Walthamstow MP, who got 26 per cent of votes to come second in her party’s deputy leadership race to Tom Watson last month, pledged to work with police in response to the violent scenes that erupted on Tuesday (October 6) evening.
Around 200 people aged 16 to 20 were thought to have been involved in the fighting in Walthamstow, East London. It was said to have started after a row between a female Leyton Sixth Form College learner and another from Sir George Monoux College over a boy.
The sixth form colleges, both rated as good by Ofsted, confirmed the two were their learners but Ms Creasy, writing in her online blog, said she wanted to “protect the good name and safety of the vast majority of young people in Walthamstow who are not involved in this behaviour”.
“As local MP I will support and work with schools, parents, colleges, youth organisations and the police to ensure those who encourage such disorder and commit assault and violence on our streets are held directly accountable,” she said.
She added: “It is now confirmed the source of the disorder was an altercation between two young women, from two different local colleges. It was not a gang-related incident.”
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said the trouble started just after 5pm and the group dispersed around four hours later.
A 16-year-old male and a 16-year-old female were arrested on suspicion of affray, while an 18-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of violent disorder.
Kevin Watson, principal of Leyton, said: “The college is cooperating fully with the police following Walthamstow’s disturbance. Clearly, we take such incidents very seriously and will respond accordingly if and when more information becomes available.”
Paolo Ramella, principal of Sir George Monoux, said the college was working closely with local police to find out if any of its learners were involved.
“Sir George Monoux College has a zero tolerance approach to unacceptable behaviour, whether inside or outside of college. If any of our students are found to be involved in any way, they will face serious consequences,” he said.
When Find a Future deputy chair David Cragg is asked how long he has been working in FE he cracks a smile and says “110 years.”
It’s an exaggeration, of course, as he was born in 1946 and became involved in FE in the late 1960s with a general studies teacher post at Warley College of Technology (nowadays part of Sandwell College).
But it’s nonetheless hard not to be impressed by the small matter of the half century or so that he does have under his belt.
And it’s even more impressive that his formative FE experience didn’t put him off education altogether.
We’ve got a huge issue in the UK as a whole, of not valuing and not understanding the crucial importance of vocational education, careers and skills
He says: “It was a period in which the whole introduction of general or liberal education was a government policy, but was profoundly resented by all the technical and specialist staff, so you always got timetabled for killer slots.
“However, it was a great experience and I learned a huge amount about FE — the good, bad and sometimes ugly — and how important it was.”
Prince Charles awards Cragg his OBE at Buckingham Palace in 2008 for services to training and to education. In 2012 he also received a CBE for services to education and skills
Before long, Cragg’s college bosses took advantage of his German languages skill and asked him to teach modern foreign languages, which he duly did and then built a teaching team around him.
He had studied languages at university, having gone to grammar school before that in his native Yorkshire.
After academia, Cragg secured a role as a languages assistant in Germany for a year in the late sixties, where he discovered his passion for teaching, and then put it into practice in Warley upon his return to England.
He then went on to work for a decade as the chief executive of Birmingham and Solihull Training and Enterprise Council.
Cragg (left) in the German Alps when he worked as an interpreter and tour guide for an American college tour with a colleague
“I built up a whole network of connections with business at a time when things were changing in the outside world, and the college I worked at was under significant threat,” says Cragg.
“So there was more and more need to relate more clearly and strongly to local business.”
Further into his career, with his developed business acumen, Cragg was able to play a vital role in both of the Rover crises.
When Rover collapsed in 2005 he led the retraining programme for former employees to ensure that many got new jobs.
“Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and a whole entourage were sitting in a room with the regional development agency, myself and my then chairman of the regional board saying: ‘What the hell should we do about it?’ when we heard the news,” Cragg recalls.
“We were able to put in place a retraining package for people in the space of a week, which was a fantastic tribute to the flexibility and responsiveness of FE.”
Cragg (right) sings with a friend while working in Germany in 1968
Then under the government’s reform programme in 2007, Cragg managed the overall transition of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), where he was regional director for the West Midlands, to the newly created Skills Funding Agency (SFA).
His responsibility was to distribute 3,200 staff members from the LSC across 155 organisations.
He says: “I managed the whole process and had the responsibility of reporting to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills [BIS] for the design and set-up of the SFA.”
He then served on the management board of the SFA as national development director, with a responsibility for policy implementation, until his retirement in 2011.
But then WorldSkills London happened the same year.
“I suppose you’ve got to understand a little bit of the history of this to see where I fit into it,” he says.
Cragg’s father, Thomas Cragg, pictured at the end of the First World War
“BIS asked me to oversee WorldSkills London, so we had the big, once-in-a-generation opportunity of running a huge international show equivalent of this year’s Sao Paolo show.”
Cragg continues: “I had the good fortune and the opportunity of writing a legacy strategy and proposing that to a group of ministers.”
With Find a Future, which organises the UK’s participation in WorldSkills and also the Skills Show, he explains that the idea behind the London WorldSkills remains the fundamental, underlying principle behind the Skills Show now.
He says: “We’ve got a huge issue in the UK as a whole, of not valuing and not understanding the crucial importance of vocational education, careers and skills.
“And the show makes a direct impact on attitude and we’ve got evidence on behaviour to prove it.”
Over the three years that Find a Future has run the show, it has seen a 25 per cent increase in the likelihood of young people taking up a vocational option and pursuing a vocation career, he says.
He explains: “The Skills Show is, on the one hand, a showcase for everything, for the whole breadth of what our technical, vocational, professional education system produces, but it’s also a modelling tool, and a laboratory for demonstrating what we really ought to be doing.”
When asking Cragg what new elements he is bringing to the show next month, he says: “It’s evolution, rather than revolution, because we know the show works and we’ve got a fantastic opportunity this year because we’ve got a gang of people who have just come back from Brazil.”
The Sao Paolo team will be attending the Skills Show and different skills champions will be sitting among guests on every dinner table at the welcome dinner.
Cragg says: “The focus is on these young people who have achieved such fantastic things, not just winning a competition, but what they’ve done with their lives, what they are doing now, how enterprising they are, and the show will more and more reflect that.”
Influencing people is a key element in this year’s Skill Show and Find a Future carried out research last year which showed that for 70 per cent of young people, their parents were most influential in their life choices.
“At this year’s show we are having a family and an adult day so parents can feel well-informed about the breadth of careers available and are more likely to recommend a vocational option to their children,” says Cragg.
The influential role parents can have on their children is central to Cragg and he wants to highlight to them the importance of taking the FE route.
He says: “The most interesting thing about FE is that it sits right at the core of the economy, which means it’s changing all the time, so it gives a platform for innovation and almost an inbuilt need to innovate.”
Cragg’s college ID when he taught general studies at Warley College of Technology
He adds: “FE is where our whole education system should be and it’s a role model we ought to have applied in our university system, in our schools system, and regrettably we haven’t.”
And Cragg has a clear vision to improve that situation.
He says: “What’s crucially important is that we acknowledge and recognise that the world around us is changing, and in particular devolution’s going to change all of that, so we are working closely with local enterprise partnerships and the emerging combined authorities.
“Sao Paolo is a fantastic example, but the challenge for us is to say: ‘We want to be Switzerland,’ as it has a fantastic vocational system that uses competitions as an integral part of its mainstream, as an integral part of the development of its workforce and as an integral part of their vocational system — that is where we want to be.”
It’s a personal thing
What is your pet hate?
Probably elitism in education and the hypocrisy of many of my friends and colleagues about which school they choose to send their children
What is your favourite book?
One in German, one in English. All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues). And probably Birdsong — so I’m a bit rooted in the First World War but that’s part of my personal history. The First World War is an exercise in supreme futility and it’s in my bones
What do you do to switch off from work?
I read a lot. I’m a German speaker, and the promise I made myself when I formally retired and went to part-time working, was that my German would be as good as it ever was. So I speak German every Friday morning to my personal tutor, and I think I’ve spoken two sentences of English to her in four years
If you could invite anyone to a dinner party, living or dead, who would it be?
My uncle because he lost his life in 1917 at the age of 18, having been sent to this crazy war [First World War]
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
A cricketer and I failed miserably.
I might have been a professional opera singer when I was about 27, and I trained at what is now called the Birmingham Conservatoire, but then I had the misfortune — or good fortune — of having a child,which kind of meant that economic security had to come first.
But my daughter is a professional singer so I get satisfaction from traipsing off and seeing her in Germany or Austria or elsewhere
A host of new learning technology projects have been funded to the total tune of £750k. Rebecca Garrod-Waters explains some of the projects and what she hopes they might achieve.
In a bold move to help stimulate the take-up of digital learning in vocational education, Ufi Charitable Trust has funded 16 demonstrator stage projects — any one of which could catch the imagination of tomorrow’s teachers and learners.
We want this model of a Ufi ‘family’ of projects to underpin future funding
All are at an early stage, and each has received up to £50k funding for the next 12 months to help develop their product or service.
We are really excited about funding this cohort — we want Ufi funding to be about more than the grant, where projects get benefit from each other and from the association with Ufi.
Tight budgets mean that people are unwilling to take a risk on something unproven.
This presents difficulties for innovators who have great ideas but need help to get a project to a stage where they are ready to go to market or attract further investment.
What Ufi, as a charitable trust, is able to do is to de-risk this developmental stage and help products and services reach a marketable point.
This includes looking at technologies that had initially been developed for a different market, but where building them to concentrate on vocational technology could have real benefits.
Our driving goal is to catalyse change — achieving an increase in the scale of people who can gain and develop vocational skills.
The 16 projects cover a wide range of technologies and services — including hardware, apps, e-learning and supporting services.
This was a deliberate decision — we don’t believe there is a single solution for FE and training, and the blending of a range of tools woven into more traditional teaching methods will be key to the successful growth of workforce training. Together the projects form a cohort, supported by the trust and benefiting from the opportunity to work with each other.
We hope there will be synergies and connections formed — and we want this model of a Ufi ‘family’ of projects to underpin future funding.
The projects include Target, a full commercial trial of wearable technology (the HoloLens and Epson Movario smart glasses) in a manufacturing environment. When switched off the glasses form a standard pair of safety glasses, but when switched on will deliver interactive content directly to an individual as they look at a specific machine.
There is also NanoSimbox, currently used in schools to teach chemistry by visualising how molecules work. This is being developed to refocus on vocational learning for those who need a better understanding of chemistry to enter the workplace.
Meanwhile, two of the projects are developing new ways of using simulations. One is combining audio analytics with situational skills practice, to provide objective insights into performance when rehearsing skills which would otherwise be difficult, expensive or risky to practise in real life. The other is developing a digital platform that will use virtual reality to create multi-agency emergency scenarios. Learners will include emergency response incident commanders within the West Midlands Fire Service and other fire and rescue services who work within the emergency services.
In addition, Ufi Trust looked to fund projects that bring e-learning to new, sometimes hard to reach audiences, and cover non-traditional subjects. Myerscough College is developing videos on horticulture, Cuppa is a project to bring bite-sized learning to care workers, and GivebackUK is producing a library of video resources for the charity sector.
It is clear that ways of accessing and gaining vocational skills need to be brought in line with the way people live their lives. We live in an increasingly fast-paced digital world and we have expectations about how we learn — we must make sure that vocational teaching and learning is at the forefront of new ways of skills delivery.
The relationship between lead and sub-contractor may be one defined by tension for some, and tranquility for others. Matthew Lord outlines how to help make these relationships fall into the latter camp.
With the final push to sign off contracts and the last-minute dash for recruitment dominating our lives, I’ve been thinking about exactly what we, as a ‘sub-contractor’ are looking for from our college partners (although ‘sub-contractor’ is surely a misnomer if ever there was one – to us it’s a partnership, with all the sense of alliance and co-operation that implies).
We simply haven’t got the time to be passed around the college talking to all and sundry (delightful though your colleagues are)
We’re all united by a single aim — to deliver great learning to our students — but too often the sub-contractor-college relationship founders because one ‘side’ or another doesn’t understand what the other needs. So let’s banish misunderstanding, frustration and soaring blood pressure and make the relationship work.
The first thing to consider are time frames and contracts. Timing is everything. Is your college able to commit to our time frames, process the necessary due diligence and get the course under contract in time for us to be able to recruit learners at the right time of year? If you can do this, it tells us you’re a super-efficient college — just what we like.
Secondly, count date meeting. Meet with us one week before the count date and please make sure you withdraw learners that need to be withdrawn.
Third is registers. Decide how these are submitted and monitored. And please make sure someone from the college does actually look at them and that they are monitored regularly.
Bursary application forms comes fourth in this list. Provide us with a checklist of the exact evidence required. And once you receive the forms, please process them quickly. Delays at this late stage cause real problems for us and, more importantly, our students. Many of ours are entirely dependent on financial help to pursue their studies.
Fifth is being ‘Ofsted-ready’. Check that your sub-contractor is Ofsted-ready — you don’t want your next inspection to be adversely affected by any shortcomings beyond your control. It will boost your confidence — and that of your sub-contractor — to know that everything is hunky-dory.
And sixth is English and maths. Does the sub-contractor have the necessary support to ensure success in these crucial areas? Do staff have the necessary training and resource support? This should include initial testing, teaching delivery and exam preparation. Good results are in everyone’s best interests.
It hardly needs saying, but keep in touch. This is number seven. Do meet regularly with your sub-contractor and draw up a set agenda around numbers, quality and support.
Number eight is fewer points of contact. With the best will in the world, we simply haven’t got the time to be passed around the college talking to all and sundry (delightful though your colleagues are). Less is definitely more, so let’s agree a few key points of contact at the start of the relationship. These are sub-contracting/business manager (responsible for internal liaison with safeguarding, HR, finance and contracts); registration (enrolments, withdrawals, bursary forms, exam registration); quality assurance; and heads of department.
And if your staff change, remember to
tell us.
Back to the list of ten and at nine is learner support. Make sure that your contractor has a robust system in place for learners who need support. In the case of Let Me Play, the vast majority of our students have been turned off learning by bad experiences at school and have very low self-confidence, so this is second nature to us. Before they can even begin to learn, our young people need to acquire the habit of regular attendance at our learning centres and find some self belief. Many have difficult home lives, and some are already living alone at the age of 16 or even homeless. These are all potential barriers to learning which have to be overcome before they’re ready to move on to college at the end of our courses.
And ten is free school meals. Young people need feeding — and nutritious meals aid focus and concentration. If your sub-contractor delivers full-time study programmes to 16 to 18-year-olds off-site, do you have a system for paying for free school meals to eligible learners?
Judith Doyle inherited a grade three Ofsted-rated college in August 2013 and within eight months of her appointment inspectors dished out the same result again. But, picking up the gauntlet, she instigated a raft of changes that in July saw the college rated as outstanding.
I was proud and delighted to be made principal at Gateshead College in 2013, a college which at that time was graded by Ofsted as requiring improvement.
I relished the opportunity to build on the improvements that were already in evidence but equally recognised that turning things around would need focus, clarity, and ultimately a bit of backbone.
We used to effectively have a college that operated as two — work-based learning on one side and classroom-based learning on the other
Gateshead College had an impressive legacy of being a technical college; close to local business and close to its community.
At some point this got lost in translation, focus and delivery.
My primary goal became the delivery of a strategic transformation programme, starting with a shift in culture. Simplified, it was going back to what we always did best.
The priorities were having a relentless focus on quality improvement and a curriculum that suited market, employer and business needs. We could no longer afford to be distracted from this approach, however interesting or attractive new opportunities appeared to be.
Our first priority was our students [and our strategy] — to make them the most highly-prized in the jobs market, and to give them the best learning experience in a safe, nurturing and aspirational environment.
We aspired to give our students the ‘employment edge’ — a point that Ofsted recognised in its report. Our approach to safeguarding was also recognised as outstanding and we continue to review and improve beyond the current framework — we’d been working on the Prevent agenda for a number of years.
We restructured our college board; traditional structures made way for more dynamic, agile and focussed committees with a greater business representation. The support of my chair and board was very important to developing a clear strategy going forward.
My role was clear: to drive and lead — encourage, motivate and kick (a little). I had to communicate a vision, a clear sense of purpose to which all staff could engage every member of staff had to understand the part they had to play in delivering excellence for students.
We recognised the need to improve communications with all staff. Regular, more focussed team briefings were introduced to encourage and cascade communication in departments and there was an increased focus on informal communication. I used every opportunity to reinforce the message to all staff that if we delivered high quality, teaching, learning and assessment the rest would follow. It is our core business and we had to get that right.
Another huge internal shift was establishing a ‘one college’ approach to our business. We used to effectively have a college that operated as two — work-based learning on one side and classroom-based learning on the other.
There was a lack of a coherent sense of purpose and no real accountability as well as waste, duplication and lost opportunities.
We enhanced our management information systems and became far more rigorous about capturing and routinely analysing data. We now have extremely detailed and accessible information about every student’s achievement, progress and experience along with a range of performance data which is used this to make quick management decisions and early interventions.
Our links with the local and regional business community have always been important, but I set about strengthening these further by listening to employers and working with them to shape our curriculum and enhance students’ experience of work. We had proven our ability to be highly responsive to businesses, delivering many bespoke solutions, and could demonstrate the impact of this to the inspectors.
We have forged outstanding — and very meaningful — partnerships with regional organisations like the Confederation of British Industry, North East Chamber of Commerce, Entrepreneur’s Forum and our local enterprise partnership.
All of this is being achieved within a tough political and financial landscape, but we are working from a robust financial position to deliver on the government’s skills agenda.
If conference season has shown us anything, it’s that one wing of the political establishment has changed its tune on education policy while the other remains steadfastly on the same track.
Given the fervour surrounding the election of new leader Jeremy Corbyn after a heavy defeat at the polls under Ed Miliband, Labour could be forgiven for wanting to take that energy into the policy realm and adopt an apparently bolder, more radical voice in opposing Conservative education and skills policy.
Likewise, buoyed by general election victory the Conservatives could be forgiven for wanting to continue with their plans for education in England. Indeed, the party’s newfound majority gives it a mandate the likes of which it has not wielded for 18 years.
In Brighton, Labour’s education and business spokespeople Lucy Powell and Angela Eagle signalled the beginning of a period of stronger and more combatant opposition, ready to take on the government over free schools and academies, post-16 funding and teacher recruitment.
In contrast, speeches by Prime Minister David Cameron and Education Secretary Nicky Morgan in Manchester demonstrated a commitment to their existing pathway of reform. The future is more free schools, more academies and an end to council control of schools. But questions about the future of FE funding remain.
In this supplement, we bring you a roundup from each conference (pages 4, 5, 10 and 11), coverage of our very own fringe events on the critical subject of English and maths (pages 6, 7, 12 and 13), and post-match expert pieces from sector leaders who attended the events (pages 14 and 15).
But first, we thought we’d recap the key education stories from the conferences of other parties and also the Trades Union Congress, which you can find on page 3.
Cash raised by the proposed new large employers’ apprenticeship levy should be combined with government funding in a central pot available to all employers of all sizes under a “simple” new system, the government has been told.
The Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) made the proposal in its submission to the government consultation on the levy proposals, which closed on October 2.
It said: “Our overarching view is that we must keep this system simple, so we would be much clearer that any money raised by the levy goes into a single fund (for England) which would be combined with any investment funds allocated by the government (currently £1.5bn).
“The fund would then support all apprenticeships in England, for both large and small employers.”
Its response to the consultation added that all employers would then have “access [to] the funding support and the level of that support would be set out by the government for each standard (by bands) and for each age group of apprentices”.
An important benefit of this system would be that the “government’s [apprenticeship] contribution would not be dependent on each employer’s contribution or the price agreed for the training,” it added.
It welcomed guidance that the government had provided on its plans to distribute levy funding through a digital voucher system, but criticised the lack of information provided so far on the planned rate and scope of the charge.
It comes after the government was criticised by the CBI, in an FE Weekarticle published on August 21 following the launch of the consultation, for failing to specify what the minimum size of “larger employers” set to pay the levy would be.
But the AELP response said that it “might consider a dual measure [for the minimum size] — either a minimum number of employees such as 250 and/ or a minimum turnover”.
It added: “There needs to be a simple method of calculating the levy and basing this figure on payroll costs appears to be the most straightforward approach.”
It also warned that “employers who are doing internal training, but which does not meet the standards required of an apprenticeship programme, may be tempted to re-badge their own provision to get their funding back”.
It said this could be avoided by, for example, an independent quality assurance process “managed by an organisation such as Ofsted, although this must be more closely managed by employers and stakeholders rather than government”.
Speaking as the consultation response was unveiled this morning, AELP chief executive Stewart Segal (pictured) said: “We accept that the levy will be a source of additional investment and will engage more larger employers.
“However we have to be cautious about the impact on the smaller employers in the apprenticeship programme and how the levy will focus the attention of employers on the programme’s financial cost rather than the quality of delivery.”
The consultation responses of a number of other sector bodies, including the Association of Colleges (AoC) and CBI were reported in edition 149 of FE Week.
The AoC warned the government against “using the levy as a reason to reduce its own £1.5bn annual spending on apprenticeships”.
The CBI’s response called for the levy to be controlled by a new independent board, using the Low Pay Commission as a “blueprint”.
A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) declined to say how many responses it had received, but said: “The government response [to all consultation submissions] will be published in due course.”
Apprentices could be asked to sign contracts upon enrolment requiring them to deliver careers advice, Skills Minister Nick Boles told the Conservative Party conference in Manchester today.
Leading a panel including an apprentice and Crossrail chair Terry Morgan, Mr Boles called for help from delegates in Manchester in persuading young people to take up apprenticeships and in convincing employers to create the earn and learn vacancies.
He said: “One of the things we’re thinking about is asking every apprentice to sign a simple contract. We are going to ask people in that contract to agree to go back to that school and talk to the youngsters coming behind them about the opportunities of apprenticeships, so everybody really understands from the horse’s mouth what a great thing this is.”
Mr Boles also admitted to having felt “quite pleased” with himself when the government claimed to have hit its 2m starts target of the last Parliament around a year ago, which was followed by the pledge by Prime Minister David Cameron that the target would be 3m in this Parliament.
“I need your help as parents, as grandparents, as friends and neighbours to persuade young people like Josh that an apprenticeship is a great thing for their future,” said Mr Boles.
“And I need your help as councillors, as businesspeople, as members of rotary and round table, in persuading employers like Terry that they should be investing in apprenticeships to create those opportunities for young people.
“We have a lot of work to do, but it’s good work and it’s very exciting to be a part of it.”
The panel discussion was followed by a speech from Business Secretary Sajid Javid, who said the government was “going further” in its bid to create apprenticeship starts.
Business Secretary Sajid Javid speaks at Conservative Party Conference. Pic: PA Photo/Jon Super
He added: “Our targets are not just numbers. Our targets are people. Like Josh, the young man we saw on stage this morning. Someone filled with drive, dedication and determination. The sort of person that this one nation government is unashamedly on the side of, and will always be.”
Mr Javid also celebrated his party’s win in May’s general election, and even heaped some criticism on his Liberal Democrat predecessor in his government post, Dr Vince Cable.
He said: “It’s been nearly 20 years since the last Conservative secretary of state left the Department of Trade and Industry. Two decades of countless Labour ministers. Two decades of side-lining and marginalising business, including five years of Vince Cable, and believe me, that was more than enough.”
Apprenticeships also featured in other speeches, with Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin announcing that he would work with Crossrail’s Mr Morgan to create “30,000 apprenticeships across road and rail by 2020”.
Click here for coverage of last week’s Labour conference. Expect further conference coverage in a free supplement with edition 150 of FE Week, dated Monday, October 12.
Main pic: Nick Boles at Conservative Party conference today. Pic: PA
