The government announced last month that it was relaxing the rules on which providers can run traineeships. Liz Williams reflects on why this could be a positive move, if it helps boost the number of starts, so long as it is managed with care by the Government.

From the start of the next academic year traineeships will be delivered by more providers, not just those rated as ‘outstanding’ or ‘good’ by Ofsted.

Traineeships must be managed and regulated in the correct manner, and it’s vital the change does not oversaturate the market

With almost a million young people across the UK struggling to find work, this should be positive news.

If it means more young people can benefit from opportunities to help get them into work or training and it helps plug provision gaps in areas not currently well served, then it will be of real benefit.

There is, however, an inevitable ‘but’.

The change will only be good news if the quality of each traineeship course fulfils on its promise to the participant and those providers needing to improve continue to do so.

Traineeships must be managed and regulated in the correct manner, and it’s vital the change does not oversaturate the market in certain towns or cities, but genuinely leads to more, high quality provision in the areas that need it.

BT currently runs traineeships in 35 different locations across the country.

We see a huge variety of young people through our doors.

Some require support to build their workplace skills, whilst others simply need opportunity to experience the world of work.

Our programme aims to help them close these gaps and become more work-ready.

We measure, track, report, and review those on our programmes extensively; we always aim to improve the numbers of young people that complete the programme and we are very proud of the diversity and our success rates.

Our current traineeship design combines vocational training, employability skills, academic learning, work experience, a job interview where possible, and, importantly, 12 weeks of follow-up support.

More than 50 per cent of those finishing the programme are no longer NEET (not in education, employment, or training) after six months of completion, and 10 per cent are currently working in BT.

Although we’re really proud of the young people that do make the transition into a role at BT, that’s not our primary goal.

We’re aiming to give young people an understanding of a broad range of careers and help them on their first step down the path of their choice.

We’re constantly working to develop the BT programme, and are always open to working with others to learn from their best practice and share ours.

It is really important to us that we help as many young people as possible into employment.

There are a lot of working models now available that could be used or re-engineered by new providers. And BT is certainly prepared to share our experience and best practise.

We work closely with Jobcentre Plus to promote our programme to eligible young people, and it’s encouraging to see their recent initiative of working with schools to raise awareness of local employment opportunities including apprenticeships, as well as the importance of work experience and programmes such as traineeships.

However, there remains a need to do more to make the public, those at school, and those eligible, aware of traineeships and how they can change the course of someone’s working life for the better.

The new Youth Obligation for 18-21 year-olds will also bring a new dynamic when introduced in 2017.

The expectation that a young person will sign up for an apprenticeship or traineeship within six months of unemployment will increase demand.

This means it makes sense to make it easier for organisations to run them and enable more participants on programmes.

However, let’s not lose sight of quality as we strive for quantity and ensure that there continue to be appropriate controls to safeguard standards and ensure every traineeship delivers a high quality experience.

Chris Thomson reflects on how a longer than expected post-16 area review process is giving time to focus on how to improve FE in their regions.

Whether you believe the area based reviews are progressing quickly enough or not depends on whether you think our colleges are more like a motorbike than a mouse.

The Minister appears to be of the former view and at one time may even have wanted the area based reviews (ABRs) completed before Christmas.

Colleges have an awkward tendency to behave much more like organisms than machines

That is fair enough if you think of colleges as machinery.

You can do what you like to machines and they never object or obstruct you. You can reasonably expect step-changes in their performance, as you can very quickly adjust their gearing or the power supply.

The problem with this view of colleges is that they are run by governors and principals — human beings.

Colleges therefore have an awkward tendency to behave much more like organisms than machines and so from a Minister’s point of view can very easily seem as refractory as camels and frustratingly slow to respond to the Government’s will.

The principals arriving at our first ABR meeting were probably evincing an all too human response to what they’d read about ABR.

By and large, they were baffled at all the reasons adduced for the process, nonplussed as to why savings were sought before rather than after the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), incensed by the Minister’s original preference not to include them, frustrated by the exclusion of school sixth forms, doubtful of the benefits of structural change, and fearful of what was about to be done to their colleges.

Not, that is, raring to get stuck in to a change programme, thank you very much.

So the prospect of progress, never mind expeditious progress, must have seemed a rather elusive and gloomy one to the commissioners and team who had gathered to greet us.

Yet three months into the process, although some objections remain — notably in regard to the exclusion of school sixth forms — there is genuine co-operation from the colleges.

This has happened because of the paradigm the Commissioners have chosen to adopt — to work with rather than on the colleges, an approach that has been felt perhaps in three ways.

First, although it remains perfectly clear the ABR team will present us with their recommendations at the end of the process to which we will be obliged to respond, steering group discussions have focused on facilitating, not enforcing, solutions.

Secondly, all the ambiguity in the ABR documentation has been resolved into the simple, compelling question, are we making the best use of the available resources in this area?

And thirdly, it is becoming clear that the definition of ‘best use’ has every bit as much to do with the quality of provision to learners and employers as it has to do with financial sustainability.

Attention is being paid to the leadership of those involved in the process as well as to the mechanics of the process itself.

You might object that the atmosphere in which the work is conducted is totally irrelevant to the purpose of ABR.

I think that would be a mistake. If all involved are engaged and committed to answering the question we’ve been set it is likelier we’ll identify improvements that are beneficial to learners and employers. What could be more important than that?

From their point of view what is vital is that the ABR process produces good outcomes, rather than quick outcomes.

It is not yet certain that ABR won’t cost more than it saves, demonstrably the case that some college finances are not fixable through ABR outcomes alone and equally certain that structural change is no guarantee against further financially costly failures in leadership and management.

This being so, we should be doing all we can to ensure that at the very least ABR produces genuine and sustainable improvement in provision.

If that takes a month or two longer to devise than the instruction manual advises, no learner or employer will grumble — whatever may be said in Westminster.

While area reviews mean colleges will become closer than ever before, Martin Simmons argues that collaboration was always going to be key to the sector’s future.

Mergers, funding ’simplification’, crazy targets, political dogma — where lies there any certainty in this landscape: this landscape, the beloved of so many, despite the best efforts of the meddlers and the ignorant? I can think of two certainties.

Firstly, our future learners will require and indeed thrive using digital technologies. Secondly, investment in FE will decline year-on-year for the foreseeable future. These two certainties make for difficult bedfellows and if we are to reconcile the opposites then we necessarily need to work in a different paradigm. That different paradigm is collaboration.

Curriculum development and delivery is where the real opportunities for successful collaboration lie

Having had the privilege to work in a team of eight colleges, together with an awarding organisation, sector skills council and private research organisation, I can attest to the truism that collectively we really can achieve, exponentially, more than we can ever achieve alone.

And curriculum development and delivery is where the real opportunities for successful collaboration lie. Yes, there are savings to be had in shared payroll, management information systems and, possibly, IT services, but nothing compared to what can be achieved by working together on curriculum content for online delivery.

We and others within the recently formed Designelearning Network have successfully delivered a blended learning solution to the first cohorts of budding e-learning Designers.

In less than one year, our project wrote — and had Ofqual approved — the content and detailed schemes of work for a new level three and four diploma in learning design, something we could never have achieved alone, more particularly as everyone in the team had their day jobs to do.

Again, a couple of indelible truths. Firstly, as we all know, it takes too long for individual practitioners to develop, let alone refresh, good quality online materials. Secondly, while you can buy materials from the private sector, much of it is prohibitively expensive and it is ‘locked down’ so that teachers cannot customise the materials for their own needs. As for MOOCs (massive, open, online courses) proceed cautiously.

At the risk of sounding like a 1960s advert for Kibbutz living, the answer to both ‘certainties’ may be found through collective, collaborative effort. If we find partners (whose values we share) and work together, then we will really accelerate the development of online content.

If the sector starts to train its own digital learning design technicians, then we will all have the capacity to adapt, customise and update the e-learning materials that we import from our partners.

Training the designers is now possible thanks to the diploma in digital learning design (collaboratively written and developed) — yes there is an investment required, but an extremely modest one given the potential return on that investment.

And no, it’s not Nirvana because all professionals will always want to change the content to suit themselves. But this is no different to buying a textbook: you use one section as is, another gets cut up and rejigged into a handout, a further bit is ignored.

It’s the mind-set that must change. And there is some precedent. Sharing between colleges on big European Social Fund-type projects has worked (it has also spectacularly not worked, but we cannot afford to work on the lowest common denominator) and I have heard objections on the grounds that we are competitors and need competitive advantage. But I have yet to hear a 16-year-old applicant ask whether our level two on-line childcare learning materials are of the same standard as our FE college 15 miles up the road.

You will notice that this article has not suggested that colleges will necessarily secure grand savings through on-line learning and that is because I don’t think there are (m)any — certainly in the short term. Using online learning to increase income, on the other hand, does open up both national and international learning opportunities, as I can clearly evidence.

Online learning — as many esteemed colleagues are advocating — is about meeting need, it is about what our learners demand, it is about the Martini of learning: “anytime anywhere”.