The hard work in designing, analysing and interpreting on the FE & Skills Survey that featured in the last edition of FE Week was carried out by the Policy Consortium. Nick Warren outlines the process.

The FE & Skills Survey 2015 revealed a higher level of concern than we anticipated about government priorities, mentioned in a remarkable 16 per cent of responses as of greater concern than funding. This has surprised us. It may not surprise you.

Research is worth little if it does not sometimes come up with surprising findings. And those in the annual survey conducted by the Policy consortium in partnership with FE Week demand attention, particularly in the light of the General Election results.

Recent history and the election campaign have shown us that aside from apprenticeships no one in Whitehall has much conception of what FE does or what impact the shifting funding and policy imperatives have on the day-to-day work of the sector.

Yet, across the nation, FE continues to deal with (according to the latest figures from the Association of Colleges) a simply astonishing 3.1 million students each year. Furthermore, FE is in a constant state of reinventing itself to respond to rapidly changing funding and policy priorities. We have a lot to be proud of. We adapt.

We needed to identify a range of things that concerned the entire sector, including governors, principals, teaching staff and admin staff alike

We decided to find out last year what those at the chalk face thought and how the sector looked and felt from the inside. It turned out to be a bigger job than we expected. It seems simple, but we had to agree what to ask and how much free response to offer.

Anyone who has tried to devise a survey will know how hard it is. We set out to discover what kept people awake at night, but to do so we had to take an educated guess at what kept people awake at night.

We needed to identify a range of things that concerned the entire sector, including governors, principals, teaching staff and admin staff alike. See the sequence? I started from the “top” there out of habit, I realise. We should start from delivery, because that is the “top”. We also wanted to give scope to people to express their views on things we had not thought of.

We thought it important to make the questions as neutral as possible across the topics we eventually settled on and to enable people to enlarge on or explain their answers.

A survey team of around a dozen Policy Consortium members, each with specialist expertise, sifted the results and made sense of the figures and comments in their narrative commentary. The open responses in the “anything you want to add” question 33 were grouped thematically. A copy editor kept us in line. A lot of people are involved and no one gets paid.

We might have expected a good deal of moaning and special pleading, but in fact the majority were measured in their responses.

The sector did not let us down. If anything, concerns were even more sharply focussed and were strikingly consistent.

Our colleague Mick Fletcher, commenting on the broad sweep of the survey, acutely noted that funding cuts, which we might have expected to be at the top of the list took second place to a range of other concerns clustered around “systemic failure”: the status of the sector, competition, institutional viability and the impact on learners.

After the first survey was published we were invited to address the Labour Business, Innovation and Skills front bench team in the Lords. The Government team expressed no such interest.

By the time you read this the election will be over and we might even have a new Government. The publication date this year was carefully chosen. If and when we know the names of the BIS, Government and Opposition teams (and whether FE even remains in BIS) the report will go to them. We hope they take the chance to read and reflect.

The full report will be available early next week.

I am writing this on the eve of the General Election knowing that by the time you read this all the votes will have been cast and the scramble to form a government will most likely be under way.

Politicians who have been rubbishing their competitors’ policies and promises throughout the campaign will be making loving overtures to each other and if the polls are to be believed the future of our county will be decided in the ubiquitous ‘smoked-filled rooms’ of the parties’ managers and not by the ballot box.

Eventually we will welcome the 62nd Skills Minister to pick up the apprenticeship mantle which all the parties have been professing to support and he or she will find out the sad truth of the current state of the programmes.

Apprenticeship numbers are falling, apprenticeship completion rates are falling and apprenticeship funding has been falling throughout the last administration’s tenure.

Is there a correlation between reductions in funding and reductions in apprenticeship starts and completions compounded with the continual changes?

As reported in FE Week, apprenticeship completion rates have fallen by 5 percentage points over the past three years.

The principal reason for this was the introduction of Functional Skills to replace Key Skills.

At the time of their introduction, both the department and then minister publically stated they were prepared for a 10 percentage point drop in completion rates with the introduction Functional Skills.

Eventually we will welcome the 62nd Skills Minister to pick up the apprenticeship mantle which all the parties have been professing to support and he or she will find out the sad truth of the current state of the programmes

It is of some credit to the apprenticeship providers, despite the shortage of specialist maths and English teachers, that completions have only fallen by half than the minister and officials expected.

The introduction of Technical Certificates by David Blunkett many years ago was a sensible way of ensuring apprentices had sufficient theoretical knowledge to support the vocational skills they practiced at their workplace.

However, with the recent Govian wave of tests and tests and more tests, driving out assessment of these theory skills by assignments and projects, many practically-minded apprentices who are both competent and knowledgeable are failing their online tests.

Again, ministerial bias for exams adds nothing to the skill set of the apprentices and reduces completion rates for no apparent advantage, rather to the disadvantage of those who have difficulty taking examinations.

Much is made of individual learners’ learning styles, but styles of assessing, quantifying and marking their achievements does not reflect this.

So, new Skills Minister, when you unravel your brief you won’t find a simple apprenticeship scheme for you to expand.

Your predecessor left a half open can of worms that ignored progression to provide an apprenticeship framework that met the needs of the employer, the learner, the community and the national economy, not just the narrow needs of the employer.

Compulsory employer contributions became blurred as did the funding route.

The employer pilot scheme failed badly and where employers delivered apprenticeship themselves without a provider or college, they achieved disastrously low completion rates averaging 40 per cent. But then empirical evidence was always behind political expediency.

So what’s the betting on how many ministers we will have if the new administration goes the full five-year term — will we reach the 70 mark?

Will skills, FE and higher education remain with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills or return to the Department for Education and can Peter Lauener still straddle both the Education Funding Agency and the Skills Funding Agency?