Chartered status for colleges and training providers in the FE sector has moved an important step closer after the body set up to launch the quality mark was given legal approval.
The Queen approved the grant of a Royal Charter to the Institution for Further Education (IfE) in June, as reported in FE Week.
The body announced today that it has now been given the Great Seal of the Realm.
A spokesperson said that this meant it had been granted legal status and would now be known as the Chartered Institution for Further Education (CIfE).
Lord Lingfield, chair of the new CIfE, said the development was “a significant milestone” in the chartered status project for FE.
He added: “I am grateful to everyone in government and in the sector who have helped us to get this far.
“We shall now be moving to fill in the remaining details of the Institution’s internal governance framework and to set up the new chartered organisation to accept qualifying colleges and training providers into membership.”
Plans were originally drawn up, by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, for the Royal seal of approval to be granted to high-achieving FE institutions in July 2012.
It was almost another year before the appointment of Tory peer Lord Lingfield (pictured main, above) as chair of the IfE.
In March 2014, he told FE Week that he expected “negotiations to be completed within months” that would allow for the quality mark to be launched.
But an FE Week survey on the mark, carried out in May last year, unveiled concern that it could simply “sink without trace, before further worries earlier this year that it had “stalled” after no sign of movement.
The University for Industry (Ufi) Trust has officially launched 16 tech-based projects that it hopes will revolutionise digital learning in FE.
The VocLearnTech projects, which involve for example augmented reality simulators, 3D printed robots and interactive chemistry platforms, have been backed by the trust with £750K funding.
The launch event held last night (October 8) at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce building, in London, was attended by more than 40 guests from across the tech and education sectors.
Ufi chief executive Rebecca Garrod-Waters told guests that 200 different organisations had submitted applications for funding to develop tech-based education ideas since April, through the VocLearnTech scheme, which was whittled down to 16.
“We have had such a good response this year that we want to make it an annual project,” she said.
“There is something really exciting about each project and they can have an impact on digital learning.”
Ufi trustee and Toshiba education adviser Bob Harrison, who contributed to the FE Learning Technology Action Group (Feltag) report, said the next stage for the 16 projects would be for them to be “commercialised into a product” that can be sold to the private sector and adopted by colleges.
Ray Barnes, chair of the Ufi trustees board, said: “There is risk with these new projects, but if they work then it will be great.
“We will see all of them through to the next stage,” he added.
Ufi launched its charitable trust in May 2012 to help solve the UK’s skills deficit, as reported by FE Week.
Click here for an expert piece by Ms Garrod-Waters on this year’s funding awards.
Main pic above: Neville Rudd, director of Learn TMP at the event
Here are the 16 projects:
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Interactive instructional videos for the land-based sector — Myerscough College:
The videos will be geared at level two golf greenkeeping learners.
An app will be developed to allow learners to access the videos on smart phones.
A Ufi spokesperson said that the aim of the “easily accessible, interactive instructional videos” will be to “maximise access to training and develop new methods of active learning through the use of technology”.
Cuppa – Sarah Dunn Associates
Cuppa will deliver concise, workplace-specific learning resources to social care staff.
A Ufi spokesperson said it will provide “a skills boost in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea”. “Cuppa will use mobile channels, exploiting an accelerating ‘bring your own device’ trend to deliver just-in-time learning to a workforce that is on its feet, pushed for time and not always well-supported,” she added.
Digital vocational badges — Sussex Downs College
The project aims to improve the ways skills in education are recognised and assessed.
A Ufi spokesperson said that the college will take on board the skills, attitudes and evidence that employers are seeking across key vocational areas and encode them into the digital badges.
“These [badges] can be awarded to learners that meet the criteria and shared with employers or via social media,” she added.
CommSim — Learn TPM
Learn TPM is already experienced in applying technology — particularly serious games and simulations — to deliver learning, training and outreach in diverse contexts.
A Ufi spokesperson said that CommSim will “fuse the known ability of immersive simulations, to provide rehearsal of skills in contexts which would be otherwise difficult, expensive or risky to practice in real life, with unique audio analytics to provide valuable objective insights into performance, facilitating reflection, analysis and improvement”.
Badgemaker — We Are Snook
It will provide a simple platform for schools to build, earn and display online standards known as ‘open badges’.
The project will allow young people to “display a range of skills that build upon traditional qualifications”, a Ufi spokesperson said.
“Badges act as a digital form of validation that can be shared with educators and future employers,” she added.
Electronics for Everyone — MakerClub
MakerClub will for example use 3D printing and an intuitive online platform to bring programming, design and electronic engineering to life with a range of robotics kits aimed at the 12+ age group.
“The kits use proprietary browser based technology with mobile, and bespoke hardware to create a seamless learning experience that is tailored to the users individual ability levels,” a Ufi spokesperson said.
Elli-centric — Vital Partnerships
Elli-centric is a learning assessment and development tool based on the Seven Dimensions of Learning as identified at Bristol University.
A Ufi spokesperson said that the project involved the development of “an interactive, user-responsive platform with a suite of innovative animations”.
Frequency Based Learning Platform — Rapid English Limited
The project will aim to improve the flow of information between educators and learners, as well as employers and employees, by changing how all the parties involved relate to the language they use.
A Ufi spokesperson said it will bring “a new level of efficiency to vocational education, course material production and course content management, using a revolutionary combination of linguistic know-how, big-data and machine learning”.
GroupMOOC — Tamarisk Capital Ltd
GroupMooc will help organisations train their staff using free online courses from the world’s best universities.
A Ufi spokesperson said the idea is to “aggregate online courses from multiple providers so they’re all in one place, including an organisation’s own proprietary courses”.
I am Enterprising — The Women’s Organisation
The I am Enterprising app is designed to help build the entrepreneurial capability of learners.
A Ufi spokesperson said that it “can be integrated into courses and extra-curricular enterprise activities”.
Job Packs — PlayLingo
The project aims to teach migrant learners essential vocational vocabulary in a mobile social game designed to keep users motivated while they learn independently.
The target audience is “the almost 1m UK migrants with little or no English as well as migrants who are proficient in general English but seeking to develop their vocational vocabulary to improve employability,” a Ufi spokesperson said.
NanoSimBox — Interactive Scientific
The Nano Simbox is a molecular dynamics tech-based platform.
A Ufi spokesperson said had “been shown, in early stage trials, to engage a wider range of learners than traditional science teaching”.
Target — European Innovation
The project will involve a full commercial trial of wearable technology (in this case smart glasses) (in a manufacturing environment.
A Ufi spokesperson said: “When switched off, the glasses can form a standard pair of safety glasses.
“When switched on, the two head up display screens built into the glass can deliver interactive content directly to an individual as they look at a specific machine.”
The Charity series — GivebackUK
GivebackUK is a not-for-profit organisation creating a free online video learning library for the UK’s third sector.
A Ufi spokesperson said that it is “creating professional, bite-sized video interviews to share work based knowledge and expertise — as well as being popular, research shows that watching this type of video aids learning”.
Voc Qual tracking — Bedford College
The aim is to create tailored modular extensions for qualification progress tracking and personal learning planning.
A Ufi spokesperson said that the modules had been specially designed “to meet the needs of FE colleges”.
The Virtual Reality Personal Incident Command (VRPIC) — West Midlands Fire Service
The project aims to improve training, development and assessment of emergency response incident commanders who work within the emergency services.
A spokesperson said it will “evaluate and support ongoing development of emergency incident commanders and provide individuals with bespoke targeted tools to support their development”.
Two central London colleges have laid out their ambitions to become an Institute of Technology (IoT), as consultation opens on a possible merger.
In a joint proposal sent out by City and Islington College and Westminster Kingsway College, the two colleges outline a number of collaboration models.
These include developing their “offer of the highest quality” intermediate and higher level technical and professional training, which would put them “in a unique position to become an Institute of Technology at the heart of London”.
Collaboration, the proposal outlines, would enable them “to become recognised as the ‘go-to’ place for technical and professional training in London and the South East”.
Andy Wilson, principal of Westminster Kingsway College, which received a grade two Ofsted rating when it was last inspected in 2011, said: “We’re trying to create a college that employers and students see as the place to go for higher level technical qualifications.
“If there was the opportunity for us to be recognised for that type of work”, he added, “it fits in with our aspirations”.
IoTs are part of the government’s plan to address the UK’s skills shortage and close the productivity gap. First outlined in the government’s Productivity Plan, launched in July, they will have a specific focus on delivering high-standard, high-level professional and technical training.
The government expects there to be one IoT per local enterprise partnership, according to its guidance on the area reviews of post-16 education. The steering group for each area review is expected to consider the case for an IoT in its area, and whether any existing colleges could become one.
Speaking to FE Week at the time of the announcement, Sir Frank McLoughlin, principal of City and Islington College, which received a grade one Ofsted rating when it was last inspected in 2008, said: “This is nothing to do with survival or cost cutting, it’s about ambition.”
According to a spokesperson for City and Islington College, the colleges were consulting with staff, local and regional authorities, suppliers, funders, colleges, banks and other organisations they have relationships with.
Respondents to the consultation, which is available on feweek.co.uk, are asked for their views on the benefits of collaboration between the two colleges, what the strengths of the two colleges are and what form of collaboration they would like to see — from loose collaboration, federation or full merger. The consultation, which was sent out on October 2, closes on November 6.
Skills Minister Nick Boles (pictured above) addressed concerns about how the quality of apprenticeships will be policed as the government drives towards its target of creating 3m apprenticeship by 2020.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) raised the possibility, in its consultation on the proposed large employers’ apprenticeship levy set to be introduced in 2017, of allowing employers to use providers that are not subject to an approval system or even Ofsted inspections.
It sparked concern that quality might be sacrificed for quantity as the government tries to meet its manifesto pledge to create 3m apprenticeship starts over the next five years.
Yet Mr Boles appeared to pre-empt any decisions over how training standards might be maintained, before BIS published its response to the consultation submissions, at the Conservative Party Conference on Tuesday (October 6).
Speaking at a fringe event hosted by Sky News reporter Adam Boulton, Mr Boles said: “You will have to spend your apprenticeship levy money with a registered training provider who is on the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) register and Ofsted will have a continuing role in inspecting those registered training providers.
“I don’t intend to change that at all, I think it’s an incredibly important reassurance for everybody.”
He added: “I think they [Ofsted] have a crucial role to play [in maintaining apprenticeship standards] and while we are going to put a huge amount of emphasis on employers being the police force, as it were, of their own apprenticeships in their own sectors, that doesn’t in any way remove Ofsted from the process.”
Mr Boles also looked forward to a time when employers would be so committed to apprenticeship Trailblazer standards, expected to fully replace the current system of frameworks come 2017/18, that they would root out any organisations undermining the brand.
He said: “What I want is for all of the employers affected to be really annoyed that one of their competitors is undermining the brand and the quality and reputation of the apprenticeship that they created and are investing in and to kick them out.
“I think that in addition to Ofsted will actually produce results.”
The apprenticeship levy consultation asked respondents whether they thought providers that receive levy funding should “have to be registered and/or be subject to some form of approval or inspection”.
Meanwhile, Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw wrote last year in his annual report on FE and skills for 2013/14 that the “quality of apprenticeships is still not good enough”.
Mr Boles spoke out at the Tory conference on the issue after Shadow Skills Minister Gordon Marsden warned in FE Week this month against a “Soviet-style five-year plan simply churning out numbers at the expense of quality and progression”.
He said he was “especially concerned” that success rates for apprentices aged 19 and above fell by almost six percentage points, from 74.3 per cent in 2011/12 to 68.4per cent in 2013/14.
The same national success rates table, reported by FE Week in April, showed that overall apprenticeship success rates had fallen by nearly 5 percentage points, from 73.8 per in 2011/12 to 68.9 per cent in 2013/14.
Meanwhile, FE Week reported last month that the government had rejected calls to stop employers running in-house ‘apprenticeships’ of less than 12 months, despite a 12-month minimum duration being a key element for ensuring quality for publicly-funded apprenticeships.
The SFA has also said that it will not publish achievement rates for the new apprenticeship standards in the national success rate tables, and that apprenticeship standards will not be included in minimum standards for 2015 to 2016.
The SFA has also opted to keep the minimum standard threshold for apprenticeship success rates at 55 per cent for 2014/15 — although it has said it is “intending” to raise that threshold to 62 per cent for 2015/16.
Ofsted declined to comment on Mr Boles’s plans for the education watchdog under Trailblazers.
Three Greater Manchester colleges subject to one of the government’s post-16 education area reviews have been called on to take learners from a local school after it suspended sixth form enrolment.
Parents and carers of prospective Stockport Academy sixth formers have been told by the school that Stockport College, Aquinas College and Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College — three of 21 Greater Manchester colleges whose futures have been put into question by an area review — could take their children.
Small numbers in preceding years at the academy, which opened just eight years ago, forced the temporary move from next September — and it has drawn an angry response from the FE sector with the school exempt from the same area review process that could ultimately see the colleges closed.
James Kewin (pictured above), deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges’ Association, said it highlighted the “absurdity of not including schools and academies in the area review process”.
And while schools did not automatically feature in any of the six area reviews announced so far by the government, Association of Colleges chief executive Martin Doel said they should take into account “the unsustainable nature of all post-16 school provision”.
He also said the government should not open any new post-16 school provision while reviews were taking place.
The government has said the “need” to move towards “fewer, often larger, more resilient and efficient providers,” underlies the area reviews.
However, Mr Kewin said increasing pressure on pre-16 funding meant more schools were questioning whether maintaining an “unviable” sixth form with money intended for younger students was sustainable.
He said: “Although this may have been a difficult decision for Stockport Academy, it was also a sensible one. Many school and academy sixth forms limp on with uneconomic class sizes and a narrow curriculum, which leave students poorly served.
“If all sixth form providers were in scope [of the area reviews] it would be much easier to ensure that all young people had access to sustainable and high quality 16 to 19 provision.”
Mr Doel said: “We are likely to see more school sixth forms suspending enrolment as funding pressures grow.”
He added that in its Spending Review submission, the AoC recommended that school sixth forms with fewer than 250 students merge with others.
“We hope that this could not only ease the funding pressure but create a more stable environment for students,” he said.
“We will be speaking to local councils and regional schools commissioners about the future of sixth form provision in their area as and when the reviews are completed,” he added.
David Robinson, governors’ board chair at Stockport Academy, said: “To run a viable sixth form we need a minimum of 100 students per year group and currently have 49 on roll in Year 12 with lower numbers than this likely in the future from our small current years 9 and 10.
“Taking into account our need to provide more Year 7 spaces and the falling intake at Year 12, our conclusion is that with regret we will suspend enrolling students into our Sixth Form from September 2016.”
Ryan Jones, assistant principal of Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College, said: “We have guaranteed all Stockport Academy students a place at the college subject to satisfactory references.”
It comes after FE Week reported on September 25 that 21 general FE colleges and 13 sixth form colleges (SFCs) were to be be involved in three extra post-16 education and training area reviews announced by the government.
They are for Tees Valley, Sussex Coast and Solent regions — with the government warning that more area reviews will be announced “shortly”.
A previous story by FE Week on September 8 reported that 22 general FE colleges and 16 SFCs were to be involved in the first round of post-16 education and training area reviews announced by the government, in Birmingham and Solihull, Greater Manchester and the Sheffield City region.
The results of an exclusive FE Week survey published on September 11 also showed that almost 90 per cent of principals affected by the first area reviews announced on September 8 were unhappy with the government’s guidance.
It comes after five FE colleges and SFCs facing “significant financial challenges” announced on July 21 that they are “actively considering” collaboration plans, following a review of post-16 provision in North East Norfolk and North Suffolk.
Stockport College declined to comment on the area reviews or the suspension of enrolment at Stockport Academy sixth form. Aquinas College did not respond.
An upcoming Ofsted review of apprenticeships is likely to lay bare “quite a lot of bad practice,” Skills Minister Nick Boles (pictured above) has said.
The results of Sir Michael Wilshaw’s much-awaited inquiry are expected this month and Mr Boles told Conservative Party conference-goers on Tuesday (October 6) that he did not think they would paint a positive picture of the programme.
He also pointed to the shift to Trailblazer apprenticeship standards from frameworks, set to be finished by 2017/18, as a helping to improve standards.
“Ofsted is doing this review and I suspect that they are going to discover what in a sense we all know, which is that there is quite a lot of bad practice,” said Mr Boles.
“We are in the process of transferring from the old apprenticeship frameworks to these new Trailblazer standards and let’s be honest, while development of the standards is going very well it is still the case that almost all the apprenticeships are being done on the old frameworks.
“Some of those frameworks are great, but some are a bit flaky quite frankly, and you add some employers who are a bit flaky and training providers who are a bit flaky and you will get some bad practice.
“I’ve met recently with Ofsted at a senior level and asked them to give me to ask their whole network for examples of bad practice so we can start shining a light on it and driving it out of the system.”
Paul Warner (pictured right), Association of Employment and Learning Providers director of employment and skills, criticised Mr Boles for the comments.
He told FE Week: “We are a little surprised by the minister’s comments on bad practice, because while we agree that all of it should be rooted out, we have not been presented with any evidence to suggest that poor delivery occurs on the scale he suggests.
“If we are trying to engage more employers to hit the [government’s] 3m target [for apprenticeships], it is vital business is hearing positive messages.”
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
