Further education has already taken its “fair share” of cuts, the Association of Colleges (AoC) has warned amid claims another £48bn could be slashed from government budgets.
The organisation has called for a review of education spending after warnings in national media that cuts could spiral way above the £25bn suggested by Prime Minister David Cameron, and a former civil servant warned the situation could be tough for FE for another decade.
A spokesperson for the AoC told FE Week: “Fair funding for colleges is always something that is high on our agenda and forms part of our discussions with the three main political parties.
“So far the FE sector has taken more than its fair share of funding cuts and we’re calling on the government to carry out a once-in-a-generation review of education spending to ensure that all age groups get an adequate budget. More stable funding would allow colleges to plan in the longer term.”
Education and Training Foundation chief executive David Russell said: “We have known for some time the fiscal climate for public services will remain very challenging for another five to 10 years.
“This presents a huge challenge to those delivering public value with public funding. It is the reason why excellent leadership, management and governance are vital to success of the FE and training system.”
The Treasury declined to comment. See feweek.co.uk for more sector reaction.
The Association of Colleges (AoC) has backed Ofqual plans to ditch current regulatory arrangements for the Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF).
A consultation launched in July on the QCF, which was itself launched in 2008, proposed that qualifications should be regulated by Ofqual’s general conditions of recognition.
A number of submissions from FE organisations, including representative bodies and awarding organisations, have now been seen by FE Week (see table).
AoC senior skills policy manager Teresa Frith (pictured), who submitted the response on behalf of the representative body, supported “efforts to reduce the amount of regulation”.
She said: “All qualifications should be valid regardless of their structure but [we] recognise that, in some instances, the QCF regulatory arrangements have not supported this intent.”
Ofqual stated in the consultation that it would not “impose design requirements about how QCF-type qualifications are structured [following the withdrawal of QCF regulatory arrangements]”.
Ms Frith said: “This proposal should provide a welcome degree of flexibility in qualification and unit design.”
But she raised concern that “the removal of regulation might be seen as the removal of QCF, rather than allowing for a greater degree of flexibility to ensure ‘validity’.”
She warned scrapping the QCF regulatory arrangements “could be perceived as removing the ability to create credit bearing, unitised qualifications.
“A renaming of the remaining qualifications framework might be considered to ensure the sector remains clear that such an approach is not being prevented by the proposed changes to regulation,” she added.
Ms Frith said the AoC would like “clear reassurance” that the regulatory reforms would not lead to the complete “withdrawal of QCF from the system”.
Jeremy Benson, Ofqual’s director of policy, said: “This isn’t the end for qualifications based upon the QCF. We expect those QCF qualifications which are good quality and valuable to remain. But where they are found to fall short of our requirements, we would expect them to be either developed or withdrawn.”
Ofqual also asked for comments, through the consultation, on its plans for “QCF-type qualifications” to be “governed simply through our general conditions of recognition”.
Ms Frith said: “This appears to be a sensible way forward which should simplify regulation without removing the possibilities for easy accreditation of prior learning arrangements, unit assessment and the currency of credit. Any funding ramifications would need to be considered however.”
An Ofqual spokesperson said it was still considering responses to the consultation that closed last month.
A Midland college has been warned about its “hand-to-mouth” financial situation by FE Commissioner Dr David Collins.
Dr Collins visited Birmingham’s 12,000-learner Bournville College (pictured), which has a current Skills Funding Agency (SFA) allocation of £8,495,746, in August after it was issued with a financial notice of concern by the in April.
In his report, published last week by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Dr Collins praised the leadership and governance of the college and the quality of the provision offered to learners, which was rated good by Ofsted after a visit in May, but said it needed to do more to balance the books.
He said: “The college has successfully improved its quality and diversified its income streams over the last few years. It has grown by more than 5 per cent per year and predicts that it will be able to continue on this growth path into the foreseeable future. However, while this is an ambitious and commendable approach it is not without its risks.
“Not all projects have delivered the returns forecasted and a failure by the college to address inefficiencies in parts of the college’s operations has led to high levels of borrowing and serious cash flow issues.
“The present “hand to mouth” situation cannot be allowed to continue and there are opportunities to improve the position significantly if the college is prepared to bring its expenditure into line with sector norms. Fears that this will lead to a diminution of quality are not borne out by the evidence elsewhere.”
He said new projects or ventures into new markets needed “to be considered with a far greater degree of scrutiny by the governing body” and added that the college’s income base had “not been matched by an appropriate control of costs”.
College marketing director Alma Aganovic said: “We welcome the feedback from the FE Commissioner and are already in the process of implementing the recommendations from the report. The college would like to point out that last year we achieved a substantial improvement in our financial position which is commendable in the current climate. We were also recently inspected by Ofsted and achieved outstanding for leadership and management.”
A £50m tender to refurb the new Department for Education (DfE) HQ in London includes a gym and the creation of space for the government art collection, according to FE Week sister newspaper Academies Week.
The DfE announced in March that it was to leave the rented Sanctuary Buildings, in Victoria, and move its 1,600 staff to the Grade II-listed Old Admiralty Building (OAB), in Whitehall, by summer 2017. It claims the move will save £19m a year.
A tender for the refurbishment was put out last month offering the contract at a price tag of up to £50m, excluding VAT. It expects work, which will enable more staff to work in the building, to start next November.
Bidders are asked to provide details of their suitability to carry out work such as “full refurbishment of the gym” and “creation of space for the government art collection”.
The DfE said “no final decision” had been made on whether there would be a gym in the building and it was still in discussions about the artwork.
It also said refurbishment costs would be mainly met by the Cabinet Office through the sale of other government property. The size of the DfE contribution remains unclear.
Employability is the added value that colleges can give learners — but just how well are they fulfilling this task? The Mindset Group of colleges is hoping it has developed a tool — free for UK-based colleges to use — that can assess how well colleges are performing on this, explains Lawrence Vincent.
As the Office for National Statistics figures released recently show another fall in the unemployment rate in the UK, you could be forgiven for thinking that the issues around youth unemployment were abating. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
In its August 2014 report Remember the Young Ones, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) puts the figure of unemployed young people at 868,000 with the startling figure that those under 25 were three-and-a-half times more likely to be out of work.
The think tank has acknowledged that the Coalition has attempted to tackle the issues around youth unemployment, but that it had “failed to grasp the extent of the problem, or had not had the imagination to come up with better solutions”.
Youth unemployment is not just a UK phenomenon, but European countries with strong work-based vocational education and training see a smoother transition from education into work and consequently lower rates of youth unemployment.
The IPPR also cautioned that even a full economic recovery was unlikely to see the problems of youth unemployment disappear recommending that employers and educational institutions needed to improve their relationships.
European countries with strong work-based vocational education and training see a smoother transition from education into work and consequently lower rates of youth unemployment
That’s not to say some organisations are not doing so already. Facing an often poor perception, FE colleges are conscious of the need to do more to improve the employability of their students, whether it is improving external links or their more general internal provision. In order to make these improvements, individual gaps in provision and areas of weakness need to be identified.
In order to address this need, The MindSet Group — a non-trading group of FE colleges — was set up to address both the perception and the reality of the FE sector and ultimately to help tackle the UK’s issues surrounding youth unemployment.
Currently made up of 12 FE colleges and employability and recruitment organisation REED NCFE, The MindSet Group aims to develop the sector’s employability competence through innovative solutions by the sector, for the sector. The members are Barnet Southgate College, Blackpool and The Fylde College, Bournemouth & Poole College, Derby College, Harlow College, Portsmouth’s Highbury College, Milton Keynes College, North East Surry College of Technology, South Essex College, Stockport College, Sunderland College and Telford College.
The first of these solutions is the Student Employability Toolkit (Set) — a tool that can be used free, for a whole-college employability review which has been developed by four members of The MindSet Group; Bournemouth & Poole College, Derby College, Highbury College and Milton Keynes College.
It has been created to assist in developing the reputation and positioning of the FE sector in relation to its role with employers in the future of the UK economy, through both self-assessment and knowledge sharing.
Members of The MindSet Group believe UK FE colleges need to grasp the employability initiative, bringing solutions, guiding policy and informing debate by working together to improve the employability of the UK’s students and this begins with sharing knowledge and identifying gaps in provision.
Only by working together will we help our young people achieve their full potential.
MindSet launched its employability toolkit — the Set — last month with two regional events in Derby and Bournemouth and then three events this month in London, Sunderland and Stockport.
Go to www.themindset.org.uk for more details, or come and see us at our stand at the Association of Colleges conference.
Further education organisations can apply for new £100k research grants from the Further Education Trust for Leadership (Fetl).
It announced on Thursday (November 13) that it was accepting applications for collective research grants.
Jill Westerman CBE, Fetl chair, said: “We would welcome applications from organisations with innovative and visionary ideas, particularly around leading learning and leadership for the future in our sector.”
Former Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) chair Dame Ruth Silver launched Fetl over the summer with a budget of up to £5.5m of leftover LSIS funding.
Fetl invited applications for individual FE leaders to apply for fellowship grants in September and has now agreed on four candidates set to receive between £10,000 and £30,000 each. The four individuals are expected to start their research in the new year. Mark Ravenhall, Fetl chief executive, declined to comment on the identity of the chosen individuals nor their research topics.
However, he said: “We received 21 applications which were whittled down to a shortlist of six, before four were chosen.”
Groups interested in FETL collective research grants should visit www.fetl.org.uk to apply by noon on December 12.
Neil Carberry’s relationship with education didn’t get off to the best of starts with his Edinburgh primary school burning down the day before his fifth birthday.
“I could see it from my bedroom window,” he says.
“And when you’re just about to turn five, that happening just before your birthday is a bit freaky.
“I remember sitting in my bed going: ‘Has this got anything to do with me?’”
Carberry (right) with his father, Tom, and younger brother Graham in 1983
The school was rebuilt as a much-needed special needs school so, Carberry says, “in many ways it was alright in the end”.
Carberry coped with the change in his education and, now director for employment and skills at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), he has a refreshingly laid — back outlook on the changes gripping the FE sector.
“I think there’s an element of defensiveness in the sector about facing up to the coming of a market, and some smaller employers are rightly worried about change — because businesses do worry about change,” says the 37-year-old. But he feels this anxiety is largely fuelled by providers.
“There are lots of small and medium enterprises which phone me up and say: ‘I’m worried about apprenticeship reform’,” he says.
“Funnily enough, they all say it in exactly the same terms, and they’re all worried about something that I don’t think is clear comes with employer-directed funding, and that’s red tape.
“And there are some providers who are telling small businesses: ‘All these meetings with the Skills Funding Agency I have to go to, you’ll have to do that if you get the funding’.
Carberry by the seaside on the outskirts of Edinburgh, aged one and a half, 1978.
“That’s not what it’s meant to be — and actually, I see my job as making sure that that’s not what it is.
“If you get it right, the money flows to businesses to buy training, and you sweep away the red tape.”
Carberry tells me that, for him, FE represents “opportunity”.
“It’s about how are we helping people to make the best of themselves,” he says.
“There are two ways of thinking in many political environments — it’s either we have to give more to people, or it’s laissez-faire, and actually it’s somewhere in between.
“It’s how we put in place the structures that people can help themselves grow —and in the past we had a history of doing that really well in apprenticeships, not mention HNDs and HNCs, widespread opportunities for people to build their careers — you can see it in my family.”
Sustainable growth requires us to have routes for people who can’t take a year off and sponge off their wife, the way I did, to do their vocational learning
His father, Tom, started out as an apprentice printer, but moved into engineering.
“I feel very strongly about vocational education, partly because when I was a kid I didn’t see my dad on Tuesday and Thursday nights because he went down to Waverley station, got the train to Glasgow and went to do a HND,” says Carberry.
“Dad ended up as the chief executive of a major company, and he did it because he became a factory manager because he’d done a HND in a college in Glasgow.”
The family left Edinburgh and moved to Cumbernauld, a new town north of Glasgow. “New town living gets a bad rap,” says Carberry.
“But you always felt that the development corporations felt slightly guilty pulling all these families out of central Glasgow and central Edinburgh, so they put on some fantastic facilities.
“Actually, the most trouble I have ever been in with my mum and dad was when we went out to play, my little brother Graham and I, and we didn’t come back for nine hours — and it wasn’t because anything had happened, it was just that we got so absorbed in what we were doing.
Below: Carberry marrying wife Alice on July 15, 2001, in Silchester, Hampshire
“And that’s probably a childhood that’s lost on my children, which is slightly sad.”
Initially, Carberry was convinced he wanted to study sciences but he says, “met a deeply inspirational history teacher, and ended up doing the arts instead”.
“The teacher was an ancient historian, and taught me Latin and Greek alongside my A-levels.”
As a result, he says, he’s “that rarity — a working class, comprehensive school boy, who ended up doing classics at Oxford”.
“I’ve seen the error of my ways,” he jokes, nodding to the current emphasis on science, technology, engineering and maths subjects, but it’s hard to imagine Carberry would have enjoyed it as much.
A self-confessed “political history nut” he frequently breaks off to add historical anecdotes — his favourite Roman general is Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator, the man who “invented Guerrilla warfare”. He tells me this during a conversation about family pets.
Carberry also describes himself as a “sports nut” and a lifelong Heart of Midlothian fan — but it was his teenage love of rugby that introduced him to wife Alice.
“A friend of mine met my wife in passing in the corridor and they got to talking and she said her taste in men was Celtic rugby types, so he introduced us about five minutes later,” he says.
“There’s an element of defensiveness in the sector about facing up to the coming of a market, and some smaller employers are rightly worried about change”
“She’s a damned good conversationalist — I talk a lot and in a very disjointed way, and she kind of copes with that pretty well.”
The couple now live in Wallingford, just south of Oxford, with daughter Rowan, aged seven (“and a half — that’s very important,” he tells me), and son Tom, three.
After graduating from Oxford, Carberry found himself wondering what to do next.
He went back to working on the floor of a factory producing decorative card, which he had done to raise finance in university holidays.
Eventually Carberry decided he was “interested in people” and found a job at an HR consultancy for investment banks, which he describes as “a fantastic little family-run business, a really good grounding actually for the stuff we do at the CBI now”.
“I have actually been inside a business with 12 employees, I know what the difficulties are and I could see the effect it had,” he says.
He jokes that the job was “an opportunity to teach investment bankers how to behave like human beings”.
Left: Carberry on a family holiday in Ballybunion, Ireland, 1985.
“It was really interesting and quite telling,” he says. “I met some fantastic people, and some I wouldn’t want to meet again.
“My sense was there were people saying: ‘There’s a cultural issue here’ — it was just starting to emerge, and I left before it all went south, partially because, if I’m honest, it didn’t feel real enough for me.
“After a while I thought, ‘You know what? Vocational education is kind of helpful…’ so I went and did a second degree, an MSc in industrial relations’.”
And a decade ago, following the MSc, he arrived at the CBI and after various roles, found himself at the head of its employment and skills division.
“Why am I here now? Because I went and did something more vocational,” he says.
“But in fact real sustainable growth requires us to have routes for people who can’t take a year off and sponge off their wife, the way I did, to do their vocational learning.
“It’s about making sure that what we’re doing is really relevant and that do people talk about vocational education as opportunity.”
It’s a role — combining his interests in politics, people and education —in which he seems utterly at home.
Although, he reflects: “I’m never happier than being in Heart of Midlothian’s stadium Gorgie, pie in one hand, pint in the other.”
It’s a personal thing
What is your favourite book, and why?
Around the World in 80 days by Jules Verne. I grew up in a new town in central Scotland, which I loved, but it can be quite dreary a lot of the time so travel seemed impossibly exciting, and I love to travel and Jules Verne was a kind of highway into that kind of thinking
What is your pet hate?
People who stop in front of you when you’re walking along — it really winds me up
What do you do to switch off after work?
I spent time with my family. We live outside London. I like to cook, and other sorts of inside things, and I’m a great reader of history, and I am an absolute sports nut. I’m a cyclist, but also I’m a massive football fan, and genetically cursed to follow the famous Heart of Midlothian
If you could invite anyone, living or dead, to a dinner party who would it be?
Political reformers Thomas Paine and Thomas Muir. I think I’d probably want one of the Pankhursts, because I imagine that they’d be good company at dinner, and Olympic athlete Jessica Ennis because I find her a very engaging and inspirational person
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
I had to deal with the crushing of my hopes fairly early on as I realised when I was about seven I’d only be wearing the famous maroon jersey of Heart of Midlothian Football Club from the stands and not the pitch. For a while I wanted to be a doctor, until I was about 16
With the outlook for Functional Skills very different to just a few months ago, Charlotte Bosworth makes the case for the qualification as a viable alternative to the GCSE.
If you cast your mind back to July and the written ministerial statement about post-16 English and maths, the writing was on the wall for Functional Skills with the seemingly endless march towards GCSEs for all.
But roll on a few months, past a reshuffle and through party conference season and the news is a little more positive.
In recent weeks, in print, in person and on platform, the new Skills Minister Nick Boles has spoken more positively about the importance of Functional Skills and, most critically, about the importance of an alternative for those learners who struggle with the way the GCSE is constructed and assessed. I, for one, greatly welcome this change of approach.
There is no doubt that attaining a minimum level of English and maths skills should be a core priority.
However, there isn’t one fixed route to achieving this goal. I advocate a more holistic approach to gaining these skills.
While direct English and maths teaching works for some learners, many are more likely to achieve these skills when they are learned and absorbed within a context.
When the government was calling for GCSEs for all, I spoke of the need for a vocational modular GCSE alternative that could be offered to those where the traditional GCSE is not the appropriate route to take.
Whether we have a vocational GCSE or Functional Skills, we must ensure that we use the format of assessment that is most appropriate to assess the skills required
Whether we have a vocational GCSE or Functional Skills, we must ensure that we use the format of assessment that is most appropriate to assess the skills required.
Back in 2006, the National Research and Development Centre published a research report that found vocational courses that embedded the delivery of literacy, language and numeracy had more positive outcomes than those programmes that delivered them separately.
Embedded courses had higher retention, higher success rates and higher rates of achievement in literacy and numeracy qualifications.
So why have we been drawn to GCSEs? One perspective, even one voiced by the minister at the FE Week / OCR fringe event at the Conservative Party conference, is that employers understand GCSEs.
I challenge that assertion. The GCSE brand has been in circulation long enough for employers to have heard of it and have a vague appreciation of the skills that the qualification brings.
How many times have you heard someone ask what O-levels a person has? It still happens and we’ve had GCSEs in one form or another since the late 1980s. The issue for Functional Skills is that it is still relatively new and it was introduced following a range of other initiatives that have broadly similar names: basic skills, key skills, core skills, essential skills, etc.
In her correspondence with the Minister, Ofqual chief regulator Glenys Stacey acknowledges that it takes “some years for qualification titles to become understood and trusted”.
On the topic of potential reforms, she refers to that tricky balance between change and stability and suggests that minor reforms could be enacted over a two to three-year period.
I urge caution on the need for reform or re-branding. Functional Skills and other more tailored programmes of English and maths might just need more time, more communication to the general public about their purpose and a full retreat from previous recommendations that GCSE is the only accepted qualification.
The need for good levels of English and maths skills is not just a skills issue, it’s an economic imperative.
The GCSE is, and always will be, an important qualification. However, they do not themselves provide the contextualisation and problem-solving skills that are often required in the workplace. It’s for this reason that Functional Skills is so important. I hope that this government and the government we have from May onwards remembers this.
More debate is needed about the future of the Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF) in the face of plans by Ofqual to abolish it, says Graham Hasting-Evans.
we agree that change is necessary, but reliance on the General Conditions of Recognition (GCoR) as a replacement for an employer-recognised framework is inadequate to meet the needs of our economy and will, in our view, undermine public confidence.
We believe what’s needed is a robust and consistent national qualifications framework for England, in effect an ‘ENQF’ (or revised QCF) for all vocational qualifications, including apprenticeships, which has the support of employers from all sectors of the economy.
Employers we’ve spoken with were completely unaware of these proposals. Employers, employees and also learners looking for employment, are the real ‘clients’ and therefore must have an input in any changes.
The case to withdraw the QCF is not evidenced by Ofqual’s research and appears to misunderstand the QCF in several places
Employers have told us they want a robust national framework that they, their employees and learners can have confidence in. They don’t see or understand the relevance of using the GCoR, or its place in apprenticeships.
Reliance solely on the GCoR could mean multiple ‘Qualification Frameworks’, which will further confuse and bewilder employers, employees, learners and training providers and result in a lack of confidence.
Employers value unit learning, as do learners, who have difficulty with or cannot commit the time for large qualifications. The consultation fails to understand the value of unit/modular/credit learning from the ‘real’ client’s point of view.
Further concern is that the QCF proposals and the guided learning hours (GLH) proposals for 16 to 17-years-olds don’t provide clear measurement for the size of qualification that covers all age groups — despite the fact that many essential qualifications such as employability skills, including literacy and numeracy, cover a wide age range from school aged learners to adults.
The current ‘common measure’ of the size of a qualification is taken as ‘credit’ and used for adult funding. With some awarding organisations electing to stay with ‘credit’ and others not, it’s unclear what will happen to adult funding if ‘credit’ is no longer the universal common measure. GLH proposals only cover 16 to 17-year-olds and don’t give a comprehensive answer for all age groups.
A common measure is an essential component of a national framework. An agreed ‘size’ of qualifications and units/modules which can be applied regardless of whether they’re delivered by traditional classroom techniques or by e-learning is what’s needed.
We believe the case to withdraw the QCF is not evidenced by Ofqual’s research and appears to misunderstand the QCF in several places.
For example, there’s no evidence to show that the large number of qualifications on the QCF is due to the design. In our view, this problem stems from the large number of awarding organisations recognised by Ofqual.
There are international concerns too. Many developed and developing countries have established or are establishing their ‘NQF’ based on many of the current UK principles. The changes will mean we’ll be out of step with many other major economies.
UK learner qualifications may not be recognised outside the UK, which could have a detrimental effect on people with UK qualifications just when they’re trying to compete internationally for jobs. It would also be a major step backwards and potentially discredit the UK’s technical and vocational education and training (TVet) system and qualifications.
The lack of a UK framework could disadvantage UK awarding organisations in bidding for international work. Without an ‘ENQF’/revised ‘QCF’, other countries could consider that the UK system is ‘second rate’, therefore undermining the UK government’s aim of encouraging UK awarding organisations to work internationally.
Under Europe’s EQF the UK has an obligation to be able to relate its national qualification framework to the EQF structure. It’s not clear in the proposals how Ofqual intends this to work, nor if the proposals in fact contravene the UK’s treaty obligations.
What is clear is that a full debate is needed with employers, across all sectors, employees and learners on what is the best way forward.
