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Meeting the direct recruitment challenge — one year on

As participating colleges get ready to take on learners from the age of 14, Graham Towse outlines his experiences as one of the few principals with a full academic year of the policy under his belt.

In September 2013 we welcomed our first intake of students to the HCUK 14-16 College.

This represented a new legal status for us as a college and followed recommendations by Alison Wolf that colleges be allowed to enrol students from age 14.

Our first year has been extremely successful — at our initial monitoring visit by Ofsted, we received the highest rating possible.

A series of strengths were identified, and the students were praised for their strong aspirational goals, and the progress they made since joining us.

We have also successfully managed the implementation of the changes to GCSEs, introduced nationally.

We begin our second year this September with a cohort of around 210 students across years 10 and 11 at Hull and Goole Colleges. This growth has driven the relocation of the 14 to 16 college to a larger, purpose-built standalone building, which is within the college campus and is exclusively for the use of the 14 to 16 college students.

Schools don’t like what we are doing mainly because we do not just accept students that schools wish to pass onto us

We have had to negotiate two key difficulties — the funding lag and obtaining Fischer Family Trust (FFT) data for our students.

The funding lag means we had to operate for the whole of the academic year without any funding at all, which had a significant impact on cash flow for the college. We are hoping that this will be addressed by the EFA for this year.

We have also faced significant delays in obtaining FFT Data — essentially our students’ transition data — from schools, as we are not officially classified as a school and therefore cannot access the data centrally.

We have had to request this data from the Local Authorities, which takes longer, delaying the essential process of ascertaining the individual needs of pupils early on in their learning programme. Unfortunately, the issue remains unresolved [click here for FE Week story on the resolution of this issue].

Our cohort has already expanded significantly, and we have capacity for up to 300 students in our new building.

We do plan to grow in the future — when that time comes, we will have the teaching capacity, having already recruited a dedicated 14 to 16 teaching and support team which will grow as the provision does.

Our vocational provision is bought in from Hull College, so we would not foresee satisfying growth as being a problem.

Our 14 to 16 students come from a spread of schools throughout the Hull and East Riding Area and some travel a significant distance to attend college.

A number of students travel from Withernsea every day, which is a 90-minute bus journey each way. We don’t tend to recruit in large clusters from individual schools, we’re more likely to take a handful of students from each school.

We have been clear in describing that our provision complements that which already exists locally within schools and academies.

What we offer does not compete directly with the schools, as nobody else offers the same vocational pathways as the 14 to 16 college.

We have maintained a strong relationship with many local schools and we still receive their students through our curriculum partnership model. It is true however, that some schools don’t like what we are doing mainly because we do not just accept students that schools wish to pass onto us.

All new entrants to the 14 to 16 college must apply for a place and must have the full backing of their parents.

For our own students, we continue to offer impartial information, advice and guidance regarding progression. The majority of our students will choose to follow an apprenticeship route, but we can also support them to study vocational FE, A-levels and beyond to a range of locally-available foundation degrees and degrees.

Security was a key consideration within the initial requirements for colleges wishing to enrol from age 14. We employ all the same safeguarding procedures that we do for post-16 provision.

As previously mentioned, our students are housed within a separate building which has swipe card entry, and a dedicated staffing team.

However, they are not locked in the building from 8.15am to 4pm. They have use of general communal areas within the main body of Hull and Goole Colleges if they wish, including refectories, library and resource centres.

Years 10 and 11 are all allowed off-site and into the city centre at lunchtime providing they have parental consent. While many Year 11s will choose to leave the site at lunch time, the Year 10s tend to stay within their building and use the dedicated social areas.

While the 14 to 16 college is a relatively new concept, Hull College has been teaching 14 to 16 students from schools on day release programmes and similar for a long time so has significant experience of managing younger pupils within the college environment.

Bromley College takes on 14-year-old learners for the first time this month. Click here for an expert piece by principal Sam Parrett.

Hub breaks down on ILR data deadline day

Providers trying to submit information for the first individualised learner record (ILR) return of the academic year faced software issues on deadline day.

Thursday (September 4) was the deadline for the first ILR return of 2014/15, but many providers found using the Skills Funding Agency’s hub software impossible due to technical issues.

It is not the first time problems had occurred on the first deadline day of the academic year, raising questions as to why the R01 return still existed in its current format.

Morley College funding manager Steve Hewitt told FE Week: “I would like to point out that the Information Authority [whose board was scrapped last year] did canvas on getting rid of R01 as a return and paying everyone on profile because of this happening every year about three of four years ago and providers were very much in favour.

“I honestly can’t see what the return gives to SFA and all it does is massively inconvenience a lot of people who, almost inevitably, end up getting paid on profile anyway.”

An SFA spokesperson said: “For those providers who submitted a file during the ILR R01 collection period, we will pay against that file.

“We recognise that some providers have experienced technical issues submitting data. Therefore, for those providers we will make a profile payment as per normal practice, increasing payments where appropriate.

“We apologise for any inconvenience that this may have caused. Our primary concern will be to continue to ensure all providers receive timely payment.

“To mitigate any impact on providers we will postpone the opening of the ILR R13 collection for 2013-14, which will now open on Monday, September 8 and will close on September 15.”

Sector bodies have their say on government plans

Officials at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) are currently sifting through the results of FE and skills consultations — one focussed on traineeships and the other on FE loans.

The traineeship consultation began on June 19 and closed on August 14. It asked if traineeship providers should be paid based on learner destination. Progression into apprenticeships, jobs or further learning could be incentivised from 2015/16 under the proposals.

Meanwhile, the consultation on FE loans, which opened on the same date but ran a week longer, considers extending the system to cover level two qualifications and more learners as it looks to make 19 to 23-year-olds. Currently, FE loans are available to level three and above learners from the age of 24.

Below is a snapshot of the responses the government received from some of the major sector bodies.

*Some bodies only responded to one consultation

Peter Pendle, deputy general secretary, ATL

An “East End boy” with a passion for politics and a flair for all things FE, it’s hard to find a job Peter Pendle hasn’t done.

From admin roles with British Rail to college vice principal via a seat on one council and policy roles at others, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) deputy general secretary is happy to share his experiences, both in and out of the FE sector.

A self-professed product of the FE system, Pendle, now 56 and a great-grandfather, was born in West Ham, he reveals as we sit down at the union’s smart offices near Charing Cross.

He grew up in Southend, Essex, where he opted to learn on the job with British Rail after leaving his comprehensive education.

But it all could have been very different had the political views of his staunch Labour-supporting parents been different.

“Southend still had a grammar school system at the time,” he says, “and it wasn’t until 30 years later that I found out that I had passed my 11+ but because of their political views, I didn’t have the choice of going to the grammar school.

“Now, in retrospect, that probably worked out quite well for me because in the secondary mods, I performed very well, whereas I reckon if I had gone to grammar school I would have struggled.

“My parents were both active within the Labour Party, my dad was a councillor and I was very active at a very young age, so I joined the Party at 15, I was a young socialist member, in our school we had a school election as well, and I was the Labour candidate in that, so politically active from quite an early age.”

On-the-job training proved the right path for Pendle. He completed a BTec in public administration at East Ham College followed by a diploma in industrial relations and trade union studies at Middlesex Polytechnic. He also has a Master’s Degree from the Open University.

Year after year this sector gets screwed in terms of funding

But it wasn’t just vocational education which Pendle seemingly had a knack for. He was 24 years old when he was elected to Newham Council in 1980. He served as chairman of the continuing education committee and as a governor of East Ham and West Ham colleges.

Having run a Trades Union Congress (TUC) centre for the unemployed in London and held roles at Brent Council, Pendle became chief admin officer of Greenhill College in Harrow in 1990, and rose to become vice principal.

Like many professionals who worked in the sector at the time of college incorporation, Pendle has an astute insight into changes to the college and FE system in the past two decades.

“It’s difficult to say whether it’s better or worse,” Pendle says. “It’s different.

“It’s certainly better for the learner, in a lot of respects. Delivery of teaching and learning is better now, for those that teaching and learning is still delivered to. If you compare what’s done now to what was done in the 1990s in terms of adult continuing education, so much of it has just gone because the funding has gone — that’s got to be a bad start.

“All of the continued paring away at things like English for second language speakers, and so forth, whole swathes of that has just disappeared, so that’s got to be bad.

As a leader and manager you need to make difficult decisions

“In terms of a lot of the other provision, particularly for full-time 16 to 18, full-time 19-year-olds, a lot of that is much better, in terms of retention, achievement, progression. Huge steps have been made there. One of the problems has always been that you can’t just take things in isolation, so year after year this sector gets screwed in terms of funding.”

After six years at Greenhill, Pendle became director of resources and company secretary for what was then the committee of vice chancellors and principals of the universities of the United Kingdom, now Universities UK, renamed for brevity’s sake by Pendle himself. This was followed by a stint working for the Association of College Management.

As well as the deputy job at the ATL, Pendle now also holds the role of chief executive at AMiE, the union’s leadership arm. But he claims to have no conflicts about representing college leaders, who are often the ones making the decisions which affect lower-level union members.

From left: brother Paul Foster and Pendle in the late 1960s

He says: “As a trade unionist, among other things, I think what we want is to have good employers.

From left: brother Paul Foster, Pendle and friend Rick Steadman in Southend in 1975

“One of the reasons ATL wants leaders and managers in membership is not just so we get the subscriptions, but because part of them being a member means that we can get the message over to them in terms of good leadership and management, and best practice, and all of those sorts of things.

“So actually the two are quite important, and where you see it work best in FE is in colleges where the principal and members of the senior management team are in AMiE and the college has big AMiE and ATL membership — that’s almost a perfect world.

“As a leader and manager you need to make difficult decisions, and that’s what you paid for, and good leaders and managers make those difficult decisions — what they do is they do it in a professional way — they do it as they should.”

Pendle confesses to being an “East End boy” at heart, and said his last move to Epping, where he now lives with his wife Leela, was the furthest out of London he would ever consider moving.

His youthful love affair with the Labour Party has now been reduced to basic membership and the occasional leaflet through the door, and Pendle admits that a lot has changed since his days of party political activism.

“It is very different,” he says. “You can see at a local level with elected mayors or cabinet or whatever, the level of involvement that backbench councillors had is much reduced. But they handle huge businesses now, they’re billion pound organisations.

“I think one of the big changes, particularly with the Labour Party, but all political parties I think, there has been a move away to what I would call professional politicians.

“When I was involved in the Labour Party, what you would do is you would become active locally, you would go on the council and be a councillor, then you might be a leading councillor and then you might aspire to be an MP or something like that, or you would get involved in the trade unions.

“In the Tory party, you would run a business or an organisation or something like that. But more and more, what you get is professional politicians, so they go to university, they do a politics degree, they will do an internship, and then they will become a special adviser, and then they get elected to Parliament.

“I think across all the parties, that’s the reality now — and I think that’s a shame, because there are a lot of people who have run things, been involved in communities, who don’t do it anymore.”

Closer to employers and further away from funding agencies

In the 26 months since Geoff Russell stepped down as chief executive of the Skills Funding Agency, FE and skills has undergone much change — with more imminent. Having taken up post at Positive Outcomes independent learning provider this summer, he assesses the sector and considers whether it’s heading in the right direction.

Further education is a government-funded, yet commercially delivered sector with a public mission.

Colleges and training organisations must pay close attention to the wishes of their one customer — government.

Failure to do so is a good way to get into trouble — yet failing to ensure you are commercially-managed is another.

This delivery model presents unique challenges.

On the one hand, government is perpetually thinking of new ways to improve skills, meaning a relentless stream of changes to policy, learning priorities and funding rules.

On the other hand, the core mission has always been to provide high-quality vocational skills.

Overall, FE has been doing that very successfully for many years.

The sector needs to continue to get closer to employers and vice-versa — and less close to funding bodies

In recent years, the biggest policy challenge has been increasing the quantity and quality of apprentices to improve Britain’s economy and competitiveness.

A more recent challenge is the ‘employee ownership’ trial to put training procurement in the hands of employers, rather than government funding agencies like the one
I led.

This initiative aims to engage employers more in the design, delivery and funding of training so government-funded learning is more focused on skills employers need.

It also has the potential for better
value for taxpayers’ money. So this is good public policy, but will bring significant change.

As ever in the sector, there is a lot going on.

Yet the way the sector and government work together is a poster child for cost effective use of public funds.

Skills funding is split between colleges and private training organisations. Both are required to make a surplus on the funds they get in order to be able to invest and grow and both are penalised if they do not deliver learner achievement.

It’s a system that works — I am waiting for other public services to catch up.

Having said that, while the sector has
been successful, there are still gaps and shortages in skills and, of course, today’s skills will not be the same as the ones we need tomorrow.

So the sector needs to continue to get closer to employers and vice-versa — and less close to funding bodies. The employer ownership pilots are one way of trying to address this, as of course are apprentices, which require close working with employers.

The pilots have produced some good results, but there are still practical issues to work out.

And while apprenticeship numbers have increased significantly in recent years, around 87 per cent of employers do not use apprentices and those that do are mainly small and medium-sized enterprises.

Big companies who understand the benefits of apprentices on the shop floor need to understand that the same benefits extend to corporate HQ. Happily, an increasing number are doing just that.

Another important but difficult policy priority is young people not in education, employment or training (Neets).

Raising the school leaving age to 18 will help, and many at age 17 will pursue vocational education and training.

But when they finish, they need to be attractive to employers. And employers — who often are perfectly happy to provide them with the skills they need — want employees to have a positive attitude, a willingness to work and competence in maths and English.

There is progress here with the advent of traineeships that can lead to apprenticeships or other jobs, but there is more to do.

As ever, the sector faces a raft of challenges in carrying out its mission — but I am optimistic that it will continue to deliver and am delighted to be back in it. I hope that working with a strong provider will allow me to make a difference, even if from the opposite end of the system to my last role.

Co-operation is key to taking on school-age learners full-time

Bromley College was one of nine colleges given permission to enrol 14 and 15-year-olds full-time this September, in addition to six from last year. Sam Parrett outlines how the college went about preparing for the task.

When the government announced in 2012 that FE colleges could recruit from the age of 14, I knew this was an ideal opportunity for us to consolidate our strong working relationship with local schools and we welcomed our first cohort of 85 year 10 students to our new 14 to 16 college this month.

They will study for a minimum of eight GCSEs, including a vocational component chosen from engineering, hair and beauty, hospitality and enterprise and motor vehicle studies.

We had on average two applicants for every place and if we had the space we would have considered taking more, such was the demand.

Bromley College is vocationally-focused and we have been teaching Year 10 Link and Increased Flexibility programme students under arrangements with local schools for many years.

I am absolutely clear that the real key to sound recruitment of 14 to 16 students is having good open and transparent relationships with local schools

We have been offering a GCSE retake programme for more than 15 years enrolling 500-plus students each year with considerable success.

We visited and worked closely with those colleges which started their recruitment in 2013, particularly Hull College, who were generous with their time and advice.

We have also benefitted from pilot work we did during 2013 with local schools
when I launched the idea at the Secondary Heads’ Forum there was overwhelming support for the development of a vocational 14 to 16 college. We then set up a 14 to 16 pilot, led by the college and a 14 to 16 partnership with senior college curriculum staff and school deputy heads — a forum for sharing ideas on curriculum, transitions, staffing and developing the environment.

We also recruited an experienced head teacher who advised on designing the curriculum offer and admissions process.

A 14 to 16 steering group was established, led by the deputy chair and joined by three further governors.

We identified buildings that we could convert and refurbish into a designated 14 to 16 college, which met with Department for Education (DfE) guidelines regarding safeguarding and provided students with common room facilities and dedicated classroom areas.

I am absolutely clear that the real key to sound recruitment of 14 to 16 students is having good open and transparent relationships with local schools.

Many of our local schools included the new Direct Recruit details in their year 9 Options booklets for parents and carers in addition to bringing students to taster events at the college.

In addition, we have had the full support of the local authority for this programme which it recognises will help deal with a shortage of more than 4,000 secondary school places in Bromley from 2016.

The 14 to 16 cohort will be funded by the Education Funding Agency in the same way as post-16 learners and the lagged funding presents financial complexities; the pre-16 learner is accessing almost double the amount of Guided Learning Hours over
the two-year programme. We have had to plan for this and manage our finances accordingly.

Of course we wish we were funded up front like a Free School or University Technical College, and that we had access to capital funds to support our development, but we aren’t, and we don’t.

The programme at Bromley 14-16 College embraces rigorous academic outcomes as well as embedding clear progression, vocationally, at level three and into our higher education programmes.

I have been delighted at how bright and highly motivated our students and their bold parents are about taking on a skills education at 14. Our Skills not School website hit the right note with them.

We look forward to a year of success and achievement by our new year 10s and wish all colleges entering the direct recruitment market a good year.

Leadership thinktank launches £50K future-gazing fellowships

A new FE leadership thinktank set up by former Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) chair Dame Ruth Silver has launched its first initiative with £50,000 fellowships to gaze into the future of the sector.

The Further Education Trust for Leadership (FETL), which launched over the summer with a budget of up to £5.5m left over following the closure in July last year of LSIS, is accepting applications for the research.

The fellowships will cover the cost for sector managers to take time off from their roles with providers and other FE-related organisations to research and report on leadership issues affecting the future of the sector.

Candidates chosen for fellowships will work with a university chair in FE leadership at the London-based Institute of Education (IoE).

They will also have access to the IoE library, but regular attendance in London will not be necessary and research can be done from home.

Mark Ravenhall (pictured on front), appointed FETL chief executive two months ago, said: “When people apply, they will be able to talk through their ideas with me, then write a letter explaining what excited them about it and how they plan to pursue it.

“We want to stress the fellowships are open to anyone involved in leadership with an interest in the sector.

“I have already had a number of emails and two people have got in touch through the website — so the scheme seems to be producing quite a bit of interest.”

Applications opened on Tuesday (September 2) and must be lodged by October 10. The fellowships are expected to start early next year.

Mr Ravenhall, who was director of policy and impact at the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education from 2001 to 2013, added that FETL was “open-minded” about subject areas for the fellowships.

But he said: “We are less interested, for example, in research on the introduction of advanced learning loans than thinking on how leaders will have to respond to an environment where learning is financed rather than funded, and whether this will bring about a complete change in the way providers work. Are we playing by different rules now?”

FETL launched a basic website in July that was upgraded on Wednesday (September 3) and now features a guide to applying for fellowships.

Dame Ruth (also pictured on front), FETL’s honorary president and a former Lewisham College principal, said it would “give space to highly-pressured colleagues to clear their heads and have time to think new thoughts with the supportive resourcefulness of others”.

Organisation with an interest in FE will also soon be able to apply for FETL grants to fund research into sector leadership issues, but it has not yet been confirmed when this scheme will be launched or how much money will be available.

Visit www.fetl.org.uk for more details.

Riding Giants

Download your free copy of the FE Week 16-page supplement on Riding Giants ~ ALT Annual Conference 2014 in partnership with Tribal.

Click here to download (10mb)

Hello, and welcome to this FE Week supplement covering the 21st annual Association of Learning Technology (ALT) conference. Since last year’s conference the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group (Feltag) report has been published, detailing a series of recommendations to improve the use of technology in FE.

The report, and the prolonged consultations with FE and technology experts which produced it, has put learning technology, if not centre stage, then closer to the limelight than it’s ever been.

It’s no surprise then that technologists gathered at the ALT conference were asking: what’s next? How do we maintain the momentum Feltag and its cross-sector successor, the Education Technology Action Group (Etag), has created? And how do we try to stay ahead of the curve when we don’t know what technologies the future holds?

With this in mind, the conference itself was entitled Riding Giants — innovating and educating ahead of the wave, and on page three ALT chief executive Maren Deepwell introduces the conference and gives us some of her highlights.

For those who are looking to innovate but wondering how to finance it, FE Week takes a look at some of the funding programmes available on page four.

However, Feltag was part of a process, not an end in itself, and an ALT survey found there was a long way to go, as ALT president Diana Laurillard explains on page 5.

On page six, Matt Dean, the Association of College’s technology policy manager, says government must support the sector in implementing Feltag. And you can read about the government’s response to Feltag just before his piece on the same page, where Jade Kesall, Manchester University’s e-learning technologist, also explains how colleges can work with technologists to produce relevant learning material.

On page seven there is a flavour of some of the sessions and conversations that were happening at the conference.

Bryan Mathers, learning technology consultant for City & Guilds, describes what institutional qualities are need to support innovation on page 10, where Rachel Challen, e-learning manager at Loughborough College, explains what they’re doing to comply with Feltag.

On page 11 you can meet the FE stars of this year’s Learning Technologist of the Year Awards and on pages 12 and 13 there is coverage of the conference debate on Feltag implementation, along with a piece from Martin Hamilton, Jisc futurologist, wondering what Feltag can do for young people not in employment, education or training.

Finally, we find out what conference delegates thought with some vox pops from the floor, and online on Twitter.

Don’t forget you can also join in the digital conversation by following @FEWeek.

Could a learner have committed militant hacking?

Police investigating the hacking of a college website which resulted in it “supporting” the militant group Islamic State (ISIS) have not ruled out learner involvement in the cyber attack.

Carlisle College disabled its website on Saturday, August 30, after various elements were changed, including the main description which appears next to the site in internet search engine results.

Carlisle-College-redring

For several hours late last week, the description (pictured) read: “Carlisle College are proud supporters of the Islamic State (ISIS) movement.

“We believe that their actions are justified, and have courses to help new Jihadists.”

According to local newspaper the News and Star, which broke the story, college staff only realised after they were contacted by police officers on Saturday.

But initial speculation that the website may have been targeted directly by Islamic militants appears to have been rejected by the college.

A Cumbria Constabulary spokesperson told FE Week that officers were working with IT specialists and the college’s web team to try to identify the hacker via their IP address.

He said police were at an early stage of a “potentially long investigation”, but added that he could “not rule out” learner involvement.

College head of communications Paul Walker told FE Week: “The investigation is ongoing. It appears that it’s nothing more than a malicious hack, and it’s difficult for us to say more at this stage.

“We are not ruling anything out but we don’t think it’s likely it was a learner. The jury is out on that.”

It is not known how long the changes remained in place before they were discovered by the college.

Speaking to the News and Star earlier in the week, Mr Walker said: “A member of the public from the Cleator Moor area made police aware, and they contacted us.

“We are trying to establish who was responsible and how they did it; we have quite robust security measures in place. Initially my reaction was disbelief.

“Like many of your readers, we can understand if we were high-profile — if we were one of the agencies or somewhere in the United States — but for a small college, in a small city, it’s quite unusual.”

Mr Walker said the college website would be inactive while the police investigation was ongoing.