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.

 

Leps need more responsibility and funding to deliver on digital skills, adult education chief tells Lords

Local enterprise partnerships (Leps) should be given more responsibility and funding to point learners in the direction of opportunities to learn new digital skills, a sector leader has told Lords.

Addressing members of a House of Lords committee looking at the UK’s digital competitiveness yesterday morning, David Hughes (pictured), chief executive of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (Niace), said the success of Leps at helping to deliver skills was “patchy”.

His comments came after Lady O’Cathain, a member of the committee, said people did not know about the responsibilities of Leps to promote skills.

She said: “I think [Leps] are somewhat unstructured at the moment. I don’t think people actually credit them with what information they have got or indeed with their ability to pull in all the people mentioned like the chambers of commerce, the unions, the employers.

“It seems to me that if you could tell us if you think it is a good idea to invest in these Leps and try to encourage these Leps throughout the country to take on that responsibility and indeed to channel some funding to it.”

Mr Hughes said: “They are very patchy. Their capacity is very different in different parts of the country.

“But you cannot generalise. There are some fantastic examples of Leps with superb approaches to skills and there are others which have got less experience and less capacity so this is an issue which needs to be addressed.

“I think partly you can address that by giving them more responsibility, and my approach would be for the centre which holds the purse strings to do deals with Leps so locally that social partnership of organisations can team up to deliver outcomes that are related to skills and jobs and inclusion.”

He added that Leps had an important part to play in promoting courses and qualifications available in certain areas of the country.

He said: “Employers getting engaged with the public bodies locally, with the community organisations, with the learning providers, universities, colleges, independent providers seems to me to be a really important part of the answer.

“Lots of the people we talk to don’t understand the system and don’t understand what learning they need. It wouldn’t be adequate just to put out a big list of qualifications, it would bewilder people.

“What does work, we think, is when people can say there are employers who are going to create these jobs over the next five or 10 years, they are looking for people with these sorts of skills and putting those together. Then the providers of learning, the colleges and universities have to follow and help inform that pattern of delivery. They have to give the flexibility that’s needed.

“At the moment, it’s so focused on the transition to work and then people get into a first job and they are left, and that seems to be bizarre given that people will be working for 50 years or more potentially, so I think the local focus is really critical. People can understand it, people can connect with employers, understand the local labour market better.”

No tracking of traineeship job outcomes

The government has admitted it did not ask providers to keep a record of whether traineeships resulted in learners moving into a job or apprenticeship last year.

An FE Week freedom of information request to the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) has uncovered that it was not tracking learner progression for the first year of the government’s flagship youth unemployment programme.

It is only from this academic year that the SFA requires traineeship providers to record outcomes such as progression into work as part of the individualised learning record returns.

But the revelation that there is no data with which to judge the progression success of last year’s traineeships has triggered fierce criticism from Liberal Democrat Lady Sharp (pictured), an economist who is the party’s spokesperson on FE in the Lords.

She said the SFA was “not living up to its own standards”, and called for answers about why the information was not collected in the first year.

Lady Sharp, who chaired the 2011 Colleges in their Communities Inquiry that produced the Innovation Code aimed at helping colleges run employer-responsive courses, said: “Given the emphasis on outcomes now required of schools, colleges and universities, I am amazed that since the whole purpose of traineeships is to enable the young person to go on to a job or, preferably, an apprenticeship, the SFA seem to be making no effort to measure this.

“Is this a matter of not practising what they preach? KPIs imposed by the SFA on the college sector require precisely this information — why are they not living up to their own standards?”

Earlier this year, former Skills Minister Matthew Hancock announced that funding for traineeships could be dependent on progression into employment or further training from 2015/16.

And the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) launched a consultation on the plans in June. The consultation closed in mid-August and the results will be published this autumn.

Traineeships, which were designed to help learners progress into work or further training, got off to a slow start, with an SFA FoI response in May showing that just 4,160 online applications had been made for 3,480 traineeship vacancies in the eight months since the programme’s launch in August last year.

More recent data has revealed that 7,400 traineeships starts were recorded in the first three quarters of 2013/14, but the SFA, in response to the FE Week FoI request, refused to reveal how many had been completed on the grounds that it intended to publish the information at a later date.

An SFA spokesperson said: “We don’t currently hold specific data on progression into work for traineeships, but subject to meeting national statistical standards, traineeship progression data will be published in future Statistical First Releases.”

FE Week and Me 2014 – COMPETITION NOW OPEN

Our annual FE Week and Me photography competition is back and once again FE Week has teamed up with NCFE and the Royal Photographic Society to hunt for stunning pictures that depict student life in the FE and skills sector, through the eyes of students.

In 2014, after over 500 submissions, FE Week and competition sponsors NCFE and supporters Royal Photographic Society, whittled down the photography students’ entries to the competition down to 20 finalists. Following a national vote, Hassan Chowdhury of Newham Adult Learning Service was crowned the 2013 winner.

Entrants will be in with a chance of winning some stunning prizes and the chance to shadow a high-profile professional photographer.

This year there are two categories of entry: photography student and non-photography student.  Each year the competition has been flooded with a real mixture of photographs. Previously, many entrants have not been photography students and it therefore seemed fair to to have two categories going forward.

This years prizes will consist of:

Category – Photography student – Nikon D5100 Camera Kit and work shadowing placement with a professional photographer.

Category – Non-photography student – Samsung Galaxy Camera 2

Free promotional posters are available by clicking here.

You can view last year’s finalists by downloading our finalists PDF – click here

How to enter…

Brief: entrant’s photos need to depict student life in the FE and Skill sector. Photos can be taken on any type of digital photography kit. It is as simple as that!

To enter the competition students need to email their entry along with no more than a 100 word description of their photo and why they’ve chosen this shot to feweekandme@feweek.co.uk no later than October 20, 2014. Entries received later than this date will not be reviewed or considered for short listing.

Entrants need to provide the following information  when submitting their photo. Any entries with missing details will not be considered.

Name

Category entering: photography student or non-photography student

Course studying

College or Learning provider

Email address

Mobile telephone number

Photo description (100 words max.)

Shortlisted entries will be announced in early November.

The winner will be announced at the end of November.

Math teacher training fund divides opinion after colleges with notice of financial concern are barred

A new maths teacher training fund which will exclude the most cash-strapped colleges doesn’t add up, according to the Association of Colleges (AoC).

The £1.5m ‘funding in-service maths teacher training in FE’ scheme, which will hand out training funds for maths lecturers teaching at GCSE level and above, has been criticised by AoC after it emerged the money would not be available to colleges under notices of financial concern.

Joy Mercer (pictured), AoC director of policy, said: “With the adult skills budget reduced by approximately 35 per cent in the past five years, and Education Funding Agency funding by three per cent this year, colleges have been dealt a double blow.

“Any organisation would struggle to maintain its provision under these circumstances.

“The Skills Funding Agency [SFA] needs to consider applications for this additional funding on a case-by-case basis rather than a blanket ban on colleges in financial health difficulties.”

More than 10 per cent of colleges, FE Week understands, are currently thought to be under a notice of financial concern — in May last year FE Week revealed that 22 colleges had been given the notices.

Colleges are awarding notices of financial concern based on SFA ratings of their financial plans, taking into account their trading results, cash position and debt.

The rating are graded in the same way as Ofsted, from grade one to four with most grade fours being slapped with a financial notice.

Ms Mercer added: “All colleges have an increasing volume of students enrolling this year without a maths GCSE.

“They all need to be able to apply for additional support to get the right teachers supporting students.”

The scheme forms part of a proposed £30m investment by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) over the next two years to increase the quality and quantity of teaching in FE.

Any college or training provider with an SFA contract will be able to apply for a payment of £20,000 per graduate trainee on a first come, first served basis.

A BIS spokesperson told FE Week that the initial commitment of £1.5m, administered by the SFA, was expected to fund training for “more than 100 new maths teachers” and that the impact of the scheme would be reviewed before future commitments were made.

There are currently 981 providers with SFA allocations.

Skills Minister Nick Boles said: “Maths is essential for any job, that’s why we are committed to getting the basics right and ensuring that all learners are able to develop these vital skills.

“Over the next two years we are investing more than £30million to raise the quality and quantity of teaching in further education.

“This scheme will give the sector the knowledge and confidence to deliver excellent maths teaching and has been designed to give colleges and providers the freedom to train their new teachers in the most effective way possible.”

The move has been driven by the requirement that from September, 16 to 18 year-old-learners without GCSE grade C in maths will have to work towards a GCSE alongside their chosen study programme.

Colleges and providers without a notice of financial concern will be able to apply online for the support between September 1, 2014 and July 31, 2015.

Sixth form colleges, school sixth forms and providers who only have an Education Funding Agency contract are not eligible for the scheme and must use the School Direct Training scheme to employ trainee teachers.

Despite criticising the exclusion of colleges with financial problems, Mrs Mercer welcomed the principle of the scheme.

“One of the best ways of increasing the number of maths teachers who can teach students who haven’t got GCSE grade A* to C, is to provide training on the job,” she said.

“We are very pleased that colleges will have a resource they can use to ensure that potential maths teachers have the best possible programme of training while they are also developing their skills in the classroom.”

Filling the newly-formed employability and personal development quals void

Charlotte Bosworth thinks that while the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) removal of funding from a raft of level two qualifications had economic merit, young people must be able to learn employability and personal development skills to prove attractive to potential employers.

Earlier this year the SFA announced it was removing funding support for nearly 1,500 qualifications at level two and above.

This followed two government-backed reviews to investigate the merits of continued funding for certain qualification areas at a time when public budgets are under increased pressure and scrutiny.

One of the key qualification areas that has fallen victim to the resulting cuts is ‘employability and personal development’, which was deemed to be somewhat generic in nature and too lacking in robust qualification status to impress potential employers.

The lack of a clear path to work was cited as a primary reason to pull the funding for such qualifications.

Most education stakeholders — including OCR — agree that a process of de-cluttering the qualification system is a positive step forward, especially in areas where there is little or no take-up.

Nonetheless, it is also important that we continue to support young people who have perhaps struggled academically, but could be helped to fulfil their potential through access to relevant guidance and training in skills and personal development.

If we remove funding for employability skills and personal development qualifications in line with the decision of the SFA, then we must strive for alternative options so that the potential for students to miss out does not gain traction

If we are not careful, we could begin to see a gap emerge where such students fail to benefit from the employability skills and development support they require and deserve.

We have a clear duty to ensure that young people who, for a variety of reasons are furthest removed from the workplace, are not forgotten in the race to slash public expenditure.

Such students who have perhaps struggled within an academic environment need to be encouraged and supported in realising their own aspirations to forge a successful working career, despite a lack of formalised qualifications.

We believe that many students’ learning thrives when exposed to a more holistic combination of essential skills such as maths and English, set alongside practical and inspirational learning experiences found, in vocationally-based courses.

This enables them to access the type of skills and characteristics that will ultimately help them in the world of commerce when they are competing against other candidates for positions.

If we remove funding for employability skills and personal development qualifications in line with the decision of the SFA, then we must strive for alternative options so that the potential for students to miss out does not gain traction.

An alternative approach could be to provide adequate funding for programmes of adult learning, rather than reliance just upon qualifications.

Such a programme for the post-19 age group would enable learners to continue to attain the softer skills, which, alongside vocational and practical training, can develop a potential employee with more rounded attributes to set before a prospective employer.

While a programme of this nature may not carry the badge of formal qualification, it will, give students a fighting chance when it comes to securing employment.

I view it as a form of ‘intervention’, where the ability to access skills via learning in a supported environment can only enhance and not diminish the employment prospects of many.

The SFA’s remit is to fulfil the government’s desire to make sure that FE provides the skilled workforce employers need and to help individuals reach their full potential.

While the need to optimise hard-pressed budgets from the public purse is sensible, we should also make sure that by saving cost in the short term we do not also create a bigger and potentially more expensive problem further down the line.

See the first 2014/15 edition of FE Week, dated Monday, September 8, for an expert piece by Dr Fiona Aldridge, assistant director for development and research at the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (Niace), on SFA qualifications reform and its decision last week to list a further 174 qualifications facing the axe.

 

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Police investigate after college website hacked to promote Islamic militants

A college website inadvertently gave its support to the militant group Islamic State (ISIS) after it was hacked, prompting a police investigation.

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

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.

Paul Walker, head of marketing and communications, told the paper: “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.”

The News and Star also reported that although police had confirmed an investigation had been launched, they could not confirm what offence was being investigated.

For more on this story, check back on the FE Week website on Friday or read the first edition of FE Week for 2014/15, dated Monday, September 8.