With the government having announced plans for secure colleges for young offenders, Paul Phillips uses his experience of delivering adult prison education to outline the issues that will need consideration.
The whole world of offender learning has faced massive change over the last 18 months with the introduction of the OLASS (Offender Learning and Skills Service) 4 approach.

Essentially, that has enabled a much greater focus to be given to the skills agenda and to ensure that prisoners are equipped with the latest skills and expertise to enable progression to secure work when their sentence is completed.

The transition process has not been easy but the approach taken by the government has been highly necessary.

Most recently, the government announced plans for ‘secure colleges’.

At Weston College, we are the offender learning provider for a large number of prisons across the South West and the concept of secure colleges is one that is interesting, but one that also will need great planning for such a model to become successful.

From my perspective as principal, we need to take the lessons from OLASS 4 and look at what has been happening in terms of youth custody, which is currently generally outside our remit.

The key messages from my perspective are that education has got to be the priority and the qualifications on offer must be those that can lead to sustainable employment or progression to higher levels of study.

Are the entrepreneurs of the future out there who can create these secure colleges?

It is also imperative that we recognise that many offenders will either have learning disabilities, special educational needs or mental health needs.

Therefore the funding that follows the prisoners must ensure that they have the additional support for success.

Currently, under OLASS 4 methodologies, albeit for older prisoners, the levels of additional learning support available are significantly below that required.

As the concept paper from government suggests, the secure college must achieve the very best educational provision combined with rigorous security.

If these two parameters can be achieved then there is a real change of taking the free school/academy model and creating an enviable resource for the future.

There is also the need to consider the whole environment that will be needed to impact upon such change.

So are the entrepreneurs of the future out there who can create these secure colleges?

I believe that there is a key solution which must combine the very best of OLASS 4 methodologies with experts in security.

Both these parameters must have equal priority in planning for the future, but equally the whole concept of youth custody needs re-examination.

If the government is serious about these proposals, then it will need to engage with outstanding learning providers with real expertise in the skills agenda.

Similarly, these providers will need to work with organisations who have proven expertise in security.

This is certainly not an easy proposition, but I believe these providers exist.

The paper from the government, entitled transforming youth custody — putting education at the heart of detention, may be the catalyst that we need in this country.

It clearly needs to be thought out in great detail and then of course there is the cost benefit analysis that will be crucial.

The concept will not be cheap, but, as the green paper states, with average cost per place running from £65,000 to £212,000 per annum and with reoffending rates of at least 70 per cent, change is necessary.

The strategies announced are feasible and to be applauded. I do have a caveat however and that is use the experts from the world of FE and others to influence and support these changes.

Dr Paul Phillips OBE, principal, Weston College, Somerset

 

Former House of Commons Education Select Committee specialist  Ben Nicholls is head of policy and communications at London’s Newham College. He writes exclusively for FE Week every month.

FE colleagues probably have little time to watch TV and, if they do, they may reasonably avoid anything to do with education.

I’m glad, though, that I’ve found time to watch the start of Tough Young Teachers, a new BBC3 series following six Teach First participants in three of London’s more challenging schools.

I’m glad for lots of reasons, not least because it increases my ever-growing respect for what teaching colleagues across the country do every day. There can’t be a more valuable or under-valued job.

I’m glad, also, because it confirms both my fears about, and delight in, education on TV.

Professor Mary Beard, talking about her experiences on Jamie’s Dream School in 2012, argued that while the series was “useful”, we “have to be very clear that we were dealing with a group of kids and teachers who, in some ways, were fighting for the attention of the TV cameras”.

So, while TV education can be highly entertaining, and can both shape and stimulate important debate (as well as raise teachers’ status), it cannot ever be the full picture, and we should never pretend it is.

Finally, though, I’m glad because the programme helped me crystallise some of my own puzzled thoughts about teacher training.

Previously, I’ve felt — and written here — that the profession needs to attract people from all walks of life, with all sorts of skills and backgrounds. But Tough Young Teachers has really brought home that teachers need just as robust training as doctors, firefighters, soldiers, or any other professionals.

I know teachers who found their training pretty useless. I know teachers, too, who refer back to it every day.

These are issues of quality, which arguably need addressing — but neither scenario negates the importance of training itself.

That importance is summarised by the tough young teacher who declares, after her second lesson: “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Learning on the job is important, but it can’t be the whole package. Criticising Teach First isn’t my purpose here. The scheme has perhaps done more than anything else to encourage people towards teaching who would never have considered it before.

It just needs to give those people some more training — and I can fairly safely say that most Teach First participants, in my experience, agree. Tough Young Teachers comes at a time when the National Union of Students is running its own campaign to ensure that FE teachers still need to qualify — against a government which disagrees, and which already allows the unqualified to teach in Free Schools.

My own college is clear that teachers need to be qualified, and we’re glad that our Student Union agrees with the importance of this.

It’s a question, though, which is particularly apt in vocational subjects where practical experience is critical for teachers, and highly valued by students.

Proposals being developed by thinktanks and others to facilitate professional secondments into FE will need to consider this question very carefully.

To return to Dream School, I can do no better than quote student Nana Kwame.

When asked whether subject knowledge or ability to communicate mattered more in a teacher, he responded: “You can’t pick between the two — you need someone in the middle, who knows what they’re talking about [but] can get along with you”.

The House of Commons Education Select Committee robustly defended this position, stating in 2012: “There is no clear formula for an ‘outstanding’ teacher… although good subject knowledge, overall academic ability and a range of personal and inter-personal skills are vital”.

But the committee also argued forcefully that “school-based training is vital in preparing a teacher for their future career”.

Six weeks in the summer before Lesson One cannot, with respect to Teach First, ever be enough — and Tough Young Teachers supports that position.

There’s no question that the six participants are pretty tough, not to mention a plethora of other superlatives — they just need to be trained as well.

With Skills Minister Matthew Hancock having announced plans for a nuclear college, Mike Robbins looks at whether he should just have been grateful for the existing FE offer and used it as an industry model.

he government has announced proposals to build new specialist colleges to support the skills training required for HS2 and the nuclear industry, but we have seen how an established training institution can evolve, adapt and innovate to deliver the new and bespoke skills required for a major civil engineering project.

The nuclear new build at Hinkley Point C represents a highly-ambitious project of international significance; the proposed construction of two new nuclear reactors will necessitate a workforce of 25,000 across the ten years of the build, and clearly there is insufficient existing capacity within the whole of the South West, let alone Somerset itself.

A major programme of community engagement, skills development and training is clearly required, and with associated infrastructure works that include highways improvements, campus accommodation, park and rides and wharf and jetty improvements, the question is — why build a brand new, purpose-built college as well?

To do so would be to ignore the wealth of experience and expertise already available in the FE sector, particularly when it comes to science, technology, engineering and
maths disciplines.

Partnership can lead to significant private investment in facilities within colleges to deliver skills development and training on a huge scale

While close collaboration between industry and the education sector on a project of this magnitude has simply not happened before, the Tier 1 contractors connected with Hinkley C are wholeheartedly embracing the fact that colleges already have the mechanisms in place to respond quickly and flexibly to industry.

This type of partnership can lead to significant private investment in facilities within colleges to deliver skills development and training on a huge scale, and enabling them to continue with their core offer to young people even in the light of reduced government funding.

The impact on the local communities that colleges serve can be substantial — in the case of Hinkley C, for example, one third of the jobs are intended for people within a 90-minute commute, and the involvement of a coalition of South West colleges has led to aspirations being universally raised.

New ways of working often require new delivery and assessment methods, and the private investment afforded by industry partnerships enables colleges to look far beyond the reaches of traditional classroom delivery.

Realistic working environments for specific construction skills — such as formwork, plant operations, excavating, scaffolding and concrete pouring — can be created using industry-standard plant and equipment, on a scale that simply would not be possible if colleges were wholly reliant traditional funding streams.

And colleges can work together to pool expertise, share facilities and franchise programmes, creating a UK-wide skills base that will serve industry for decades to come.

An early alliance with major civil engineering projects is not without risk for colleges, particularly in terms of up-front investment, but it can prove to be a very sound strategy. The benefits to colleges and the communities they serve are clear; but the benefits for the projects themselves cannot be underestimated either.

The vast array of skills training required is being placed firmly where it belongs — in the hands of proven experts who have often been recruited from the industries themselves — and early engagement means that the preparatory work has already been completed in readiness for the green light.

It is debateable whether a new college could overcome teething problems and hit the ground running, even assuming practical considerations such as location, planning, recruitment and marketing could be overcome.

It is also worth noting that the eventual employers on major infrastructure schemes come from far and wide, and to focus on a single training provider in a single location would seem inappropriate and inefficient — a widening of opportunity to optimal numbers of people is absolutely key to future success.

We would like to see government maximising the potential of the many excellent colleges that lie along the route from London to Leeds or near the areas where nuclear new build and operations exist.

Mike Robbins, principal, Bridgwater College