Colleges run their own ‘business’ to allow learners to gain experience and 157 Group executive director Lynne Sedgemore said last week that such ventures could be seen as providing a realistic taste of the workplace. However, Iain Mackinnon says they are too few and far between to offer a viable alternative to experience of a truly commercial environment.

I think 157 Group executive director Lynne Sedgmore struck the wrong note in responding to the government’s new advisory paper on work experience.

In making a case on the rather narrow grounds of protecting the best examples of artificially-created work environments she risks appearing on the wrong side of the argument.

She should, instead, be leading the charge to get high quality experience of work for every vocational learner.

First things first. The government is right to set its sights high, and to ask that every student should experience a realistic work environment.

And colleges and other training providers should say: “We agree — this is a good ambition, and we will join you in helping to achieve it.”

Colleges should step up to the challenge to get a high quality placement for
every vocational student

But Mrs Sedgmore began by seeking to challenge “the myth that colleges cannot provide a true-to-life working environment for learners”.

Of course they can, and do — but this is very much a minority game at the moment, and for the foreseeable future. We need a better answer for the many, not just the few.

I was impressed by what North Herts College told me about the gym which its students run as a successful commercial venture.

I like very much that they not only get a useful BTec qualification, but also the really powerful learning you only get when you experience some of the commercial pressures which are the vital backdrop to every job.

But let’s be clear, learning companies like this one are rare, and likely to remain so.

Too many of what Mrs Sedgmore calls “Realistic Working Environments” (RWE) — and the government describes as “simulated work environments” — are simply not realistic, because students do not face the commercial pressures which shape everyone else’s daily work.

Students obviously need time to try things out and make mistakes, but learning how to build their working speeds to much closer to commercial standards is also part of the task — and a key part of the task in the eyes of employers.

I readily agree that far too much work experience is low quality.

Education Business Partnerships did a great job in showing what’s possible, but too many got sucked into a low level numbers game, and it’s more than time to move on and get the focus on quality.

But we need quantity too, and colleges should step up to the challenge to get a high quality placement for every vocational student.

There should be no disagreement with that ambition. Alison Wolf made the case powerfully. Report after report explains how valuable it is for vocational students to get work experience alongside academic studies.

The argument should be about how we close the gap to get a good placement for everyone, not whether we should try or not.

And we do know it can be done. Fleetwood Nautical Campus, for example, part of Blackpool and the Fylde College, which recently won outstanding status from Ofsted, has an international reputation for its courses for trainee officers for the Merchant Navy.

Every one of them gets a multi-part sandwich course with long periods of ‘sea time’ (ie on-the-job learning) complementing what the students learn in college.

Students use sophisticated (and expensive) simulators too, of course, but there is no substitute for the real thing.

Employers step up, I think, despite the cost, because they know that and because they trust the college to deliver.

It’s imperfect in detail, but a good model. It is realistic to go for a target of 100 per cent — every vocational student getting a high quality experience of work environment with realistic business pressures.

Colleges should step up, accept the challenge and work to make it happen.

Iain Mackinnon, managing director,
Mackinnon Partnership, and former college governor of 14 years

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.

A year ago, when I was appointed to Newham College, I didn’t know all that much about FE (it’s okay, I said so at my interview — they knew what they were letting themselves in for).

I wanted to work in FE because I’d always thought it did some of the most valuable work in the education sector, because of its spot-on focus on employment and skills and progression, and because I was fed up of seeing vocational study treated with less equity than its academic neighbour.

And I was excited at the prospect of a trailblazing job — the first in-house role in the sector focussing on policy and colleges’ involvement in its development.

If I had any fear about the role, it was that there might not be enough policy stuff to get my teeth into — could my job be the only one in the sector because there wasn’t enough to do? How quickly that fear disappeared.

FE colleges, and vocational education more broadly, still lack the attention they deserve and need, but we cannot complain, this year, of a deficiency of government consultations.

It doesn’t take a genius — much less a newbie to the sector — to recognise that 2014 will present a number of challenges to colleges, as some of the reforms become reality, and within an increasingly straitened climate

Within a week in post, I was grappling with Chartered Status, soon followed in rapid succession by the FE Guild (as then was), qualifications reform, accountability, the achievement of white working-class children, capital funding, the development of apprenticeships and traineeships,
Ofsted frameworks, and several more besides.

All this, of course, was as well as the debates, the events, the meetings with MPs, the working parties, the research projects, the cross-sector fora, the internal and external communications, the public relations, and — by far the most fun, of course — my monthly rants for FE Week.

What a year it has been. At the end of it, though, are we any clearer on the future direction of FE policy, and do we feel better engaged in its development?

Perhaps this is inevitable, but my answer to those questions is a resounding ‘yes’ and ‘yes’.

While we may not all have agreed with every word forthcoming from the government, the resultant picture of the future seems increasingly clear.

It is clear, not just from the follow-up to the Richard Review, but from the development of traineeships and from the personal focus of all three major party leaders, that apprenticeships are not just here to stay, but will change and grow in a number of ways.

If there is a danger here, it is that those for whom these pathways are not the right answer will feel compelled to pursue them — rather, indeed, as some might argue has happened with university degrees — but we are, perhaps, some way from that just yet.

Similarly, the government has been clear on which qualifications it values, and why, and how performance measurement will reflect that.

It has been clear on the principles it wishes to see applied to funding, particularly of apprenticeships, and it has been clear that it expects the sector to lead itself on matters of professionalisation and development.

Even if this is a cover story for cuts, autonomy should be welcome, and the appointment of David Russell as the Education and Training Foundation’s chief executive begins an interesting new chapter.

It doesn’t take a genius — much less a newbie to the sector — to recognise that 2014 will present a number of challenges to colleges, as some of the reforms become reality, and within an increasingly straitened climate.

At the same time, though, the next General Election will feel an awful lot closer the other side of New Year’s Eve, and we can hope that all three major parties decide to pursue bold, exciting policies.

More importantly, we can hope that they continue to develop those policies with reference to, or even better hand-in-hand with, the FE sector.

Claims last month that up to 50,000 teenagers were studying ‘dead-end’ level two courses were ‘superficial and sensational’ says Lynne Sedgmore.

The second Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report in its Condition of Britain series, entitled Growing up and becoming an adult, makes a helpful contribution to our understanding of a complex issue — why too many of our young people have difficulty making the transition to adult life and what we might do about it.

It points to many factors including the weakening influence of the family in some parts of modern society and the negative effect of many aspects of contemporary culture.

Unfortunately, any positive impact from the analysis risks being vitiated by the superficial and sensational reporting of a so-called finding about vocational education — 50,000 youngsters on ‘dead end’ courses.

The figure of 50,000 appears to be derived simply from an extrapolation of the Neet (not in education, employment, or training) figures — the implication is that if young people become Neet the courses they followed were to blame.

The report then highlights the higher incidence of Neet among those who undertook courses at level two and below compared with A-level students — hardly a surprising finding, but underlining the accusation that the nature of level two provision is to blame.

Yet IPPR clearly knows what sort of young person finds themselves on a course at level two or below at the age of 16.

They are those who have not been served well by the education system to date; those who have a learning difficulty or come from a disadvantaged background.

They are young people who have been aimed at the lower end of the labour market since they started secondary school, or even since the age of seven as the Jesuits would have it.

The suggestion that the critical factor determining young people’s fate is the content of the courses they followed at the age of 16 is simply ludicrous.

The IPPR asserts that courses at level two and below have ‘limited teaching’ or ‘limited time in the classroom’.

It is not clear where the evidence for this comes from since it is not referenced in the report.

Moreover, it is contrary to the experience of most colleges and the figures recorded in the individualised learner record (ILR). An analysis for the Nuffield 14 to19 review by Fletcher & Stanton found that teaching hours on level three programmes were around 4 per cent greater than on level two, accounted for mainly by the fact that the most able students are sometimes encouraged to take on five A-levels or the equivalent.

The report asserts that it would be preferable if more students undertook apprenticeships.

This is probably true as long as it is not done by diluting apprenticeship quality; and it ducks the important question of what provision needs to be made for the large number of young people who will not be taken on by employers and for whom A-levels are not appropriate.

At the moment, vocational courses in colleges serve the great majority of them very well. Through the use of both work experience and realistic work environments they help induct young people into an occupational identity, provide useful occupational skills and motivate them to continue with more general education.

Such students can be found in training restaurants and college farms, running shops and salons, travel agencies and, in one case, a museum.

There is undoubtedly some weak provision at level two just as there is at level three and in all parts of education.

The casual denigration of level two vocational programmes in this report is however part of a pattern.

Lower level work in colleges is something that is not well understood by elite commentators, is low status and easy to stigmatise.

Such careless commentary is damaging, not least by inviting yet more tinkering and ‘transformation’ of a system that is not in any real sense broken.

These students and the colleges that serve them deserve better.

Lynne Sedgemore, executive director,
157 Group