The Gazelle Foundation has been awarded a £1m learning technology contract from the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) amid concerns about a lack of evidence surrounding its effectiveness. David Russell acknowledges such scepticism as he defends the award.

The ETF has announced the latest of our contract awards and the biggest among them was a £1m contract to support the education and training sector in realising the potential of learning technology.

This is a vital agenda, and a role I am delighted that we have been asked by Government to take on following its recent response to the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group (Feltag) report.

But first let me address one possible concern head on.

I read the papers. I know there is scepticism in some quarters about Gazelle, who will lead the consortium on this delivery work for us.

I understand some teachers and lecturers have asked pointed questions about whether Gazelle delivers on its promises, and about whether it always acts in the interests of learners.

It is right to ask questions, to scrutinise, and to expect evidence of impact. I expect that too.

Whatever we may say about the autonomy of institutions in our sector, it is public money which pays for most of our activity, the ETF and providers alike. Public money must deliver public value; this is a non-negotiable for me.

We had four bids for our learning technologies contract. It is not normal commercial practice to disclose the number of bidders, but in this case I believe there is an overcompensating public interest in disclosure, to show that we made a positive choice when awarding this work.

The two strongest bidders were very close, with different strengths. But in the end our process produced a clear front-runner, which was the Gazelle-led consortium.

They won the contract because their bid was convincing in the depth of knowledge and understanding it displayed; dynamic and innovative; pedagogy-focused not technology-focused; and above all with learner benefit at its heart.

This programme will provide support across the education and training sector, including colleges, private training providers and others (it is not aimed at any particular group of providers).

Gazelle will be assisted by its consortium partners: the Association of Colleges, Association of Employment and Learning Providers, 157 Group, and the National Foundation for Educational Research, together with a wider steering group that they are convening to oversee the programme.

More generally, I recognise there will be scepticism in some quarters from time to time about some of our awards going to ‘usual suspects’ around the sector.

But it would be quite wrong to let those ‘noises off’ affect an impartial and objective process of contract awarding.

My board and I are very clear: the ETF is an outcomes-focused organisation in everything we do.

Our contracting model is set up to support that.

All our contractors are 100 per cent clear that they must demonstrate impact for learners (and employers where appropriate) throughout the work.

Any contractor that cannot deliver on the promise of its plans will see swift remedial action taken, the ultimate of which is contract termination. No contractor is too big to fail.

Learning technology is evolving rapidly and its potential is huge.

The biggest inhibitor to its success is lack of workforce capacity to exploit it.

The ETF is focusing energetically on helping the whole workforce — including leaders — to recognise and utilise the power of learning technology.

That is what our contract is designed to do, and that is what we will deliver through it, whoever happens to be our successful contractor of the day.

Nine colleges are looking to join the ranks of the existing seven that have been allowed by the Department for Education to recruit 14 to 16-year-olds directly. A year after his own college started direct recruitment, Lee Probert looks at what lessons have been learned.

September 2013 saw our Hull and Goole colleges welcome 100 young people to study their key stage four programme with us, following Professor Alison Wolf’s recommendation that colleges should be allowed to enrol 14 to 16-year-olds directly.

While this cohort of students had a new legal status for us, welcoming them to the colleges built on a long track record of partnership delivery with schools for key stage four provision.

In the two years leading up to launching the HCUK 14 to 16 college we had worked with the local authority to deliver the Energy League, a cohort of full-time 14 to 16-year-olds who transferred from a school as part of a managed closure.

Key to success in setting up this provision has been ensuring an appropriate balance of high quality national curriculum provision as well as a rich vocational diet alongside. Specialist pathways have been offered which complement local enterprise partnership priorities in engineering, construction, sport, health and care, creative and digital media, renewable technologies and logistics.

Across the group of colleges we can offer progression routes through FE and into higher education at undergraduate and post graduate levels.  This has proved to be significant in supporting young people and parents to commit to a change in education provider at 14.

A specialist and focused curriculum with good progression routes to further learning and employment has led to us securing a full mixed ability cohort of young people. Young people in our 14 to 16 college are rightly proud to be part of it, having been selected following interview.

The admissions process is individual to each child involving their parent or guardian making an application directly to the colleges. Students have chosen us as much as we’ve chosen them. This stage is critical to ensuring that we have offered places to students who can truly benefit from a college learning environment. It’s not easy to obtain transition information for individual students and therefore this investment in the admissions and initial assessment process is critical.

Investing in dedicated staff whose primary responsibility is to the 14 to 16 college demonstrates our commitment to this as a new and important part of the group as well as ensuring we have the right skills and expertise to work with 14 to 16-year-olds.

Alongside a dedicated senior leader for 14 to 16 provision, we’ve appointed an experienced secondary head teacher, special educational needs coordinator and experienced GCSE teaching staff. This core team works alongside our experienced and industry qualified vocational staff to offer complementary skills and experience to the curriculum offer.

Our 14 to 16 college is based in a dedicated zone offering the students a choice of bustling college life or their own private and safe space. The newly created 14 to 16 zone houses the designated teaching space to support national curriculum delivery as well as their own social space.

Students selected their own informal branded uniform giving them a sense of identity and community within the college. Almost all 100 students have a dedicated mentor who has volunteered to work with them for the duration of their programme. Trained mentors are drawn from college staff in senior leadership, teaching and support roles as well as A-level students. These relationships support progress and achievement as well as provide a point of contact for pastoral support.

There are bespoke policies and procedures as well as new data sets and tracking to become familiar with. Specialist training for staff and a discrete policy framework ensures that each student’s needs are met as well as ensuring that our offer is consistently high quality. Ofsted said we had made significant progress in all areas following our monitoring visit and reflected that we had often exceeded minimum requirements.

As we look forward to the current year 10 moving to year 11, following the obligatory prom night we’ll welcome more than 100 new year 10s to the 14 to 16 colleges in Hull and Goole in September 2014. This reflects our commitment to investing in this new college financially along with leadership time.

Dedicated open evenings, taster events and above all the experience of our students makes this a part of college-life which is here to stay.

When I wrote in FE Week three months ago about the second annual round of FE Loans, the new application process had just opened. A few months on, what’s happening? Where are things heading?

Most notably, moves to extend FE loans ‘downwards’ — both for age and level — have begun, and many preparing for the 2013-14 round saw this as inevitable for several reasons.

A recent consultation by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) makes several proposals. If adopted, loans to cover fees will also apply to 19 to 23-year-olds taking certain kinds of level two learning, in addition to 24+ learners taking level three and four courses.

Funding for HNC and HND would move from the university sector into FE’s orbit, and loans. Part of that reflects concerns over ‘bogus’ colleges and learners; FE arrangements are easier to monitor.

Some providers didn’t engage with that first round, though, since they had few or no learners over 23, and/or little or no learning beyond level two. Some may even have retreated from those ‘older’ and/or ‘higher’ fields.

If the consultation’s suggestions are adopted, however, they may well apply to courses from August 2015. Thus, many FE providers not much involved with loans may need to re-consider their strategic and operational positions, to plan for this coming year and implementation thereafter.

Having been involved in Learning and Skills Improvement Service support for providers towards the first round of loans, I’m convinced that successful and less successful FE loans ventures depend first and foremost on attitude and mindset within providers. That strongly affects the ‘mood music’ throughout all parts of the organisation, and its community, and that can have big impacts on messages and take-up. Where it’s in a minor key, learners can walk away, and everybody loses.

Those who were doubtful or even hostile had their reasons, of course. But if that restricts or even prevents participation, then there’s a problem for us all.

Loans for many kinds of FE learning aren’t going away (a general election notwithstanding), and indeed, their territory is spreading. So it may be time to embrace the concept more wholeheartedly. Even those with real philosophical doubts should see some real potential advantages.

That can be a ‘tough ask’, whether at the strategic level and/or at the front line. Investing in your post-school education and training just isn’t as strong a tradition or philosophy in Britain as it is elsewhere. Things may be changing, but perhaps not quickly and solidly enough.

One possible new sign of continued hesitations, despite some encouraging statistics, lies in the set of April-May 2014 figures for the new round of 24+ loan applications. Where we might have expected increases compared to the corresponding period last year, through the system settling and building momentum, take-up so far this time looks to be around half of the same period in 2013.

It’s early days and there may be many explanations. But, even given the removal of apprenticeships (which accounted for few applications last time, anyway), the picture so far raises some concerns.

How many learners may have been put off, for whatever reason? What’s been the impact of ‘mindset’?

Perhaps it will indeed turn round, over coming months. Yet, a total loans budget of £129m for 2013-14 was apparently by no means fully used. For this financial year, that’s more than tripled to £398m.

The trend needs to be much more sharply upwards, soon. If not, then the implications for the sector, and the nation, are a worry — and particularly given the shrinking of the adult skills budget, and the proposed ‘double-downwards’ expansion. This income stream matters, and increasingly so.

Finally, here’s a bit of ‘wish-fulfilment’. An earlier BIS consultation considered how loans for higher education could accommodate the beliefs of many Muslims, for whom the conventional ideas of borrowing and interest are unacceptable. The likeliest system to be adopted is one based on the concept of ‘takaful’ — shared benefit and obligation. Simply put, this involves a fund built up by a community, allowing its members to draw on the money contributed. They then contribute back into the fund in turn, as and when possible.

It’s an interesting approach. And, it’s a quite familiar one in some parts of the Western world, especially England: think of the ideals and methods of the early co-operative movement, ‘mutuals’, and friendly societies. Why not?

The BIS consultation suggests that this could also happen for FE loans. A logical question arises: if such a ‘takaful’ system can be used for Muslim learners, both in higher education and FE, why couldn’t it also apply to all learners?

Hackney University Technical College (UTC) is to shut at the end of 2014/15 because of low recruitment numbers — just 29 out a target of 75 pupils signed up for September. Dr Lynne Sedgmore looks at whether the UTC project as a whole is actually the problem.

I have been working in FE Colleges for 34 years and have seen many, many initiatives come and go — some of value, others purely political vanity projects.

I have never been opposed to FE colleges being rattled and shaken by politicians, learners or stakeholders. It is vital that we constantly prove our worth over and over again — that comes with the territory when in charge of taxpayers’ money.

What does pain me however, is when new ideas are born out of ideology, a limited evidence base and, it seems, an almost wilful determination to prove that FE colleges have failed.

This view seems still to have currency despite the rich evidence that FE is a huge success on many fronts, and has been for many, many years.

In this context I find it sad (though not surprising) that the very day after a commons debate on vocational education, during which the Edge Foundation was praised profusely and MPs queued up to announce a new University Technical College (UTC) in their constituency, we hear that the Hackney UTC is closing down. It will have only been open for three years.

Despite considerable hype in national and local media inspectors had made wide ranging criticisms of its performance and recruitment remained well below target.

This follows poor reports at other UTCs, serious problems of under-recruitment across the country and the Bedfordshire UTC being in such a state that an FE college was brought in to help sort it out.

How should we in FE react to this news when we are constantly being told that UTCs are the new way forward, vastly superior to anything we have ever done or achieved?

What should be our response to the proposals from the Labour Party to open 100 UTCs across the country to solve the problems of technical and vocational education?

Sadly our only option is to grit our teeth and help policy makers dig themselves out of a hole of their own making.

We need to help because at the heart of the UTC proposals is a good idea — that young people can be energised by learning in a setting that demonstrates the relevance of their studies to the world of work; that learning with state of the art technical facilities, from staff with recent industrial experience and with the strong engagement of employers boosts motivation and drives quality.

We know this because it happens every day in FE colleges up and down the country.

These ideas are too important to be allowed to fail simply because impatient politicians, anxious to claim credit for something new, set up fragile institutions that are not always fit for purpose.

In a world of rational policy making we would have to ask why universities should be asked to take the lead in this area when they know little about the teaching of 14 to 18-year-olds; why are UTCs being set up as tiny institutions without the scale to weather variations in recruitment or deliver financial economies; why are they set up as free standing entities without the opportunities for progression upwards or across disciplines; why are they essentially mono-technics, lacking the social and intellectual benefits of learning alongside other students from other sectors?

Alas the answer, as we know only too well, is that policy making in England is far from rational.

FE colleges, built around the same core philosophy as UTCs, were nevertheless not involved in policy formulation and only grudgingly engaged at the implementation stage.

All we can do with this, as with other political playthings is stand by and catch them when they fall.