Mature student Billy Plimbley recalled most of his teachers thought he was either “thick” or simply not paying attention at school. It was only after he enrolled South Leicestershire College more than 30 years later that he discovered his problems had been caused by dyslexia, writes Paul Offord.
eading blue letters against a black background might sound like a headache-inducing task to most, but for 51-year-old Billy Plimbley it has proved his ticket to an English education.
Billy, from South Wigston, in the Midlands, registered for a level one English functional skills course at nearby South Leicestershire College in 2012.
Despite being a capable student, lecturer Karen Gregson noticed the dad-of-two found reading difficult.
“She saw there was a problem,” said former bus driver Billy.
“She offered to carry out some tests and found that I was dyslexic. Then she set about finding what help I needed.
“It was taking me an awful long time to read. They tried different coloured transparent screens for me to read through.
“It turned out I can read best when there are black letters on a blue background.”
He went on to pass level one easily and then level two within a year.
College bosses were so impressed with his progress that they named him English
student of the year at the recent South Leicestershire College student star
awards.
He said: “Now I would like to eventually do a degree and go on to teach people with similar problems to myself in a college.”
He added: “Dyslexia was pretty much unheard of when I left school in 1978. I scraped through most of my CSEs with the lowest possible pass marks and was always playing catch-up. The teachers would say I wasn’t listening or paying attention, or that I was deliberately being thick.”
Billy the Coventry schoolboy, in 1973
Mrs Gregson said: “Billy had a bad time at school and would assume he couldn’t do things at the start.”But I noticed that while Billy answered questions very well, he was struggling to read. There was obviously a discrepancy there, so we did some tests on him.”
She added: “He grew and grew in confidence after that and was so enthusiastic, which inspired everyone else in his classes to do the best they could too.”
Billy hardly read any novels before he was diagnosed, but now places his blue transparent screen over the pages to help him understand what’s on the pages.
He said: “I used to read a bit at school but gave up when I started work. Now my nose is hardly ever out of a book.”
Billy, who is father to Kyle, 21, and Melissa, 22, spent his working life in a variety of jobs in the catering sector, as a builder’s labourer, and driving buses.
He said: “I was made redundant as a bus driver and there were no vacancies around at the time. I decided I was going to use my time off productively and try and prove everyone who said I was thick wrong by going back to college.
“It has done me such a lot of good to find out I’m dyslexic and that’s the reason why I struggled to read and write. Now it’s hard to believe I’m student of the year.”
Main photo: Marion Plant, principal of South Leicestershire College, and Billy Plimbley after he was given the student of the year award
The sight of Ofsted inspectors is not the only thing to strike fear into the heart of principals at poorly-performing colleges now the FE Commissioner is in town. But while such principals rightly face a grilling, the rest of the sector should be able to learn from the mistakes of others and the experience of the commissioner, says Jayne Stigger.
espite many calls for better early warning signals to allow early and pre-emptive interventions in FE, we now have a commissioner, David Collins, who investigates after the fact, using strong measures to ensure improvement.
In his own book, A Survival Guide for College Managers and Leaders, published in 2006, he wrote: “Institutions that are not so good work in isolation, performing poorly in a number of areas … there remains a considerable range of performance levels across the sector, … linked to the quality of the leadership and management that the college possesses.”
Is this a clear statement on his opinion of the causes of inadequate performance in FE?
Dr Collins has investigated at least four colleges since his appointment, leading to administered status at Stockport and K College, and recommendations for Bristol and Liverpool.
Yet, he does not seem to have visited Coventry, where all 16 outcomes in the main findings were inadequate, following on from two poor inspection results and overseen by a principal of 16 years’ tenure.
Are those four colleges guilty of ‘working in isolation, poorly performing in a number of areas’, or really worse than Coventry, particularly when ‘protecting learners’ interests is the primary purpose of intervention’ is the prime consideration?
Key judgements following a visit by the commissioner, leading to ‘administered status’ and/or ‘recommendations’ must be shared
Truth is, we don’t know. Currently, the commissioner’s findings are not made public, nor do we know whether that situation will change.
My view and that of many in the sector is that it should change; we need to know.
No one is suggesting that highly sensitive material be made public, but the key judgements following a visit by the commissioner, leading to ‘administered status’ and/or ‘recommendations’ must be shared with other providers.
The rules we play by are complex and as Dr Collins writes, we do operate in ‘a choppy sea of ever-changing government policies’.
If colleges are to respond to these environmental conditions, they can only benefit from full and frank sharing of information, so, why the secrecy and who benefits from it?
Not us. How can we improve, change and adapt if we don’t know the new rules?
Is the secrecy because it highlights perpetual weaknesses in the provider which Ofsted should have identified and acted on, but did not?
Or is it that the provider has simply not complied with Ofsted, departmental or Skills Funding Agency requirements?
Or maybe the reasons are not sufficiently strong to justify the response of the commissioner?
Swimming blind, in a ‘choppy sea’, is no way to run a sector.
Obfuscating the underlying concerns for the commissioner’s visit and particularly his recommendations for improvement, are against the very open nature of FE, which is collaborative, inclusive and by our very nature dedicated to continuously improving our delivery for the benefit of our learners, local communities and national economy.
Simply put, we need to know.
This information, this judgement, this determination of our status cannot be made in a ‘secret court’. These should not be closed material procedures, where secret intelligence can be introduced but will only be seen by the judge and special advocates.
These decisions are made, but we have no counsel to weigh the evidence.
As yet, there has been no college dissolution, but it is a possibility we face. There is a danger that these actions come to be viewed as politically punitive rather than educationally corrective.
If the commissioner feels it is necessary to act, then we should have feedback on why and how.
We do not doubt his knowledge and integrity, only asking that it is shared, widely, for the benefit of the whole sector.
Colleges are delivering what government has asked of them, but if the goal posts are changing, we should be told.
If there is no agenda other than clear improvement and backing for FE, then there can be no justification for withholding this information from the very sector it is purported to support.
Jayne Stigger, head of maths and science (HE) at North East Surrey College of Technology (Nescot)
The importance of education as a means to getting on in life was instilled into Christine Doubleday by her parents who both left school when they were 13.
She grew up on a huge council estate in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in a catholic, working class family with her brothers Martin, now aged 60, Paul, 56, and John, who died in 1999 at the age of 35.
Her father, Jack, worked on the railways as a goods guard and was secretary of the local branch of the National Union of Railwaymen.
“He started going to literacy classes through the union. He got to the point where he could have gone to the trade union college in Oxford, but he didn’t go because he wouldn’t have left the family,” she says.
“However, while my dad was really proud of being working class, he and my mum, Pat, had an old fashioned view held by many people from their background that education gave the kids a chance to get up and out.”
Doubleday, 58, recalls how her father was prepared to take drastic action when he feared his children were being distracted from their studies.
We occupied the building where they took their exams. I seem to remember sleeping on the corridor floor for about two nights, before being removed by the university police,
“My dad was always telling us: ‘If you don’t do your homework, the telly will go back to Radio Rental’,” she says.
“As kids, we didn’t believe him, but I came home one day when I must have been about 11 and it had gone. It never came back until after I had done my O-levels.”
Doubleday went on to get eight O-levels and four A-levels and was offered a place studying medieval history at Leicester University.
But, she says: “I went a bit weird when I was 17. I discovered boys and music and decided I wanted to go to the university of life instead.
“I went to work in a hotel in Switzerland for about six months. When I came back to England, I went to visit a friend at Oxford University and never came back.”
Christine with her brothers Paul (back left), Martin and baby John
She became involved with student politics while visiting a friend at Pembroke College, Oxford, joining in protests supporting a campaign for a central students’ union for the entire university.
“We occupied the building where they took their exams. I seem to remember sleeping on the corridor floor for about two nights, before being removed by the university police,” explains Doubleday. “I ended up living in Pembroke College for a whole term in 1973, even though I wasn’t a student there.
“It was the first time I had experienced southern middle-class politeness. I thought I would get away with it for as long as I could.
“In Wakefield that would have been about five minutes, but no-one ever questioned why I was there — which was funny because it was an all-male college.”
One of the middle-class students she met, Miles Doubleday, became her husband for 23 years, before they divorced in the late 1990s.
They had three children, Tim, 35, Clare, 33, and Katie, 31.
She worked at a bakery, before marrying aged 20 and doing a social studies degree at Oxford Polytechnic, which she completed shortly before having her first baby, aged 23.
She set out on her career in education in the early 1980s, teaching adult literacy in colleges, through local authority-run classes, and with the Workers’ Education Association.
She was then thrilled to be one of the first people in Britain to be trained by American feminist icon Anne Dickson to give assertiveness training to women.
She said: “I used to get women turning up with badminton rackets and yoga mats because that’s what they told their husbands they were doing. But the idea was to give women the confidence to get on in their careers.”
Doubleday secured her first managerial post in 1989, as regional organiser for community education for Cumnor and Kennington, in Oxfordshire.
She says: “It was a case of running things like badminton and sugarcraft classes to pay for more of the things I really wanted to do, like adult literacy and numeracy classes and assertiveness training.”
Between 1992 and 1997, Doubleday also travelled regularly to Russia to train trade unionists how to recruit in the post-communist era.
She says: “It wasn’t very fashionable to be in a union out there at that time. It was quite funny because I would be trying to teach these older people, who had been part of the communist regime, and their approach was very much ‘you must join’, which wasn’t really how we did things.”
It was also during this period that she completed a masters degree which changed her approach to FE.
She says: “I had this notion you shouldn’t accredit adult education, following the liberal idea of education for education’s sake.
“I did my thesis on the idea that accreditation has no place in adult education, but completely disproved this notion through my research — all the adults I spoke to really liked having a qualification to show for their studies.”
Doubleday took this on board when she set up the Oxfordshire Open College Network in 1991. She says: “We would accredit curriculums, for example for special needs and access to HE courses.
“Some of the tutors hated it, but there was me saying: ‘You have to have aims. You have to have an outcome’.”
Doubleday had a difficult period in the late 1990s. She left FE for a few years, taking a post graduate diploma in careers guidance, having divorced and suffered the heartache of her brother committing suicide. “Being bereaved by suicide when there is no explanation and no clue it is coming leaves not only a massive gap, but also confusion,” she says.
“I never did find out and I guess I never will, but have gradually let go and learned to simply grieve.”
Doubleday emerged from this dark period by 2001, when she returned to FE as director of research for the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) for Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.
She became acting director for two years from 2003 and permanent area director for Stoke and Staffordshire LSC in 2006.
She says: “I really loved that job, but after Gordon Brown created two separate departments for our sector, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Education, it was obvious the power of the local LSC offices had gone, as the very notion of a council for both learning and skills no longer applied.
“I moved briefly to the LSC’s national office in 2010, but was looking to move on.
“I kept bumping into Lynne Sedgmore [executive director of the 157 Group] at meetings. She was one of those people who made me think ‘that’s where it’s going to happen’ and I was lucky enough to be able to move to the 157 Group in 2011.”
Doubleday, who still lives in Oxford, started-off as shared services manager and became deputy executive director in 2012.
She says: “I love it. Education is so important and FE is the cog in the middle that turns everything else.
“To have a job that helps turn that cog a little bit just makes me think ‘what a bloody privilege’.”
The person on the rail platform who waves the flag and blows the whistle to say the train can go
What do you do to switch off from work?
I have been learning to be a silversmith through FE courses for the last three years and can make my own jewellery. I also sing with my local choral society
If you could invite anyone, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would it be?
Eddie Izzard, [scientist] Brian Cox, pianist Helen Grimaud and my brother, Paul
As employers take greater ownership of the skills agenda, it’s important to remember the qualifications of apprentices remain relevant to the sector — not just their boss’s immediate workplace needs, says Scott Waddington.
Privately-educated pupils have been warned by Girls’ School Association president Hilary French they can no longer afford to be ‘sniffy’ about apprenticeships, while MI5 and MI6 are set to recruit up to 100 apprentices in the coming year.
Chancellor George Osborne also declared recently that 20,000 new apprenticeships were to be funded over the course of the next year, and as a whole the public perception of apprenticeships has been cast in a whole new light.
At government level there has never been a greater focus on increasing the number, range and quality of apprenticeships on offer, and young talent in the UK is becoming increasingly attracted to vocational.
So as its popularity continues to rise, can the apprenticeship truly begin to rival its academic counterparts?
Industry chiefs have long maintained vocational qualifications can help address those challenges currently faced by the UK economy, and we do seem to be witnessing the first shift in perceptions required to make this a reality.
Ever more employers and educationalists are recognising the merits vocational qualifications can bring to both the organisation and the individual, while statements like those from Girls’ School Association President Ms French would support the notion that this is beginning to play out at grass roots level too.
Might this restrict the scope of the training and in turn the ability of the trainee to work elsewhere in their field, should they wish to?
As more and more prestigious organisations including GCHQ look to vocational pathways to fulfil their own skills gaps, both now and in the future, the profile of apprenticeships is no doubt set to rise further in 2014 and beyond as a result.
This is partly due to the ongoing drive to create greater investment incentives in apprenticeship training from the employer’s perspective, and MI5 will surely be great ambassadors in encouraging others to engage in similar schemes.
But there is another factor that must be taken into account during the transition, and that is the need for ongoing collaboration between employers and government to ensure the quality of training is maintained throughout this process.
Employers and training providers alike must make sure qualifications remain rigorous and comprehensive in relation to the learner’s chosen field, and are not there simply to meet the particular requirements of a candidate’s employer.
As the popularity of alternative apprenticeship formats increases, this must not get lost in the transition.
If the sole focus is on the company involved, might this restrict the scope of the training and in turn the ability of the trainee to work elsewhere in their field, should they wish to?
Apprenticeships must indeed be held in higher esteem and preserving their quality and scope will prove essential if we are to build on the prestige created in association with the likes of GCHQ.
A balanced and continuous exchange between employer and training provider can only support the rising profile of apprenticeships further and support parity of regard between vocational and academic qualifications moving forward.
In Wales, this is achieved through the stringent regulation of providers operating collaboratively to ensure qualifications available are both industry relevant, and provide young people with as comprehensive and wide a skillset as possible.
The UK Commission’s 2012 Employer Perspectives Survey shows us that employers in Wales have the highest uptake of vocational qualifications out of all the four home nations, but there is no room for complacency yet.
The expansion of opportunities for employers to recruit young people through apprenticeships is indeed transforming the way in which businesses are acquiring and developing the skills they need.
This must, however, be supported by a collaborative approach and a unified mindset — both from the employer’s and the learner’s perspective.
Scott Waddington, Wales commissioner for UK Commission for Employment and Skills, and chief executive of SA Brain
The spotlight of Ofsted attention shone for the first time on prison education with the watchdog’s latest annual report — and it didn’t make for positive reading. Alexandra Marks looks at what’s going wrong behind locked doors.
It was a challenging year for prison education that saw the new Offender Learning and Skills Service contract (OLASS 4) affect key skills, arts and distance learning.
Regime changes within many prisons in 2013 also caused many prisoners to spend less time doing activities, and the government announced proposals for new types of institutions such as resettlement and super prisons.
In its annual speech, Ofsted cast its eye over prison education for the first time. Matthew Coffey, the education watchdog’s director of FE and skills, said that only 35 per cent of prison education departments were judged to be “good”, which would cause a “national outcry” had the figures applied to schools.
After prison inspection results showed that the quality and quantity of purposeful activity in prisons was the worst for six years, Ofsted’s annual report, revealed that prison learning came bottom in the whole FE sector.
Accountability for the quality of learning provision is weak, but can be addressed by greater leadership from prison governors and senior staff
Is that surprising, you might think? After all, why should prisoners receive a standard of learning better or equivalent to that in the community?
The answer is that this issue affects us all. Reoffending rates are currently 58.5 per cent for people serving sentences of less than a year, the annual cost of the crime committed by former prisoners is up to £13bn, yet £37,648 per year per prisoner has been spent on their custody. The Chief Inspector of Prisons and the Chief Inspector of Probation said only last month that efforts to stop reoffending are not working.
The Prisoner Learning Alliance (PLA), formed by 17 expert member organisations to improve learning in prison. The group was established by the charity Prisoners Education Trust in November 2012 and members include the Black Training and Enterprise Group (BTEG), the Institute for Learning, Prison Radio Association, the Association of Employment and Learning Providers and Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations (OCR).
The PLA’s new report, Smart Rehabilitation, evidences its vision of putting learning at the heart of rehabilitation in prisons, and includes recommendations for achieving it.
Accountability for the quality of learning provision is weak, but can be addressed by greater leadership from prison governors and senior staff to prioritise a wide range of learning, encompassing everything from relationship skills to higher education.
As insufficient numbers of prisoners are actually undertaking any form of education, we would like to see a prison culture that engages people with interesting, personalised and inclusive learning plans.
Once a prisoner begins learning, mechanisms in prison must enable them to progress and achieve their true potential. Communal areas, such as education departments, can be hotspots for tension in a prison and therefore staff must be supported in behaviour management to make classrooms safer for teachers and learners alike.
Beyond this, teachers should be supported to develop professionally. Achieving excellence requires a commitment from prison staff, education providers and volunteers.
We are concerned that the Ministry of Justice’s plans for transforming rehabilitation in 2014 will not work unless prisoners are supported to use their time constructively to develop the attitudes, skills and knowledge that will enable them to play a positive role in society.
Our report offers practical guidance for both prisons and the UK Government’s efforts to become more joined up, ensuring that prisoners have a successful learning journey throughout their time in custody and after release and thus, in turn, reducing reoffending.
Just over half of all providers in England were not paid for all the work they carried out last academic year, leaving some providers “very disappointed”.
The Funding Year Values released by the Skills Funding Agency last month showed 51 per cent (514) of the 1015 providers included were paid less than the value of their total 2012/13 adult skills budget (ASB) delivery.
We are very disappointed that our over delivery will not be funded.”
It is the second year that the Funding Year Values have been published, revealing a total underpayment of £61.8m — a stark contrast to the £91m total overpayment to providers last year, as reported at the time in FE Week.
However, the agency insisted it had provided funding according to its allocation this year.
London’s City Lit was paid £2.2m less than the £8.7m-worth of learning it delivered.
Meanwhile, Derby College went unfunded for 10 per cent (£1.8m) of its £18.5m-worth of provision
Derby College chief executive Mandie Stravino told FE Week: “We are very disappointed that our over delivery will not be funded.
“We have met the needs of our local businesses and our wider community… and feel strongly that this should be recognised financially, as in previous years.”
She added although the “agency’s departure from funding over-delivery” was not expected to cause job losses, it would result in reduced adult delivery and impact upon learners with additional learning support needs.
The same figures reveal 10 per cent of providers (104) received more cash than the value of training they delivered.
An agency spokesperson said: “We have funded all delivery up to the allocation awarded to colleges for 2012/13 and in addition we have funded all adult apprenticeship delivery.
“Instances where funding has been paid in excess of the allocation is due to the agency paying additional funds for learner support and adult apprenticeships.”
No one from the agency was available to clarify why such “additional learner support and adult apprenticeships” provision was not included in the providers’ delivery figures.
The most striking example of overpayment was LeSoCo, which was paid more than £3.3m (15 per cent) over what it delivered.
It comes in addition to the £2.2m in 2011/12 reported by FE Week in January last year, making a total over-payment of £5.6m in the last two years.
An agency spokesperson said: “To ensure the interests of learners and employers were protected, the agency at the time agreed to remove the college from the normal year end rules [during merger of Lewisham College and Southwark College]. This was for the academic years 2011/12 and 2012/13.”
A college spokesperson said the arrangement was “in recognition that it would be very difficult to achieve the funding targets in the first year after the merger”.
A City Lit spokesperson said the agency had paid the college’s full allocation, adding: “We don’t expect to be paid for over performance on classroom-based learning unless they have an underspend issue nationally.”
A spokesperson for Learndirect, which was underfunded by £1,437,766, said: “Due to the economic circumstances in 12/13 we saw high demand for our services which exceeded our allocated funding.”
A small number of providers were excluded from the figures as the agency was “still finalising their final 2012/13 position”.
The government unveiled plans for a new level three qualification to keep young people studying maths until 18, but sector bodies have expressed concerns over funding.
The Association of Colleges (AoC) and the Sixth Form Colleges Association (SFCA) welcomed the aims of government proposals published last week to introduce a “core maths” qualification targeted at the 200,000 students a year who achieve C or above at GCSE but who do not take maths A-level.
However, SFCA deputy chief executive James Kewin (pictured top) challenged the government to “match its ambition for curriculum reform with the funding required to deliver it”.
Core maths would sit alongside students’ main 16 to 18 study, according to the Department for Education (DfE) policy statement.
It is expected to be half the size of an A-level, preparing students for employment and study where maths is not the sole focus, but a basic level of numeracy is required.
The DfE document said: “One of the main reasons for introducing new qualifications is to address the 16 to 18 ‘maths gap’, whereby students often forget the maths they have learnt previously.”
The announcement comes just four months after an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report found England was the only country where older generations had higher proficiency in numeracy than young adults.
Mr Kewin said: “We share the government’s ambition for more young people to study maths to an advanced level. But if the stated ambition for introducing these new qualifications is to address the 16 to 18 ‘maths gap’, the government would be well advised to first address the 16 to 18 ‘funding gap’ — the plans for these new qualifications were unveiled shortly after the third cut to sixth form funding in three years.”
He said cuts had already led to fewer sixth form colleges offering further maths.
Joy Mercer (pictured below), AoC policy director, said the move toward’s new maths qualification was “welcome”.
But, she added: “Sixth form and FE colleges will need to employ more teachers to meet demand for these courses.
“The DfE identified earlier this year that 1,200 additional teachers are necessary to teach GCSE level after the age of 16. Colleges tell us they are struggling to recruit and when this higher level maths qualification is introduced it will be even more difficult.”
The DfE proposal added that new performance measures could recognise the proportion of students gaining level three maths qualifications.
Ms Mercer said: “AoC cannot understand why this would be a separate accountability measure in performance tables as take-up will be affected by how well it is received by employers and higher education, not by performance tables.”
The qualification technical guidance is due to be published in March, with the qualifications widely available from September 2015.
One of London’s largest FE colleges, and a former outstanding one, has crashed to a grade four Ofsted rating.
LeSoCo, a 17,600-learner college in South London, has been graded inadequate after its latest inspection, less than two months ago.
While we fully accept the need for improvements in some areas of our teaching and learning provision, we do not recognise the grading of the college as inadequate and will appeal,”
The education watchdog’s report criticised poor teaching in engineering and foundation English and maths, as well failing to get enough apprentices through their training on time.
Among the criticisms was that the “teaching of functional skills is inadequate. In most subject areas teachers do not use the results from the initial assessment to inform the planning of learning”.
It is not yet known if the outcome is bad enough to prompt a visit from FE Commissioner David Collins, however, the college, which has a current Skills Funding Agency allocation of £26.2m, could be facing the boot from high-performing colleges’ body, the 157 Group.
Principal Maxine Room told FE Week she “did not” recognise the grading and would appeal. “While we fully accept the need for improvements in some areas of our teaching and learning provision, we do not recognise the grading of the college as inadequate and will appeal,” she said.
The college was formed of a merger in 2012 between Lewisham College — rated outstanding in 2006, before dropping to satisfactory (a grade three and now termed ‘requires improvement’) in 2012 — and Southwark College, which was graded inadequate in December 2011.
However, Ofsted said the college management of the merger had been a strength, but it nevertheless got a grade four result overall and also in the teaching, learning and assessment headline field. It was deemed to require improvement on outcomes for learners and leadership and management.
The Ofsted report said: “Staff do not set learning targets for learners or track their progress effectively. Tutorials are often unproductive [and] many learners cannot
recall when they last received a tutorial, when they were given individual targets relating to their qualification, or when they had a discussion about issues such as attendance.”
Ms Room said she was “devastated” by the outcome of the inspection and criticised the way the report appeared to let poor performance in English and maths bring down the college’s overall rating. “If you look at the proportionality of the grading, 80 per cent of the provision was grade two, and 20 per cent was grade three and four,” she said.
“The weighting on English and maths has overweighed the rest of the provision, and that is what we think is unfair.” Ms Room also said the college had a post-inspection action plan in place and that a number of visiting tutors had been removed in the past year because of poor performance.
But, she said, it was “not the time to talk about blame” and she had “no intention” of resigning. Nevertheless, she also criticised Ofsted for failing to keep the college informed about the outcome of the inspection.
Ofsted said it took complaints seriously, but would not comment on individual cases.
Lynne Sedgmore, 157 Group executive director, said it was too early to comment on LeSoCo’s future membership of the group, but said she was “surprised and disappointed” by the report.
A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills declined to comment on whether the FE Commissioner, who was appointed as a troubleshooter for failing colleges, would be sent into LeSoCo.
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Another week, another college crashes to a grade four inspection result.
It would be wrong to ignore the fact we’re seeing more outstanding colleges, but worryingly we’re also seeing former grade ones falling to inadequate.
We’ve seen Liverpool and Stockport stumble, and Bristol became a grade four having previously been good. Now we have LeSoCo, too.
Is there a trend? It’s certainly the case that in each college Ofsted saw extreme shortcomings on teaching, learning and assessment.
Perhaps this is the truly shocking part of all this — that any college should get an inadequate grading on what is essentially a bread-and-butter task.
But what exactly has been changing at these colleges? An obvious question surrounds size — are they too big? Or maybe there are growing challenges presented by the city environment?
Certainly London has an issue, as Ofsted conceded in FE Week last year, and the LeSoCo result adds further fuel to that fire.
It would be unfair to say Skills Minister Matthew Hancock is reluctant to act having created the office of the FE Commissioner (although to learn there’s even a possibility David Collins may not be sent in to LeSoCo seems somewhat a dereliction of duty).
Investigation is needed to get under the bonnet to find out if there is a common, and hopefully rectifiable, denominator in all or just a few of these crashing colleges.
Members of the Education Select Committee could probe controversial government plans to cut funding for full-time education for 18-year-olds.
Committee member Pat Glass said she would be calling for an inquiry into proposals to fund 18–year-olds by 17.5 per cent less than 16 and 17-year-olds.
It comes as she and fellow committee members await an impact assessment on the funding rate cut that was promised in mid-December by Education Secretary Michael Gove.
And House of Commons education questions on Monday, January 6, saw Skills Minister Matthew Hancock come in for tough questioning on the matter — and the issue of the impact assessment was raised.
Ms Glass told FE Week: “The 18+ funding was the main topic of conversation, raised by loads of Labour MPs, me included, and the impact assessment was promised but no date given.
“I intend to talk to Graham Stuart [Education Select Committee chair] and suggest the committee does a short inquiry just into cuts to 18+ funding — keeping it short and limited.”
Labour’s Clive Eltham was one of the MPs to question Mr Hancock in the Commons, saying: “The Association of Colleges has said that young people from disadvantaged areas and black and minority ethnic groups will be hardest hit by the cut of 17.5 per cent in the funding for 18-year-olds.
“That is borne out by the assessment that has been carried out by my local college, Greenwich Community College. Why have the government not issued an impact assessment on this proposal, given the severe impact that it will have on disadvantaged groups?”
Mr Hancock told MPs that he had seen the impact assessment and that its findings would provide reassurance about the funding rate cut.
He said: “This is a difficult decision and not one that we will take lightly, but the alternatives are also difficult, and 18-year-olds have already had two years of study post 16 and, indeed, they often study for fewer hours than 16 to 17-year-olds.”
He added: “We will publish the impact assessment very soon.”
But Eddie Playfair, principal of Newham Sixth Form College in East London, told FE Week that he remained sceptical.
He said the proposals as they stand would affect 550 of his learners in 2014/15, creating a financial impact of just over £500,000, around 3 per cent of the college’s £16m budget.
Mr Playfair said: “We are all looking forward to reading the impact assessment because evidence suggests that disadvantaged students will be hit harder.
“In a sense the very fact that it will be third year students who will be hit is worrying because they are more disadvantaged as low achievers.
“The second point Mr Hancock made about these students needing fewer hours is something I just do not understand. They are doing exactly the same courses, sitting in exactly the same classes. They are exactly the same as their peers so this is just a funding cut.”
Meanwhile, in response to a written question from Shadow Junior Education Minister Rushanara Ali about a lack of consultation on the funding rate cut, Mr Hancock said: “We wanted to inform colleges and schools of the decision as soon as possible, to support planning for the 2014/15 academic year.
“It has been standard practice under various governments not to consult on funding rates.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Education said there was no date for the release of the impact assessment, but said it would be put online after the select committee had seen it.
