My daughter Ornella is 18 and “educated one year below her chronological year group”. She has been in desperate need of support despite having been assessed for an education, health and care plan (EHCP) at the age of 9 and being granted one two years later.
When Ornella was 4, chickenpox left her with complex chronic health issues. Ever since, because she has had over twenty operations, long hospital stays, a life-threatening septic shock, multiple heart attacks and a prolonged coma, her health needs have had an increasingly detrimental impact on her learning.
I am her full-time carer. I have put my career on hold to look after her for the past 14 years, spent all my savings on private tutoring to make up for the lack of EHCP implementation, and had to become her teacher too for years at a time. I am exhausted. I suffer from PTSD from fighting constantly for the support she is entitled to.
Despite regular requests for annual reviews, we have been consistently ignored by school and local authority alike, year in and year out. This means that for six years Ornella was vaguely educated at home by tutors with variable academic abilities and no training or experience in learning needs.
We once received a letter of apology from a SEN team manager, promising new behaviours. For the first time, the LA provided intensive and costly tutoring to make up for missed learning opportunities leading up to her GCSEs. It lasted two months. Nothing else has been offered since.
Ornella is now at college, not only bearing the brunt of years of inadequate provision but also of unfathomable backlogs in specialist assessments. Cruelly, even when she finally managed to get assessed by CAHMS neuropsychiatrists as requested by the LA to document the aftermath of her coma seven years ago, the LA then employed more delaying tactics by refusing to incorporate her brain injury diagnosis into her EHCP, making for a mockery of it altogether.
The EHCP had become an obstacle to my daughter’s learning
Her educational needs have been heavily documented over 15 years, yet repeatedly ignored. The LA has consistently failed in its legal duties under the Children and Families Act, SEND Code of Practice and the Equality Act. We have just had an emergency annual review, but we are fast approaching A Level exams season and Ornella is still nowhere near accessing specialist support.
As a result, she has now disengaged from attending college and I find myself teaching her all over again. Her EHCP has actually compromised my ability to be her full-time carer because my precious time has been wasted on jumping through administrative hoops instead. I often wonder whether we wouldn’t have been better off not having one at all.
This is echoed by her college leaders who find themselves also wasting their time on the LA’s administrative blunders instead of spending it teaching. It is as if the EHCP had become an obstacle to her learning, and the whole sorry process is surely more expensive than delivering the support Ornella needed in the first place.
What it has done is made me a fighter. That and the PTSD might mean I and parents in my position present as challenging when we meet a new educational provider and have to start again from square one. Please bear that in mind.
But also, please join the fight. We are long past the point of needing urgent national and local policy changes. Parents like me need leaders like you to go beyond the battle for each individual learner like Ornella and demand systemic change.
We need simplified EHCPs, consistent over time and across the country, a digitised system that notifies all stakeholders when EHCPs are due for review, and proper accountability for spending and implementation. We need EHCP case officers who are qualified, trained, regulated and paid as professionals. And we need much more thought given to transitions.
I am now taking our case to tribunal, but I am not hopeful. In fact, the backlog plays in the LA’s favour because by the time a judgment is reached, many young people are likely to have left education anyway.
That might be the case for Ornella, but I am determined that it shouldn’t be the case for anyone else. If the LA think I’m going away, they are badly mistaken. Will you help?
Fifty-one colleges and universities have won a share of a £12 million funding pot designed to expand degree apprenticeships.
The Office for Students (OfS) has today released the names of ten colleges and 41 universities that have been awarded funding from wave one of its £40 million degree apprenticeships fund launched in September.
Bidders for this wave had to be able to demonstrate they could deliver projects that could increase starts and improve the diversity of their degree apprentice recruits. Funding must be spent by the end of July 2024.
Of the £16 million that was made available for this round, just under £12 million was awarded in total and 51 of 69 bids submitted were successful.
Liverpool John Moores University scored the most cash, winning £1 million to boost its intake across 10 apprenticeships including police constable, chartered manager, transport planner and registered nurse.
Further education colleges that won the most funding were Weston College (£272,000), DN Colleges Group (£211,600) and Gloucestershire College (£203,000).
The University of the West of England was awarded £175,624 for role model and employer outreach projects aiming to enrol more women on its aerospace, civil engineering, building services design and manufacturing engineering degree apprenticeships.
Funding awarded to Bournemouth University has been committed to creating a new route for under-represented students to its nursing and operating department practitioner degree apprenticeships.
Weston College will spend its funding on expanding four degree apprenticeships including digital user experience professional, project manager, registered nurse and digital and technology solutions professional.
Exeter College has been awarded £68,227 for its data scientist degree apprenticeships while Abingdon and Witney College bagged £93,771 for its chartered manager apprenticeships.
John Blake, director for fair access and participation at the OfS, said: “We set universities and colleges a challenge to deliver an extensive range of degree apprenticeships that students from all backgrounds could access. They responded with a wide range of innovative and ambitious bids.”
The OfS launched the fund in September to increase the number of providers delivering degree apprenticeships as well as increasing overall numbers and improving diversity.
It said at the time that the “relatively small proportion” of registered higher education providers offering degree apprenticeships, as well as “uneven and slow” concentrated in a small number of providers, were “market failures.”
Robert Halfon
The fund seeks to support projects that target students who are least likely to access higher education.
This comes as evidence from organisations such as the Sutton Trust found that degree apprenticeships were more socially exclusive than traditional university university courses.
Skills minister Robert Halfon said he is “delighted that the institutions awarded a portion of this £40 million will not only be expanding the number of degree apprenticeships offered but have also demonstrated their commitment to boosting access and participation and prioritising equality of opportunity.”
Future waves
The remaining OfS funding will be awarded across two further waves.
Bids for wave two closed in December but the winners have not yet been announced.
Providers funded under waves two and three will have more time to deliver results. Activities funded under these waves must conclude by the end of July 2025.
Providers new to the degree apprenticeship market were ineligible to bid for wave one funding but were eligible for wave two and will be eligible for wave three.
Applications for wave three will open this spring and are expected to close in June.
Teachers at London’s largest college group have launched an eight-day strike amid a dispute over pay and working conditions.
Members of the University and College Union (UCU) at Capital City College Group (CCCG) walked out yesterday across London’s biggest college group’s four sites across the city.
Negotiations have broken down over the college’s offer of a pay award between 4 per cent and 6.5 per cent, beginning from January 1 this year.
The union says the offer goes against the Association of Colleges recommendation last September of a 6.5 per cent pay award from the start of the 2023/24 academic year.
Staff are also disputing the working conditions such as workload as well as a maximum class size of 20 to 22 students as opposed to classes of up to 30 students, as some workers report.
They are also demanding an agreement of 36 teaching weeks per year.
College workers will walk out from January 16 to 18, and the entire week beginning January 22 – during a busy period for exams and during the first few weeks of new CEO Angela Joyce’s tenure.
The strike will impact the group’s sites in Enfield, Camden, Finsbury Park and Westminster.
The staged walkout is not new for the large college group. In 2021, staff walked out for 10 days and settled on a one-off payment and notified monitoring of teaching.
Before the end of the 2021/22 academic year, staff then agreed to a 9 per cent pay rise for those earning under £30k, and 6 per cent for those earning between £30k and £45k, beginning August 2022.
UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: “Our members are being forced to take sustained strike action because CCCG would rather see its staff use foodbanks than make an acceptable offer.
“We have reached deals at 60 colleges, but CCCG is shamefully holding out and refusing to negotiate. It urgently needs to get back to the table, recognise that staff need decent pay, and settle this dispute.”
A Capital City College Group spokesperson said: “The 2023/24 pay award for all CCCG staff ranged from 4 per cent to 9 per cent, with part of the award unconsolidated and the larger part consolidated. This action is primarily linked to workload, namely class sizes and the number of teaching weeks. We hope UCU will work more constructively with us to resolve these matters.”
A college for disadvantaged adults has returned to a ‘good’ Ofsted rating just a year after it was downgraded to ‘inadequate’.
Ruskin College was last year accused of safeguarding failures after inspectors claimed leaders were unaware of the “significant personal challenges that some vulnerable adults faced while in their care” and were “unable to help staff keep these learners safe”.
But since then, leaders have “monitored improvements to ensure that safeguarding is effective and ensure that learners’ well-being is also supported effectively”, a follow-up full inspection report for the college published today said.
Inspectors found that staff are provided with “essential training” in safeguarding and found that learners feel safe at college and “know how to protect themselves from radicalisation and extremist views”.
Learners “appreciate the welcoming and supportive environment that staff create”.
The college, which was teaching 326 adults at the time of the latest inspection in November, is now deemed ‘good’ in every category judged by Ofsted.
The result is the latest improvement success for Oxford-based Ruskin College, founded in 1899, which designs its courses for local residents furthest from the labour market, those who are socially isolated and those seeking a second chance at education.
Ruskin had its financial notice to improve lifted by the government in March 2023 almost 10 years after the notice was first served.
The college’s former principal was fired in 2021 following a significant funding clawback, and the college was forced into a last-minute merger with the University of West London (UWL) later that year.
Last year FE Commissioner Shelagh Legrave praised “important progress” in improving the college’s financial performance after years of decline and contraction – mainly caused by falling student numbers.
While “challenges remain to grow FE provision to make best use of the funding available for the benefit of students and to secure sustainability”, there is now a “clear educational vision for the college”, Legrave’s report said.
Today’s Ofsted report said most learners “value the inclusive culture that staff create” and all students “develop new knowledge and skills that are essential to their personal and professional lives”.
Staff were praised for being “highly qualified, experienced and passionate about their subjects”, while leaders and trustees are “increasingly well informed about the quality of provision, which enables them to evaluate and drive improvement”.
A UWL spokesperson said: “UWL is delighted with the continuing and considerable progress since UWL acquired Ruskin College to secure its future in 2021. We are committed to ensuring the highest standards in all aspects of the college’s performance, and we are very pleased to have had this recognised by Ofsted and the FE Commissioner alike.”
The government is seeking a “small” number of colleges to pilot simplifications to funding, audit and reporting in the next academic year.
A one-year trial set to run in 2024/25 will aim to reduce complexities by removing “several” funding rules and “some” ringfences within adult and 16 to 19 funding streams, the Department for Education said today without providing exact detail.
Colleges involved in the pilot will also be allowed to deliver skills bootcamps without the need to bid for funding through procurements and those with existing skills bootcamps contracts may be able to access additional funding.
The pilot is part of the DfE’s wider reforms to simplify FE funding and accountability, which involves merging several adult skills budgets into a single skills fund in 2024/25.
The DfE said the pilot will help to improve how the department “deliver adult skills funding to improve predictability”.
It will also “capitalise on the reduced funding rules and ringfences to simplify how we audit and assure FE funding as well as simplify back-end data processing”.
The DfE added that it will develop options with a view to test several simplifications for apprenticeships, which could “include simplifying onboarding, testing new funding approaches and streamlining end point assessment processes”.
There is a separate apprenticeship “expert” provider project currently ongoing to test ways to reduce time and resource spent aiding small employers through the apprenticeship system, learning from which will be shared “where appropriate” with the college simplification pilot.
The DfE said it will work with colleges selected for the pilot to finalise the proposals that will be tested from August 2024.
The pilot is only for general further education colleges because they “deliver the widest range of provision types and therefore are subjected to the most complexity”.
Proposals in the pilot will not impact funding that colleges receive from authorities with devolution deals for adult skills funding, the DfE said, adding that colleges in regions with devolved responsibilities for adult skills are still eligible to apply.
Those selected must be willing to increase their delivery of government “priority” schemes – such as apprenticeships and bootcamps, make a “reasonable” commitment to working with the DfE both before, during and after the pilot through regular workshops and meetings, and be “willing to complete relevant evaluation processes and requirements for the pilot”.
An expression of interest window will close on January 31, with decisions communicated to bidders in February.
From this point the colleges will work with DfE officials to finalise the exact funding rule changes and other simplification proposals ahead of the rollout in August 2024.
The Department for Education will publish detailed plans on meeting its sustainability targets following pressure from a committee of MPs.
In a letter to the House of Commons’ environmental audit committee (EAC) in December, published today, Baroness Barran, the DfE’s minister for the school system and student finance, defended the department’s record on safeguarding the education estate from the effects of climate change such as flooding, overheating and water scarcity.
This comes in response to criticism from the committee late last year, which said the department’s school rebuilding programme was behind schedule and that the risks facing schools and colleges were “not adequately understood” by education leaders.
The EAC has been conducting an inquiry into the environmental sustainability of the DfE.
Barran said the DfE is expecting its sustainability leadership hub to go live by May this year, which it says will “meet the strategic commitment for all settings to have a climate action plan in place by 2025.”
She added that the government was also funding a climate ambassador network, to be announced by the end of December 2023. The network has not yet been announced, however.
The committee revealed concerns that just 20 per cent of the school estate in England would be net zero compliant by 2050 under the department’s current plans.
“This is a significant worry when education is currently the largest emitter of carbon from buildings in the public sector,” said EAC chair Philip Dunne. “For the whole of the UK to meet net zero, the education sector in England must make swifter progress on decarbonisation.”
In Barran’s response, she said: “We agree in principle with the Committee’s recommendation that the department should publish a detailed roadmap to achieving our sustainability targets – we aim to do so by Autumn 2024.”
Dunne welcomed the DfE’s response that it will publish a roadmap this Autumn.
“This will be an invaluable resource, allowing the Department to set out in detail the challenge ahead and giving ministers sufficient visibility of the urgent case for significant additional funding for this large element of the public buildings estate,” he added.
The department was urged to commit “adequate funding” to its climate action plans or “the education estate will remain at significant risk of flooding, overheating and water scarcity.”
The EAC urged DfE to publish a realistic and fully costed plan for its sustainability strategy targets as “a matter of urgency”.
“The plan must set out how issues such as student safety, the remediation of buildings containing RAAC and the mitigation of flood risk can be addressed alongside sustainability improvements,” the committee said.
Barran added that it is testing retrofitting across the education estate and has launched pilots to “put us in the best place to understand the funding required”.
She also re-committed to launch a risk framework for colleges, schools and nurseries this month and use the data to publish a full climate risk assessment of the education estate in January 2025.
A “rogue” apprenticeship provider boss has received a six-year director’s ban for failing to explain £3.5 million worth of spending, most of which was public funding.
Shakar Habib, 28, from Newham, London, was the sole director of Vista Training Solutions Limited, which since 2011 worked as a subcontractor to deliver apprenticeship training before landing its own direct contract in 2018.
The provider was found making ‘reasonable progress’ by Ofsted in an early monitoring visit later that year when Vista was training 129 apprentices, mainly in ICT.
But the firm went bust in 2020 following an Education and Skills Funding Agency investigation into its use of taxpayer funding for apprenticeships.
The ESFA last year made a claim of £2.5 million against Vista during the liquidation, and the government’s Insolvency Service has now said Habib could not account for nearly £3.5 million from the company’s accounts.
Investigators discovered that Habib had failed to keep adequate company accounts – a legal obligation for company directors – and that records from April 2019 onwards were missing.
They were therefore unable to verify whether £3.5 million of payments from the company’s bank accounts during its final year of trading were legitimate company expenses.
The company’s liquidator – FRP Advisory Trading Limited – was also unable to account for £525,000 in assets due to lack of financial records.
A statement from the Insolvency Service said the ESFA continues to work with the Insolvency Practitioner to support their investigations for potential recovery of money – but the latest statement of receipts and payments from the liquidator admits it is “unlikely” that there will be sufficient funds available to pay unsecured creditors.
Habib has now been banned from being a director of a company until November 20, 2029. It prevents him from becoming involved in the promotion, formation or management of a company, without the permission of the court.
Marc Symons, deputy head of investigations at the Insolvency Service, said: “Shakar Habib disregarded his legal duty to keep accounting records. But thanks to the joint working between ESFA and the Insolvency Service, he has been removed from the corporate arena for a substantial period.
“His ban should be a stark warning to other rogue directors that we will act to protect the public from those who abuse taxpayers’ money.”
Andrew Thomas, director of finance and provider market oversight in the ESFA, said: “This successful outcome demonstrates that ESFA will take robust action and work with regulatory partners across government to hold individuals and organisations to account.”
Rachel Bown was crowned the FE lecturer of the year at the 2023 Pearson National Teaching awards for the inspirational PE teaching she does at her small specialist college, Fairfield Farm in Wiltshire.
But Bown is inspiring not just for her teaching.
After a brain tumour left her blind in one eye and at one point fighting for survival, she went on to win an international medal as a triathlete and broke a Guinness World Record as a marathon runner – while dressed as a happy hippo.
Bown also makes ends meet as a part-time celebrant, which involves writing funeral eulogies celebrating the lifetime achievements of others.
In the photographs of Bown winning the European triathlon championships for her age (40 to 44) in 2012, which she won “by a second”, she wears a look of fierce determination.
These days, it feels “weird” for her to see those pictures knowing there was a “big fat tumour” sat in her head that she had no idea about. She had been having problems with her vision and headaches, but doctors put that down to her strict training schedule. A year later, at the age of 44, she was diagnosed with three brain tumours.
That same fierce determination which brought her to the winning podium has been needed in spades since.
Rachel Bown winning the European Triathlon Championships
Teaching in a dinner hall
When Bown was announced the winner of the Pearson national teaching award in November, she was proud of having won for her “little college in a village” where she teaches “in a dinner hall”.
She was also “a bit shy” about the accolade.
“I didn’t want other people to think that I thought it made me better than them, because I don’t think that,” she says. When she looks around her staff room, she knows “everybody here works really, really hard”. But her job is “slightly different” to theirs, so she has been able to “make it my own”.
“I don’t just teach PE – I do a lot of other things. That’s what made it a winning application.”
But Bown says she doesn’t teach sport, but “what you can learn through sport”.
For example, she teaches counting and tallying skills by recording step-ups.
She has also personalised PE experiences for pupils by setting up individual goals, and customising life skill sessions.
Since Bown introduced PE to the college in 2016, it has “progressed year on year” and now boasts a leadership in sport pathway, two annual county mass participation events, a multi-sports day, and football matches.
Rachel Bown scooping FE lecturer of the year award
Competitive streak
Football was Bown’s first love. She would spend hours on end playing “keepie uppy” with her boy mates as a kid. Her parents “never had a sporty bone in their bodies”, and she puts her sporting drive down to her grandfather. He was “very sporty” and even aged five, “never let me win”. When she did eventually beat him at games, he would never let her play with him again.
“It made me highly competitive. I always strived to win, however many times I’d lose.”
Bown went on to play football for her Cardiff University team while studying for a human movement degree, then later for both the Somerset and Wiltshire county teams and the Southwest Regional team.
She therefore feels incensed when she hears it said that women’s football in England is a relatively recent phenomenon. “There was a different generation truly pushing football forward for girls, to allow the Lionesses to be who they are.”
When she hit 40 in 2010, Bown retired from football to concentrate on triathlon, and “to see how good I could be”. But more on that later.
Rachel Bown as a kid
School teaching
Very early in her career she realised that she was naturally attracted to working with disaffected kids and they with her as she listened to them.
She realised in her next role, in a Bristol city school, that she was “naturally attracted to working with disaffected kids”, and they with her, “because I listened to them”.
Bown would often provide cover at the school’s internal exclusion centre, where she found the same years 10 and 11 girls were always being sent.
After sparking their curiosity about football, Bown offered to set up a football lunch club for them – on the condition they turned up to lessons on time. The deal worked, and Bown even arranged for a local club to play a match against them on Saturdays.
“Lots of members of staff said, you’ll never get those girls here on a Saturday morning. They all turned up and got thrashed. They didn’t care because someone had taken care of them and shown them they could be something more than just the trouble that they were seen as.
“That’s where mainstream schools get it wrong. It’s all about competitive sport, which is why so many kids switch off to PE.”
Her next job, at a school for boys with emotional difficulties, became “the key” to her career. She was “spat at, kicked, and called all the names possible”, but “also felt the loyalty” of those boys.
“I loved unlocking them … once you’d really found out about them, they’d do anything for you.”
Bown became a senior leader at a similar school and was on the pipeline for headship, but realised she preferred “being with the kids on the ground and seeing them achieve”.
She has spent the last seven years at Fairfield College, where her salary as a qualified FE teacher is “two-thirds” what she used to make in schools.
She can only continue in the role because of the extra money she earns as a celebrant. She questions why she and other special needs teachers in FE should not be fairly rewarded.
“I want to stay at the college – I love the students, I’ve got a lot of autonomy and feel valued.” But that means she must work “really hard” in two jobs, including through the Christmas holidays.
Rachel Bown in her footballing days
When the world changed
Bown can remember “very vividly” the day the doctor called after she had her brain scans. She was about to go for a run. He asked her if she was on her own, and Bown said yes.
A phone call wasn’t ideal, but the doctor needed to stop Bown from driving and exercising straight away. She had three brain tumours, including one behind her eye which needed operating on as a priority.
“The world spun, I just remember being in a trance. It’s as if you’re looking in on yourself, it’s a very strange feeling. My world had changed but nothing had changed for anybody else.”
Telling her parents was the worst moment. “I remember not sleeping, not wanting to eat, and just being a mess.” At her ex-partner’s house, she recalls excusing herself to use the toilet and waking up four hours later in a bed upstairs. “I was just exhausted.”
Rachel Bown after her operation
Operations
Whereas many people with multiple brain tumours must wait a while before surgeons will operate, Bown believes that her operation was prioritised because her specialist “knew I’d make the most of my health”.
She was “excited” before her 12-and-a-half-hour-long operation began because it signalled “the start of getting well”. She discussed with her specialist the “deficit” she was prepared to live with, and “how far to go to take out as much [tumour] as he could”.
Bown was left feeling “wobbly” with a “lot of things to relearn” afterwards. She was let out of the hospital on Christmas Eve but on New Year’s Day started feeling ill with an infection. Ten days later she was rushed back for an emergency operation and things were “touch and go”.
“I said to the doctors if they couldn’t cure me, to withdraw treatment. I wasn’t going to just lay in a bed for the next however many years being looked after, mainly because I felt dreadful.”
Bown endured another round of surgery in 2015 followed by 30 rounds of radiotherapy two years later.
Rachel Bown
She had always thought of herself as “optimistic” and “resilient” before her diagnosis. Her tumour gave her the chance to find out what she was really made of.
“I asked myself, ‘all my life have I been a fraud?’ I’m pleased to say that I am that person I thought I was.”
She still struggles with depth perception and balance and often bumps into things.
This has added an extra 30 seconds to her triathlon races because she can no longer run alongside her bicycle, jump on, and keep pedalling.
But her visual impairment has also made it easier for her to identify with her special needs students. Rachel is passionate about being their voice, because sometimes they lack the confidence and ability to speak for themselves.
“Sometimes they lack the ability or confidence to stand up and say, ‘I don’t want to do that’.”
Rachel Bown, undergoing a scan
Celebrating life
In 2016, she picked up a Guinness World Record by becoming the fastest female athlete to complete the London Marathon as a charity mascot.
She wore a “happy hippo” for Brain Tumour Support, but inside the costume, she was far from happy.
Bown felt like her “muscles were being ripped off” her legs, it was “horrifically hot” and she struggled to remove her hippo head after the race. “I couldn’t lift my arms up to take it off. If anybody has beaten that record, I don’t care. They can keep it!”
Six years later in Poland, she achieved the dream she had set when she embarked on her recovery journey, of winning an international medal, by scooping bronze in the European triathlon championship. She burst into tears afterwards for having “proved I am good enough again”.
“What I do is about being the best I can be with the tumour, because I can’t be cured. I battle demons every day. But I’m doing all these things with a brain tumour that no one else has.”
Bown has written two books about her life, The Butterfly Within and 101 Dalmatian Memories, and is currently writing ‘Special to me – a different kind of education’ about her teaching career.
She will “probably” not publish it until she retires, because the last chapter “will be me making that difficult decision to retire”.
She has “thought a lot” about whether she would choose not to have had brain tumours. Despite all the pain she has endured, she would not change that.
Without the tumours Bown would not have been a celebrant or world record holder, and “that special moment in Poland wouldn’t have been quite as special had I not known where I started that dream from – in a wheelchair.”
“I’ve never had children, or been married. I’d never known what my purpose on this earth was. What was my legacy? Now I know. To talk to people about making the most of their lives now.”
Rachel Bown
Entries for the 2024 Pearson National Teaching Awards will be open until 1 March, and college staff are encouraged to nominate their peers. Submissions can be made at teachingawards.com
Colleges, training providers, and schools handed back 15 per cent – £28 million – of cash earmarked for Covid catch-up tutoring in the first two years of the scheme for 16- to 19-year-olds, blaming rigid eligibility rules and stop-start policy.
FE Week analysis of new 16-19 tuition fund spend figures shows that of the total £187.5 million allocated to over 2,000 education providers across 2020/21 and 2021/22, £159.5 million was spent.
Almost 300 providers with an allocation failed to spend a penny over that period and returned all funding to the Department for Education.
The DfE said it was allowed to reinvest the clawed-back tutoring cash within the department to support other 16 to 19 and wider education funding pressures, rather than handing it back to the Treasury.
A further £110 million and £112 million have been distributed to spend in 2022/23 and 2023/24 respectively for the tuition fund, but clawback figures for those years are not yet available.
Sector leaders have called for the scheme to be extended again beyond this year but with more freedom over how the funding can be spent.
Strict rules stifle tutoring plans
The 16-19 tuition fund was announced in July 2020 for providers to hold “small group tutoring” for 16 to 19 students whose studies had been disrupted by the pandemic.
But colleges, training providers, and sixth forms that opted into the fund had just weeks to design, staff and implement schemes for a limited group of eligible students.
Providers could use the funding to support students in groups of up to seven in subjects disrupted by the pandemic, but only if they had not achieved a GCSE grade 4 in English and/or maths or have a grade 4 or above and were from an economically disadvantaged background.
The DfE did eventually expand the eligibility to students who didn’t achieve a grade 6 at GCSE in those subjects, but not until the 2022/23 academic year.
Funding could be used for staff costs to deliver catch-up tuition but not for non-staff costs such as diagnostic tools, room hire, equipment, laptops, transport, or stationery.
James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said the £28 million underspend “largely reflects the narrowness of the eligibility criteria in the first two years of the scheme and restrictions on how the funding could be spent”.
“It certainly does not reflect a lack of need – £100 million per year was never going to be sufficient to meet the needs of 1.2 million young people – and most colleges could have spent their allocations several times over if they had been able to target the funding at all students that needed additional support,” he added.
The DfE allowed providers to roll over any underspent funding from 2020/21 to 2021/22 after recognising the ongoing impact lockdowns were having.
But an independent evaluation report of the scheme, published by the DfE in July 2023, said education leaders described how other ineligible students may have a higher level of need for catch-up support for reasons that cannot be captured in the eligibility criteria. For example, those who experienced bereavement, didn’t have a supportive family, or space to study at home.
Spending varied by provider type
FE Week’s analysis shows schools with sixth forms spent 76 per cent of their allocations, while university technical colleges (UTCs) spent 78 per cent.
Kate Ambrosi, the director of education and innovation at the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, which represents UTCs, said sixth formers affected by the pandemic require innovative and specialised interventions, adding that the development of such interventions was “stifled by the original limits on how the funding could be spent”.
UTCs spent their tuition fund cash to pay staff for weekend, after-school or holiday intervention classes with small groups of post-16 students, she told FE Week, adding that the technical colleges would like to see the fund continue but with relaxed rules.
Almost 80 independent training providers opted into the tuition fund in the first two years, with combined allocations hitting £9.1 million. This provider group spent £7.25 million (79 per cent) of their funding.
Simon Ashworth, director of policy at the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said his members reported that the criteria attached to the funding are too rigid still, despite being loosened recently.
Simon Ashworth
For example, tuition hours had to sit outside planned hours, with some students unable or unwilling to do so.He added that the tuition fund continued a “worrying trend of stop-start policy” in the skills sector.
“While the fund has been available for three years, it was initially announced as a one-year pot, with further annual extensions announced. Had providers known the pot was for three years, they could have invested resources with more confidence. Short-termism and stop-start policymaking continue to limit potential.”
General FE colleges and sixth-form colleges spent 87 per cent and 86 per cent of their total allocations, respectively.
Activate Learning, which runs seven colleges, received one of the biggest allocations of over £2 million across 2020/21 and 2021/22. The group handed back around £620,000 after those years but told FE Week the funding had a significant impact.
A spokesperson said: “Using the funding, we’ve introduced specific roles to help track and manage our students’ development and progress, added in additional tuition groups to provide extra help and support, and worked with external providers to put in place peer-to-peer tutoring, all of which have seen proven success in boosting student achievement.
“We recognise that we weren’t able to utilise the funding as much as we would have hoped in the first year, however since then we have used the majority of the funding made available to us and in the past two years, we’ve spent all of the funding we’ve had access to.”
Julian Gravatt, deputy chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said the tuition fund is a “helpful part of the offer to students, many of whom are still behind where they could be because of lost time at school during the pandemic”.
He said the DfE hasn’t yet publicly confirmed that the tuition fund will stop in July 2024, adding that “there is a case for continuing it as part of the collective effort to raise student English and maths achievement”.
A DfE spokesperson said the department is evaluating both the National Tutoring Programme and 16-19 tuition fund which will “help inform decisions on how best to support students going forward”.
“We will provide more information on succession planning in early 2024,” the spokesperson added.
