WorldSkills UK announces team for EuroSkills competition

The elite squad of UK talent heading to Belgium for next week’s EuroSkills competition has been announced.

A window displayer from Liverpool, a Somerset stonemason and a painter from Leicester are among 22 competitors bound for Spa.

A Gloucester hairdresser is also in the team for the biennial competition, which takes place October 4-6, along with a Scottish welder and carpenters from Northern Ireland and Wales.

Most of the Euroskills team also figures in the UK squad already announced for next year’s WorldSkills competition in Leipzig, Germany.

Euroskills is an important part of our competitors’ training ahead of the selection for Team UK”

Jaine Bolton, from the National Apprenticeship Service (NAS) and UK delegate at EuroSkills, said: “This will be the first experience for Squad UK members of competing against competitors from different countries. I wish them the best of luck.”

And the Spa tournament will give UK selectors an early chance to see their competitors in action, before whittling their WorldSkills squad, managed by NAS, down from around 90.

“Euroskills is an important part of our competitors’ training ahead of the selection for Team UK as it will enable them to benchmark their skill levels against those from all over Europe and gain confidence in competing in front of audiences,” added Mrs Bolton.

Nick Linford, editor of WorldSkills UK media partner FE Week, said: “EuroSkills will give us a good idea of the kind of standards we’ll need to meet — and beat — if we are going to come away from Leipzig next year with gold medals.”

He added: “I’ll actually be at Euroskills too, with FE Week colleague Shane Mann, to wave the flag and report on how well we do.”

Members of the UK’s Worldskills squad not competing at EuroSkills will take part in other competitions and industry events as part of their training regimes, including next month’s Skills Show at Birmingham’s NEC.

Picture: Hannah Clague, 21, from Gloucester, attends Red Edge Training Company

The EuroSkills UK competitors are as follows:

Sarah Smithers, 20 and from Woking, in Surrey, goes to East Berkshire College and will be competing in window display with Liverpool Community College’s Jenna Stephenson, 18.

Gloucester 21-year-old Hannah Clague, who attends Red Edge Training Company, will be doing hairdressing, while Weymouth College’s Robert Broomsgrove, 20, will compete at stonemasonry.

Apprentice Alastair Wilson, 21, who works at Doosan Babcock, in Scotland, will be welding.

James Overend, 22, studies at the Engineering Council for Northern Ireland and will be competing at mechatronics with fellow Irishman David Cargill, 18, who studies at Northern Regional College.

Electronics will see Wigan duo Gareth Humphries, 19, and Heather Peach, 18, who both work at MBDA UK, battle it out.

Landscape gardening and design will have three UK entrants in 25-year-old Jack Jameson, from Ipswich and Ottley College, Aaron Jamison, 18, who goes to Northern Ireland’s College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise, and Writtle College’s Jack Conway, 19 and from Essex.

Philip Glasgow, 21 and from Northern Ireland, goes to South West College and will be showing off his carpentry skills with Welsh 19-year-old Gareth Jones, who goes to Coleg Sir Gar.

Middlesbrough’s Robert Johnson, who goes to Redcar and Cleveland College, will be competing at plastering and dry wall systems with fellow 19-year-old Ken Wilson, who goes to Belfast Metropolitan University.

Leicester College 20-year-old Reece Johnston will be painting while 21-year-old Mark Woods, who goes to Northern Ireland’s South West College, will be tiling walls and floors.

Amy Leigh Wilson, 17, goes to Blackpool and The Flyde College, will be displaying her skills as a carer with 18-year-old Georgina Briscoe, from Derby University.

Cooking and serving skills will be on the menu with Middlesex 19-year-old Andre Rhone, from the Royal Garden Hotel, and 22-year-old Wojciech Pastor, who works at The Gleneagles Hotel, in Scotland.

 

Cheltenham Fashion Week student win

Models stormed the catwalk dressed in creations by Gloucestershire’s best young fashion designers in sell-out shows for Cheltenham Fashion Week.

Hosted at Gloucestershire College, the shows were judged by designer George Davies, who launched the Per Una range at Marks & Spencer and George at Asda.

He was joined by fashion journalist Sarah Hayley and hair stylist Stuart Holmes.

More than 800 guests came to see the designs from 20 education providers across the county.

Laxmi Chavada, 20, and Stephanie Allen, 21, won £1,000 for Gloucestershire College when they were crowned the winners of the college and sixth-form category, and were offered a two-week placement with Mr Davies’ team.

“The standard of the show was truly excellent, nothing I have seen has been average,” said Mr Davies. “Congratulations to everyone who has taken part. The winning designs are amazing. As a designer it’s important to be versatile and you can see from the pieces I have chosen they do this perfectly.”

Top Peter Jones student enters the retail den

A promising retail career looks in store for a Midland apprentice already crowned student ambassador of the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy.

Nick Bannister (far right), from the Dragons’ Den star’s academy at Solihull College, is continuing along the route to success with a place on a national apprenticeship scheme.

The 20-year-old, from Sutton Coldfield, reached the final interview stage with discount retailer Aldi and impressed the panel enough to secure a place on the scheme.

He will be trained in all aspects of retail management within three years to hopefully emerge as a deputy store manager.

“I’m really pleased to have joined Aldi on the apprentice scheme and I’m excited about my future working in retail,” said Nick.

“Studying at the academy helped me develop a range of skills including finance and business planning, as well as build my confidence.”

Yvonne Malpass, head of retail at Solihull College, said: “We are extremely proud Nick has secured one of the positions working for one of the UK’s fastest-growing companies.”

Active IQ

The Awarding Body of choice for the Active Leisure sector

Boxing clever with sports title

Double Olympic gold medallist Dame Kelly Holmes joined London 2012 boxing star Nicola Adams to pass on their sport skills to students in the north east.

Football freestyler John Whetton was also on hand to teach Gateshead College students tricks at the launch of the sports scheme run by Kelly Holmes Education in which students traded blows with gold medallist Nicola in a boxing masterclass.

More than 400 sport academy students will be tutored by some of the country’s top sporting talent as part of the programme, with double cycling Olympic medallist Bryan Steel and judo Paralympian Darren Harris providing coaching.

The college is the first education provider to work with the Olympic medallist’s foundation. “For me this is a great way to put something back to support the next generation and inspire the students to dream big and achieve their sporting goals,” said Dame Kelly.

“I’m looking forward to sharing the journey with these talented students.”

Boxing studies student Liam Kelly, 18, from Consett, said: “To be able to come to college and be coached by Olympic champions is absolutely amazing and something that we’ll all remember for the rest of our lives.”

Nicola Adams said it was great to meet everyone at the college. “They gave me a terrific reception.

“The programme with Kelly Holmes Education is fantastic and the students have such amazing opportunities to learn from the very best.”

UKBA says colleges have been ‘selling immigration’

Further education colleges have been accused by the UK Border Agency of “selling immigration rather than education”.

The agency said it had beefed up its Highly Trusted Status (HTS) requirements for colleges because of lower levels of compliance when compared with higher education.

“For too long we have seen educational institutions selling immigration rather than education, and too many students coming here to work rather than study,” an agency spokesperson told FE Week.

“We saw the highest levels of compliance in the university sector and, as such, their students are subject to fewer restrictions than those at further education establishments.

“The system is now more rigorous and accountable, with all education providers expected to take their immigration responsibilities seriously.”

In August London Metropolitan University hit the headlines as the first university to have its HTS revoked by the agency, which said it was not making proper checks. The university has recently been given permission to challenge the decision in court.

John Mountford, international director at the Association of Colleges (AoC), said: “It is important that when UKBA talk about further education they make a distinction between private for-profit-colleges and state-supported FE institutions, which is not always the case… Our members take their role as sponsors seriously and have no interest in abusing the system.”

He continued: “As for UKBA’s assertions, we have never seen the statistics that support these. We know, in fact, that there has never been a like-for-like study of how different sponsors perform. It is interesting, however, to note that this is the position from which UKBA is coming.”

Providers can only recruit foreign students if they have a HTS licence. The criteria for such a licence was changed last year: it used to be set depending on the level of the course not on where the student studied. Now there are separate requirements for colleges and universities.

Colleges say that  universities have more leeway to attract foreign students, as their students can spend more time on work placements and in paid employment, and colleges are not allowed to run pre-sessional courses or administer their own English tests.

There does seem a tendency to act in a rather hasty manner with colleges”

Greenwich Community College in south London lost its HTS in December last year. Gary Chin, the principal, said: “There is an unfair playing field between colleges and universities.

For example, an international student studying on a Higher National Certificate (HNC) at university is allowed to work for 20 hours a week, whilst an FE student on the same HNC can only work for 10 hours a week.

“Our frustration is that a market that was going to be lucrative for FE only a few years ago, at a time when we need to diversify more than ever as a sector, has now become too big a risk for most colleges to invest the time and resources in.”

Sue Sharkey, international director of Bournemouth and Poole College, said the number of international enrolments is down this year after a UKBA ban on colleges running pre-sessional courses. These are booster language courses for students that do not have the level of English needed for their chosen course.

“Colleges should have the same opportunities as universities,” she said, adding that the unfair treatment would drive colleges to work in other countries, rather than attract students to the UK.

Mr Mountford said HTS should mean the same for all institutions, and questioned why only universities could administer English tests.

“The agency is, in a sense, saying that universities are a better sponsor because they have the expertise to administer their own tests, whereas a further education college has to rely on an external partner. In our opinion that simply isn’t fair. If you’re weighing up where to study, that’s the sort of thing that affects your decision.”

Students studying at a university are allowed to carry out a work placement for 50 per cent of their course, but those at a college can only spend 33 per cent of their course out of the classroom. Mr Mountford said this is “ridiculous” given that colleges specialise in employer-based programmes.

Colleges must maintain a certain number of points to keep their HTS licence. They can lose points if, for example, a student is refused a visa or does not attend their course once in the UK.

Mr Mountford said this system makes colleges more vulnerable than universities because they are generally smaller institutions.

“If you’re trying to manage a number-based system you’re at a big disadvantage if you’re only recruiting 10 students a year, because you only have to lose one or two students and then you’re off the scale. If you have 2,000 students then you can lose a lot more, because it’s all done on percentages.”

The international director believes there is a tendency for the border agency to take a “more robust” and “less understanding” approach when granting colleges an HTS licence.

“There doesn’t seem to be always a huge amount of willingness to fully understand the college offer.

“From our experience and the feedback we get from members, there does seem a tendency to act in a rather hasty manner with colleges. Some that have lost their HTS status  have it reinstated on appeal.”

The AoC regularly meets the Border Agency and Mr Mountford is encouraged by the understanding and flexibility it has shown with some of the cases discussed.  “Our wish is for them to become better partners. To work with any college that does have issues or problems before any quick draconian decision – which they’re not going to overturn on reflection or further examination.”

A view on Ofsted’s new ‘Trip Adviser’ website

Mick Fletcher, visiting research fellow at the Institute of Education and member of the Policy Consortium, casts a critical eye over Ofsted’s new Learner View website.

Ofsted has officially launched its Learner View website — an on-line mechanism for collecting feedback from students about the institutions they attend.

The Daily Telegraph was predictably delighted. Under the strap line “teenagers will be able to shop sub-standard colleges,” it explained how the Trip Adviser-style service could be used by the education watchdog in making judgments about an institution.

No doubt the move will be welcomed with varying degrees of caution in the sector. Listening to the learner voice is in keeping with the zeitgeist, and no one wants to oppose greater transparency.

More importantly, for an institutional leader, contradicting Ofsted in public is a little like challenging Robespierre in his prime. All the more important, therefore, for those not on the payroll or under threat of no-notice inspection, to point out the serious flaws.

At worst Ofsted’s Learner View website will become another dodgy statistic”

Firstly, it is not clear how many completed questionnaires will be needed before Ofsted publish responses for an institution — the website doesn’t say what the minimum is.
Ofsted may be waiting to see how many people use it. A higher threshold would clearly give more credibility, but equally it would look bad if few institutions achieved it.

It is not clear whether the threshold is linked in any way to the size of the student population. Ten returns from a provider with 40 apprentices is impressive, but twice the number of learners from a college with 20,000 enrolments would be meaningless. So will Ofsted report the size of the student cohort alongside the responses to give context to the comments?

Crucially, it seems there is no way of knowing how representative a sample those responding are.

According to the Learner View FAQs, respondents must give an email address and a password and they may report on up to three providers. They do not appear to give details of the course they attend or their personal characteristics, or even whether they have finished the course, are halfway through it or only just begun. Without such data, it is difficult to begin to interpret the significance of the results.

One thing we can be clear about, however, is that those filling in the form will not be a random cross-section of the student population. Those with a real or imagined grievance will be over-represented as will, in some cases, those encouraged to give favourable responses. At worst it will become another dodgy statistic.

The lack of course level information and analysis is one of the major flaws in the scheme. For most students, particularly part-time ones, it is the course rather than the institution that matters. And most of the questions they will be asked relate to the course. For a prospective student, it’s a bit like general Trip Adviser ratings for, say, restaurants in Madrid, or accommodation in Bangkok, rather than anywhere specific you might want to look at.

Why then, with all these problems might Ofsted be doing this, particularly when the well-established Learner Satisfaction Survey does a similar job far more professionally?

The suspicion hanging over Ofsted has to be that it is simply attempting to curry favour with political masters. Their view that the market is best is so deeply ingrained that the public sector is regularly visited with caricatures of  market mechanisms. Think, for example, of the endless stream of accounts and vouchers purporting to empower the user, or information on choices that no one asked for and few use.

The truth that even Michael Gove concedes in relation to exam boards, is that the market doesn’t always work in education. It’s not a commodity that is bought, but a process in which you engage.

Learning requires effort and commitment from learners as well as teachers. To judge it as you would a weekend in Benidorm is deeply demeaning.

David Igoe, CEO, Sixth Form Colleges’ Forum

While searching for biographical information about David Igoe to prepare for the interview I reap little reward.

Google coughs up only a few facts – the name of his secondary school, his degree in education management at the University of Bristol and his job as principal at Cadbury Sixth Form College.

At Igoe’s office in Westminster conversation surprisingly twists and turns; before Bristol he spent two years training to be a Catholic priest, began an architecture degree, settled on becoming a music teacher, despite having taken no formal music exams, and taught at one of the most radical schools in the country.

“It’s depressing now how everyone is forced to see their education and qualification choices in terms of employment routes,” says the chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges’ Forum. He believes that the notion of education for education’s sake has been lost pre-university and that we need to give young people far more opportunities to explore their interests at school and college.

“I am fighting for a way, a philosophy of education, which seems to have disappeared,” says the 62-year-old.

Igoe was brought up in Staffordshire in a very traditional Catholic family by dad William, who was the head of a primary school and president of the Catholic Teachers Federation, and mum Margaret, who had a range of jobs, including running a grocery business, she looking after him and his six siblings. He was sent to a seminary at the age of 11, where he was given a “strict rigid education”.

Morale is just devastating. Nobody feels good about working for a sixth-form college anymore”

He describes his time at Cotton College as “all about corporal punishment and spartan living.

“We were flogged for the most minor of discrepancies…It was pretty grim.”

The harsh environment of the seminary gave him resilience and self-confidence, but hindered him emotionally.

“Most of us who went through that kind of experience pay an emotional price; we become almost too self-contained and relationships can be quite challenging for us. We know how to be in difficult circumstances, but we’re not very good at empathising with how others might be feeling. You learn to hold everything in,” he says.

“Certainly when I left the seminary I had a lot of growing up to do on an emotional level and that characterised my twenties.” He now lives in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, and is married to Iryna with three children, Ben, 34, Gemma, 31, and Matthew, 11.

After training to be a music teacher at a college in Twickenham, Igoe’s first job was at a school staggeringly different from the seminary he had attended.

Run by late visionary Peter Hastings, Trinity Catholic school in Leamington Spa was renowned for its innovation.

Pupils were allowed to draw graffiti in corridors and call teachers by their first names. There was also a homework ban for the youngest children while the curriculum was dominated by lessons of a more practical nature.

Igoe vividly remembers turning up for his “bizarre” interview with Hastings, which “wasn’t even a chat”. The head teacher had long grey hair and was wearing a “slightly stained” fisherman’s jumper and sandals.

“He was sitting in a little room, which apparently was his office, but I thought was some sort of cupboard, and he was writing notes on the cardboard inserts of shirts. There was a big pile of them on the table,” says Igoe.

Hastings asked him only one question – where he saw himself in five years – and after being satisfied by Igoe’s “spluttering answer” sent him off to the head of theology.

“[The school] was totally radical and very risky, but by force of his own personality [Hastings] got away with it,” he says.

It was, he says, a fantastic place to learn the craft of teaching and “oddly” five of his colleagues from the school also went on to become principals of sixth-form colleges.

Having taught for four years at the school his career leapt once again to a starkly different institution, as he joined a “traditional little school” on the south coast.

“It was a total culture shock for me. I went from having this visionary, charismatic, highly intelligent head teacher who had a very clear view of what education was all about, to what I describe as a the kind of prefect head teacher whose main concern was making sure that everybody in their classroom was quiet,” he says.

“I found it so stifling.”

He “survived” two years before he moved to run the theology department at St Brendan’s Sixth Form College, in Bristol, and later became the principal of Cadbury Sixth Form College.

Why are we being kicked so hard? We don’t understand it.”

During this time he became passionate about the value of sixth-form colleges and is angry they are being hit so hard by cuts and government policy.

“The morale is just devastating. Nobody feels good about working for a sixth-form college anymore. They ought to be feeling good, not smug about their achievements, but they ought to feel [they’re] doing a good job,” he adds.

“All the indicators put us at the top, we outperform every other sector. Why are we being kicked so hard? We don’t understand it.”

Igoe is very critical of the government’s drive to raise standards through competition, arguing that it is not a level playing field. He points out that a student at an academy on average receives £7,300 of funding, but a pupil at sixth-form college gets £4,800.

“In that game you have winners and losers and things go to the wall,” he says.

“What about the young people in those institutions that are made to go to the wall? Don’t they deserve the same opportunities? Shouldn’t we be working collaboratively to ensure that the provision across an area is the best quality that it could possibly be?

“We’re not making units. We’re making people. You can’t afford to have any failures in education.”

A view on Ofsted’s new ‘Trip Adviser’ website

Toni Pearce, vice president FE at the National Union of Students adds her voice of support to Ofsted’s new website.

It is welcome that Ofsted has recognised the need to review its methods for consulting learners. Further education is rapidly changing and the National Union of Students has been lobbying for a long time for learners, as the primary stakeholders in the sector, to be involved in quality improvement.

Arrangements for involving the student voice in the direction of education have become more formalised to ensure that learners can experience the same benefits across providers. As a result, greater emphasis has been placed on closing the gap between student representation and the decisions resulting from student input.

Recognising the importance of informal links between students and staff has also become a crucial element in ensuring the involvement of active learners in both planning and decision-making.

Although learners have had the opportunity to communicate with inspectors, through email and in person, for a number of years, we have not been satisfied that the opportunity to do so was open to everyone.

Ofsted’s Learner View site represents an opportunity for the student voice to become properly embedded into inspection processes – something that is particularly important as we move towards more ‘light touch’ inspections, and where continuous audit of provision will be crucial in ensuring that learners get a fair deal.

Learner View, from the union’s viewpoint, therefore is an interesting and helpful development. It’s encouraging that Ofsted have made further steps to engage learners in the evaluation and inspection of their provision, particularly by providing online and accessible tools to support them to do so.

The Learner View website has the scope to revolutionise the way that students give feedback on their experience”

The union worked extensively with Ofsted in the formation of the new common inspection framework and the Learner View tool. It is exciting to see the highest level of the sector taking seriously the views and opinions of students.

It is particularly welcome that Learner View will be open continuously to contributions from every learner, whatever their age and whether or not their college or learning provider is being inspected – and that data will be made available online.

The ability to see ‘live’ data on the student views of any given provider is a big step forward for transparency in the sector. It is great to see Ofsted take such a bold move. These are important steps towards protecting all learners against poor provision.

Learner View will have an interesting introduction and may well receive a varied reaction and initial take-up. It is important to remember that the success of this and other learner voice strategies rely heavily on the emphasis placed on student engagement from the provider. Learner View alone is not a panacea.

However, if properly implemented alongside investment and support from providers, it does have the scope to revolutionise the way that students give feedback on their experience.

This new tool has the potential to recognise rapid change in the further education sector by supporting the engagement of all sorts of learners from different backgrounds and disciplines who might not have the opportunity to feed into regular inspection practices – apprentices, distance learners, evening students and mature students. That expansion can only be positive.

Combining recognition of the diversity of the further education provision and of the student body with the imperative to engage students in their education suggests that the Learner Voice could succeed.