Doncaster College students add a splash of colour to Old Hall

Anyone who has been to Old Hall at University Centre Doncaster recently will have noticed the walls have been transformed by a splash of colour.

The Hall, which includes four large corridors and several entrance foyers, has been transformed by painting and decorating students from Doncaster College.

The students involved had to take measurements as well as take into consideration health and safety due to working in a live environment.

The project involved various departments working together across the college, including estates, painting and decorating lecturer Neal Preskey and students, marketing and senior management and art lecturer Mike Bunn and students from arts courses.

Errol Michell, from marketing, said: “It would have been easy to select safe but obvious colours on the walls and a transitional approach would have been just that, so change and a visually strong change was the choice.”

Chesterfield College launches new referee Academy with Premier League star visit

Former Premier League football referee Uriah Rennie visited Chesterfield College to launch its brand new Referee Academy programme.

More than 25 students have signed up to the programme so far, which complements the college’s already-established football academies that place young people back into the game, all while they gain their qualifications.

Sports lecturer Neil Cluxton said: “Uriah was great. He’s an ex-student so he came back to talk to the children and give them one or two pointers.

“Young people often get a bad press but we’ve loads of really keen students, both boys and girls, at the college who get involved in voluntary work and we wanted to see if we can get them in to refereeing too.

“This may be the start of a very successful refereeing career for some.”

Many of the students have already started refereeing at the game’s youth level and it’s hoped that following the academy students will gain a qualification to allow them to officiate senior games locally and earn valuable experience.

The programme was also featured as part of the Get Involved campaign by Sky Sports News.

Alton College Driving Awareness Week

A powerful message was delivered at Alton College during Driving Awareness Week.

The week started with a driving simulator where students tested their driving abilities.

Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service also visited the college to demonstrate how they approach and deal with collisions.

Hundreds of students witnessed volunteer Yegor Ryazanov act as the victim as several officers removed the whole roof from the car using a powerful saw.

Yegor, the current Students’ Union President at Alton College, said: “I was very fearful in there.

“Everyone really needs to take care when driving and make sure they are driving at an appropriate speed for the road.”

City College Norwich plans £5m building

City College Norwich has unveiled plans for a £5.7m state-of-the-art building for all of its students in the creative arts from September 2013. The planned building will be sited at the college’s main Ipswich Road campus, on the site of the former West Lodge accommodation block.

The new creative arts building will support the college’s vision to deliver outstanding and innovative creative arts provision, with three purpose-built floors. As well as providing a vibrant space to stimulate students’ creativity, the building has been designed to be low-carbon.

Dick Palmer, principal of the college, said: “The college is committed to providing 21st Century learning environments for all of our students and this exciting new building will enable us to provide all of our creative arts students with the facilities they need in one place.

Bicton College launches new EaRTH Hub

Bicton College’s innovative new Environmental and Renewable Technologies Hub (EaRTH) has been officially launched.

The event, which saw nearly 200 people attend, was designed to showcase the new centre, to demonstrate the cutting-edge technologies and to give thanks to all those in the community who have been part of its construction.

There were short talks by the principal of Bicton College, David Henley, and the Head of EaRTH, Graham Waddell, as well as inspiring talk by Juliet Davenport, CEO of south west based Good Energy, and a passionate advocate of sustainable energy technology.

The Hub includes new training bays, solar tubes that let in natural daylight and a biomass boiler. Many of the technologies that keep EaRTH lit, heated, cooled or running are exposed, allowing people to see how they work and to really feel part of this building.

Mr Henley said: “What really struck me tonight was pride – firstly the sense of ownership from the local community who are proud to share this facility with Bicton and secondly is pride of the impressive feat of engineering in an agricultural context that this building demonstrates.”

Apprenticeship inquiry heads to Northampton

The inquiry into apprenticeships by the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee will head to Northampton next week.

An itinerary for the visit, which takes place on Tuesday, March 13, has been released today.

During the visit, members of the cross-party committee will undertake visits to Cosworth Ltd, GE Precision Engineering Ltd and Church & Co (Footwear) Ltd.

The committee will also be holding a formal evidence session in the afternoon at The Guildhall, Northampton.

The schedule of witnesses for the formal evidence session is as follows:

2pm

  • Professor Nick Petford, Vice Chancellor of Northampton University
  • Len Closs, Principal of Northampton College of Further Education
  • Mike Griffith, Head Teacher of Northampton School for Boys
  • Councillor David Mackintosh, Leader of Northampton Borough Council
  • Councillor Jim Harker, Leader of Northampton County Council

3pm

  • Dr Ann Limb OBE DL, Chair of the South East Midlands Local Enterprise Partnership
  • Peter Mawson, Chief Executive of West Northamptonshire Development Corporation
  • Mike Conway, Head of Employee Relations, Barclaycard
  • Milan Shah, Chair of the Governing Council for the University of Northampton and Board member of the Northamptonshire Enterprise Partnership

 

 

Prince of Wales amazed by Great Yarmouth College showcase after royal visit to campus

Students at Great Yarmouth College treated the Prince of Wales to a showcase of vocational skills when he visited their campus.

The Prince even tried his hand at construction skills in the brick workshop and later asked catering and hospitality students if canapes they had designed and created specially for him could be boxed for him to take away.

Principal Penny Wycherley and chair of governors Dr Michael Field greeted the Prince on his arrival at the college’s two-year-old £6m Home of Construction, the Kier Building

Second year Level 2 diploma student Ricky Turner (18) said: “He was surprised by how much cement you need to lay a brick.

“I was a bit nervous, but it was nice to meet him, it’s something different.”

The Prince also saw a 1950s–design speedboat made by young apprentices on the college’s 14-16- programme and stopped to chat to crowds of students and pupils from nearby schools who lined the route to the opposite campus, where he was greeted with singing and dancing by 27 performing arts students.

Mrs Wycherley said: “He was amazed by the sheer variety of the training that happens at the college and how confident and enthusiastic all of the students he met were.

Are they trying to simplify funding or simplify FE?

The latest announcement on simplifying funding, ‘A New Streamlined Funding System for Adult Skills’ represents a small step forward.

There is clear evidence that colleagues at SFA and BIS have listened to the sector and have found, like all new brooms before them, that while everyone will buy the idea of simplification in theory its practical application is fraught with difficulty. They note in particular the inevitable trade off between simplicity and fairness and the real danger of unintended consequences.

The result of this listening is well illustrated by the growing size of the rates matrix – in many ways the centrepiece of the simplification proposals.

The initial idea floated in the consultation document in 2010 was to have just nine rates – qualifications could come in three sizes (Award, Certificate and Diploma) and three cost bands (cheap, medium and expensive). This was rapidly realised to be too simplistic and replaced by a 20 cell matrix; Units were added to give four sizes of qualifications and the cost bands were increased to five.

The current proposal doubles this to 40 cells – 5 cost bands and eight sizes of qualification – but it is still not clear that this is the end of the road.

The paper leaves open the question of an additional cost band for the most expensive programmes; and more importantly the model does not yet cover all FE provision. According to the paper there is more work needed on how basic skills is to be treated and how the model is to apply to apprenticeships, hardly trivial matters.

Although it does not highlight the fact more work is also needed to accommodate A levels and programmes of Access to HE (unless the assumption is that the withdrawal of grant funding for over 25s at level 3 will kill this work off entirely)

The steadily increasing complexity of the proposals (perhaps why they are now called ‘streamlined’ rather than ‘simple’) is partly a reflection of reality but there are in addition some clear own goals. The greatest amount of unnecessary complexity is of course caused by the illogical separation of the FE world into pre and post-19 sectors.

It would not be so bad were the two departments and their agencies not determinedly pulling in opposite directions with DfE and YPLA looking for a stable funding system that reflects providers’ costs while BIS and SFA prefer a more turbulent framework where central agencies manipulate prices.

Indeed had BIS really wanted to simplify funding it might have looked more closely at the real simplification inherent in Alison Wolf’s proposals – a fixed sum for full time students with a very limited set of price bands.

More complexity however derives from the determinedly centralising approach of BIS officials despite all the ministerial rhetoric about setting institutions free. Even in a document on funding simplification BIS / SFA cannot resist contemplating separate rates for large employers, or complicating achievement funding (itself unnecessary) by paying half of it for those who gain employment – but only for a specified subset of students.

The centralising impulse is illustrated most tellingly however by the move to base rates on credit or learning time rather than guided learning hours which reflect teaching time.

It is inherently illogical because it is teaching time that incurs costs not learning time and a model based on learning time would have an inbuilt bias towards those subjects and those tudents best able to cope with a large element of undirected private study.

The argument advanced for credit however is that GLH is not regulated.

To the evident horror of those in Whitehall the basis for funding FE up to now has reflected professional practice across the sector; local judgements about how much support learners need rather than the theoretical assumptions of a few designers at the centre.

A concern to regulate rates mirrors the increasingly detailed regulation of eligibility also being developed by BIS at the same time as talk of new freedoms.

The suspicion grows that SFA and BIS know that a funding system based on the QCF framework does not reflect the complexity of the FE world.

Their plan however could be to use a simplified funding system to force the simplification of provision; a system that providers see as responsive but the centre just sees as messy and outside its control. If this is true then learners are sure to be the losers.
Mick Fletcher is a
consultant on Further Education

Battle lines drawn over apprenticeships

Lord Knight of Weymouth gave the opening address  |  Scott Upton, vice principal of Sandwell College speaks out  |  Karen Woodward, NAS said quality was illusive

Reinforcing standards, the growth in new adult starts and the ever elusive definition of an apprenticeship was at the heart of the agenda for the last session of the Apprenticeships England conference last week.

The event, organised by Peter Cobrin and Lindsay McCurdy of the popular LinkedIn group ‘Apprenticeships England’, allowed colleges and training providers to voice their concerns about current practice.

Graham Hoyle, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) reinforced the responses he gave at the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee evidence session earlier this month, and said the sector couldn’t debate the quality of the programme without settling on a definition of the word ‘apprenticeship’.

“You can’t talk about the quality of anything until you know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Until we’ve got a very clear understanding of what an apprenticeship is, it’s quite difficult to actually start determining how we get the right quality into it.

“I have to say it’s a really debilitating issue at the present time within the current debate.”

The AELP chief executive said the issues with the programme were “peripheral problems” for the National Apprenticeship Service (NAS) and didn’t detract from “a massive success story”.

Mr Hoyle said: “Why have I not seen anywhere that we’ve got 750,000 apprentices out there?

“When one or two years ago in every city you were still bumping into people on the street saying, ‘shame we don’t have apprentices any more’ – the move in such a short period of time has been absolutely phenomenal.”

Mr Hoyle offered a definition for apprenticeships, consisting mainly of a job, a programme which is employer designed and elements which are independently accredited.

With 76.5 per cent of apprenticeships “ticking those required boxes” the duration of an apprenticeship, Mr Hoyle says, is “broadly irrelevant”.

“Not totally, but broadly, irrelevant,” he told delegates.

Sort them out and I’m the first there with the rifle, but I’m not prepared to come along with a blunderbuss”

“Why are we getting pulled up, particularly about length of duration being the particular quality issue, if all those boxes are properly ticked?”

Mr Hoyle admitted some providers had “clearly pushed the limits” and “crossed the line” in recent months, but advised government to avoid creating a brand new set of rules to combat it

“We’ve found out where they are – sort them out,” he said.

“But don’t do what normally happens in these situations when government money is involved – you set up a brand new set of rules and overlay them on everybody who is actually doing a darn good job.”

He added: “Sort them out and I’m the first there with the rifle, but I’m not prepared to come along with a blunderbuss.”

Nick Linford, managing director of Lsect and managing editor of FE Week, chaired the conference and said it was quite right to call the duration of apprenticeships “the battlefield”.

Mr Linford said: “We now know that from the first of August, all 16 to 18 year-olds have to be at least 12 months.

“Now we can debate whether that’s about quality, but actually that’s probably just as much about raising the participation age as it is about quality.

Peter Cobrin, notgoingtouni, organised the conference, which included (from L-R) Liz Green, OCR, Karen Woodward, NAS, Scott Upton, Sandwell College, Jack Farren Kerr, Pearson, Graham Hoyle, AELP on the panel

“Because of course if you’re doing two levels at less than a year each, they’re not going to be 18 and still participating at the end.”

The conference chair emphasised that as long as the government continued to fund Train to Gain, apprenticeships should not be seen as the only option for adult employees.

“My worry is we assume apprenticeships are the only thing in the workplace and therefore the only option.

“For the adults where you’re not worrying about duration, I would suggest the correct programme might be Train to Gain, which hasn’t gone away even though no-one likes to call it that anymore.”

Scott Upton, vice principal of Sandwell College, spoke out about his frustration with short duration apprenticeships and inappropriate frameworks adopted by training providers.

The senior college leader used the new marketing campaign, launched by NAS during National Apprenticeship Week, to highlight the difference between what the government is promoting as an apprenticeship and a significant amount of delivery in the sector.

There are fewer employers, our apprenticeships are shorter in duration and most of them are at a lower level than some of our international comparisons”

“If you’re running a successful engineering company, you did an apprenticeship, but I bet that your apprenticeship lasted more than 12 weeks,” Mr Upton said.

“I bet your apprenticeship definitely lasted more than seven weeks, five weeks, which young people have been presented to my college with.”

Mr Upton continued by arguing that adult apprentices aged 25 and above were damaging the reputation of apprenticeships.

“I bet also that Joe’s apprenticeship was completed when he was a young lad,” he said.

“Not when he was 30, or 40, or 50, that’s adult training – that is not an apprenticeship, it’s different and it’s polluting the brand.”

The vice principal also suggested implementing a minimum duration for apprentices aged 19 to 24, along with making them fully funded and scrapping all adult apprenticeships aged 25 and above.

“An apprenticeship is for young people, 16 to 24 and you should get the full amount of money for it,” he said.

Karen Woodward, a divisional apprenticeship director at NAS, was also among the panel speakers and agreed there were some problems with the apprenticeship programme.

“There are a whole set of issues around apprenticeships that we still need to reflect upon.

“There are fewer employers, our apprenticeships are shorter in duration and most of them are at a lower level than some of our international comparisons.”

The NAS representative also greed with Mr Hoyle and said more needed to be done to clearly define what an apprenticeship is.

“Quality is elusive but when you see it, you really understand what it is,” she said.

“When you see a fantastic apprenticeship, you could bottle it and want to present it right across the country.”

The event, which was the first of its kind held by the Apprenticeships England group, was a huge success.

The original format, which stripped away PowerPoint prompts and actively encouraged audience participation, gave training providers the chance to hold key stakeholders to account.