A report has identified several changes the UK needs to make to its education and skills system to remain globally competitive.
‘Techicians and Progression’ is the result of a six month parliamentary inquiry, chaired by Professor Alison Halstead and conducted by the Skills Commission; a body comprising senior parliamentarians, leaders from the further and higher education sectors and industry representatives.
The report’s recommendations are directed at a range of actors in the skills sector including government departments, professional bodies, colleges and employers.
An analysis of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) qualifications commissioned for the report, found “the English further education and skills sector is not producing enough technicians”.
It adds that “a plan for growth requires a new strategic focus on technician education and training – a plan for technicians, a cross-departmental government strategy for STEM.”
The report also calls for changes to the qualification development system, that those who are using and paying for training, including learners, teachers and employers, are more involved in its design.
The Commission also recommends steps to allow and encourage further education colleges to offer vocationally oriented degrees.
The report explores how the professions can be opened up to those with vocational qualifications and says the government should “support the establishment of a new technical pathway to the professions as a worthwhile alternative to university education”.
Meanwhile, the report also suggests that professional bodies should play a greater role in the development of qualifications and apprenticeships.
The Commission envisages a system where a 14-year-old studying an engineering diploma in school is already on the first rung of a ladder leading to chartered engineer status.
Finally, it concludes that the split between the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) creates “unnecessary obstacles for employers wanting to provide their employees with technician and higher level training”.
It recommends the Government establish a single funding agency for post-compulsory education – merging the HEFCE with the SFA.
The Commission also recommends the government look at re-introducing financial Learner Accounts as a way of stimulating more non-government investment in training and making the education system truly driven by learners and employers.
As millions of people sit down to watch TV talent show The X Factor, few would be as nervous as tutors and students at Trafford College.
One of their own, Misha Bryan, has been making waves on the hit ITV programme with a wealth of stunning performances. Misha, whose version of the Adele classic Rolling In The Deep won wide reaching praise from the show’s judges last weekend, recently started her second year of the two-year Vocal Artist course at the college’s plush Manchester Music Base.
Based in the heart of Manchester city centre, the Music Base has purpose built recording studios, rehearsal spaces and editing suites.
It was launched in 2007 following a £1.5 million refurbishment and has been pivotal in helping to create Misha mania.Her tutor Leanne Brown said: “Misha has a really polished and confident performing style and she has always been a very natural performer. She has a very strong voice and has taught us a thing or two about putting on a performance.”
Leanne also said the college’s approach to the course has been an ideal setting for Misha to prepare for her X Factor journey.
She added: “Our Vocal Artist course gives students experience in performing because they have to put on their own concerts as part of their assessment.
“This helps give our students the confidence to perform which has certainly come across throughout Misha’s time on the X Factor so far.”
But how far does Leanne think Misha can go? She said: “Misha has the potential go to all the way in this competition, although I have warned her that to become a real success she needs to avoid getting caught up in the circus of the show and concentrate on her talents.”
However, Misha is not the only college student to star on The X Factor.Liverpool Community College student Craig Colton has been an impressive competitor on the show – many tipping him for the top.
Craig studied at the college’s Arts Centre, but last week he was wowing the judges with his version of Christina Perri’s Jar of Hearts. Staff and students at South Tyneside College, meanwhile, are throwing their support behind The X Factor group hopefuls Rhythmix. The four-piece girl group, which features the college’s former student Jade Thirlwall, won praise from the judges following their performance of Nicki Minaj’s hit Superbass on the first live show last weekend.
Every year colleges are asked to change not only the data that they send to government, but the software and management tools which they use to collect it.
The Autumn College Data Conference held by Lsect was a chance for further education (FE) colleges to discuss good practise with experts and colleagues.
The main conference hall at Morley College was the perfect setting, attracting more than 100 delegates into its traditional architecture on October 10.
Exhibitors at the event included; Capita, who were marketing their Integrated Management Information System and answering delegates’ queries; Drake Lane Associates, known for producing software such as SCORE, 4CAST and ADaM; and Perspective, who were promoting a number of their products including Sunesis, Tracker and Funding Manager.
Nick Linford, Managing Director of Lsect and Managing Editor of FE Week, opened the proceedings before handing over to John Perks, Head of the information authority.
Mr Perks explained to the conference that the data burden was being reduced “throughout all of government”, and that it was designed to try and reduce both administration and the bureaucratic burden in the FE sector.
Mr Perks ran through the 2011/ 12 Individualised Learner Record (ILR) specification, explaining how it had brought together four data collection types for the very first time; learner responsive funding, employer responsive funding, adult safeguarded funding and European social funding.
He added that there were an “awful lot of trials and tribulations” to changing ILRs, and said that he understood it looked like the information authority had “tried to fix something that wasn’t broken”.
However, Mr Perks stressed that the data collection types were “all due to go topsy-turvy anyway”, and that he felt it was “better to stay ahead of the game”.
One of the reasons why delegates had attended the event was to find out how ILRs would change in 2012/13, and how they as providers would need to change their data collection accordingly. Mr Perks explained that that the new system in 2012/13 would only accept Extensible Markup Language (XML), rather than the traditional ‘flat file’ ILR.
He said that there would be no conversion facility available in the new Learner Information Suite (LIS), and therefore college staff would need to get accustomed to the latest system as soon as possible.
Other changes in 2012/13 included three fields set to be removed; provider number (UPIN), planned group based hours, and planned one to one hours, as well as an alteration in ULN validation, reducing the minimum duration of learning aims to 10 days.
“We have gone as far as we can go in terms of just changing the data allocation,” Mr Perks said.
“We want to make sure as far as possible that data allocated is data we will use.”
Mr Perks added that he had been under pressure from day one to reduce data in the ILR.
He said: “The most important thing is that we don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Your college needs you, so make your voice heard.”
Rich Williams, Head of the Data Service continued the data conference with a presentation titled ‘Strategic replatforming of data collection systems’.
Mr Williams stressed that there had been important changes to FE funding arrangements recently, emphasising in particular how minimum contract values (MCVs) had put increased pressure on providers.
He said LIS had undergone a number of major changes, taking on board feedback from various beta versions which the Data Service had made available to the public.
Mr Williams announced that there would be a maintenance release for LIS on October 13, with a following patch for the Online Data Collections (OLDC) systems on October 23.
He also announced that the majority of providers had submitted their RO2 ILR return, which had been due on October 06. This included a return from 687 providers, with 1,738,000 aims for 528,464 learners.
Mr Williams said they would “completely replatform” the OLDC for the summer of 2012, using a portal approach based on SharePoint 2011.
“We’re planning to use the portal as a single one stop shop for you,” he said. “Hopefully it will stand the test of time.”
He added that the new system would use Oracle Policy Automation (OPA), migrating from Oracle to SQL server and removing Provider Online (POL).
Mr Williams added that the Provider Information Management System (PIMS) would change to a Microsoft platform for “easier interfacing with other collections systems”, and include a redesign of the data structure in Dynamics 2011.
The conference then broke for lunch, giving attendees a chance to stretch their legs and speak to exhibitors.
Upon their return Mr Linford set up a Q&A panel with a number of the conference speakers, including John Perks and Rich Williams.
One delegate asked the panel if anyone was using the Next Step service, as he felt his own college wasn’t getting anything back from it.
John Perks replied: “The Next Step people have, and would say that their system is being used. We are addressing the question of evidence. We certainly want to see the data that is passing through Next Steps. We will be chasing that up.”
Mr Perks stressed that at the moment the feedback from Next Step had only been anecdotal, and that it would be unfair to generalise from specific case studies.
However, Mr Perks took a quick show of hands at the conference and found that roughly one in ten delegates thought the system was a complete waste of time.
Another delegate said that based on web traffic no-one had enrolled at his college via Next Step – and that as a result staff at the college were obliged to ignore the system altogether.
Mark Smith, Development Director at Drake Lane Associates and Mark Emerson, MIS Manager at Chelmsford College used the afternoon to take delegates through the technical changes within LIS.
This included changes to field names, the structure of tables and their relationships.
Mark Smith said that table relationships had become much more complex, describing the system as a tree which “has grown much bigger”.
He added that to avoid errors college staff needed to check their results and validate report output multiple times. Mr Linford had a number of discussions throughout the day, talking about a mixture of updates in the FE sector such as changes to fee remission and the new 16-19 funding formula consultation announced by the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) last week. In line with all Lsect conferences the event finished with survey feedback. The most telling was the question: “Do you think data demands in the next few years will increase or decrease?”
Roughly 78 per cent said they thought the burdens of data handling would increase (see figures here).
This reinforced not only just how important the issue of data handling is for FE colleges, but also the need for “simplification” in all aspects of data collection.
Only once providers start using the latest software and submitting ILRs will we know if the changes have been for the better.
Delegates and FE Week Gold Members have been emailed a full copy of the conference slides
Labour leader Ed Miliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls jumped on a train to Southend to see an innovative example of traditional boundaries in education being broken down by new forms of partnership.
The day after it was announced that youth unemployment had nearly touched a million, the opposition’s leadership toured Futures Community College, a school for 11 to 19 year olds which offers a uniquely blended curriculum of academic and vocational learning.
Students can study academic or vocational subjects or a mixture of both, while apprenticeships in electrical engineering and construction are provided in a training centre incorporated into a new £20 million state-of-the-art upper college building.
Five years ago, the once failing secondary school was taken over by Prospects Learning Foundation, a south Essex charitable training provider.
The Foundation entered into a partnership with the US school improvement consultancy, EdisonLearning, and since then the new college has been transformed.
Following their tour, the Labour politicians held a question and answer session with the students, apprentices and the apprentices’ local employers.
Mr Miliband was careful not to give any promises about EMAs and disability benefits. Other questions covered help for young carers, expanding apprenticeships and rebalancing the economy more in favour of manufacturing.
Mr Miliband and Mr Balls were briefed on the Futures model by the college’s principal, Simon Carpenter, and Prospects chief executive, Neil Bates, a former vice chair of LSIS.
The college’s leadership emphasised four key messages for avoiding a ‘lost generation’ of young people:
blended academic and vocational curriculum offerings in schools should be encouraged. It shouldn’t be an either/or offer depending on which type of school the student attends.
the positive role of local authorities in influencing the education and skills provision that actually meets the needs of local employers and communities should not be underestimated and their role in responding to the worsening NEET problem among young people requires strengthening.
increasing pre-apprenticeship provision is vital for young people who have left school with few or no qualifications.
further government investment, while encouraging so far, is needed to expand the number of high quality Group Training Associations (GTAs) that enable smaller businesses to offer technical apprenticeships and employment to young people.
Mr Bates told FE Week: “It is very encouraging that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have come to see how the blended learning approach is transforming the lives of many young people in Southend.
“Our message is that we support diversity and choice, but free schools, UTCs and studio schools do not represent a panacea to solving the weaknesses in our educational system.
“Government should invest an equal amount of effort in improving existing schools and should encourage the type of partnership seen here.”
Mr Miliband voiced his agreement, adding: “The sad thing is that we do not have enough of these types of colleges. This is what we need to focus on.”
On this, there appears to be cross-party agreement. Last year, an education minister in the coalition government called Futures a pioneer and the beginning of something new.
The government is failing to cut the burden of data collection and bureaucracy, a study has suggested.
Nearly 80 per cent of delegates surveyed at the Autumn College Data Conference last week thought that data demands would continue to increase in the next few years.
The survey, organised by Lsect, found that data demands would increase dramatically for around 41 per cent of respondents. A further 38 per cent said they thought their data demands would increase a small amount in the future.
In comparison only four per cent thought their data demands would decrease.
David Willetts, Minister of Universities and Science, said in 2009 that reducing the amount of resources spent on data collection was a priority.
He said: “Every college principal I meet tells me they have literally dozens of staff whose job is to collect data for a multiplicity of regulators and funding bodies which is not needed for the good management of the college. This is where the savings have to be made.”
The survey also showed that nearly 20 per cent of delegates hadn’t submitted their Individualised Learner Record (ILR) data return (RO2) on time.
Roughly half of respondents said they had completed their R02 without mistakes, while 23 per cent said they had sent their report with a small number of errors.
Rich Williams, Head of the Data Service, clarified at the conference that 687 out of 1,081 providers had submitted their R02 on time. This means that only 528,464 learners were accounted for in the R02 return.
Read the full report from the Lsect Autumn College Data Conference (click here)
Pearson have announced they have bought TQ Holdings Ltd., a private training provider based in Derbyshire.
TQ provides vocational and technical education and training services to governments, institutions and corporations worldwide.
The company boasts particular expertise in skills related to the defence, engineering, oil and gas and construction sectors
FE Week spoke to Pearson about the acquisition. A spokesperson said: “This is part of a broader and on-going approach to expanding our technical education business.”
Pearson’s recent acquisitions include training providers Construction Learning World and Zenos bought under the holding company Melorio Plc, as well as awarding body, EDI.
Bit controversial this, so controversial that most college marketing departments have had a little warning about us, and. at a certain marketing bash in November you can take part in a workshop to defend yourself against companies like ours. What we do isn’t evil, it isn’t against the law, and actually works quite well.
HEALTH WARNING: Before you read further, we are an education marketing and PR agency, and I make no apology for that. SHOCK HORROR: We have expanded into outsourced services. Now you have been warned, read on at your own peril.
A few colleges have taken the marketing outsource leap like Bournemouth & Poole College, Barnfield and Northampton. A few are going through the process like Yeovil, and a few are just sniffing the air to see what’s going on.
Lots of colleges outsource their IT and HR so, why not marketing? When a college outsources its marketing, a company like ours takes responsibility for the marketing function.
In our instance that includes everything from research, strategy and planning, to the delivery of marcoms (prospectuses, guides, brochures), PR, advertising, copywriting, social media, websites, event management, and media buying, placement and printing.
Budgets are being squeezed, and squeezed again, and the constant call of ‘more for less’ is a like a broken record that won’t stop spinning. Outsourcing is an option. So, what are the downsides?
Bedding in
An outsourced marketing team is not of the college’s culture, every college is different, and the transition period can be a little bumpy. We need to understand personal and political agendas, how things are, how things are usually done etc, and this takes a little time. One senior manager explained that it was rather like steering an iceberg, the top changes course much quicker that the bottom.
Managing expectations
The agreed scope is the agreed scope – additional work has to be charged for, if the college or a department suddenly needs ad hoc events, additional meetings, new branding or a swift poster, if these weren’t agreed at the beginning of the contract, they have to be paid for. So, what are the benefits?
Focus
Even if a college has its own marketing department (some don’t), a reliance on marketing outsourcing frees up in-house personnel for certain responsibilities, so they can play to their strengths. If a college does not have its own marketing department, outsourcing can provide it, lock stock and barrel! Discipline
With marketing outsourcing, every discipline is on the table. That is important to consider, because no matter how hard a traditional agency tries to serve its customers, the fact is that it basically exists to sell public relations or production of marketing collateral etc.
An outsourced team has a different objective: Identify and deploy the resources needed, based not on what its in-house talent can produce, but on a strategic analysis of the college’s goals, market position and budget.
Reduced overheads.
By engaging a marketing outsourcing agency, colleges can significantly reduce overheads. Just ask any of the principals at the colleges who have taken the leap!
Access to specialist skills
In-house marketing staff may not always have specialist skills, it’s a demanding job and often they have to wear lots of different hats, often all at once!
Outsourcing to an experienced marketing team that understands FE not only brings in new ideas and added energy, but also the specialist talents, (like PR, research, digital expertise, copywriting and project
management) needed to execute the college’s marketing goals.
For these reasons and more, marketing outsourcing delivers real value, bringing in a new level of efficiency and effectiveness to the often daunting task of marketing a whole college offering to what is increasingly a demanding, diverse and often difficult-to-reach audience.
Of course, I’m in PR and run a marketing agency, so I would say that.
However, I’d like to say this too: some colleges really don’t need to outsource, in our experience there are some fine college marketers and PROs out there and they are doing a cracking job – you know who you are!
Alison Wolf says she had “no intention of having anything to do with education.”
In fact, when she left university in the early 1970s, she was destined for a career in journalism, having secured a job on the Daily Mail’s money pages.
But she never made it to the newsroom; her husband was offered a job at the World Bank in Washington so she moved to the other side of the world, where she finished her postgraduate studies and taught research methods in two universities while moonlighting as a journalist.
A random encounter changed everything. She interviewed a man who was setting up a new federal agency, called the National Institute of Education and he offered her a job. “I’d love to say it was my brilliant interviewing technique,” she says modestly. “But actually I think he thought it would be good for them to have a member of staff who was not a product of the American system, that it would bring something they didn’t have.”
But going into policy work was “not quite as daft as it sounds,” she says. Having studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Oxford, Wolf was, essentially, a social scientist with a background in statistics. “I ended up working for the US government on education policy reporting mostly to congressional committees. And actually I had a ball. It taught me how much different political systems can affect the policy-making.”
Wolf, now the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at Kings College, the University of London went on to work for several political think tanks and local authorities on a freelance basis, combining part-time work with bringing up two small children, which she admits was tough but helped her “get very good at working late at night and early in the morning.”
When the family returned to the UK in the mid-1980s (she is married to the economics commentator Martin Wolf) she called a friend who was working at the Institute of Education to see if he knew of any jobs.
There were no vacancies, but he did offer a desk and a phone so she could try and raise herself some research funds, which she did successfully, initially for pedagogical research, some of which related to work-based learning, which she says sparked her interest in FE.
If anything that I said was going to be implemented I had to get it to them [Ministers] fast because otherwise by the time they’d got it they would have moved on and been reshuffled and it would be the eve of the next election and be utterly pointless.”
Securing funding from the Nuffield Foundation in the early 1990s for research into the evaluation of GNVQs moved her back into policy. “I’d begun to have some serious worries and questions and started to become that woman who was always criticising,” she says. “And personally I was getting very uneasy about the way vocational qualification policy was going…whether these qualifications were proving to be worthwhile to people in their adult lives.”
What concerned her most was the introduction of Level 1 and Level 2 qualifications (equivalent to GCSE) that were not fit for purpose, for example hairdressing qualifications that could be taken in school, but did not give young people the necessary skills to do the job. “It was at the point where they [the government] had introduced all these levels and all these targets and it was becoming, you know, like ‘let’s shell them like peas.’ I’m sorry, but they are a scandal, they have no place in school curriculum, it’s a complete waste of time…” she says crossly. “And what was even worse was that they [the students] were getting GCSE points for them.”
This is typical Wolf. Passionate and driven, she speaks incredibly fast, switching between girlish and excitable to fiery and indignant in seconds.
But her work with the Nuffield Foundation didn’t just get her back into policy. It also propelled her into the media spotlight. “That was definitely a baptism of fire stuff because it was the first time I had been on national radio and starting with Today is pretty big,” she recalls.
While now a radio pro (Wolf sometimes presents the Radio 4 show analysis, which looks at the idea and forces that shape public policy) she has never got used to TV. “I’ve done little bits of television and it’s terrifying,” she says, covering her face with her hands (something, like talking fast, she does a lot). “Radio is fine, but when I did the vocational review [the Wolf review], I did the sofa, BBC breakfast and it confirmed my views…I’ve been asked to do Newsnight and I’ve said no. I hate television.”
After living on what she calls “soft money” for many years, she was relieved to be offered a job as a “conventional academic” at the Institute of Education (IoE) in the mid-1990s. “So at this point you have this wonderful liberation that you actually have a regular job and you can say what you think without worrying where the next pay cheque is coming from…which is why I get cross about many academies who I think pull punches too much. I mean no one is going to do anything to us as long as we do the academic part of our job properly. I think we ought…” she tails off, as if she has spoken out of turn. “Yes, anyway, where had we got to?”
Later she talks about the “liberation” of being an academic, which allowed her to start writing for think tanks again. “I might as well be open about this…it’s a lot easier to write critical pamphlets when you have a full-time job and you do it full-time.”
But writing think pieces about further and higher education (in her case for “centre and centre right” organisations), was about “policy not politics,” she insists. And with a change of government looking likely, it was a deliberate move on her part to position herself in a time of political flux. “I suppose I became more and more aware that if you want to influence government you don’t do it by publishing research papers,” she says. “You do it by journalism and by think tank pamphlets. And once a government has been in power for a long time you don’t get much purchase on them. If you want to actually get your ideas over to people, you do better with the group that might be going to come in fresh.”
It was a strategy that paid off, and last summer, she received a phone call from the office of the schools minister Nick Gibb inviting her to Westminster for a meeting. “Now I know you never have conversations with the minister, you always have conversations with the minister and 16 civil servants, but I didn’t know that then,” she recalls. “I thought I was going in to have an informal conversation with the minister. I turned up to the DfE and was shown up to the 7th floor – which is the ministerial floor – and I sat in a little waiting room and then they said ‘the minister’s ready for you know’ and I walked into this room full of people. “
I don’t want to be a politician and I don’t want to be a civil servant, I want to be an academic.”
While she admits to being “a bit terrified” about what she was asked to do – a major piece of research on further education, now known as the ‘Wolf review’ – she insisted that it must be done fast. “I said I wanted to do it fast because everything takes forever [in government].
“If anything that I said was going to be implemented I had to get it to them fast because otherwise by the time they’d got it they would have moved on and been reshuffled and it would be the eve of the next election and be utterly pointless.”
Between August last year and February, Wolf worked around the clock, balancing research around teaching and other commitments to deliver the report, which concluded that while there was some very good practice in the sector, some young people are wasting their time on colleges courses that do not lead to employment or further training.
The report also stressed the need for young people to study a core of academic subjects up until the age of 16.
“I made two important recommendations,” she says. “One was to actually have some truly respected vocational qualifications that people would recognise…and the other thing – which was almost the most important thing to me – was to change the funding system, because I think that it’s only when you can get per student funding that you can release the innovation and allow institutions to do interesting things. I think that post 18 funding still badly needs sorting out.”
Since last autumn, Wolf has had little spare time for the things she loves most, like cooking, making jam and relaxing in her flat in Tuscany. Having delivered a major government report in record time, she jokes that her next project is to “have a holiday.”
One of the most significant things she has taken away from the experience, she says, is a greater appreciation of politicians.
“It’s made me appreciate them…how unbelievably hard they work and how incredibly difficult it is to be a minister and it has also made me quite clear that actually I’m in the right occupation, I don’t want to be a politician and I don’t want to be a civil servant, I want to be an academic.”
