In a letter to the education committee, published this week, Gillian Keegan said she intended to appoint an interim chief regulator on an “exceptional basis” for 12 months from January.
Keegan said this “takes account of the challenge of recruiting an experienced suitable candidate to such a high profile and a challenging role on a short-term basis”.
She intends to carry out a full, public appointments process for a permanent successor as soon as possible.
Ofqual will have had five chief regulators in four years, including two other interims.
Sally Collier resigned in August 2020 over that year’s grading fiasco. She was replaced on an interim basis by Dame Glenys Stacey, who was also her predecessor.
Simon Lebus replaced Stacey, again on an interim basis, in January 2021, and then Saxton took over in September of that year.
Keegan also asked the committee of cross-party MPs how it “would like to engage” with appointing the interim official.
Permanent appointees are quizzed by the MPs in pre-appointment hearings.
Keegan said Saxton’s leadership has been “invaluable in stabilising Ofqual following a challenging few years”, but the next 12 months “will be a challenging period … which will require continuity and stability of leadership”.
The principal of York College, Lee Probert, has stepped down with immediate effect.
The 40-year-old’s decision follows a “series of health investigations”, the college said in a statement.
“We send Lee every good wish in respect of his health and thank him for his work over the last four years in strengthening the college’s external relationships and guiding the college through the difficult Covid period,” the college added.
He has been replaced on a temporary basis by deputy principal Ken Merry, with a process to appoint a permanent successor to begin shortly.
Probert has also stepped down from the board of the Skills and Education Group.
He joined York College as chief executive in June 2019 from City of Bristol College, where he was principal from January 2016.
Prior to that he was deputy chief executive at Hull College, where he spent nearly seven years in total.
Probert also chairs the board of governors at Millthorpe School in York and is a trustee of the York Centre for Voluntary Services.
Liverpool City Region metro mayor Steve Rotheram is donning a hi-vis vest, trowel in hand, and reminiscing to local college students about the hard graft of his first job as a bricklayer and how he’d be incapable of it today.
His attempts at bricklaying in front of young learners (and cameras) at the City of Liverpool College during Colleges Week are a PR stunt. But the image is an apt one because Rotheram is the only serving metro mayor to have had first-hand experience of life as an apprentice.
He is a champion of the apprenticeship system because it put him on the first rung of a very successful career ladder, including a spell at the Learning and Skills Council, after leaving school at 16 without English or maths GCSEs.
But he admits his construction attempts today “brought back memories that made me think I took the right decision not to be a bricklayer anymore. It’s a fantastic trade but…when you get to a ripe old age, you’re thankful you don’t have to do it every single day.”
This party conference season he has been bending the ears of Gillian Keegan and her Opposition counterpart, Bridget Phillipson, with his ideas on what’s needed to lift more young people out of poverty and into good quality jobs.
Keegan is from similar working-class roots in Huyton, a mile or two from Kirkby and Rotheram’s home turf. She was also once an apprentice. But that is where their similarities end. She has overseen a 3 per cent fall in apprenticeship starts in 2022-23 since becoming education secretary, whereas Rotheram has pushed his bold manifesto commitment of a “guarantee” of a job, training or apprenticeship to any young person out of work, education or training.
He claims to have done this through the 2019 launch of the UK’s first UCAS-style online apprenticeships portal which uses AI to help users write CVs and offer personalised recommendations. It was expanded last year into an all-in-one training and careers portal and there are early plans to build in progression pathways for users, for example by explaining the skills required for a career in offshore wind and where in the region you could get those skills.
The region also gives apprentices aged 19-24 access to half-price public transport, and Rotheram claims his recent plans to take the bus system under public control will also mean cheaper fares to “help people starting in the world of work”.
Steve Rotheram giving bricklaying another go at City of Liverpool College
The Tory ‘wake’
Rotheram can’t resist the opportunity for a snipe at his Tory Scouse nemesis. “She ended up in the Tory party and obviously, I ended up in the proper party.
“She espouses things that are hard to disagree with, about working-class people getting chances and all that. But then as the secretary of state she hasn’t implemented some of the easy reforms and funding that are in her gift.”
But although he describes the atmosphere at the recent Conservative party conference as “a wake”, he was also spotted smiling with Keegan at a fringe event.
He explains that their conversation was around his claims that although higher apprenticeships at level 4 and above have grown (up 7 per cent from last year), most are in the City and in corporate courses that “the company would have paid for anyway”.
“It’s [courses] for multi trillion-pound companies…being paid for from the apprenticeship levy. That’s not what it was raised to do. More people with MBAs, that’s not going to tackle skills shortages.”
Keegan’s response to this was “very defensive” – but she did agree to “come up [to Liverpool] and have a chat about it”.
“Let’s see if she’s as good as her word.”
Keegan is not the first education secretary to say they’ll listen to Rotheram when it comes to his ideas for apprenticeships.
Eight education secretaries have been in post since he became mayor. Justine Greening was the first. On the eve that he became mayor in 2017, the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack locked down the Commons for several hours. Rotheram, then an MP, thought “sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m not just sitting here”, and used the opportunity to let Greening, about to introduce the apprenticeships levy, know his ideas around its implementation. She showed interest, but after being made mayor never responded to his letters on the issue.
He recently saw her in London and reminded her of their conversation.
He says she claimed that civil servants at the time had “sat on it”. “Apparently, she was up for doing some of the things that I proposed, and the machinery had got in the way.” Greening never responded to FE Week’s request for comment about this, but she was a signatory to a letter earlier this year urging the chancellor to review the apprenticeships levy due to the “billions” going “unspent by employers”.
Gillian Keegan at the Conservative Party Conference
Building up a career
Rotheram, who has seven siblings and whose father Harry was a forklift driver, says his upbringing “coloured” his approach to politics – his dad was a long-serving Labour councillor.
He came very close came to remaining a bricklayer, with his life path changing “literally by accident”. While taking down ceilings during a property conversion, Rotheram was “covered in black soot” when a man wearing a suit walked in.
When Rotheram asked him “how have you ended up with a suit on and I’m like this?” The man explained how he used to have a similar construction job, but returned to college to get qualifications.
“I just thought, yeah, OK. I’ll do that.”
After doing O Levels and an apprenticeship in bricklaying at Kirkby College, then an Ordinary National Certificate at a college in Bootle, he worked for a civil engineering firm in the Falkland Islands for eight months just after the war ended. It was “very desolate” – “no TV, one radio station…and you couldn’t even telephone home. You had to book a call”.
Upon returning home and a short stint as a house husband, he bagged a business manager position for the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), which gave him the opportunity to do a master’s in contemporary urban renaissance at Liverpool Hope University.
The LSC area director at the time was Elaine Bowker – now chief executive of the City of Liverpool College. “I still call her boss.”
Elaine Bowker, chief executive of City of Liverpool College
Technical excellence colleges
It was during this time (2000) under the last Labour government that the LSC introduced the Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) programme, pitched at the time as helping colleges specialise in the “skills needed to prosper in the new economy”.
Seven years later, the scheme was replaced by a new standard costing £8,000 to apply for.
But Labour leader Keir Starmer is now proposing a similar scheme to CoVE, this time branded “technical excellence colleges”.
Rotheram is backing the plans as “where we need to go”, and believes the new status could help create more “parity of esteem” between colleges and universities.
“The problem for us to tackle is that how [college courses] are perceived by some employers. A degree still seems to be of a higher status qualification than an NVQ level 5, 6 or even 7. I don’t get why there’s not yet that understanding.”
The biggest challenges facing his region’s colleges are in getting provision in place for courses around “emerging technologies” such as heat pumps, hydrogen boilers and electrical charging points, which they have been trying to solve by dividing up different types of provision between them.
Before devolution, Rotheram claims every college was “trying to do all of that individually and competing with each other when there wasn’t the scale. We can plan things much more strategically when we work together.”
He would like much more devolution of skills funding, but his own party as well as the current government have brushed aside his repeated calls for the apprenticeship levy to be devolved to local areas.
He is eyeing the trailblazer deals recently signed by the Greater Manchester and West Midland mayors Andy Burnham and Andy Street, hoping to be next in line for a similar settlement.
Those areas will get to spend up to half their free courses for jobs budget on any adult level 3 qualification to meet local skills needs, although the ring-fencing will be removed after the next election. They will also get more freedom over bootcamp spending.
More than anything, Rotheram wants an end to the “piecemeal approach” of local skills funding.
“Over three years, you can start to plan things….But all too often at the moment you’ll get little pots here and there, and you can’t really plan like that.”
Sir Keir Starmers keynote speech Credit: Karl Black/Alamy Live News
Cradle to career
Rotheram used the opportunity of hosting the Labour party conference in his home city to pitch ideas to the shadow cabinet. At a meeting with Phillipson, he claims she was “really interested” in exploring an initiative his region is investing £5.25 million in, Cradle to Career.
It’s a place-based programme initiated and part-funded by a philanthropic foundation founded by the former chairman of housebuilding firm Redrow plc, Liverpudlian Steve Morgan.
The programme, which includes initiatives to support vulnerable learners, reduce the number of post-16 NEETs and create family hubs, was launched in 2021 in North Birkenhead in partnership with Wirral Council.
Since then, it claims to have boosted the reading age for more than 1,600 children, and significantly reduced the number at risk of being taken into care.
“We’re starting to see results filter through,” says Rotheram. He believes that giving children a “good start” in this way will save colleges money later down the line. At City of Liverpool College around 75 to 80 per cent of its 16 year old cohort leave school without the required GCSE maths and English, and Rotheram says the college is using “too much of their funding, as much as they can possibly pull in, to get kids to those standards”.
“That really should have been things that they gained in secondary school.”
The 61-year-old seems despondent about his ability to inspire the City College youngsters he spoke to today, however.
“It’s difficult to say ‘I was your age once’ because all they see is a grey-haired bloke,” he says.
“I still see myself as a 16-year-old standing, watching somebody telling us about how wonderful things are. But I want them to fully appreciate that [bricklaying] is not just a short-term qualification, it can lead them on to all sorts of weird and wonderful things – as it did for me.”
Steve Rotheram with City of Liverpool College learners
A coffee shop owner and a Ukrainian refugee who retrained as an ESOL tutor are among the shortlisted finalists for the second Mayor of London adult learning awards.
Nearly 300 nominations from the capital’s adult education providers, businesses, tutors and students have been carefully assessed by officials at the Greater London Authority and then a panel of expert judges.
From these, 21 hopefuls have been selected as finalists vying for the awards, sponsored by Ascentis and FE Week, across ten categories.
Among the finalists for the inspiring adult learner of the year award is Abdulkadir Mohamed, who was nominated by his employer, Central and Northwest London NHS Trust.
Mohamed came to the UK in 1998 as a refugee from Somalia. After teaching himself English while working as a kitchen porter, the trust took him on as a healthcare support worker, where he helped refugees and asylum seekers with PTSD. This April, he qualified as a mental health nurse through a degree apprenticeship.
The small business SEND Coffee has been selected as a finalist for the learning for good work employer of the year award. The company is the brainchild of Harry George who, having seen the struggles faced by young people with special education needs and disabilities trying to get well-paid jobs, set up a small coffee shop in Camden to employ and train SEND young people.
Harry George, founder, and Hashim, barista, SEND Coffee
The company has since expanded to three coffee shops and employs mentors to guide and train employees in skills such as travelling safely on public transport, handling money as well as barista training.
SEND Coffee’s nominator said: “When people come into the shops…they do not see a disabled person, but a barista doing their job. By the end of a year with SEND Coffee, learners have their own bank account and are able to travel independently, which is life changing.”
Waltham Forest College is also up for the learning for good work employer of the year award. It was the first FE college to become accredited under the Mayor of London’s new Good Work Standard and was nominated for this award for its work tackling career progression barriers for its ethnic minority and disabled staff.
“The college is actively working with specialist organisations to support improved recruitment, identification and progression opportunities within its workforce for people with disabilities, including those identifying as neurodiverse,” the college’s nomination said.
Anastasiia Trubkina
A finalist for this year’s inspirational tutor in adult education award is Anastasiia Trubkina. When war broke out in Ukraine last year, Trubkina, an English teacher and shop owner, managed to escape to the UK.
She joined MI ComputSolutions, a south-London based social enterprise, two months after arriving which reignited her passion for teaching. With the support of MI’s tutors, she expanded her teaching skills to include ESOL and now supports other Ukrainian refugees.
Her nominators said Trubkina “quickly expanded her ability to teach at all levels, learning to deliver on accredited and non-accredited ESOL. Anastasiia’s lived experience has helped MI staff to understand the plight of Ukrainian refugees fleeing war.
“Along with offering vital translation services, she provides additional guidance and support to learners, helping them adjust to living in the UK. Learners see her as someone that they can turn to for support.”
Winners will be revealed on November 2 at an awards ceremony in City Hall.
Government plans are afoot to develop a “long overdue” skills “classification tool” in a bid to help training providers to be “more efficient”.
The Department for Education (DfE) announced the proposal in a report released on Thursday. Such a tool would “[enable] better matching between the needs of employers and the skills available in the workforce”, it said.
The project, which could be developed over 18 months, will define jobs via a combination of core skills, skills areas, skills groups and occupational skills and tasks into a system known as the “standard skills classification” (SSC). Defining jobs in that granular detail and in one system would “generate positive economic benefits” by pushing efficiency and adaptability in the training system, the DfE said.
It also said that the new system would help employers to be “more innovative and flexible” and “enhance employment opportunities” by making it easier to progress within work.
Skills classifications are available in other countries but adapting them for use in the UK would previously have been a “slow and prohibitively expensive process”, the DfE’s report said.
Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools “present a timely opportunity to combine and refine the best of the existing provision, adapting it to our needs to develop the world’s best classification of skills”.
Currently, the system to assess skills in the UK is “fragmented and deficient”, while the language used to define skills needed for jobs is “inconsistent and unnecessarily complicated”, and sometimes does not relate directly to the UK jobs market.
The classification tool would include information from the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education’s occupational standards and the National Careers Service with O*NET, a free US tool developed to help people develop their careers.
The DfE would also use information from the European Union’s career development tool, the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations framework.
A beta version of the classification could be available in six months for testing and assessment.
As part of the SSC, the DfE would develop around 30 “skills areas” which it defined as “broad skill domains that relate to most occupations” such as making decisions or solving problems.
A job would also have a number of skills groups assigned to it, which the DfE defined as “intermediate skills domains”. These might include the ability to diagnose health conditions or disorders. The DfE is proposing to develop around 300 of them.
On top of that it will develop around 2,000 “occupational skills” which would “relate to a small number of occupations”, such as the ability to diagnose neural or psychological disorders.
A job would have occupational tasks assigned to it. An example would be the ability to identify psychological, emotional or behavioural issues, and to successfully diagnose disorders.
The DfE said the resource would make it easier for local authorities to “articulate clearly” to training providers which skills are needed in the local area and which ones could be needed in the future.
Employers could use the SSC to create a long-term skills plan to “quantify and prioritise skill shortages”, and to recruit workers based on their skills more efficiently.
The DfE said job seekers would also be able to figure out what their transferable skills are, look at their career possibilities and see where they have skills gaps which need filling.
Minimum service levels are set to be introduced in schools and colleges, the government has announced.
The Department for Education said the proposals will “put in place protections for children, young people and parents to ensure education can continue during any future strike action”.
Education secretary Gillian Keegan has written to union leaders inviting them to discuss proposals on a voluntary basis in the first instance.
DfE said “she is clear” that should a voluntary agreement not be reached, the government “is committed to using powers” granted through the controversial Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act introduced earlier this year.
This would lead to a consultation and is “expected to include a range of models” for minimum service levels in education.
It follows over 10 days of strike action in schools this year in a dispute over teacher pay and working conditions. Government says 25 million school days were lost cumulatively.
Strike action in colleges has been increasing in recent years. Staff at 32 colleges have voted to strike this autumn through the University and College Union. It follows the Association of College’s staff pay recommendation of 6.5 per cent, mirroring the offer made to schoolteachers.
The government first proposed minimum service levels last year. It has consulted on introducing them in ambulance, fire and rail services.
Keegan announced earlier this month that the DfE also intends to consult on minimum service levels in universities.
Today she said: “We cannot afford a repeat of that disruption – particularly as schools and teachers continue to work so hard to help children recover from the pandemic.
“I am asking the teaching unions to engage with us and agree to put children and young people’s education first – and above and beyond any dispute.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said this is “nothing more than an attempt to distract from her department’s own shortcomings”.
He added it was “unimaginable that there will any agreement over legislation that involves removing the basic rights of employees. Industrial action is only ever taken as a last resort, when all other options have been explored.”
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said his membership body will engage with DfE to help ensure that colleges can achieve a voluntary agreement on minimum services during strike action.
He added that if the DfE was to move ahead with regulations, the AoC will push to ensure that the “specific circumstances” of colleges are covered and that there aren’t “overlapping rules resulting from their dual rule in education of young people under the age of 18 and higher education provision”.
Jenny Arrowsmith, partner and head of educations at Irwin Mitchell, told FE Week that the consultation is likely to mirror the consultation for ambulance services.
“The employer must identify who is needed to carry out a minimum level of work during industrial action – this should not be more than is reasonably necessary,” she explained.
“The employer must then inform the union of who this is and the union must, in response, take reasonable steps to ensure that those persons do not participate in the strike. The consequences of the union allowing those members to strike is significant both for the union and its members. All strikers, for example, would lose the usual unfair dismissal protection.”
“The indications of the higher education consultation suggest this may include a proposal that it should allow for all marking to be done and for undisrupted teaching of specific groups,” she added.
Previous Job: Interim Chief Executive, Redbridge Council
Interesting fact: Lesley is a life-long Chelsea fan and season ticket holder – and she doesn’t mind who knows it
Imran Anwar
Governor, Middlesbrough College Group
Start date: July 2023
Concurrent Job: Founder and CEO, Alt Labs
Interesting fact: Imran learnt to fly planes at a very young age and was awarded his gold wings at RAF Topcliffe at the age of 15
Darush Dodds
Governor, Middlesbrough College Group
Start date: September 2023
Concurrent Job: Director of Corporate Affairs, Esh Group
Interesting fact: Darush starts his day earlier than many, sometimes as early as 3am, and often uses the early start to walk his three sausage dogs – Boris, Freddie and Eric
As party conference launches reach orbit and yesterday’s boosters head back to Earth, we should all take a satellite look at our education and skills system. Some amazing organisations and dedicated people have ensured FE was on board for lift-off this time, but nothing any politician has said over the past few weeks has abated my 30-year-long frustration.
Today, the happy 50 per cent at school will go on progressing to A Levels and university. And down this easy, well-trodden, well-understood and well-funded path, they will find access to the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) of £28k to spend on level 4 and above as and when they want.
Meanwhile, the other 50 per cent face 12 years of a school curriculum, teaching and assessment that aren’t right for them and don’t nurture their amazing talents. They get to feel like failures, and worse, the very talents that are taught out of them are often the ones most desired by employers.
Worse still, demotivated and let down by GCSE exams with their baked-in failure rate, they finally escape school for FE to pick them up off the floor – only to be beaten down again with GCSE retakes with a pass rate of 16 per cent.
Worst of all, FE gets the lowest funding in the education sector to support them, regardless of the fact they are some of the learners with the most need.
I say worst of all, but it doesn’t stop there. Level 2 and 3 apprenticeships are underfunded, and participation and opportunities have reduced. If you can work your way to a degree apprenticeship you might have the added benefit of not having to pay £28k for a degree – but the advantaged are slowly elbowing out the disadvantaged here too.
Then there are T Levels. Sunak’s Advanced British Standard reveals them as little else than vocational A Levels. And for those who don’t meet the entry requirements? We are wiping out BTECs and removing pathways, leaving them nowhere to go.
Does this feel like a system designed for all?
At least when the disadvantaged 50 per cent get past 18 adult learning will support them! No chance. Adult funding is in an even worse state and there is no prospect in sight for any form of level 2/3 lifetime entitlement to make up for systemic failures pre-19. That’s only for those ready for a level 4.
In his new book. Equity in Education: Levelling the playing field of learning, Lee Elliot Major argues that class is missing from the debate about diversity. Contending that middle-class advantages are “baked into” the education system, he suggests pupils from low-income families should be referred to as “under-resourced” rather than “disadvantaged”.
So in summary the under-resourced 50 per cent spend 12 years as an ill-fitting peg in a school-shaped hole, after which they progress to organisations that lack the funding to make the most of the two or three years they have to turn their chances around, and if they don’t succeed the funding and opportunities only shrink after that.
Does this feel like an education and skills system designed for all? I see one that forever favours the advantaged and leaves the under-resourced, well, under-resourced.
Before we tinker with programmes, curriculum and qualifications, we need to step back and start by looking at what an education and skills system should be providing all our young people and adults, not just those who have been favoured by policies that supposedly favour the “working-class aspiration to go to university”.
This isn’t a time to review A Levels to make the 16-18 phase even better for them. It’s a time to resource the under-resourced first.
Some fine words have been spoken at the party conferences. But they have for the past few decades. Whatever party is in power always gravitates towards A Levels, higher skills, universities and schools. Talk of technical excellence colleges and Advanced British Standards already show a drift in that direction.
Maybe, for once, the parties should start at the bottom and work up, rather than at the top and never reach those that need the support the most. That’s what we need if our skills system is going to be stellar, rather than crash back to Earth with a bang.
After a thirty-year career in cyber security and with a desire to share my passion for it, I entered the classroom as a lecturer at the South Central Institute of Technology. Now in my third year as a full-time educator, I have been on a professional journey that has taught me a great deal, including a very different way of operating compared to my experience in industry.
I’m a very practical person by nature. I learn by doing; in reality, trying, failing, trying again, etc., until I succeed. Theory only gets us so far and I know from my own personal experience that unless I anchor my knowledge in something tangible, new information can erode quickly. I also believe deeply that difficult conversations and debate are essential to understanding a topic well.
My classroom activities have a strong practical element – cracking passwords, hiding data with steganography, performing a forensic analysis with autopsy software and, among many other things – a class outing to the dark web. This is a very well-attended lesson which, while billed in something of a controversial way to drive excitement, addresses some very serious points.
It is important to point out that all of my students are aged 18 or over, and some of them will have been using the dark web for several years with information they’ve personally researched on the internet. The quality of this information ranges from the good to the downright dangerous.
The lesson is conducted using just-in-time Azure Cloud Virtual Machines, which the students have learnt to build in an earlier lesson. The Virtual Machine (VM) is both an enabling tool and a protective layer; if it gets infected with malware, then you just delete it and start again. Using an Azure VM – as opposed to a constrained dedicated educational VM – has a reinforcing action on prior learning as well as instilling essential, work-ready cloud skills and knowledge.
A significant percentage are already exploring the dark web
The students will then download and install anti-virus tools and the TOR Browser to their Virtual Machine and at this point we stop to discuss what we are about to do. First, we debate the dark web. What is it? How does it work? What are secure routes? Are you really anonymous there? What are the risks? Many learners don’t know there is more law enforcement on the dark web than anywhere else on the internet; in fact, one of our destinations is the CIA dark web homepage.
We debate online marketplaces; the places where you can buy literally anything. We talk about how users can know they are not law enforcement sting operations (there are many); and what happens if the site is raided and customer details are seized (yours will be too, and then they will be routinely shared with law enforcement agencies around the world).
We also debate the dark web as a force for good, which it certainly can be. It offers freedom of speech not permitted by oppressive regimes and the ability to research and self-solve Ransomware attacks. These essential topics balance conversations around more lurid areas such as drugs, firearms and fake passports
When I explained this lesson at the Education and Training Foundation’s ‘Big Data, Cyber Security and the Future of Learning’ conference earlier this year, a small number of people in the audience expressed a valid safeguarding concern: that such a lesson could expose learners to information that would put them at risk.
In response, I think we need to ask whether there is a better environment in which these learners could be informed and guided on this subject. A significant percentage are already exploring the dark web, guided by information from forums. Many aren’t insulating themselves well from malware attacks, and many are registering on websites and online marketplaces that lead to guilt by association.
The answer I gave then and by which I stand now is that we have a duty as educators to explore the difficult, debate wisely and drive safety through better knowledge. If we don’t teach the right way of doing things, it will be taught by others – and almost certainly not how we’d want.
