Latest news from FE Week

You can deliver a pizza. You don’t deliver learning

A pizza delivery on a rainy night or the rare historical text I found online are great uses of delivery. Education is not.

Too often, teachers talk about delivering lessons. Leaders say they are delivering a talk. Even students say they are delivering presentations.

But this paints education as a ‘done to’, passive experience. One person imparts the content while others simply have it delivered to them.

In FE, lecturers, leaders, and learners need to reimagine how our sector explores learning. This involves mindset, practical and semantic shifts in order to improve student engagement, lecturer satisfaction and institutional practice.

Mindset shifts

For those who have long thought about ‘delivery’ as the best way to impart knowledge, a change in mindset is necessary. This involves shifting from the concept of an expert delivering to a novice to the idea of guiding learners to discover with us.

Trust me, after over 25 years studying and teaching history, I have a lot of fascinating anecdotes to tell my students. However, I might have to give up some weird trivia facts on US presidents or my hot take on the phrase ‘Remember the Alamo’ in favour of learners discovering these for themselves. For example, I can give context for a historical situation, provide primary sources with guiding questions, then facilitate a discussion. Throughout that process, I am still able to provide my expert knowledge, but I can learn their perspectives and even new insights I might not have had.

Along the same lines, we can think about ourselves as lifelong learners. We always have more to learn. It’s actually one of the joys of working in education – upskilling our techniques, learning new methodologies and diving into theories and content in our curriculum areas. If we are constantly pursuing new knowledge and skills, we are modelling that discovery for students.

A college that prioritises staff development and provides space for innovation creates engaged staff. That trickles down into co-learning with students.

Practical changes

After the mindset shift comes the practical changes. First, try incorporating more active learning. Active learning is an instructional approach that purposefully engages students in the learning process. Instead of passively receiving information, students participate in activities such as discussions, problem-solving, group work, and hands-on projects.

This methodology encourages critical thinking, collaboration, and the application of knowledge. When employed well, it engages students as well as facilitates knowledge and skill development. For instance, instead of lecturing for a full carpentry theory lesson, an instructor can bring out models for students to explore, assign peer-marking for exam-style questions, and employ game-based formative assessments.

This type of active engagement leads to deeper understanding and retention of concepts. And that leads to better achievement, which is of course good for colleges and the sector.

Further, let go of rigid routes to achievement and embrace more nuance and adaptation. We can lead students to their educational goals – such as passing their level 2 beauty exam or completing their T Level work experience in health – without putting each student on the exact same path.

Many awarding bodies have suggestions for assignment briefs, but allow for variation. Use that creative freedom. Start by defining the final objectives and backwards plan to make the assignments and activities engaging. This type of adaptation is also important to meeting the diverse needs of our learners. And it’s a lot more interesting for teachers!

Semantic tweaks

Changing the words we use to speak about education can communicate the difference of approach. When I was pregnant, a doula told me, ‘You deliver a pizza, not a baby.’ I’ve taken the same idea and applied it to teaching.

You don’t deliver learning. Instead, we should emphasise how our programmes and courses facilitate learning. They don’t do the work for us. We work with the students to create engaging and rigorous learning experiences.

Implementing these changes will help transform FE colleges into learning-focused environments that empower learners, rather than merely providing education.

My dyslexia diagnosis changed the way I teach

I was doing my PhD when I found out that I was dyslexic.

By that stage, I had already spent many years in education, but the diagnosis suddenly helped me understand why I had found certain things more difficult than other people seemed to. It did not mean I wasn’t capable – I was completing a PhD after all – but it helped me understand that I learned and processed information differently.

That experience has stayed with me throughout my teaching career.

Perhaps because of it, when I see a learner struggling, I tend to look a little deeper. Instead of immediately thinking they are not working hard enough or are not capable, I want to know: what is getting in the way?

There can be many answers.

A learner may have dyslexia, ADHD, autism or another additional learning need. They may have low confidence, difficulties with literacy, English as an additional language, or things happening outside college that we know very little about.

Working within a trauma-informed approach has made me particularly aware that learners do not simply leave their life experiences at the door when they enter our classrooms.

Sometimes we see the result rather than the reason.

We see poor attendance, missed assignments or a learner who has stopped engaging. But what is happening underneath?

Teachers are not there to diagnose. However, because we spend so much time with our students, we are often well placed to notice when something does not seem quite right.

As a science teacher, I might speak to a learner who can explain a difficult scientific concept perfectly well, yet their written work shows little of that understanding.

That difference should make us curious.

Teachers, however, need support too. We already plan, teach, assess, monitor attendance and progress, manage behaviour and respond to very different learners.

We cannot keep adding responsibilities without providing appropriate training and practical tools.

Teachers do not need to become SEND specialists. But we can be better equipped to ask simple questions when someone is struggling.

What have I noticed? When does the difficulty occur? Is there a pattern? What have I already tried? What does the learner say? Who else could help?

That is not diagnosis. It is simply taking the time to understand the learner.

And once a concern is raised, there must be an effective system behind the teacher. Supporting learners requires teachers, learning-support teams, SEND specialists, curriculum staff and learners themselves to work together.

I also think we sometimes concentrate so much on qualifications that we forget about the whole person.

Sport has become an important part of my own life, and it has changed how I think about education. As a competitive women’s cricket player and a qualified cricket coach, I have seen how sport can build confidence, resilience, teamwork and a sense of belonging. I would love to see more opportunities for all learners, including science learners, to experience sport and physical activity.

A learner struggling academically may discover confidence somewhere completely different. Sometimes helping a learner does not mean giving them another worksheet. It may mean helping them discover something that makes them believe in themselves again.

Too often, we intervene after things have already gone wrong: assessments have been failed, attendance has fallen or the learner has disengaged.

I know from my own journey that a learning difference does not determine someone’s potential. Being dyslexic did not stop me completing my PhD. Understanding my dyslexia helped me understand myself, and it has helped shape the teacher I became.

So when a learner is struggling, perhaps our first question should not be:

“Why aren’t they achieving?”

Maybe it should simply be:

“What is getting in the way – and what can we do to help?”

If lifelong learning is for everyone, it must reach our prisons

Without literacy, numeracy and digital skills, many people struggle to access opportunities most of us take for granted. Nowhere is this challenge more clearly felt than in our prisons, where around two-thirds of people struggle to read.

In September, adult education charity WEA held its essential skills round table in Parliament as part of its Lifelong Learning Labs campaign, which is bringing people and organisations together to build a stronger case for a national lifelong learning strategy.

Shannon Trust is one of the many cross-sector organisations supporting the change. We work in prisons across England, Wales and Northern Ireland to help people improve their reading and numeracy.

The impact of this support can be seen both in the scale of learning and in what it enables people to do next. In 2025, 11,380 learners engaged with Shannon Trust’s reading and numeracy programmes, taking part in more than 142,000 learning sessions.

Shannon Trust trains people who can read to support those who need help developing their skills. Many of the people we support have spent years believing education isn’t for them. Peer-led learning works because learners see someone like themselves succeeding.

There are no exams or classrooms. Instead, mentors work one-to-one with learners, progressing at the learner’s own pace. Learning from someone with shared lived experience helps remove stigma, builds trust and creates a supportive environment where people feel able to succeed. Mentors develop valuable communication, leadership and coaching skills that can support them beyond prison.

We know that learning to read changes lives. It opens opportunities and gives people more control over their future.

Many people in prison have had negative experiences of education. Some left school without literacy skills, often hiding their skills deficit due to a lack of confidence to learn altogether. Research from the Ministry of Justice has consistently shown a link between engagement with education and reduced re-offending, highlighting the importance of these foundations. If lifelong learning is going to work, it has to reach people who have had the worst experiences of education and who are least likely to engage through traditional routes.

Too often, we talk about essential skills as something people pick up at one point in their lives. In reality, they need ongoing opportunities to learn and progress. Essential skills should be seen as a lifelong investment, not a one-off educational intervention.

Reading provides the foundation on which further learning is built. Without it, accessing vocational training, qualifications or employment becomes more difficult. With it, people can continue their education, secure work, strengthen relationships with their families and contribute positively to their communities.

This work is taking place against a challenging backdrop. While the overall prison education budget in England has increased in cash terms, the Ministry of Justice has acknowledged that inflationary pressures and changes associated with the new Prisoner Education Service have contributed to a reduction of around 20–25 per cent in core education delivery.

Published commissioning figures indicate that planned core education hours across 94 prisons are around 25 per cent lower from April 2026 than before the new contracts began in October 2025. At a time when education provision is under pressure, ensuring people can access essential literacy and numeracy skills is more important than ever.

No single organisation can achieve this alone, which is why we’re supporting the WEA’s Lifelong Learning Labs campaign. Almost half of WEA learners left school with low or no qualifications, leaving them furthest from opportunity.

The campaign was launched in February 2026 to gather evidence, listen and challenge assumptions to ultimately build a stronger case for a national lifelong learning strategy.

If we’re serious about improving essential skills in the UK, we must focus on those facing the greatest barriers to learning, such as those supported through the Shannon Trust and the WEA.

Read the WEA Lifelong Learning Labs campaign interim report here. The final report will be released in December 2026.

Our AI marking tool is designed to challenge teachers, not replace them

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, once said: “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.”

At the Centre for Humane Technology, that maxim is how you diagnose what a product does to people – and it has become the guiding light of our own AI strategy.

Fixter, our AI assessment sparring partner built by teachers for teachers, has been in testing since January.

Commercial AI is built to be frictionless and agreeable – quick to answer, quick to agree, because that’s what keeps you coming back. Fixter is engineered to do the opposite: to slow a teacher down long enough for their own judgment to stay in the feedback, rather than being handed over to the model. Before finishing any piece of feedback, it stops and asks the teacher for a personal observation — something only a human in the room would know.

We saw this first-hand in early prototyping. Teachers’ own fatigue, assumptions, and unconscious leniency were skewing feedback. And Fixter, marking only to the criteria, was catching it.

I was the teacher it caught. A transcript came back “not yet passed” when I’d projected what I already knew about the learner onto the work: tired from marking too many assignments at once, and quietly softening my judgement because I knew they were struggling and didn’t want to ask for a re-submission. Fixter didn’t know any of that. It just held the work to the criteria.

This isn’t a race to efficiency. Finnish education leader Olli-Pekka Heinonen argues that learning was never an optimisation game: productive struggle builds depth. Fixter is our attempt to apply that thinking to how teachers mark, not just what students submit.

Fixter’s origin story starts with a heated debate on our concourse at an INSET day in January 2023, when we were all still figuring out how to move forward. Lisa Fixter, an engineering teacher, challenged the unthinking rush to embrace AI – not the technology itself, but using it without asking why, how, or whether it helped anyone learn. The tool is named for her; she’s now one of our most deliberate AI users, and her scepticism has guided its development.

Fixter sits inside an intentional AI strategy: every student completes an AI Driver’s Licence at induction, now in its third year, before using our offloading tools. We’ve prioritised a refocus on authentic assessment since last year. Our learning coaches, who delivered CPD on it this August, are already seeing learning experiences that better prepare learners for their sector’s lived reality than an essay.

The question now is not whether to use AI, but how to design assessment that cannot simply be outsourced to it. This is built around one distinction: using AI for offloading rather than outsourcing. Offloading is using AI to hold a first draft steady while you do the real work of thinking. Outsourcing is clicking approve.

The American sci-fi writer Ted Chiang says using AI to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room: you move the weight, but you never build strength yourself. The same is true for the person marking: a teacher who lets AI write feedback unread doesn’t get faster at noticing what a learner needs next.

Take Priya, a hairdressing apprentice (a composite drawn from real learners we teach). Written essays at school made her feel education wasn’t for her. But her evidence for this unit, instead of an essay, is a vlog transcript on a client consultation that went wrong, annotated reflective photographs, and a witness statement from her supervisor. Her teacher feeds all three into Fixter, which flags where Priya’s account doesn’t quite match the witness statement and drafts feedback against the criteria.

Before it finalises anything, the human nuance check stops and asks for something Fixter cannot see: what it means for Priya’s confidence to have her own voice reflected back, not a blank page. The teacher adds that context. VARCS Alignment then checks the draft against JCQ guidance in full, relevant awarding body standards, and the Centre for Humane Technology’s AI principles. Grounded in our own do-this, don’t-do-that teacher guidance, a running log tracks what percentage of Fixter’s wording the teacher keeps or edits, criterion by criterion.

Fixter’s real quality assurance is design, testing, and iteration led by the teachers who use it every day. Are commercial AI tools actually incentivised to enhance learning? We deliberated hard to find ones that are – because not every AI platform shares an educator’s incentives. It is a sparring partner for noticing what the evidence shows, not a replacement for a teacher who knows Priya well enough to notice what the evidence can’t.

England and America have each solved half the apprenticeships puzzle

England tightened its apprenticeship funding rules this year to favour young people. It hasn’t worked yet.

Young people’s share of new apprenticeship starts fell to 23.8 per cent in the first half of 2025-26, the lowest level in five years. This occurred even as the government restricted level 7 funding to under-22s and launched foundation apprenticeships aimed at young entrants. FE colleges’ share of the market slipped too, from 21 to 17 per cent.

The policy change logic was sound. The results aren’t matching it. Something besides funding rules is missing. And a new American report on community colleges suggests what it might be.

That report, from the nonprofit coalition Apprenticeships for America, examined how US community colleges function not just as training providers but as apprenticeship intermediaries. These are institutions that recruit and manage relationships with multiple employers, handle the compliance burden apprenticeship sponsorship requires, and provide the tutoring and transportation support that keep young apprentices enrolled.

The number of colleges playing this role grew more than five-fold between 2016 and 2023, from 30 to over 200. But the growth was thin. Of 541 colleges registered as sponsors, fewer than half have an active apprentice. And the roughly 15,500 enrolled represent only about 3 per cent of the nation’s civilian apprentices.

What’s most striking is that active programs draw the overwhelming share of apprentices. In some cases, the number is up to 95 per cent who come from existing employees rather than from young people entering the workforce for the first time.

Read together, the two countries are missing complementary pieces of the same puzzle. England has rewritten its funding incentives to favour youth. However, funding eligibility alone doesn’t automatically produce youth recruitment. Someone still has to find young people, match them with employers, and walk them through a system not built with them in mind.

That is precisely the intermediary function the AFA report describes. They actively broker connections between students who don’t yet know an apprenticeship is possible and employers who don’t yet have a relationship with any training provider. America has built a network of colleges willing to play that role. But it’s missing a funding architecture that steers them toward first-time entrants rather than the incumbent workers who are easier and cheaper to recruit.

Neither country’s problem is really about apprenticeship as a concept. It’s about the connections between a young person and a place. Those connections include the relationships, referrals, and institutional legwork that turn a funding rule or a training slot into an actual match. That’s a social capital issue.

Skills England’s remedy this summer, raising funding bands on the standards young people use most, may help at the margins. It remains to be seen whether higher rates alone can move the youth share without more recruitment and matchmaking capacity behind them.

But the UK and US data point to the same conclusion. Funding incentives are necessary and not sufficient. Somebody has to do the unglamorous work of recruitment and matchmaking that neither a levy nor a report can do. That argues for a specific kind of investment on each side of the Atlantic.

In England, it likely means giving Further Education colleges more explicit backing to act as the on-the-ground intermediaries the youth-first funding rules assume already exist. This includes treating recruitment and employer-matching as a resourced function rather than an unfunded expectation layered onto colleges already stretched by funding pressures.

In the U. S., it means the reverse. Attaching new incentives to the existing college apprenticeship infrastructure that already exists. This rewards colleges for reaching first-time entrants rather than defaulting to easier-to-recruit incumbent workers.

Each country has built half of what apprenticeship at scale requires. The other half is not a new policy lever so much as a willingness to fund the human work of connecting one young person to one employer at a time. That work is slow, expensive, and, on this year’s evidence, indispensable.

Movers & Shakers: Edition 555

Councils call for more bailouts as SEND deficits to top £10bn

Ministers must be prepared to write off SEND deficits accrued over the next two years, councils have warned, after predicting they will rise to £10 billion even after historic debts are wiped.

The government is wiping 90 per cent of deficits built up by April 2026 in return for approved local SEND reform plans.

Analysis by FE Week’s sister title Schools Week shows this could cost the government nearly £6 billion, which will be paid later this year.

But councils will then continue to build up deficits until 2028, when the government will take responsibility for cost pressures in the system.

Ministers said in March they would continue to take an appropriate and proportionate approach, but that support would not be unlimited.

Today, the County Council Network warned deficits could hit a record £10.4 billion in just two years. The Office for Budget Responsibility previously forecast deficits over the next two years would total more than £9 billion.

‘Financial catastrophe’

The CCN said councils had seen a “sharp increase” in applications for education, health and care plans (EHCPs) since government SEND reforms were announced in February.

Reforms propose that EHCPs be reserved for pupils with the most “complex needs” from 2035.

The number of pupils with EHCPs rose by 13 per cent between January 2025 and January 2026.

A survey by the Association of Local Authorities Treasurer Societies of 89 councils found that even after accounting for the write-off of historic deficits, councils believe the shortfall could reach £4.8 billion by March 2027 and £10.4 billion by March 2028.

The network said the DfE should give a “cast iron commitment” to wipe out deficits accrued until March 2028.

The CCN said “anything less” than removing 90 per cent of remaining debts by 2029 will cause “financial catastrophe” for many town halls. Even then, one in 10 surveyed councils said this support may not be enough to avoid bankruptcy.

‘Not out of the woods’

Linden Kemkaran, SEND spokesperson for the CCN, said while the bailout is a “lifeline” for councils, they are “not out of the woods”.

“Despite this, we have little clarity from government on how much support we will receive, and when.

“If councils are left carrying billions of pounds of SEND debt, it will not just be a problem for local authorities. Taxpayers and local communities will ultimately bear the consequences as councils face impossible choices about how to protect frontline services while managing debts that have accrued through no fault of their own.”

A government spokesperson said: “We inherited a SEND system under immense strain, and have always recognised that both deficits and EHCP applications will continue to rise before our reforms are fully rolled out.

“On top of grants to pay off 90 per cent of council deficits, we’re investing billions to make sure every community has easy, early access to specialists like speech and language therapists, and so councils can deliver their tailored local reform plans.”

The spokesperson said government will reveal details of further support by March 2028.

City & Guilds staff to vote on strike action over return-to-office plans

Hundreds of staff at awarding giant City & Guilds are set to vote on strike action over plans to require employees to work from the office at least two days a week.

Unite the Union claimed the “vindictive” policy is being used by the company’s new owner PeopleCert to force workers out of the business.

City & Guilds bosses rejected the allegation and accused the union of “misrepresenting the situation”, while describing the policy as a “reasonable and carefully considered” move designed to improve collaboration, performance and service delivery.

It comes months after 75 City & Guilds roles were put at risk of redundancy, prompting threats of legal and industrial action from the union. Sixty-four redundancies were ultimately made.

Unite claimed “all” staff have been instructed to work from the office for a minimum of two days a week, and more if required, despite “many” having remote-working contracts and working from home since “well before” the Covid pandemic.

It said interim CEO Andy Moss had previously encouraged flexible location contracts as a strategy to overcome recruitment difficulties.

Unite added that City & Guilds was refusing to cover travel and overnight accommodation costs for staff who live long distances from their designated offices, in some cases hundreds of miles away.

Parents are also facing “significant difficulties” arranging and paying for day and overnight childcare, the union added.

But City & Guilds said the policy applies only to the 990 employees whose contractual place of work is an office. Around 150 staff contracted to work from home are not affected, it said, while reasonable adjustments, flexible-working requests and individual circumstances will “continue to be considered fairly and appropriately”.

In response, Unite said City & Guilds has failed to commit that they will not impose future changes to the number of days workers need to work from the office without negotiation. A spokesperson added: “This means that all workers are at risk of having their number of office days changed without any warning.”

Around 800 City & Guilds workers are Unite members.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “This is a blatant and unfair attack on the workforce to try and make redundancies on the cheap.

“City & Guilds workers can see straight through PeopleCert’s attempts to cull its workforce with this totally unjustifiable and vindictive policy. Unite will not stand for it – these workers have their union’s total backing.”

A spokesperson for City & Guilds said: “We’re disappointed that Unite has chosen to misrepresent the situation and ballot members on what is a reasonable and carefully considered policy that is in the best interests of learners and customers, as well as being equitable for all our colleagues.

“Many colleagues already attend their workplace regularly, and we believe greater consistency across the organisation is reasonable and fair.”

They added that the company has engaged “constructively and extensively” with Unite on these arrangements, holding eight meetings before and since the policy was announced, as well as extending the timeframe for those discussions to allow “proper debate”.

The return-to-work implementation date was originally set for 28 September but was extended to 19 October.

Office working to improve C&G ‘competitiveness’

PeopleCert bought City & Guilds’ awarding and commercial business from the 148-year-old charity last October for around £166 million.

The controversial sale has been the subject of three separate investigations involving the Charity Commission, PeopleCert itself and the City & Guilds Foundation.

In May, PeopleCert put 6 per cent of City & Guilds’ then 1,250-strong workforce up for redundancy. Unite threatened but did not pursue legal and industrial action, after accusing the company of advertising jobs in Greece during the negotiations, and failing to involve staff early enough in the redundancy process.

The dispute also followed a leaked PeopleCert business plan which proposed cutting around a third of City & Guilds’ workforce through “natural employee churn”. The plan included moving some roles to Greece, where personnel costs were said to be “up to 50 per cent lower”.

Unite accused PeopleCert of unlawfully withholding key information during staff transfer consultations.

The union said a consultative ballot of around half of Unite members at City & Guilds found 97 per cent in favour of industrial action over the return-to-office “diktat”.

Unite national officer Peter Storey said: “Thanks to the collective strength of the workforce, Unite forced PeopleCert to backdown from its previous dishonest plans. But we warned at the time that Unite would remain vigilant and we have been proved right.

“There has been no serious meaningful consultation or negotiation from PeopleCert about fundamental changes to people’s working arrangements and work from home policies. PeopleCert needs to backdown because its current plans will blow up in its face.”

A spokesperson from PeopleCert said Unite’s comments “mischaracterise both PeopleCert and our ambition for City & Guilds”.

They added: “We are a UK-headquartered global business serving thousands of organisations, government agencies and partners across more than 200 countries, with the UK being our core market.

“The policy is designed to improve City & Guild’s competitiveness and performance in a highly contested market and form part of a wider transformation programme to unlock its potential and build a world-leading organisation that is fit for the future.”