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Dale’s mission to ride a zipline of happiness

Mark Dale was enjoying a quiet smoke of his pipe in the woodlands surrounding Portland College Group’s Nottinghamshire campus, trying not to set anything on fire, when a vision formed in his head.

He imagined the college’s then mainly wheelchair-using learners having a “whale of a time” abseiling from a tower and racing along a treetop walkway.

That was in 2013. Seven years later, just as Covid lockdown measures came into force, the chief executive’s dream was realised when Portland’s Woodland Adventure Zone opened, complete with climbing tower, 90-metre zipline, adventure trail and archery zone.

It is Dale’s “pride and joy” – and symbolic of his “learning for skills and happiness” educational philosophy.

Portland College’s woodland setting

Epicurean college

Dale’s inspiration is the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Happiness, he explains, does not mean “ice cream on a warm day, as lovely as that is”. It comes from five practices: nurturing relationships, keeping physically active – particularly in nature – helping others, continuing to learn and practising mindfulness.

Nowadays, the college mainly caters for learners with SEND and its more cognitively able learners practise meditation and fundraise for local causes.

But Dale is no misty-eyed idealist. He sees one of the principal jobs of a college leader much more prosaically: to “get money”.

“You can be full of passion and ideas, but if you haven’t actually got the resource to pay people, you’re barking into the wind.”

His happiness curriculum draws “hardly at all” on the teaching and learning theories he encountered during the 18 years he spent working in the University of Nottingham’s education department, before joining Portland as chief executive in 2006. Most of his learning, he says, has instead come from directly observing and participating in teaching.

Underlying it is his conviction that the culture of the mainstream education system itself is “wrong”, because “trying to force all children to be the same doesn’t work”.

He draws from personal experience. His two youngest children spent time out of school because they “couldn’t cope with the demands of mainstream” before moving to special schools. One son is now at Portland.

He is, by his own admission, “never short of a view”. Interviewing him, he jokes, will be “like the longest taxi ride you’ll ever have”. (Indeed, my visit to Portland does overrun by about two hours.)

He is also “far more radical” than the Portland charity itself and stresses that his views are his own.

Mark Dale outside one of the new residential buildings at Portland College

Student days

The youngest of three children, Dale grew up in Birmingham with a post office worker mother and telephone engineer father who were “focused on paying off the mortgage and mowing the lawn”.

Dale was bullied in three different schools for being “academically quite clever”. Teachers did “absolutely nothing” to stop it, and playtime was “torture”.

His striking height and stature made him “more than able” to defend himself, but he remembers well his peers who could not.

It would be easy to frame his life mission as being about helping the more vulnerable members of society. Dale sees it differently: his job is to help people help themselves by “arming them with knowledge, rather than with bats”.

An economic and social history degree at the University of Nottingham sparked his interest in adult education. He volunteered as an adult literacy tutor in a deprived part of the city and later taught at what is now Nottingham College but was then People’s College – a name whose ethos he “loved”.

Unsure what to do with his life amid soaring unemployment, he pursued a doctorate in urban planning. Studying institutional racism in Leicester’s planning system gave him a “crusading sense of wanting to tackle social injustice”.

He became a lecturer in adult education – the “youngest in the country for years on end because it was a dead profession” in universities. A restructure put him in charge of taught education studies, including teaching FE and adult education teachers. One was Portland’s then principal, Mike Syms, whom he took over from 20 years ago this month.

A celebration of Portland College’s history

Reinventing Portland

Portland was conceived in the mid-1930s as a support centre for injured miners on land donated by the Duke of Portland. After opening in 1950, it broadened its reach to war veterans and people with congenital disabilities.

When Dale joined, it had 125 learners. All but five were residential.

Portland was then the largest of nine adult residential providers in England, and Dale had inherited a declining Department for Work and Pensions programme for adults who had “fallen out of work”.

The programme was expensive – around £23,000 per job outcome – but it was “incredibly effective”. At its peak, 85 per cent moved into employment and more than 80 per cent remained in work for over six months.

When it was axed in 2015, Portland made a £500,000 trading loss.

Further DWP contracts followed, but Dale became increasingly frustrated with what he calls their “disastrous” payment-by-results approach. Portland’s wide footprint across the East of England made it challenging to meet the DWP’s stipulated parameters of success.

He remembers travelling to Sheffield on an “uncomfortable minibus” with a colleague with multiple physical disabilities, only to be put on the “naughty step” by six civil servants led by an “idiot with a toothbrush moustache”, who told them how “rubbish” their contract performance was.

Dale “breathed a sigh of relief” when the contract ended.

Another idea was emerging.

At least half of Portland’s DWP referrals had mental health difficulties. Dale became interested in the US-inspired ‘recovery college’ model, offering free courses to improve wellbeing as well as employability.

Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust was already running the model locally with general FE colleges, which Dale says withdrew one by one for cost reasons.

With £15,000-a-year backing from a local company, he established Portland Pathways and opened an office in Mansfield Citizens Advice Bureau to enrol jobseekers. Accessing public funding was less straightforward.

As a specialist college on the government’s approved ‘section 41’ register, Portland is in what Dale calls a “gilded cage” of restrictions on their remit, and the college can only access other funding streams through partnerships with other organisations. By the time he secured adult education funding, Portland was on its fourth such partnership.

Portland still operates the programme, now called Rebuild Your Mental Health and run independently of the healthcare trust.

It resembles the old DWP programmes, but with a “people first” rather than a “work first” approach. Nobody is “kicked off” a programme for failing to follow set rules or interrogated about how many jobs they have applied for.

And participants can benefit from counselling and psychotherapy from supervised master’s students at the University of Derby.

Demand is “skyrocketing”. The programme now supports around 120 people a year into employment, and is soon to be funded through the new East Midlands mayoral strategic authority.

Portland College’s cafeteria, which does around 300 covers each lunchtime

A college transformed

Portland’s main base is more than a college campus. It provides residential respite for families, rents out its hydro pool to Water Babies (infant swimming) classes and allows dog walkers to ramble across its picturesque woodland grounds.

Signs of Portland’s rapid expansion are everywhere. A front garden has become a car park; the former caretaker’s house is an independent-living training facility.

Dale can see therapy donkeys nibbling grass from his office windows.

“I live and breathe this place,” he says, offering me tea and biscuits as he proudly shows off a royal-themed mug a colleague gave him to celebrate his recent MBE.

Portland has substantially expanded its SEND cohort since the Children and Families Act came into force in 2014. Dale was at the time involved in DfE consultations about the changes, as vice-chair of specialist college body Natspec.

Despite commanding cross-party and cross-sector support, he recalls the reforms becoming “adversarial almost immediately”.

He partly blames funding. The £6,000 contribution providers make before local-authority high-needs top-up funding kicks in has remained unchanged for years, and Dale believes it should now be nearer £10,000.

The college now has 290 high-needs FE students, alongside another 30 learners at its independent special school and alternative provision in Mansfield and new complex-needs centres in Nottingham.

Although much of its accommodation has been converted into classrooms, around 30 adults on adult social care live in supported accommodation on campus.

Accommodation for adults on campus

‘Preloaded for a fight’

Being ‘outstanding’ means parental preference is a factor too, and the Ofsted rating has caused a rise in families of young people with fewer needs trying to secure a place at the college.

The tribulations of the SEND system mean the families of the young people the college serves are “used to fighting”, and often arrive “preloaded, ready for a fight”.

“You can see it in the body language,” Dale says.

Disabled people fare worse on health, wellbeing and employment measures, he adds, leaving the college with a “job to do” empowering those students who can help themselves.

Some colleagues, he believes, can display a “subconscious bias”: people with “very kind hearts” who are nevertheless “risk averse” and sometimes think more about learners’ limitations than their abilities.

The same suspicion of paternalism shapes his views on regulation.

Care Quality Commission policy, he says, weighs against supported living on Portland’s campus because it is not considered a community setting.

Yet some long-term care residents would “love” to move into supported living there and already consider the open campus, close to Mansfield and a GP surgery, their community.

“The regulator decides rather than the people. To me, that’s wrong.”

But Dale has a “very productive” relationship with Nottinghamshire Council, which he says acts quickly to resolve disputes with families. He is “surprised” to have been involved in only two tribunal hearings during his time at Portland.

Dale sees “parties of all political hues really trying their best to make it work” locally. Councillors responsible for SEND often have family experience of the system and “skin in the game”, as he does, which “helps with the discussions”.

But he also sees council officers with “lots of positive intent” being “overwhelmed” by demand.

He compares the SEND system to a video game in which players desperately scramble up a ladder to escape a room filling with water – except the water is rising faster than they can climb.

Mark Dale and Portland College curriculum manager David Winter

Rigid templates

Dale supports the principle behind the government’s reforms of making mainstream schools more inclusive.

However, he believes they are “destined to fail”.

The national curriculum, Ofsted’s influence on school improvement and academisation have, he argues, created a rigid template of what education should look like which some children “don’t always fit”.

He also attacks “the government obsession with attendance, and multi-academy trusts’ obsessions with uniform”, pointing to a local school that sent children home during this summer’s heatwave for wearing shorts.

“Whilst ever you have schools displaying almost barbarous inhumanity – isolation rooms, teachers who think it’s acceptable to measure the length of a girl’s skirt, or a boy’s skirt for that matter – even if you have the best skills in the world to understand neurodiversity, if you are working in a template around control and conformity, people are going to keep butting heads.

“Because with neurodivergent profiles, even if they wanted to conform, there’s wiring in them that means they can’t do it all the time.”

Dale also sees parts of the government’s education agenda as an “erosion of parental rights” and “regulation gone bonkers”, particularly increased local-authority oversight of home-educated children.

He experienced social workers visiting his own home to check on his children’s welfare when they were being home-schooled, which he “tried not to take personally”.

But he does not reject the logic of the government’s reform agenda entirely. Funding SEND more generously upfront through education providers is a “potentially sound” idea.

His concern is that young people with “complex presentations” requiring several forms of support could instead be “funnelled down a particular channel” when they need a blended approach.

Dale is “absolutely sure” the reforms will mean fewer EHCPs and, consequently, lower demand for Portland, and admits that worries him.

And health services, he believes, will have to do much more.

Dale recalls an impact report prepared for the local SEND board by an officer from Nottinghamshire’s integrated care board.

It was, he says with a tone of exasperation, merely a list of meetings they had attended.

For a man redesigning a college around the pursuit of happiness, that is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of what he has spent his career railing against: institutions mistaking process for progress.

Bickering big beasts’ sideshow is Tory skills highlight

“You have put words in my mouth that I absolutely did not say,” Amanda Spielman told David Willetts.

During a no-drama conference offering slim pickings on education and skills policy, this was more like it.

Spielman, the former Ofsted chief inspector who was quietly made a shadow work and pensions minister over the summer, had just delivered a damning judgment on universities from a panel called: “What should the Conservative plan be for tertiary education?” Too many students were getting little economic benefit from their degrees, some were bored and lonely, and student debt “hangs like an enormous sword over young people’s heads”, she claimed.

Willetts, a former universities minister and architect of the current student loans system, was visibly riled.

“I really do not believe that the evidence bears out the assertions which we have just heard from Amanda,” he said, before dismantling her arguments one by one.

Their disagreement at a King’s College London Policy Institute fringe event was admittedly entertaining. But it was just one example of how much further the Conservatives have to work on a coherent education policy platform.

Labour’s 2.0 vision at least had a clear role for FE and training in Andy Burnham’s hope agenda. Reform UK had ideas for skills in their first 100 days. But in Birmingham this week, the Conservatives’ most useful contribution was a discussion about why their own apprenticeship policy wouldn’t work.

As we approach the halfway point of a five-year parliament, the official opposition still has time to work out its offer. But the polls are not in their favour, with YouGov’s conference week poll putting the Conservatives on 20 per cent, behind Reform UK on 22 and Labour on 27.

Right on cue

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s stall was to go back to first principles. Her much-promoted 100-page ‘statement’, The Right Way, published on Sunday, intentionally harked back to pre-Thatcher Conservatism.

Badenoch argued that governments have taken responsibility for too much while losing the ability to deliver. Problems did not begin with Labour in 1997 or 2024, and previous Conservative governments made some of them worse, she argued.

There was no mention of further education, and the statement’s only point on education was a defence of the last Conservative government’s school reforms.

Elsewhere at the conference, the party pledged to remove inheritance tax from family homes, end the £100,000 income cliff-edge for free childcare, and create a £10 billion ‘Britannia Shield’ to protect us from missiles and drones.

Badenoch also promised to halve national insurance for under-25s and repeated her pledge to cut student loan interest.

Shadow education secretary Laura Trott’s main-stage speech echoed her former Tory colleague now-Reform UK education spokesperson Suella Braverman’s speech from a few weeks ago.

Trott’s “pledge to parents” promised stronger enforcement of impartiality rules for teachers and guest speakers, alongside a new law to keep trade union politics out of schools. The closest she came to vocational education was to defend English and maths, “They’re still the most important vocational qualifications,” like they were under threat.

Laura Trott speaks from the conference lecturn — Laura Trott

Degrees of disagreement

Out on the conference fringe, Willetts took Spielman’s critique apart, starting with how she judged educational quality.

As chief inspector, she had assessed schools on teaching quality. Why then were universities judged so heavily on graduates’ earnings? Creative and performing arts courses could have brilliant teaching but poor salary outcomes, while A Level courses were praised for their teaching without equivalent scrutiny of subsequent earnings.

On her argument that too many degrees delivered little benefit, Willetts said earnings were only part of the picture. Higher education also brought health and employment benefits, including for graduates working in jobs not classified as graduate occupations. And young people reporting mental health problems were more likely to remain in employment if they had attended university, he argued.

Next came the “gigantic” student loan write-offs. Their size reflected policy choices about repayment thresholds and loan terms, rather than simply universities’ performance. Changes introduced by the last Conservative government meant England’s system now required a lower taxpayer contribution than other European models, he said.

What about that “sword” hanging over graduates? What mattered was their repayments, not the headline debt. In Willetts’ illustrative calculation, graduates earned £4,000 to £5,000 more a year than non-graduates while repaying about £500, retaining most of the financial advantage.

Lords Willetts and Amanda Spielman exchange heated views across a conference panel — L-R: Lord Wiilletts, Bobby Duffy, Amanda Spielman

He also challenged comparisons between graduate and apprenticeship earnings. Measuring apprenticeship returns only up to age 28, while assessing graduates over a lifetime using different assumptions, was a shaky basis for redirecting young people’s choices, he said.

Spielman objected that he had misrepresented her position. “I made no suggestion about closing courses,” she said, insisting she had not presented economic returns as the only test.

Willetts’ scepticism extended to the very concept of a tertiary system. Universities, colleges and apprenticeships operated under fundamentally different rules.

Graduate earnings made loan repayments a viable funding model for higher education, he argued. Other provision needed different arrangements because extending loans could produce unacceptable write-offs.

Universities’ autonomy, colleges’ public-sector status and employers’ freedom to recruit apprentices further complicated any common framework. Employers did not face the same admissions scrutiny as universities, either.

Sums don’t add up

The Conservatives’ existing offer includes 100,000 more apprenticeships for 18 to 21-year-olds, funded alongside lower student loan interest by reducing the subsidy for degree courses they consider poor value.

It’s a soundbite peppered across the conference: fewer disappointing degrees and more opportunities to earn and learn. Reform UK made similar arguments about diverting funding from universities to apprenticeships.

It’s a two and half year old policy for the Conservatives announced by Rishi Sunak shortly before the 2024 general election.

Public First’s education director Jess Lister said polling now showed parents’ enthusiasm for apprenticeships had caught up with their preference for university. The difficulty was finding places.

“Good luck getting them. Good luck finding them,” she said.

Alison Wolf was blunter. “An apprentice is an employee. An apprentice needs an employer. And you don’t free up resource by closing down some humanities faculties.” If students from closed courses enrolled on different university courses, Wolf added, the supposed saving would disappear immediately.

Willetts challenged the accounting too. Student loan write-offs were not a pot of cash sitting inside the Department for Education ready to spend on apprenticeships, he argued.

He also warned that ministers taking control of degree offers risked tipping universities into the public sector, as happened to colleges in 2022.

Wolf at the door

Willetts and Wolf have a stake in this tertiary discussion. They were both in positions of power, the former a university minister and the latter a Number 10 adviser, in the last government.

Willetts was very much on the defence over a student loan system he introduced, but which is now almost universally derided.

Wolf, on the other hand, was hungry for change.

“I don’t think we’re being radical enough. I would like to strongly suggest that we look at 17th century London. People travelled to become apprentices; they had a special legal status, and their parents supported them, but they didn’t need to support them that much because the employer had a bargain there.”

Nowadays, “we have made apprenticeships expensive, we have made it awkward, we have tried to centralise it with an all-singing, all-dancing website, which is a horror,” she lamented.

Amanda Spielman and Alison Wolf behind microphones on a panel — L-R: Amanda Spielman, Alison Wolf

More controversially, she repeated earlier calls to bring degree apprentices into the student loan system. Willetts said this would free up levy money for younger people on lower-level programmes.

There was also an uncomfortable reckoning with Conservative skills reforms.

Wolf called for higher technical qualifications to be abandoned, arguing that they had consumed money without providing the right remedy.

Her warning about another round of qualification invention was met with nods of approval. She was equally dismissive of Labour’s vocational GCSE ambitions, recalling the abandoned hairdressing equipment left in school basements after earlier reforms, like the 14 to 19 diploma.

Spielman defended the principle of continued English and maths study after 16, arguing that GCSE resits helped explain improved adult skills results. Wolf agreed, while supporting the new stepping-stone qualifications.

Tough love

A more immediate offer to young people came from shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately.

The conference heard about her plans for a ‘get to work’ programme which would provide intensive support for out-of-work under-25s, with benefits conditional on attendance.

“If you don’t turn up, you shouldn’t be paid,” she said.

Badenoch’s closing speech promised no out-of-work benefits for school or university leavers and a restricted “spending card” for jobseekers that could only be used for essentials.

Whately also described employers telling her they could not afford to recruit, and choosing experienced or skilled foreign candidates when they did. That leaves a substantial policy problem for getting inexperienced young people into work quickly.

The national insurance pledge addresses part of that problem. The conference offered much less clarity about the training capacity needed for a compulsory out-of-work programme.

The tertiary debate had at least established some common ground. English and maths mattered. Young people needed more apprenticeship opportunities. Another round of qualification invention was unlikely to solve the problems employers and providers already faced.

But the panel also exposed how far the party has to go. The people who helped shape Conservative education policy in government were still arguing over what counted as value, who should pay and whether the savings behind its now two-year-old apprenticeship pledge existed at all.

A general election may still be some way off, but colleges, providers and employers looking for an alternative skills agenda had little to learn this week.

Councils ignore Milburn’s NEET taskforce call

Fewer than a quarter of councils have agreed to set up local taskforces to tackle NEET numbers as part of a drive led by Alan Milburn.

Leaders from 89 councils across the UK have pledged to set “at least one” objective to keep 16 to 24-year-olds in education, training or work.

Out of 382 UK local authorities, 23 per cent agreed to bring together schools, colleges, employers, heath and voluntary services to form a joint plan and monitor NEET numbers.

Latest figures show 13 per cent, or almost one million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK, were NEET between April and June.

Milburn, the government’s NEET tsar and a former Labour cabinet minister, said: “Nobody knows a community like the people who serve it. That’s why so many councils are stepping up now to grip the NEET crisis on their own doorsteps.”

Milburn’s interim NEET report, published in May, calculated NEET young people were costing the economy around £125 billion in welfare, lost tax receipts and health bills. He warned that without action, the number of NEETs could rise to over 16 per cent within five years, to more than 1.25 million people.

Milburn’s final report and recommendations to the government are due this autumn, reportedly after the chancellor’s budget.

The NEET taskforces sit alongside eight youth guarantee trailblazers aimed at reducing youth inactivity, run by mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority. Trailblazer funding was extended by £45 million to run until March 2027.

Clear commitments

The Department for Work and Pensions appealed to all councils through bulletins via the Local Government Association to join the “NEET taskforce”.

The taskforces will commit, for at least 18 months, to:

Convene key local stakeholders such as schools, further education, the DWP, health sector, employers, voluntary sector and the community and social enterprise sector to create one joined‑up plan and monitor transition outcomes regularly.
Set at least one objective in support of sustained participation of 16-24 year olds.
Agree on a set of practical actions they can deliver quickly, using powers they already have, with each area free to decide what will work best for their young people and economy.

In England, 83 of the 317 councils have signed up.

No councils in Wales or Northern Ireland are on the list, but six Scottish councils will launch a taskforce.

LJ Rawlings, chief executive of Youth Employment UK, said: “People pledging and being committed is not the same as a strategy.”

London forms the bulk of boroughs on the list. The City of London Corporation and 31 of the capital’s 32 boroughs have signed up, with Havering the only omission.

Several south London boroughs are working together through the South London NEET Taskforce.

“The South London NEET taskforce is a significant step towards creating a more responsive system that helps young people progress into good jobs,” said councillor Barry Lewis, chair of South London Partnership and leader of London borough of Sutton.

“By working collectively, we can ensure support reaches those who need it most and help more young people make successful transitions into good, sustainable work.”

Meanwhile, Kent County Council and Medway Council are running a joint Kent and Medway NEET taskforce.

Councillor David Wimble, cabinet member for economic development at Kent County Council, said the task force will come up with “clear actions and solutions” to provide more opportunities for local young people.

He added: “Nearly 7 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds in Kent and Medway are not reaching their potential due to the challenges they face with finding the right training and securing a job.

“At the same time, our employers are struggling to find the people they need to help them grow.

“We will work with local partners to take practical steps, starting with providing clearer information and advice for our young people and businesses.”

Financial independence should be the goal of careers education

I spend a lot of time visiting schools. The fact that as an apprenticeship provider I am invited shows that the headteachers no longer see traditional options as a guaranteed route to employment or financial independence and equally do not want their students to add to the serious challenge which Alan Milburn is addressing in his NEET review.

Yet with many of the hundreds of students I talk to, the picture can be more nuanced than simply finding a job which comes with an apprenticeship. The need for financial independence often leads to the blunt question of “how can I make some money?”

The Diverse Futures model delivers a multi-stepped approach to supporting the objective of more local jobs for local people. It comprises three pillars: selecting talent based on character, attitude and aptitude for learning (not grades), work readiness training and further training which is flexible to individual learning and needs. This approach has led to Ofsted declaring the organisation to be ‘exceptional’ for inclusion, the first independent training provider (ITP) to be awarded this.

Our focus on inclusion is not at the expense of achieving successful outcomes; our overall apprenticeship completion rate is an almost unmatched 86 per cent for an ITP. For those learners from disadvantaged backgrounds, 73 per cent get distinction.

Achieving more successful career starts begins with providers being able to speak to pupils as young as 12. From then on until they leave school, it is vital that learners receive a constant update on local jobs, apprenticeships and other opportunities. The pathway to financial independence needs to be made clear.

The first pillar requires schools to encourage young people to lean into what they enjoy or are passionate about. They should start following people in that area, reading blogs and commenting on social media feeds.

It may be that what they thought was interesting was actually boring, but more often it isn’t dull at all. Those whose interest is piqued should start their own activity – set up a website, do demonstrations, sell products or do something else. When they approach an employer, the employer will see the passion, the person’s tribe and experience.

The best reason to land a job is based on “I love what I do but I want to do more of it” or in other words, “I’m doing it now but joining you could open up so much more opportunity”. This makes the young person very employable.

This is all new to most parents and schools, but highly relevant to increasing youth employment.

Diverse Futures has shared with the Milburn review team details of our second pillar, a blueprint for work readiness training which was described by inspectors as “distinct”. It has been proven on a commercial basis through Westminster City Council, Mazda and other employers.

It involves teaching practical workplace skills, human and professional skills, and future-focused skills. Obviously making this available as part of a national or devolved government programme presents ministers with a funding challenge, but a consequential reduction in the benefits bill would be a major pay-off.

Work readiness training can make a difference to securing a much sought-after apprenticeship opportunity which is the third pillar. As has been pointed out in these pages, Ofsted has not defined what exceptionally inclusive provision for apprenticeships looks like. But the report of our inspection offers clear pointers.

The first thing inspectors observed is that inclusion is embedded as “a defining feature” of our organisation. This starts with the leadership investing significantly in staff expertise and what Ofsted describes as “very effectively focused development in teaching, sector knowledge and additional learning support”.

Colleagues have protected time for professional learning. Partnerships are also key with employers, charities and specialists such as psychologists to strengthen apprentices’ experiences and progression.

The result is that the organisation uses detailed on-boarding, initial and cognitive assessment and ongoing coaching to build an accurate understanding of apprentices’ starting points and barriers. Apprentices then receive highly personalised support which can be adapted as apprentices become more independent and confident.

Targeted coaching, specialist resources and workplace adjustments lead to employer confirmation of improved resilience and ability to take on greater responsibility.

Inspectors concluded that apprentices with learning difficulties and disabilities achieve at least as well as their peers and frequently achieve higher grades. They add that the combination of tailored coaching, adjustments and work readiness support means apprentices developing “new technical knowledge and skills that far exceed the requirements of their qualification”.

We hope that young ex-offenders will also soon benefit from our approach. For policymakers who wish to learn from our ‘exceptional’ provision, the lesson is simple: clearly there is a lot of talent out there – young people just need a pathway and preparation.

Movers & Shakers: Edition 554

Building my own AI agent made me a better skills coach

Until recently I was a digital skills coach at a Manchester university, supporting degree apprentices in digital technology solutions and user experience. Every three months I met each apprentice and their line manager to talk through wellbeing, where they were up to with the requirements of their programme and progress against their knowledge, skills and behaviours (KSBs), then I wrote it all up as a formal review. This was meaningful work, but took 40 to 45 minutes to get done.

Over the past year I’ve built a review write-up agent in Copilot. It analyses the meeting transcript and produces a structured draft, aligned to KSBs and quality expectations, which I then refine into the final document.

My write-up time is now down to 18 to 20 minutes, more than 26 hours saved every three months across my caseload. That’s welcome, but my real excitement has come from the effect it’s had on my working practice.

Knowing the session would be transcribed changed how I run the meetings. I’ve become more deliberate in how I structure them, and I take fewer notes, knowing the agent will read the transcript. Because I’m not half-focused on writing, I’m more present in the room, which means better developmental coaching and pastoral support.

As one apprentice I work with put it: “I’ve noticed in our more recent reviews that our conversations certainly have flowed more freely in a greatly productive and natural manner without the need to pause or capture written points.”

Building the agent has sharpened my sense of how to capture impact and quality in my write-ups too. I don’t see it as doing my job for me, I see it as helping me get better at what actually matters: my ability to support and coach apprentices.

This matters beyond my own practice, too. Ofsted’s inspection guidance for FE and skills providers, in place from September this year, is explicit that its focus is the quality of decision-making about AI, not simply whether providers use it. How thoughtfully we use these tools is now part of how quality gets judged.

I didn’t develop that instinct for what good quality looks like on my own. Around a year ago I joined an AI working group at my university. We experimented with basic Copilot and talked about our worries and our hopes about the ethics and practicalities of using it in reviews.

Our head of quality endorsed and facilitated the sessions, which gave us the confidence to speak openly. Talking to colleagues there shaped how I thought about efficiency and about capturing impact in our roles.

When I later got access to Copilot’s premium tier, I was encouraged to build my own agent, which pushed me to look harder at how I conducted reviews myself, and at what counted as good evidence of quality, not just what the agent produced. The group had a steer on quality from our central team, but real autonomy within that. Its purpose was to establish whether there’s a business case for the university buying licenses for all skills coaches, grounding us in what the role needs, not just what the technology can do.

FE Week opinion writers have argued that AI adoption succeeds when it’s employer-led, from the top down. My experience points to something that sits alongside that: if agents like mine are adopted more widely, they’ll likely be standardised through Copilot Studio. But the working group stage that got me there matters in its own right, building a culture where skills coaches feel able to explore what AI can do for their practice, rather than being handed a finished tool.

Skills coaches are best placed to know what’s worth exploring and how to do it responsibly. But that only works with endorsement from senior leaders, so exploration gets recognised, not just tolerated. Concretely: give practitioners protected time and a sanctioned space, like a working group, to design their own workflows, not just training on someone else’s finished agent. That’s where the gains that don’t fit in a spreadsheet come from.

A fake press release put our college in an AI-generated story

I walked into work one day last week anticipating a fairly standard Thursday in the office. Perhaps this was my downfall. About halfway through the morning, I read an email and had to quite quickly put my coffee back down on the desk.

I’d been forwarded a press release from a media contact, with a message essentially along the lines of “is this you?” It had Nottingham College in the headline and peppered throughout the copy, which was being pitched to journalists and only loosely attributed to a client based in the US that was not linked to education.

The story itself isn’t especially relevant – though it wasn’t exactly glowing with praise – but what struck me was that this had come completely out of the blue.

Usually, myself or our PR leads work really closely with partners to fact-check and provide comment if we are mentioned in another organisation’s news release, even if the angle is negative. It’s the done thing to add legitimacy to any story while maintaining positive stakeholder relations. In previous roles heading up PR and communications teams, both in private sector agencies and in the charity sector, I had found it pretty standard practice; approvals are sacrosanct regardless of industry.

Upon closer inspection, it transpired that in this instance, the individual sending the email doesn’t exist. Nor does the ‘agency’ ‘she’ purports to work for, nor does the ‘client’ ‘she’ is requesting a back link for. Even the quoted ‘expert’ in the release doesn’t appear to exist. Or if she does, she’s a really busy woman working for at least 16 different organisations with a similar number of job titles.

The phenomenon of AI-powered PR has been a subject of interest for the Press Gazette for several months, which is maintaining a tracker of publications which have fallen for such antics. It makes for sombre reading, and the list of certified examples is long.

I still cannot fathom the exact purpose of this particular campaign. It appears to be a link-building effort but the destination is just a website full of links out elsewhere. Maybe it’s a wild way to generate clicks and advertising revenue; it’s certainly not an organisation with a genuine purpose, like an FE college.

All I know is that had the story been used, its impact could have been significant in how we appear in AI-powered search. If legitimate press outlets had taken the press release as genuine and covered it, our reputation would have been influenced by this false narrative.

It cannot be underestimated how potentially damning the impact of this type of activity could be, not only on our organisations’ reputation, but then subsequently what this means for our students looking to trust us with their future goals and aspirations.

We have a huge responsibility to young people. Choosing a qualification and then a place to study is often not a quick ‘purchase’ but a considered decision over many months and even years. For this to be undermined by AI, in an attempt to boost web traffic for an irrelevant source which has no bearing on the futures of our local young people, is irresponsible and immoral.

Perhaps the wildest thing of it all is how I wouldn’t have even known this was going on, had our relationships with the local media not been as good as they are. It troubles me to think this could happen far more frequently in the future, unbeknownst to any of us until it’s too late.

We keep a keen eye on our media coverage, whether they are mentions generated by our own stories or citations elsewhere. But the idea of having to expand this monitoring to consider false citations, written by machines, adding no value or truth or context… It feels like a game we’re playing that we haven’t signed up to.

What a waste of time when our efforts should be amplifying the authentic and inspirational stories of our students who are doing great things on their own.

I was at a bit of a loss yesterday as to what to do about it. After I’d calmed down, unable to contact the named individual, PR agency or client (probably lucky for them), I posted about the experience on LinkedIn and it blew up with incredulity.

And then we started the “well what do we do about this?” conversation.

If our media strategy must now factor in reputational impact entirely orchestrated by machines, I will have to lie down in a dark room temporarily. Then, the best course of action I’ll be following goes like this:

Continue to have good relations with local media. People to people, with trust, open conversation and two-way understanding to give journalists what they need in a format that works best for them. It also helped us find out about unscrupulous goings on like this.
Emphasise the importance of visible PR leads. Colleagues working in press / media engagement need to be known both internally but externally as well, as trusted sources of news and stories.
Ramp up our media monitoring. We unfortunately cannot snoop in journalists’ inboxes, but we can set up alerts to track if any rogue stories get through the newsrooms and out into the public domain.
Fight misinformation with accuracy and positivity. Prioritise sharing stories that people (and AI powered search!) value, about our students, overcoming adversity, achievements and impact we having in our communities.
Add AI-generated press activity to our organisations’ risk registers and deliver targeted media training to key spokespeople who can articulately and authentically rebuff any whiff of misinformation.

It’s an evolving picture and dare I say in a week or month’s time this bizarre situation may be happening more, or differently. I welcome more suggestions and experiences on a postcard. Just please don’t ask AI to come up with the answers first.

Burnham: If you want real technical parity, start with VAT

Last week in Liverpool, Andy Burnham told his party that it is time for Britain to have hope again. As Greater Manchester’s mayor for years, he saw what its young people could achieve and how often opportunity depended on their postcode.

Now, as prime minister, he has a chance to take the handbrake off the colleges that have the ability to change that.

LTE Group works in the communities he knows, and we share his determination to end what he calls the academic bias in our education system and make technical education a respected route into good work.

One change to the VAT rules would let us do much more with the money the government has already committed – and drive down youth unemployment.

Picture a teenager from the Harpurhey suburb of our city arriving at The Manchester College’s campus there, curious about science but unsure where it might take them. We have just opened a new science laboratory at this campus. With the right teaching and equipment, that interest could lead to a qualification, the confidence to pursue further study, or a route into employment in the healthcare sector.

That is what a technical education should offer: somewhere to start and somewhere to go next. There are thousands of young people like that across Greater Manchester, ready for a chance to seize opportunities.

Alan Milburn’s interim review shows why this matters, and the Chancellor also gets it. John Healey has told his party of a moral duty to get a generation of young people into work. Almost a million young people are outside education, employment, or training. Yet 84 per cent of those surveyed said they wanted a job, education, or training.

Milburn identifies FE as the main route into vocational education for young people from a wide range of backgrounds. When the first rung of the ladder into work is getting harder to reach, a college place matters more than ever.

Burnham took barely ten days in office to set out his ambition: technical pathways from 14 with the same prestige as the academic route, shaped by mayors, employers, and local leaders. I welcome that, and Greater Manchester is ready to go first. Here we know the jobs and skills our communities need. But the first of those pathways are due in 2028, and they need workshops, laboratories, specialist teachers, and enough places for the young people who want to take them. That means building now, and every pound counts.

At present, a school or academy can recover VAT on relevant publicly funded spending. An FE college generally cannot.

Education itself is VAT exempt, but we still pay VAT on much of what we buy to deliver it. A workshop can cost a college up to a fifth more than an equivalent facility at an academy school. That is a practical limit on how many learners we can serve, and an obvious anomaly that a government that wants technical and academic routes treated as equals would fix.

The mismatch became harder to explain when colleges were reclassified into the public sector in 2022. We took on tighter borrowing and spending controls, but the VAT treatment schools and academies enjoy did not follow. Public money for skills loses some of its value before it reaches the learner.

LSE Consulting estimates that irrecoverable VAT costs colleges around £200 million a year. LTE Group’s annual VAT bill is about £5 million. We estimate that, if we could recover it, we could offer around 400 additional places for 16-18-year-olds in Greater Manchester. Imagine what those places could mean for young people in Harpurhey, Openshaw or Wythenshawe, and for the employers looking for their skills.

The Treasury will rightly want to know what a change would cost, and this is a Budget with little room to spare. But this is not a request for new money. It is a request to let money already committed to skills do its job.

Colleges should show exactly what every pound recovered buys: more places, better equipment, skilled staff.

As more decisions on skills pass to mayors and strategic authorities, it makes little sense for devolved money to buy less when it is spent through a college.

Alongside Activate Learning, Capital City College, Luminate Education Group, and New City College, I am asking for a targeted VAT refund arrangement for eligible FE colleges, on the same footing as the one academies already have.

On 28 October, in the first Budget of the Burnham era, the Chancellor can commit to reform, or set a clear Treasury timetable to deliver it by Budget 2027.

The Prime Minister says he wants to draw a line under a decade of drift and division. He knows the streets these learners come from, and what good technical education could mean for them. If hope is to mean something in Harpurhey, it starts with a college place. Let’s take the handbrake off our colleges and let every pound reach the learner.

Hundreds of outsourced careers staff move in-house to DWP

About 800 careers advice staff have moved to work in-house at the Department for Work and Pensions following 14 years of outsourcing.

From 1 October, about 500 qualified careers advisors and a further 300 back-office staff transferred into the DWP following the government’s decision not to renew National Careers Service (NCS) contracts from 30 September.

According to the DWP, adults seeking careers advice will now access support through jobcentres rather than NCS providers, creating a more “joined up” service.

Since the contracts were launched in 2012, more than 50 organisations with NCS contracts delivered careers advice to about 300,000 customers per year at an annual cost of up to £55 million per year.

A DWP spokesperson told FE Week that it plans to continue serving about 300,000 customers per year to help “everyone” seeking careers advice, either on the telephone or face-to-face in jobcentres.

Last year, an estimated 1,000 staff worked for NCS contractors. The DWP said it offered roles to about 800 through the service transfer process.

DWP minister for employment Andrew Western, said: “Everyone deserves the chance to find secure, meaningful work and build a career – and we are delivering a modern employment service to make that a reality.

“Bringing careers advice under the same roof as the jobcentre will join up fragmented services and enable thousands of people to access joined-up careers advice and employment support.

“This builds on the wider employment support we are already providing young people as well as disabled people and those with long-term health conditions to ensure everyone has the chance to get on life.”

Last-minute transfer concerns

MPs have repeatedly raised concerns about an “information void” around the how many of the estimated 1,000 NCS staff would move into the DWP.

In correspondence published by the work and pensions committee in September, chair Debbie Abrahams said she was concerned that the department “only” started its formal staff transfer consultation period in August – leaving “many staff” in a state of uncertainty about what roles they would move to last week.

She also cited “deep uncertainty” at the future of community-based organisations about to lose a key source of income.

The DWP said moving NCS staff in-house is part of its development of a new “jobs and careers service”, although jobcentres will continue to be known as Jobcentre Plus.

Last month, the government announced a new “insourcing unit” that will identify outsourced services that could be delivered more effectively under direct public control, such as security and cleaning.

The Cabinet Office also issued guidance on insourcing and the public interest test in June, which asks decision makers to “holistically assess long-term value for money, service quality, and broader economic and social goals” when making sourcing decisions.