Latest news from FE Week

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.”

DWP question time October 2026: Live blog

City & Guilds Foundation pulls plug on Blackledge CEO hire

Trustees at the embattled City & Guilds Foundation have withdrawn Ben Blackledge’s chief executive job offer just days before his planned start next week.

Blackledge will now continue as chief executive of WorldSkills UK after its board agreed to let him withdraw his resignation. He had been due to leave today after 12 years at the organisation, which had already begun recruiting his successor through an executive recruitment agency.

The reversal comes a year after the controversial £166 million sale of the foundation’s awarding and training business to PeopleCert, which remains the subject of a Charity Commission statutory inquiry and a separate investigation commissioned by the foundation following pressure from its members.

The foundation appointed learning tech-firm boss Jessica Leigh Jones as its new chair in April. Blackledge’s appointment, announced the following month, was to give the charity its first permanent chief executive since the sale.

The foundation, formally called the City and Guilds of London Institute, said trustees have now decided not to proceed with appointing a new chief executive at this stage.

A spokesperson said: “The institute is undertaking a wider review of its future strategy, organisational structure, and operating model to ensure it is best placed to deliver its charitable mission in the years ahead. Trustees have decided it would be more appropriate to complete this work before making a permanent leadership appointment.

“Existing interim leadership arrangements remain in place, and the organisation’s day-to-day operations, services and commitments continue as normal.

“As part of the review process, trustees will consider a range of evidence and stakeholder feedback before determining the timing of a future recruitment process.

“The trustees and team have enjoyed working with Ben Blackledge during his preparation to join the Institute and thank him for his contribution during this period and wish him every success for the future.”

The foundation’s website lists Barbara le Fleming, its executive director of finance and operations and secretary of the institute, as acting chief executive.

Announcing his appointment on 12 May, Leigh Jones praised Blackledge’s “exceptional track record” and said: “Ben’s leadership will be vital as we deepen our impact.”

The role was advertised with a salary of around £130,000 and responsibility for an annual grant-making budget of £3 million to £5 million, alongside policy work and developing a long-term strategy.

FE Week has asked the foundation what changed after the appointment was announced, why Blackledge could not lead the review, and whether either investigation into the sale informed its decision.

Back to Blackledge

WorldSkills UK had already begun recruiting Blackledge’s successor through recruitment firm Starfish Search. Final interviews had been scheduled for 15 and 16 October.

Marion Plant, chair of WorldSkills UK’s trustees, said: “The WorldSkills UK board has agreed a request from Ben Blackledge to withdraw his resignation and continue as chief executive.

“Following Team UK’s success in Shanghai alongside exciting developments in our workforce development activity, and the continued opportunity to support young people into the world of work, we are delighted that Ben will continue to lead WorldSkills UK.”

Blackledge said: “I am delighted to be continuing as chief executive of WorldSkills UK.

“There is so much to look forward to as we meet for our national finals in Wales next month and begin the next international cycle for WorldSkills Aichi 2028.”

Blackledge has led WorldSkills UK as chief executive since May 2023, having previously worked as its deputy chief executive. He stayed on to lead the organisation through Team UK’s participation at WorldSkills Shanghai last month.

Investigations continue

City & Guilds Foundation trustees agreed to sell the City & Guilds awarding and training business to PeopleCert in October 2025.

Reports of million-pound bonuses paid to senior executives involved in the transaction prompted scrutiny from the regulator.

The Charity Commission opened its statutory inquiry in January and is yet to report. It is examining information the charity supplied about the sale and trustees’ decision-making, including the information they considered before agreeing the transaction and a coexistence agreement with the new company.

The regulator had sought assurances before the sale, although the deal did not require its approval.

City & Guilds Foundation members voted for an independent inquiry at their annual meeting in April. Following a campaign, the charity agreed in June to commission a King’s Counsel-led investigation into the reasons for the sale and its governance processes.

That inquiry has begun but is also yet to report. The foundation previously said its findings would be shared with its advisory council this autumn and published.

Meanwhile, PeopleCert has claimed it is seeking to recover almost £3 million in bonuses paid to former City & Guilds chief executive Kirstie Donnelly and finance chief Abid Ismail after an internal investigation concluded the payments were “unauthorised”.

Donnelly and Ismail “categorically rejected” the allegations and previously said they would present evidence to the courts that “overwhelmingly demonstrates” all bonus payments were “approved, documented and implemented” as part of the transaction process.

ASCL council passes no confidence vote in Ofsted’s leadership

The Association of School and College Leaders’ union has said it has no confidence in Ofsted’s leadership to “address the damage being done by the new inspection system” following a vote of its ruling council.

The union has also agreed to survey members “on whether to hold an indicative ballot on industrial action if change is not forthcoming”, calling for a pause to inspections so Ofsted can “review the inspection system as a matter of urgency”.

Around 60 school and college leaders are meeting in the Midlands this week to discuss key matters of education policy.

The vote comes amid mounting tensions between Ofsted and teaching and leadership unions following growing reports of adverse impact on leaders’ health.

In a statement issued today, ASCL council said it had seen “no meaningful progress on the part of Ofsted to address significant wellbeing issues caused by inspections, and that it is increasingly concerned about the welfare and morale of members”.

Introduced last year, the new inspection framework was supposed to decrease the pressure placed on leaders and their teams.

It scrapped headline grades and now gives FE providers one of five ratings in up to 16 judgment areas.

Ofsted-commissioned research, released today, found three quarters of FE providers said their inspection had negatively affected their, or their staff’s wellbeing, with one third saying the impact was ‘a fair amount or a lot’. Most responses, however, were from independent training providers.

An Ofsted press release highlighted that most education providers said inspections had been conducted respectfully, while more than six in 10 said their inspection would help improve their setting.

Oliver said the research showed the watchdog was “on the right track”, sparking backlash from unions, who branded the findings “damning” and Oliver “out of touch”.

Pepe Di’Iasio, ASCL’s general secretary, said: “This motion reflects the strength of feeling among our members. It is not a step we have taken lightly but only after our repeated attempts to resolve our concerns through discussion and negotiation have hit a brick wall.

“Ofsted’s warm words about recognising wellbeing pressures on school and college leaders have not been matched by the action necessary to dial down the incredibly high stakes of an inspection system which is damaging people’s health and driving them out of the profession.

“School and college leaders agree with the importance of having an inspection system which gives parents information and assurance and works in the best interests of children and young people.

“But the current system is not fit for purpose. It is an overbearing mess and urgently needs to be reviewed.”

Ofsted was approached for comment.

ASCL’s statement in full

ASCL has no confidence in the ability of Ofsted’s leadership to address the damage being caused by the renewed inspection framework.

We have seen no evidence of meaningful progress on the part of Ofsted to address the significant workload and wellbeing issues caused by the framework, and are increasingly concerned about the welfare and morale of our members.

The evidence is clear that schools serving disadvantaged communities are penalised by the methodology being used in inspections and we are not convinced that enough weight will be placed on similar schools comparisons to take school context into account. Neither are we persuaded that report cards are clear and helpful to parents given that they can only be properly understood by reading the toolkits provided to inspectors.

Furthermore, we fear that the disproportionate stress and anxiety exerted by the inspection system will lead to leaders deciding to leave their posts with a consequent impact on schools, children, and young people.

Repeated attempts to resolve these matters through negotiation have not been productive and ASCL does not believe that genuine change is achievable within the current culture of the inspectorate.

We call upon the government to pause inspections and review the inspection system as a matter of urgency in order to allow these issues to be properly examined and acted upon in the best interests of families, schools, and colleges.