Workload has sped up for college boards recently. Accountability agreements, LSIPs, annual conversations with DfE, external governance reviews. Meanwhile, worries about quality, finances and big estates plan (more on these later) haven’t gone away for many, maybe even most.
You’ve been worried for a while that something could go wrong. Then something does. DfE conducts an assessment through the FEC team and its last recommendation is a commissioner-led Structure and Prospects Appraisal (SPA). That’s it. You’ve lost control of your future.
How did it come to this? The board is split, maybe feeling blindsided. It’s not really much use now, but you’re having strained conversations about how you could have headed off this situation.
The answer to that question is a college-led SPA. A SPA is a process to follow if you are considering anything from major structural change to a significant alteration of your delivery model. It doesn’t have to be focused only on merger.
Outcomes of a SPA might include federation or looser collaborative models, withdrawing from or locally merging key areas of provision or, of course, no change at all. If you’ve got a nagging doubt that your college could be vulnerable in future then trust your instincts. Get ahead of the curve and get answers for yourself. Run a SPA through a committee that reports to the Board.
At the very least, it will be useful as you approach your next annual conversation with the DfE. Something in the back pocket. It’s ten years ago now, but the business, innovation and skills department (DBIS) published guidance for colleges on how to conduct them that is still relevant.
Another good reason to do this is that reclassification could still result in further centralising behaviours from DfE in response to almost palpable anxiety around colleges’ financial grip. Now feels like the right time for colleges to take back some control.
I believe the two London Colleges I chaired between 2018 and 2023 were well served by commissioner-led SPAs. They were in almost uniquely difficult circumstances, but merger was the necessary outcome for both. Nevertheless, I do sometimes wonder what their alternative futures might have been if they had determined to take control of their own destinies.
Get ahead of the curve and get answers for yourself
When I think back to the huge pressures on executive and non-executive leadership through those years, I also wonder what steps leadership in colleges local to those two colleges could have taken collaboratively to preserve, enhance and protect the leadership bandwidth that we know is so precious in the sector.
Just as important to protect are the people who embody that bandwidth. One of the main worries for chairs today is their duty of care to their principal and chief executive. The association of colleges is rightly speaking up about these pressures. Collaboration and mutual support are surely central to the response, however it’s formalised (or not).
The DBIS guidance details a few triggers chairs should consider for commissioning a college-led SPA. Interestingly, it doesn’t prominently pick out large capital estates schemes. In my experience, however, any significant capital scheme should almost automatically warrant board consideration of a college-led SPA. It’s no coincidence that my last detailed estates conversation with a college leader segued imperceptibly into musing about merger.
The role of the board, and the chair in particular, is key. Harder-edged structural changes that come about outside of intervention are invariably driven by the chief executive, sometimes communicating with DfE/FEC. It is all conducted in highly private, perhaps deliberately non-transparent ways. That’s understandable, but chairs and boards really need a greater role up front.
Perhaps I am just tripping over process, but I believe it’s important (and uncodified) process. In local and regional contexts, college-led SPAs could be discussed transparently first by chairs, and then commissioned to chief executives by chairs and their boards.
To work, it would require groups of like-minded chairs and boards, prepared to put aside competitive instincts. But that should be achievable. After all, they are the essence of the corporation. Ultimately, they own the blueprint for FE education and training delivery in their local areas, and do so in the best interests of all students and their whole community.
Previous Job: Director of Finance & Corporate Services, The Housing Ombudsman
Interesting fact: As a linguist, Gillian has lived in both Spain and France and, when a student at university, used to earn a bit of extra cash by making and decorating wedding cakes
Michael Wood Williams
Chair, Gateshead College
Start date: April 2023
Concurrent Job: In house corporate counsel and investor
Interesting fact: Michael worked as a professional skier and climber for ten years in the Austrian Alps
More than 140 students from 51 colleges will have their work displayed as part of a national exhibition that explores the theme of sustainability.
The online exhibition was launched this week by the Sixth Form College Association and features hundreds of films, paintings, podcasts and music pieces. More than 600 young people from Sweden were also involved through their Pengar! project alongside 146 students from UK sixth form colleges.
“Pengar” means “money” in Swedish, and exhibition explores “how the dynamics of money, finance and sustainability are connected, in the past, the present and the future”, association chief executive Bill Watkin said.
“The detrimental effect our relationship with money has on human systems, our planet and all living beings is becoming crystal clear,” he added. “Money is a tool – abundance or lack of it orchestrates our dreams and aspiration, as well as our fears and nightmares. Ultimately it affects our future.
“Pengar! is a project that calls for action, to use money with discernment and wisdom, in service of all living beings and our planet.”
Sixth form art focuses on rewilding, plastic pollution and cost-of-living
Students took on some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity, such as sustainability, the need to rewild and modern slavery. Woodhouse College’s Harerta Tesfay is one of those whose art, called “Bigfin Squid and it is plastic”, on display.
Tesfay said the message of the piece was to call on humans to adapt to “live sustainable lives and combat global warming”, just as squid can use their chromatophores to change colour in threatening situations.
“‘Bigfin Squid and it is Plastic’ represents polluted oceans and how beautiful creatures like squids, who live so far from humans, can be affected by pollution. To live sustainable lives, we must adjust our way of living so that we can save our planet from global warming,” Tesfay said.
Romany Jarrettrock’s piece, “Fast Food”, features a woman with her head in her hands surrounded by empty McDonalds cartons. Jarrettrock, who is a fine art student at Richard Huish College in Taunton, Somerset, said that, without the convenience of fast food, you are only left with the “damage it causes” to bodies, the environment and life in general.
“The detrimental effect our relationship with money has on human systems, our planet and all living beings is becoming crystal clear”
“It is only when we remove the layer of convenience that we notice the obvious wrongs of this industry. These damages are what I have intended to portray in my painting, to make you look closer to notice the wrongs.”
Charlotte Clowes’ “Submerged” artwork meanwhile comments on the “devastating use of water in the fashion industry” It features a photograph of a person in a dress submerged in water in a swimming pool.
“Its ambiguity reflects the conflict of young people’s feelings around our planet’s future, with elements of feeling suffocated and helpless, being dragged down by our obsession with clothing, yet also expressing hope that we are still within reach of safety,” Clowes, from The Blackpool Sixth Form College, added. Though the confines of the swimming pool “suggest security and even the possibility of rescue”, they also surround the person in a “man-made environment of treated water far removed from the natural world”.
Ian Pryce believes FE “hasn’t been good” at telling the story of how 30 years of college independence from government changed it “out of all recognition”. The chief executive of the Bedford College Group, is determined to redress that in his final FE Week interview as he approaches retirement.
There is a perfect synchronicity to how his career matches that 30-year golden era.
Pryce, 64, started out in 1992 at the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC, forerunner to the Education and Skills Funding Agency), just as it was launched to replace local authorities in distributing funding to colleges.
He is now entering retirement as colleges have been reclassified as public sector entities and, as a consequence, lose the borrowing and spending freedoms independence has given them for three decades.
Pryce believes independence made the sector financially prudent and unleashed a wave of innovation, but fears reclassification will reverse those advances. He sees this as a “serious mistake”.
Ian Pryce, Bedford College Group
The surreal interview
Pryce’s career in FE began with a very different sort of interview; in a desolate building with one other person present and no furniture. So strange was the set-up that Pryce “wondered if it was actually something real”. In the middle of a room sat Sir Robert Gunn, the chair of the new FEFC who Pryce had previously worked under at the East Midlands Electricity Board. Pryce had never set foot in a college before (aside from a concert), but Gunn persuaded him his new venture – to create a new national college sector – would be “really exciting”.
It was the start of a career journey for Pryce, who went on to become one of FE’s longest-serving leaders with 24 years at the helm in Bedford.
His previous role had been as a financial controller for East Midlands Electricity, which put him in good stead as an FEFC regional finance director, as both roles were “about freeing people up to be in charge of their own institution”.
Like colleges, Pryce had also quit the world of local government finance. His first job was as a trainee accountant under Derek Hatton, deputy leader of Liverpool City Council, when finance officers were tasked with trying to keep the city afloat by any means – including leasing car parking meters to a bank in Japan.
He recalls how when colleges were first “released from the shackles” of local authorities they were keen to distance themselves from their former gamekeepers. There ensued a “rupturing of relationships”, later regretted.
Ian Pryce in his younger years
Financial freedoms
Prior to independence, colleges’ funding was a patchwork quilt across the country with some getting five times more per student than others (the winners were those best at negotiating with their local authority).
Pryce slammed this as “clearly unfair and a bad use of national resources”.
Among the “transformative changes that we now take for granted” is the concept of funding following the learner through the national funding formula, which Pryce credits with creating fairness.
The mandate from government was for colleges to boost their numbers. But that growth had to be “very financially efficient”; “growth money” came at a “lower marginal rate”.
Pryce said it felt like “we were trying hard to give colleges the freedoms given to the old polytechnics”, which had just been made independent universities. Whereas college leaders previously lacked choice over which courses they could run, they were handed “significant control over their curriculum, their strategic intent…and were involved a lot in defining quality.”
Crucially, colleges were given control of their own assets, enabling them to “knock their buildings down, build them up and borrow on them” which facilitated the sector’s rapid growth.
Crucially, they could borrow from banks to “accelerate” projects.
Pryce believes college buildings “significantly improved” in the 10 to 15 years after incorporation while schools – which remained beholden to the purse-strings of government – had some “very poor” estates.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. College leaders now required new skills in how finances and estates were managed, and how colleges should market themselves. Some thrived, others did not. But the new corporate culture made colleges “more responsive” to what students wanted.
There was also a “lot of competition” in those early days between colleges in some of the big cities. “People were stealing each other’s students because they could. The government didn’t mind that, because they wanted that competition on quality.”
Ian Pryce with Gordon Brown
Feeling valued
Pryce believes the still prevalent myth that colleges are for those who “didn’t do well at school” and are mainly about “evening classes” was truer in those first few years than now.
But when the Blair years began in 1997, just after Pryce joined Bedford as finance director, government funding taps really started flowing, with “a big drive on community engagement and adult education”.
Colleges sat under the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills between 2007 to 2009, and being tied in with innovation and universities gave them “a lot of engagement” with ministers.
Then in 2010, their mandate to widen participation was turbocharged when the education participation age was raised from 16 to 18.
Schools didn’t lower their entry criteria to more pupils; it was colleges that went on to become the most popular destination for 16 to 18-year-olds.
It was in the 2010s, when colleges lost their “special status” and became “providers”, that the tide started turning on them.
Per student 16 to 18 funding fell by 14 per cent in real terms between 2010–11 and 2019–20, and the government became more “hands-on” in its management, but without the nuanced understanding of colleges to do so effectively.
Ian Pryce
Treated as schools
Since FE was handed to the Department for Education in 2016, Pryce believes the government has treated colleges “too much like schools”.
Reclassification “seals a change to treating us like a big school”, whereas under incorporation colleges were treated as “small universities, which we are”.
He points out that contrary to perceptions, most college students are not 16 to 18; “the average age is about 40”. And whereas schools average 400 students, colleges have about 10,000.
He credits education secretary Gillian Keegan and skills minister Robert Halfon with being “certainly on [FE’s] side”. But nowadays, he believes that “almost doesn’t matter” because if the Treasury says no, “that’s the end of the game”.
Pryce also believes that Keegan’s own, relatively positive experience of having done some form of an apprenticeship has led her to overly focus on that agenda. “The danger that if you know too much about a subject then you don’t take in some alternative views.”
He questions what the government “really wants” from colleges now, other than “just giving employers what they want” which fills him with disillusionment. “I don’t know what that means anymore.”
Possible benefits?
Pryce reluctantly admits there could be upsides to reclassification. One is “the possibility” colleges could be brought under similar overall teacher pay thresholds as schools, which would mean more generous pay awards.
Staff salaries were “cut back hard” under independence, and Pryce believes lecturers are now “fed up” with seeing their school counterparts being paid £10,000 more than them.
Another potential upside is that reclassifying colleges as public assets distinguishes them from private training providers, which he says are not “assets for the community” in the way that colleges are.
“Rightly, they can pick the things they want to do, whereas we should always serve the community first…therefore we should be funded differently. Being classified differently to private training providers might help us with that.”
Ian Pryce
Fears over reclassification
But Pryce believes there are many more downsides to reclassification.
As he understands it, the purpose behind it was to give the government the power to dismiss a college principal and governing body. But it has become a “classic sledgehammer to crack a nut” with its myriad of other consequences.
Pryce knows of one college group that has recently taken a loan from the government under the new public sector borrowing arrangements, but has “only been given enough to keep afloat”, creating a “financial headache”.
Banks used to ensure colleges were borrowing more than they needed. Now colleges will have to put in bids to the government for capital funding. Pryce warns it will be the bigger colleges with established bid teams – like his own group – that will benefit, rather than those with the greatest need.
There is also a “fear of interference” from civil servants who “generally don’t stay in jobs very long”, which will lead to less innovation.
And time-pressed civil servants will be hard-pushed to respond to all the requests that will come from colleges. After all, colleges now have to seek permission for severance packages, and for ex gratia payments, even of small amounts, which “slows things down” and “takes away that freedom to manage”.
Pryce also fears the government is not putting “anything like enough aside to even maintain” the £10 billion of college assets, which means some buildings could become “unsafe” over time with neglect.
College finance teams are also now facing the dilemma of how to treat surpluses that are “not really ours”. And there is the “tricky” challenge of bringing accounting timelines in line with the government’s.
He also questions whether the sector will be able to retain quality governors. “What’s the attraction of being a governor, if almost every decision you want to make has to be rubber-stamped by department officials who perhaps don’t know much about FE?”
Principal changes
As he departs after 24 years as chief, Pryce cannot imagine any college leader today being able to stay in the job for as long as he has.
“If I started now I would have been sacked about three times on the way! People were pretty forgiving. You don’t get many chances to make mistakes any more.”
But he leaves the sector with his reputation still high – and his musical talents noted (he once performed Dolly Parton’s Jolene dedicated to Justine Greening, the former education secretary).
The £10 million budget he had when he started is now £80 million, and his 250 staff list has grown to 1,800. Pryce found colleges “absolutely fascinating” when he started out, and still does today. “I’ve always liked being in the centre of stuff.”
The government’s apprenticeship and technical education quango has committed to reviewing “high priority” occupational standards this year.
The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) this week published plans to simplify the skills system, in the form of its “A Simpler Skills System” report.
While the proposals were light on tangible new actions to simplify the system, the highlight was the launch of a new occupational maps “service”, which aims to make it easier for people to check out options to “train for a job then progress to senior skills levels on tablets and mobile phones”.
Alongside this, the institute said it would use “big data to rapidly identify where change is needed to support the economy, streamline the way we work with employers to develop occupational standards, and prioritise reviews of those standards where change is most needed”.
An occupational standard is a description of an occupation. It contains an occupational profile, and describes the “knowledge, skills and behaviours” needed for someone to be competent in the occupation’s duties. They are used to design apprenticeships, T Levels and, increasingly, new technical qualifications.
IfATE’s report pledged to review standards in occupations “identified as high priority where updates are needed to support emerging skills, so that more people secure the skills they need to be successful in a future economy” this year.
Chief executive Jennifer Coupland said the institute was working through exactly how many standards to review with the Department for Education.
She told FE Week: “We have a matching tool which takes into consideration all sorts of criteria such as regulatory changes, and whether there have been any technological changes. And the combination of those features pushes the standards to the top of the list for review.”
A London college is being sued amid allegations that it ignored a six-figure debt owed to a football club for use of its pitches and coaches, FE Week can reveal.
As part of its football apprenticeship programme, Stanmore College students were able to use training pitches belonging to Barnet FC’s academy, while the academy provided coaching staff to deliver football skills and fitness sessions to students.
The academy also provided learners with analysis and medical services, and managed their matches within an affiliated league.
But High Court documents seen by FE Week show that Barnet’s academy and Amber Football Centre, a community football venue owned by Barnet FC’s chairman, alleged that Stanmore College breached an agreement to pay more than £110,000 for those services.
The club has now attempted to sue Stanmore College for £168,180. This comprises three unpaid invoices, interest on the late payment and additional compensation.
After nearly a year of negotiation, the case has been suspended in the hope that it can be resolved out of court – with mediation scheduled for next month.
In email exchanges dating back to 2015, the college’s former principal Jacqui Mace and representatives of the football academy agreed that the college would pay the academy to use its facilities via “block pitch bookings”.
Barnet FC’s academy then sent Stanmore College three invoices worth a combined £112,900 the following year, to cover the training costs.
Despite the repeated invoices, Stanmore College both “failed and refuses” to pay any of them, the court documents reveal.
The college argued that the emails from Mace “do not establish any valid and enforceable agreement relating to the claimants” – insisting the former principal did not make that agreement on behalf of the college. Instead, the college argued Mace sent those emails on behalf of Stanmore Training Company Limited, a college-run firm which provided bespoke training and apprenticeship services for the college.
That firm was then dissolved in December 2016.
Stanmore College also alleged that the emails do not show “offer and acceptance” of the deal, as the final email just “provided for further discussion” between Mace and Barnet FC’s then academy manager, Henry Newman.
Master Iain Pester, the judge in charge, suspended the court case in February so that it could be settled by “alternative dispute resolution” (ADR). Representatives of the college and football club have agreed to a mediation day on July 27, 2023, according to a spokesperson for Stanmore College.
By settling the dispute in this way, both the college and football club will be able to avoid the high costs associated with a drawn-out legal case.
In a joint statement, Barnet FC Academy and Amber Football Centre said they were “not in a position to comment further” as the ADR process is ongoing. “However, we hope that the matter will soon be resolved,” they added.
Colleges are bracing themselves for six-figure bills following a landmark ruling that gives all staff equal holiday pay.
But an expert law firm is advising colleges to be cautious as the government moves forward with proposed legislation which could bypass the legal case.
Colleges across England have consulted lawyers since the Supreme Court judgment in Harpur Trust v Brazel last July, which ruled that all workers should get a minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday time, regardless of how many hours they work.
The case focused on music teacher Lesley Brazel, who argued that it was unfair she got less annual paid holiday because she worked variable hours each week during term-time.
The decision to rule in favour of Brazel is significant because it means that thousands of term-time workers have been underpaid and could now bring claims going back up to two years.
Large colleges have warned that the ruling will have a “significant adverse impact”, with at least two setting aside more than £100,000 to resolve any claims.
‘Significant adverse impact’
Since the ruling, workers who feel they are owed holiday pay have been able to approach their employers to claim that money back. Colleges have been preparing for the impact.
At DN Colleges Group, legal firm Eversheds Sutherlands advised the college to “implement compliance” with the working-time directive, but said that it would be “unlikely” to need to engage in collective bargaining with trade unions.
The impact, some warn, will be severe, with East Kent College saying the ruling had a “significant adverse impact” on the group.
Following the ruling, it undertook a “full review” of staff affected and “recalculated staff pay”, letting all staff know the impact it would have on them. The college does not specify how much it paid out to staff.
Meanwhile, Brockenhurst College declared a “potential historical liability” of £150,000, while one of the biggest colleges in the country, Chichester College Group, set aside £140,000, which it says would cover two years of relevant backpay. “It is expected that a payment will be made in the year to 31 July 2023,” it said in its annual report.
FE Week understands that the Association of Colleges took legal advice from Irwin Mitchell on the impact the changes could have, but it does not have an estimate of how much the college sector could have to pay back in total.
University and College Union general secretary Jo Grady said: “For far too long employers have used underhand tactics to deny casualised workers their full holiday pay. This case is one of many brought by the union movement which confirms that, when employers play fast and loose with the law, they will be held to account.”
‘Be pragmatic’
But things have changed. In January, just months after the ruling, the government launched a consultation looking at pro-rata holiday entitlement for part-year workers.
The proposals, if accepted, would “ensure that holiday pay and entitlement is directly proportionate to the time they spend working”. The consultation closed in March and is set to report back this year.
Irwin Mitchell’s lead practice development lawyer Joanne Moseley told FE Week that the move by the government had been unexpected.
Before the consultation, the advice was for colleges to prepare backdated payments. That advice has now changed.
The law firm expects the government to respond to the consultation in the autumn – which could mean any changes come into effect next year.
“Our advice is to be pragmatic,” Moseley told FE Week. If a college has already changed its contracts to implement the changes after the legal case, it should stay with that course.
If, however, colleges are in the process of changing the contracts, a different approach could make more sense.
“You might be able to build in flexibility in the contracts of employment, so that you can then reduce the amount of holiday they receive if the law changes.” If a college has done nothing to implement the changes, a “wait and see approach” could be more fruitful, Moseley said.
“What we are saying is that, yes, that’s the law: you are breaching the law. But, if people are not bringing claims, do you want to alert them to this?”
A Department for Business and Trade spokesperson said: “We want to address disparities in holiday pay and annual leave entitlement to ensure any entitlement is directly proportional to the time spent working.
“This is why we launched a consultation on holiday entitlement which ended in March, and we will issue a response in due course.”
Back in 2001, I was waiting for Estelle Morris, the then education and skills secretary. Despite the conference venue, Church House, being literally just across the road from her department’s Whitehall HQ, she was running late.
Her skills minister, John Healey, was about to go on stage but was anxious to catch a word with his political boss. We were launching the new sector skills councils (SSCs) initiative to an invited audience of industry leaders.
“What’s our core message?”, he asked me.
As a post-16 advisor at the time, I told him: “Well minister, we need to put employers at the heart of the skills system. Sector skills councils will achieve this aim by handing ownership of the skills and productivity challenge over to them.”
“Great”, he said, “make sure Estelle gets the same message when she arrives.”
Ever since that point, we have seen a succession of government ministers and senior officials parrot the same line: “Employers at the heart of the skills system.”
The trouble is, the whole thing has turned out to be one massive illusion.
Employers today are no more engaged in government skills policies than they were two decades ago. In fact, there is strong evidence by volume of firms engaged, not to mention employer investment in workers, that they are even less engaged.
The Labour Force Survey shows a 28 per cent decline in company training since 2005 (11 per cent since 2010).
Some people reading this will remember the employer ownership of skills pilots (EOP). It turned out that firms are great at taking “free money” from taxpayers to boost skills. But they are rather less forthcoming in stepping up and putting in their own cash, as reported by FE Week at the time.
In fact, independent researchers commissioned to evaluate the pilots found huge deadweight in the £350 million programme. Only 40 per cent of the original planned starts were met.
It is hard not to be cynical when you rock up at another one of these taxpayer-funded “terrace events” in Parliament, as I did this week.
The core message of the event on Tuesday, marking the launch of a new report by IfATE on “a simpler skills system”, was as predictable as it was tiresome.
Perhaps we should not blame hard-working officials who put together this guff. They are made to “drink the Kool-Aid”.
I liken it to blaming the passengers on a bus that has broken down. You would always look at the mechanical faults in the engine compartment first.
The truth is that civil servants have become prisoners of an ideology that is total nonsense.
Let’s start by examining the bold claim that the institute is the “voice of employers in the skills system”. For a public body established under the political direction of ministers, this is constitutionally impossible.
IfATE can only ever be the voice of the government of the day. It is the duty of officials to serve ministers in what they want to achieve in terms of apprenticeships and technical education.
The institute is chaired by a Conservative peer. It has a career civil servant at the helm, as opposed to a celebrated captain of industry.
IfATE is neither a representative structure nor is it an independent voice in the skills system. It exists to do the bidding of the governing party. And, in a democracy, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
If the government was really serious about employers being placed in the driving seat – or taking more responsibility for skills development, public and private – we would see some kind of renaissance of the employer-led sectoral approach to training.
I find it amusing, given my Labour background, that I successfully argued back in 2001 that the last people you would put in charge of a skills system are a bunch of civil servants, however well-meaning.
When Estelle Morris finally arrived at Church House, I dutifully relayed the “employers at the heart of the skills system” message. In retrospect, I wish I had just told her Ronald Reagan’s famous line about the nine most terrifying words in the English language: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
NCG has become the first further education college group to be granted permanent awarding powers for taught degrees up to masters level.
The Office for Students (OfS) has confirmed that, with effect from June 1, it removed the time limit on NCG’s degree awarding powers, making it the first FE institution with indefinite taught degree-awarding powers.
Jon Ridley, NCG’s deputy principal for higher education, described the milestone as a “gamechanger” for the organisation, giving it the ability to plan longer term and expand its “full tertiary” offer in Newcastle and beyond.
NCG, formerly known as Newcastle College Group, is one of England’s largest groups with seven colleges across the country under its belt. Its degree-awarding powers apply across all its college sites, though most of its HE provision is currently delivered at its Newcastle College University Centre.
Higher education providers are initially awarded taught degree-awarding powers with a time limit. NCG was first awarded the powers by the Privy Council in 2016 until July 2022. This time limit was extended by two years by the OfS in July 2022, and removed altogether this month.
“NCG has a long, proud history as a provider of higher technical education stretching back decades, and we have been an awarding institution for over 10 years,” Ridley said.
“Having taught degree-awarding powers without time limit recognises the quality of our higher education. This is a first for a college-based HE provider and supports our ambition to be the country’s leading provider of higher technical education.”
This is the latest in a run of firsts for the group’s higher education portfolio. The then-Newcastle College Group was among the first FE colleges to be granted foundation degree-awarding powers in 2011. It was then the first FE institution to receive time-limited taught bachelors and masters degree-awarding powers in 2016.
There are other colleges, such as WCG and TEC Partnership, with bachelors degree-awarding powers, though these are, for now, still time limited. And private provider Multiverse received the power to award its own degrees in certain subjects in September, though they too are time limited.
NCG’s offer currently boasts a BA(Hons) in fine art, BSc(Hons) in aircraft engineering and an MBA.
“This is a full tertiary solution,” Ridley said. “You can arrive here with no qualifications and leave with a masters, on your doorstep.”
The final approval for NCG came after a “rigorous” assessment process with the OfS, Ridley said.
“Do you have the right academic structures, are you self-critical as an organisation, can you uphold the standards of higher education? We’ve had to prove that we’ve sustained that level and also grown as an institution.
“It is gamechanger because now we can plan with confidence.”
Jon Ridley at the Newcastle Aviation Academy
The college’s higher education prospectus boasts smaller class sizes and dedicated HE student services as part of its offer, which must be important with two large universities – Newcastle University and Northumbria University – on its doorstep.
Higher education accounted for around £19 million of the group’s £136 million total income in 21/22, with learner numbers hovering between 2,300 and 2,400 over the past four years.
For Ridley, being the only FE institution with indefinite awarding powers could catalyse new partnerships with other colleges and providers.
He said: “Our ambition is to grow our partnership work with other colleges and providers, but that has got to align with our values and principles.
“We are going to do degree apprenticeships, we are going to do modular. We are already doing those things. Our focus is on degrees and higher-level study that leads into employment or to better somebody’s opportunities.”
