The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education is gearing up to re-procure for awarding organisations to run the health and science T Levels.
Pre-procurement documents, seen by FE Week, indicate that a full invitation to tender will be launched by March for the T Levels in health, healthcare science and science, all held currently by NCFE.
This means the first T Levels that were introduced for teaching, in 2020 and 2021, now all have a timetable for re-procurement.
The new contracts will feature a new “demand-sensitive” pricing model, which means awarding organisations can charge providers higher fees if learner numbers are lower than expected.
IfATE commenced procurement for seven T Levels in December for education and early years, construction and digital. Awarding organisations had to indicate their interest in December. Those progressing to the full tender have until mid-March to submit their bids.
This second procurement is for the T Levels in health, healthcare science, and science.
Forecasted student numbers for the three health and science T Levels will increase by over five times, the Department for Education estimates. Around 1,800 students took the qualifications in 2022. In 2026/27, when the new awarding contracts start, the DfE predicts 10,200 students will sign up, rising to 12,200 by the end of the contract period, 2030/31.
IfATE operates a single-license model for the technical qualifications in each T Level, meaning that one awarding organisation is responsible for updating content and assessment materials, providing training to teachers and provider staff, quality control, and assessing and grading students.
New contracts will be awarded for five years, with the option for up to three annual extensions, overlapping with level 3 qualification reforms and the development of the Advanced British Standard.
It’s not yet clear how much these contracts will be worth. Contract values for each T Level are expected when the invitation to tender is released in the next couple of months.
Jennifer Coupland, chief executive of IfATE, said: “My team has worked closely with awarding bodies and providers in the design of the next round of procurement to make them even more commercially attractive.”
FE Week understands the lower-than-expected student numbers and high development and operating costs have left several awarding organisations barely breaking even on their T Level contracts.
Start dates for teaching of the newly re-licensed T Levels will be staggered.
Students will be taking new generation 2 T Levels in early years, construction and digital from September 2025, while the health and science T Levels won’t be ready for teaching until September 2026.
The awarding organisations that currently hold T Level licenses can re-tender, though the generation 2 contracts do make provisions for staff to be transferred under TUPE regulations if a new awarding organisation takes over. Documents also state “there will be a need for constructive collaboration” in the event of an overlap from one T Level license holder to another.
Interested awarding organisations have been provided with DfE estimates of health and science T Level numbers over the generation 2 contract period. They currently predict 32,400 entrants to the T Level in health over the five years, 9,700 entrants to the T Level in healthcare science and 16,900 to the T Level in science.
However, if learner numbers don’t reach forecasted levels, providers could be left fitting the bill.
Generation 2 contracts will feature a new “adaptive pricing model” which will allow awarding organisations to make a “one-off adjustment” to the entry fee it charges providers if the projected number of students increases or decreases over the contract term. This is described as “an adjustment facility for higher learner fees at lower learner numbers.”
The health and science T Levels suffered from well-publicised issues which led to results being regraded in their first year. Various changes have been made to make them fit for purpose.
Ministers are standing firmly behind T Levels despite the prime minister announcing they are set to be replaced by the Advanced British Standard in the next decade.
Writing for FE Week in October, skills minister Robert Halfon said, “This is not the end of T Levels, which will be the backbone of the new [ABS] qualification. The Advanced British Standard will build on the success of T Levels.”
The Federation of Awarding Bodies (FAB) has announced Charlotte Bosworth as its new chair.
Bosworth, who is managing director of Innovate Awarding, will take over from current chairs Kirstie Donnelly and Alan Woods who will both be standing down from the FAB board in the Spring.
John McNamara, FAB’s interim CEO and chair of Innovate Awarding, said: “I know that the Federation will be in very capable hands when they hand over the reins to Charlotte in spring, and that Charlotte will work with Kion [Ahadi] as the next CEO, and the board of directors to continue to build on the success achieved by Kirstie and Alan.”
Bosworth is now in her seventh year as a member of the FAB board and is also vice chair of Walsall College and the chair of compliance for the accountancy professional body AAT.
“There will be challenges ahead as we face a general election, further education reform and developing and new technologies, however I am resolute that as an industry we will work together to ensure that the importance and value of qualifications and assessment in changing the lives of learners is heard at every opportunity,” Bosworth said.
This comes as the federation announced it was investigating the “human and emotional cost” of government regulation, including the approach and conduct of regulators.
Following reports of how Ofqual was accused of driving an end-point assessment organisation out of the apprenticeship market with an “excruciating” and “unfair” investigation that led to one senior manager feeling suicidal and another taking medication for stress.
The body plans to survey its members after the issue was raised by delegates at the FAB annual conference late last year.
The FAB board unanimously elected Bosworth as their next chair at a meeting last week.
Outgoing co-chairs Donnelly and Woods have led the federation since December 2020. In that time, they led the search for the appointment of the new chief executive, Kion Ahadi, who starts on February 5.
In a statement, Donnelly, chief executive of City and Guilds, and Woods, chief executive at VTCT, said: “Since our election by the membership to the Board in 2019, and our election as co-chairs the following year, we have focussed on raising the profile and value of qualifications at the highest levels within government, regulators and the full variety of stakeholders that we work with. Meanwhile, we have sought to position the federation as the strong collective voice of the industry that it is today.
“We believe that now is the right time for us to stand down from the board so that Charlotte and Kion can take FAB forward in the years ahead.”
Tim Leunig, the brains behind some of the biggest education policies of the past decade, knows that some of the opinions he’ll be sharing in his new role as an FE Week columnist will raise some eyebrows. But he has never been shy about courting controversy.
We meet at Westminster Abbey, where Leunig gives me a tour of its memorials to the people who have created ripples on the tide of British history, before we sit down to discuss the ripples that Leunig himself has created over the years.
The setting enables him to indulge in his love of history and politics. He has just stepped down after 25 years as an associate professor in economic history at the London School of Economics. He is a director at the policy and research consultancy Public First and has just started as chief economist at the centre-right think-tank Onward.
But it is the 12 years which Leunig spent as a senior civil servant that I am interested in.
Tim Leunig outside the grounds of Westminster Abbey
The weirdo and misfit
Not only has he advised Number 10 and the Treasury, but Leunig was the DfE’s joint chief analyst and later chief scientific adviser, becoming a close ally of Michael Gove, Nick Gibb and Dominic Cummings. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey is an “old friend” who lives around the corner.
Like Cummings, Leunig puts others to shame with his vast grey matter and is unafraid to stand out from the crowd. He meets me donned in a high-vis vest (though he didn’t cycle here).
He agrees with Cummings’ infamous remark that the government needs more “weirdos and misfits”. “We need more people willing to tell us how it is.”
Did he feel able do that as a civil servant? “Yes. Dom and I disagreed respectively. He was much better working at DfE than Number 10.”
When Leunig left the Treasury in 2022, Cummings praised him for giving “honest advice without any of the normal courtier dynamics so ubiquitous and poisonous” in Westminster. His departure was “another sign this Downing Street is pointless”.
Someone in government was perhaps listening, as Leunig spent the next year in advisory roles spanning the departments of health (including on mental health issues), education and housing, as well as Downing Street.
Dominic Cummings Picture: Asadour Guzelian
Plasma TV outrage
These days, Leunig may receive a less warm welcome in Liverpool than Westminster. In 2008 he sparked outrage by saying that money spent there on regeneration “should have been used to buy plasma televisions” after co-authoring a report arguing that the North is “less desirable” for business.
Leunig called for more housebuilding in the South, because “you cannot move Canary Wharf to Liverpool”.
He claims that every OECD country has a population “moving south”, because “people prefer to be somewhere warmer and drier” and dismisses suggestions that global warming might change that. “It’s hard to believe London will be so hot that people think, ‘let’s move to Newcastle’.”
Leunig blames high house prices for hindering those in deprived northern areas from moving to London, or indeed Medway in Kent, where he grew up.
Leunig had a relatively modest upbringing. His father left soon after he started primary school, his mother did shop work and similar, and the accent which he admits can sound “rather posh” is a result of being taught to overpronounce syllables to cure a speech impediment.
Despite only getting a B in his A-level history and a C in further maths, Leunig got a first in modern history and economics at Oxford and is now a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He believes he was “unlucky” with his history A-level and that history exams, like driving tests, are “valid but not reliable” due to the discretion involved in the assessment. “The same is true of Ofsted.”
He uses the example of Ofsted coming in on a day when “three of your best teachers are ill”.
“Ofsted is supposed to be a valid judgment, but that comes at the expense of reliability. So, the question is, what do you do with that judgment?”
‘The greatest privilege of my life’
Tim Leunig as a school boy
While Leunig was a Treasury adviser from 2019 to 2022, hiseconomic argument appeared to have lost out to Boris Johnson’s levelling up agenda which saw money pouring into regenerating the North.
But that is not to say that Leunig’s ideas didn’t have a big impact at Number 11.
A few months before Covid, he became curious about how the German government helped to fund the furloughing of a company’s staff when a problem was impacting its industry. Leunig had this “at the back of my mind” so, when Sunak asked, “what to do to prevent mass unemployment” when Covid hit, “I had an answer”.
Leunig believes UK unemployment would have hit four million in a similar fashion to how it spiked in the US post-lockdowns without furlough. He says: “Being part of something that saved three million jobs is likely to be the greatest privilege of my life.”
But, while the scheme “worked perfectly for large firms”, he admits that “some small firms behaved very oddly”. “We can be pretty sure that, when Ikea furloughed someone, they were at home not working. That was much less clear for firms with only a single employee – particularly if they were a family member.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the pandemic
RAAC regrets
Leunig has been unafraid to court controversy over the years because he will say “what I think is true”. But he will change his mind when his “understanding of the facts changes”.
“That’s why people have me as a columnist – a columnist needs to create a mailbag.”
But at the DfE, he could only react to what he was told. As chief scientific adviser between 2014 and 2017, he was not informed about the risks of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC).
He is “surprised that no local authority mentioned RAAC” at the time, because “they employ structural engineers”.
He points out that Heathrow and Gatwick airports both contain RAAC but, “because they maintain their buildings much better than the state maintains its schools, they have absolutely no problem”.
Aside from crumbly concrete, Leunig is concerned about deteriorating mental health among girls.
He believes that “the standard argument” that “boys fall out, punch each other, hug and get on with life” while girls are “catty and backstabbing” has “always been true, but now social media has taken them to another level”.
He points to evidence from the US that the “satisfaction with life” of 12th graders dropped dramatically in 2012 with the advent of smartphones, while their satisfaction with parents rose, rebutting arguments that family tensions were to blame for their angst. “People need to know this,” he adds.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the Conservative Party where he announced the new ABS qualification proposals
Mandatory maths
When it comes to the curriculum, there was “virtually nothing” in terms of maths-favouring policies that crossed his DfE desk that Leunig did not “put a big smiley face and a double tick on”.
He believes that maths skills will be essential in our future AI-driven economy because maths teaches a “way of thinking that is structured and not intuitive”.
He recalls a report from the 1970s which found that the Germans had a “productivity advantage” over us when it came to installing kitchens, “because they knew more maths”. That is apparently because, unlike us, the Germans use “angles” and the “Sine Law” so they can draw and cut holes in units before they are installed.
“There are not many people who find maths easy as children – maths is hard. When you’ve conquered it, you’ve gained a skill and a sense of logic that lasts you a lifetime.”
Leunig’s proposals for the Advanced British Standard qualification for which most students will study at least five subjects at either “major” or “minor” levels, including maths and English, have prompted controversy. The name has been derided because of the other unfortunate connotations of “BS”.
Leunig reveals how Nick Gibb had at one time proposed instead for it to be called ACE – Advanced Certificate in Education.
Some people fear that making maths mandatory will put young people off post-16 education altogether, and question its feasibility given that the education sector is already struggling to recruit maths teachers. Leunig believes the solution is to pay them more, to “out-compete other employers”.
He sees the problem as being that England has “lots of graduate careers” for maths graduates, whereas Finland does “quite well” when it comes to education because of the lack of alternative graduate jobs there.
Labour is proposing to prioritise primary rather than post-16 maths, but Leunig believes “there’s no reason” why it should not focus on boosting maths skills for both primary and post-16 cohorts.
He concedes that colleges are currently struggling under the weight of young people arriving there without maths and English GCSEs. “It is true” that maths retakes “have not worked in the way” that was intended.
“That’s why we need to get maths right at primary.”
Tim Leunig
Stopping sixth forms
Leunig is not shy of criticising schools when it comes to post-16. He welcomes how the Baker clause gave colleges the right to “come into schools and try and recruit students”, but questions whether schools have really “done anything differently” in recent years to champion apprenticeships.
Leunig believes the 11 to 16 budget should be ring-fenced within schools to prevent the “unfair competition” some schools have created with colleges by creating new sixth forms.
He sees scope for the government to make savings by stopping the “huge cross-subsidies” some schools are making to their sixth forms.
Government data shows the number of schools with sixth forms rose 4 per cent from 1,959 to 2,039 in the year 2018-19, although it has dropped by 2 per cent since.
Leunig believes that “a lot of academies now create sixth forms because it impresses parents. It makes it easier to recruit teachers… but many of these are very small and inefficient.”
He questions whether there is evidence for the argument some heads make that having a sixth form can have an aspirational effect on its younger pupils. “If you take Cambridge, virtually no school there has a sixth form… does it really have an aspiration problem? I doubt it.”
Sajid Javid when he was Business Secretary in 2015
Heart in FE
Leunig counts himself “pretty lucky” to have served under relatively long-standing ministers and secretaries of state at DfE such as Gibb and Gove, and credits skills minister Robert Halfon for “knowing his stuff”.
“Try working on housing – you have a new housing minister every year! Other parts of government have suffered more.”
But Leunig regrets that “we never had a secretary of state whose heart was in further education”.
He “always hoped” that Sajid Javid, whom he served as chancellor and whose educational journey included technical college before doing a degree at Exeter University, would be offered the role of education secretary, “particularly towards the end of his time in government”.
“It was someone in an FE college who said to Sajid to not just go to university, but to go to a prestigious one. They changed his life.”
One of Leunig’s DfE positions was as joint chief analyst, a role which covered FE as well as schools. But FE was “never at the core” of his work.
He perhaps has more experience writing about apprenticeships as they were back in the 1600s (he wrote a history paper in 2009 about it). But now, Leunig is particularly “looking forward to writing about FE – because it matters so much.”
I began working as a British Sign Language (BSL) teacher at City Lit in 2018. My learners encompass a wonderfully diverse range of adults from 18 to 60. Each has their own motivation for learning BSL. For some, it’s work or fun. Often, it’s because they have people in their lives whom they wish to empower and support.
Learning BSL can be beneficial for a range of reasons – and you don’t need to know someone personally who is Deaf to start. Every learner who becomes a skilled signer has a positive impact on those they communicate with, and on the wider Deaf community. When you learn BSL, you are discovering not just language and linguistics but a whole culture. This is the rich history of a minority who have fought for equality and access – a history full of oppression, but also solidarity.
It’s important to know that history, because Deaf people today are still affected by it. I didn’t have access to signed education until the age of 17. I learned Sign Support English (SSE) from the wonderful CSW (Communication Support Work) at City Lit while I was studying design and art foundation at Southwark College.
I grew up at a time when oralism was still the norm. This culture came from the shadow of the 1880 Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf, held in Milan and notorious for recommending that sign language be banned. For much of the 20th century up until the 1990s, schools promoted oralism rather than bilingualism in Deaf education. Only in 2003, after Deaf people had been campaigning for years, was BSL officially recognised by the British Government. It wasn’t until 2010 that the motions passed in Milan in 1880 were rejected in Vancouver at the 21st International Congress on the Education of the Deaf.
Actively encouraging staff in FE to learn BSL challenges this history. And colleges have so much to gain: everyone benefits when more staff receive training in BSL rather than rely on a sign language interpreter to engage with Deaf students. Teachers are better equipped to foster a welcoming environment and more aware of the needs of their learners, which can help reaffirm inclusive teaching practices. This is also an opportunity for integration with Deaf culture and a springboard for learning experiences that enrich the whole college community.
I grew up at a time when oralism was still the norm
Experiencing Deaf culture is imperative to breaking down barriers and creating allies for my community. I encourage my students to attend events: last year, for example, I took some of my learners to the BSL rally to experience first-hand the Deaf community coming together. It’s important to me remain tightly woven into that community. In 2014, I started the ‘BSL News’ Facebook group to provide social media content in BSL on current affairs and Deaf news. We regularly film ourselves explaining what’s going on in the world, giving Deaf people the opportunity to access information and ask further questions. The group, now with 7,000 members, has gone on to cover Covid news, election information, and cost-of-living advice.
On Saturday 13 April, I look forward to taking part in Deaf Day, City Lit’s annual event for the Deaf community. Now in its 26th year, Deaf Day is a free annual one-day event at City Lit celebrating Deaf culture. It is an opportunity for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people to get together, socialise and celebrate Deaf provision and the Deaf community – increasing our social impact and strengthening the community. This has been part of City Lit’s ethos since its early days; some of its first courses in 1919 were lip-reading courses for deafened soldiers returning from WW1.
As a new learner ambassador for Learning and Work Institute, I’m passionate about advocating for the transformative effects of lifelong learning. For me, that extends to colleagues too. Everyone benefits from the culture of learning and openness we create in our colleges. Let’s make BSL integral to it everywhere.
Emma Iliffe won the tutor award at the Festival of Learning 2023. Nominations for this year’s awards are open until 2 February. Access them here
The longstanding challenge for the end-point assessment (EPA) sector has been reconciling the rising demand for assessments with a limited ability to scale in parallel – leading to strain and pressure on the EPA system.
So, as we look ahead to what 2024 will bring, I expect this need for greater efficiency will remain a key issue for the sector to try and address.
Ofqual’s latest data on the recent growth in the number of apprenticeship completions highlights that from 2020/21 to 2022/23, the number of EPAs completed increased from 13,405 to over 110,000.
To compound matters further, the next 12 months will also see a number of reviews to existing apprenticeship standards which could bring significant change to assessment plans. This could result in huge operational impact for end-point assessment organisations (EPAOs) in terms of how these changes are delivered.
So, if EPAOs are to stay ahead of the game in 2024, it’s crucial that they remain cognisant of ‘emerging’ technologies, ones that can make a marked improvement to the efficient delivery of end-point assessments.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one huge area of opportunity here. Within vocational education, discussions on AI have largely focussed on concern around the prevention of cheating, with a small acknowledgement that AI may be able to primarily assist training providers, rather than EPAOs. But I believe there’s a vast range of other useful applications that are yet to be explored for EPAOs.
A significant boost to efficiency that would be impossible to ignore would be the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate question banks based on inputted occupational standards. These LLMs could be embedded within the question authoring system, providing the ability for the requisite assessment information to be fed in without user intervention – in a similar way to how APIs work. As a result, this could save EPAOs significant time and cost on question writers, with experts able to refine questions rather than create them.
A vast range of applications are yet to be explored for EPAOs
Another huge efficiency boost for the EPA sector would be the exploration of AI for boosting the productivity of administrators. If this came to fruition, we could see a huge reduction in the cost and logistical planning hurdles that are often associated with EPA. For instance, AI could be used to coordinate diaries of the candidate and assessor via an online booking platform, meaning candidates could book in and take their exam sooner.
Oral assessments represent another area that can benefit from an infusion of AI. As speech-to-text technology improves, the recording of the assessment could be directly inputted into an LLM, transcribed, and then compared against a marking rubric.
It means a live human assessor could have a first draft of a mark done almost immediately and wouldn’t need to spend hours revisiting transcripts or recordings. Of course, it still needs to be checked by human intelligence, but this would be significantly more efficient and would increase the capacity of an assessor to deliver more assessments, as well as providing more standardised, consistent assessment decisions.
These three AI developments are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to possible improvements that AI can make to the operations of EPAOs.
Critically, this isn’t to say AI is the panacea to the issues the EPA sector is facing: human intelligence remains the key driver to success. Rather, it’s to point out that we, as an industry, have the ability to drastically improve the efficiency of how we work, and AI could be an incredibly valuable ‘co-pilot’ in providing solutions to the widespread issues facing the EPA sector.
The common issue I’ve come across to date is that EPAs perhaps don’t have the resource to fully explore where they can utilise AI, which brings us back to the overarching issue: resolving challenges in the EPA space requires continuous innovation and development.
In 2024 and beyond, edtech providers must continue to prioritise solutions that deliver measurable and tangible impact for the sector.
Our new report, published this week, Enabling Better Outcomes: A wider view of apprenticeship success, has revealed that while employers overwhelmingly see the value in hiring apprentices, there are too many barriers to supporting apprentices to complete their apprenticeship programmes.
Crucially, we found that financial barriers hinder the progress of apprentices, as businesses – particularly SMEs – do not have the necessary funds to offer competitive pay, or time off, for apprentices to complete other elements of their apprenticeship.
Employer perspectives
This report is the second in our series looking at apprenticeship outcomes and destinations. Our 2022 report looked at apprentices’ perspectives, while this new release provides unique insights into the employers’ views on apprenticeship completions.
To conduct this research, which was produced in partnership with Learning and Work Institute (L&W), we surveyed over 800 employers to better understand what leads to successful completions, and the challenges they face.
We found that almost all employers view apprenticeship completion as important but only 1 in 3 report completion rates of over 75 per cent, against the government’s target of 67 per cent by 2025.
Employers told us that the number one barrier they face is the ability to arrange time off for apprentices to study, finish assignments, or complete off the job training. Financial support was raised as crucial to helping apprentices complete their programmes, as it helps cover off-the-job training time and can be used to help apprentices with direct costs, such as transport or childcare.
Employers also suggested their relationship with training providers posed additional challenges due to poor communication and lack of support, as well as lack of staff capacity to line manage apprentices and the ability to pay apprentices competitive rates.
Importantly, we found that employers who place more value on completion believe apprentices gain better soft skills, industry knowledge and experience, and become more productive employees.
Unsurprisingly, these employers experience higher completion rates, something that indicates completion is a value not just in itself, but because it has wider business benefits.
This wider set of positive impacts underlines how apprenticeships play a crucial role in facilitating access to employment, bridging skills gaps, achieving economic growth, and, consequently, generating additional opportunities for the future.
Creating a system that supports employers
We recommend several policies that would create a system that enables employers to support their apprentices to complete their programmes.
As a starting point, the Department for Education should convene a stakeholder group to look at what can be done to help employers provide sufficient off-the-job training. Through close collaboration with businesses, additional support and guidance should be published on how this can be achieved, with a particular focus on SMEs, who in particular struggle with the costs of providing this.
Internally, employers need to reflect on their organisational culture and take steps to create an environment that facilitates more pastoral support for apprentices. A key part of this should be more time being made to train line managers, who in turn can then more thoroughly support apprentices and drive completion rates.
Additionally, the relationship between employers and training providers needs to be strengthened to support more apprentices. Both parties should be encouraged to consider enabling more three-party meetings – between apprentices, training providers, and employers – throughout apprenticeships, given the evidence this makes a strongly positive difference to apprentices and the prospects of completion.
We know that high-quality apprenticeships benefit people, employers, and our economy, and are an integral part of the Government’s skills policy in England, but these ambitions cannot be realised unless we expand apprenticeship opportunities and raise completion rates.
As ever, policymakers, employers, and training providers must work in tandem to create an environment that supports employers to support their apprentices to complete their programmes. Working together, we can see excellent results that will bring benefits to the individual, businesses, and the wider economy.
These two changes are separate (one covers students and the other covers staff), but they do cover similar topics and colleges need to be ready for both.
Student sexual misconduct
There has been a recent case about the investigation into reports of sexual misconduct made by two students about a fellow student. The students studied at a higher education college, although the findings apply just as much to further education colleges.
The judgment concluded that the college was negligent in the conduct of its disciplinary process and in its treatment of the two reporting students in the course of that process, causing them psychiatric harm. As a result, the students were awarded damages.
What does this mean for colleges?
This case does not create a new duty of care. It applies the ordinary principles of a duty of care, albeit for the first time in the context of an education institution’s disciplinary proceedings for sexual misconduct.
There is no duty of care to prevent harm generally (self-harm or harm by third parties). The duty relates to matters that are within an institution’s reasonable control or matters for which it assumes responsibility.
The lesson of this case is that, if a college mishandles the disciplinary process in cases of alleged sexual assault, it is reasonably foreseeable that it is likely to cause or exacerbate psychiatric harm that often follows such an assault. If a person is left exposed to harm that arises from making a report or because they are unsupported, that harm is likely to make a college vulnerable to a successful claim.
Although every case is very much determined by its specific facts, this is an important reminder for colleges to review their practices. Serious sexual-misconduct cases can have significant consequences for both reporting and responding students and, if badly handled by institutions, can result in liability for the college. Does your college have policies and procedures in place to deal with such a situation?
Sexual harassment in the workplace
In the context of employment law, the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 comes into force in October 2024. This means that all employers, including colleges, will be under a statutory duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. If employers fail to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, then the Equality and Human Right Commission can take enforcement steps, plus any successful tribunal claim will be subject to a compensation uplift of up to 25 per cent.
What does this mean for colleges?
Colleges must understand what their obligations will be and put in place the correct policies and procedures to ensure that they can show they have taken such steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. This includes providing specific, tailored training to line managers and senior staff who are responsible for ensuring compliance with those policies and procedures.
Clear and unequivocal statements as to a college’s ‘zero-tolerance’ policy and approach to harassment should also be set out, perhaps by way of clearly displayed signs or notices. Colleges might also wish to consider having a central register of all harassment complaints raised, so that they can keep track of any areas with particular issues or trends and so that they can ensure they are addressed quickly. However, that would need to be carefully executed considering data protection rules.
The cost of getting it wrong could be extensive, with no cap on compensation in discrimination claims, plus the potential 25 per cent uplift on that compensation when employers fail to take reasonable steps to prevent harassment.
Staff at the University and College Union have escalated a pay dispute with their bosses and accused them of “prioritising the pay of senior management”.
Talks broke down last week between Unite, the union representing over 200 UCU employees, and UCU management to the point where the union has demanded a meeting with UCU senior officers including president Justine Mercer.
UCU has offered staff a five per cent pay rise backdated to August 1, 2023, plus a 3.5 per cent pension-related uplift from January 1, 2024, a London weighting increase to £5,400 and a one-off non-consolidated £1,200 payment.
Employees have rejected the offer, instead demanding the percentage increases be translated into a flat sum for all staff, a compromise that a Unite UCU spokesperson told FE Week wouldn’t cost UCU any more than its offer.
“Clearly our employer’s priority during the cost-of-living crisis is to bolster senior manager pay at the expense of lower-paid staff,” the group said in a tweet last week.
A Unite UCU spokesperson told FE Week: “To resolve this dispute, we have tabled a compromise counter-proposal, which will not cost UCU a penny more than it has already offered; but it would redistribute the money already identified in a way which prioritises those on the lower part of the pay spine – those staff hit hardest by the cost-of-living crisis.”
Pressure is mounting on UCU bosses to resolve the dispute, especially as the ballot to vote for UCU general secretary and the national executive committee (NEC) begins next week. General secretary Jo Grady is standing for a second term and will compete against three other nominees.
UCU represents around 120,000 people working in universities and colleges. The union often attacks so-called “greedy” university and college bosses as it represents lecturers and other staff in their fight for higher pay and better working conditions.
UCU employees have been fighting bosses’ workplace policies as far back as last March, when Unite submitted their pay claim on behalf of UCU staff.
Unite also launched a dispute over UCU’s failure to agree a hybrid working policy, as well as members voting to strike over colleague redundancies in September, and a dispute over UCU managers forming their own union.
Unite also reported UCU to the health and safety executive (HSE) – a safety regulator – last summer over concerns that the employer was not risk assessing the level of work-related stress of staff.
The HSE investigation found in November the employer breached health and safety law by not carrying out risk assessment at an organisational level, opting for individual stress risk assessments for employees who report work-related stress.
A UCU spokesperson said: “UCU staff do an incredible job for our members, and in return they rightly receive some of the best pay and terms and conditions in the whole trade union movement.
“We are committed to ensuring that members are satisfied, and we remain hopeful that the 2023/24 pay round will be agreed as soon as possible, despite Unite members rejecting a consolidated pay offer worth 8.5 per cent as of January 2024, and a non-consolidated payment of £1,200. This equates to an in-year salary increase of around 11 per cent (excluding London allowance) for those on a midpoint salary.
“UCU met with Unite last week, where we offered to reconfigure how the non-consolidated amount is paid and look forward to resolving this pay round.”
A Unite UCU spokesperson said: “As a trade union UCU should model the values and the practices that it wishes to see all employers uphold. It is deeply disappointing, therefore, that UCU as an employer has disregarded the key trade union value of solidarity by prioritising the pay of senior management at the expense of lower paid staff.
“It is now up to UCU as an employer to do the right thing by agreeing to our compromise proposal. Any other response would be contrary to the interests of UCU staff and contrary to the interests of UCU members.”
Union representation of union staff members is not out of the ordinary, nor are internal disputes at unions.
Unite also represents employees of the National Education Union (NEU). Last November, members voted for strike action, rejecting the employer’s five per cent pay offer.
Meanwhile, one of the UK’s largest unions, GMB, was found to be institutionally sexist by an independent inquiry in 2020. Last year, another inquiry found sexism, bullying and a “mafia-like” culture was pervasive at Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association rail union.
Councils have spent just one per cent of a grant pot earmarked for creating tens of thousands of new specialist education places on post-16 providers, new data has revealed.
Of the £1.55 billion used by local authorities from the high needs provision capital allocation (HNPCA) grant to date, £20 million has gone towards post-16 learners.
From the 20,000 SEND places this funding creates, only 160 will be for young people with SEND in post-16 education.
The grant was announced by the Department for Education in 2021 when ministers committed £2.6 billion to spend over three financial years, from April 2022 to March 2025. By the start of 2024, £1.55 billion had been distributed. The remainder will be handed over in the 2024-25 financial year.
SEND experts said the level of spend on post-16 places “wasn’t a surprise, but it was disappointing”.
Matt Keer, SEND specialist at the Special Needs Jungle website which obtained the data through a Freedom of Information request, told FE Week: “With FE, the SEND system rarely misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and it’s happened again with this capital grant.
“Young people with complex special educational needs often have few local choices when they reach 16. This funding will make very little difference to their situation.”
Clare Howard, chief executive of specialist college membership organisation Natspec, added: “It’s disappointing as we’ve been pushing DfE and local authorities for years to remember post-16 and further education in those grant allocations.”
A Local Government Association (LGA) spokesperson said: “These are local decisions for councils to make, in consultation with parents and schools. Councils would likely have consulted SEND groups and these decisions therefore reflect local priorities.
“The Department for Education has indicated that they want most of the funding directed to schools, with capital funding likely going to new places in special schools, where there is a shortage of spaces.”
The LGA spokesperson added: “Post-16 colleges are more flexible and can accommodate SEND without building new sites due to the lack of limits on class sizes.”
Howard disagreed. “There are a lot of colleges finding it very difficult to find spaces for the number of young people that need places in further education across general FE and specialist colleges,” she said.
“Most of our members have restricted sites. They may well be able to put extra buildings on that site, but they don’t have the capital funding to do that.
“Most of our members are charities, and they’ve had to use their charitable funding, they’ve had to draw down reserves from their charity to build new spaces for these learners.”
A 2021 Natspec survey found that 53 per cent of 125 member colleges had buildings in need of urgent repair, or within the next two years. The majority (96 per cent) of colleges said that their buildings would need repairs within 10 years.
Howard pointed out that specialist colleges are also locked out of the £1.5 billion FE capital transformation fund, the £1 billion plus school transformation fund, and are unable to bid for the post-16 capacity fund available to FE colleges.
Calls have been renewed for the government to create a separate capital improvement fund for specialist colleges to develop their estates.
In October, conservative MP Jo Gideon wrote to the minister for children, families and wellbeing David Johnston to call for FE’s eligibility for capital funding rounds and a one-off urgent capital improvement fund.
“This lack of access to capital funding is adversely affecting some of the most vulnerable 16 to 25-year-olds currently in the system,” she wrote. “They are learning in cold, drafty and damp buildings, as a result of failing boilers, leaking roofs and single-glazed windows, or in teaching spaces that cannot adequately accommodate their wheelchairs or the specialist equipment they need to hand.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “It is the decision of the local authorities to determine how best to use their high needs capital allocations to meet local priorities.
“Local authorities can use their high needs capital allocation to work with any school or institution in their area, including academies. They are also free to choose to spend the funding across the 0-25 age range, including in dedicated post-16 institutions or other FE settings.”
