London’s Croydon College has been told to “harmonise cultures” by the FE Commissioner after Ofsted judged it as ‘inadequate’ due to “inappropriate” behaviour.
The FE Commissioner’s team visited the south London college in June after a “significant minority” of students reported instances of homophobic language and “taunting” behaviour which left female learners feeling uncomfortable.
Ofsted dealt the college a grade four report in May to the “surprise” of its leaders. Most criticism was targeted at “behaviour and attitudes” at the college’s Coulsdon campus.
The FE Commissioner’s follow-up intervention report, published today, said work to ensure all learners at Coulsdon feel safe whilst attending college has been strengthened through increased visibility of staff (including senior managers), teachers more consistently challenging and confronting poor learner behaviour, and effective consultation with staff and students.
Students at both Coulsdon and the college’s Croydon campus now report that behaviour is “respectful, positive, and tolerant between peers and staff”.
Croydon College merged with Coulsdon Sixth Form College in March 2019. Ofsted previously criticised leaders for a “considerable variation” in the quality of teaching across the two colleges.
Today’s FE Commissioner report echoed this concern and warned that “organisational progress” since the merger has been “too slow”, particularly the formation of a “single organisational identity through harmonisation of cultures and purpose”.
“Many” staff and students interviewed “were not able to identify a consistent set of college values. This will need to be addressed if senior leaders are to successfully establish a corporate culture across both colleges,” the report added.
The college’s chief executive, Caireen Mitchell, has now been tasked with developing a strategy to “provide purpose, harmonise cultures, and reinforce values, which needs to be applied to all college processes”.
‘We are encouraged by the positive observations’
A new management structure has been introduced since the Ofsted inspection, but it was “too early to judge” how effective it is at the time of the FE Commissioner’s visit.
While the FE Commissioner’s team highlighted many areas of “progress”, they said the pace of “corrective action” needs to be increased to ensure “timely improvements to the 16- to 18-year-old learner experience and their outcomes”.
As part of this, the college’s chair, governance professional, and chief executive have been told to develop and implement a strategy for ensuring governors “understand what it is like to be a student at Croydon College”.
The “significant volume” of data and information produced by the college also needs to be managed more effectively to be accessible, inform decisions, report performance, and drive actions for improvement.
The FE Commissioner’s report said student attendance and punctuality are still too low, but recognised progress has been made to “marginally improve” this area.
Leaders at Croydon College were praised for gaining ‘outstanding’ financial health through careful management of cash, operating surpluses, and capital expenditure. Even if the Ofsted result causes a dip in student recruitment over the short term, the college is well positioned to absorb any associated reduction in income, the FE Commissioner’s report said.
Overall, governors are “confident that recent changes to the college leadership structure have strengthened the leadership team’s capacity to steer the college through its journey of improvement”.
One of the FE Commissioner’s national leaders in further education will continue to assist the principal of the Coulsdon campus for the 2023/24 academic year.
The college teaches over 2,500 young learners – around two-thirds of whom studied at Croydon with a third at Coulsdon – as well as over 2,600 adult learners, around 200 apprentices and 200 students with high needs.
In a joint statement, principal Caireen Mitchell and chair Tony Stevenson, said: “The merging of the two colleges in 2019 presented significant challenges, not least because of the lasting impact of the Covid pandemic. We are therefore encouraged to see the FE Commissioner recognise the senior leadership’s approach to creating a harmonised, single-college culture.
“Achievement for the group is now in line with the national average, and we were pleased to celebrate many individual success stories this summer of students securing high grades and coveted places at prestigious universities or corporate training schemes. This has been followed by a very healthy enrolment for 2023/24 at both colleges, which reflects the positive perception of our colleges in the community.
“We are encouraged by the positive observations of the FE Commissioner, as we forge ahead with our quality improvement plan, and our shared ambition to achieve a ‘good’ Ofsted rating.”
Darren Hankey is keen for his students to grasp the tantalising opportunities to acquire net zero skills that are emerging in his region as a way of pulling themselves out of poverty.
In the college’s 175-year history, Hartlepool has gone from being an industrial powerhouse to one of England’s most deprived towns. Students’ behavioural problems are presenting an ever-greater challenge.
They are bearing the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis, Hankey tells me, with bursary applications going “through the roof”. But the country’s efforts to wean itself off fossil fuels are creating apprenticeship opportunities which offer a way out of entrenched cycles of social deprivation.
Hankey, who has just marked ten years as principal at the college, spent the morning before my visit hobnobbing with business executives from SeAH Wind, who were also visiting the college. The Korean company has invested £450 million in a monopile manufacturing facility in nearby Middlesbrough – the first of its kind in the UK.
The monopiles are needed to build one the world’s biggest offshore wind plants, on former industrial land at Teesworks, part of regional mayor Ben Houchen’s grand vision for the Tees Valley region to lead on the net zero agenda. The Tees Valley local skills improvement plan (LSIP) includes hydrogen and carbon capture and storage projects as well as offshore wind, creating around 10,000 jobs over the next five years.
Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen
Over 2,000 of those jobs are expected to be created through the monopile factory and its supply chain, with SeAH taking on 14 Hartlepool College apprentices in its first cohort.
Hankey shows me new facilities where students are learning to maintain electric vehicles and explains how many of the college’s 1,000 apprentices (who make up a fifth of its total student population) are in an engineering discipline, with many joining companies in the supply chains of Nissan and Hitachi.
This year the college’s apprenticeships division was rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted. Hankey attributes this to the significant work they put into finding out what employers want.
‘I’m not one to be sat in my office looking at spreadsheets’
For Hankey, developing the character of apprentices is “just as, if not more important, than the qualifications themselves”.
We walk past a new student who isn’t wearing his college badge, and Hankey tells him to make sure he brings it tomorrow. “You’ve got high standards, I recognise that about you – they just dipped a little bit today,” he gently warns him.
Interacting with students – whether that’s as a teacher or wandering in and out of classrooms (something that he encourages his senior leadership team to do regularly) is the part of his job that Hankey enjoys most.
“I’m not one to be sat in my office, looking at spreadsheets.”
He is, though, one of the country’s most visible college principals on social media, airing his views on policy and posting reminders of pro-FE statements made by former cabinet ministers like Gavin Williamson and Boris Johnson to expose how funding has not followed sentiment.
Hartlepool College of Further Education
Working poor
In the century or so after the college opened in 1849, many of its students went on to jobs in the local iron, steel, shipbuilding and marine engineering industries. But much of that is now gone.
Under Thatcher, thousands of steel workers lost their jobs, just a couple of decades after the last ship to be built there set sail.
Industrial decline left its residents feeling neglected. During Brexit, Hartlepool recorded the biggest margin of victory in the region for the Leave campaign – 69.6 per cent of the vote.
Ironically, Hartlepool College’s website still features the EU flag branding for the European Social Fund next to the college’s own logo, despite the fact that this funding has now ceased – a reminder of how EU money was central to boosting skills in the region.
These days, the college hallways are adorned with posters featuring inspiring quotes and pictures of icons such as Bukayo Saka and Marcus Rashford, because Hankey sees positive role models as a way of countering the growing influence of popular figures like Andrew Tate. Last year, six of his students were targeted for criminal and sexual exploitation.
The principal himself is also a source of inspiration for the many college students having to retake their English and maths GCSEs. Enrolment for those courses has almost doubled this year, from 642 to 1,204.
Hankey knows first-hand just how “disheartening” that sense of failure can be. He passed his maths GCSE at the age of 22, after attending night school at Leicester College.
“I tell them, get that GCSE before I got it,” he said.
Education was not seen as a priority for Hankey growing up in Leicester. After his parents separated when he was a young boy, his mum worked hard to put food on the table, which often meant going from a day job cleaning offices to working evenings in a pub.
He sees his own background in many of Hartlepool’s current students; they have parents who work hard but still cannot make ends meet. Last year, around half of the college’s bursary applications came from working families, something they had “never really seen before … it was eye-opening.”
West Hartlepool Technical College, as Hartlepool College was known then, back in 1912
Second chance education
Hankey left school at 16 with the equivalent of three GCSEs and got a warehousing job at WH Smith, sweeping the floor and picking up litter. The initial excitement of earning a wage quickly wore off, and the work became “quite monotonous”.
Fortunately, WH Smith sent him to night school at Leicester College when he was 18, where he took a management course and then went on to Sociology and French A-levels.
“If you’d told me when I first walked through those college doors that I’d still be there four years later, I wouldn’t have believed you. But I really thrived in that environment.”
WH Smith paid for all Hankey’s courses, apart from French, which only cost him £50.
It was a Leicester College lecturer who approached him after an evening class to suggest he went next to university. Hankey drove home with “fireworks going off in [his] head”.
“He thought I’d have an aptitude for it. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. I knew about Oxford and Cambridge, I knew Leicester had a university and a polytechnic, but I didn’t know the difference between them. I just had no clue.”
Leicester College, as it is now
Beverly Hills 90210
Hankey had some “wanderlust” and applied for a business and economics degree at Sunderland University which included a year in Austin, Texas. There, he was placed in “the equivalent of Beverly Hills 90210”, sharing a dorm with a student who had been handed a $30,000 Ford Mustang as a high school graduation gift.
“When I left school, I went down the working men’s club with my grandad and got a pint of bitter!”
Hankey found part-time work as a learning support assistant in maths and statistics classes, which gave him the “bug for teaching”. He spent the next six years teaching at FE colleges in inner-city London, starting with entry-level courses and moving on to teaching marketing and HR.
When the opportunity arose to move back up North as Hartlepool’s assistant principal in 2001, he grabbed it. By 2013, he had climbed the career ladder to principal and chief executive.
Bursary blues
The percentage of Hartlepool’s 16-19 cohort applying for bursaries usually “fluctuates between 40 and 50 per cent”, but last year it was 95 per cent and this year it is gearing up to be even higher. This time last year, the college had received 750 bursary applications. They have already had 850.
Hankey believes poverty is forcing increasing numbers of young people to leave college to take on paid work.
Last year the college’s achievement rate was around 80-85 per cent, whereas normally it is in the nineties.
A big bugbear for Hankey is the legwork that goes into students having to apply for free school meals. For schools, the process is automatic.
“We’ve got a great team who do that, but I’d rather they’re doing something different than processing all that paperwork.”
The bureaucracy means around 100 of those entitled to free school meals go unclaimed because those young people live in “a chaotic family with parents or carers dependent on alcohol or drugs. They can’t get the evidence to us, through no fault of their own.”
The college uses bursary funding for those students, because “we know there’s a need”.
“We just try to spread the jam and make it work.”
Ronnie Bage welfare officer at Hartlepool College with donations for refugees
‘It’s absolutely tough’
The college tops up the standard free school meal allowance from £2.53 per student – which “you’d struggle to feed a growing teenager on” – to £3.50. Some students receive double, “because otherwise they’re probably not going to be eating. It’s absolutely tough.”
Ronnie Bage, the college’s welfare manager and resident knight in shining armour, welcomes me into his office. It is crammed full of donations he has been collecting – bikes, car seats, clothes and toys – to give out to needy students.
When his mother-in-law died six months ago, he brought the “full house” in and “gave it to all the refugees”.
“I know cooking is important in their culture, so I brought slow ovens.”
He always carries spare change in his pocket to hand out to needy students, although Henkey emphasises that “we’ve told him not to”.
“I know, I’m sorry, boss,” Bage responds.
He points to a new student walking past who lives with her nana, along with five siblings.
“None of them have been to school and they don’t have any standards. I fed them all last week – they were lovely then. But now they’re kicking off. It’s trauma that’s causing it.”
The college works with local civil engineering firm Seymour on training up out-of-work adults (including many former prisoners) in groundworks skills, and Bage receives a phone call about a young man who had found himself homeless following a domestic incident. He is hungry and crying, and Bage announces that he will “go over there and give him all the information he needs” to find accommodation.
Another engineering course the college offers helps unemployed students to get jobs in the rail sector within just six weeks.
The students are naturally required to be clean of drugs and alcohol, which Hankey says means the first day on that course is “always quite entertaining” as “people turn up with Ribena bottles. We know what they’re trying to do”.
Bage believes that student behaviour has got worse as council support has fallen away.
“We’re not social workers, but the skills our team has are second to none. We’ve had to upskill ourselves, just to deal with the young people that come through those doors.”
But he is incredibly proud to work for the college, which is “amazing in its facilities and staff”. “We don’t want pity. However, how do we keep pulling people out the river? How do we cope?”
Darren Hankey with a 1940s MG car restored by former students
Councils have attacked the inflexible funding rules of the prime minister’s “short-termist” flagship maths programme after new figures revealed that a third of the money allocated in its first year went unspent.
Multiply, Rishi Sunak’s adult maths education programme, committed to provide £559 million across three financial years to the end of 2024-25 from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
The scheme offers free courses for adults who did not achieve a grade C or above in GCSE maths or an equivalent level 2 qualification.
But, in its first year of delivery, £30.3 million of the £81 million awarded was clawed back by the Department for Education and returned to the Treasury, according to data obtained by local government expert Jack Shaw through a Freedom of Information request.
Councils that returned the largest proportion of their funding told FE Week that this was down to the terms and conditions of the funding: money was handed out over halfway through the 2022-23 financial year and councils were not allowed to roll over any that was unused.
“It’s clearly problematic,” Shaw told FE Week. “Multiply is described as part of the Shared Prosperity Fund, but the non-Multiply element of the SPF was allowed to be rolled over, and this wasn’t.
“The government was meant to allocate this for the financial year of 2022-23, but authorities received it well into the financial year – leaving them somewhere in the region of six months to plan, stand up, deliver and wind down programmes.”
He said the scheme was not unique in having a large amount of underspending in the first year, adding that this reflects a “systemic challenge that Whitehall is too short-termist and doesn’t have an adequate appreciation of what implementation involves”.
Sunak, who launched the Multiply scheme when he was chancellor, used his speech at this week’s Conservative party conference to criticise the political system being heavily focused on “short-term advantage, not long-term success”.
Sue Pember, director for policy and external relations at adult education provider network Holex, said it was “disheartening” to hear about local and combined authorities returning funds but insisted the scheme had been “embraced as a valuable source of funding for numeracy, igniting innovation and reaching thousands of learners”.
She added that over 45,000 people participated in the scheme in its introductory year, which is a “remarkable achievement, especially considering the programme’s rapid launch without development funding or established infrastructures”.
DfE approval delayed Multiply roll-out
Councils complained that the roll-out of the scheme was delayed as their investment plans could not be implemented without approval from the DfE.
A Greater Manchester Combined Authority spokesperson said the department only approved their investment plan in the second half of 2022, “meaning that recruitment, procurement and delivery of the programme was not finalised and implemented until the fourth quarter of the financial year”.
In Greater Manchester, 331 residents were recruited onto the scheme. The combined authority received £4.3 million for the first year and returned £3 million (69 per cent) of it to the Treasury.
Hampshire Country Council said waiting for the DfE to approve its plan, plus procurement time, meant it did not start delivery until January 2023.
A spokesperson said the county council supported 1,607 individuals on Multiply from January to March 2023, of which 998 were parents of children in Hampshire schools.
“We have a number of target groups on Multiply, including local businesses, parents, refugees and those with a lived experience of the criminal justice system,” the spokesperson said, adding that it has supported 1,225 people so far in year two, for which it has received £2 million in funding.
Oxfordshire County Council handed back the largest proportion of its year-one funding, returning £717,555 (92 per cent) of the £778,200 allocated. Its first year consisted of “research and planning” so the money was not required, a spokesperson told FE Week.
Warwickshire Country Council gave back £503,650 (66 per cent) of its £768,922 allocation. A council spokesperson said the funding was used to enrol 400 learners.
Pember said: “Challenges arose from not funding through established adult education budget routes, necessitating some councils and combined authorities having to instigate tender processes. This slowed down the process of student recruitment.”
Rishi Sunak’s pledge to abolish T Levels in the week that his government chose to celebrate the flagship qualification has left colleges “demoralised”.
The prime minister announced during his Conservative party conference speech that he would create a “new single qualification for our school leavers” by replacing A-levels and T Levels with the Advanced British Standard.
The reform comes only three years after T Levels were launched with over £1 billion investment and during “T Levels Week” – created and led by the Department for Education to applaud the “gold-standard” qualifications.
Under the plan, A-levels and T Levels would be merged into the new Advanced British Standard, which would see 16 to 19-year-olds “typically” study five subjects including “some form” of English and maths.
Sunak said technical education is “not given the respect it deserves” but he is “changing all of that, pulling one of the biggest levers we have to change the direction of our country” with the creation of the Advanced British Standard.
The policy appears to be a fleshing out of the “British baccalaureate” proposed by Sunak in his first leadership run last year.
The government has said it will launch a consultation next month, with a proposed white paper next year.
But the reforms are dependent on the Conservatives winning the next election and, if implemented, would take 10 years to deliver in full.
This week’s announcement comes despite ministers’ plans to scrap other level 3 vocational qualifications, such as BTECs, and replace them with T Levels.
Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association that leads the Protect Student Choice Campaign, said it was “surprising” that the government “appears to have brought the T Level journey to an end at such an early stage and after making such an eye-watering financial investment in the project”.
He added: “As the chaos caused by the plan to scrap most BTECs is now being followed by a plan to scrap A-levels and T Levels (until now described by the government as ‘gold standard’ qualifications), there could be turbulent times ahead for the sixth-form sector.”
Successive DfE ministers have beaten the drum for T Levels in the face of much opposition since they were born out of the Lord Sainsbury review of technical education in 2015.
They got off the ground in 2020 despite a plea from then DfE permanent secretary Jonathan Slater to delay the roll-out. The qualifications, designed to be the technical equivalent of A-levels, have since suffered from annual recruitment challenges for colleges as the DfE struggles to raise awareness among students, parents, employers and school staff.
The announcement of the Conservatives’ intention now to scrap T Levels, which will not be fully rolled out until 2025, will make recruitment for colleges even harder, according to FE marketing expert Ben Verinder.
One college leader sarcastically tweeted: “Good job colleges up and down the country haven’t been grafting their spuds off to get T Levels up and running then…”
Another said: “Some vocational areas have not even got T Levels off the ground! All that time, energy and money put in to their development, the promotion of T Levels by college staff from lecturers to marketing!”
IfATE pleads for T Levels delivery in the intervening years
Jennifer Coupland, chief executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, which is responsible for procurement and management of T Levels, urged colleges and awarding bodies to continue “high-quality” delivery in the intervening years until the Advanced British Standard is launched.
She said: “IfATE has worked tirelessly to improve the quality of technical education, applying employer-set standards to T Levels and helping grow the programme. It is great to hear that employers’ occupational standards will underpin the technical options within the ABS and that the technical route to achieving ABS will build on the T Level design.
“As this is a long-term reform programme, we must ensure that students have access to high-quality T Levels in the intervening years.”
Coupland added: “We will continue to work closely with employers, education providers, awarding bodies and the DfE to grow and extend the T Level offer – including launching our procurement for the next generation of T Levels very shortly.”
Jennifer Coupland
Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research, said Sunak’s plan to “end the denigration of technical education, while welcome in principle, is concerning, as T Levels were only launched as the new ‘flagship’ alternative to A-levels three years ago”.
He added: “Time is needed to allow these new qualifications to bed in and be evaluated in terms of their fitness for purpose.
“This announcement, during T Levels Week, must be demoralising not only for providers but for the young people who have already completed or are completing their T Levels.”
Worth added: “With the looming defunding of BTECs and other applied generals from 2024 onwards, this hardly presents a period of stability for post-16 education over the next 10 years.”
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said he was delighted with Sunak’s plan.
“I am delighted to see technical education and colleges form a focal point of Rishi Sunak’s plans for a more prosperous future,” he said.
“The announcement on the Advanced British Standard could have a significant impact on colleges, and I am particularly pleased that our push for young people to have more teaching time has been heeded.”
University and College Union general secretary Jo Grady took a different view.
“The prime minister’s announcement of reforms to post-16 education are a further example of a government out of touch that is tinkering around the edges rather than offering genuine support to students or staff,” she said.
“Ministers should be listening to teachers, not pulling ideas out of the hat as a desperate way to shore up support for a failing government.”
More security guards could have their work licences revoked after a new undercover investigation found fraudulent training.
A BBC exposé this week revealed how two London-based training providers offered shortened courses for a higher fee, forged timesheets and, at one, taught ways to “kill and be killed”.
The awarding organisations for the training providers have now suspended their recognition while a full investigation is carried out with qualifications regulator Ofqual and the Security Industry Authority.
The SIA, which holds the power to revoke licences from qualified security guards, said parts of the undercover footage recorded by the BBC indicate criminality and it has been passed to the Metropolitan Police.
The news comes eight years after a BBC investigation revealed how another London-based training provider was fraudulently handing out security guard qualifications, with staff offering to sit exams for learners. It led to more than 100 security guard licences being revoked.
The awarding bodies involved in the latest investigation, which have the power to revoke qualifications awarded but not licences, defended their quality assurance processes for providers that they approve. These include frequent, unannounced inspection visits.
‘We must stamp out the minority of unscrupulous providers’
The BBC approached 12 companies offering level 2 SIA door supervisor courses for between £200 and £300. Its report said four offered shortened courses ranging from a day and a half to three days. The course has a mandatory length of six days.
Two training providers were named in the investigation: Ilford-based Caetop College and Steps Institution, which is based in east London.
An undercover reporter attending Steps Institution was told he could begin his training on day five of the six-day course if he paid an extra £310 – missing compulsory modules in first aid, conflict management and door supervision.
The provider allegedly told him to forge timesheets for the full course. He also joined a “physical intervention” session, which was not a mandatory part of the course, where a trainer was recorded teaching attendees ways to “kill and be killed”, including by using “one punch”.
Awarding body BIIAB Qualifications, which is part of the Skills and Education Group, has suspended Steps Institution from using its qualifications “pending investigation”. Steps Institution has registered 49 learners with the awarding body.
Scott Forbes, chief operating officer for development and delivery at the Skills and Education Group, said it was “important that we strengthen the collaboration between awarding organisations and share greater intelligence in order to stamp out the minority of unscrupulous providers”.
Laser Awards, another awarding body that has Steps Institution as an approved provider, said it “takes all allegations of malpractice and maladministration seriously” and is carrying out a “full investigation”.
A spokesperson added: “Through ongoing quality assurance activity, we carry out regular unannounced inspection visits and scheduled quality visits to all centres delivering our qualifications in this sector and we carry out investigations where concerns are raised, which lead to the withdrawal of our approval to deliver qualifications where we are not satisfied that the training centre and/or individual trainer is upholding the standards we require.”
Steps Institution declined to comment.
At Caetop College, the undercover reporter was only offered a three-day training course rather than the full six days. He was allegedly coached on a test that he should have completed after a day of first-aid training, before being told his “first aid is finished now”.
On the third day, the BBC said the reporter sat a final exam without questions. Instead, the trainees were given answer sheets and told what option to circle. They were also told to vary their answers sometimes so that their test papers were not identical.
Awarding body Pearson has suspended Caetop College from using its certificates and signing up new students while it is under investigation.
A spokesperson for Pearson said it takes all allegations of malpractice “extremely seriously” and sanctions could include “debarring individuals from involvement in the delivery of our qualifications and withdrawing approval for a training provider to deliver Pearson qualifications”.
Caetop College claimed it does not offer any security guard courses when approached for comment by FE Week. The firm’s website was taken down at the time of going to press.
The SIA said: “Where qualifications that have been awarded by the awarding organisations are shown to be unsound and are withdrawn, it will result in the suspension of a licence.”
Asked by FE Week what action had been taken to root out fraud in security guard training over the past eight years, the SIA said it conducts its own unannounced visits to training providers – 200 of them since 2022. This has led to three providers being shut down.
A spokesperson added that, in the last financial year, over 170,000 qualifications were awarded. Of those, 70 cases concerning training were raised, 44 were against training companies and 26 were regarding allegations of individual malpractice.
Ofqual said it introduced additional controls following the 2015 exposé that order awarding organisations to suspend or terminate their relationships with providers accused of, or found to be committing, malpractice.
The regulator has also “improved the way it gathers and shares information about suspected fraud or malpractice across the sector”.
Government lawyers have dismissed claims made by a major group of training providers that the Department for Education acted unlawfully in the recent national adult education budget tender.
Learning Curve Group and its seven subsidiary training companies filed a lawsuit against the DfE in August following its unsuccessful bids for a new national AEB contract.
They claimed that the department breached its duties under procurement regulations in its evaluation of their bid, specifically in relation to the group’s responses to tender questions about future learner numbers (question 1B1).
Learning Curve Group claimed it was “deprived of a real chance of winning a contract” and the DfE’s Education and Skills Funding Agency, which ran the procurement, provided “brief” and “vague” reasons for low scores in the tender.
The providers demanded a re-run of the procurement, as well as damages.
Defence lawyers acting for the DfE denied Learning Curve’s allegations that it had not provided appropriate feedback in its response to the tender, claiming that its response complied with the relevant regulations.
The case rests on a row over Learning Curve’s Q1B1 submissions – a template for bidders’ mobilisation and delivery plan which the DfE said should have included forecasts for training courses and learner numbers. A strict two-page limit was in place on the template, and bidders needed to score of at least 75 (good) to be considered.
Learning Curve’s providers did not list the number of forecasted learners for each course, so they received a score of 50 for Q1B1, the DfE said.
Learning Curve claimed its response satisfied the criteria for a higher score and the DfE’s response to its tender did not justify the score of 50.
Defence documents filed by the DfE this week and seen by FE Week confirmed that “…there is a gap in the response which means an element of the question has not been addressed at all. The response fails to provide the forecast of the number of learners per course which is an entire deliverable asked for in the question and on the template to be used for responses.”
This paragraph was taken from Learning Curve’s tender award letters from the department.
The DfE denied that it was under any obligation to clarify its justification for Learning Curve’s score any further than stated in the paragraph above, countering Learning Curve’s claim that it was entitled to further clarification.
Later in the defence, DfE lawyers stated that, if the providers had not “chosen to submit materially similar responses (on occasion identical)” to Q1B1, “there would have been sufficient space to address the number of learners per course”.
They point to “other bidders” that “were able to provide all the information requested by the question within two pages and receive a score of ‘very good’”.
Learning Curve’s claim that a “reasonably well-informed and normally diligent tenderer” would evaluate Q1B1 alongside a separate “volumes template”, which also required information about forecasted learner numbers, was also denied.
The DfE’s defence explained that the AEB tender guidance issued by the ESFA “expressly required” bidders to provide learner numbers in both the Q1B1 and the volumes templates. They also claimed that Learning Curve’s volumes template only recorded forecasted learners by sector subject area, not by course as required.
Learning Curve’s claim that each of their Q1B1 submissions “satisfied the scoring criterion for the award of a score of at least 75” and “the reasons stated in the award letter do not provide any lawful justification for the award of a lower score” was written off by DfE lawyers. This part of the claim, they said, was “embarrassing for want of particulars”.
National AEB contracts were finally awarded in late August after Learning Curve Group agreed to remove an injunction that prevented the ESFA from entering in to contracts with winning providers while there was a live legal challenge.
But delays to the procurement outcomes, and the awarding of two further contracts after 54 winning bidders were announced, drew fierce criticism from training leaders.
Learning Curve Group declined to comment. The case continues.
Yesterday’s announcement regarding the Advanced British Standard presented a bold vision for the future of post-16 education.
In light of the ever-shifting political landscape, it is clear that these proposals may undergo modifications or even bear a different name when transformed into official policy. Therefore uncertainty remains, notwithstanding potential consultations and the publication of a white paper.
Nonetheless, these proposals challenge the existing status quo in post-16 education and open the door to substantial discussions on reforming the educational landscape for this age group.
Over the past five years, there has been a noticeable policy shift towards emphasising technical education reform including the T Level consultation in 2018 and the skills for jobs white paper in 2021.
However, these initiatives still retained the concept of separate paths for technical and academic education.
The current announcement seeks to eliminate these distinctions by merging both streams under the umbrella of the Advanced British Standard, allowing students to blend technical and academic routes. From the perspective of further education colleges, this reimagining is a welcome development, and it’s heartening to see the sector integrated into these proposals.
Nevertheless, the success of these proposals will hinge on their funding and practicality.
The proposal to increase students’ study time to align with international standards (1,475 hours over two years) comes with a substantial cost.
For further education colleges, this means a 315-hour increase in the standard full-time curriculum, far surpassing the 195 hours mentioned in yesterday’s policy document.
This adjustment would require the equivalent of at least 25 new teachers per college for a medium-sized general further education college with 2,500 full-time 16-18-year-old students. The recruitment challenge alone poses a significant hurdle.
The proposed £30,000 tax-free incentive over five years to address new teacher attrition is indeed a positive step and will aid in retaining newer staff.
However, retaining experienced staff remains just as crucial for colleges and is not addressed by this incentive. A broader increase in the base funding rates is the only viable long-term solution to this issue, enabling colleges to offer competitive salaries that encourage the long-term retention of staff.
The recommendation to mandate the continuation of maths and English education until age 18 is also complex.
While there is no doubt about the value of these subjects to learners and their future career prospects, it must be acknowledged that there is already a high demand for maths teachers. This could pose a significant challenge for colleges that are already coping with a surge in students requiring these subjects post-pandemic and a shortage of teachers.
Furthermore, increasing teaching time by 15-20 per cent necessitates equivalent space.
Current avenues for capital investment in colleges are insufficient to bring about the necessary changes, particularly given re-classification limiting alternative options. Addressing this investment gap is imperative; otherwise, many of these efforts will be stymied by a simple lack of physical capacity.
Putting aside these funding challenges momentarily, these proposals demonstrate a readiness to reshape the educational landscape.
They offer any incoming government the opportunity to boldly address the country’s skills needs through more comprehensive reform, with further education colleges at its core, than might have been possible previously.
As a sector, we should cautiously embrace this potential.
For the past decade I have run the Media Learning Company at City College Norwich, an educational programme which emulates setting up and running a media production company. Post-level three students join us for an academic year and gain real-life experience across the media sector.
Riding high from the ‘anything’s possible’ spirit of London Olympics and Paralympics, entrepreneurial learning was an educational buzz-term in 2012. Of the many schemes and courses that launched into the further education sector at that time, ours has been an ongoing success.
Local production company, Eye Film had been looking at ways to give young people proper production training. They had started conversations with the college and I was lucky enough to land the job of taking it forward. The job description was rather open and I soon realised that there was no route map for what the Media Learning Company was to be.
I was a little terrified; the students were due to start just a couple of days after me. But very soon I embraced the freedom to try radical new approaches to learning. Coming from a traditional university teaching background, this felt exhilarating.
We began by developing a model in which students were in five days per week, 9 to 5, plus additional production hours, creating real media content for real organisations while fulfilling the requirements of their qualifications. I watched a lot of Ted talks and tried out all sorts of structures and ideas based on research and practitioners who I found inspiring. Some worked, lots did not.
With support from the college and mentorship from Eye Film, we outlived the educational trend from which we were born and have since solidified our position as a course with very high educational and employment impact. The Media Learning Company offers real experiences of genuine value.
Having worked with hundreds of organisations big and small, there are two constants across every brief we engage in: high pedagogic value, and ethical grounding. Each project has to provide excellent learning opportunities – the chance to develop new skills such as scriptwriting, casting or using new equipment or techniques, and Media Learning Company is not here to mop-up projects companies don’t want to pay a professional to do. Collaborations have to be meaningful and of value to the students up to and beyond completion.
Their impressive work ranges from blockbuster movies to household TV programmes
Students start the year by establishing their own production company. They decide their company values, name, logo, promotional film and website design. This not only shows them the basics of setting up their own businesses but serves a deeper purpose of creating a collective identity they can draw on under pressure.
Over the years, students have pitched and produced cross-media campaigns about weighty subjects such as county lines and domestic abuse. They have run live events, fashion shows, scripted dramas, cast, crewed, animated, designed and were entrusted with telling real people’s stories from our own communities within documentaries.
Though the educational model was the key to our unique learning environment, the qualification remained a rigorous backbone. We initially delivered a Foundation Diploma, but have recently moved to the UAL Level 4 Professional Diploma in Technical & Production for the Creative Industries.
The sector has changed immeasurably over the past decade with the rise of online content creators, streaming platforms and now AI. Yet our graduates are finding ways to adapt and excel in this quickly changing landscape. They have gone on to set up their own award-winning businesses, worked in the production of TV, film, radio, animation, live events, marketing and video as well as going to university. Their impressive work ranges from blockbuster movies like Disney’s The Little Mermaid to household TV programmes like Grand Designs and Love Island.
The key to this resilience rests entirely on the real-life nature of the course. Meeting clients, working and reworking projects until they are signed off. Project by project, building endurance, skills and guts. Taking risks and surpassing what they thought themselves capable of, often without safety nets.
Even when things went wrong, which of course they do, learning happens. They have stepped up and taken the leap, and now there are only more possibilities before them.
