Latest news from FE Week

ESOL is evolving, policy and funding must evolve with it

When I started teaching in FE and adult education in the late 1980s, ESOL was often a quiet and improvised part of the system. Classes took place in community centres, church halls and borrowed rooms, supported by skilled teachers working with too little recognition and too few resources. Yet what happened in those rooms was unmistakable: people gained not just grammar, but confidence, independence and a stronger place in the world.

That truth has not changed. What has changed is almost everything around it. ESOL now sits much closer to national debates about immigration, employment, integration and public services. The stakes are higher, the learners’ needs are broader, and the pressure on providers is more acute. The question is no longer whether ESOL matters. It is whether the system has kept pace with what ESOL has become.

Around one million people in England and Wales cannot speak English well or at all, according to the 2021 Census. Yet in 2023-24, only around 170,000 people enrolled on an ESOL course and only a proportion of them were regulated award based qualifications. This is not a small technical gap. It is the distance between what policy increasingly expects of people and what publicly funded provision is able to help them achieve.

That gap has been building for years. ESOL investment has fallen from £247 million in 2010-11 to £186 million in 2023-24 in real terms, a 25 per cent cut at a time of sustained demand. Providers are managing waiting lists, recruitment pressures and funding rules that can push learners towards functional skills English qualifications that were never designed for people learning English as an additional language. Meanwhile, the national curriculum which dates back to 2001, was built for a different era. Its survival-focused model gave the sector important structure, but it no longer fully reflects the lives many learners are living now.

Recent immigration policy has also moved towards higher English language expectations which include demands on work, family life and settlement. The aim is understandable. Most people in the sector would agree that English helps people integrate, work and contribute. But raising expectations without strengthening provision is not a strategy – it’s a contradiction. If English proficiency is treated as a condition of participation then language learning must be treated as essential infrastructure, not an optional add-on.

This is where ESOL is evolving most clearly. For too long, it has been described as if it were mainly about survival English: making an appointment, asking for directions or filling in a form. Those things still matter, but modern ESOL has to reach further because learners’ lives reach further. People need English for work, health, housing, digital services, parenting, further study and community participation. They need to navigate systems that are increasingly online. Above all, they need the confidence to belong, not just the vocabulary to cope.

A contemporary ESOL curriculum should therefore connect English to the real situations learners face in their homes, workplaces and communities. That means building language through meaningful contexts: problem solving, collaboration, digital confidence, employability and civic participation. Practitioners such as Sam Pepper, an external quality assurer at Ascentis and a NATECLA trainer, have argued that approaches such as Fusion Skills, human centric skills all people need to thrive and connect with others in a diverse society, which can help ESOL move beyond a narrow survival model. This would give learners the language, confidence and adaptability they need for life beyond the classroom. It also means recognising learners as adults with experience, skills and ambitions, not simply as people with a language deficit.

Teachers and providers are already moving in this direction. They are designing learning that reflects changing communities, changing workplaces and changing technology. The sector cannot modernise on goodwill alone. Technology can help where it gives learners safe opportunities to practise, especially outside the classroom, but it remains a complement to skilled teaching rather than a replacement for it. What learners need most is high-quality provision, accessible routes through the levels, and enough funded places to meet demand.

The learners in ESOL classrooms are not a policy problem. Many are already working, raising families and caring for others. Many more could contribute further with the right support. If we want stronger communities and a stronger workforce, we need to fund the language learning that makes participation possible.

ESOL is evolving alongside our society. Policy and funding must evolve with it.

Burnham – parity of esteem starts with pay, not pathways

“From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap.”

This is what Andy Burnham said this week while unveiling new technical pathways from Year 10, pairing core academic subjects with skills training linked to local jobs.

I’m behind the announcement in principle but I wonder whether the value placed on technical education is about the education itself, rather than the career waiting at the end of it. Change the pay, the security and the way people talk about a job once someone qualifies, and doesn’t the status of the qualification that got them there move with it?

When we look beyond the headlines, the comparison is not simply between technical and academic education. Even the pledge itself reaches for the hard hat as its defining image – a symbol of one particular type of technical manual work. It is not, for example, the architect who designed the building, despite their work being every bit as technical. Our instinctive image of “technical” remains the person on the frontline.

Britain already knows how to reward technical skill highly. Accountants, software developers and structural engineers carry a badge of prestige, no-one questions their credentials as skilled professionals. A 2024 UK study by Newlands and Lutz, which surveyed prestige and social value across 576 occupations, found that electricians and plumbers are rated as more socially valuable than accountants, yet both still land lower on prestige. The work itself isn’t rated as less useful; in fact, the study consistently rates it as more useful. It’s rated as less prestigious, with a gap opening up once the work moves from a desk to a toolbox.

If we go back to 2020 and 2021: care workers were one of the occupations treated as holding the country together, clapped on doorsteps for a broader base of frontline job holders than the first pan-banging for NHS workers. None of it survived contact with a normal year, with median hourly pay for independent sector care workers still sitting barely above the National Living Wage, with pay progression so thin that five years’ experience is worth only a few pence an hour. The status flickered on for a moment because the country needed the labour and could see it clearly. It flickered off again once the visibility passed. The skills required to do that job have not changed in between.

If the ambition is to close a parity gap, isn’t the more interesting version of the argument asking why a structural engineer and an experienced care worker, both doing technical, skilled, often physically demanding work, end up in such different places on pay, security and public regard? That’s not a question about the education system in isolation but one of debating which kinds of hands-on work Britain has decided, over a long time are worth paying for.

With strategic authorities being asked to turn a national pledge into local pathways and employer partnerships, this challenge lands with them. When they decide which technical routes to champion and which employers to bring to the table, are they choosing the sectors where status is already recoverable, such as construction and engineering, where shortages give workers leverage, or the sectors where the logic actually needs to be tested in care, early years, hospitality, where the shortage is just as real but the leverage never seems to follow?

Nobody should expect a devolved skills strategy to undo a class-coded hierarchy that’s taken decades to settle. It will fail if we once again place the solutions to broader societal challenges on the shoulders of teachers.

My home in the Northeast of England is a good a test case. It’s a region built on technical work that used to carry real weight because it was scarce, dangerous and visible: coal, shipbuilding, steel.

The fair question is whether sectors like social care in the region will be backed with the same scale of investment and the same public visibility as money given to Nissan, as the shortage there is at least as pressing. If a region shaped by the memory of skilled manual work that was properly valued finds it easier to back the sectors that already carry status than the ones that don’t, that would say a great deal about how hard this pattern is to shift.

None of this is a reason to hold back from the policy itself. It’s one worth getting behind. The slow burn of the Manchester Baccalaureate may not be a mark against the national version. However, it’s a useful reminder of the timeframe this runs on, and a reason to be patient with today’s announcement.

But patience only helps if education is where the problem sits, and it isn’t entirely. No curriculum, industry placement or work experience, however well-designed closes a gap that was never about training in the first place.

Mayors to design technical education routes for 14-year-olds

Mayors and local leaders will be handed a role in shaping education for 14- to 16-year-olds under plans for new technical pathways from September 2028.

Prime minister Andy Burnham will announce tomorrow that pupils will be able to combine core academic subjects with technical education, employer projects and workplace experience from year 10.

Number 10 said the pathways would be shaped by strategic authorities, councils, schools, colleges and employers around the industries and jobs available in their areas.

But the announcement included no new funding and leaves unanswered questions about which qualifications pupils will take, whether colleges will teach them directly and how school accountability measures will change.

The Department for Education will instead examine how its existing budgets can be “prioritised” to support the reforms.

Every figure mentioned in the announcement had been announced previously. Downing Street cited £570 million for additional college places, the £4.7 billion schools uplift by 2028-29 agreed at the 2025 spending review and £3.7 billion for SEND places in mainstream settings.

Ministers said the pathways would build on local initiatives including the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, or MBacc, introduced while Burnham was mayor of the region.

Pupils would continue to study English, maths and science while accessing technical training, practical projects set by businesses, visits to employers and work experience.

Local pathways could focus on sectors including advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, clean energy, life sciences, construction, health and care or the creative industries.

Burnham said the reforms would put technical and academic education on an equal footing.

“For too long in this country, students have been told that you must take the academic path to do well and to be respected,” he said.

“From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap.”

Downing Street said the changes formed part of a wider devolution programme and would give local leaders “greater influence” over education for 14- to 16-year-olds.

Strategic authorities will be expected to bring together schools, colleges and employers, identify local priorities and coordinate workplace opportunities.

Undefined powers

However, the announcement does not explain what formal powers mayors will receive, how the system will operate in areas without a strategic authority or whether every part of England will introduce the pathways at the same time.

Work with local leaders and education providers will begin ahead of an “ambition” to start rolling out the routes in September 2028.

No detail has yet been published about which existing or new qualifications will form part of the pathways.

Nor has it been confirmed whether pupils will remain enrolled exclusively at schools or whether colleges will be able to enrol or teach greater numbers of 14- to 16-year-olds.

School performance measures and Ofsted inspections will be changed to recognise technical education and how well schools prepare pupils for employment.

That would amount to a second change to inspection inside a year. Ofsted’s report card framework only took effect in November 2025. The announcement referred only to school inspection and said nothing about the further education and skills framework.

Ministers have also not revealed whether the progress 8 or attainment 8 measures will be changed as part of the reforms.

Schools will be given stronger incentives to offer technical pathways rather than treat vocational education as an “optional add-on”, according to the release.

What gets the chop?

Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), backed the ambition but warned that the reforms would require investment, achievable timescales and a national framework.

“Right now there is little detail about what this will look like in practice,” he said.

Di’Iasio said parity between academic, technical and vocational routes must be reflected in performance measures and repeated ASCL’s call for progress 8 and Ofsted’s new inspection framework to be reconsidered.

He also criticised the timing of the announcement during the summer holidays and questioned what schools and colleges would be expected to do less of if they were required to prioritise the new pathways.

Education secretary Lucy Powell said the plans marked the start of a “shared effort” to connect young people with jobs and careers in their local areas.

“By offering high-quality technical and vocational education alongside academic achievement, we’ll give more young people the chance to leave education with the skills, confidence and opportunities they need to thrive,” she said.

Strategic authorities, schools, colleges and employers will be expected to make the new routes accessible to young people with SEND. No funding was attached to that expectation beyond the £3.7 billion already committed to creating around 60,000 specialist places in mainstream schools.

The reforms follow an interim report by Alan Milburn, which warned that more than one million 16- to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training.

Milburn welcomed the announcement but said a “whole system reset” was also needed across health, welfare and labour-market policy.

His report was critical of schools and colleges being held to account on enrolments and attainment, rather than sustained outcomes.

Employers would be expected to offer mentoring, workplace visits, practical projects and work experience, but no minimum requirements or entitlement for every pupil were set out.

Number 10 did not respond before publication to questions from FE Week about funding, qualifications, college involvement, accountability measures and the rollout timetable.

There’s a wall keeping jobless teenagers and employers apart

The Times has put a number on what lots of us have long sensed. A 16-year-old on the under-18 minimum wage, working the legal term-time maximum of 12 hours a week, takes home about £94. A teenager signed off can receive £100 a week more.

You can argue about the causes, but not the incentive. Alan Milburn’s interim report spells it out: for a young person with a health condition, inactivity can mean more money, less hassle and less risk than work. It persists because the welfare system treats the individual and the employer as two separate worlds.

Those worlds barely touch: by design, an employer rarely knows whether a young recruit is on universal credit, and a jobcentre only becomes involved once a claim is made. The young person weighs tapers, conditionality and the fear of losing a health payment for a few hours’ work; the employer sees none of it. So the system nudges a teenager towards a claim while firms that might have offered a first job sit on the other side of a wall.

A wall the government keeps building

The youth guarantee, ministers’ flagship response, risks making that wall higher: it promises 18 to 21-year-olds a paid placement only after 18 months on universal credit – eighteen months before an employer even appears.

It has taxed hiring directly too: employer national insurance rose to 15 per cent and the threshold fell from £9,100 to £5,000, hitting low-paid jobs hardest. The Bank of England found 44 per cent of firms cut jobs over that rise, against 29 per cent citing the minimum wage. The cost of taking a chance on an inexperienced young person keeps climbing, and the Employment Rights Act has added to the chill.

It’s no surprise the welfare bill keeps growing. The government’s 2025 attempt at modest reform, sold as saving billions a year, was watered down by a Labour backbench rebellion. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says what became law delivers essentially no savings over the next four years, and costs money in its first two. Andy Burnham, who became prime minister a week ago, inherits not just a welfare bill out of control, but the backbenchers who forced that retreat.

Tinkering won’t turn the dial

Against this, the policy response has felt like tinkering: the levy rebranded as “growth and skills”, a few shorter apprenticeships (so-called “units”), Skills England stood up but weaker than its predecessor, new V Levels mooted without detail. None of it is turning the dial on a NEET count nearing one million and, on Milburn’s diagnosis, heading for 1.25 million within five years – a shocking one in six young people. His most damning finding: in 2024-25, for every £1 spent on employment support for young people, around £25 went on welfare.

Ministers do not lack advice. Sir Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working review said it last November: on health and work, employers should be “on the pitch”. Milburn’s final report, due this autumn, must say the same about the young, and be heard.

We need to think bigger, not another quango. We already have the Careers and Enterprise Company, the National Careers Service, UCAS and Jobcentre Plus – hundreds of millions of public money a year, with ample room to join up, simplify and expect more.

Instead, government should reverse the jobs tax with an employer national insurance cut targeted at entry-level jobs, and give employers a reason to invest beyond the levy – currently a ceiling, not a floor – with a training tax credit modelled on R&D relief.

At the same time, stop taxing the institutions doing most for NEETs: colleges, unlike schools and academies, cannot reclaim VAT, a quirk that costs them more than £200 million a year, despite teaching more disadvantaged 16 to 18-year-olds than anyone else.

None of it works unless the two worlds connect earlier. Colleges and training providers, trusted by both sides, are the obvious connector: fund them to stay alongside a young person and their employer through the first year of work, when dropout risk peaks.

Government needs employers onside and spending more on training. So far, everything it has done pushes the other way – but Andy Burnham has rightly made tackling the NEETs crisis his priority. Let’s hope his speech tomorrow resets the government’s approach to employers.

Mystery as DfE misses summer accounts deadline

Problems unearthed by an audit have delayed publication of the Department for Education’s annual report and accounts until October.

Major government departments are expected to lay their financial reports before the House of Commons adjourns for summer recess each year. But the DfE missed the July 16 deadline.

It means the DfE is one of four government departments whose annual report and accounts (ARA) will be certified by the National Audit Office after Parliament returns on September 1.

“The NAO is continuing to work with the Department for Education to address matters identified during the course of our audit,” a NAO spokesperson said.

“The work required means that the department was unable to publish its annual report and accounts before Parliament’s summer recess. We currently expect to complete our audit in October.”

The NAO did not give details of the matters identified.

Government departments are not legally bound to publish their ARA before the summer break.

Under the government resources and accounts act 2000, departments are legally-bound to send their annual report and accounts to the NAO’s comptroller and auditor general Gareth Davies no later than November 30 after the relevant financial year.

The NAO examines and certifies the accounts, issues a report and passes both on to the Treasury by January 15.

The Treasury then lays accounts before the House of Commons no later than January 31 the following year.

However, both the Treasury and the NAO had set an earlier target for all 17 major government departments to publish their 2025-26 accounts before the summer break.

The three other departments that missed the July 16 deadline are the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Ministry of Justice.

According to an NAO report from January, nearly two thirds of annual reports were published before the Parliamentary recess in 2024-25, down from a high of 76 per cent in 2018-19.

The NAO said delays in recent years were caused by machinery of government changes, cyber-attacks, local audit backlogs and issues identified by audits that “could not be resolved quickly”.

The DfE has met the July recess deadline for the last three years but missed the target during the Covid-19 years.

The NAO found that the pandemic years had a “detrimental impact” on the timing of audited accounts provided to Parliament. Only 55 per cent of accounts were published on time in 2020-21.

The DfE also previously missed the statutory deadline in 2014-15, when it applied a statutory instrument to extend the deadline for laying its accounts by three months.

It came after the NAO issued an adverse opinion on DfE’s group financial statements, which considered the level of error and uncertainty in the statements to be “material and pervasive”.

The DfE requires further education colleges to publish their own audited accounts by January 31 each year “to maximise transparency and support accountability.”

FE leaders drop their requests into Burnham’s in-tray

When Andy Burnham became the seventh prime minister in a decade on Monday, he promised a 10-year plan to fix an unstable political system. But where should his focus lie for further education and skills?

In his first speeches as Labour leader and PM-in-waiting, Burnham committed to an “education system based on parity between academic and technical” routes and pledged to end what he called a “school system configured entirely around the university route”.

His cabinet includes Lucy Powell as education secretary, who has experience in education policy, and John Healey as chancellor, a former adult skills minister under Tony Blair. Pat McFadden remains as work and pensions secretary and Jacqui Smith keeps her skills minister post.

FE Week spoke to sector leaders and independent experts about what the first three months of a Burnham government should prioritise.

‘Growth cannot be ordered from the top down’

Devolution sits at the heart of Burnham’s political identity. In his speech bidding to be the next prime minister, he pledged the days of Whitehall “fighting the devolution of power into the regions and nations are over for good”.

As mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham clashed with the government over its control of skills funding, particularly over potential 16 to 19 devolution, and has not yet revealed whether his prime ministerial ambitions extend that far.

Smith previously ruled out handing mayors control over 16 to 19 budgets, but her reappointment under Burnham has reopened discussion amongst sector leaders.

James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association (SFCA), wants to see more autonomy and responsibility devolved to colleges themselves, rather than “another tier” of government.

“Transferring power in this way would have a bigger impact and would be easier to do given that much of England is not yet covered by a strategic authority,” Kewin explained.

Meanwhile, Imran Tahir, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the country “doesn’t have a good grasp” on devolution yet and could risk fragmentation.

Three-quarters of the £1.7 billion adult skills budget has already been devolved across 20 areas since 2019, 14 of which have mayoral strategic authorities. A further four to six areas are expected to gain powers next year.

Julian Gravatt, deputy chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said fully devolving the 16 to 19 budget would require “serious thought” since existing and planned strategic authorities only cover two-thirds of the country.

Ben Rowland, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, told FE Week apprenticeship funding needed to stay national “because employers are not regional”.

He argued the devolved role should be “to get people and businesses ready to participate” in a national scheme, with local areas free to top up funding bands to reflect local demands.

‘We will help more young people into work’

Burnham has named youth unemployment as one of the tests of his premiership.

Over one million young people are currently not in education, employment or training (NEET) and the new PM has pledged to help more young people into work by “changing the education system and giving them more support”.

Alan Milburn’s landmark interim report in May found evidence that qualifications do not guarantee a transition into jobs.

Four in ten NEET young people now hold qualifications at A Level standard or higher, while more than one in five hold a level 3 qualification, the report found.

Rowland said Burnham must tackle the “congestion” at the bottom of the labour market where graduates are looking for roles they are overqualified for.

“They’ve got a degree, they’ve got good parents who are both in nice jobs and they live in the southeast, but they’re still NEET and still need the system. If you are to be effective in helping the hardest to reach you have to help those who are easier to reach too,” he said.

Milburn’s final report in autumn promises to recommend a raft of system-wide reforms and will be key to how the new government delivers on Burnham’s pledges, experts say.

Education policy analyst Tom Richmond said the timing of the report, expected just before Labour’s party conference, would give ministers the “perfect opportunity” to detail how they are rethinking the education system.

Richmond’s main wish for the new education secretary is to commit to funding more 16 to 18 places in colleges.

“It was a bitter disappointment that the previous education secretary did not fund more places in 16 to 18 education when colleges were bursting at the seams. That is clearly a solvable problem for the new prime minister if he wants to engage,” he said.

‘A complete rethink of how we support the next generation’

Meanwhile, the Department for Education has already set out major level 3 qualification reform.

V Levels, which will replace BTECs and sit alongside A Levels and T Levels, are due to be taught from September 2027, but materials will not be made available until spring 2027, and assessment arrangements remain unconfirmed until later this year.

The SFCA has called for Burnham to review the “rushed” timeline as a priority.

Gravatt also questioned if the rollout would be affected by the Milburn review conclusions “if there are any”.

Kewin expressed concern that limiting V Levels to one size (equivalent to one A Level) would “disadvantage the most disadvantaged young people”.

James Kewin, Sixth Form Colleges Association deputy chief executive

“After controlling for prior attainment, diploma and extended diploma size vocational qualifications have the lowest dropout rate, so scrapping them is very hard to square with the government’s ambition to reduce the number of young people who are NEET,” he said.

Richmond added that Burnham was a fan of 14 to 19 diplomas and now has the power to “move the system in that direction if he wanted” following on from his mayoral work introducing the Manchester Baccalaureate (MBacc).

“The MBacc was designed to be a set of pathways more than a set of individual qualifications,” he said.

“If you set up some pathways that start at age 14 and help point students towards sectors in high demand, you could see that aligning with a push for something like a 14 to 19 diploma at a national level, even if there is some local flexibility about exactly which courses get delivered.”

‘Work placements and apprenticeships for young people’

Burnham has pledged that the government would require “a much greater supply” of T Level 45-day industry placements and apprenticeships for young people from businesses holding public contracts.

Rowland said his words raise the merit and profile of apprenticeships and place greater expectations on employers, but the delivery would depend heavily on the sector.

Richmond agreed the plan had merit but said its success would vary widely by contract type.

“You could easily imagine a construction project being able to engage with the apprenticeship system fairly easily, but that could be very different for service sector contracts, where there is a much poorer representation of apprenticeships and a much weaker tradition of delivering high quality courses to young people,” he said.

The AELP’s main ask from the new government is to ensure the growth and skills levy goes into the apprenticeship and training system in its entirety.

England’s apprenticeship budget will grow to £3.3 billion in 2026-27 but forecasts suggest £4.5 billion will be levied by employers, leaving around £700 million retained by the Treasury after the devolved nations get their share.

“[The levy] got you £4.5 billion pounds worth of employer engagement and buy-in, which is priceless. You’re not just taking the money away from them, you’re taking away their engagement,” Rowland said.

He added that if funding bands stay low, “employers will eventually turn their back on the system”.

“If Burnham is serious about making vocational education recognised, he needs to stop pretending that inflation somehow has magically avoided the skills sector,” he added.

‘Invest in people’s success’

Burnham has so far not addressed adult skills directly, beyond a general commitment to a “more preventative state, investing in people’s success, rather than paying for failure.”

While the PM has pledged to stick to Labour’s 2024 manifesto, Sue Pember, policy director at HOLEX, said the manifesto “is really relatively quiet on adult learning itself” compared with its commitments on Skills England, devolution and technical education.

The Department for Work and Pensions recently made changes to the 2026-27 adult skills fund but froze base funding rates for a third year. The £1.4 billion fund pays for skills, employability and wellbeing courses for more than one million adults each year.

“We need sustained investment in lifelong learning and community provision,” Pember said. “We need a national learning strategy for the country. We don’t need bits.”

She added that just because Burnham directly addresses young people and not adult skills, it doesn’t mean they won’t be funded.

“I can’t bear it when people pit us against each other. It’s not one or the other. It has to be both.”

Evans disagreed: “I would like more money for adults, more money for young people… but if you’re going to have to pick within a fixed pot, then it’s going to be young people, and it’s going to be up to and including level three.”

Pember argued that the focus within adult learning should be on those with the “lowest basic skills and those that are furthest away from the workplace.”

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, warned not to count on Healey’s adult-skills past as indication for future funding.

“The minute people go from one policy area into the Treasury, very often they get owned by the Treasury very quickly,” he said.

End to ‘a school system configured entirely around the university route’

Burnham has also made it clear he wants to rebuild parity of esteem between academic and technical education routes but keep universities at the “heart of local economies”.

However, he has remained vague on whether it means rebalancing funding away from higher education towards further education.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute

Hillman said the framing risks being read as an attack on universities regardless of Burnham’s intention.

“I think it certainly will be read by some people as an attack on universities and therefore a bit of a continuation of the political rhetoric we’ve heard from both sides of the political spectrum in recent years.”

Universities UK, representing 142 UK universities, wrote to Burnham following his appointment, offering to help on the NEETs challenge and college pathways, in exchange for policy stability on funding, regulation and international recruitment.

Richmond was sceptical about how Burnham will utilise universities to be part of the youth employment solution.

“How they want to use the higher education system in this space remains unclear,” he said. Do they see them as part of the solution to their skills and youth unemployment challenges, or do they see that as something separate?”

Hillman added: “Universities should always be worried [about funding], just as colleges should always be worried, because most of the time universities and colleges are quite a long way down the pecking order in the list of public money, particularly colleges.”

Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union, added that any investment in further education “must not come at the expense” of universities.

“Burnham should lift the economically harmful visa restrictions so that higher education can thrive once again,” she added.

Auditor waves red flags over adult-skills subcontracting

Scrutiny of adult skills subcontracting by colleges is blighted by “gaps and weaknesses” in the West Midlands, an audit review has revealed.

A West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) internal audit report, published this month, found three colleges out of the 15 grant-funded institutions reviewed planned to subcontract around 95 per cent of their adult skills fund (ASF) allocation in the 2025-26 academic year.

The report said subcontracting levels at City of Wolverhampton College, Heart of Worcestershire College and Shrewsbury College broke the WMCA’s 25 per cent cap, introduced the previous year to reduce the risk of fraudulent or inaccurate funding claims.

Together, the colleges planned to subcontract about £14.7 million of their £15.5 million in grant allocations. City of Wolverhampton College received the bulk of that funding, about £14.2 million, and planned to subcontract almost all of it.

Subcontracting education, apprenticeship training and employment support is common practice by colleges, local authorities and training providers, particularly for specialist provision.

But the government has sought to curb it over the last decade following a string of scandals and large government funding clawbacks linked to rule breaches, poor oversight by lead providers and large management fees.

Auditors find ‘no oversight’

While auditors found a “generally sound” system in place around ASF subcontracting at the 15 providers reviewed, they also discovered “gaps and weaknesses” in oversight both in the West Midlands authority’s internal skills directorate and at “lead provider” colleges.

They flagged out-of-date registers of subcontracting arrangements and “no oversight” of subcontract documentation, or whether Department for Education-mandated external reviews were carried out every three years.

Auditors noted high management fees at some lead providers, with one subcontractor subject to different management-fee rates across three lead providers. They also found “a gap in assurance” because the combined authority’s quality monitoring of colleges did not extend to providers in their supply chains.

Weak oversight was partly caused by “challenges” in WMCA’s skills team, including a staff restructure in November 2025 and “resourcing pressures” caused by vacancies.

They also said WMCA officials were working “proactively” to reduce subcontracting through performance reviews and planning to “address disparities” in management fees to ensure value for money.

WMCA refused to confirm with FE Week what college subcontracting arrangements it had agreed with colleges this year, and it has not published a full register of subcontracted providers and amounts subcontracted since 2022-23.

WMCA’s internal auditors, which have a rolling programme of assessing governance and financial controls at the authority, chose to focus on adult skills supply chain management at grant-funded colleges and local authorities late last year after identifying it as a “high-risk area”.

This year’s audit follows a 2022 investigation into a whistleblowing allegation about “non-compliance of a contractual arrangement” between a provider and WMCA. The investigation made two recommendations about subcontracting and performance reviews of providers, but officials have kept most details secret on the grounds they relate to its “business affairs”.

The colleges

Subcontracting at City of Wolverhampton College is now likely to end up at less than 50 per cent, a spokesperson told FE Week.

Explaining the lower percentage, the college said 2025-26’s subcontracting figures were first set out in a delivery plan submitted in February 2025, six months before the start of the academic year, and that “in the normal course of events a lot can change”.

It added: “Our choice of partners is directly informed by sector-specific skills shortages, allowing us to grow genuine partnerships based upon shared delivery, facilities and technical expertise.”

The college confirmed that its subcontractors are National Infrastructure Solutions, which specialises in rail industry training, Duplex Business Services, which specialises in electric vehicle technician training, and BlackRook Academy, which delivers digital and essential skills.

The college publishes a general subcontracting policy, but its spokesperson did not provide the value of each current arrangement or the management fee retained in each case.

Previous WMCA disclosures show the college subcontracted £4.1 million to National Infrastructure Solutions in 2022-23.

A spokesperson for Heart of Worcestershire College, which receives a £1.4 million ASF grant, said it was unable to respond to FE Week’s questions because most staff were on annual leave.

Shrewsbury Colleges Group only received a small ASF grant of about £73,000 this year. A college spokesperson disputed the accuracy of WMCA’s subcontracting figures.

They said: “Shrewsbury College is very proud of its work for WMCA delivering high quality training and education for residents of the West Midlands.

“Shrewsbury College directly delivers all of its ASF allocation from WMCA. We have sub-contracted some of our much smaller Free Courses for Jobs Allocation, based on an approved business case.”

‘Threshold’, not ‘prohibition’

WMCA described the 25 per cent figure as a “threshold” rather than a prohibition. Its published rules refer to it as a cap, but allow providers to exceed it where an exception is approved through a business case.

The authority said that subcontracting above this level was “permissible” for reasons such as access to specialist expertise, engaging specific learner groups, or to cover locations not reached by the lead provider.

“WMCA has worked with providers to reduce reliance on subcontracted provision whilst ensuring continuity of learning for residents and employers of the West Midlands,” it added.

“More broadly, the audit did not identify fraud, misuse of funds or the absence of an approval framework.”

The Department for Education and eight of the 13 authorities with devolved adult skills have a cap of 25 per cent on subcontracting, although most say providers can breach this level with prior approval.

A management fee cap of 20 per cent is also in place at nine authorities.

Waite and see… Get Further boss and her insights on Powell and Milburn

Sarah Waite has unique insights into the motivations of new education secretary Lucy Powell, and the man tasked with helping to solve the NEET crisis, Alan Milburn.

She set up Get Further, the tuition charity for FE students retaking English and maths GCSEs, after working as a political adviser for Powell when she was shadow education secretary. And Waite later led on policy at the Social Mobility Commission when Milburn was its chair.

The Get Further chief executive has long argued that FE is where education can have the greatest impact on social mobility, and is spearheading a campaign for disadvantaged students to receive a student premium equivalent to the pupil premium in schools.

Targeted funding for disadvantaged students falls by around a third, or £1,000, between the July they leave school and the September they begin 16-to-19 education.

While working in Whitehall, Waite saw first-hand how, when a minister arrived at the DfE with a policy initiative for disadvantaged young people, it was inevitably handed to the pupil premium team.

“The policy often then doesn’t look beyond the age of 16. That needs to stop,” she says.

Waite is optimistic Milburn will recommend a student premium in his final report on young people and work, provided there is “accountability around it being spent on tackling the NEET crisis”.

Get Further has commissioned a cost-benefit analysis of the proposal for the Treasury, with Waite citing “interest” from its officials.

The fact that Powell said in opposition, with Waite advising her, that it “makes no sense for the post-16 education budget to be treated with less importance than the 5-16 schools’ budget” bodes well for her campaign.

Sarah Waite as a child growing up in Reading

Well read in Reading

Unlike the young people Get Further supports, Waite never had a problem with GCSE English or maths. She achieved a full suite of A*s, and her mum believed she would end up working at a hedge fund.

Waite’s mother was the daughter of Irish and Kashmiri immigrants who established Dublin’s first Indian restaurant. Her father spent his career driving taxis and a mobile school library, of which Waite enjoyed as a keen reader.

“It was amazing, just floor-to-ceiling books,” she says.

He became mayor of Reading while Waite’s mother was a Labour councillor, giving their daughter a keen interest in left-wing politics and a strong identity with her hometown, where she later returned to raise her two young sons with her husband, a consultant and former DfE official.

When Waite left home to study further maths at the University of York, she was “shocked” by its elitist culture.

It took her “a while” to find fellow students who had attended comprehensive schools. That was “the start of me getting quite fired up about tackling education inequality”.

She joined Teach First, which places trainee teachers in underserved communities, and worked at a school in Leeds where the GCSE pass rate averaged 27 per cent.

Surprisingly, it was not the bottom sets that presented her biggest challenges but the top ones.

She recalls “very sharp kids who didn’t necessarily have easy backgrounds, so they answered back and you had to be strict”.

Meanwhile, pupils in the lowest sets had often been taught by non-specialist maths teachers. Waite found even those with “profound additional needs” could “still learn maths and do really well, when supported to do so”.

Their achievements planted the seed of an idea for a tutoring charity.

Sarah Waite as a child

Powell and politics

After three years teaching and a year working on policy for Teach First, Waite took her first step into politics, becoming an education policy officer for Labour during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition years.

She was thrown in at the deep end, drafting and circulating lines for senior politicians.

“When you first start, you think: ‘I can’t draft a set of lines for the shadow education secretary. I don’t know what the answer is.’

“But there were brilliant people working for Labour who I learned from.”

She worked closely with Powell, then shadow childcare and early years minister, which was “a lot of fun”.

Waite found Powell to be a “brilliant politician” who excels at “creating an argument and landing it”.

When Powell became shadow education secretary in 2015, Waite became her political adviser.

Powell became a strong advocate for FE at a time of significant financial pressure, repeatedly arguing it had become the “forgotten” part of the system, and that cuts to post-16 budgets undermined the requirement for young people to stay in education until 18.

With Waite advising her, Powell positioned FE as an economic necessity, arguing Britain could not build a high-wage, high-productivity economy while reducing investment in colleges.

“Lucy championed colleges and did not shy away from persistently raising the negative impact of the then government’s funding cuts to FE, both on opportunities for young people and our country’s economy,” she says.

“Now, the interim Milburn Review has rightly highlighted the role that the weakening of FE has played in the youth NEETs crisis. With the final Milburn report due this autumn, it’s a great moment for Lucy to become education secretary.”

Lucy Powell when she was shadow education secretary

Milburn and mobility

Powell resigned in June 2016 to oppose Jeremy Corbyn’s party leadership. Waite moved into Whitehall as the Social Mobility Commission’s head of policy.

Having felt relatively powerless in opposition seeing how “the whole of DfE is at the resource of the secretary of state”, she was “hungry” to “make change at systemic level”.

Under Milburn’s chairmanship, her “deep dive” into the biggest barriers to social mobility initially focused on early years.

She “naively” thought that “if you got it right in the early years, there would be no attainment gap”, after repeatedly hearing the argument from school leaders.

But discovering that parental education levels were a larger influence on children’s cognitive outcomes by age three than childcare made her reflect on how challenging it was for school leavers with poor literacy and numeracy to later support their own children through school.

Post-16 education was, she felt, the “missing puzzle piece”.

“We don’t spend as much time talking about post-16 and adult education as we do about childcare policy in this country, even though it’s much more of a factor in tackling social mobility intergenerationally,” she says.

Alan Milburn when he was chair of the Social Mobility Commission

Devolution needs accountability

Waite’s next move put her at the cutting edge of devolution, as principal policy adviser on skills and employment at the Greater London Authority in the run-up to adult education funding being devolved to mayors.

The experience convinced her that devolution presents “lots of potential opportunities” for FE, particularly if (as she predicts) mayors are given responsibility for tackling the NEETs crisis.

But she is concerned that combined authorities should not become “bureaucratic tiers in and of themselves”, because “the whole purpose is innovation”.

She suggests the government should strengthen the role of the ‘what works’ centres operating across government policy areas, to “ensure we’re robustly evaluating what’s going on in different combined authorities and disseminating that”.

Adult education funding has been devolved for long enough, she believes, for research to assess how effectively it has been spent in different areas, particularly with further devolution on the horizon.

Sarah Waite and Lucy Powell

Getting further

Waite became more emboldened to launch her tutoring charity after seeing how officials at the DfE were “aware of the problem” caused by young people not achieving grade 4 in English and maths GCSEs, but did not consider it a priority issue.

The final catalyst for leaving her “stable salary” and setting up Get Further was winning the Teach First Innovation Award, given to initiatives tackling education inequality; its £15,000 prize made the decision “a lot easier”. But it was a “difficult two years” before the charity generated enough revenue to pay her properly.

Waite spent her first year “trying to fundraise, design and pilot the programme, stepping in when a tutor was absent, communicating with colleges and parents and writing the impact evaluation” almost entirely alone.

Then Covid struck.

Get Further had only around 165 young people on its books, all tutored in person. Many programmes were paused by colleges, particularly after the government cancelled exams.

But during the second winter of the pandemic, provision moved entirely online and rapidly expanded to support 760 students. Colleges could use the Covid recovery plan’s 16-to-19 tuition fund to pay for tutoring.

Its subsequent discontinuation in 2024 was a “big challenge” for the charity.

Whereas Get Further had once run programmes involving 400 students, it now works with a record 31 colleges but delivers smaller programmes of between 60 and 120 students.

Get Further still offers online tutoring for “deeply anxious” young people reluctant to leave home, but in-person provision is the “default preference”.

“It’s easy for a young person not to turn up when it’s a screen. It’s harder if a person’s sitting in a room waiting for you.”

Waite is similarly sceptical of AI-powered edtech platforms that gamify English and maths revision, believing many of their claims are based on a “fundamental misunderstanding of how humans learn”.

“When AI gives you an answer, how can you interrogate that if you don’t have the underlying knowledge yourself?”

She also doubts disengaged young people will interact meaningfully with an AI tutor.

“A lot of these young people haven’t been short of screen time in their lives, but they might be short of relationships and positive role models to advise them.”

Get Further can point to evidence supporting its own effectiveness.

Its GCSE maths pass rate last year was 55 per cent higher than the national average and over twice as high for disadvantaged students.

In English, it was 72 per cent higher and three times higher for disadvantaged students.

Charity growth

Waite used to find asking for donations “really hard” in what she describes as a “quite murky world” of fundraising.

“I didn’t have high-net-worth individuals in my contact list, or know where to find them,” she says.

She now feels “a lot more effective” at it. Last year Get Further received £100,000 from social mobility charity Impetus, and Waite believes there is now “more awareness” of FE among potential funders.

The Santander Foundation, an independent grant-making charity connected to Santander UK, is now focused entirely on supporting disadvantaged young people in FE.

Waite believes it is unprecedented for an organisation of its kind to dedicate itself to the sector.

Get Further also works with some of education’s most inspiring role models.

Its patron is Jason Arday, a University of Cambridge sociologist who did not speak until he was 11 and learned to read and write aged 18 at Merton College thanks to mentoring from a dedicated lecturer there.

“Jason’s story shows how important it is that, as a society, we give people second chances,” Waite says.

Meanwhile, Get Further’s student premium campaign is supported by the Association of Colleges and Sixth Form Colleges Association, among others.

The proposed premium would provide £1,100 for each young person at greatest risk of becoming NEET. It could fund interventions such as tutoring, from which Get Further would directly benefit, but also pastoral support and mentoring to help disadvantaged young people build networks and progress into apprenticeships or university.

Jason Arday and Sarah Waite

A stepping stone

The 2014 requirement for students not achieving at least a grade 4 in GCSE English or maths to continue studying the subject post-16 is one of England’s most divisive education policies.

Influential voices have called for the requirement to be scrapped, but Waite believes removing the opportunity would make young people “significantly less likely to progress to any higher-level course”.

However, she accepts national pass rates are “far too low”, particularly for students with low prior attainment.

English GCSE resit pass rates have fallen from 31.9 per cent in 2019 to 20.9 per cent, a decline of 11 percentage points, and in maths from 22.3 to 17.1 per cent.

Only 0.5 per cent of those who achieve a grade 1 achieve a grade 4 or above by age 19.

Waite blames the lack of progress partly on colleges treating GCSE resits as “almost like revision courses rather than meaningful continuation of study” for young people who have not developed the necessary building blocks of literacy or numeracy.

To address the problem, Get Further called for a new level 1 English and maths “stepping stone” qualification, as the default route for 16 to 19-year-olds with grade 2 or below working towards a GCSE pass.

The Francis review appeared to heed their advice, with the qualification set for introduction as part of wider post-16 reforms.

Opponents argue it is unnecessary because students with grade 2 or below can already take approved level 1 or functional skills qualifications.

But Waite argues that functional skills was “always designed to be an alternative” to GCSE and has a very different curriculum.

“The stepping stone will be very much tailored to the GCSE. That’s the whole point,” she says. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel with a different alternative qualification.

“We want to support young people with the very lowest prior attainment to have that time and space to go right back to the point where they stopped understanding in school.

“Passing that qualification will send the message that they are ready to re-attempt the GCSE, if that’s the right qualification for them.”

But a second round of consultation on the qualification’s content has yet to be announced, and Waite does not anticipate rollout until at least September 2028, alongside wider changes to English and maths curricula.

For now, her gaze is fixed on the opportunity for a student premium.

“With the Milburn review there’s a window to address the disadvantage funding gap at 16, and that’s what we’re really focused on,” she says.

“I’m feeling hopeful – hopefully not naively. It just makes complete sense, doesn’t it?”

Pointless to ask for advice on level 7 defunding after pulling the trigger, say MPs

MPs have criticised ministers for failing to consult Skills England and employers before removing public funding for level 7 apprenticeships.

The influential work and pensions committee also branded the current level of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) a “travesty”, and warned eligibility for the government’s paid work experience scheme is “too tight”.

Committee members published their report on youth employment, education and training on Wednesday, blasting the government’s “lack of coherence” over the crisis.

The cross-party group of MPs urged the government to stop tinkering with the apprenticeships system until it has a better understanding of its impact.

And while ministers were “right” to rebalance apprenticeships towards young people, the decision to defund standards pursued by a high proportion of over-25s was “too blunt”, the committee argued.

The report added: “Defunding these apprenticeships will have an immediate impact on many workers looking to retrain, reduce opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and risk inadvertently harming the prospects of young people looking to enter the labour market.

“It is deeply regrettable that DWP only sought evidence from Skills England and employers after making its defunding decisions.”

‘Not convinced’

Skills England was asked to gather evidence on the impact of the policy only after the defunding decision was announced.

It found level 7 apprenticeships generally recruit older learners, with exceptions including accountancy and taxation where 71 per cent of apprentices were under 25.

And the agency said the programmes improved access to some professions, such as boosting diversity in the legal profession.

Overall, MPs on the work and pensions committee said they “remain to be convinced” that changes to the apprenticeship system will deliver the goal of refocusing the training route on young people.

They added: “England’s apprenticeship system suffers from overly complex systems, excessive policy tinkering and an ongoing lack of esteem for vocational training. DWP must do more if it wants apprenticeships to deliver for young people.”

Constant changes to formats and funding rules have also left employers “disincentivised”, MPs said.

The committee urged the government to “closely monitor” the impact of the growth and skills levy, set out how it would evaluate the system, and build a greater understanding of when to intervene.

The government should “avoid further changes” until it has assessed the effectiveness of the current framework, MPs recommended.

The Department for Work and Pensions should also explain how it will improve awareness and understanding of apprenticeships, including through the Department for Education, which should also ensure that schools, colleges and educators are promoting apprenticeships alongside other non-academic routes.

The committee said none of the causes of young people becoming NEET were “inevitable” and argued various support systems including schools and children’s health services had “failed” in recent years.

MPs called for a youth employment strategy that is cross departmental, long term, and has ambitious targets for increasing rates of employment, education and training.

The report follows the release of Alan Milburn’s interim report into young people and work in May, which identified systemic issues across education, health and welfare.

Jobs guarantee limited

Tight eligibility for the government’s jobs guarantee programme of six months’ subsidised employment will “limit its impact”, the committee warned.

Members cited Resolution Foundation estimates that 44 per cent of the estimated one million young NEETs will not be able to access the scheme because they are not on benefits.

Milburn’s interim report found it was also closed to 290,000 young people who were out of work on health and disability benefits.

The committee said: “We are concerned about the long-term impact on a young person of being unemployed for 18 months and that waiting a year and a half before offering a work placement risks undermining the benefits of the scheme.”

MPs called on the DWP to publish a cost-benefit analysis for the programme showing different options for how long someone is unemployed before the scheme kicks in.

Tax, policy churn and incoherence

To prevent the youth guarantee from becoming another “here-today-gone-tomorrow” programme that joins the list of six other youth-focused schemes launched since the late 1990s, the DWP should commit to funding over the next decade, they said.

On tax, the committee urged the Treasury to extend the national insurance upper secondary threshold to all employees under 25, so employers pay no class 1 contributions until a young worker earns more than £967 a week. Employers already avoid contributions below that level for apprentices under 25 and all employees under 21.

MPs also slammed the DWP’s lack of coherence on its benefits policies for young people and apprentices as “inexcusable”.

They highlighted punishing rules for 16 to 18-year-olds from families on benefits, young adult carers who study for more than 21 hours a week, and the DWP’s proposed removal of the health element of universal credit for under-22s, which the government has not ruled out.

“[DWP] has not produced evidence to justify a different approach for young people or that such a change would have a positive employment effect,” the committee said.

A Government spokesperson said: “The decision on level 7 apprenticeships was informed by a wide range of evidence, including insight from Skills England informed by extensive engagement with over 700 stakeholders.

“We are shifting funding to young people to reverse a 40% decline in youth apprenticeships over the past decade, and creating shorter and more flexible courses which employers have been calling for.

“Our £2.5 billion youth employment package will support almost one million young people and help deliver up to 500,000 opportunities to earn and learn, while Alan Milburn’s review is investigating the barriers stopping young people from getting into work.”

Work and pensions committee chair Debbie Abrahams said the inquiry heard from young people who were “demoralised” by unemployment and felt like “leeches” on their families.

She added: “This situation is not only unfair to them, it is also harmful. Even a short spell as NEET in one’s formative years can damage mental health, impact future career opportunities and reduce lifetime earnings.

“Young people face an uphill struggle in current conditions to get that critical work experience.

“While the Youth Guarantee is a good start, the contradictions between the government’s strategic aims and the rules of various schemes mean we desperately need a youth employment strategy.”