I like the Association of Colleges. More importantly, I respect them. They were good partners when I worked in government. You could talk to them, and it wouldn’t leak. They were knowledgeable and they didn’t cry wolf. Those three things are important, and cannot be taken for granted.
What follows needs to be understood in the context of my respect for them.
Their document, Opportunity England, is a classic example of sector lobbying. It reads like documents that I have read from so many groups in so many sectors over so many years.
It is well-intentioned, which is a good start. But well-intentioned is not enough. Indeed, I sometimes think that ‘well-intentioneditis’ is a diagnosable condition. Its most common symptom is a lack of precision.
For example, it is obviously well-intentioned to say – as Opportunity England does – that the government should encourage schools, colleges and universities to collaborate to ensure a complete ‘offer’ for every 16-year-old. Who, after all, could object to people working together to ensure that 16-year-olds have a smoother transition to the next stage of their lives?
But what exactly are the authors asking the government to do? Send a letter to schools, colleges and universities asking them to collaborate? I think receiving such a letter would make no difference at all. Convene some round tables? Produce a government report saying the same thing? Again, I am struggling to see this making any difference at all.
Years ago one of my more thoughtful ministers remarked to stakeholders that any government has five possible approaches: ban, mandate, tax, subsidise and make speeches. The first four work.
We ban children from working in mines. We mandate that schools should teach English and maths to age 16. Education to the age of 18 is so heavily subsidised that it is free. We tax cigarettes, alcohol etc to reduce their consumption. All of these work.
But making speeches and encouraging people? Who cares what the minister thinks or wants? A speech rarely changes anything.
What exactly are the authors asking the government to do?
A good example of a mandate is the right of further education colleges to speak to year 11 pupils, to tell them that they don’t have to stay at the same school for Key Stage 5. Schools would have no incentive to let their rivals pitch for ‘their’ pupils, so a mandate is needed.
Therefore, if you want something to happen, please remember these four points: ban, mandate, tax and subsidise. Which of these levers do you want government to pull?
If you want to make recruitment easier for further education colleges, you should definitely ask for a bigger subsidy so that you can compete with schools and other employers. You might also want to ask government to mandate the use of common pay scales across schools and colleges.
But note: it would be a nightmare if you got that and no extra funding. With government finances tight, asking for money and common pay scales risks getting only the latter – which really would be a pyrrhic victory. So be careful what you ask for, and remember that politics is the art of the possible.
I know, of course, that documents like this exist for two reasons. The first is to influence government. For that, you need to take my injunctions above very seriously. They are the route to effectiveness. The second is to represent consensus within the sector.
I understand that you need to get everyone on board. And I understand that this will always lead to well-meaning but imprecise documents like this. But I urge you, from the bottom of my heart, as someone who likes and respects the sector and sees it as key to building a wealthy and contented society for all: please, work hard to make stakeholders within your sector understand that the way to influence government is to be precise.
If politics is the art of the possible, then lobbying should be the art of the achievable. The route to influence that changes lives for the better is to make demands that government – and ideally one Secretary of State alone – can deliver. Sadly, this report does not do that.
Labour’s mayoral candidate for the West Midlands has claimed he has placed skills and adult education at the centre of his campaign, while others have chosen to focus on other policy areas in the build-up to local elections.
Richard Parker, who is hoping to win sitting Tory metro-mayor Andy Street’s job, says his “absolute priority” is creating “new jobs and training opportunities” in every town in the region.
His manifesto, due to be published today, ambitiously promises to “guarantee” an apprenticeship place for every young person who wants one.
Apprenticeship statistics for the West Midlands show that in 2022/23, only 22 per cent of apprenticeship starters were under the age of 19.
Speaking to FE Week ahead of the election, Parker – who left school at 16 before returning to education to gain an economics degree – said he understands the importance of education.
But aside from his apprenticeship guarantee – which lacked detail explaining how this would be possible – his campaign contained no other specific pledges on adult skills.
When pressed, Parker would only say that he would invest the West Midlands’ £150 million adult skills budget in “proper skills for people to get proper jobs”.
While Parker places jobs and training at the top of his list, the manifestos of many other candidates, including his rival Street, emphasise other key policies under mayoral control such as transport and housing.
Adult skills spending is one of the key policy areas under the direct control of the ten combined authorities planning to elect a new metro mayor on May 2.
Parker claimed Street has been “passive on skills” and commissioning training courses on using “Excel spreadsheets” to hit government targets.
Street was unable to speak to FE Week, but his 149-page manifesto published yesterday pledges to take a “proactive approach” to getting young people into apprenticeships, continue focusing on technical skills and to “tailor” skills funding to local businesses’ needs.
His record includes overseeing the development of the “best qualified workforce in the West Midlands ever”, the manifesto claims.
Some candidates barely mention adult education
Sadiq Khan, who hopes to continue running London’s £320 million adult skills budget, does not mention skills or training in his top ten manifesto pledges.
However, he promises to continue his existing policy to provide free training to anyone 19 years and over who is unemployed, on a low income, or has limited formal education.
His Conservative rival Susan Hall has not mentioned skills in her campaign materials and did not respond to requests for comment from FE Week.
Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen, the only other sitting Conservative mayor apart from Street, has released a “plan for local jobs” that makes only passing reference to skills.
Sitting Mayor for Greater Manchester Andy Burnham is yet to reveal any pledges on skills other than the Greater Manchester baccalaureate, an educational pathway for 14-16 year-olds that would promote technical careers.
Incumbent mayors underline value of skills
Speaking to FE Week about their pledges on skills, incumbent Labour mayor for Liverpool City Region Steve Rotheram and independent candidate for North East Jamie Driscoll were both keen to emphasise the importance of their adult skills budget.
Rotheram, who started his working life as an apprentice bricklayer, said: “Skills is the building block that will allow us to attract the investment skills is the important thing.
“Skills is massively important – if we get skills right, we can improve productivity.”
He added that managing the adult skills budget during his seven-year tenure has felt “quite constrained” and pledged to fight for more spending flexibility in a devolution deal similar to Greater Manchester and the West Midlands.
Driscoll argued that since he has run the North of Tyne’s adult skills budget he has increased training enrolments by a “phenomenal” 60 per cent and given training providers more security through three-year settlements.
He pledged to continue taking a “learner-centred approach” to adult skills, with a focus on “getting people something meaningful in their lives”.
He added: “Now, if you’re starting with someone who’s barely literate, then actually that is a huge opportunity.
“But if you’re saying to people in central government style ‘you must go on a course because we effectively want to punish you out of unemployment’ that’s just a waste of everybody’s time.
“Why don’t we get people doing something that’s going to get them out? Some kind of benefit, because we all get repaid by that in the end.”
A care training provider has been graded ‘inadequate’ after Ofsted found apprentices being forced to work additional shifts instead of attending their training.
But the firm has hit out at the watchdog, accusing inspectors of “totally overlooking” the crisis the care sector is in.
Ofsted found that many of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne-based ACT Education’s 236 apprentices had “substantially” passed the planned end date of their programme during a visit in January this year.
They said apprentices were “frequently required” to cover additional shifts instead of attending training and leaders had insufficient oversight of whether they had catch-up sessions.
ACT Education was downgraded from ‘requires improvement’ to ‘inadequate’ in all areas except personal development, in a report published on Thursday.
Duty of care took priority over studies
The provider’s director Neil Wray hit back at Ofsted’s report, which echoes similar criticism placed on other care providers judged ‘inadequate’ since the pandemic and led to several failed legal challenges.
Wray told FE Week: “We are aware that there are other care training providers that have recently been rated as inadequate that have the exact same sector-specific issues that we do.
“We did lodge a complaint against the inspection, listing numerous contradictions and factual inaccuracies, which was obviously not upheld. As a mental health training provider, we found the attitude and conduct of the lead inspector to be very poor. The entire inspection was a very unpleasant process.”
He said learners usually miss their planned end date because “duty of care for vulnerable people” and staff shortages mean they need to cover shifts.
Wray claimed that if this happens learners receive additional training “at our own personal cost”.
ACT Education is owned and run from the same office by New Beginnings, a company providing home care services to adults with learning disabilities and autism which is rated ‘outstanding’ by the Care Quality Commission.
Overall, the companies declared a profit of just under £1 million after tax on a turnover of about £13 million.
Wray told FE Week “less than 10 per cent” of ACT Education’s apprentices are employed at New Beginnings.
Inspectors criticise low expectations
Ofsted said apprentices make “slow progress” at ACT Education due to a lack of off-the-job training, which amounts to “one or two hours” each month.
They added that trainers did not set apprentices high expectations and impeded progress by failing to give deadlines for completing assignments.
Often, apprentices and employers did not attend progress review meetings, resulting in “little joint planning” for training opportunities.
They said ACT Education had also been “too slow” to address concerns about English and maths functional skills training at an inspection in September 2022.
Trainers did not set apprentices high expectations and impeded progress by failing to give deadlines for completing assignments, they added.
Other concerns included ineffective careers information and insufficient personal development training.
Although Ofsted praised tutors’ knowledge and experience, they said managers had been “too slow” to recruit suitably qualified staff.
Wray said the inspectors’ criticisms “did not reflect the full picture”.
The company now faces seeing its contract with the Department for Education terminated, in line with its policy for independent training providers who receive an ‘inadequate’ rating.
However, Wray said: “We are continuing to offer apprenticeships as we have received no instruction otherwise.”
He added that the training provider will focus on improving ahead of an Ofsted monitoring visit due in six months.
Young carers should be recognised on the government’s individualised learner record (ILR) to better identify and support their needs in further education, sector leaders have said.
Making this “simple change” would also help address the “gaping hole” in data that is recorded between FE learners and school and higher education students who have caring responsibilities.
The Department for Education added young carers to the annual school census in 2023 for the first time, while UCAS also added the group to its university application forms last year.
DfE minister Baroness Barran recently told parliament that making this amendment to the school census led to the identification of 38,983 young carers, “raising their visibility in the school system and allowing schools to better identify and support their young carers”.
She said this is providing the department with “strong evidence on both the numbers of young carers and their educational outcomes” as well as an annual data collection to establish long-term trends.
Yet the DfE has made no such amendment to the ILR, which records and tracks individual students in FE.
Andy McGowan, the policy and practice manager at charity Carers Trust, said the new data on young carers in schools through the census and universities through UCAS application is “vital” to understanding the educational challenges and employment routes young carers face compared to their peers.
“We are now left with a gaping hole in the data in further education,” McGowan told FE Week.
“This simple change [adding young carers to the ILR] would help the government to see the huge pressures young carers in education face. Only then can they truly understand how their policies affect young carers as they approach a key stage of their lives and transition into adulthood.”
A DfE spokesperson told FE Week that “further recording requirements will be considered in due course” for young carers. They added: “At the moment we are considering what the data tells us and what additional measures we need to consider going forward.”
Young adult carers are described as people aged between 16 to 25, who look after a friend or relative with a disability, illness, mental health condition, or a substance problem and cannot cope without help.
Data from Learning and Work Institute suggests that young carers are three times more likely to become not in education, employment or training (NEET) and four times more likely to drop out of college than their peers.
Latest statistics of the annual school census found young carers in schools were nearly twice as likely to be persistently absent as their peers, and nearly one in four of young carers missed 10 per cent or more of their education last year.
The Carers Trust estimates that 10 per cent of all students are likely to be young adult carers – at least 370,000 in the UK.
A separate data field on the ILR would help evaluate what employment routes young adult carers are taking, experts told FE Week.
Eileen Darby, director of safeguarding and wellbeing at Chichester College Group, said: “We hear that young carers won’t do certain careers like police uniform services because they have to leave their parents. Anything that involves unsociable hours, or nursing as they’re already doing that at home.”
Nicola Aylward, head of learning for young people at Learning and Work Institute, said adding young carers to the ILR would give a “better evidence base for tailoring support” that could look at how the means-tested 16 to 19 bursary fund impacts young carers.
Former skills minister Robert Halfon stated in a parliamentary question last month, that DfE allocated over £160 million of bursary funding in 2023/24 to help disadvantaged 16 to 19 year olds meet costs.
It is unclear how many young adult carers received 16 to 19 bursary funding due to the data collection gap.
Awareness training ‘practically doubled’ numbers
Colleges have their own ways of recording young carers, through asking students during the interview and enrolment process, and through lecturers and feeder schools, if they have caring responsibilities.
Greenhead College in Huddersfield “practically doubled” the number of carers it recorded this year, just by emphasising types of caring responsibilities via social media and parent/carer updates.
“I still think that students don’t know they are carers, so we will be doing more of that early on next year,” said Claire Parr, director of SEND and inclusion at the college.
Leaders fear that hundreds of young carers go under the radar every year. They claim that recognising young carers through the ILR would help address this.
The government is refusing to publish evidence that a revived training scheme for unemployed people is succeeding in getting them into work, despite pouring tens of millions into it since the pandemic.
Although the concept of the Department for Work and Pensions programme – known as sector-based work academy programmes (SWAPs) – is viewed positively by training providers and sector bodies, officials have been criticised by MPs for a lack of transparency over its results.
SWAPs aim to give unemployed people the skills they need to work in a specific sector, such as construction or care, through a short-term combination of training, work placement and a guaranteed job interview.
The DWP recently celebrated “smashing” its 80,000 target for the number of jobseekers that start SWAPs each year since the pandemic, with about 330,000 participating since it was renewed as part of the government’s Plan for Jobs in mid-2020.
But despite spending an estimated £35 million, with a further £25 million due to be spent this year, there is limited evidence of the scheme’s success since Plan for Jobs was launched.
A lack of transparency
The DWP is understood to collect data on SWAPs that includes how many participants complete SWAPs and whether they remain in sustained employment for at least 13 weeks.
But the department refused to tell FE Week what data it collects when asked through a freedom of information request, claiming that most statistics are held “clerically at a local level”.
Last year, an inquiry into Plan for Jobs and other employment programmes by MPs on the Work and Pensions Committee said the DWP “lacks transparency” around the performance of work schemes including SWAPs, making evaluation of their success “unfeasible”.
The inquiry published a report in July added that the department fails to consistently “set clear targets” for its programmes and makes “unsubstantiated” claims about their success.
The government published basic figures showing the age, region and sector of SWAP starts for the first time in February this year.
While preparing a reply to FE Week‘s questions, the DWP also announced that it will begin publishing data showing how many people are starting SWAPs on a quarterly basis.
However, the department’s spokesperson did not respond when asked whether they could prove SWAPs are a success or when an evaluation of Plan for Jobs, understood to have been carried out in 2022-23, will be published.
Work and Pensions Committee chair Stephen Timms told FE Week that the DWP is failing to follow its own protocol – introduced under David Cameron – that government should publish research it has commissioned.
He added: “[Outcomes of SWAPs] strikes me as exactly the kind of information that the government should be publishing – but unfortunately it isn’t on this programme or many others.
“But actually, if they are open about it and there’s public debate, then that is a powerful lever to improve the programme and would be helpful for the department to do a better job.
“David Cameron used to say sunlight is the best disinfectant and under him we saw a genuine openness that unfortunately has been lost – I very much hope it improves.”
Does the scheme work?
Training providers and sector bodies told FE Week they believe the SWAPs are “effective” at getting people into sustained employment.
The DWP also pointed towards two studies, carried out in the mid-2010s, that suggested SWAPs increased the time young unemployed people spend in employment, but failed to provide older participants with work experience or a job interview.
Deputy director at Learning and Work Institute, Sam Avanzo-Windett, said helping people who are economically inactive into employment through work experience in a sector “feels like a good thing”.
But she added: “Without data, it’s quite hard to know how many of those people are getting into jobs.
“It’d be important to know if there are sanctions that sit alongside the SWAPs programme as well as any information on those job outcomes.”
The Association of Learning Providers (AELP), which represents hundreds of training providers, is supportive of the scheme as a “quick and intensive” way of getting people work-ready.
Simon Ashworth, AELP’s director of policy told FE Week: “We have seen them used particularly effectively in sectors with big skills shortages such as hospitality and retail.”
Ashworth added that the “short, sharp, high impact intervention” of SWAPs complements skills bootcamps, which are longer and higher-skilled training programmes lasting up to 12 weeks.
How did SWAPs start?
SWAPs were first launched under a different name in 2011 as part of David Cameron’s ‘Get Britain Working’ initiative, with 330,000 people starting the scheme in the next seven years.
But Jobcentre Plus’ failure to tell participants they faced benefits sanctions if they refused to work resulted in a successful legal challenge known as the ‘Poundland case’.
SWAPs were revived alongside other work training schemes in mid-2020.
Participation is voluntary, but benefit claimants still face financial sanctions for dropping out before completing the course or refusing a job offer for good reason.
In the 2021 spring budget the government set aside £10 million per year for SWAPs, which has jumped to £25 million this financial year.
Concurrent Job: LSIP Executive Director, Essex Chamber of Commerce and Industry
Interesting fact: Following a 27 year career in further and higher education, Andy moved to the Chamber to develop and maintain the Essex, Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock Local Skills Improvement Plan (LSIP)
David Gallagher
Vice Chair, Federation of Awarding Bodies
Start date: March 2024
Concurrent Job: Chief Executive, NCFE
Interesting fact: Growing up, David wanted to be either an architect or an archaeologist (somewhat Indiana Jones inspired). He think an architect is still in there somewhere as he’s very interested and involved in how our skills system is designed
Interesting fact: Joanna is a great traveller and has been to all seven continents. She once got overtaken by a giant tortoise on a trek up the side of a volcano in the Galapagos but in mitigation explains that it was very hot and rather steep!
David Marsh
Chief Executive Officer, TTC Group
Start date: April 2024
Previous Job: Chief Executive, Babington and Co-Chair, St Martin’s Group
Interesting fact: David played for the 1st team in both Rugby Union and Rugby league for Oxford University and was also once invited to compete in the world’s toughest mudder in New York
Cyberbullying, vaping, revenge porn, smartphone addiction… College staff are now having to deal with types of anti-social behaviour that were practically unheard of just a decade ago.
Across England, colleges are reporting a rise in challenging behaviour, particularly among their first-year 16-19 students.
While the immediate impact of Covid has gone away, it has left behind a trail of disaffected young people, who had stopped attending school regularly by the time they took their GCSEs. School absence and exclusion rates for year 11s last year rocketed to record levels, DfE data shows.
More than three-quarters (77 per cent) of college student support staff believe that their students felt more dissatisfaction with wider society in 2023 than in previous years, a survey conducted exclusively for FE Week of The National Association for Managers of Student Services’ members reveals. Almost the same share (71 per cent) believe that this disaffection has contributed to a rise in challenging behaviour.
DfE’s newly-appointed FE student support champion, Polly Harrow, said that “without question, post-pandemic colleges are facing more behaviour that we find challenging.”
The challenge now for colleges is to win back those young people, who have previously rejected, or been pushed out of, mainstream education.
Polly Harrow, FE student support champion
Inclusive FE culture
While many schools are responding to increased behavioural disruption with punitive measures such as isolation booths, suspensions or permanent exclusion, colleges generally take a more inclusive approach.
Only 26 per cent of NAMSS respondents believed that their college permanently excluded more students in 2023 than in 2022.
Harrow believes that “colleges do everything they can to keep exclusions to a minimum”.
But they do appear to be resorting to fixed-term exclusions more frequently, some of which are being imposed for an entire academic year.
Almost half (48 per cent) of NAMSS respondents said their college had temporarily excluded more students in 2023, while only 26 per cent were sure they had not – with the rest being unsure.
One NAMSS member reported a doubling of exclusions and suspensions in the first term of this academic year compared to the same period the previous year, noting that those students were coming onto campus regardless.
Getting an accurate picture of how many students are being excluded from colleges – and where they end up afterwards – is impossible, because DfE does not collect the data.
Harrow questions why the department gathers such data for schools and not colleges. “Where’s the curiosity for what the levels of exclusion are in FE?”
The data for sixth forms shows that although they did not permanently exclude any students in the 2022-23 Autumn term, their suspension rate was the highest since these records became available in 2019-20 (0.4 per cent).
The real picture is also difficult to ascertain because while some colleges might ‘exclude’ a student for disruptive behaviour, another college might simply withdraw them, without labelling this as an ‘exclusion’.
The Association of Colleges’ policy manager Eddie Playfair believes that exclusions are used “very sparingly” in colleges, but it is hard to gain an accurate picture because “in some cases, exclusions are just called withdrawals”.
NAMSS chair Lisa Humphries echoes this point.
“Unlike schools, there’s no standard practice. There’s no consistency across the sector because it’s everyone’s individual interpretation.”
While exclusions data remains elusive, our FOI of colleges last year indicated there had been a rise in withdrawals. 7 per cent of students in the 2022-23 academic year had withdrawn from their courses by January 2023, while in the entire 2021-22 academic year, 9 per cent withdrew.
This could help explain the recent increase in 16- to 18-year-olds not in education, employment or training (NEETs), which in 2022 rose to 8.4 per cent – the highest rate since 2012.
Lisa Humphries, NAMSS chair
Permanent exclusion last resorts
Colleges only resort to permanent exclusions in exceptional circumstances. For example, last year Plumpton College permanently excluded two students who were arrested after a sheep was attacked and killed on the South Downs. Two others treated as significant witnesses were “withdrawn from their course”.
Blackburn College has excluded 15 students since September, but not all permanently. Its student support director, Matthew Robinson, said around 36 others have been “right at the top of the disciplinary process” but “at some point, interventions worked and they’ve integrated back into college. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t be game over for these young people”.
Kirklees College, where Harrow is assistant principal, only permanently excludes students “at risk of harm to themselves or others”, and therefore has only permanently excluded one person in the last five years, Harrow explained.
Harrow sees permanent exclusions as “painful decisions” because authorities often then lose sight of these young people.
Although legally local authorities are responsible for young people until they are 18, there’s no legal obligation on colleges (as there is on schools) to report to councils when someone is missing from education.
“There’s an expectation that if you were concerned about someone missing, you adopt the school practice in college…you follow it up to make sure that they’re safe,” said Harrow. “But it’s a grey area, 16 to 18. If they can’t be in college and don’t get a position in another college… it gets very tricky.”
Attendance woes
Attendance and punctuality were the most common types of challenging student behaviour reported by NAMSS members to have increased in 2023 (cited by 84 per cent). One member noted a “general lack of concern if they’re not in class”, with “more hanging around socially”.
In school sixth forms, DfE data shows how severe absence (50 per cent or more days missed) has risen consecutively each year since 2017-18 from 1.1 to 3.3 per cent in 2022-23, while the overall absence rate increased from 7.4 per cent to 10.1 per cent.
Cat Marin, group director at Activate Learning, which runs seven colleges across Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Surrey, said that Activate’s dropout rates have increased most commonly for mental health reasons.
Robinson said while the “golden number” that colleges aim for is 90 per cent attendance, he believes it is more important for them to consider “the distance travelled”. “If a young person’s attendance at school was 50 per cent, and then they’re at 60% at college, actually, that’s progress.”
Similarly, the City of Liverpool College’s recent inspection, which rated it ‘good’, noted that attendance rates were “not consistently high” but praised leaders for setting “realistic individual targets” in the “context of very high persistent and severe absence rates across schools in the city”.
“Low-level disruption” was noted by 82 per cent of NAMMS respondents, while three-quarters (74 per cent) reported a “general lack of engagement”.
Humphries says her members are “not seeing more students who are violent”, but “more disengaged students – low-level behaviour stuff. Where we could quickly sort it in the past, it’s becoming harder to do that.”
Over half of respondents said drug and alcohol use (55 per cent) had risen, with one member stating that the “cost of living crisis now makes drug dealing an appealing career option”.
Robinson notes a particular challenge with THC vapes, not just at Blackburn College but among young people across Lancashire.
Ben Beer, director of The Safeguarding Group
Social media stress
Inappropriate use of social media was also cited by most respondents (53 per cent) as causing a rise in behavioural issues and was the most common source of student disaffection (cited by 84 per cent).
One NAMSS member cited a “big increase in the amount of online bullying and harassment caused by students being set up and filmed for public social media sharing and shaming”.
Ben Beer, director of The Safeguarding Group, which regularly audits colleges’ safeguarding data, believes there has been a shift in the type of college behavioural incidents, which is being driven by the impact of social media.
“The feeling of behaviour getting worse is a manifestation of colleges not necessarily being prepared for the rapid increase in social media, and how that’s used to facilitate some crime, abuse and harassment.
“What’s emerging is outside the current skill set or training available to many colleges. There’s loads of bespoke training available on county lines or drugs and alcohol, but not a lot around how we build cultures that respond to some current adolescent issues.”
Beer notes that some colleges have updated their behaviour policies to reflect the changing student culture.
Weston College’s new student behaviour policy, published in November 2023, includes the rule to ‘behave respectfully towards others online and all platforms of social media.’
Robinson believes that in maths and English GCSE classes in particular, teachers are having to “mitigate” the compulsion that students have to be “connected all the time” through their mobiles, because “sometimes the interest [in those subjects] isn’t there”.
Beer believes that these classes have “unique behavioural pressures” because colleges have “very little buy-in” from students, and the provision is “often under-resourced, with quite transient staff… it’s a really tough gig”.
The impact of the schools’ crisis
The record numbers of young people dropping out of mainstream schools, either through absenteeism, exclusions or elective home education, is having a profound impact on those young people’s readiness for college.
The absence rate for year 11s – the final GCSE year before young people start college – jumped to 26.1 per cent in 2022-23, its highest level since records began in 2017-2018. The year 11 suspension rate also reached a record level that term of 6.81 per cent, while the permanent exclusion rate was 0.08 per cent, the highest level since 2019-20.
Over three-quarters (76 per cent) of NAMSS respondents noted a rise in behavioural problems among students who missed a large amount of time in school, due to anxiety, exclusions or poor engagement. Similarly, 69 per cent of respondents to a recent survey of attendees at an AoC safeguarding conference said their college had been impacted by the rising number of school exclusions.
Zoe Lewis, principal of Middlesbrough College
Zoe Lewis, chief executive of Middlesbrough College, cannot recall another time in her 20-year FE career where “attendance at schools is lower than at college”. She describes this as “quite remarkable”.
Middlesborough’s secondaries had an absence rate in summer 2022-23 of 14 per cent, while its suspension rate for year 11s in 2021-22 was a record 90 per cent, compared to 12 per cent nationally.
Many young people leaving mainstream school early end up in alternative provision, which is often unregulated and provided in small, niche settings. Harrow believes the quality of this provision “should be of interest to colleges”.
College can then come as a culture shock to those young people.
“They find it much more difficult to find a sense of belonging,” said Harrow. “We have to do lots more pastoral care around them to really build trust in an education system that they’ve lost confidence in.”
Similarly, Robinson finds that often, “it’s not until a behaviour incident happens that you realise their previous education setting was very different. When they enter this big, noisy college environment with lots of freedom, they struggle.”
Harrow is calling for “something to bridge the gap” in the sector for the growing cohort of 16- to 17-year-olds “not yet ready to learn”.
Blackburn College is hoping to provide such a service. Robinson said he is exploring expanding the college’s team, which supports the transition of high-needs students into college, to support other students with that transition too.
How colleges are stepping up
Last academic year Middlesbrough College was witnessing “the worst behaviour we’d ever seen”, said Lewis. She witnessed more “vandalism, vaping, backchat…you name it. There was a lack of respect which we’d never had before”.
The turning point came after she observed some particularly rowdy behaviour on one of her regular walks about campus, and decided enough was enough. The college needed to chart a new course, “to support our staff as much as our students”.
Workshops and focus groups with students and staff were conducted to find out “where the pinch points were – what they didn’t like, where they felt we needed to be tougher, where we’d been too tough and just lots of listening”.
Senior leaders came up with a new behaviour action plan, investing in new roles to pilot new initiatives.
Vaping detector
Lewis found that installing vaping detectors “really improved behaviour in toilets and changing rooms”, while installing more CCTV and security in other spaces, offset with “more rewards and celebrations” also made a difference.
The language of the college’s discipline policy was changed to have a more “positive spin”, to “reduce the friction points, celebrate more and focus on the trouble areas, rather than assuming that all students are problematic”.
By the start of this year, things “felt completely different”. Attendance rates rose by 2 per cent, and a survey found that student satisfaction with other students’ behaviour, and how the college deals with it, had risen from 88 to 93 per cent.
Middlesbrough’s last Ofsted inspection report, published last month, rated its behaviour and attitudes as ‘outstanding’.
Middlesbrough is not the only college to embark on new behaviour strategies.
Among the tactics being deployed to tackle disruptive behaviour, NAMSS members reported “employing a team of youth workers”, “strengthening links with parents and carers”, “providing more one-to-one support and reduced timetables” and taking “trauma-informed” approaches.
Kidderminster College’s principal Cat Lewis explained how just before Covid, the college adopted a more “positive, restorative rather than punitive” behaviour policy. “When we’re talking about poor behaviour, we do it privately and calmly. We don’t do public humiliation.”
Kidderminster, which is part of the NCG Group, realised it had to be “fleet of foot” in responding to “young people coming in via different routes, not just the traditional school pathway, who might not respond to authority in a positive way”.
In partnership with Activate Learning, Kidderminster has also stepped-up mental health training and is embarking on a new gamified approach to tackling mental health.
Marin explained how students will play a game through their mobiles to help them build “resilience and soft skills”, while also being part of a “randomised control trial of epic proportions”. The colleges are aiming for 8,000 students to take part.
Middlesbrough College
What’s causing behaviour issues?
As well as social media, NAMSS members put the sources of disaffection being felt by college students down to the cost-of-living crisis (73 per cent), family breakdown (68 per cent), the Covid legacy (55 per cent), global issues (32 per cent) and political disillusionment (13 per cent).
The spread of Andrew Tate-style online misogyny is thought to be influencing some poor behaviour. Three-quarters of respondents to AoC’s safeguarding conference survey said their students’ conduct was being “affected by misogyny”. One NAMSS member explained how they were tackling poor behaviour by introducing a “consent week” and “staff awareness session on sexual harassment/violence”.
And mental health problems, which have become particularly acute among college-aged students, are driving challenging behaviour on campuses.
Robinson believes that “a lot of the young people coming into colleges now don’t have the resilience, communication and tolerance skills sets they might have picked up from school”.
Almost a quarter (23.3 per cent) of 17 to 19 year olds surveyed by the NHS in 2023 had a probable mental health disorder, compared to 21.7 per cent of 20 to 25 year olds and 20.3 per cent of eight to 16 year olds.
And 95 per cent of colleges reported an increase of disclosed mental health difficulties among 16 to 18-year-olds, AoC research found last year. 82 per cent of colleges were encountering a significant number of students experiencing mental health difficulties without a formal disclosure.
Reflecting the increase in pressure on college mental health services, last month the AoC launched a new mental health charter, updating a previous version published five years ago.
Meanwhile, Humphries concludes that disruptive behaviour is mainly down to “a generation of young people who aren’t sure where they belong”.
“We need to talk about what we’ve done to our young people that makes them operate in this way. We all need to take collective responsibility here. And how do we fix it?”
A north Yorkshire college has been downgraded by Ofsted following “significant turbulence” in its leadership.
The previously ‘good’ Craven College was handed a ‘requires improvement’ judgment this week. Inspectors said “too many” study programme learners do not attend lessons and teacher workloads “may not be sustainable.”
While the college was judged ‘good’ for the quality of education, personal development, adult learning and apprenticeships, the watchdog found its leadership and management to ‘require improvement’.
“Over the last five years, there has been significant turbulence in the leadership of the college. The current senior leadership team, appointed within the last 18 months, has established stability and identified a clear path to make necessary improvements,” according to the inspection report.
However, “strategic and cultural changes have not fully permeated throughout the organisation”.
The college is currently led by interim principal Anita Lall, who took over following the sudden and mysterious absence of its previous leader, Lindsey Johnson, last year.
Johnson was last seen at the college in January, reportedly being escorted into the college to collect their belongings. According to LinkedIn, Johnson left their role at the college in January 2023, but had not been at college since the preceding October. They had been principal at Craven for three years and have since moved into a role as head of education, skills and work at the Ministry of Justice.
The college told local reporters at the time: “We are confident that Lindsey’s absence has not impacted negatively on the college’s ability to meet its obligation to its students and the communities it serves.”
As well as an interim principal, Craven College is also led by an interim assistant principal for quality and two interim assistant principals for curriculum. Just one of the five senior managers, the vice principal for finance, is not an interim.
FE Week understands interviews for a permanent principal of the college have been taking place this week.
A college spokesperson said: “Whilst the overall grades are not what we wanted or hoped for, the report acknowledges the journey the college has been on recently and highlights the steps we are already taking to address the challenges identified.”
Student attendance “doesn’t reach the high standards we have” the college admitted, adding, “our attendance is in line with the national average, but we will continue to focus on implementing specific actions” to improve.
Students that do attend learn in high-quality facilities, often in “environments in which they aspire to be employed”, Ofsted reported.
The college added: “We would like to take this opportunity to thank our wonderful staff and students for all their hard work and commitment and to extend our thanks to our community partners and stakeholders, who supported the college during the inspection and continue to do so.”
