Strike action at Bury College has been called off at the eleventh hour after leaders agreed to give staff a pay rise worth triple their original offer.
Staff at six colleges in the North west had planned to strike today over staff pay – the same day that many GCSE students are due to take what University and College Union calls a “crucial English exam”.
UCU had demanded that colleges increase pay by at least 8.5 per cent to meet the cost-of-living crisis.
However, an agreement was reached between Bury College and its UCU branch meaning that strike action has been avoided.
Staff at Bury College will receive a permanent pay award of 3 per cent and will be given a non-consolidated payment in this and the next financial year of £1000.
UCU claims that the offer is worth between 6 per cent and 6.2 per cent and is triple management’s original offer of 2 per cent.
Strikes at the other five colleges – Burnley College, City of Liverpool College, Hopwood Hall, Nelson & Colne College Group, and Oldham College – have gone ahead as planned.
UCU regional official Martyn Moss said: “The offer made by Bury College in recognition of our members’ incredible work is great news for both staff and students. It means the college is now able to avoid disruption during this crucial examination period.
“To avoid further strike action, management at the other colleges need to look at Bury and see what can be achieved when bosses engage with us on pay. With inflation and energy costs soaring, they urgently need to raise pay so we can avoid any further disruption.”
A spokesperson for Bury College told FE Week that their staff “aspire to provide the best for every student”.
“At the same time, our staff’s welfare is of utmost importance and the college has maintained throughout negotiations the need to balance a desire to make the best offer possible to staff in these difficult times, with its duty to maintain financial sustainability and manage future risk,” they said.
“By combining an approach of offering a consolidated pay award of 3 per cent along with a non-consolidated payment in this and the next financial year we feel we have been able to strike that balance.”
Staff at the other five colleges on strike today were on picket lines at college entrances and an online rally took place with UCU general secretary Jo Grady.
“UCU is demanding the other colleges follow Bury’s example and make improved pay offers to meet the cost-of-living crisis,” UCU said in a statement.
The union said that the Manchester College – the largest further education college in the UK – is also set for action “short of a strike” on May 20. This includes working to contract, not covering for absent colleagues or vacant posts, and not rescheduling lectures or classes cancelled due to strike action.
UCU noted that since 2009 pay in further education has fallen behind inflation by 35 per cent and the pay gap between school and college teachers stands at around £9,000.
Photo: Protestors on the picket line at Burnley College. Credit: UCU Burnley College
MPs have said prisoners should have laptops in their cells to help them study and should be assessed by an educational psychologist when they first enter the prison system.
In a new report, the House of Commons education select committee highlighted what it called the “cracks in a clunky, chaotic, disjointed system which does not value education as the key to rehabilitation”.
Citing data that shows prisoners who participate in education whilst incarcerated are 7.5 percentage points less likely to reoffend than those who don’t, MPs made recommendations to improve the current situation.
These included allowing every prisoner to receive an assessment for learning needs from an educational psychologist.
MPs also said a change in attitude to technology in prisons is “long overdue” and that if security concerns can be overcome, prisoners should have access to in-cell laptops, such as Chromebook, when undertaking education – something that the Prisoners’ Education Trust have advocated for.
The Ministry of Justice told FE Week they have made “clear commitments” in the 2021 Prisons’ Strategy White paper to expand the use of secure laptops so that more prisoners can study from their cells.
“For the majority of offenders, prison must be a place where an old life ends, and a new one begins,” said chair of the committee Robert Halfon.
“The key to starting again is education. Education – from a practical apprenticeship to a masters’ degree – increases employability, one of the most important factors in reducing reoffending.
“The argument for placing education at the heart of the prison system is a no-brainer: prisoners who engage with education and those who find employment on release are statistically less likely to reoffend.”
However, he noted that six years after these points were set out to the government in a landmark review, prison education is in a “chaotic place”.
“Shambolic transfer of records, no assessment for educational needs and the lack of access to modern learning tools add up to paint a dismal picture.”
The committee made recommendations around the assessment of needs, education delivery, education facilities and infrastructure, academic study and the route to employment.
The report noted that a high proportion of prisoners have learning needs.
“It is concerning that prisons have only had to screen for additional learning needs since 2019. This means that the majority of the prison population may never have gone through a screening process,” MPs said.
“It is clear that there is a lack of data around the numbers of prisoners with special needs and that the true scale of the issue is not known.”
To address this, MPs said they believe there is a “strong case for every prisoner to receive an assessment for learning needs from an educational psychologist, or at the very least a more intensive form of screening”.
The committee recommend that the Ministry of Justice prepares a cost appraisal for implementing such an approach.
Many of the suggestions centred around taking a more digital approach to improving the system.
As well as laptops in cells, MPs called for the introduction of digital education passports which would contain a record of each prisoner’s learning and educational needs.
This, it is hoped, would facilitate better transfer of studies across the prison estate and help improve prisoners’ ongoing education.
“Prison education has been underfunded for many years and is at the bottom of the class when providing outcomes for prisoner learners,” Francesca Cooney, head of policy at the Prisoners’ Education Trust, said.
“The digital divide between prisoners and the community is ever increasing and the committee is clear that we cannot let that continue.
“We strongly support the call for the government to set a date for prisons to provide restricted broadband and for prisoners who are studying to have in-cell access to security-approved laptops,” she added.
The Prisoner’s Education Trust told FE Week that the Committe was right to highlight the lack of support for those with additional learning needs.
“Ensuring that every prison has a Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator, as the report recommends, could really benefit those with additional learning needs, helping them to get the support that they need,” a spokesperson said.
The Ministry of Justice, in its 2021 Prisons Strategy White Paper, said that only four adult prisons (including one privately managed prison) and one Youth Offender Institution (YOI) in England and Wales have access to in-cell technology, with the appropriate infrastructure in place for staff and prisoner facing digital services.
The government said in the white paper, that it will extend this to a further eleven prisons by Summer 2022 including Young Offender Institutions and two Women’s prisons.
“Making our streets safer is one of the government’s top priorities,” a spokesperson from the Ministry of Justice told FE Week.
“Offenders who have a job are significantly less likely to reoffend when they leave prison – that’s why we’re rolling out in-cell education technology, prisoner apprenticeships and driving up the incentive for governors to get prisoners into work to cut crime and protect the public.”
Quality of prison education
The committee said that the quality of prison education is of “huge concern” and has been deemed “inadequate”.
“The vision of governor autonomy, as set out by the Coates Review, has not been realised by the new contracts and we are disappointed that the new contractual arrangements resulted in the same four educational providers being appointed.”
The report noted that new contracts were meant to encourage partnership between prisons, prison educators, the further education sector and the voluntary sector, but in practice bureaucratic contracts undermine this vision and make educational provision transactional, rather than rooted in the needs of the individual and the local area.
“The government must ensure that there is a greater emphasis on working with the further education sector,” the report added.
Apprenticeships
MPs said they were pleased on the government’s recent decision to let prisoners take apprenticeships.
They added that in any future review of the apprenticeship levy, the government must change the rules to allow businesses to direct it towards prisoner rehabilitation schemes.
The report concludes the committee’s 18-month long inquiry. Peter Cox, managing director of Novus, one of over 70 organisations that submitted evidence to the committee, said that the report “highlights the vital role [prison education] can play in reducing the £15 billion-a-year cost of reoffending to taxpayers.”
The six colleges that will host the WorldSkills UK national finals this year have been named today.
Barking & Dagenham, Belfast Metropolitan, Blackpool & The Fylde, Cardiff & Vale, Edinburgh and Middlesbrough colleges have been chosen as the venues for a total of 62 finals between them during the week commencing November 14.
The UK’s most skilled students and apprentices will compete for gold in trades (see full list below) ranging from bricklaying to culinary arts, and aircraft maintenance to hairdressing.
Competitors who impress under the pressure of a national final could be in with a chance of representing the UK at the “skills Olympics” in France in 2024.
Winners will be revealed in a special live medal ceremony show presented by TV presenter Steph McGovern from her Packed Lunch Studio on Friday November 25.
WorldSkills UK deputy chief executive Ben Blackledge said he hopes witnessing the drama of the finals live will “inspire young people to keep developing their technical and employability skills”.
During the finals, the host colleges will run events showcasing what they offer, providing careers advice and giving visitors the opportunity to talk to employers and industry experts.
People who cannot get to a local event will be able to follow online through a special broadcast featuring live finals action, as well as interviews and advice from previous winners, experts and career advisors.
Zoe Lewis, principal of Middlesbrough College Group, said she was “incredibly proud” to have been chosen by WorldSkills UK as “one of only a handful of hosts for this major competition”.
“We’re training people at the cutting edge of technology and knowledge, and this competition brings together the very best up and coming talent in these sectors,” she added.
The finals are the culmination of a seven-month process including regional heats and intensive training.
What happens after a serious violent incident plays out in a college? How can colleges best support students and communities around criminal exploitation? Jess Staufenberg looks at whether safeguarding responses and violence reduction units are working
Lindsey Styles, inclusion and safeguarding lead, was soon on the scene, trying to get an ambulance to the teenager. “The poor young man had collapsed, so students and staff ran out to administer first aid,” she tells me. “They responded amazingly well, doing CPR, trying to staunch the blood and save the boy’s life.”
The ambulance arrived quickly – but they couldn’t save him. Later the hospital rang the college to thank them for their efforts.
How does a college cope with this sort of terrible incident? How can safeguarding against criminal exploitation of students be as effective as possible?
FE Week has researched the subject and found 17 colleges in the news since 2014 for a serious violent incident on or near the college.
In 2021, for instance, a student at Richmond upon Thames College, who was also a refugee who had fled war in Afghanistan, was stabbed and killed. In 2020 at Riverside College in Liverpool, students were stabbed at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, very close to the front door.
It’s important to say colleges are largely very safe environments, and not to overstate the threat of violence. But providers also say violence and criminal exploitation is increasing.
Oldham College students practicing emergency street first aid
Back at Milton Keynes College, Styles is clear the impact can be devastating. “Staff and students were deeply distressed by it. We responded immediately by having counsellors to help staff and students to offload.”
Aside from therapeutic support, the next issue was misinformation. The first police officer had incorrectly reported that the victim was a college student. Following a review, the college has now set up a telephone hotline for the media.
“If there’s an incident, now there’s a designated number to prevent misinformation.”
The college also wrote a “more specific” emergency “step-by-step plan”, around how to manage traffic and parent requests.
But interestingly the college chose not to ramp up security measures, such as knife arches and more stop and search procedures.
“We don’t want students to feel we are searching them every time they come in,” says Styles. “This is about young people feeling safe, and acting in a safe way – not about feeling threatened and so acting in a threatening way. It’s about de-escalation not escalation.”
It’s about de-escalation not escalation
Instead, knife arches were showcased to students by police officers as a “learning activity”, says Styles. Talking frequently to local community leaders is especially important, she adds.
It’s an important area of debate. Two months ago City & Islington College paused stop and search checks introduced in February in response to concerns about local knife crime and student safety, after students said the measures left them feeling “violated” and staged a mass walk-out.
Nationally, criminal incidents have risen in line with austerity cuts since 2010. Last year there were around 41,000 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, which was a drop on 2019/20 ̶ but still 27 per cent higher than in 2010.
At the same time the number of police officers in England and Wales has been cut back: a staggering 20,600 fewer between 2010 and 2019. The reoffending rate remains high ̶ in 2020, 39 per cent of children reoffended.
Drugs-related criminal activities have also received more attention. National Crime Agency figures show at least 14.5 per cent of referrals were flagged as county lines issues last year, compared to around 11 per cent in 2019.
Oldham College students graduate after completing the Greater Manchester VRU funded Street Doctors Step Wise, street first aid programme
A flagship response from the government has been violence reduction units (VRU), launched in 2019 as cross-agency groups, with police, health, education and local government representatives.
For 2022/23, £64 million will fund 20 violence reduction units (VRU), split across eight regions: for instance, £7 million has gone to London, £3.4 million to Greater Manchester, £880,000 to Bedfordshire and so on. These share information and signpost providers to services.
Eddie Playfair, senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges, said colleges in all regions are reporting engaging with their nearest VRU. They also say “the number of issues and referrals is greater”.
“Colleges are much larger than schools and draw students from a wider catchment area, so it means the cross-agency violence reduction work is really important,” he added.
Longfield met with staff from eight colleges at the end of March for the ‘colleges’ section of her report: Kirklees College, Shrewsbury College, Bolton College, Cheshire College, Orbital South College, Liverpool College, South Thames College Group and Stoke College.
The report, published in April, emphasises better inclusion of vulnerable young people at risk of criminal exploitation, but notes “it is clear from our conversations the college sector feels it is often an afterthought in national policy discussion”.
One suggestion is youth development facilities could be based inside colleges.
“Why spend youth investment money on new shiny buildings when colleges have many sports and arts facilities that could be open for longer?” the report quotes a college leader.
It chimes with Longfield’s view that colleges can play a key role in her goal for inclusion to be “baked” into the accountability system, she says. She notes many colleges are “almost inclusive by default” because they take in so many disadvantaged students, including the 14-to-16 age range as alternative provision.
Given that 60 per cent of 16-to-19-year-olds attend college, Longfield wants to “do more work” with the sector and is also holding a 16-to-24 age range roundtable soon.
“I’d like to look at exclusions in colleges, but also the number of kids who fall off courses,” she adds. “Sometimes they drop out in a matter of weeks.”
One college the commission team visited is Kirklees College, in West Yorkshire. Polly Harrow, assistant principal for student experience, echoes Longfield’s concern about students excluded from FE due to criminal activity.
“Every college has their own threshold of what they will tolerate ̶ there can be exclusions in areas of this country where students are excluded more quickly than elsewhere. But do we always understand we might have a very, very frightened human here, who might be under threat? We are sometimes criminalising young people who are afraid, traumatised or being exploited.”
Harrow was driven to introduce a trauma-informed, restorative justice approach at the college following an awful personal experience: her husband’s brother was murdered by a 17-year-old.
“When that 17-year-old was 24, he was released from prison, and we went through that process of restorative justice and sat opposite that person. The fact is, if we can do this here, then we can do it in education.”
Harrow says the key is “really respecting the student voice” on the issues at play.
In such discussions, students are often shocked to discover that those who die through knife crime often die on the weapon they are carrying.
Delivering trauma-informed and restorative justice training to colleges is the Greater Manchester VRU, whose education lead is Rebecca Bromley-Woods, on secondment from The Manchester College. (In 2016, the Manchester College received national media attention when two students were stabbed in an argument outside the canteen.)
The interventions are co-designed with students, but it’s important they don’t compound a feeling that students are unsafe, says Bromley-Woods.
This also helps to counter social media, “which amplifies and escalates” violent incidents, she explains.
“People involved in serious violence are low numbers, but there’s now more people on the periphery following it on social media. That fuels a perception they have to keep themselves safe and maybe carry a knife.”
There’s now more people following the violence on social media
Social media sharing also makes violence more normalised, adds Bromley-Woods. “It’s like violence is almost accepted because it’s online, it’s not real. We’re potentially headed for a culture of acceptance, where it’s seen as the norm by too many groups.”
The VRU, which delivers against a violence reduction strategy, also delivers training on “safer searches” of students and on neurodiversity and inclusion.
John Poyton, chief executive at Redthread charity, which is the joint secretariat for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Knife Crime and Violence Reduction, says an “incident” is a “teachable moment” for colleges, but long-term prevention is all about knowing the wider context.
He points to sociology professor Carlene Firmin’s work on “contextual safeguarding”. Firmin’s approach counters the traditional safeguarding model of students focused “on the home, in isolation” and calls for public services to look for abuse outside the home too.
“It could be about training up council workers cutting the grass in parks, because actually where are young vulnerable adolescents going to be sleeping? Probably on a bench.
“It’s about looking at all the contexts,” says Poyton, adding that the contextual safeguarding framework “fits well” with violence reduction strategies.
Finally, in terms of how best to support young people at risk of criminal exploitation, staff should again listen to students. Suzanne Taylor, assistant director at Barnardo’s (also the joint APPG secretariat), said students report wanting access to peer support and a trusted adult, rather than a referral to a professional service.
“They want support to come to them, in their context,” she explains.
It’s clear that colleges face extremely difficult situations around criminal exploitation and violent behaviour. Take this situation: just last month, a student at Crawley College brought in a fake gun, pulling the trigger in order to scare people. He will now serve more than five years in a young offenders’ institution. It’s such a complex scenario to unpick.
And how effective is the government’s response, including VRUs? In April, the Home Office announced the VRUs and “hotspot policing” are “working”, and have supposedly prevented 49,000 violent offences.
But can better information sharing and signposting really undo such huge loss of personnel among police and youth workers, and cuts to FE funding?
Meanwhile, protecting students aged 18 and over, when they are classed as adults, remains a “cliff edge” of support, experts warn.
There’s some brilliant practice happening, but much more to be done. Let’s hope the Commission on Young Lives, and the Home Office, work with and support colleges as closely as possible.
The government should create a new minister for skills and youth employment role that is shared between the Departments for Education and Work and Pensions to help tackle the NEET crisis, a think tank has said.
The recommendation was made in the ‘Finding a NEET solution’ report by the education and skills think tank EDSK, which was published today.
EDSK’s paper said that on current trends it will take over 150 years before there are no longer any young people who are ‘not in education, employment or training’ (NEET) in England.
The think tank made a number of recommendations to tackle the issue, including calling for more money for the 16 to 19 bursary fund and the removal of level 7 apprenticeships from levy funding.
“After two decades of failing to make any notable progress in reducing the number of young people who become NEET after leaving school or college, it is time for government to look again at why thousands of students are still leaving our education system every year with poor academic results and low self-esteem,” said Tom Richmond, director of EDSK.
Richmond said this “failure” to engage many young people is needlessly driving some of them out of the education and training system by undermining their motivation, aspirations and confidence over the course of several years.
“It is then left to taxpayers and society to subsequently spend considerable sums of money trying to bring these young people back into the fold later,” Richmond said.
“Not only is this desperately inefficient from a public expenditure perspective, it is also a tragic waste of young people’s talents,” he added.
The paper noted that at the end of 2021 there were over 700,000 16 to 24-year-olds classified as NEET in England – equivalent to 1-in-10 young people.
“Worse still, despite endless initiatives and interventions from successive governments, the proportion of young people who are NEET after leaving school or college stands at 12.6 per cent – just 0.4 per cent lower than in 2016, and only 0.7 per cent lower than two decades earlier,” the report said.
The think tank made 14 recommendations to the government to tackle the issue, including the creation of new roles and responsibilities in government.
EDSK said that to create clearer accountability and responsibility in government for preventing young people from becoming NEET, the current role of ‘minister for skills’ at the Department for Education (DfE) should be converted into a ‘minister for skills and youth employment’. This role would be shared between the DfE and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
EDSK called for the government to remove level 7 apprenticeships from the scope of the apprenticeship levy.
“The requirement for 5% ‘co-investment’ from non-levy paying employers towards the cost of training younger apprentices should be scrapped,” the report said.
The aim of this would be to stimulate more demand for, and supply of, apprenticeships for young people.
Another suggestion is for the government to create a new service called ‘CareersLink’, that would coordinate the support available to young people who are at risk of becoming NEET.
Authors of the report said that more support for young people within schools and colleges was needed. To tackle this, they argued that the 16 to 19 bursary fund should be increased from £150 million a year to £225 million a year for the start of the academic year 2022/23.
EDSK also said that financial incentives could be used to encourage more employers to recruit young people into schemes like apprenticeships, traineeships and T Levels.
“To build capacity among employers to recruit and support young people, financial incentives ranging from £500 to £5,000 should be available to organisations offering apprenticeships, traineeships and T Level placements,” the report said.
Interesting fact: Rachel is a keen sportswoman and currently has a gold handicap of 12, she once played four rounds of golf in one day for Cancer Research, teeing off at 4am in the dark!
Matt Laws
Vice Principal- Technical and Vocational Education, Shrewsbury Colleges Group
Start date: May 2022
Previous Job: Assistant Principal, Dudley College of Technology
Interesting fact: Since 2014, Matt has supported international education authorities in designing and delivering leadership programmes in countries such as South Africa, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and India.
George Ryan
Press and PR Manager, Association of Colleges
Start date: May 2022
Interesting fact: George’s signature party-piece/go-to karaoke is singing Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights word-perfect, in falsetto, with appropriate dance moves.
“You joke about it with your friends – ‘we’re the year that didn’t do exams’ – but you do think you got the easy way out,” says Blackpool Sixth Form College student Megan Taylor, 18.
As the sun beams in through huge glass windows in a room on the college’s second floor, offering tree-topped views across the Fylde coast, Taylor is one of six students giving their views on the return of exams this summer – the first since pre-Covid 2019.
For Megan, the chance to take exams is about “self-credibility and self-fulfilment… You don’t have to worry about what other people think about you going through your young adult life and not having an exam”.
It’s a common theme. Earlier in the day we had visited South Shore Academy, also in Blackpool.
Students preferred to be taking exams. One said they were “more accurate”. Another didn’t want “Covid grades”.
‘The dynamic has changed’
But they were all nervous. A few talked about it being stressful. One of the reasons behind this, according to head Rebecca Warhurst, is that year 11 pupils have “not had the peers to look up to in the same way, due to lockdown.
“We noticed a change in ambience and dynamic but, with wellbeing at the heart of everything we do, we have been able to fully support our students.”
Ofqual allowed adaptations this year to try and smooth out some of the Covid disruption. One year 11 pupil at South Shore said being able to take in a formula sheet had “taken the stress off our shoulders”.
But the youngsters – we spoke to around 10 across years 11 and 10 – also said the extra adaptations just added more things to get used to. Some exams this year will have reduced content, and there have also been coursework changes.
The government confirmed this week that exams would return to full subject content coverage. While the intent is to return to normal “as quickly as possible”, it has not ruled out allowing exam aids and advance information in next year’s exams.
The year 10 pupils at South Shore think it only fair they should get some help. “We did miss a lot of school too,” one said. Another felt they had not properly settled into the independent learning of year 10 because of Covid disruption.
Speaking after the visits, Saxton said her heart was set on assisting pupils but, with her regulator hat on, the right thing to do is to check the evidence after the use of aids this year. The government will “monitor the path and impact of the pandemic” before deciding.
‘Classrooms are being taken out of action’
But back to this year, and schools and colleges are facing their own disruption amid a surge in students requesting access arrangements and reasonable adjustments to exams.
South Shore would usually have a handful of pupils asking to do their exams in a separate room. This year it is 20, most of whom say they are too anxious to sit in such a big room.
Four in five of the 527 heads surveyed by the Association of Schools and College Leaders said the level of stress and anxiety among exam students was higher than in pre-pandemic years. A similar number said they had received more requests from pupils to take exams in separate rooms.
A survey by training provider communicate-ed of 146 school and college staff found the average increase in referrals for extra exam help was around 30 per cent. The most popular requests were to sit the exam in a separate room, be given extra time, use a word processor or have supervised rest breaks.
But more than half of respondents said they felt their centre would not have the capacity to accommodate all the requests, as well as being overwhelmed by the time needed for the associated admin.
Stuart Ormson, assistant principal at Blackpool Sixth Form College, said students were “struggling to cope with anxiety and stress more generally. But that is becoming more and more challenging trying to house it. It’s taking classrooms out of action.”
In the meantime, the college is looking to repurpose a restaurant as an exams hall. Unity Academy in Blackpool is looking at using 22 rooms for 120 exam pupils.
Saxton pointed to the lack of familiarity with exams – for both pupils and new staff – as a contributory factor. She said schools were going “above and beyond in a new way” to provide such support. She hopes things will get closer to normality next year.
But the issues are also exacerbating invigilator recruitment struggles. Blackpool Sixth had already lost some of its most experienced invigilators, who don’t want to “take the risk” after Covid. The ASCL survey found more than a third of heads had not recruited enough invigilators.
Ofqual has relaxed some rules, including extending the normal ratio of one invigilator for every 30 pupils to 1:40. But staff we spoke to said they wanted to stick with 1:30 as having more adults in the room makes pupils feel more at ease. Blackpool Sixth has trained some of its senior leadership team as invigilators.
Challenges for new teachers, too
Like their pupils, many of the Blackpool schools’ early career teachers (ECTs) had not yet experienced exams.
Stephen Cooke, head of nearby Unity Academy, who joined us during the South Shore visit, said new teachers not knowing the exams process “puts a lot of pressure on the more experienced staff.
“So you have pressure at both ends. Although a lot of ECTs have been through it this year, so a lot of that worry will disappear quickly.”
This all follows an unrelenting few years for staff. South Shore had to defer an Ofsted inspection this year because 22 people were off.
They collapsed year groups into the hall, with classes taught by new teachers or non-specialists, just to keep the school open.
South Shore serves eight of the country’s 10 most deprived neighbourhoods. Sixty-two per cent of its pupils are on free school meals.
During Covid the school, like many of its neighbours, had to provide resources such as pens and paper to families. They also gave out dongles with 30GB of data as some parents did not have internet access, but live streaming lessons meant that was sometimes burnt through in a day.
Warhurst added: “We’ve all been through the same storm, but in very different boats.”
The school is making great progress with a literacy-centric approach that includes 40-minute form periods where teachers read books to pupils. The current year 10s, the first group to go through a programme where progress is tracked via the New Group Reading Test, run by GL Assessment, saw their average standardised age scores shoot up from 86.2 per cent in year 7 (well below average) to 94.6 per cent (average).
But, overall, the Blackpool heads felt the pandemic had exposed the inequalities between poorer pupils and their peers. Ofqual has admitted it was unable to come up with a solution that ironed out those differences.
However, with a “roll your sleeves up” attitude, staff have battled through to give students the best possible shot – and it means a lot to the youngsters.
Blackpool Sixth Form College student Lloyd Paterson, who hopes to study journalism at university, said exams offered him the chance to “prove I can do it. I didn’t have that fulfilment when we finished school”.
“I don’t want people looking back and seeing us as ‘the year that didn’t do GCSEs’,” added Taylor.
Around half a million pounds is up for grabs to set up a new governor recruitment service for colleges at risk of intervention.
The successful bidder will have three years to place at least 134 governors on college boards in return for £458,000.
Colleges “identified by department colleagues” will have access to the service which will seek out new board members for them for free from September 2022.
FE Week understands that the new targeted recruitment service will replace the Inspiring FE Governance programme, which was open to all colleges and training providers with governance vacancies.
Procurement documents seen by FE Week show that at least 50 per cent of governors recruited by the successful bidder will have to be women and at least 30 per cent must be from black, Asian and other ethnic minority backgrounds.
At least 80 per cent of newly sourced governors must be in post for at least six months.
Governance experts have welcomed the new service and its requirements on the winning supplier to increase diversity on college boards.
Fiona Chalk, founder and CEO of Governance4FE, told FE Week that investment in governor recruitment “shows an important direction of travel on the professionalisation of college governance.”
The diversity and skills sets of college boards was flagged as a priority area for the government in its 2021 further education white paper, Skills for Jobs. The document committed the DfE to provide “more support for college corporation boards to develop their capacity and build a diverse membership that better reflects their local areas”.
As well as bolstering board membership, the white paper also promised a review of the process for paying board chairs, refreshed guidance on the appointment of senior leaders and new requirements for regular external governance reviews.
Firms bidding to win DfE’s recruitment contract will be expected to ensure that “cognitive diversity” and “diversity of knowledge and experience” is considered alongside traditional equalities characteristics such as gender, age, race, religion and sexual orientation.
This new service will only be available for colleges referred to it by the DfE itself, likely through its territorial teams and the further education commissioner.
This isn’t the first time struggling colleges have had access to free governor search support.
The government funded a pilot of a fully subsidised governor recruitment service in 2020/21. The £110,000 pilot contract was won by Peridot Partners.
Peridot’s director of education practice Drew Richardson-Walsh told FE Week that the department’s focus on diversity was “really positive” and revealed that 36 per cent of governors recruited through the pilot were women and 38 per cent came from a BAME background.
While tender documents state that colleges “experiencing considerable difficulty” can apply directly to the DfE to access the service, Chalk said that a lack of a sector-wide universal service for governor recruitment was “disappointing, but in this case understandable”.
The Inspiring FE Governance matching service was launched by the Education and Training Foundation in 2017. Unlike the recruitment service DfE are currently tendering for, Inspiring FE Governance was accessible to all colleges and training providers. An independent evaluation of the programme said that it had been “largely successful” and that the DfE had agreed to continue to fund the ETF to run it in 2021/22.
This has not been the case, however. The ETF’s national head of governance development, Kurt Hall, confirmed that “the DfE has decided to replace Inspiring FE Governance with a revised programme of support for the recruitment of governors.
“As part of the ETF’s ongoing efforts to provide high-quality training in this area for the sector, we are developing new qualifications for governance professionals, as well as offering a variety of other programmes and support for college boards. We are excited about this programme of leadership and governance support and more details will follow on this in due course.”
Digital skills such as cyber security are more important than ever, and bootcamps are a good delivery model, writes Caroline Fox
As well as reporting the tragic consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the ground, the media carries regular stories of a propaganda war being conducted in cyberspace.
Teams of IT experts are trying to get round state-controlled outlets to explain to the Russian people what is really going on.
Meanwhile, away from the warzone, governments, businesses and educational institutions across the globe have been reviewing the security of their own IT systems in case they are on the receiving end of cyber attacks from Russia.
Of course, cyber attacks from Russia are nothing new (GCHQ has reported that UK ransomware incidents doubled during 2021). But the war has brought home how vital it is for us to protect our essential utilities, of which IT networks are one.
It is therefore particularly important that the government and the mayoral combined authorities have made digital skills a key priority in skills bootcamps.
As a delivery partner for the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA), we are running programmes for cyber security analysts within our digital bootcamps offer.
As the name implies, bootcamps are by definition short (up to 16 weeks) and so no one can become a cyber security expert overnight by participating in one of these courses. A credible degree of core IT knowledge from prior learning is required.
Nevertheless, within the space of a few days, the learner can acquire new skills and knowledge to help augment an organisation’s ability to protect its own or a client’s cyber security.
This is where the reforms in last year’s skills white paper represent a genuine step forward in giving the country the skills it needs for the economy to grow.
Bootcamps should be better aligned with other programmes like Restart
It’s heartening to see government recognition through bootcamps that learners can top up their existing skills in ways directly relevant to fast-evolving employer needs.
In this sense, bootcamps are one solution to addressing post-16 education’s perennial challenge of providing obvious routes for progression.
Another major advantage of bootcamps is that their content can be relied upon to be up to date. In many areas, such as ICT, the speed of technological change can be very rapid. This means that by the time a student has completed a medium-term course of study for two years, new areas of priority may have emerged. Bootcamps can close that gap in knowledge.
Partnership is a recurring theme in the reforms for both higher and further education, and bootcamps point to a complementary model of provision gained from the combination of FE colleges and independent training provider-delivered bootcamps.
The latter can also draw on the ITP strength of good employer engagement.
In terms of the wave 3 expansion of bootcamps that the DfE announced in January, real thought and imagination have gone into the design of the latest procurement. This includes the invitation for ‘bespoke’ bids for digital.
But there is still room for improvement. For instance, bootcamps should be better aligned with other programmes, such as Restart, the job support programme for universal credit claimants. At the moment, learners who have signed up for a bootcamp can still be referred to an additional programme, which then takes priority.
Unfortunately this can disrupt a learner’s progress towards securing a positive employment outcome.
Providers have also been confused by the plethora of national and devolved procurements for bootcamps. The DfE’s announcement of a dynamic purchasing system (DPS) will reduce the number of tenders, but a DPS relies on providers keeping capacity in place with no guarantee of future funding.
Nevertheless, the case is growing to make bootcamps a firm fixture within the national skills fund.
We can see on the international stage just how important cyber security skills are for every nation. Here in the West Midlands, bootcamps have become one of the most sought-after methods to obtain the additional skills required.
