The Department for Education has set aside £20.9 million to create local skills improvement plans in 38 areas over the next three years as part of its national rollout of the scheme.
First proposed in the FE white paper, the plans aim to make colleges and training providers align the courses they offer to local employers’ needs.
Pilots with eight employer representative bodies (ERBs) were run in 2021, with the first batch of trailblazer local skills improvement plans being published last month.
Now the government is calling on ERBs to express an interest in becoming the designated ERB for a specific local area. The deadline to do so is June 6, 2022.
“The skills for jobs white paper set out an ambitious employer-led approach aimed at making FE provision more responsive to local skills needs and ultimately local economic needs,” the DfE said in a guide for ERBs published today.
“The aim is to forge a stronger and more dynamic partnership between employers and FE providers that will enable provision to be more responsive to skills needs of employers in local labour markets.”
Some £20.9 million has been set aside for 38 areas (10 mayoral combined authorities, plus the Greater London Authority, plus 27 local enterprise partnership areas) over three years.
The DfE said they expect to be able to designate ERBs for specific areas of the country from early autumn 2022 onwards.
It is hoped that “most” of the country will be covered by an LSIP by summer 2023.
Those who can become ERBs include body corporates that are both independent of government and not a public authority or undertaking the functions of a public authority.
The government also announced a new local skills improvement fund being introduced in 2023-24. This funding will be for providers to “collaborate and collectively respond” to the skills priorities their LSIP says is needed.
Each designated ERB will be able to apply for up to £550,000 to support the development, implementation, and reviews of an LSIP for the period up to March 2025.
There will also be £50,000 start-up funding available immediately upon designation, which will be deducted off the final agreed total funding.
The DfE told FE Week that they will set out further details of funding “in due course”.
DfE guidance makes clear that while its intention is for the LSIPs to have traction, ERBs are not being asked to take a direct role in funding or commissioning skills provision. Those powers will “remain with the ESFA and bodies with devolved powers, including MCAs”.
The geography of a specified area for an LSIP will be largely based upon “current functional economic areas” that providers and other relevant stakeholders operate across to ensure LSIPs have traction and can fully achieve their aims.
This means that in areas that already have devolution, LSIPs will mirror the boundaries of combined authorities, MCAs and the GLA.
In other areas of the country, the LSIP specified areas will follow existing LEP geographies except for the south-east region which will form three areas – Greater Essex (Essex, Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock), Kent and Medway and Sussex (East and West Sussex and Brighton and Hove).
Government plans to reform and simplify level 2 and below qualifications risk adding further confusion to the landscape, Ofqual has warned.
The exams regulator has also flagged “significant risk” with the timeline for implementation as the proposals overlap with changes to level 3 qualifications and could “overwhelm” educators.
The DfE claims the current landscape is “confusing” with around 8,000 technical and academic qualifications available at these levels, many of which cover the same or similar subjects.
Ministers now plan to axe thousands of the courses. Sector leaders previously called the proposals “devastating” and a “full-frontal assault on the very idea of lifelong learning” which “fly in the face of the ambition to level up the country”.
Under the plans, the surviving qualifications would be placed into 17 new “groups” – eight at level 2; five at level 1; and four at entry level.
Ofqual has now warned: “At present, there is a risk that the large number of proposed groupings are not sufficiently clear or straightforward for students and others to differentiate between.”
The watchdog said its “expert opinion” is that it would be helpful to “segment, and define, the provision based on aspects such as qualification purpose – in effect, combining those of the 17 proposed groupings that have common features”.
Not only will this aid navigability for students, but also provide “clarity with respect to purpose” which is “critical” to supporting good assessment design by awarding organisations.
“This will help ensure that students are tested on the right things, in the right way, to support them in taking their next step, whether this is into work, an apprenticeship, or further academic or technical study,” Ofqual said.
“School and college leaders will, in turn, have a clearer basis on which to design the associated programmes of study.”
The level 2 and below consultation follows a separate contentious review of level 3 qualifications which proposes to remove funding for most courses – including Pearson’s popular BTECs – that overlap with T Levels and A-levels from 2024.
The DfE said it expects the process for deciding which level 2 and below qualifications will remain to be done in a phased way from 2024 to 2027.
Ofqual pointed out that the proposals at level 2 and below – which were originally intended to follow those at level 3 – will now largely be implemented at the same time.
This poses “significant risks in terms of system capacity, which may impact on students’ ability to engage with the new provision”, according to the regulator.
It will also entail challenges for qualification design as, based on the present timeline, some level 2 qualifications are expected to be developed and approved before the corresponding level 3 qualifications – to which in some cases they are intended to progress – are available.
Ofqual pressed that a more phased implementation process of the plans is required to help secure the quality of the provision and the ability of students, and school and college leaders, to engage with it.
The DfE’s level 2 and below review impact assessment estimated that about a third of those aged 16 to 19 who enrol on the qualifications in scope of the reforms are in the most socioeconomically disadvantaged group.
Ofqual said it is important that aspects of the proposals, such as certain sizes of qualification being available only to certain age groups, “do not remove legitimate choices and opportunities for the students who depend on these qualifications”.
The DfE’s response to the consultation, which excludes GCSEs, functional skills and essential digital skills qualifications, is expected to be published later this year.
Nicki Hay is the second ever chair – and its first female chair – of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers in its history. Can her messaging make the government credit ITPs at last?
“I like to get things done,” Nicki Hay, the new chair of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, tells me. “I’m very much about bringing networks of people together to talk to each other.”
So far, so expected. FE Week first interviewed Hay in 2016, and since then she has gone on to be appointed chair of an organisation representing about 800 independent training providers. It’s a not insignificant role – ITPs now deliver seven out of ten apprenticeships. She’s taking over from long-standing chair Martin Dunford, who has been in post for a mindboggling 18 years, and as such is ushering in a new era for AELP.
Alongside Jane Hickie, chief executive, and Alex Khan, vice chair, Hay is all about connections ̶ improving member links with employers and ministers. Networking is in the blood of the organisation.
And Hay has a great track record on this. Back in 2016, she voluntarily began linking up job centre coaches with training providers, unprompted and with no government contract.
She’d spotted that many coaches in London’s job centres didn’t know too much about apprenticeships, and many unemployed people appeared to be missing out on opportunities.
“So I worked with the National Apprenticeship Service [NAS], and we trained up ‘apprenticeship coaches’ in every job centre across London,” explains Hay, evidently proud. “We educated them about apprenticeships and how to network with providers.”
It’s not as if Hay wasn’t busy herself ̶ she was running a training provider she had founded at the time. Spearheading the project alongside her was Carolyn Savage, then at the NAS and now head of apprentice participation at the Education and Skills Funding Agency.
They approached job centre leads across London to find an “apprenticeship champion”. Hay estimates that over a year and a half, apprenticeship starts from job centres in London rose by ten per cent.
But the pandemic, and trying to do it all voluntarily, led to the initiative “fizzling out”, warns Hay. She is trying to get it back off the ground now.
It seems a no-brainer, I comment. Shouldn’t there be a proper national contract or funding to train apprenticeship coaches in job centres?
Hay nods. “The Department for Work and Pensions and Department for Education need to make sure there’s a policy to make that happen. It shouldn’t be that someone from the National Apprenticeship Service and an ITP come in and run that.”
Hay with her family
It’s not the only area where Hay has stepped in directly to make changes. In 2018 she began working with headteachers and students aged 14 to 19 in Hounslow, west London.
She and a group of training providers devised a free “calendar of activities” for the schools, which aimed to increase exposure to and the status of vocational education among staff, students and parents.
A particularly successful initiative was introducing students to at least ten apprentices.
“We took the apprentices from different industries along to the schools, and the students got cards with questions to ask the apprentices,” smiles Hay. “We had a bell, and the students moved around each of the ten apprentices, asking them questions.
“So when they came away, they knew at least ten different industries, and how they got into the apprenticeship.”
Of course, the programme benefited the training providers too – Hay says the project was partly prompted by ITPs struggling to get young people in the capital into apprenticeship vacancies. But it’s an all-round win-win. Again it’s just a shame that some of Hay’s ideas are not turned into a national programme.
Rolling up her sleeves to juggle multiple plates is a lesson Hay learned from her mum. She was born in Surrey, and her dad was a draughtsman who designed oil rig infrastructures. Her mum a senior manager for Parity Training, a big project management training organisation. She was a key influence in Hay’s life.
“My mother was a real advocate for having a career and a family, and I got that ethos and work ethic from her,” she tells me. “My parents were on a par as breadwinners.” Her own daughters have proven ambitious too, with one completing a level 7 CIPD apprenticeship (an HR strategy qualification) and the other taking the higher education route, studying neuroscience.
After A-levels in PE, English and geography at Farnborough Sixth Form College, Hay went to work at the Co-Op bank. After that she became an insurance underwriter, sitting the exams at 22 years old. “I was the third woman to take the exams,” she tells me. “On the underwriting floor I operated on, there were only two women among a couple of hundred men.”
I was one of two women among a couple of hundred men
She moved on to become a senior manager with ASM, a membership organisation for the freight-forwarding sector (now known as logistics). Age just 26, she was helping provide services to companies moving goods through customs. “And that’s how I got into apprenticeships!” she tells me happily.
She and her team realised there was an ageing workforce, so they worked with a sector skills council to design a youth training scheme (or YTS), a kind of semi-apprenticeship first introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1983 (and sometimes criticised that they amounted to cheap labour for employers).
But soon ASM – later sold to Quantica Training – was running the largest contract in London for apprenticeships.
Then in 2009 Hay went solo, starting her own provider, Outsource Training and Development.
Again, she showed a flair for business. Focusing on apprenticeships for the aviation sector, the company expanded to 140 staff and worked with British Airways, Virgin and easyJet.
It taught about 800 learners annually, according to Hay, and in 2016 she sold the business for £3 million to Seetec Group (now Seetec Outsource). She stayed for three years, before being headhunted in 2019 for her current role as chief operating officer at Estio Training, a sub-contractor of Seetec Outsource that she knew well.
Interestingly, Estio Training, which specialises in digital apprenticeships, was bought by BPP education group in 2021 – which is the only training provider to hold university status, says Hay. It means the provider can offer apprenticeships from level 2 to level 7.
“They’re really unique – it’s really exciting. With the future, there’s obviously a massive focus on higher level skills,” she says, before adding: “But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten my roots, and how important it is we have level 2 programmes available.”
Hay receiving her MBE from Prince Charles
Now, big policy challenges are on Hay’s plate. She’s worried about the impact of the pandemic on apprenticeship starts, and the fact that small and medium-sized enterprise sector have “disengaged” from the apprenticeship levy, because of the “clunky” digital accounts they must use.
This in turn is impacting on ITPs, who try to sort the issues “on behalf of SMEs,” says Hay. It’s not sustainable, so AELP will be “lobbying to make the digital account simplified for SMEs to use”.
Other priorities include lobbying the DfE to ensure its review of level 2 and below qualifications (the deadline for responses is April 27) does not “negatively impact on sectors, or on opportunities for learners”.
Another interesting point she makes is about the ITP market (already slimmed down on the adult education budget last year by almost 60 per cent).
Overall, she says, 80 per cent of ITPs are currently grade 1 or 2 under Ofsted – for colleges it is 81 per cent (however, almost double the proportion of colleges hit a grade 1: 18 per cent as opposed to ten per cent of ITPs).
But Hay warns: “When the market was opened up under the apprenticeship levy, a lot more providers entered the market. If you split out the new providers from the existing providers, you’d see there’s really high quality with the existing providers operating in that space, which has been a bit distorted with some of the new providers coming in.”
This seems to be backed by the data. Ofsted’s annual report showed that 24 per cent of providers that had a new provider monitoring visit in 2020-21 had at least one ‘insufficient’ judgment. While not strictly comparable, that’s much higher than the three per cent of ITPs to receive an ‘inadequate’ overall judgment for full inspections.
Just this year chief inspector Amanda Spielman said, “We would be very keen to see that proportion decrease, and ideally disappear.”
So what’s to be done? Hay says AELP will support all members to improve, but adds “sometimes it’s about exiting that provider out of the market”.
It’s admirable honesty.
However, as with many ITP bosses, Hay remains fundamentally frustrated at “the lack of recognition for the good work of ITPs” by the DfE and media, who she says focus on colleges (one whole section in AELP’s latest report is called “inequitable treatment”).
There’s a lack of recognition for the good work of ITPs
But there is an important point to press back at AELP here. FE Week has sent out various round robin missives to ITP bosses, as well as college bosses, asking for contributions to its ‘Staffroom’ column and podcast. College leaders usually reply enthusiastically, putting forward staff and students to discuss tricky topics, often within a day.
But with a couple of exceptions, ITPs FE Week has contacted have largely said they either cannot think of anyone to put forward, or have not replied. Similarly, FE Week has requested sector data from AELP that it does not have, while the Association of Colleges has its equivalent.
A charity walk across the Sahara in aid of the Lupus UK charity
However FE Week understands most independent training providers do not have large dedicated marketing and communications teams, making press responses at short notice challenging. This does not, of course, indicate a lack of interest in doing so from providers!
Hay also says she wants to “get ministers to understand independent training providers better”. Yet she got her well-deserved MBE for improving the lives of learners through her job centre and school initiatives.
If ITPs start banging on about learners, rather than themselves, I suspect they will be listened to more often. Having an important message to shout is a lot more powerful than asking to be taken notice of.
It’s a challenge I will leave with Hay. Ultimately, it’s clear that AELP have a super-competent pair of hands at the wheel.
Whatever suggestions she gives the DfE about apprenticeships, they’d be fools not to listen.
Combined authorities might favour ‘bricks and mortar’ provision so training providers need to be ready, writes Jane Hickie
On Thursday next week, large parts of the country will get to vote in this year’s local elections. Many areas will elect their councillors, and in South Yorkshire there will also be a metro mayor election.
While most people are aware that local government is responsible for delivering a range of our local services, we sometimes forget that councillors and mayors are also in charge of a growing amount of post-16 education.
More devolved powers to come
In recent years, there has been more political will to devolve skills policy and funding decisions to local and combined authorities.
This means – at least in theory – that those making decisions about skills provision understand the needs of local learners and labour markets.
We currently have ten devolved city regions across England, each with a directly elected mayor.
Every area has a different ‘devo deal’, meaning varying powers and funding, but all share the commonality of control over the devolved Adult Education Budget (AEB).
This is significant funding for adult skills to the combined tune of £788 million per year, and city regions are in line for more powers, as the government reveals more about its plans for ‘levelling up’ the UK.
The recently published levelling-up white paper sets out plans for every part of England – that wants one – to have a devolution deal in place by 2030.
At least nine more areas are expected to announce devolution deals by the autumn.
This would take the percentage of AEB devolved locally from around 60 per cent to 80 per cent. This in turn casts significant doubt on whether there will ever be an Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA)-led procurement on AEB again.
After last year’s farce, this is perhaps welcome news for many training providers.
What’s the landscape?
In line with ambitions in the white paper, even more skills policy and funding is heading local. Local and combined authorities have just been informed of their allocations for delivering the £270 million for the Multiply programme, which is due to come in from spring this year.
Furthermore, a high proportion of the £1.6 billion national skills fund – including free level 3 adult qualifications and skills bootcamps – is now in the hands of combined authority commissioners, many of whom are already undertaking commissioning exercises.
Despite limited details, we do know that local areas will be administrating the £2.6 billion UK shared prosperity fund.
In short, there are now billions of pounds of skills funding in the hands of local and regional decision-makers – funding that was previously controlled by the ESFA.
Risks and rewards for training providers
It’s clear that there are some risks to further devolution. A diverse approach to commissioning can mean that providers are having to bid for multiple different funding pots, each with different nuances compared to a centralised and uniform system.
There is also the age-old issue of combined authorities favouring ‘bricks and mortar’ provision in localities, putting national providers at a disadvantage in certain areas.
But there are also some great examples of best practice in devolved commissioning. Tees Valley Combined Authority has adopted a 100 per cent commissioning model, treating colleges, local authorities and independent training providers (ITPs) with parity.
However, many others tend to commission in a similar way to the ESFA – with far too much AEB going straight to grant-funded providers, and the scraps being commissioned or subbed out to ITPs.
Regardless of how any of us feels about skills devolution, the horse has well and truly bolted the stable and training providers should be fully aware of the opportunities and challenges that devolution brings.
There is a great opportunity here to demonstrate what they can offer learners and employers up and down the country.
Without doubt, local government now has significant powers to make decisions that reflect the needs of local communities.
So, when we go to vote next Thursday, we should remember it’s not just bin collections, potholes and libraries at stake – but our local skills priorities too.
The Department for Education spent more than £11,000 on canapés and booze for the launch event of its climate change strategy – but civil servants were barred from the buffet.
Nadhim Zahawi launched his education sustainability vision – which included a new natural history GCSE – at the Natural History Museum on Thursday evening last week.
Attendees included adventurer Bear Grylls and Doug Gurr, the museum’s director. While the museum waived its fee for hosting the event, the DfE had to cover catering for the 200 to 250 guests, a spokesperson said.
Taste Studios, trading as “The Recipe”, was given a £11,480 contract to provide the food – about £46 a head. Taste describes itself as a “premium caterer” for “some of the largest and most prestigious events” in London.
Canapés listed on its website include seared duck breast served on sweet potato polenta cake, decorated with comfit cherries.
Or rolled wing of skate with summer truffle stuffing and crispy celeriac sticks. The government said it had to use a caterer from the museum’s list of accredited suppliers.
Staff were “asked not to eat or drink [at] the event” as they were there for work and not as invitees. The Civil Service Code says officials must carry out their “fiduciary obligations responsibly”, making sure public money is used “properly and efficiently”.
The launch “brought together individuals and organisations who can help us implement our strategy in order to galvanise support from them – whether through funding, resources, driving public support and awareness, or encouraging youth engagement”, said a spokesperson.
The government has been on a money-saving mission in schools and colleges – sending in experts to help leaders cut costs. One adviser told a school in 2019 to limit lunch portions for pupils.
Colleges are encouraging more men to work flexibly and are overhauling recruitment imagery to attract more women into better-paid teaching roles to try and tackle gender pay gaps.
An analysis of gender pay data by FE Week shows the gap at most of England’s colleges is narrowing but that it will take 15 years to close completely at current rates of progress.
While the gender pay gap has improved on average at most colleges, sector leaders have said the rate of change is too slow.
Out of a sample of 147 colleges, the difference in median hourly pay between men and women went from 16 per cent in 2020/2021 to 15 per cent in 2021/2022.
Catina Barrett, from the Women’s Leadership Network, told FE Week that colleges must not “just keep rolling the same approach” if the situation is to be improved.
“It’s fair enough to say it may take several years to make a significant difference. But if you’re saying it will take several years and we do one percentage point a year, that is not good enough,” she said.
‘Disproportionate’ percentage of women in lower-paid part-time roles
Out of FE Week’s sample of 147 colleges, Kendal College in the Lake District reported the highest gender pay gap for difference in hourly rate (median) at 60.4 per cent.
When comparing median hourly wages, women at the college earned 39.6 pence for every £1 that men earned. Furness College in Cumbria had the second highest gap (36.6 per cent).
Kendal College said the median figure for female staff is significantly lower due to the fact they have a higher proportionate number of female staff employed as classroom learning assistants, cafe assistants and cleaning assistants.
They added that many of these roles are part-time contracts, and each employment is counted separately in the median comparison.
“Part of the pay gap issue we face is that we have made many roles increasingly family friendly and flexible which has attracted a disproportionate percentage of women into the lower-paid part-time roles which fit around other commitments,” Kendal’s principal Kelvin Nash told FE Week.
“The dominance of women in these roles is, from our analysis, due to the unequal shares of caring work in the home done by men and women, resulting in women doing more part-time work, which in comparison with full-time jobs have a lower hourly median pay.”
Nash told FE Week the college is taking the “positive steps” required to change the imbalance, such as proactively advertising vacancies for women in higher paid roles, such as management, science, engineering and construction.
Furness College, where women earned 63.4 pence for every pound earned by men, said its lowest quartile is primarily made up of cleaning and catering staff, roles that many organisations outsource and therefore do not include in their gender pay gap reporting.
These roles at Furness are currently 84 per cent female-staffed, and “this is primarily the reason for our gender pay gap, which we are working hard to address”.
The college added that outsourcing their cleaning and catering staff would bring the college’s gender pay gap under national and sector benchmarks.
“Lots of colleges find that median and mean isn’t very helpful to them,” Catina Barrett told FE Week.
“So, they all blame childcare, women wanting to work part time, women only wanting to work term time, those kinds of things.
“If there’s an issue, it is about how they’re organising part-time working, and then they’re running a whole raft of vacancies. They need to look at that practice, not on what’s wrong with the data reporting… because other organisations will equally have a workforce that has women in it, and they don’t say that it’s distorted in the same way.”
Tackling the gap
Kendal College said it has made it easier for men to opt for part-time and flexible roles, in a bid to tackle the gender pay gap.
“Opening up traditionally male roles within the college to flexible working has encouraged more women to work in them, and in turn, more men to switch to part time,” said Nash.
“This is working, in that we have in place, for example, part-time female managers building careers around other responsibilities, and a growing number of males in part-time and lower-paid jobs.”
Kendal College has also introduced a pay award for 2021/22 that they claim has reduced the differential.
All staff on minimum wage were paid a six per cent increase, with other staff receiving a three per cent increase. As the majority of staff on minimum wage are women, the pay increase of six per cent helped close the gender pay gap.
Hartlepool College, who had the joint third highest gender pay gap in FE Week’s sample, along with West Nottinghamshire College, at 35 per cent, said it is doing all it can to recruit and select females into teaching roles, especially in construction and engineering.
“In addition, in recent years extra pay has gone to those performing valuable roles on lower pay scales,” a spokesperson told FE Week.
Fluctuation in the gap
Government data showed significant fluctuation in the gender pay gap at some colleges.
FE Week analysis found that 73 colleges were able to close their gender pay gap between 2020/2021 and 2021/2022.
However, 59 colleges saw their gender pay gap increase. There was no change at 15 colleges.
The largest increases seen were at Bath College – where the difference in median hourly pay went from 3.9 per cent in 2020/2021 to a gap of 15.1 per cent in 2021/2022.
And Stoke on Trent College, which had no gender pay gap in 2020/2021, had a gap of nine per cent in 2021/2022.
FE Week contacted both colleges for comment but did not get a response.
By contrast, NCG told FE Week that their gender pay gap reduced from 42.9 per cent to 13.3 per cent and has reduced by a further 1.2 percentage point in the last reporting period to 12.1 per cent, although this data differs from what is on the government’s gender pay gap website.
Joe McGraw, director of people and development at NCG, told FE Week that over the past two years the organisation has reduced its gender pay gap by implementing a number of “positive changes”, including a commitment to paying the living wage to all their colleagues.
“We are continuing to standardise our pay structure and criteria for pay progression from entry point to career progression and implement a role-profiling system to develop an equitable salary and benefit structure,” he said.
“As part of this, we undertake a continuous equal pay audit to ensure our pay system delivers equal pay across like-for-like roles regardless of gender.”
Employers keeping score stops lesson observations from being a real development opportunity, writes Neil Jones
Lesson observation at our college used to be regarded as an annual hurdle to jump. For less confident teachers (and I mean confidence here in the context of doing their job whilst having someone observing and judging their work) it could be a source of great anxiety.
Every department had a week when the observation team would observe one lesson for each teacher and everyone knew that these observations would be graded: from the hallowed and rarely achieved grade 1, to the dreaded and rarely awarded grade 4.
Most people would acquire a grade 2 if the lesson had generally gone well, or a grade 3 if it hadn’t gone quite so well. Not much was learnt about teaching in the process.
With the arrival of a new senior management team from 2015, we reviewed this process and changed it to something more developmentally focused. We knew people’s attitudes wouldn’t change instantly; it would be a gradual change of culture over two or three years.
We stopped grading any observations and announced that the process was to be entirely focused on a developmental conversation about the complex craft of teaching. We wanted to break down the psychological barriers that prevented teachers from seeing lesson observation as a positive opportunity.
I don’t mean to make light of these barriers. If you know that your employer keeps a list of your scores each year in an annual one-off test of your abilities, it’s no surprise that you would see this as a threat rather than an opportunity.
After three years, we could see that things had definitely opened up. We had also invested in some self-observation equipment and a few course teams were now embracing the opportunity to record themselves and share clips with each other on a chosen aspect of pedagogy for their subject.
After three years, we could see things had opened up
I attended a chemistry staff team meeting where they discussed their observations about how team members were teaching practical experiments. The room was abuzz with positive thinking: the developmental ethos was thriving.
Then came Covid and the lockdowns. In the space of a few weeks, we moved to a new version of teaching and learning delivered remotely via Microsoft Teams. The technology seemed so ready for the needs of the situation ̶ we just needed to be ready to use that technology!
As everyone embarked upon a crash course in digital teaching and learning, performed live to their students’ screens, we quickly realised that people were evaluating, sharing and developing their craft on an almost daily basis.
Lesson observation week was one thing we therefore removed from the annual calendar to lessen the list of tasks for teachers and heads of department.
Now that we are tentatively breathing post-lockdown air, and everyone is getting back to working ‘normally’, we have reinstated lesson observation. We have returned to the menu of choices for departments: self-observations using Teams, paired observations in courses, across courses in departments, or across different departments.
It’s a mark of how much people now view lesson observation as a positive opportunity to develop our craft that four different departments have gone straight to observing in completely different subject areas.
As people are freed up from concerns with subject specific knowledge, they find they can concentrate on all the minute moments of finely crafted communication that construct an exciting and challenging learning experience for 22 diverse students.
Our answer is that we achieve that assurance through the processes that record our developmental culture.
We know that our colleagues want to develop themselves as teachers. We expect that they record any ideas they have had from observing or being observed in their end-of-year review with their line-manager. These in turn will be gathered together into their department’s action plan for the following year.
So the process is indeed tracked from a management perspective.
But its foundation stone is the understanding that hard-working colleagues want to develop themselves and their craft in one of the most difficult and rewarding jobs in the world.
Ofsted last week unveiled a new five-year strategy with two key areas of focus for FE: to review that it has the right inspection model given the “complexity and diversity” of the sector, and to assess all colleges on how well they meet local skills needs.
So what changes can providers expect to see when Ofsted comes knocking? FE Week sat down with the watchdog’s deputy director for FE and skills Paul Joyce to find out.
Q. How will inspections differ when Ofsted assesses how well colleges meet skills needs?
A. This is something that we’ve been asked to do by the Department for Education to support the reforms detailed in the skills bill.
So from September, we will be conducting enhanced inspections of colleges. That’s going to involve inspectors evaluating the contribution the college makes to meeting skills needs. This is an extension to inspection activities already undertaken by the education inspection framework (EIF), rather than something completely new.
Inspectors are going to spend more time examining a wider range of evidence to see how well leaders and managers engage with key stakeholders and establish skills needs, and the actions they then take with their curriculum.
Q. What new evidence will inspectors look at, and will this result in a separate judgment in reports?
A. Expectations will increase over time. You’ll be aware of things like local skills improvement plans (LSIPs) and accountability agreements that are mentioned in the skills bill. So we will be using things like that. And we will be speaking with a wider range of stakeholders to see how well the college meets with, talks to, understands local skills needs, and importantly, what they do to adapt their curriculum or working collaboration with other providers to address those identified skills needs.
All college inspections from September will be full inspections and we will be increasing the number of inspectors that go to those colleges by an additional two inspectors.
The skills need judgment won’t be a main EIF judgment. We will be making a worded judgment within the inspection report, and there will be a section in the report about how well the college does meet skills needs. But it won’t result in a separate report or grade.
Q. Why will independent training providers not receive skills needs assessments?
A. We’ve been asked to do this by the DfE because of the skills bill. And in the skills bill, this duty for a college to meet skills needs, the duty and legislation does only apply to colleges, sixth-form colleges and specialist designated institutions. So the duty in law does not apply to independent training providers, for example. Whether it will in the future or not is something for the government to consider.
Q. Are Ofsted inspectors best placed to judge whether a college is meeting the skills needs of the economy? Do they have the expertise?
A. That is a good point and it’s why we’ve been involved in discussions about how we do this with DfE for quite a while, and why we’ve run a number of pilots.
You are quite right to say inspectors are not economists, and it is extremely unlikely that a single college will meet all of the skills needs of an area. So we’ve been very clear to the DfE in terms of what it is possible to do through inspection and what it isn’t possible to do through inspection.
Through our piloting, the judgment that we will actually make is not whether the college is or is not meeting skills needs, but we can make a judgment about how well college leaders and managers are engaging with key stakeholders to try and understand what skills needs there are. And as a result of whatever they identify, what it is they are doing to address those skills needs.
So that’s a slightly different way of coming about it, rather than an inspector determining what the skills needs are, which we’re not able to do. What we’re looking at doing is finding out how well leaders and managers talk to people, whether they’re talking to the right stakeholders, and what they’re doing based on the information they receive, and obviously inspection and inspectors are able to do that.
Q. Ofsted’s strategy also said the watchdog will review whether it has the right model of inspection, given the “complexity and diversity of provision” in FE, and the size of some providers. FE’s complexity and diversity has been well known for years. What has changed recently for Ofsted to realise it might need to adapt its inspection model to reflect this?
A. You’re right ̶ FE has always been diverse and complex. But with the skills bill, the various qualification reforms, other things that are happening, we need to make sure our inspection model keeps pace with that.
With policies like T Levels, skills bootcamps, higher technical qualifications ̶ they’ve all been relatively recent additions to the landscape since the introduction of the EIF. This review is just to make sure that our inspection practice and reporting does keep pace with the changes.
Q. What changes are on the table?
A. The main commitment here is to review what we do, how we do it and how we report on it. That’s not to say that anything will change. I’ve got no fixed views of what needs to change. For me, this is about will it be helpful and useful to write specific things about T Levels and skills bootcamps, for example, rather than write as we do now about education programmes for young people.
Q. Campus-level inspections for large college groups have been on the cards for years – could this be introduced as part of this review?
A. Certainly, as part of the review, a look at how we inspect and report multi-sited provision will be part of that. I wouldn’t want to commit now to say that we are going to report on individual campuses. We’ll certainly want to explore whether that is something we ought to be doing.
The campus-level inspection argument really has evolved somewhat since it was first mentioned because of devolution and moves to greater local accountability. We want to make sure that however we inspect, or however we report, is the best for the user group. Whether that’s campus-level or a different response, it’s yet to be determined.
Q. The strategy is silent on areas that were thought to be priorities for the inspectorate, such as apprenticeships and prison education. Why?
A. If we were to list everything that we are going to do within the strategy, it would be a very, very long document. I assure you that whilst we specifically mentioned skills needs, apprenticeships, for example, prison education, for example, are key topics. They are woven through the different priorities in our strategy, although they may well not be mentioned by name. But there’s no deliberate omission.
