To understand what is preventing further and higher education institutions from becoming green campuses, we gathered opinions from more than 130 FE and HE representatives and 1,000 16- to 19-year-olds planning on applying to college or university. We also spoke to universities and colleges at different stages of their green journey.
Our research revealed that 2 in 5 (42%) FE and HE institutions are not confident or do not know whether they will meet the government’s goal of a 78 per cent reduction in emissions by 2035 compared to 1990 levels.
That so many institutions predict falling short is worrying. They face issues in common and understanding these is key to supporting them. For 77%, finance is the primary barrier, while 42% struggle to deliver renewable energy campus-wide and almost a third (31 per cent) blame a resistance to change within the institution.
The technology doesn’t come cheap, and with college funding notoriously constrained over the past decade, FE needs to look at alternative capital options. Most public sector government incentives are aimed at social housing and local authorities but government support is available. There are also sustainable lending options and strategic advice from banks, including private placement funding, the public sector decarbonisation scheme grant and the green heat network fund.
These funding options may change if the ONS, as is widely expected, reclassifies colleges as public sector bodies. This will result in additional budgeting and consent requirements, complicating matters. Colleges will likely need to compete for funds with other parts of the public sector, making it even more important to develop a clear and compelling case for green investment.
There are very few carbon neutral or net-zero campuses
In our latest report, Building a Green Campus – what’s stopping institutions?, we explore further options for colleges including case studies of institutions that have delivered part of their green strategy using these devices.
Deadlines loom but there are few easy-to-find examples of carbon neutral or net-zero campuses. Indeed, there isn’t even a standardised definition of a green campus.
However we have developed a definition, and given the significant undertaking to achieve this status we have proposed a badge for ‘emerging green campuses’ in acknowledgement of those who are en route .
This formal recognition matters. Indeed, 79% of prospective students want institutions to have clear strategies for tackling climate change. But there’s a mismatch in priorities; less than half (48 per cent) of institutions think factoring climate change into decision making is important to prospective students.
Our research also shows that solutions lie in cross-institutional activities such as leadership and management, teaching and learning, research and innovation, and services and facilities. In short, co-ordinating and implementing green campuses requires a common, cohesive goal for the whole institution.
One campus making good progress on its net-zero journey is Gloucestershire College: in 2022, it converted its Gloucester and Cheltenham campuses to fully renewable energy. The campuses host 4,500 solar panels from which it plans to sell excess energy back to the grid. With battery storage also on campus, the college is able to purchase cheap power to hold in reserve when daylight hours are shorter or during peak times. The project is expected to have paid for itself in about six years.
Sustainability targets cannot be achieved overnight. Transparency and collaboration within and between institutions and partners such as lenders, lawyers and consultants could be the key to unlocking the sector’s potential for green campuses.
But to make a real difference, sustainability cannot simply be delegated to estates or sustainability managers. It must run through every aspect of strategy, and its appeal to young people can be just the incentive to put it there.
At a recent roundtable discussion hosted by the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) in partnership with Qube Learning, my co-panellists and I discussed how decreasing opportunities for level 2 candidates in further education will compromise the levelling up agenda and force some learning providers to close due to funding shortages and poor policy making.
The discussion, chaired by AELP’s director of policy, Simon Ashworth and including employer representatives from the healthcare and retail sectors, highlighted the extent to which funding cuts, functional skills grade requirements and lack of flexibility will also impact on staff retention.
That the government has remained committed to boosting apprenticeship achievement rates to 67 per cent by 2025 is to be welcomed. However, the cut in level 2 opportunities is a serious setback and will totally undermine this goal.
The withdrawal of this funding is undoubtedly an increasing concern: many employers rely heavily on the apprenticeship levy, so any reductions or removal would place participating businesses and the apprenticeships they offer in jeopardy.
The continuing squeeze on funding and the government’s view of level 2 provision need further attention to ensure learners and employers are offered the right choice of programmes. While we are not against devolution, higher level or degree apprenticeships, there must be a clear pathway to allow all learners to progress in their education and career and to access these routes.
Qube Learning has used single units funded through the adult education budget to allow employers to meet their priorities and help get people into work, with very high achievement rates. However, last summer many of these units were no longer funded impacting on delivery for the initial two months of this contract year.
Many school leavers now lack the skills for a level 3 apprenticeship
Everyone on the panel agreed wholeheartedly that many school leavers are now leaving secondary education with lower-level qualifications and lacking the skills needed to be accepted on a level 3 apprenticeship. This highlights even further the need for level 2 placements, without which a vital pathway to career progression can be closed.
Maths in particular has become a real challenge, because it is not currently being tailored to the apprentice roles which candidates are applying for. This means that if some employers remove level 2 apprentices altogether, then many school leavers will be locked out of careers that they could have excelled in.
Meanwhile, the current economic climate means employers are understandably even more preoccupied with costs and budgets. This means it is all the more imperative that we are able to meet candidates where they are and progress them from there.
But even among those who are able to start at level 3, doing so without the basic skills covered at level 2 only creates a greater risk of dropping out. So not only are employers essentially being forced to reduce (or even totally remove) level 2 apprenticeships because funding has either been withdrawn or is too opaque to access, but the policy is bound to increase risk-averse decisions about who is accepted at level 3.
Non-regulated provision and single-unit funding gave providers the opportunity to agree the types of people, skills and knowledge they needed with employers, and we saw a greater return on achievement as a result.
So the problem is not solely lack of provision at level 2, but the policy around it. For example, reductions to funding bands have a knock-on effect for other issues such as end-point assessment charges. Where funding bands have been reduced, some providers have gone out of business.
Last week’s autumn statement had precious little to offer the further education and skills sector, but levelling up remains a priority. A transformation of jobs and skills is evidently a central aspiration for Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt.
To deliver that promise, this new government must seriously reconsider the lack of funding and provision for level 2 apprenticeships and streamline the policy surrounding them.
This isn’t just a question of avoiding damage to their own political vision and agenda. More importantly, it’s an urgent matter of insulating young learners from the life-limiting damage of becoming NEET and of protecting the economy from more damage from skills shortages and unemployment.
As the cost-of-living crisis has gathered pace, affecting homes and businesses alike, all eyes have been on government for support and solutions. Yet the commitment to a further £2.3 billion for schools in 2023 and 2024 was one of only a few bright spots to come out of the autumn statement.
Schools are the crucial foundations of essential, academic, practical and lifelong learning; they provide the socialisation, civic responsibility and world knowledge every child needs. They build an infrastructure of knowledge, skills and behaviour, so that when a learner is preparing for their next steps, they have had the best start possible. Our schools do amazing work and have been under-funded for many years.
I fully concur with Mr Hunt: ‘pro-education is pro-growth’. The best teaching, learning and experiences are essential to ensuring that we have a workforce ready and able to take on the roles of the future, taking us out of recession and ushering in a return to economic growth.
But with no mention of skills or colleges in the announcements, how will we ensure young people and adults have the highest quality technical and vocational training to drive productivity to that end?
Further education has benefitted from significant capital funding projects in the past few years – over £400 million’s worth – to ensure that fit-for-purpose buildings and modern learning facilities, in line with industry standards, are in place to deliver the newly introduced government T level qualifications, higher technical qualifications and apprenticeships. But while essential, a focus on buildings, resources and equipment simply isn’t enough.
Funding rates for 16- to 18-year-olds are 11 per cent lower than they were in 2010 and adult funding is half what it was ten years ago. Yet the costs of delivering have increased, and with inflation now clearing 11 per cent these will continue to soar. Bus trips, subsistence, materials, technology, resources – everything has gone up.
Delivery of economic growth comes at a cost and that cost is increasing
According to Julian Gravatt of the Association of Colleges, between 2015 and 2025 spending on schools will have grown by 51 per cent, higher education student outlays by 71 per cent, yet further education by 25 per cent. Over the same period inflation will have risen by 45 per cent.
Teesside, which my college group serves, is home to Europe’s largest brownfield site, ‘Teesworks’. A freeport with inward investors lining up and some breaking ground now, Teesworks is lined up to become a cradle for the UK’s renewable energy industries and technologies.
There are plans for the site to bring thousands of skilled jobs and regeneration to the area – precisely the ‘levelling up’ and opportunities for social mobility we all wish for. So it’s vital, alongside this incredible repurposing of heritage industries, that skills and the successful colleges and providers which provide them are included in government investment plans.
I do not want to take anything away from the schools who so deserve the increase in funding that they have been allocated. And I am extremely grateful for the financial investment my college group has received in recent years from the government. But I would call upon the chancellor to reflect on the funding of further education.
It would be encouraging to see education discussed as a whole in such announcements, with a closer focus on the various learning provisions that make up our education system, and inclusion of further education as a separate entity.
Further education works with industry to build curriculum to deliver knowledge and skills aligned to the jobs of the future. We work with employers to ensure learners have access to the best work experience and industry placements to support them in developing the attitudes and behaviours of the workplace. And we work with other providers to ensure that the local offer is inclusive and fit for the demands of the local community.
Colleges, sixth forms and training providers collaborate to support the delivery of economic growth – but this comes at a cost, and that cost is increasing.
Pro-education is indeed pro-growth, but we must be pro-entire-education, ensuring there is a sustainable strategy for post-16 education through and beyond this recession.
Gillian Keegan has rehashed the government’s previous skills investment pledges after FE was ignored in the chancellor’s education funding boost last week.
The education secretary wrote to the whole education sector today and claimed that Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement “underlined the government’s commitment to education as he seeks to restore stability to the economy”.
Despite the autumn statement not mentioning the word “colleges” once, Keegan said it was “great to hear him [Hunt] acknowledge the massive contribution our heads, teachers and classroom assistants make to our national life and his statement reinforces our mission to drive up standards and give every child or learner an excellent education”.
The autumn statement announced that schools will receive £2 billion in extra funding in each of the next two years, which is the “biggest injection of funding ever”, allows schools to return to at least 2010 levels in real terms, and is “what the sector said it needed”.
The only announcement for FE was the appointment of Sir Michael Barber as a new adviser to the government on skills.
Keegan offered no explanation as to why FE and skills received no additional funding like schools.
Instead, she reminded the sector today: “We are already investing an additional £3.8 billion in skills in England over this Parliament, including high-quality technical education for 16 to 19-year-olds and boosting opportunities for adults to upskill.”
She added that the nation currently has 1,255,000 vacancies, so “we need to upskill, train and retrain to ensure business needs are met and more people realise their potential”, adding that reforms including T Levels, higher technical qualifications, skills bootcamps and degree apprenticeships are all being rolled out to this effect.
Keegan said the lifelong loan entitlement, set to be introduced from 2025, will also “mark a profound shift in the way students of all ages can obtain funding for further and higher education”.
She concluded: “I would like to echo the chancellor’s comments and thank all of you, across the education sectors, for your tremendous efforts. His comments underline our belief that education is an engine of growth and social change.”
Colleges in the fifth wave of the T Level rollout are being invited to bid for a slice of £150 million to help upgrade their facilities and purchase specialist kit.
The capital fund, which reopened today, is being made available to those that will offer the new technical qualifications from 2024. It follows previous funds that totalled £38 million for wave one, £95 million for wave two, £135 million for wave three, and £150 million for wave four.
There are two parts to the fund:
the building and facilities improvement grant (BFIG) which providers need to bid for
the specialist equipment allocation which is awarded using a formula allocation
The specialist equipment allocation is a payment available to all T Level providers when they begin delivery of a T Level route for the first time. In waves one, two and three the allocation was based on the number of students a provider expected to have in the fourth year of T Level delivery.
Providers delivering T Level routes for the first time in academic year 2023 to 2024 are eligible for wave four specialist equipment allocation funding. DfE will allocate funding based on the October 2022 T Level data collection.
To receive the specialist equipment allocation for the 2024 to 2025 academic year, new providers must have registered to deliver T Levels by midnight on 24 March 2023.
New and continuing T Level providers delivering T Level routes for the first time will be eligible to receive funding if they complete the May 2023 and October 2023 T Level data collections, today’s guidance said, adding: “You need to confirm projected student numbers for the first 4 years of delivery of the T Level route, starting with the 2024 to 2025 academic year.”
Providers must bid for the BFIG by 12 noon on February 3, 2023. This grant is not available for independent training providers.
Skills, apprenticeships and higher education minister Robert Halfon said: “T Levels are the new gold standard for technical education and this funding pot of over £150 million will help to ensure that providers have the world-class facilities they need to deliver top quality courses.
“I’d encourage T Level providers to bid so they can extend the ladder of opportunity to more young people looking to gain the skills and workplace experience to forge successful careers.”
The first three T Levels – the technical equivalent to A-levels – in construction, digital and education and childcare were launched in September 2020.
A further seven were made available from 2021 in subjects including health, science and onsite construction and subjects including finance, media and legal will be introduced from 2022 and 2023.
All providers, including those judged ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’ by Ofsted, will be able to offer any of the 23 T Levels available from 2024. The last T Level, in marketing, will be available for all providers to deliver from 2025.
As previously revealed by FE Week, colleges will have to keep on running T Levels for at least 20 years if they want to avoid handing back the millions they will receive in capital funding.
An ‘inadequate’ specialist college has been criticised again by inspectors for “overstretched leaders” failing to improve its teaching and curriculum.
Trustees of the London-based The Michael Tippett College were found not to have been given “secure” assessments of the quality of teaching and leaders lack enough expertise in SEND education to improve, according to a monitoring visit published today.
The college made “insufficient progress” in three of the four areas examined by Ofsted eight months after a damning full inspection found that safeguarding, education, personal development and leadership and management were all ‘inadequate’.
Perry Vlachos, the acting head of Michael Tippett College, has been the sixth college leader in seven years.
Vlachos explained that if the college fails to make improvements by the next Ofsted inspection, expected in early 2023, this could trigger a review of funding arrangements by the ESFA.
Today’s monitoring visit did find ‘reasonable progress’ on improvements to safeguarding after the previous inspection found that students were being tube fed and medicated in classrooms in front of their peers and staff.
Policies have been rewritten to be “fit for purpose” and leaders have taken “appropriate action to rectify the specific issue noted at the previous inspection regarding learners’ dignity when using feeding tubes” the monitoring visit report states.
The education watchdog praised staff, who treat learners with respect and have created a “calm and orderly environment”.
The college are currently receiving support from a college with an outstanding SEND provision, who are providing the leadership team with “expertise and experience to better personalise the curriculum to make it more fit for purpose for the students” he told FE Week.
Vlachos said they have not been able to recruit specialist SEND teachers or leaders because of uncertainty about the future of the college.
He says they have attempted to address the problems raised by Ofsted, who in turn have offered useful guidance on where the college has gone wrong.
Ofsted said that the trustees, leadership team and staff have worked “diligently to make improvements, but they are overstretched and continue to have insufficient expertise in the education of learners with SEND” to have an impact or bring about “rapid and sustained improvement.”
The report says the college has been unsuccessful in recruiting additional SEND expertise to their board, or any additional leadership capacity at all since the last inspection.
Inspectors said that the amount of time spent on improving safeguarding led to “limited” efforts to improve teaching. For example they found that “targets that teachers use are the same for all learners, regardless of their ability and prior knowledge and attainment”.
Teachers are not “adequately appraised” by leaders and do not properly integrate life skills into vocational subjects.
And inspectors found no comprehensive plan for the curriculum, noting that teachers “only plan one term at a time.”
The Michael Tippett College is an independent specialist college in Balham, south London, with 42 learners aged 19 to 25, which has struggled to achieve a good inspection since they opened in 2016.
At the time of the last inspection, Lambeth Council told FE Week that it was reviewing its relationship with the college, noting Ofsted’s “concerning findings.”
Executive Dean – Engineering, Digital and Sustainable Construction, University College Birmingham
Start date: November 2022
Previous Job: Executive Director, Solihull College and University Centre & Greater Birminghan & Solihull IoT Interesting fact: Rosa is a trained aerospace engineer and has taught all over the country from Inverness to Southampton.
Clair Hanson
Area Education Manager – Greater Manchester, WEA
Start date: November 2022
Previous Job: ESF Community Grants Project Organiser, WEA
Interesting fact: Clair was proud to become a first time graduate at the age of 40, which is why she is passionate about adult education and the WEA. She also runs an Instagram account tracking the adventures of her family pet, Bill the Chinchilla, at @marplechinchilla
Chris Payne
Managing Director, Acacia Training
Start date: October 2022
Previous Job: Chief Executive Officer, NEBOSH
Interesting fact: Chris once played the character Tony Manero in a local theatre production of Saturday Night Fever for charity
The head of a Bedfordshire college has resigned after more than a decade at the helm.
Ali Hadawi, principal at Central Bedfordshire College for 11 years, has handed in his notice and is due to leave his post at the end of the month.
A statement from the college said: “The board is grateful for his contribution and many achievements whilst in post, and he leaves with our best wishes for the future.”
The establishment confirmed that Sarah Mortimer, the college’s vice-principal for more than a decade, will be acting principal and accountable officer.
The college added: “Central Bedfordshire College is currently in the process of a merger with The Bedford College Group, therefore recruitment for the principal role as part of the merged structure will take place at a later stage.”
FE Week understands that Hadawi had been planning to leave at the end of January, but requested an early departure due to poor health.
The college’s merger with The Bedford College Group was announced in March, and planned to take effect in February 2023.
At the time of the announcement, Hadawi said it would allow the college to expand its offer of courses and boost learner numbers.
It had previously been eyeing a merger with Barnfield College several years ago, but negotiations collapsed in 2017.
Dr Michelle Meadows was second-in-command at Ofqual during the 2020 exams fiasco, a grading disaster that will echo for years to come. She reveals to Samantha Booth what happened behind closed doors …
Dr Michelle Meadows is used to a grading crisis. She helped to handle at least five that hit the headlines in her two-decade career at exam board AQA and qualifications regulator Ofqual.
But perhaps none was as big as the 2020 pandemic grading fiasco. As Ofqual’s deputy chief regulator until last year, Meadows was deeply involved in creating the unprecedented alternate awarding system for grades when exams were cancelled.
So much has been written about what went wrong: from government pressure for Ofqual to ensure grading standards were in line with previous years to communication failures and a lack of public trust in the regulator.
Meadows says that with hindsight it is “easy to say that was a policy mistake”. But Ofqual was being pushed to the limits of its remit as a regulator during 2020, with just four months to roll out the alternative plan.
“Ofqual stepped into a role that was not really what it was set up to do,” Meadows tells me from her University of Oxford office, where she is now an associate professor and course director of a masters in educational assessment.
On the other hand, she accepts Ofqual – and importantly government ministers – should have been out there “explaining, explaining, explaining”.
School reports were “pretty indifferent”
Born in the north west, Meadows describes herself as a “problem-solver”. Working in regulation was the dream as it’s “problem-solving on a day-to-day basis”.
For someone who ended up working in education, though, the 54-year-old admits her own academic performance at her comprehensive was “truly unremarkable”.
A younger Meadows (centre)
“If you look back at my school reports, they were pretty indifferent. I had a very ambivalent relationship with the whole business of being educated.”
But she was nevertheless put in the “upper” stream for O-levels, something she now questions “because there was no standardised assessment”.
After obtaining “average” O-levels, she did A-levels at Stockport College, also the alma mater of Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner.
One thing she did know from 13 was that she wanted to be a psychologist. She scraped two Cs to study at Hatfield Polytechnic in Hertfordshire and became the first person in her working-class family to go on to tertiary education.
Although psychology is hugely popular now at A-level (there was an 11 per cent rise in entries last year), it was an unusual choice in the 1980s. Her college didn’t even offer it as an option.
Her parents – a shorthand typist mother and electrician father – had both studied at technical colleges so going to university was a “mystery, but a serious thing”.
Her love of education really began at 19. She credits this, and a chance to retake A-levels, as her driver for “fairness and second chances” in life, adding: “I wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I had.”
“I feel very strongly that for the vast majority of students, how they do …. in terms of their qualifications, it’s just a reflection of them – a snapshot – at that point in time.”
After graduating, she worked as an assistant psychologist at St Mary’s Hospital in west London and completed a PhD in driver behaviour before unexpectedly helping to create the “blueprint” for the national speed awareness course in Lancashire.
She was perfectly happy working in academia, but wanted a “good chewy problem” and was hired as a senior researcher at the exam board AQA in 2002.
The first crisis in 2009
“I did not know what I was getting myself into at all really,” Meadows reflects, arriving to see staff exhausted from the demanding curriculum 2000 reforms on post-16 education.
Her first crisis came in 2009 when Ofqual, the new regulator in town, decided to lower grade boundaries in GCSE science at AQA, as grades couldn’t be aligned across the boards.
The second was in 2012 with grading the-then modular GCSE English, which led to a High Court judicial review by 150 schools, 42 councils and 167 pupils. Many received lower than expected results.
It boiled down to the qualifications structure, which the judge said was “the source of such unfairness”.
Meadows says the modular structure allowed some schools to do the exam in January and wait until June to take coursework. This meant some were “able to work out what mark their students needed to get the magic grade C”, which “broke the awarding process”, making grade boundaries higher than usual.
Meadows says at first it was difficult to spot what was causing the issue. But a bright researcher dug into the data and found huge spikes on grade boundaries for those schools that took the exams early.
Meadows thinks the Michael Gove reforms to linear GCSEs made sense as the qualification modules were too small, and the introduction of more grades through the 9-1 system gave more meaningful information on a student’s performance.
But she thinks it’s a “great shame” that AS courses are now fading away, narrowing post-16 study for some students.
“That fabulous feedback mechanism at the end of year one has now been removed,” she says, adding “a lot of people working in education would welcome” it back.
From exams are on to schools shutting…
Meetings began with exam boards and the Department for Education in early March 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was spiralling. Meadows had been promoted to deputy chief regulator, as well as overseeing the risk and research teams.
Early meetings were about how to spread out exams to mitigate any disruption.
“We were working out how to make exams work. Almost overnight we went from exams will go ahead in some form to, oh, schools are shut. It just proved impossible for exams to go ahead.”
At the outset of creating a standardisation model, Ofqual knew some grades would have to be downgraded with estimates of 30 per cent (which was similar to UCAS predicted grades).
While it worked to keep results in-line nationally, it was disastrous for many pupils.
In the end, almost 40 per cent of grades awarded by teachers were pulled down after going through the standardisation model.
Come results’ day, with pupils in tears on television over how their grades had been unfairly hauled down by this faceless regulator, Ofqual and ministers – who had made the decision to standardise grades – were forced to make a U-turn.
Consultation with the sector before drawing up the model was “incredibly positive”, but Meadows says there was a difference between “theoretical propositions and practical realities”.
“We knew it would be problematic and in our risk analysis we had identified a probability that the public wouldn’t accept these grades,” she says. “But having said that, we had four months to deliver something, so we were heads down trying to create the best possible model in no time whatsoever.”
Meadows says what was unexpected was the extent to which different schools and colleges would behave in “different ways”. Some tried to “pre-standardise” to try to reduce the chances of downgrading; others awarded many A* and As despite previously having a full range of grades.
“[Results day] took a massive toll because whatever we think about Ofqual I can hand on heart say they are good, earnest people trying to do the right thing. It felt like Ofqual was hated, that we were somehow incompetent or evil. Neither is fair at all.”
Meadows takes particular aim at a Daily Mail article on chief regulator Sally Collier, who resigned after the fiasco, as being “deeply unpleasant and personal”. The article included details of Collier’s marriage.
Collier is one of five chief regulators in Meadow’s seven years at Ofqual. “That is a lot of turnover, and I think speaks to the difficulty of doing the job. You can be guaranteed that within your three or five-year term, you’re going to have one big doozy of a crisis or you’re going to have something where you disagree with government.
“It makes it tremendously difficult. That’s a terrible shame as it puts experts off doing these jobs.”
Warning over T-Levels
A large part of Ofqual’s work is regulating vocational and technical qualifications. But this wasn’t always the case, Meadows says, as the regulator mainly focused on general qualifications when it launched.
“Now it’s totally transformed. The problem is regulation has to be risk-based – and there are 200 awarding organisations offering 18,000 VTQs and they are enormously disparate.
“You can’t have infinite resource to regulate all qualifications equally, you’ve got to make some difficult choices.”
While Meadows has “some sympathy” for the view the vocational landscape is too complex, she says the need to “really weed out” qualifications is “incredibly resource intensive”.
She worries “a lot of faith” is being placed in T Levels. “I would personally be treading very carefully and want to make gradual changes… which never fits the political cycle. There’s always a desperate desire to want to do things quickly and that’s understandable not just from a political perspective, but also if you believe that something isn’t working well, you want to fix it.”
