School and college system minister Baroness Barran will remain in post – seemingly completing the Department for Education’s ministerial line-up.

Barran, who founded domestic abuse awareness charity SaveLives, has survived all the recent reshuffles, meaning she will work under a fifth education secretary this year.

Barran’s appointment seems to complete the DfE’s ministerial line-up. Gillian Keegan is education secretary, Nick Gibb and Rob Halfon are ministers of state, and expected to take up the schools and skills roles respectively.

Claire Coutinho is a junior minister. That leaves the university brief, which did have its own minister but was recently made part of the skills minister’s portfolio.

Barran took on some responsibilities for post-16 education following Liz Truss’ reshuffle in September. These included education provision and outcomes for 16 to 19 year olds; college governance and accountability; intervention and financial oversight of further education colleges and reducing the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training.

Full briefs for the new ministerial team have not yet been confirmed.

Claire Coutinho, the MP for East Surrey, has been appointed as a minister at the Department for Education.

She was appointed as minister for disabled people just last month, and became an MP in 2019.

She will join the department as a junior minister. Coutinho work at investment bank Merrill Lynch and accounting firm KPMG before being elected to parliament. She’s also served as a special adviser at the Treasury.

She will join Nick Gibb, who FE Week understands will be named schools minister, and Robert Halfon, who is set to be named skills minister.

That means Coutinho is likely to replace Kelly Tolhurst, who was schools and children’s minister. 

Tolhurst tweeted that it had ”been a privilege to serve as Minister for Schools & Childhood. I have decided that now more than ever, with the challenges we face I want to focus on supporting & helping the people of Rochester & Strood, representing my constituents & businesses from the backbenches.”

New prime minister Rishi Sunak reportedly wants to reform post-16 education with a new ‘British Baccalaureate’.

So, what do we know about the policy, and how likely is it to come to fruition?

FE Week has all you need to know…

1. Compulsory English and maths to 18, but 🤷 on the rest

Calls for some sort of Baccalaureate to replace GCSEs or A-levels have been around for some time.

The National Baccalaureate Trust published detailed plans earlier this year which would see pupils study English and maths up to 18, but also personal development and research projects, such as the Duke of Edinburgh.

The EDSK think tank proposed a new three-year baccalaureate to replace A-levels, BTECs and T-levels. EDSK director Tom Richmond said if government was “serious about boosting technical education, it must end the political obsession with A-levels”.

Returning DfE minister Robert Halfon has also previously called for GCSEs and A-levels to be scrapped and replaced with one “holistic baccalaureate” for 18-year-olds which recognises academic and technical skills and personal development.

There isn’t much meat yet to the proposed Sunak policy. It was one of the policies he put forward during his failed leadership bid earlier this year.

Sunak said a new “British Baccalaureate” would require all pupils to continue to study core subjects like English and maths in sixth form.

When asked at the time, his campaign would not provide a full list of subjects.

Two problems: the government is already struggling to recruit enough maths teachers, so would have to come up with a plan to recruit more.

The second is cash: post-16 education has seen the largest funding cuts of all education areas.

The British Baccalaureate policy was one of the key proposals in the recent Times Education Commission, which called for a “broader academic and vocational qualifications at 18, with parity in funding per pupil in both routes, and a slimmed-down set of exams at 16 to bring out the best in every child”.

2. Plans part of vocational education push

The Times reported a Downing Street source saying Sunak believed if there were “one silver bullet in public policy” that would improve lives, it would be investment in education and skills. “This is an absolute priority for the prime minister,” the paper reported.

Rather than pumping more funding into existing and well established colleges and providers, Sunak supposedly wants a new network of ‘elite’ technical institutes to transform vocational training. This was an idea also favoured by Liz Truss.

But the focus is very much on putting vocational schooling at the forefront of policy, The Times added.

Former skills minister Gillian Keegan, who left school at 16 to do an apprenticeship, has been made education secretary to oversee the drive.

Before it was announced he would be returning as skills minister, Halfon told the Times the new baccalaureate would see students “have a much wider curriculum so they get the skills that they need and employers want”.

He said Sunak was “supportive of vocational education because he understands to improve productivity we have to improve skills”. Halfon has long called for a baccalaureate system to “ensure pupils can access skills and vocational education as well as academic learning”.

3. But there are big barriers: time, and Nick Gibb

A big stumbling block to introducing any new major education reforms is time – the current government essentially has two years tops to drive through changes before a general election.

The current students starting A-levels last month won’t finish their courses until the summer of 2024, so such reforms would almost certainly need longer.

This could potentially mean the next two years are used to scope out the plans, with them becoming one of the Conservative government’s key education election pledges in 2024.

But, there’s still a likely blockage: returning schools minister Nick Gibb – a strong traditional education advocate who has driven education reform, based on those principles, for the best part of the last ten years.

A move from academic study at post-16 to a more vocational focus is unlikely to get his backing.

As one policy expert said: “I can’t see Gibb signing off the end of A-levels before an election.”

For a change, the Conservative government proposal would likely get support from unions.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the government must also be “more flexible in allowing and supporting a choice of subjects that students can study pre-16 which embraces technical and vocational education”.

“Most” colleges and FE providers do not know whether the government’s Covid-19 tuition scheme is helping students catch up with lost learning, Ofsted has warned.

The inspectorate has published an independent review of the £500 million 16 to 19 tuition fund that was rolled out during the pandemic as part of the Department for Education’s education recovery package.

During its visits to 21 further education providers From September 2021 to July 2022, it found learners were “overwhelmingly positive” about their tutoring experiences, but the quality “differed” with some sessions put on simply for students to do coursework assignments or exam revision.

Here’s what you need to know…

Leaders do not know if tutoring is working

Ofsted said colleges and providers suggested that tuition had re-engaged learners, increased their confidence and resilience, and changed their attitudes to learning.

However, “many” leaders and managers acknowledged that they had “not yet developed efficient means of assessing learners’ progress through tutoring or back in the classroom”.

“Although many tutors used assessment well for diagnosis, not all were reviewing progress to identify whether the gaps were closed after the tuition sessions,” today’s report said.

“In many cases, teachers and learners described the impact of tutoring in terms of summative results or were awaiting the outcomes of end-of-year assessments to comment on impact.”

Some providers said they would judge whether tutoring worked according to “whether there had been a general improvement in grades, or progress ratings, across the whole group rather than evidence that learners knew and could do more”.

Some providers did not follow eligibility rules

The DfE said the tuition fund should be used for “small groups” of up to five students, or up to seven in exceptional circumstances.

It could be used for students who had not achieved up to a grade 6 in GCSE English and/or maths, as well as disadvantaged learners who had achieved those grades but were from the 27 per cent most economically deprived areas of the country.

Aside from eligibility, the scope was relatively open but the guidance specified that providers should use the fund to support tuition activity “above and beyond the programmes of education already planned”.

Ofsted said “some groups” were too large to allow the tutor to tailor the sessions to learners’ starting points, and they did not receive individual attention from a tutor. This meant that the sessions were unlikely to help learners to catch up.

In about a quarter of cases, group size was sometimes between five to seven learners. While this is acceptable under the DfE’s guidance, leaders “did not provide reasons for these decisions”.

And in four providers, Ofsted saw group sizes of more than seven. The watchdog warned that in groups of this size, “tutoring is likely to have less impact because the content is not adapted to the learners’ needs and they do not receive individual attention”.

In two of the independent learning providers visited, leaders did not check eligibility at all, and used the funding to provide extra support sessions for all learners. Ofsted said: “Learners could not distinguish tutoring from regular teaching sessions. Most learners at these providers were from disadvantaged backgrounds and would have been eligible for funding in any case.”

Tuition sessions used simply for coursework and revision

In about a quarter of providers visited by Ofsted, some tutoring sessions lacked planning and were instead open spaces to complete coursework assignments.

“This is not tutoring”, the watchdog said.

It also found that in some academic sessions, the tutor relied too much on learners to choose the content that they wanted to focus on which simply led to exam revision for exams rather than a focus on well-defined gaps in knowledge.

Some providers also used the tuition fund to deliver missed vocational content to whole groups of learners.

Recruitment for tutors proved a struggle for some

Ofsted found that tutors were often recruited from existing teaching staff and the quality of teaching was generally good.

But there were recruitment challenges, particularly in vocational and technical programmes.

Some providers recruited graduates as tutors because of challenges employing specialist teachers, inspectors found. These providers tried to recruit graduates with subject expertise in the area they were tutoring, as well as teaching or tutoring experience. However, this was not always possible.

Ofsted makes no comment on the quality of graduate tutors compared to existing staff.

King Charles has praised the value of apprenticeships but warned they are often “abandoned” and criticised a lack of vocational education across the country.

The comments were made before he became King in a one-off-episode of The Repair Shop, which will be broadcast by the BBC tonight at 8pm.

The then-Prince criticised the lack of vocational education, labelling it a “great tragedy”.

In the episode, he praises the value of technical skills and apprenticeships and says he has the greatest admiration for people who have technical skills.

Students from the Prince’s Foundation building craft programme, which teaches traditional skills including blacksmithing, thatching, stonemasonry, and wood carving, are filmed meeting Charles and showing the work they do. 

King Charles says: “I can see the difference we can make to people who have technical skills, which we need all the time. It gives people intense reward and satisfaction.

“I still think the great tragedy is the lack of vocational education in schools. Actually, not everybody is designed for the academic.

“I know through the Prince’s Trust. I see the difference we can make to people who have technical skills which we need all the time. I have the greatest admiration for people.

“That’s been a problem I think sometimes that’s forgotten. Apprenticeships are vital but I promise you people… they just abandoned apprenticeships for some reason.”

The rest of the episode shows the presenter, Jay Blades, and his repair team mending an 18th-century bracket clock and a piece of Wemyss Ware pottery made for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee which the King recalls was damaged whilst someone was opening a window.

The then-Prince says: “Quite a lot of the people we’ve trained on these courses come back as tutors, so you get a wonderful circle. Some of them will be coming back for years, filling the skills gaps.”

One repair team member says: “Learning on the job and making the mistakes myself; that has taught me more than I could ever learnt out of a book”.

David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said tweeted that it was “great to have HRH King Charles advocating for skills, vocational, and technical education”.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We recognise that an academic route is not for everyone. Young people now have a range of high quality technical and vocational training options to choose from including apprenticeships and new T Level qualifications in a range of exciting subjects, helping them gain the skills they need to forge a great career.”