The government says at least 585 former teachers have answered its call to arms to return to the classroom and cover Covid staffing issues, but there are questions over the figures.
According to the Department for Education, 485 teachers have signed up with supply agencies following the drive, and a further 100 Teach First alumni have also “expressed an interest in supporting the workforce”.
The department said the data was from just 10 per cent of agencies, and that the total number signed up was “likely to be much larger”. However, it would not say why the sample size was so small, or which agencies had provided figures.
According to government data, there are 93 supply agencies that are part of the Crown Commercial Service’s framework used by the government for its call to arms, meaning the government’s figures for the scheme is based on data provided by around nine organisations.
The DfE has also not said how many of the teachers who had signed up had started work in English schools or colleges, nor when the remainder would make it into the classroom.
Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi said he wanted to “thank all former teachers who have come forward to support the national effort and help keep our children in face-to-face education”.
“I call on all other former teachers who are able to do the same to come forward now.”
But some have questioned the figures provided by the DfE, while others have warned the number coming forward is a “drop in the ocean” compared to what is needed.
The DfE reported earlier today that an estimated 4 per cent of teachers and college leaders were off due to Covid-related reasons nationally.
Adam Sugarman, director of TLTP Education, revealed last week that of 76 ex-teachers who approached his agency, only four were compliant.
He questioned the latest figures from the DfE, and said his agency had not been asked to provide figures.
“The sample data suggests if 10 per cent of agencies are saying they’ve registered 485 ex-teachers, then 100 per cent would equate to nearly 5,000 ex-teachers registered, which is not realistic.”
He also said that if the 10 per cent of agencies that did give a response were larger market leaders, then that might skew the picture.
“If all the biggest, long-lasting agencies make up that 10 per cent then newer agencies with less manpower and smaller databases will not be able to register anywhere near as many ex-teachers.
“If you took the small agencies that make up the 90 per cent I think you would struggle to get anywhere close to 485 ex-teachers registered. I personally do not believe there are more than 1,000 ex-teachers currently registered under this new initiative across the whole of England”
Simone Payne, chief executive of 4myschools, which reported last week hearing from 13 teachers, said her agency had been asked to supply data.
But she said there would “not be many teachers ready for work yet due to vetting, and most do not want to work full time, rather just one to two days a week from our experience”.
The proportion of college leaders, teachers, and support staff absent from work due to Covid-related reasons has doubled in just three weeks.
The Department for Education’s latest attendance survey data, published today, estimates that one in 25, or 4 per cent, of FE college teachers and leaders were off on January 6 due to coronavirus. The figure for support and other staff in colleges sat at 3.4 per cent.
This is up from 1.6 per cent of teachers and leaders and 1.2 per cent of other staff on December 15, increases of 150 per cent and 183 per cent respectively.
Special post-16 providers have seen an even bigger hike in staff absence over the same period.
The DfE said 7.4 per cent of teachers and leaders were absent due to Covid-19 reasons in these institutions on January 5, up from 2.1 per cent on 15 Dec. And 6.2 per cent of teaching assistants and other staff were off work in special post-16 institutions due to the virus, up from 2 per cent over the same period.
It comes after the education secretary Nadhim Zahawi warned staff absences were likely to rise as the impact of the Omicron variant is felt in education settings.
Geoff Barton, leader of the Association of School and College Leaders, said “any hope” the Christmas holidays would act as a firebreak for schools and colleges “have evaporated”.
“The challenges posed by having so many staff absent will continue to put schools and colleges under severe pressure.”
Colleges will be facing particular problems owing to staff absences this month as around 300,000 students studying vocational and technical qualifications will be taking exams.
The DfE did not publish staff attendance data for colleges this time last year so comparison of absence levels in the same period in 2021 is not possible.
Absence rates for independent training providers are not published by the DfE.
Education staff among those most likely to report long Covid
Today’s statistics on workforce absence comes after the Office for National Statistics reported that the education sector had seen the biggest month-by-month increase in the proportion of people reporting that they were suffering the effects of long Covid.
Along with health and social care, teaching and education had the greatest prevalence of reports of long Covid. Women, those aged 35 to 69 and those living in more deprived areas were also more likely to report issues.
Interesting fact: Ann can sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in Latin.
Lindsay Pamphilon, Group Principal, Orbital South Colleges
Start date: January 2022
Previous job: Principal, Hadlow College
Interesting fact: She is an open water swimmer and likes to swim throughout the winter.
Jeff Greenidge, Chair of Governors, Bridgend College
Start Date: December 2021
Concurrent job: Director for diversity, ETF & AoC
Interesting fact: Completed the 1270 metres Innsbruck Bobsleigh course a couple of years ago and planning to do the skeleton course as the next challenge.
Providers should be more creative about inspiring students into the labour market, writes Andrew Bernard
Imagine you’re just queuing up for a sandwich and you get a subtle nudge towards becoming a nutritionist.
Or waiting for the bus, you see a sign that piques your interest in architecture, or urban design.
Perhaps while you’re walking up the stairs towards the science block, the steps tell you the HE pathway you need to become a medical professional.
These are examples of “guerrilla careers hotspots”.
What I want to share is how easy and cheap it is to make subtle changes to your college environment to highlight future aspirational pathways – by catching your students off guard.
1. Stop before you start
Before you – a tutor, lecturer, careers leader, or member of the senior leadership team – start trying to do careers advice, just stop and think.
You’re looking for creative and innovative ways of getting careers information into the eyes and minds of the students in your college, aren’t you?
But you’re very busy. Why would you do this, if it’s not actually your job? Creating guerrilla careers hotspots is perfect to set as a student competition or work-experience project.
So if you can secure a budget or sponsorship from a local company or local business group, you can set this project for your students. After all, they know how to appeal to their peers.
2. Make the brief
Create a project brief and work with the design, business and art teaching teams to agree the scope of the project. Don’t make it too complex, and don’t forget it’s supposed to be fun.
Your brief could be linked to college assignments, work experience or an internal project.
Just decide team sizes and then get the competition promoted. Is it compulsory or voluntary, which groups, which subjects, what are the prizes? All the deadlines and details need to be clear.
3. Find local supporters
Get networking. Ask local designers, printers and marketing agencies to support your project. Would they come into the college and talk in person or virtually to share examples and provide inspiration? Could they mentor the winners?
4. Set the challenge
Announce the deadline, sign up teams and issue the competition brief, then wait until the entries come in. (Leave your door and inbox open for questions and send gentle reminders in the run-up to the deadline.)
5. Run pitches
Get your friendly designer back in, a governor and the principal or someone from SLT to listen to the teams’ five-minute pitches and their ideas.
6. Get active
When winners have been chosen, give them the freedom to work on the guerrilla careers installations, and see the impact around the buildings.
7. Run a review
What have students achieved? Hopefully, real-world creativity, feeling trusted in a realistic situation, teamwork experience, some external public relations for the college and partners, and thousands of eyes seeing careers messages in unexpected places.
Finally, I will leave you with some actual guerrilla careers ideas:
Cubicle careers: posters in the loos about becoming a plumber or health professional.
Look UP: stickers at eye level to stop people in rooms and corridors and make them look at posters/prints/projections on ceilings (positioned in areas of the building where it’s not going to be dangerous, of course).
Look DOWN: let’s use this space for careers in engineering, maintenance, interior design, etc.
Posters and stickers in changing rooms about careers in sport as physiotherapists, personal trainers or in coaching roles.
Tray liners in the canteen with information about becoming a chef or nutritionist –this could also work with paper cup printing and cup sleeves.
Digital displays resembling departure boards at airports, promoting careers that use geography and languages.
A college-wide art show, where each exhibit is related to a career. The invitation card could have a QR code that integrates with an apprenticeship, university prospectus, the National Careers Week website, BBC Bitesize Careers or other source of information.
Now, go off and recruit some guerrillas to the cause today!
Collecting data on sex and gender separately is important for tackling inequalities, writes Sarah Hope
Suppose you’re asked to get involved in a project with your students? It champions a marginalised group – you’re keen.
However, there’s a catch. One or two students can’t be recorded correctly. Key information won’t be accurate.
Accurate data is important. FE providers use statistical information to measure everything, from recruitment to achievement. Precision is important, and I would say that means collecting data on both sex and gender.
A recurring difficulty for colleges such as the one I used to work with is the conflation of these terms. FE providers then also face the issue of deeply upsetting their students, whether trans students or non-binary students, when the college wishes to separate the two terms for the purposes of data collection.
Here’s the problem facing colleges: the Office for National Statistics states that ‘sex’ is the biological self, anatomy, chromosomes, and so on.
‘Gender’ is ‘personal, internal perception of oneself’ that may not match natal sex.
It’s not uncommon for the two to be confused. Perhaps even check the internal records of your own provider, and you can see the muddle.
Does this matter?
Let’s look at STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. FE providers have always been at the forefront of initiatives aimed at getting girls into STEM careers, with programmes of visiting mentors and trips to university departments.
However, there’s still a lot to do. According to the group Women in STEM, just 26 per cent of the STEM workforce is female.
In the future, similar projects may include students recently identified into womanhood. This will skew those figures.
It isn’t just a girl issue, though. Boys’ attainment has been a concern throughout the education system. In 2020, boys were seven per cent behind girls at GCSE grade 4 and higher, with those on free school meal data especially at risk.
There’s a lot of work needed to overcome the effects of poverty and family expectation.
So FE providers need to be able to collect both sex and gender information, so that they have as rich and informative a dataset as possible. It will allow them to tackle these kinds of inequalities, many of which start pre-school.
Importantly, this wider dataset would also highlight where trans students are particularly struggling as a group, by identifying which students are trans too.
Another instance is the gender pay gap among staff. Employers, including colleges, are required to report their pay gap and yet there is no clear guidance on how to record sex differences.
Many colleges have pay gaps on a par with the national average of 14 per cent, significant in a sector with a higher percentage of men in better-paid roles.
Should the EFSA follow the Higher Education Statistics Agency approach to data?
HESA uses two data headings, sex and gender, but under ‘sex’ there is a non-binary ‘other’ option, thereby potentially removing students from any sex-based analysis. Or would this have an unintended impact on data around existing sex inequalities?
Perhaps a proposal to register sex as the core demographic and add personal identities as a separate field is a better answer.
However, by following this approach, colleges risk upsetting trans and non-binary students, who can face significant persecution within society and need to feel welcomed and accepted in college life.
So, if my experiences are anything to go by, some FE providers feel confused as to how best to proceed.
I would argue for a distinction between sex and gender, explaining to trans or non-binary students that this is done in the spirit of helping identify challenges for all groups, including themselves.
But the solution should be clearer guidance from the government, rather than leaving it to providers to muddle through.
Editorial note 10/01/2022 – A reference to a campaign group was removed from this article after editors were made aware of transphobic speech linked to the campaign group.
Author name has been changed. Image is a stock image and not of the author
Traineeships are getting good outcomes but are being crowded out by other subsidised programmes, writes Jane Hickie
As we enter 2022 with sluggish economic growth, rising inflation and stubborn rates of youth unemployment, it’s more vital than ever that we equip our young people with the skills employers need.
All evidence shows that traineeships have fantastic outcomes. Young people undertaking a traineeship are far more likely to have positive outcomes than those that don’t.
But with such a crowded field of training and employability programmes, traineeships often get overlooked. That’s why the government should be paying young people to do them.
If the government is to reach its ambition of trebling the number of participants on traineeships, now is the time to incentivise learners.
What are the benefits?
Traineeships are intended for people aged 16 to 24 who aren’t in employment and have had little work experience. They offer work experience with relevant on-the-job training; and offer support to improve English, maths and key digital skills, too.
They’re also great for employers. Traineeships are flexible and designed to allow providers and employers to tailor them to the needs of local employers. They are shorter programmes than apprenticeships, so can be easier for smaller employers to commit to.
Employers need to be able to offer at least 70 hours of safe, meaningful and high-quality work experience. There is a £1,000 incentive per traineeship, and employers can claim for up to ten placements in each region they operate in. These incentives ensure taking on trainees is an attractive proposition for employers.
Around three-quarters of all trainees have successful outcomes (either taking on work, starting an apprenticeship or further study) within 12 months. This compares to fewer than half of all non-trainees.
Government research on traineeships shows that trainees are over six times more likely to take on an apprenticeship than non-trainees.
What are the challenges?
In 2020 the Treasury made a significant financial commitment to re-energise the traineeship programme. This commitment included increasing the core funding, as well as increased participation funding and a new employer work placement incentive payment – in place until July 2022.
However, the progress of the traineeship programme has been hamstrung by traineeship referrals remaining lower than expected. Too many young people are being automatically referred by Jobcentre Plus work coaches to competing provision run by the Department for Work and Pensions, such as Kickstart and now Restart.
At £7,000 per participant, the cost of Kickstart is more than twice that of the next most expensive employment support scheme. The obsession with referring all young people to Kickstart might help to meet internal departmental government targets, but it won’t necessarily offer the best outcomes for individuals. What matters most is the right pathway for the learner.
It would be too simplistic to look at low learner demand and suggest traineeships have no future. Quite the opposite: traineeships still produce exceptional outcomes ̶ whether that’s trainees moving on to apprenticeships, jobs or further study. This means that stimulating more demand from young people should be an immediate priority.
How can we solve this?
Given the pandemic, it is vital to ensure that the DWP and the Department for Education have a coherent and integrated employment and skills strategy.
However, there are concerns that the wage subsidy incentives for Kickstart participants – currently the national minimum wage for 25 hours per week for six months, as well as national insurance and pension contributions – causes other opportunities to be crowded out.
Limiting traineeships to those willing to take on an unpaid placement risks them being a last resort for our young people.
So a government-funded subsidy – perhaps similar to the apprenticeship rate, which is £4.30 per hour – for trainees would be a godsend for them.
It would also be a strong signal that traineeships are a viable way to move quickly into a job, further study or an apprenticeship.
It’s time to give trainees the support they deserve. Let’s give traineeships a fair chance to succeed by paying participants.
Over 80 per cent of college and adult learning providers that were set to be stung by an adult education budget clawback have had some reprieve.
Providers in receipt of AEB grants in 2020/21 were told that they would only receive their full funding if they could prove they had delivered at least 90 per cent of their allocation for that year.
This sparked fury at the time, with affected colleges arguing that the pandemic had meant students stayed at home and classes couldn’t run.
Fuelling discontent was the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s refusal to budge, telling the sector in March last year that “there will not be a business case process” for providers to challenge the clawback and that their decision “will not be subject to change”.
After months of protests, the agency finally agreed to accept business cases from colleges where the clawback could be “destabilising” and that could prove funding for “eligible costs” should be retained.
Delayed outcomes of those business cases were finally communicated to colleges and providers in December.
In response to a parliamentary question from the shadow apprenticeships and lifelong learning minister, Toby Perkins, the Department for Education revealed that 78 providers had submitted a business case.
Of those, 58 had come from general further education colleges and of those, 48 were successful.
The remaining 20 submissions came from other grant-funded providers, of which 17 were successful.
Leicester College, which challenged the agency’s 90 per cent threshold, had its business case supported, which was “good news for stability ̶ demand for adult education in Leicester remains high”, deputy principal Shabir Ismail told FE Week.
But the threat of the clawback and the delay in decisions around business cases, “forced us to make some strategic decisions to protect our financial position,” Ismail added. “We had to massively scale back our plans for T Level capital investment and put a hold on staff recruitment.”
The ten colleges and three other adult providers whose business cases were unsuccessful were able to appeal before the Christmas break.
The outcomes of those appeals are expected to be confirmed by the end of this month, DfE told FE Week, with final funding claims due to be published at the end of March.
One college currently awaiting the results of its appeal, which did not wish to be named, told FE Week that planning has been “extremely difficult.
“We will, of course, work with the agency on a resolution, but we believe our business case stands up. This is a process that should have been over months ago. Going into another term with a big question mark over last year’s budget has made planning extremely difficult.”
Marion Plant, chief executive at North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College, sits on almost every board going. She tells Jess Staufenberg why linking up the education system is so important
For one moment, I wonder if I’ve accidentally video-called Mrs Claus at the North Pole, rather than Marion Plant, chief executive at North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College.
She is beaming a huge smile at me from inside a log cabin, with dark pine trees covered in deep snow visible outside the windows. Dismissing the North Pole theory and wondering how I’ve missed the biggest story of 2022 (is there any bigger news than snow news?), Plant corrects me: “I’m in Sweden! I love cross-country skiing.”
She exudes energy, but presumably much like Mrs Claus, Plant is currently taking a break from a very intensive period. It turns out she’s not had a proper holiday in a couple of years, and I’m not surprised: the breadth of her roles is extraordinary.
Aside from leading her college, Plant is also chief executive of the Midland Academies Trust, deputy chair at WorldSkills UK, a board member of both Coventry and Warwickshire LEP and Leicester and Leicestershire LEP, a board member of Coventry University and a trustee of the Church of England’s education board.
Meanwhile, she has set up a technology institute and even sat on the Department for Education’s board for three years. According to her Association of Colleges’ profile page, the FE commissioner once said hers was “the fastest college in and out of intervention”.
Plant and her husband John cross-country skiing in Sweden
It may sound undoable, but it makes sense given Plant’s biggest motivation: deep-level collaboration across the education system. Time and again, she has taken on roles in order to knit different sectors closer together. This was a key reason for joining the DfE board, she says: “It was a fascinating insight. It showed me the connection between developing policy, and then going back to college and implementing it.
“Sometimes you can feel cross with the DfE and ESFA, and done unto by them, but I saw the other side. I think it helped me understand that many people really were trying to do their best for FE, and they were trying to juggle all these competing pressures and demands.” It didn’t stop her banging on about underfunding “like a stuck needle”, she adds.
Taking responsibility for bringing people together is in Plant’s hardwiring. She’s the oldest of a big family of five children, and unusually, she and two of her siblings were adopted, with the family growing up together in Africa. Her parents first took her to Sierra Leone when she was two, and then Zambia when she was seven (her father was an engineering academic and her mother a teacher). Plant remembers sailing over on a boat, and returning to the UK every two years.
“For each of the first two visits, we took another child back,” she smiles. “I’ve always been very open about being adopted, it’s always something I’ve valued. My parents always said they had the perfect family, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
The childhood was “full of freedom”, with no television and almost constantly outdoors, attending local schools and learning African history – but there was political upheaval too. Freedom fighters from neighbouring Zimbabwe, which was gaining independence, would pass through Zambia, says Plant. “I remember a military plane hitting the top of the tree in our garden,” she reveals.
“At the time I chose to take on a lot of responsibility for my siblings, and that’s continued.” With her parents having passed away, Plant says she is now “the glue that holds the family together”.
The experience of a big, loving family seems reflected in Plant’s approach to leadership. She quickly shot up the ranks in England, having trained as a nurse and midwife, and discovering a love for lecturing healthcare students (despite a nerve-wracking first-ever lesson on contraception) at Birmingham’s Handsworth College – now South & City College Birmingham.
Plant with former prime minister Theresa May
She was soon acting deputy principal at North Birmingham College, and moved over to join North Warwickshire & Hinckley College as vice principal. By 2003 she was principal, and has “loved it from that day to this”.
When I ask what she’s proudest of, she describes a family scene.
“It’s the ethos of my college. Every Christmas, we open on Christmas day, and we do Christmas brunch for students, with crackers and presents.” She’s attended almost every brunch, usually with about 20 students. “There were students who might not have had a happy Christmas without it.”
A strong emphasis on community seems particularly important across a college with six separate campuses (the college merged with South Leicestershire College in 2016). Plant herself is motivated by her Christian faith, and she says there is a “strong chaplaincy” in the college which contributes to the pastoral team. She’s recently appointed another chaplain for the Midland Academies Trust: however, she is very firm about not proselytising to anyone.
“I live my Christian faith, but I don’t talk about it. A college is a very diverse place, and all people need to feel valued equally. It’s not Marion the Christian principal, it’s Marion the person, and behind that person is the fabric of what I believe.”
Plant and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury
It’s well put. Plant continues that for her, good leadership is less about grand ideals than about truly being oneself. “I’m not a theoretical leader and I hate using clichés – but you have got to be an authentic leader. I wouldn’t expect anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do.”
She laughs, adding: “I find administration boring, to be honest – luckily I have a fantastic PA. I’m hands on and visible, and I’m honest when I’m finding things challenging too.”
Believing in her own authentic voice helped Plant get through FE commissioner intervention in 2018, when the college found itself in a tight financial position following the costly merger. “Some colleges get a lot of help with college costs, but we had no help at all,” she notes. “I’m not grumpy about it! But there were several strains on our finances.” The college had delivered £1 million of unfunded teaching in 2017-18, the finance director said at the time.
You have to hold your nerve
“I won’t pretend that being in intervention is easy, it’s the reputation and the noise around that,” continues Plant. “You have to hold your nerve. It took me a while to trust my own judgment – that someone else out there doesn’t have the answer. You have to remain confident. Otherwise it could topple you.” By cutting back but “without mass redundancies”, Plant quickly got the college out of intervention.
Since then, she has been able to focus on the three major cross-sector projects close to her heart. The first is the Mira Technology Institute focused on the automotive industry, including electric vehicles. Plant notes with a smile this project is really the original Institute of Technology, before the government announced its own.
Unlike many IoTs, however, this has a spanking new physical building, with students from both the college and schools able to work with industry experts to get qualifications “from level 2 up to a PhD”. She thought up the idea with the chief executive of the Motor Industry Research Association, the project’s industry partner, and she pulled in three university partners too: Leicester, Loughborough and Coventry.
Plant and the project management team in front of the Mira Technology Institute near Coventry
Here, Plant’s bridge-building abilities become clear. She sits on the board at Coventry University, and it was the Leicester and Leicestershire Enterprise Partnership that provided the £9.5 million grant for the Institute to open in 2018. “Being on the LEP board means I get lots of intelligence about the skills sectors!”
But she isn’t done yet. In 2010 the college opened the Midland Academies Trust, sponsoring its four schools. “I persuaded our governors this was the right thing to do,” says Plant, who was concerned by the number of 16-year-olds arriving unprepared for college life. “It was so obvious when I was on the DfE board that education is in so many different pockets.”
Two studio schools under the trust had to be closed in 2015 due to under-recruiting pupils – a national problem for the vocationally focused schools – but the four academies continue, with two ‘good’ and two ‘requires improvement’ Ofsted outcomes. For Plant, it’s yet another opportunity to bring sectors together to better serve learners, including allowing more students to take part in WorldSkills UK, the international competition she adores and where she is deputy chair.
“I’m not sure how in vogue colleges are as academy sponsors ̶ it’s more universities,” she muses. “But if it offers opportunities for young people and it’s right for the area, it’s got to be a good thing.” She adds that her “vision” of a knitted-up curriculum across schools and colleges is not fulfilled – “just yet”.
Plant’s triumph appears to be as a deeply embedded local leader. Just as with her extended family, she holds multiple links and connections across areas and sectors – a sort of complex human bridge. “Collaboration around education on all fronts is the way forward,” she says firmly. “Not competition.”
And with that, I let her get back to a well-deserved break in the snow.
Writing off stranded learners’ debts is a good start, but there’s more to be done on access to adult education, writes Gordon Marsden
It is great news that the #SaveOurAdultEducation campaign, which I was proud to support at its parliamentary launch in February 2017, has had a fruitful aftermath, showing 500 debt write-offs worth almost £1.5 million for the learners concerned.
I think this campaign succeeded because of four things. It was a broad-based campaign ̶ backed by adult and community groups, and others, as well as the FE community. It spoke to common sense and natural justice ̶ that learners should not have to repay a loan for a course when providers, for whatever reason, failed to fulfil their obligation.
It also had the human factor. Around 200 people packed into a Commons committee room on the day of the campaign’s launch. Asim Shaheen, a man in his 40s who was deprived of completing his level 3 hospitality course but left with an £8,000 debt, confronted Robert Halfon, then skills minister, about that injustice. And we all kept it going, with questions in and outside of parliament, and lobbying, until two years later, Robert’s successor, Anne Milton (and all credit to her) announced in July 2019 that government would act on write-off debts.
This campaign must be seen, of course, in the context of the overall problems that advanced learning loans have had since they were introduced to replace grant funding. I visited learning providers and colleges and I spoke to adult learners (many of them women) who had got level 3s with grants, as well as to other people who were contemplating starting them on the new loans system. It became clear to me that taking on debt when they have complex obligations (supporting their own children beyond school, and older family members, for example) worried them more than the traditional cohorts of 16-21-year-olds.
That has been borne out as year after year statistics have shown (and as FE Week, myself and others have consistently pointed out) that at least half of the funding allocation for advanced learner loans has not been taken up. That’s hundreds of millions of pounds ̶ which could have helped fuel so many life chances and opportunities.
The challenges for adult education in the 2020s (of which FE is a vital and central part) have been turbocharged by the consequences of Brexit and the Covid pandemic. There need to be huge new initiatives to support new skills and retraining. This is not just to replace gaps in the service sectors from EU citizens who have left the UK, but also millions of other adults needing new skills, jobs and careers because their current ones have become obsolete or have evolved with the demands of the green economy.
That is why Right To Learn, the group I and others from the Lifelong Learning Commission set up just over a year ago, is campaigning so that government ensures that low-skilled workers don’t just get full protection when they take out advanced learning loans. Government must also make it a top priority for them to be able to get Level 3 and above apprenticeships, and other qualifications, in the first place.
That requires an urgent concentration on promoting levels 1 and 2, as well as traineeships, to disadvantaged adult groups and individuals. This must also include the estimated nine million people lacking basic skills. That needs to happen not just for maths (where the Chancellor made a modest start with the ‘Multiply’ initiative in his October budget) but also for spoken and written English and digital skills.
Such adult learner initiatives would give FE providers major new and life-changing markets and a sense of achievement, as well as contributing to a fairer, healthier and more proactive society. They might even want to try pilot schemes for grants, in which enterprising elected local mayors could participate.
Who knows? It might be an idea for another broad-based and successful campaign for the sector to get involved with in 2022 ̶ #SaveOurAdultEducation 2.0.
Ann Hardy, Chief Executive – TEC Partnership
