For the UK to attract the investment that will level up communities, we need world-class skills, writes Neil Bentley-Gockmann.
Introducing the long-awaited Levelling Up White Paper, Michael Gove listed some of the United Kingdom’s successes. He talked up the size and strength of the economy, the dominance of the English language around the world and our universities’ place as global research and development superpowers.
All things that have seen us succeed at home and abroad. However, he was right to make clear that we need a change of approach if the government’s ambitious plans to level up are to succeed.
And we believe that a crucial change is the need to develop a world-class skills economy to complement our already world-leading knowledge economy.
This means the UK being recognised as a global leader in developing world-class apprenticeships and skills to help create high-quality jobs for young people in key future sectors.
And our mission at WorldSkills UK is to help deliver on that by mainstreaming international best practice with colleges and training providers. We want to help more young people reach the high-quality standards employers and investors need to create high-skill high-paid jobs across the UK.
That’s why we are ever more focused on developing world-class skills to support local economic development in three ways.
Firstly, helping boost the quantity of skills. We are working to inspire more young people, from all backgrounds, to reach their potential through apprenticeships and technical careers with the chance to become world-class through national and international competition-based training programmes.
Last year the national finals of our competitions programme took place in over 20 venues around the UK, allowing us to showcase the talent and hard work of hundreds of inspiring young people. We then saw thousands tune in from home or their colleges to watch the winners announced in a special live show presented by Steph McGovern from her Packed Lunch studio.
Registration for our 2022 competitions programme opens at the end of February. The winners could end up representing the UK on the international stage at EuroSkills in St Petersburg in 2023 and the WorldSkills ‘skills olympics’ in Lyon in 2024. Those that do will follow in the footsteps of the young people currently preparing for WorldSkills Shanghai in October, showcasing to the UK and rest of the world what it means to be world-class.
Secondly, increasing the quality of skills. From our international training programme we have created a Centre of Excellence which allows our international training experts to share their world-class teaching with educators and uses our partner NCFE’s expertise to fire excellence in skills development.
Now in its second year, the centre is already working in depth with around 40 colleges and training providers. Thisnumber will increase again next year, reaching tens of thousands of young people across the UK, while we are also constantly improving our hub of world-class online resources.
Thirdly, helping to promote our high-quality skills. Our Skills Taskforce for Global Britain is currently exploring how we make sure more parts of the UK can use high-quality future skills to attract and retain valuable inward investment. The taskforce will deliver a report in the spring with recommendations on how to bring skills and inward investment delivery closer together to get the high-skilled, high-wage jobs local economies need.
Put bluntly, if you want to attract investment you need high-quality skills, and if you want high-quality skills you need inward investment. With global competition for inward investment getting fiercer every year, the UK must add world-class skills to its international calling card.
The global locations successfully bringing in foreign investment not only have a sophisticated skills offer to attract investors, but also target firms for the high-quality skills they can bring and for the positive productivity and spillover effects they have on the local skills base.
If the government’s levelling up agenda is to be realised – and we are to grow, be internationally competitive and create high quality jobs – we must develop, deliver and promote world-class skills.
Fifteen organisations have been announced as the first flexi-job apprenticeship agencies.
The agencies will act as employers for up to 1500 apprentices who, over the course of their apprenticeship, will be able to work within several different companies. The scheme has been designed to increase apprenticeship opportunities in the creative, digital and construction sectors where short term employment models are more prevalent.
A £7 million competition was launched in August to find organisations that can develop “up to 2000” flexi-job apprenticeship opportunities.
The Department for Education have announced today that “up to £5 million” will be shared among ten of the 15 new agencies. The remaining five organisations have been admitted to the register, but won’t receive a grant. See below for the full list.
The proposed number of apprenticeship opportunities now set to be created through this part of the flexi-job apprenticeship scheme has also been revised down from up to “2000 to up to 1500.”
FE Week has asked the DfE to explain the shortfall, but they did not respond at the time of going to press.
The BBC and the NHS North of England Commissioning Support Unit are among the organisations that will receive a grant to set up their flexi-job apprenticeship programmes.
BBC director general Tim Davie said: “The importance of growing skills and introducing fresh, diverse talent has never been greater than it is today. It is the perfect time to be launching the BBC Apprentice Hub in Birmingham. We are working closely with local creative businesses to give apprentices from across the West Midlands the skills and experience they need to thrive in this exciting industry.
Flexi-job apprenticeship agencies will replace apprenticeships training agencies (ATAs) which, until 2018, could be set up to deliver a similar function. Remaining ATAs have now been advised that they will need to join the register of flexi-job apprenticeship agencies when the application window next opens.
The agencies will have responsibility for recruitment and employment of the flexi-job apprentices as well as sourcing placements lasting at least three months with a series of employers. Apprentices must still complete the minimum duration required by their apprenticeship standard.
The government expects the first flexi-job apprentices to begin their first job placements by the end of this month.
The secretary of state for education Nadhim Zahawi said: “Gone are the days when apprenticeships are restricted by a one-size fits all approach.
“Through our dynamic post-16 reforms, we are investing directly in people, delivering prestigious and flexible apprenticeships which suits learners’ needs.
“New flexi-job apprenticeships will not only help to deliver the skilled workforce needed to support a diverse range of sectors to grow, but it will create even more exciting opportunities for people to secure a great career.”
A separate flexi-job apprenticeship pilot was announced in January. Unlike this model, where apprentices are employed by an agency, the second route will involve “portable” apprentices finding their own job placements with the support of their training provider.
Register of Flexi-job apprenticeship agencies
Receiving a grant
British Broadcasting Corporation
Yes
Calico Enterprise
Yes
Evolve Apprentices Limited
Yes
Inspira ATA Limites
Yes
McGinley Support Services Limited
Yes
MDS Limited
Yes
NHS North of England Commissioning Support Unit
Yes
ScreenSkills
Yes
The Mid Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce and Industry Limited
Yes
Training and Apprenticeships in Construction Limited
Yes
Careers Ladder Limited
No
EN: Able Futures CIC
No
HR Provider Limited
No
Nottingham College Services
No
South East Centre for the Built Environment
No
The register of flexi-job apprenticeship training agencies (10 February 2022)
Colleges and training providers will have some flexibility over the extra funding going in to 16 to 19 study programmes from August, but leaders warn funding rates will still not be high enough.
As part of the government’s education recovery package announced in October’s spending review, an extra £800 million has been committed over the next three academic years to fund an additional 40 learning hours for students on 16 to 19 study programmes and T Levels.
This will increase the national FE base rate by 8.4 per cent – rising from £4,188 to £4,542.
There was little detail at the time about how the extra funds can be spent by providers with concerns raised about possible restrictions on how the funds can be used and increased bureaucracy.
Spending review documents described how extra study time “will be used for extra teaching and learning – including in English, maths and other subjects – depending on a students’ individual needs”.
The Department for Education published further guidance today which suggests providers will have more control over how to spend the extra funding than originally thought. It outlines acceptable uses of the extra funds, including more time on qualifications and supporting students who need extra help with maths.
While the “primary focus” remains more time for teaching and learning, providers will be able to use to provide mental health and wellbeing support around a students’ individual needs.
The examples provided include extra help with exam resilience and study skills, enrichment activities to “build social connection” and one to one therapeutic work with a mental health specialist.
Providers are warned, however, that non-qualification activity like this must be put in place according to the needs of individual students, rather than spent on generic activities for whole groups of students, such as through tutorials.
In return, providers will be expected to submit a “short” end of year report so the agency can check the extra funding is being spent appropriately. Although the agency advises that these reports should be no more than two pages in length, they list eight points that must be covered.
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges said: “It feels like this retains flexibility for colleges to do what they need to do to support learners to succeed. We’ve worked closely with officials to make sure they didn’t end up with massive new bureaucracy for what is a marginal amount of hours which is marginally funded.”
Neil Thomas, principal and chief executive at Dudley College of Technology told FE Week that “it is good to see maths and wider support being recognised as we are seeing a lot more students with these needs”.
The Sixth Form Colleges Association welcomed today’s guidance, describing it as “sensible and proportionate”.
James Kewin, the association’s deputy chief executive, said: “We particularly welcome the fact that activities linked to mental health support will be funded through these additional hours.
“When combined with the wider announcements in the spending review, our members now have a degree of certainty on 16 to 19 funding they have not had for some time, along with a material increase in per student funding”.
While welcomed by college leaders, this extra funding will do little to ease impending cost pressures on next year’s budgets, such as staff pay awards, rising energy costs, inflation and the national insurance increase.
Hughes agreed that the funding “doesn’t address the cost pressures facing colleges”.
“Also, we shouldn’t have had to have had a pandemic to get the extra hours. We’ve been arguing for extra hours for five years based on comparators with every other OECD country where we lag a long way behind,” he added.
“It’s also a shame that it’s only funded at a marginal rate, when the overall funding rate for 16 to 18 is still 10 per cent behind where it was in 2010 at the end of the spending review.”
The gap in grades between poorer sixth form students and their better off peers widened in 2020, Education Policy Institute research has found.
Researchers said the gap was a result of A-level students gaining a whole grade more from teacher assessments than those who studied qualifications such as BTECs.
EPI said that because disadvantaged students are more likely to take applied general qualifications like BTECs, they may have lost out when competing for university places.
“Our research findings are very clear,” said David Robinson, report co-author and director of post-16 and skills at the EPI.
“These growing inequalities were driven by A-levels gaining more from the system of teacher assessed grades than applied general qualifications, which far more disadvantaged students take.
“The result is that poorer students could have lost out when competing for university places. These findings ought to alarm the government, and we hope that urgent action is taken to ensure that students taking BTECs and other alternatives to A-levels do not lose out again in 2022.”
The report found that disadvantaged students in 16 to 19 education were on average the equivalent of 3.1 A-level grades behind their more affluent peers across their best three qualifications in 2020, compared to 2.9 grades in 2019.
Students in 16 to 19 education in long-term poverty – those who spend at least 80 per cent of their school lives on free school meals – saw much larger gaps, and they have now widened significantly.
And the 16 to 19 disadvantage gap for students in this long-term poverty group stood at 4 grades in 2020, compared to 3.7 in 2019.
“Students from lower income families are less likely to study A-levels, which saw larger grade increases in 2020 than applied general qualifications such as BTECs,” said Cheryl Lloyd, education programme head at the Nuffield Foundation.
“This means that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds were effectively penalised for not studying A-levels, and the disadvantage gap in 16 to 19 education has become further entrenched.”
Sixth form and college students in some regions saw greater increases than in others. Grades increased the most in London and the East Midlands, but students in the North West, Yorkshire and The Humber and the North East only saw modest rises.
EPI said these regional differences have significant implications for the government’s “levelling up” agenda.
Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, told FE Week: “Last summer’s grades were awarded on the basis of evidence gathered by teachers.
“Different centres approached the gathering of evidence in different ways, and students had different experiences of online teaching, covid health and assessment, so it is not surprising that there were inconsistencies.
“The freedom and flexibility for different centres to apply the rules in different ways to reflect variability in learner experiences was consciously baked into the system.”
Watkin added that students were always going to be awarded a grade based on the evidence that showed their best performance.
“Slip-ups and off-days that are the downfall of some students on exam days in more normal circumstances were not a factor, so it is not surprising that grades were up.”
He explained that the monitoring and moderation of grades by exam boards was inevitably limited and there was no appetite for another, even improved, algorithm.
“So, there was no mechanism to iron out the apparent inconsistencies. The grades awarded to students in the recently reformed and more rigorous AGQs, now with an external assessment (exam) component, suffered in comparison with A Levels.
“This matters because BTECs and other similar qualifications often represent a vital pathway for young people from more disadvantaged backgrounds to compete in the market for HE places and eventually professional careers,” he added.
The Department for Education was approached for comment.
Skills inequalities are holding back entire communities and cannot be solved on the cheap, writes Dean Hochlaf
To level up the country, we need to level up skills.
The much-anticipated levelling up white paper has made improving skills a core mission for the government, as it grapples with the entrenched regional inequalities which plague the UK economy.
However, while ambitious rhetoric is welcome, it needs to be matched with investment and reform from government. On those fronts, the white paper is unfortunately lacking.
Regional inequalities take many forms, but one of the most pernicious disparities has been across skills and education. The latest data shows that 71 per cent of those in London held at least a level 3 qualification or higher (A level or equivalent), while 58.7 per cent held a level 4 qualification or higher (higher degree or equivalent).
In contrast, in the north east only 55.1 per cent of the population holds a level 3 qualification or higher and these proportions are not much greater across the rest of the north and Midlands.
Exacerbating the challenge to improve skills in left-behind communities has been austerity.
Evidence from the Institute for Fiscal Studies highlights how per-pupil spending in colleges fell by 12 per cent between 2010-11 and 2019-20, while the adult education budget was two-thirds lower in 2019-20 than in 2003-04.
Further, due to a combination of increasing demand and the pandemic, the IfS estimates that an additional £570 million would be needed by 2022-23 just to maintain student spending in real terms.
Unless a significant funding boost is forthcoming, we face a future where funding remains below where it was at the start of the 2010s.
Yet, there are substantial economic gains to be made from investing in skills and the FE sector.
Previous research from the Centre for Progressive Policy suggests that boosting basic skills alone could help create just over 300,000 employment opportunities in the most deprived parts of England, stimulating a significant increase in economic activity.
For these gains to be realised however, there must be a concerted effort to increase funding and transform the existing educational system, which for too long has undermined the potential of FE institutions.
It is not clear from the white paper that the promised reforms are proportionate to the scale of the challenge.
An additional £550 million for skills bootcamps and the establishment of a future skills unit are fine initiatives, but their impact will be limited if the FE sector remains underfunded.
The designation of deprived communities as education investment areas is a step in the right direction. There is also mention of creating new “elite sixth forms.” Whether these can contribute to levelling-up will depend on the detail.
Rolling out local skills improvement plans can help coordinate action on skills between business and educators, but it is important that every part of the community can play a part in fostering an environment that develops skills that will produce benefits now and in the future.
The targets feel underwhelming
We need action to tackle skills inequalities which are holding back entire communities, but we cannot do this on the cheap.
The white paper does a fine job of setting out clear targets and recognising the critical importance of improving skills.
However, while it sets out several positive policy developments, they feel underwhelming given the scale of the challenge that faces the FE sector.
After years of underinvestment and a pandemic that has threatened the prospects of an entire generation, it is imperative that resource matches rhetoric.
The success of the levelling-up agenda relies on making sure our FE colleges and institutions can equip as many people as possible with the skills they need for the benefit of their communities.
After 35 years in the sector, Gill Alton, CEO of TEC Partnership, retired last Friday. She talks to Jess Staufenberg about leadership – and keeping it snappy
One night, when she was working in the hotel sector, Gill Alton and her staff heard a commotion from an upstairs bedroom.
A group of Welsh rugby fans, extremely jolly after a match, had thrown a pillow into the street and were carefully assessing the drop.
Next in their sights was the room’s double mattress, which, it was hoped, might act as a trampoline. Alton was swiftly dispatched.
“They were great about it,” she says cheerfully, praising the group for placidly agreeing they should not, after all, squeeze a mattress out the window. “Some people are difficult at that time of night, but no, they took it very well.”
Keeping calm under pressure is one of the parallels Alton draws between running a hotel and one of the biggest FE providers in the country.
She spent two years in the hotel sector, working in human resources, before accepting a part-time role, aged 25, teaching hospitality in FE; and 35 years later, she has never looked back.
Now, the chief executive of TEC Partnership (which includes Grimsby Institute, Scarborough TEC, East Riding College and Skegness TEC) is retiring for good.
Supporting Grimsby Town (Mariners) at Wembley with husband Colin and best friend
Aside from “dealing with people and problem-solving”, however, nothing else in FE is the same as hotels, muses Alton.
FE is unmatched in terms of the reward that comes from helping so many vulnerable people (parts of Grimsby are in the most deprived ten per cent of wards in England), she says.
Her own mother was a school teacher, but did not encourage her daughter into schools because of the stress of the job ̶ yet FE is different, says Alton.
“The difference is, you’re teaching an area you love to people who often really want to learn it.” She adds: “People don’t stay in education for the money. Most other sectors pay more. It’s just a lovely sector.” Pay is a theme we return to.
Alton had actually “half-heartedly” considered retiring before, she tells me, after being a turnaround principal at Rotherham College of Arts and Technology from 2010 to 2013. The college, which had previously been ‘satisfactory’, moved to a grade 2 with some outstanding features under Alton’s leadership.
Unfortunately, after Alton’s departure in 2015 it slid to a grade 3 by 2019, although last year’s monitoring visit found reasonable progress. Alton repeatedly impresses upon me how crucial her brilliant team at TEC Partnership are – but the story shows just how important the leader at the top is for a college’s reputation.
FE Week interviewed Alton back in 2013, not knowing her next steps. At that point, she had already worked at the Grimsby Institute for ten years and had then moved to Rotherham College.
She admits “a bit of a rogue manager” had made her want to leave Grimsby Institute the first time round. When she was asked to take the helm in 2015, her strong attachment to the institution made it an easy decision (despite the half-baked retirement plan) and she was in post by 2016.
East Riding College
In the past six years, Alton’s headline measures speak for themselves: £12 million has been added to the group’s cash reserves, two Institutes of Technology have opened, there are 52 “live projects” running from bid funding, the college even bought a small logistics company to offer lorry driver training, it has merged with East Riding College – and the college moved from a grade 2 to grade 1.
As one of her last acts as chief executive, Alton and her team will pick up a Queen’s Anniversary Prize next week, which is apparently the highest national honour a further or higher education institution can get.
So what are Alton’s views on leadership, and policy, as she looks back over 35 years? Alton took on the role at Grimsby Institute – which she says was “a very good college” by 2015 – specifically to make it outstanding. How does one do that?
Alton has a great way with phrases, sounding like a scientist or a military commander at different points. On the finance front, she says, “Every pound is a prisoner.”
She and the team tightened lots of financial decisions, filling classes where possible and tracking spending closely, to make sure the “bottom line” wasn’t hit.
Listen to your governors with business acumen, she adds. When the college was buying the University of Hull’s Scarborough campus (now Scarborough TEC), she and her team were minded to sell off the 200-bedroom residential halls, not thinking they could be useful in a largely 16-to-18 college.
But her former chair of governors was a successful entrepreneur and advised her to keep the buildings and offer them as low-cost accommodation.
Now, many doctors and nurses posted to work in Scarborough live in them, and college staff with long commutes can make use of them during the week.
“You’ve got some very capable people sitting around that table,” Alton says of her governors. “Sometimes they come out with golden nuggets.”
It was also the board that got behind the college buying the company Transafe in 2018, so it could quickly enter the market for lorry training with a ready-made staff and client base for training up adults.
This was long before the government started worrying about HGV driver shortages. “Treat your governors as allies, not as anything else. That’s my belief,” Alton tells me.
On getting to outstanding achievement levels, she says straight away: “Forensically know your data.
“Know which bits of your organisation are currently not outstanding and focus on getting them to the highest level.”
Automotive lessons at the Grimsby Institute
Her team also do walk-throughs of departments, speak to students and staff and “triangulate”.
The approach is then supportive, not accusatory. “The conversation is, ‘what is stopping you from being outstanding?’ And then we put in everything they need – support from HR, data they’re missing, whatever it is.”
According to Alton, 95 per cent of areas that went through the college’s ‘support to outstanding’ strategy improved.
And it hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2017, TEC Partnership got a beacon award from the Association of Colleges for its improvement work.
Alton is also a fan of borrowing ideas (and great phrases), from elsewhere.
“I learnt an awful lot from Lincoln College about bid writing, because they have a very clear and effective process,” she says. “They don’t chase everything.”
Lincoln College trained her staff in using an ‘opportunity canvas’, which is a side of A4 that works like a SWOT analysis so a college can assess whether a pot of funding for a particular project matches its strategic goals.
A hospitality learner at the Grimsby Institute
Alton says she has taken on projects in the past that ended up as more work than use. Not any more.
In fact, if there is something noticeable about Alton, it’s that she is not given to waffle. Like any good commander, she keeps things to the point, clear and motivational. This is particularly displayed by her rules around college strategic plans.
I’ve been part of long plans most of my life
“Don’t make it long. We only ever do a one-year plan. It’s on the walls, it’s laminated, and everyone can read the strategic measurements.”
Alton has worked in places where strategic plans are closer to Biblical proportions.
“I’ve been part of long plans most of my life. But if you say to someone, ‘what’s in the strategic plan?’ and they can’t tell you, then people aren’t working towards it. I think a lot of our success has been down to that pace. ‘Let’s crack on’.”
Alton leaving the hotel to collect her OBE
Although five years ago now, Alton still clearly recalls the moment staff, who had stayed late in the main hall, got the feedback that told them they’d made it. “It was electric. It wasn’t down to the managers, really, it was down to the staff in the classroom. They just excelled. We were all pretty emotional actually.”
Of course, Alton is being modest – it was precisely her leadership, and that of deputy chief executive Debra Gray, that had enabled staff to perform at their very best.
But perhaps my favourite thing about Alton is that for all her successes, she does not shy away from angrily sticking up for those with less clout than she has.
She criticises the government’s habit of making FE providers bid for funding, saying it disadvantages smaller colleges (and that’s despite TEC Partnership doing well out of bids, winning £2 million for the college group in the latest strategic development fund).
Having to bid for capital is fundamentally wrong
“I don’t think we should have to bid for capital. Your probability of success is greater if you can afford a good bid-writing team, and that’s wrong, that’s fundamentally wrong. It should be based on need, not on having to pay for a team of people who can access that.”
Her other great parting shot is on pay. The gap in FE staff salaries compared to school staff (around £9,000 a year) is “outrageous”, she says. It also leaves college leaders in a moral quandary.
“Every leader in FE would like to pay their staff more, but they also have to make sure the college is sustainable. It’s a moral dilemma.”
Alton has come a very long way from managing a group of thoughtless revellers doing silly things.
Having said that, it’s a shame we can’t deploy her into the Department for Education for a couple of years. But she’s earned her retirement. The sector will undoubtedly miss her voice.
Colleges and universities will be told that they have a “moral duty” to help raise standards in local schools as the HE regulator floats even more regulatory controls.
John Blake, the newly appointed director for fair access and participation at the Office for Students (OfS), will use his first major speech since taking on the role to make the case that higher education providers have a “moral duty” as “educational and civic institutions” to improve results for disadvantaged pupils locally.
Blake will be speaking at the OfS’ ‘next steps in access and participation’ event this afternoon where he will set out the regulator’s expectations to college and university representatives.
“If we are at all concerned with equality of opportunity in accessing higher education, we must be concerned with improving attainment much, much earlier in life,” he is expected to say.
‘Strategic engagement’ to be closely monitored
According to the Education Policy Institute, disadvantaged pupils are on average 18 months of learning behind their peers by the time they take their GCSEs.
“Universities and colleges have a moral duty to put their shoulder to the wheel of improving that wider community they sit within, and as both educational and civic institutions, improving attainment in our schools is an essential part of that work,” Blake will say today.
“We are asking providers to seek out strategic, enduring, mutually-beneficial partnerships with schools and with the third sector, all working together to contribute to this work.
“But we are expecting providers to pull their weight on pre-16 attainment, a challenge which affects us all.”
OfS director for fair access and participation John Blake
Encouraging “strategic engagement” with schools already features in OfS’ guidance on access and participation plans. OfS requires HE providers that wants to charge higher tuition fees to have an approved access and participation plan.
These documents, which are published, must contain targets and investment plans to, for example, increase participation in higher education from under-represented groups and reduce gaps in outcomes between white and black and disabled and non-disabled students.
When asked by FE Week whether the OfS will be using its regulatory powers to force college and universities to take improvement action with local schools, the regulator revealed that it will be doing so through its approval regime for access and participation plans.
Blake will say today: “We will be asking providers to review their current access and participation plan and for them to seek variations to ensure the full scale of their work on strategic school engagement, quality, and non-traditional pathways is being captured.
“If such work is not currently happening or is not appropriate, providers should seek to remedy that too, with new action beginning from September 2023.”
OfS will be inviting variation requests before the summer, FE Week understands.
The Association of Colleges chief executive David Hughes said that colleges “have decades of experience working closely with local schools to improve achievement and transition at 16” and agrees that “all parts of the education system should work together and have a moral duty to ensure that everyone who has the ability to benefit from higher education can do so”.
Hughes adds “We will continue to encourage OfS to take account of the different circumstances of the organisations they regulate in achieving our shared goals.”
Improve outcomes for disadvantaged students
In a second call to arms, Blake will tell the sector that they should be doing more to support HE students from disadvantaged backgrounds while they are at university or college rather than focussing solely on recruiting them.
“I have heard more often than I would like that students feel their providers fell over themselves to bring them into higher education, but interest in their needs trailed off the moment they were through the door,” he will say.
This follows the OfS’ mammoth series of consultations launched in January which take aim at “poor quality” courses by bringing in tough new outcome measures.
Responding to today’s speech by Blake, the higher and further education minister Michelle Donelan said: “It is a well-worn truth that opportunity has its roots in the early stages of education – which is why to truly champion widening access universities must work with schools and help ensure that disadvantaged pupils are not left behind their peers.”
From talk of widespread devolution and the recognition of skills in socio-economic development, the ‘levelling up’ white paper offered an optimistic view on opportunities development but questions remain on the delivery.
It’s clear that skills are being prioritised by the government, with new initiatives through bootcamps and Multiply as well as the boost to traineeships a welcomed move. But with prior pledges of investment directed towards ‘skills for the future’, there is a lack of wider action in the key functional skills of literacy, numeracy and essential digital skills. While ‘levelling up’ offers commitment to bettering functional skills development, without increased funding the true attainability of these ambitions are questionable.
The recognition of skills development on economic potential is positive, offering individual opportunity for developing a ‘sustainable living’ and providing better employment prospects. But positivity won’t fulfil national skills deficiencies or labour shortages and with the growing socio-economic divide, made worse by two years of job losses and business closure alongside a desperate shortfall of care workers throughout the country, it’s time for real investment to be made into adult learning.
The move to devolution and greater local control is encouraging, offering opportunity for more suitable upskilling opportunities within the local area but the proposition poses a risk of creating a ‘postcode lottery’ and misses the mark on national employer support entirely. Some level of coherence and national entitlement will be required and it seems the Department of Education are unwilling to create an overarching skills strategy – instead opting for a range of initiatives.
With still no reform to skills funding, the burden of a funding system that channels through the institution rather than the individual and employer remains. Closing national gaps in socio-economic opportunity requires placing upskilling opportunity into the hands of the individual through individual learning accounts and this should be prioritised.
Talks on a new digital education service is positive and online ITP’s like The Skills Network, who offer high quality digital learning experiences for over 35,000 learns across the globe, know better than most the opportunity and accessibility that digital learning offers to education and skills development. This is a step in the right direction but more is needed to truly tackle the opportunity divide and skills shortages throughout the county.
GCSE and A-level students should only access advance information about exam topics on official websites, exam boards have said, amid fears misinformation could spread online.
Exam boards are due to publish advance information for most GCSE and A-level topics throughout today. It is one of several mitigations aimed at helping students in the first exam year since the pandemic began.
But the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents exam boards, has urged people to only access the content on the relevant board’s website for their subject, “to minimise any chance of misinformation”.
Ministers have repeatedly insisted that exams will go ahead as planned this summer, with certain adaptations proposed including more generous grading.
Today’s information is aimed at helping students focus their revision ahead of the summer exams series. It is being made available for most subjects, including maths, biology, chemistry and languages.
A “common set of principles” has been developed for the information. For example, they will avoid providing so much detail that answers could be “pre-prepared and memorised”.
But the information will look different for each subject and exam board to reflect “the nature of those subjects and their assessments”.
Ofqual’s ’jigsaw’ on exam adaptations
Sarah Hannafin, senior policy advisor at schools leaders’ union NAHT, said the information is “new to teachers” so it will “only be over the coming days that we learn whether they believe it will be sufficient to counter the levels of disruption which students have faced due to Covid”.
Other adaptations include a choice of topics in some GCSEs like English literature and history and support materials like formulae sheets in maths.
The DfE said that because about 500,000 exams took place as planned in January for vocational and technical qualifications (VTQs), this would give “confidence” in the exams system.
Ministers were urged last month to review their exams plan amid Covid disruption, but government has said they will proceed as planned.
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said: “Exams are the best and fairest form of assessment, and we firmly intend for them to take place this summer, giving students a fair chance to show what they know.”
