Why do so many apprentices drop out? New research offers answers

New research that further explores why half of apprentices drop out before completing their programme has been released.

The St Martin’s Group, a membership body for the country’s largest apprenticeship providers, commissioned the Learning and Work Institute to investigate the reasons behind the issue that has troubled ministers in recent years.

Government data shows that only 53 per cent of apprentices on the new-style standards stayed on their programme until their end-point assessment in 2020/21 – meaning that 47 per cent dropped out.

The dropout rate for frameworks was 17 percentage points lower than standards in 2020/21.

St Martin’s Group’s research, shared exclusively with FE Week, is also the first of its kind to compare the outcomes and destinations of apprentices for those who complete and those who do not, according to the report’s authors.

Here is what we learned…

Lack of employer support most cited reason

L&W surveyed almost 2,500 apprentices, 900 of which had withdrawn from their apprenticeship early. A lack of support from apprentice employers (37 per cent) was the most common reason for non-completions.

This mainly related to employers not giving apprentices time off to study or complete their off-the-job training, according to the report. This meant that apprentices “often worked on their studies and assignments at home, leading to a poor work/life balance”.

Other common reasons for apprentices dropping out was poor course organisation/change to logistics (32 per cent); high workload (29 per cent); a lack of support from their tutor (26 per cent); and poor-quality teaching (24 per cent).

Thirteen per cent of respondents cited a lack of support from both their tutor and employer as a reason for withdrawal.

The researchers found that participants often felt that the employer and training provider “lacked an understanding of the other’s input into the apprenticeship, and like they were the ‘middleman’ in communications between the two”.

Low pay, cited by 12 per cent of non-completers, was 10th most common reason for leaving the apprenticeship early.

‘Drop outs still have positive outcomes’

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that apprentices who did not complete their apprenticeship were statistically less likely to secure either a permanent job (eight per cent, compared to 29 per cent who completed) or a promotion (seven per cent, compared to 18 per cent who completed) with the same employer.

Apprentices who completed their apprenticeship are also significantly more likely to be in employment when compared to those who did not (94 per cent compared to 88 per cent), and to have received a pay rise (64 per cent and 60 per cent).

Those who completed their apprenticeship are also significantly more likely to be in experienced non-managerial roles when compared to those who did not (46 per cent compared to 40 per cent).

However, the St Martin’s Group said that while the research demonstrates the benefits of apprenticeship completion, it also “illustrates that many apprentices who do not complete still secure positive outcomes”.

A spokesperson added: “This is not captured in the current achievement data used to communicate the programme’s success, risking damage to the brand and public trust in apprenticeships which, during a cost-of-living crisis, is a critical sector for the UK economy.”

How do we improve the drop out rate?

The St Martin’s Group and L&W said the Department for Education should consider how to “realign accountability and responsibility to ensure employers are sufficiently incentivised to support completion”.

“This may require additional support and best practice guidance for smaller employers to help them to manage the demands of hiring, training and supervising apprentices, as well as additional support for apprentices working in smaller organisations – including incentive hiring payments, wage subsidies, and access to support networks,” the report stated.

The research also said there needs to be greater emphasis on pastoral care and wrap around support from training providers; clear and accurate information from employers and providers made available well before apprenticeships commenced; and expanding DfE data collection to capture more detailed information about pathways and reasons for withdrawal.

Provider for disadvantaged young people to close after 40 years

A training provider that teaches hundreds of young people who have had a poor experience of school education has gone bust, due to rapidly declining income and plummeting student numbers.

Achieve Training, based in Stoke-on-Trent and formerly known as PM Training, announced this week that it will close its doors on October 31 after more than 40 years.

Around 80 employees now face losing their job and students will need to be transferred to alternative providers to complete their training.

Sinéad Butters, group chief executive of Achieve Training’s parent company Aspire Housing, said: “We understand this is a difficult and sensitive time and we are doing all we can to minimise the impact of the closure.”

The closure comes after years of falling student numbers, blamed by Achieve Training on the government’s apprenticeship and funding reforms, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic.

Its last full inspection from Ofsted, which resulted in a ‘good’ judgement, took place in 2018 when the provider had almost 2,000 students. A monitoring visit was conducted by the inspectorate during the pandemic in 2020, at which points learner numbers dropped to below 1,000.

Achieve Training’s latest published accounts for 2021 show it had around 500 young people on pre-employment programmes and just 124 apprenticeship starts in the year compared to 431 in 2019-20. The accounts show a loss of £551,729 in 2020-21 and the company’s overall turnover fell by 6.5 per cent to £7.79 million.

Achieve Training’s financial statements explain that skills funding is “now more complex, more competitive to obtain, less consistent, short-term, traditional funding sources are ending, bidding is now commonplace, employers have a bigger say, and it is increasingly focused on higher level skills and standards, which means Achieve Training’s traditional and reliable income stream is reducing”.

The independent training sector has also “seen significant regulatory changes, couple with stronger intervention and audit” which has resulted in Achieve Training being subject to financial clawback in previous years from the Education and Skills Funding Agency, according to the accounts.

Stoke-on-Trent has areas of high deprivation where the percentage of working-age people with no qualifications is substantially higher than the national rate. The unemployment rate is also higher than the national average.

A large proportion of learners who studied at Achieve Training have a “poor experience of school education and low levels of attainment, as well as multiple barriers to learning”, according to Ofsted.

Butter said: “It is with regret that I announce that Achieve Training will close on October 31, 2022, following a sustained period of financial strain.

“We understand that this is disappointing and upsetting news for many. Achieve Training has supported thousands of young people into work over the last 40 years.

“We are working with the colleagues affected to mitigate redundancy where possible and working with learners, apprentices and their employers to seek suitable alternative training providers to minimise the disruption to their learning.”

She added: “We would like to thank our colleagues for their continued and valued commitment in supporting learners and apprentices.”

Top DfE civil servants grilled on skills reforms: 6 things we learned

The Public Accounts Committee questioned the Department for Education’s top civil servants on their plans for skills reform this week.

Giving evidence to the MPs was DfE permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood (pictured centre), and the department’s director general of skills Paul Kett (pictured left).

Here’s what we learned…

Officials ‘pretty confident’ employer-led system is right direction of travel

The government has embarked on an “employer-led” approach to its skills reform agenda after finding this method worked successfully in other countries, such as Germany and the Netherlands.

But in July 2022 the National Audit Office reported that there is a “risk that, despite government’s greater activity and good intent, its approach may be no more successful than previous attempts to provide the country with the skills it needs”.

Acland-Hood told MPs the DfE was “pretty confident that that having an employer-led system is the right direction of travel”. She said this view was based on “quite a lot of international evidence” and a “whole string of incredibly thorough and thoughtful reports about our systems” from the likes of Lord Sainsbury, Baroness Alison Wolf, Dame Mary Ney, and Sir Philip Augar, who all made the same conclusion.

‘Nowhere in the world does retraining well’

Kett told the committee the UK’s biggest issue is overcoming barriers to people retraining throughout their life – and it is a major problem all over the globe.

“When we looked around the world when it comes to retraining in particular, there is nowhere in the world that does this really well.

“And so one of the things we’re trying to do is make sure we’re keeping that conversation going because everyone is wrestling with this challenge and we need to kind of keep learning from one another.”

Kett explained that the skills bootcamp model that has been rolled out in recent years is one that several other nations are “very interested in”. He explained this is because there is a consistent theme that employer “skin in the game” is critical to the retraining challenge.

Skills shortages can be UK’s ‘friend’ to ensure reforms work

Successive governments have made various attempts at reforming the skills agenda in the UK, but it is widely accepted that none of them have worked.

Asked why this government’s attempt would be different, Acland-Hood said: “I do think some of the challenges in the current context are also our friends. We have a very tight labour market, which is really incentivising people to think hard about this at this moment. And I’m a great believer in making sure that if you are in difficult circumstances, you do everything you can to try and turn that into change and improvement for the future.”

Kett added that putting Local Skills Improvement Plans on a statutory footing under law ensures they have “teeth” as colleges and training providers must now have regard for offering provision that meets the needs of their local area.

Skills system is complex but ‘not because we’re all idiots’

Committee MP Kate Green said employers feel the skills system is “disjointed” and listed off a stat from the Local Government Association that identified 49 employment programmes in nine government departments and agencies.

Acland-hood admitted this complexity can deter employers from engaging in training and retraining and the government is working on ways to “rationalise skills programmes”.

“We’re increasingly trying to work with other government departments who are leads for particular sectors so that rather than designing additional programmes, what they do is work with us to articulate needs and then we design through the kind of main suite of programmes,” she said.

The permanent secretary added that it is “incumbent on us to keep trying to make the system simpler for people” but the challenge is that the government has “two countervailing forces of people want the system to be simple and intelligible, but they also want courses available that relatively precisely meet their need”.

“It’s not complicated just because we’re all idiots, it’s complicated because there is this kind of deep desire for really kind of precise and tailored training and we have to design system allows tailoring within a kind of intelligible framework.”

New Unit for Future Skills struggled to recruit

The DfE has created a “Unit for Future Skills” to replace its “Skills and Productivity Board” which was in place for only a year. The unit is an analytical and research division set up to improve the quality of available jobs and skills data.

But Kett revealed the department was “experiencing some of the challenges recruiting highly skilled analysts” and had to borrow staff from the Office for National Statistics to get the unit off the ground in April.

The team, which currently has 18 staff, has “struggled to recruit to its full complement but we will get there”, he explained. “It’s not now affecting the work that they’re doing. It’s a growing unit and we will continue to make sure we secure the right people in that team.”

Apprentice dropout exit interviews to start this month

Acland-Hood told the committee the government is exploring the “challenge” of apprenticeship dropouts, explaining that there was a “significant shift in completion rates when we moved from apprenticeship frameworks to apprenticeship standards”.

Government data shows that only 53 per cent of apprentices on the new-style standards stayed on their programme until their end-point assessment in 2020/21 – meaning that 47 per cent dropped out.

The drop-out rate for frameworks was 17 percentage points lower than standards in 2020/21.

Acland-Hood said standards are harder to complete and many apprentices simply leave their programme to go into a better job after gaining the skills they need but before getting to their end-point assessment, which goes some way to explaining the rise in dropouts. She admitted completions need to be higher.

Kett said the DfE will this month launch a new exit interview feature for apprentices who drop out to better understand their reasons for doing so. The feature was first announced by then skills minister Alex Burghart in June.

“We don’t collect that [individual reasons for dropouts] systematically at the moment and this new data collection that launches this month will collect that for us,” Kett said.

The Staffroom: How to drive inclusion for the ‘people of pride’

We’ve seen first-hand the lack of consistent support for LGBTQIA+ within the sector and its impact on staff and learners. For a long while now, we’ve been alert to a tokenistic sector-wide ‘pink washing’ that takes place annually during Pride Month. We’ve been asking ourselves, ‘But what about the other 11 months? How are we supporting pride 365 days a year?’

So, we’ve taken matters into our own hands.

To be fair, we’d been guilty of this kind of tokenism too; we’d printed our Pride logo and posted it up through June, then taken it down again in July. When we reviewed observations which had taken place, we could clearly see that other important areas of inclusion like race and disability were regularly embedded into the curriculum, yet sexual orientation and gender identity seemed only to be covered during June.

At a push, it might make another appearance in February for LGBTQIA+ Histories month in February. We allowed that to persist. We didn’t challenge it enough.

So when we started working on the Skills First level 2 certificate in LGBT inclusion in the workplace, we already knew there was a lot more to be done. But what we found through our informal conversations with practitioners was a pervasive lack of knowledge and ultimately confidence around LGBTQIA+ inclusion, even down to terminology.

So our first step had to be to raise greater awareness and to provide CPD for our members to build their confidence. It wasn’t that they were opposed to doing more; we just had to remove the barriers that were holding back their ability to make positive change for LGBTQIA+ staff and learners.

Then, serendipitously, ETF funding became available that allowed us to speed this up. With Skillsfirst and the Association of Colleges partnering and providing guidance through the steering group, we developed a project that would eventually be called Pride in FE.

Sector-wide LGBT inclusion is still in its infancy

We brought in the LGBTEd group to provide expertise and to develop a rigorous and accessible programme of CPD that stretched from basic terminology to a range of complex topics including intersectionality and accountability.

But just like organisations’ commitment to LGBTQIA+ inclusion has to go beyond a calendar month, the sector’s commitment needed to have a legacy beyond the funding of Pride in FE. That’s how the Pride in FE Charter – with 10 commitments for providers to sign up to including to staff CPD and to challenging poor attitudes and actions towards staff and learners – came about.

We knew before and feel even more strongly now that sector-wide LGBTQIA+ inclusion is still very much in its infancy. More work is needed to build on the initial success of the Pride in FE project, which is why Mark Child has formed the ‘People of Pride Collective’ which brings together people who want to work collaboratively to further develop inclusive curriculums and environments for learners and staff alike.

The collective’s membership welcomes everyone regardless of identity or gender, neurodiversity, colour, disability, or place in the sector. Parents and learners are particularly welcome, because they are their children’s strongest advocates and consistently highlight the need to better support young people.

The goal remains accessibility – for people of pride across the sector to work and study in welcoming environments where they see themselves reflected, but also for their allies to better understand how to make that a reality.

It’s with that aim that we feel it’s time to move away from the use of acronyms such as LGBTQIA+ and LGBTQQIP2SAA and towards an overarching name that, as Mark says, stops putting people into categories and is all encompassing. We propose a community title of ‘People of Pride’ instead.

Ultimately, we want to ensure that all identities are recognised and included at all times, and that significant others such as chosen family members, friends, and allies are also acknowledged for their positive support.

That’s about more than a name. It’s about commitment, listening and challenging ourselves. But we all know identities matter, and we need to be proud enough to display ours all year round.

Six ways to make the apprenticeship levy work harder

Our new government, already on its second chancellor, is now looking to make urgent public sector efficiencies. Meanwhile, the opposition are preparing to present themselves as a government in waiting. For different reasons, both sides will be keen to look at levy reforms, so while the skills minister and her shadow are in listening mode, here are my top six asks:

A modular model

Recently, the employers we work with in adult health and social care have been asking about modular programmes, like the proven model for Open University.

It would be easy to do this for apprenticeship standards. Apprentices could then better fit their modules in around their (often complicated) work and personal lives, and attain individually assessed modules to build towards a complete apprenticeship over an extended period.

This would promote inclusion and social justice for those who would otherwise be unable to access a full programme and be really helpful for short-handed employers struggling to commit to the necessary off-job training for extended periods.

Responsive funding

At a recent HIT employer forum, we asked our employer partners whether they would find it helpful to have irregular, non-linear, draw down of the levy to respond to the needs for up-front training, seasonal capacity issues and demands, and learner availability. They all said ‘yes’.

In the case of front loading, this would help employers to get learners up to speed faster and allow an extended period over which those learners would be able to embed and practice their learning. Where we have piloted this, we have found that learner engagement improves as there is greater involvement in their programme from an earlier stage.

Top-up training

Currently, if a potential apprentice has already completed over 50 per cent of the apprenticeship knowledge, skills and behaviours, they cannot access the apprenticeship. This is frequently a bar to further development.

Let’s extend the levy to support top-up training to build existing skills into a full apprenticeship. This would resolve accessibility to apprenticeships for partially skilled people, and again promote inclusion and social mobility through a complete, fully assessed programme of learning with transferable skills.

Bitesize learning

Sitting on the CBI’s south east council, I know the organisation has strong support from its members for opening up of the apprenticeship levy to smaller pockets of learning. Working on the principle that apprenticeship standards were developed by employers for specific roles, we can argue that all the learning for each role is already contained within apprenticeships.

Further, the standards are broken down into what is effectively a matrix with skills, knowledge and behaviour as column headers and occupational duties as line topics. It follows that any element of any line or column can be delivered in bite-sized chunks.

Allowing these bite-sized elements to be delivered through the apprenticeship levy, whether eventually leading to a full apprenticeship or not, would meet the demands of the CBI and their members without needing new programmes, systems, providers or contracting. Everyone would gain from this approach, and in particular learners if this was combined with the other suggestions above.

T level transition

The DfE T levels team is beginning to recognise that some students will need extra workplace support to become fully competent after they complete their programme. In the case of the culinary T level, it is difficult to see how an 18-year-old could possibly go straight from school into a chef de partie role in the same way as someone who has studied for a workplace apprenticeship. There may be equivalence of knowledge, but their skills and behaviours will almost certainly need extra attention. Flexibility in the levy to support such learners to top up their T level to an apprenticeship would benefit businesses and individuals alike.

Functional skills

Last but certainly not least, it makes sense to allow the levy to support essential skills development in English, Maths and ICT. These are currently significantly underfunded for apprentices, and more support is needed.

Toby Perkins nodded to this at the Labour party conference. Yes please, Toby!

25 years on: What did the LSRN ever do for us?

It’s jubilee year for LSRN, the Learning and Skills Research Network. Only silver, admittedly, but 25 years is a long time in this sector.

The same spirit that brought together research enthusiasts in 1997 is still at work today. More convenors than ever before – stretching across the regions of England, from Devon and Cornwall to the north east and across Wales – continue to promote the role of research in FE, just as in its founding days.

It was at the glorious Coombe Lodge campus of the then-Further Education Development Agency that the idea of a network emerged following a residential workshop (remember them?) on ‘Research in FE’. A simple statement of purposes and values and a few guiding principles agreed in 1997 remain unchanged and influential to this day.

Remarkably, this unfunded, bottom-up initiative has outlived the litany of defunct sector bodies: FEDA, LSDA, LSC, QIA, LSIS, CEL, LLUK, IfL, to list just a few by acronym. The secret of its longevity? Its fiercely protected independence has saved it from oblivion, time and again. As bodies have come and gone, LSRN has determinedly stuck to governing itself, simply doing what its activists decide to do.

Sponsors have boosted its work for periods of time. FEDA/LSDA in the 1990s supported large-scale conferences, enabling research to be shared between practitioners, academics and policy makers.

The first, organised by Blackpool College in the Grand Metropole Hotel, kicked off an annual tradition, reaching up to 400 participants at its peak and inspiring books, CDs and journal papers.  

This independence has been matched by a strong spirit of inclusivity and collaboration. LSRN has encouraged universities and all branches of the post-16 sector to work together, meeting the challenges of their cultural and functional differences.

The secret of our longevity? Independence

Regional networks undertook small-scale collaborative projects on themes such as the impact of inspection, the role of part-time lecturers and progression to higher education. An R&D Toolkit was created to help develop skills.

With the abolition of LSDA in the noughties, activists adapted the network, simplifying its activities with the support of sponsors. A grant from LSIS (later ETF), plus a venue from Pearson and administrative support from NIACE enabled twice-yearly workshops to be organised, focusing alternately on salient issues in policy and practice.

Participants from colleges, community groups, agencies, training organisations and universities discussed their research and speakers addressed themes such as learning through life, world-class skills and teaching standards. Nationally, ATL (now NEU) and NFER added their support while convenors continued to organise events regionally on topics such as literacy, NEETs, CPD – even space exploration in one case.

The pandemic brought in-person activity to an end in 2020, catapulting LSRN, paradoxically, into yet another phase of life. Adapting quickly to the opportunities of conferencing technology, convenors began mounting virtual events. With travel time saved, greater numbers were able to participate; quite simply, geographical location became less relevant.

Jo Fletcher-Saxon from Ashton Sixth Form College and Rachel Terry from the University of Huddersfield brought convenors together in a new organising group. New networks were started up as individuals volunteered themselves and new activities including online methods workshops were introduced.

LSRN activists, many of them graduates of the influential practitioner research programme at SUNCETT in Sunderland, have gone on to present their work through journals and conferences organised by BERA, ARPCE and others.

As the perils of Covid abate, convenors are looking to the next stage of development in the new hybrid world. Practitioners are as motivated as ever to engage with research and academics to collaborate with them. Extending research engagement to the bulk of teachers and leaders in their daily practice remains a key challenge. Getting the fruits of research read, discussed, and used in everyday practice is no easy task.

LSRN plays a key role in addressing this challenge through its direct connection with teachers and leaders as well as through its promotion of research. With its 25-year history of adaptation and regeneration, LSRN will surely be there, connecting research and practice, for decades to come.

Police and FE partnerships: A model for impactful engagement

Throughout my 30-year career policing in London, I have always been acutely aware of the need to build and sustain effective partnerships with every part of the community.

Whether this is visiting colleges, attending events, or simply being visible on the streets and encouraging people to engage, my colleagues and I work hard to ensure that we are approachable but also effective.

Partnerships must be a two-way process.

We cannot just go out and talk ‘at’ people. Instead, we need to provide the right spaces and forums to facilitate genuine conversations, which provide us with real insight into people’s perceptions, worries, concerns and suggestions. This means that young people and the police feel supported and safe.

FE providers and their students sit at the very heart of their communities. Colleges provide opportunities for people of all ages to achieve the qualifications they need to access employment, no matter what their background, life stage, or ambitions.

Such diverse and inclusive organisations are therefore integral to our engagement strategy, offering a societal cross-section of opinion and perspective.

To do our job effectively, we need to understand the constantly changing needs and challenges within our communities – and FE colleges are clearly a great place to start.

But how do we engage and collaborate in a way that will have tangible and impactful outcomes? An excellent, recent example of multi-organisational, cross-sector collaboration was a unique event for fifty 16-24-year-olds, which took place at Experience Haus design studio in London.

This was conceived by Experience Haus and Digital Skills Consulting, and sponsored by Amazon Web Services. The event also involved the City of London Police, working with the Metropolitan Police Service, other employers, and several charities.

We need to provide the right forums for genuine conversations

The dual aim was to build trust and confidence between young people and the police to support positive future relationships, while also introducing them to careers in the digital & creative industry.

The young people involved came from FE colleges (Activate Learning’s Oxford, Reading and Banbury campuses and Barking & Dagenham College) and local London schools as well as London charities.

A design challenge was set, and the students worked with experienced Technology UX Designers on some creative concepts to support positive relationship building.

This set-up provided a safe environment for some valuable discussions, with issues and possible solutions being talked about constructively. These ranged from ways in which the police could let people know about their rights in a more friendly and supportive way, through to the way that police uniform is perceived by young people.

The format of the event also gave us a chance to explain the scope of our work and to ensure that the students attending saw us as humans, rather than just police officers.

The ‘partnership working’ made this event extremely impactful. By bringing together FE colleges and their students in a room with employers, charities, and the police and a representative from the Home Office, each partner achieved a slightly different aim while providing the young people with a hugely useful experience.

For the City of London Police and the Met, we were able to open up a positive dialogue with a key target audience and get some extremely useful feedback. The employers involved have skills gaps to fill and were able to demonstrate to the young people the many career opportunities on offer in this exciting sector.

For the young people themselves, we were able to de-mystify some of their stereotypes around the police and challenge some of the more negative perceptions. They also had access to some hugely talented, creative individuals, and the chance to network and speak with industry experts.

No organisation can achieve all their aims in isolation. While partnership working is not a new concept, we need to re-think how we can collaborate in a way that truly benefits our communities as well as our own organisations.

FE colleges are a rich resource for such collaboration, but for more of this good work to happen, we need to widen and strengthen partnerships into the private sector and beyond.

In the meantime, I know my colleagues in police forces across the country stand ready to engage with their local colleges to achieve similar outcomes for their communities. The most important lesson we’ve learned is that when we work together, everyone benefits – and especially young people.

Is now the time to ‘waste money’ on prisoner apprenticeships?

The decision to allow every prisoner on release on temporary licence (ROTL) to take up an apprenticeship is one the whole sector has warmly welcomed. Indeed, it has been a long time coming.

At Milton Keynes College Group we provide teaching and learning in nineteen prisons, and we know how effective it can be, having seen more than 700 offenders into work through our Employment Academy Programme in the past three years.

But as the country struggles with the cost-of-living crisis and public sector spending comes under even more renewed pressure, it might be tempting for the government to see this as a convenient place to do some pruning. After all, prison education is no vote winner. We really can’t afford it and the money could be better spent elsewhere.

Or could it?

The report of the Commons Education Select Committee published in May was the catalyst for the then-justice secretary, Dominic Raab, to agree to apprenticeships being available to ROTL prisoners.

That report pointed out the direct link between prison education and reoffending rates.

It read: “Research by the Ministry of Justice in 2018 found that people who had participated in education whilst in prison were significantly less likely to reoffend within 12 months of release than those who had not by 7.5 percentage points i.e. a reoffending rate of 32.6 per cent from a baseline one-year reoffending rate of 40.1 per cent.”

Bear in mind that, encouraging as it is, this figure only relates to education. Prisoners who learn while still incarcerated and then go on to gainful employment are considerably less likely to reoffend, not least because they have more good reasons not to do so.

Prison education is no vote winner

In 2013, The Ministry of Justice published Analysis of the impact of employment on re-offending following release from custody, using Propensity Score Matching. That report compared recidivism between prisoners who had jobs to go to and ones who did not. It stated: “100 days after release from prison, nine per cent of offenders who have a P45 employment spell after release have re-offended; compared to 18 per cent of the matched comparison group.”

In other words, offenders going into jobs were twice as likely to stay out of trouble as those who did not.

The average cost of keeping someone in prison goes up every year, in line with or sometimes even above inflation. According to Statista, that figure had reached £44,640. Meanwhile, between January and March this year, 11,324 people were released from prison in England and Wales.

If we put all these figures together, we come up with some interesting possibilities. The net saving per year to the exchequer of not having those people in prison any more is £505,503,360 – i.e., more than half a billion pounds. If nine per cent fewer of those reoffend because they have work to go to, that is a saving of £45,495,302.

Meanwhile, estimates of the cost of crime vary and are subject to much interpretation. The range, depending on whose figures you alight upon, is from £50 billion to £150 billion per year. It’s impossible to say how much our non-offending former prisoners, now in employment, would have cost people and businesses, but it clearly must represent a further cost saving in the tens of millions.

And these are just savings. On the other side of the ledger, we also need to take into account the tax former offenders in employment pay, the money they spend in the local economy, the family members in receipt of fewer benefits, etc.

The result is an evidence-based, hard-headed financial argument for why increased investment in prison education makes indisputable sense.

Let’s be really conservative with our figures here in case we’re over-egging it. Let’s say education for prisoners leading to work only saves the UK a meagre £50,000,000 per year.

Could anyone still argue the investment is a waste of money?

Colleges Week: Getting schools and colleges to work together

Colleges Week comes soon after our sector’s busy enrolment period. This celebration of our sector, just as tens of thousands of students settle into their new learning environments, got me thinking about how schools and colleges can work better together for them.

While A levels are most people’s first choice, the fact is that 16-year-olds (and their parents) have a multitude of options, whether that’s at school, college or elsewhere.

They can study a plethora of vocational and technical qualifications from BTECs to T levels. They can access entry-level, level 1 or level 2 programmes. They can even get on- and off-the-job training through apprenticeships. And if they need to, they can resit their GCSEs.

As a college, we prioritise individual choice with a focus on careers not courses, offering a breadth of choice to see them onto the right qualification for that career pathway. In addition, we offer a wealth of enrichment activities and career opportunities including health and wellbeing support, trips, guest speakers, employability workshops, career-ready programmes, mentoring, and credible work placements and internships with hundreds of London employers.

All this boosts students’ skills and experience and gives them a greater insight into their career options for successful progression and positive destinations.

At the same time, we know many young people want to stay at school. If that’s the right choice for them, that’s great. Contrary to the perverse incentives inherent in the funding of 16-18 education that often pit us against each other, we are not in competition with secondary schools.

Instead, we want to be seen as a trusted partner, and two recent examples of partnership work between our college and local schools clearly demonstrate the benefits that working closely together can bring to some students.

We are not in competition with secondary schools

We’re working with an ‘Outstanding’ school in Islington to offer their pupils more A level choices. Any school would struggle to offer the 33 subjects that we do, so we are collaborating with them to set up a satellite provision which would enable their students to take a combination of A levels, with teaching delivery from both the school and our college.

And at another local school, also in Islington, we’re looking to restart a great scheme from just before the pandemic. Working closely with the school, we developed alternative provision for a group of year 10 and 11 pupils, who were disengaging and in danger of not taking GCSEs at all.

The pupils stayed at the school for their English and maths GCSEs and, depending on their interests, came to one of the colleges in our group for a vocational level 1 or 2 qualification. Some pupils went to Westminster Kingsway College to study hospitality; a group went to CONEL in Tottenham for construction, and others came to City and Islington to study animal science or hair and beauty.

Helping these pupils onto level 1 and 2 courses with us gave them a taste of life at college and helped them broaden both their horizons and career options. Most of the students subsequently stayed with us and progressed to their next level of learning at college, familiar with the environment and with successes already under their belts.

What these great partnerships have in common is that both were founded on good personal relationships. In both cases, I or a senior colleague and the deputy head at the school got to know each other and built mutual trust, also working cohesively with the local authority.

School staff have visited our colleges and we have been into the schools to speak to staff, pupils and their parents. It has taken time, but we’ve seen the benefits in better outcomes for students.

Schools and colleges all want the same thing – to ensure the very best outcomes for all their pupils and students.  While neither school nor college will be the best option for every 16-year-old, by working together as partners, we can help more students find the course that’s right for them and the positive career options that lie ahead.

This Colleges Week, we should all remember that we owe it to every 16 year-old to do no less.