During Covid, the near universal integration of communication platforms into everyday working practices changed the five-day week, nine to five office culture forever. In Spring 2022, we at SECG reflected on how we could mark this cultural step change and put staff work-life balance at the centre of our decision making, by introducing a four-day teaching week.
Our campuses are spread over 25 miles from Thurrock to Southend and staff commute from wider Essex, Kent, London and beyond. Like many providers, Fridays tend to be relatively lightly timetabled. So we asked ourselves whether we were obliging people to come in merely to be present onsite.
We decided to test the feasibility of a four-day opening and challenged curriculum heads to design student-friendly timetables over Monday to Thursday. If they had reported back that it simply was not possible, then we would have abandoned the idea. But they did not. It took effort, but all our curriculum areas delivered timetables they believed would work well for students.
At the start of 2022-23 the four-day campus operation began, albeit with our HE centre and another site remaining open on Fridays to facilitate apprenticeship delivery.
Revolutionary pilot
This revolutionary pilot was kept under review. It became clear that shoehorning a 24-hour teaching allocation into four days was challenging for teachers as it left little time for anything else. So the following year we reduced the weekly requirement to 23 hours to mitigate the stresses caused by four-day timetables. We would very much like to do more in this space, as soon as it is financially prudent to do so.
We were very clear from the outset that the change was not a move to a four-day working week. Fridays were for marking, preparation and other administrative tasks. In retrospect we were not sufficiently prescriptive about how the non-teaching day was to be used, and this caused some unintended confusion among teams.
At the start of 2023-24, we set out a clear structure to Fridays which established specific slots in the morning for team meetings and planned professional development sessions. Friday afternoons were kept free for admin. We have always been flexible about how those afternoons should be used. It was important to us that staff did not feel shackled to their laptops when they might be doing something more fulfilling. It was never SECG’s intention to substitute one type of presenteeism for another. We trust our staff to get their work done and are very relaxed about precisely when that happens.
All staff were canvassed for their feedback at the end of 2022/23. It was overwhelmingly positive. The four-day teaching week continued, and is now part of SECG’s employer value proposition.
We found that any negative impact on students was negligible as the universally compressed timetables enabled them to do part time work and fulfil other responsibilities on Fridays.
Other advantages
There have been other benefits too. We all remember in 2022 the impact on personal and institutional budgets of the huge rise in gas, oil and electricity costs. By closing most of our sites on Thursday evenings SECG has been able to save around £600,000 a year on utilities since the concept was introduced. Our staff turnover has also reduced by 9 per cent.
There may come a time when we feel the four-day teaching week is no longer right for us, but it is working so far. Our outcomes for learners increased significantly in 2023/24 and are above national averages for all levels. And we achieved a richly deserved Grade 2 from Ofsted in October. Is it right for everyone? Well, one of the beauties of the FE sector is that all colleges share the same stresses and strains but are also uniquely different, wrestling with their own internal and external dynamics. Our strategy may not be right for other organisations. But it is always exciting to explore the art of the possible and see where that takes you.
While the proportion of students passing English GCSE resits was down 5.4 percentage points on last year (to 34.9 per cent), pass rates were up by 1.9 percentage points to 24.1 per cent for maths resitters.
For those who achieved a grade four, this will be a fantastic start to 2025 and the key to accessing new opportunities in education and work.
But now is also a chance to reflect on the challenges facing post-16 English and maths, and how we might overcome them.
The November exam window can be a brilliant second chance for those on the cusp of passing in the summer. For some, a few weeks of intensive, well-designed revision is all they need to secure that all-important grade four. However, most learners, particularly those who achieved a grade one or two in the summer and those further down the grade three mark scale, need longer lead-in times before attempting the GCSE. Even the summer exam window comes too soon for many to adequately address the knowledge gaps holding them back.
Our proposal would alleviate the endless cycle of resits
Since the condition of funding began requiring students without a grade four to continue studying English and maths post-16 in 2014, the sector has achieved significant successes. Since then, there has been a 94 per cent increase in those passing GCSE English and maths in post-16 education. Much of this progress is driven by learners who achieve a grade three at 16. The sector should be proud of this. However, there is a clear need for more tailored, evidence-based approaches to help all learners succeed — especially those further behind.
Individual colleges have been wrestling with the differing needs of their learner cohorts for years. We now need to dig deep on a national level and ensure we have the infrastructure to support the delivery of targeted interventions. This is why Get Further responded to the government’s curriculum and assessment review by proposing the introduction of a “GCSE step” for resit students – a one-year course covering approximately half of the GCSE content aimed at those students with the lowest prior attainment (grade 2 or below) that prepares them to sit the full GCSE the following year.
There is plenty of evidence that a mastery approach like this is beneficial for all learners, but particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are disproportionally more likely to need to resit. At present, while many colleges would like to take a longer-term approach to supporting learners, accountability measures mean there is pressure to enter students for GCSE exams each year, leading to the often-mentioned criticism that students are “subjected to an endless cycle of resits”. Our proposal would alleviate this pressure and give learners the opportunity to consolidate foundational skills before tackling the full breadth of the curriculum.
To inform and advocate for more targeted interventions for post-16 English and maths learners, we also need better evidence to draw upon. For example, a wealth of evidence from secondary settings demonstrates small-group tuition to be an effective intervention for supporting learners, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to develop their literacy and numeracy skills. Get Further’s internal impact data supports this. However, there has been little external research conducted on tuition in post-16 settings.
This is why the Education Endowment Foundation has commissioned a team of researchers led by the University of Warwick to undertake an evaluation of Get Further’s small-group tuition in 2025/26. Their investment of nearly £1.1 million is the most they have ever spent on a post-16 evaluation, demonstrating their commitment to generating evidence of what works to support learners resitting English and maths GCSEs. We are now calling on colleges to take part in this evaluation and help us to generate these vital insights.
For some of our international counterparts, such as the Netherlands, fewer than 10 per cent of young people are without equivalent level two qualifications in English and maths by the age of 19. This new year, let’s resolve to take a more targeted approach to matching this achievement in England.
The revelation that graduates are taking up one in six apprenticeship places has caused consternation in some parts of the sector.
Ministers are set to decide what the new growth and skills levy will fund once Skills England is fully up and running.
The argument put forward by a Social Market Foundation report last week was that graduates should be banned from receiving apprenticeship funding.
Analysis by the report’s author and former Tory education adviser, Tom Richmond, found £431 million was spent on apprentices in 2023-24 who had already obtained a degree. “Unsurprisingly”, Richmond states, “this generosity has placed a considerable strain on the apprenticeship budget”.
The problem with this zero-sum approach to apprenticeship policy and funding is that it is wrong-headed. It’s the misguided belief that we can only afford to provide more apprenticeship opportunities to non-graduates and young people by depriving those enrolled in higher-level skills training access to the levy pot in the future.
The other misinformed view about HE student financial support and the apprenticeship levy is the call for these to be treated like other forms of public spending.
In reality, the money individuals have borrowed from the taxpayer is a personal liability that has to be repaid over a working lifetime of 40 years. Once graduates earn above £25,000 a year, they are liable to pay 9 per cent of their earnings above the threshold in repayments for a bachelor’s degree and 6 per cent of their income for courses studied at the master’s level.
We are underinvesting in skills at all levels
Moreover, tax receipts from the employer-generated levy are not public money in the traditional sense of the term. The 0.5 per cent levy on large company payrolls raised about £3.5 billion in the fiscal year 2022-23. The levy was initially sold to British businesses as a hypothecated fund, with the purchasing power gifted to employers paying in to decide what type of apprenticeship standards to acquire.
In practice, the Treasury treats the payroll levy as just another source of tax revenue for its general fund. According to FE Week analysis, the Treasury top-sliced £418 million of what it raised in 2022-23, which subsequently was not included in the apprenticeship expenditure settlement given to the Department for Education.
When a £96 million underspend of the DfE’s apprenticeship budget during the same year is factored in, we arrive at over half a billion pounds of unallocated apprenticeship resources.
The Social Market Foundation report, I suspect, makes no mention of the Treasury’s blatant short-changing of the system, because if it did, it would blow out of the water its main contention that there is not enough money to fund Level 7 apprenticeships. There is plenty of levy money to go around.
It’s time for a more informed debate about how we invest in skills for productivity for growth in future. The truth is we are chronically underinvesting in skills at all levels of our economy.
Compared to European competitors, British employers invest about half of what our rivals invest in employee training. We have a massive problem with lagging productivity in the public services compared to the private sector.
Empirical studies have shown that the poor quality of management and leadership in some industries can explain about a fifth of the country’s productivity gap.
This debate points to the urgency of the Labour government now getting on and fully implementing the Lifelong Learning Entitlement Act. The ambition of this legislation is revolutionary because it has the potential to create a single post-18 funding system in which co-investment by the state, employers and individuals is made more transparent.
In this scenario, the prior academic attainment of apprentices becomes irrelevant. What matters is that we arrive at a sensible “co-investment mechanism”, in which a more optimal level of skills acquisition is taking place to impact economic growth. Destroying our world-class lead in degree-level apprenticeships is not the answer.
You can read Tom Bewick’s other views in his Substack, The Skills Agenda.
Gavin Williamson blitzed it but government-backed union training could return under a new guise now Labour holds power.
By the time Gavin Williamson scrapped the Union Learning Fund (ULF) in 2021, over two million people had used it to access training. Labour accused the then education secretary of ditching the £12 million a year scheme “to settle scores with trade unions”.
Now in government, there is growing speculation Labour could revive the fund, which supporters say helped a generation of workers climb the career ladder and delivered proven value for money for taxpayers.
Big employers including Tesco, Tata Steel and Heathrow Airport lined up with unions and MPs to oppose Williamson. It was an “unnecessary and ideological decision” which “defied economic logic” according to TUC northern secretary Liz Blackshaw, and a source close to government claimed the move flew in the face of Treasury advice.
Funding was instead diverted into the National Skills Fund to provide the free courses for jobs and skills bootcamps schemes, both of which are yet to prove themselves worthy of comparison with the ULF.
A University of Leeds evaluation in 2016 found the ULF delivered an economic return of £12.30 for every £1 spent (£7.60 to the individual and £4.70 to the employer).
Now, with the emergence of Skills England, a more flexible growth and skills levy and greater devolution, unions are eyeing opportunities to embark on a new age of union learning.
Former education secretary Gavin Williamson
Blunkett on a mission
Labour grandee David Blunkett began funding the ULF as education secretary in 1998 and is on a mission to bring it back. The peer wants unions to return to being seen “not just as bodies that only get taken seriously when they go on strike but as engines of positive change”.
Trade unions have a long tradition in learning.
England’s early adult education colleges were affiliated with the trade union movement, and union courses were commonly run in FE colleges.
Blunkett was inspired to create the ULF by his own experience of FE teaching in Huddersfield on “TUC-approved courses” when he became “very familiar with the idea of developing learning representatives”.
He was also later influenced by a scheme rolled out by Sheffield City Council – when he was its leader – which provided 10 days of paid learning opportunities for employees who lacked basic skills.
“It created an atmosphere of combined endeavour, so it wasn’t management versus trade unions. I drew down on that,” Blunkett said.
David Blunkett Photo by Mark Allan
In 2021, Blunkett was tasked by Keir Starmer to form the Council of Skills Advisers to plan how Labour could fix the country’s skills crisis if it won government.
Its top recommendation – to create a ‘national skills taskforce’ of employers and representatives of unions, central and local government and education providers to work cross-government – is now coming to fruition with the creation of Skills England.
The TUC’s learning and skills policy officer Julia Jones is confident that Unionlearn (the skills arm of the TUC that managed the ULF) is on the government’s radar because “we’ve made sure it is”.
It has commissioned Public First to undertake a feasibility study on what a new ULF might look like in light of the devolution agenda, with many areas of the country now gaining control of adult skills budgets.
Proof of concept
Tom Bewick, an advisor to the government on skills policy in the early years of New Labour who “helped devise” the ULF, believes the fund’s “real strength” was “getting to people in the workplace who frankly after bad experiences were mistrusting of school”, but were “more likely to open up” to their union representatives.
Research supports this.
Tom Bewick
A Learning and Work Institute report in 2020 found it was “particularly effective at engaging workers with lower levels of qualifications”, while the University of Leeds evaluation found the fund “notably engaged older learners and learners from ethnic minority groups”.
The ULF provided not only maths, English and digital skills, but also more niche provision. Blunkett cited how the Transport and General Workers Union, working with colleges in the North West, used “transport cafés to lay on IT courses for road hauliers and coach drivers ….stopping off for half an hour – thus bringing about an entirely new version of ‘chips with everything’”.
Employers benefitted too because “they suddenly got motivated employees who wanted progression. They were recruiting in-house from their own workforce, which saved management in external recruitment costs”.
Blackshaw said that union learning set learners on “career paths they’d never envisioned, whether it was a supermarket checkout worker transitioning into an IT apprenticeship or train drivers learning British Sign Language”.
ULF 2.0
With the nation facing critical skills shortages, a new ULF could be purposefully designed to fill those gaps.
Tom Wilson, the TUC’s Unionlearn director from 2007 to 2015, believes that if funding constraints mean a new ULF “must be smaller”, then “priorities should be agreed, for example, social care where there is a desperate shortage of trained staff”.
Dr Benjamin Silverstone, a former union learning rep and now head of skills policy and strategy at the University of Warwickshire, believes a new ULF should focus on “developing the additional technical capabilities that workers need to remain relevant in markets that are rapidly shifting”, highlighting the example of an engineering motor vehicle lecturer who requires “EV competencies”. But he is unsure “how well unions fully understand that”.
Chris Gurdev, who was a union learning rep between 2016 and 2019 tasked with advising people about the union learning courses available, believes the programme lacked the publicity it deserved, and that if reintroduced it should be “linked into education providers and local community groups such as libraries and citizens advice centres”.
But Wilson believes that nowadays, online learning is “often much preferred” by union members. He calls for a future ULF to be designed to support long-term capacity, which the previous scheme did not; annual funding meant unions could only employ union learning staff on annual contracts, which were “fatally vulnerable”.
Chris Gurdev
Economic headwinds
The economic landscape is very different in 2024 to when New Labour took power in 1997.
Skills consultant Aidan Relf questions whether the government could afford to fund union learning, given the urgent need for the Treasury to service the government’s debt.
Blunkett believes a new ULF could be funded if the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business and Trade share the financial burden with the Department for Education.
He concedes the government will also need to channel greater amounts of skills funding into targeting the growing numbers of people not in education, employment or training. But he believes a new ULF does not require “massive expenditure” if employers are “prepared to play ball with the unions”.
There are also concerns about whether unions are strategically placed in the right workplaces to make an impact.
Bewick believes scrapping the ULF was an “outrageous piece of skills vandalism” but points out that when the fund was launched, the country had a bigger manufacturing industry and those unions had a “powerful impact”.
A report last year by the British Chambers of Commerce found larger firms and the public sector were already “far more likely” to provide such training initiatives.
Dr Benjamin Silverstone
Silverstone has positive memories of his time as a ULR at Pembrokeshire College. But he has “difficulty” embracing the idea of reviving union learning funding as he is no longer a union member.
“I feel like the appeal of unions is dropping in certain respects, because they don’t seem to be achieving much. Maybe having a stronger learning component might help to reverse that. But shouldn’t training be the employer’s responsibility, rather than a union’s?”
After the ULF was axed in England, the number of Unionlearn staff employed by unions in England fell sharply despite efforts to maintain programmes.
But they survived where devolved governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland continued funding their work.
The unions could use their seat at the table of the new body Skills England (which skills minister Jacqui Smith pledged would “bring in trade unions in a way that was perhaps not the case previously”), to make their case for union programmes to plug skills shortages.
The devolved nations already have similar arms-length bodies to Skills England tasked with identifying skills gaps, and Unite officer Siobhan Endean says this means these nations “identify the skills needs of the local economy, so as a union we’re able to reach out to the right cohort of workers to encourage them to develop their skills.”
For example, Unite’s Scotland union learning team is working with the construction industry to address “the absolute need for retrofitting of properties”.
Union learning in devolved areas
The devolution of adult skills funding to mayoral combined authorities in England is also slowly helping unions grow their learning provision.
The TUC’s 2024 report says it is “reinvigorating” staff learning with the election of more union learning reps. It is also “exploring new ways of encouraging learning and development, including the offer of individual learning accounts”.
Unison attracted a record 209,000 new members in 2023, including 4,097 union learning representatives, stewards, and health and safety reps – a rise of 56 per cent on 2022.
Skills minister Jacqui Smith
Unions hope the introduction of integrated settlements, giving mayors more freedom to spend their funding as they see fit, could also provide a boost.
They have secured a seat on the West Midlands Combined Authority board, leading to a skills partnership with the TUC which funded workplace learning through the Communication Workers Union in Coventry.
And South Yorkshire Combined Authority is working with Barnsley College and the GMB to teach Sheffield City Council officers digital skills, including its civil enforcement team.
GMB workplace rep Dave Furness, who organised the course, said there was a “massive need for digital skills” within the council and “probably a lot of other local authorities” that have “an ageing workforce”.
The West of England Combined Authority, which is working with unions through its employment and skills panel, recently invited trade unions to fill skills gaps by bidding to deliver training as part of its Union Learn West programme.
Unions can apply for up to £200,000 to“support workers and employers to enhance skills, increase take-up of programmes and simplify access to training”, said mayor Dan Norris.
Meanwhile, in the capital, the TUC last year launched a Greater London Authority-funded union learning project with five unions to provide numeracy and literacy programmes and support migrant workers.
Wilson believes it is “great that some union learning programmes have found local funding”, and believes that a new ULF would “support locally funded learning”.
He said: “Skills should be a priority. History shows that unions can play a crucial role, given the right help.”
A popular training and work experience scheme for the unemployed helps four in 10 participants into work, data has revealed.
The Sector-based Work Academy Programme (SWAP) aims to match jobseekers with employers in need of staff via a short combination of training, work experience and a job interview.
But scant evidence exists to show the impact of SWAPs since 2020, when the previous government revived the programme under its Plan for Jobs initiative.
Data obtained exclusively by FE Week via a freedom of information request reveals officials used personal tax information to track how many unemployed people were earning money after taking part.
The earnings data, accessed from HMRC and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) systems, suggests that as of July last year about 40 per cent of SWAP participants were earning after six months.
This rate has steadily fallen from 55 per cent in April 2021 when the government began its analysis.
The data FE Week secured does not show earnings levels despite the department seemingly having access to this information.
Data release reluctance
It is the first time the DWP has released statistical evidence that offers clues about the scheme’s impact on the 98,000 participants who start each year in 2022/23 and 2023/24.
The department initially claimed data was unavailable due to being “held clerically at a local level”, before admitting it tracked participants’ earnings using “administrative data provided by HMRC”.
Eventually, it shared the earnings tracking data with FE Week, adding the disclaimer that while it provides “some insight”, it does not give “an accurate assessment of the true impact” of the impact of SWAPs.
The department also confirmed that a detailed study, described as a “counterfactual impact assessment” of the outcome of SWAPs for participants between April 2021 and March 2023, will be published.
‘The verdict’s out’
Stephen Evans, chief executive of Learning and Work Institute, said: “It’s good DWP have released this data, though it doesn’t tell us how much people earned after completing a SWAP, nor whether they likely would’ve found a job without the provision.
“I’m pleased they plan to publish an evaluation estimating how many people would’ve got jobs without support. Until then, the verdict’s out on its effectiveness.”
The unemployed are referred to SWAPs by Job Centres. Each programme, delivered by independent training providers or further education colleges, should include training funded by the adult education budget, now known as the adult skills fund, unpaid work experience and a guaranteed job interview.
But a qualitative study released in May suggested “few” participants were offered work placements and some were “disappointed” because there was no job interview at the end.
The Department for Education declined to comment when asked whether it viewed SWAPs as a worthwhile use of adult education funding.
FE Week also obtained DWP statistics that suggest fewer than two-thirds of SWAP starters finished the programme in 2022-23 and 2023-24.
Success rate similarities
Ian Ross, chief executive officer of Whitehead Ross Training and Consulting, said the SWAPs 40% success rate was similar to the 36% rate achieved by DfE-coordinated skills bootcamps, while 38 per cent of participants in the DWP’s Restart scheme secure a job.
Steve Morris, commercial director at Learning Curve Group, which delivers SWAPS, stressed the scheme is a “good idea” as it ensures training is tailored to employers’ recruitment needs.
He said: “The reducing success of SWAPs recently, if that is the case, needs to be measured against the backdrop of an increasing rate in unemployment, a growth in economic inactivity and a constant and steady decline in the number of vacancies.”
Morris added that while a job should be the “hard measure” of success, moving people “closer to the job market” is a beneficial outcome.
Gary Durant, vice principal of Weston College, stressed the need for regional data showing starts, achievement and progression into work, to feed into local benchmarks that would help the government and combined authorities measure success.
History and future
The SWAPs scheme began in 2011 when the then prime minister David Cameron funded 330,000 starts over seven years.
But it faced controversy and a high-profile legal challenge known as the ‘Poundland case’ due to the use of benefits sanctions by Job Centres to stop people quitting what some viewed as unpaid work.
In its recent Get Britain Working white paper, the Labour government said it would fund the programme until at least 2026, pledging to “build on our experience of what works”.
A DWP spokesperson said: “SWAPs provide people from all backgrounds invaluable opportunities to gain on the job experience with local businesses across a wide range of industries.
“We are currently on course to meet our target for the number of SWAP starts for this year. Alongside this, our Get Britain Working reforms will transform Jobcentres into a truly public employment service, guaranteeing every young person the chance to earn or learn, delivering the growth and jobs our country needs.”
Regional mayors have allocated more of their adult education budgets than the government, figures obtained by FE Week show.
Between 2019 and 2023, England’s mayoral combined authorities (MCAs) spent 97 per cent of the £2.85 billion handed to them to fund adult courses, leaving a total underspend of £87 million.
Meanwhile, the Department for Education spent 91.5 per cent of its £2.98 billion budget for non-MCA areas in the same period, leaving £254 million untouched.
Experts suggest the figures show regional mayors are more effective at administering the AEB than Whitehall – and better at focusing investment on local needs.
Underspends decrease
AEB devolution began in 2019 and is continuing to grow. In this academic year, about £839 million of the adult education budget has been handed to the Greater London Authority and nine combined authorities, accounting for 60 per cent of the £1.4 billion AEB now known as the adult skills fund.
Annual underspends appear to have improved since local leaders established themselves as skills commissioning bodies.
In 2019 they underspent a combined £15 million, or 4 per cent of their budgets.
But by 2022-23, 99 per cent of the £789 million of the AEB available to regional mayors was spent, with some overspending due to high demand.
Jamie Driscoll, former mayor of the North of Tyne, which has now become part of a larger North East Combined Authority, said spending was “pretty much bang-on” during his tenure, with an underspend of just £1 million on a £70 million budget over three years.
He added: “That’s no mean feat considering we took control of the AEB budget during Covid. It was crazy.
“What AEB devolution let us do was plan, build relationships with training providers, and basically do a good job.
“We increased AEB enrolments from 22,000 to 35,000 on the same real-terms budget.”
‘Devolution journey’
Money left over from the AEB is kept in MCAs’ reserves and carried forward into future years, with many using it to make free adult education more accessible to disadvantaged people.
Exactly how much MCAs have in their adult skills reserves is unclear but authorities for South Yorkshire and Tees Valley told FE Week they had £12 million and £7 million respectively.
Some, such as the West Midlands, use left-over funds to increase the threshold for free level 3 courses to include people earning up to £32,000 per year.
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough targeted spending for the most deprived areas and introduced a £1,200 bursary for care leavers in further education.
South Yorkshire, which took control of skills in 2021-22, said it had “significantly” improved its spending from 80 per cent of its £31 million budget in the first year to 98 per cent in 2023-24.
“Devolution is a journey”, they told FE Week.
‘Effective outcomes’
Experts said the figures reflect positively on devolution.
Simon Ashworth, deputy chief executive officer of the Association of Learning Providers, said mayors with devolved skills powers take a “more progressive approach” to commissioning, which leads to “more effective spending outcomes”.
He added: “Given Treasury’s expected drive to extract more effective spending throughout government at all levels, this represents an opportunity to continue to do things differently.”
Gareth Thomas, a skills policy adviser and former director at the Learning and Skills Council, said mayoral adult education spending appears to “get better year on year”.
This is likely because authorities can “leverage” skills with other activities in their remit, such as housing, planning and business growth.
However, he added that 10 devolved skills bodies create a larger administrative cost than when the DfE managed all adult education contracts with independent training providers.
“The key thing for MCAs is getting the balance right between knowing what’s going on and assuring value for money, versus not putting too much burden on providers through admin costs and getting as much as possible out to learners on the front line,” Thomas said.
Transparency call
FE Week obtained the spending figures through a series of freedom of information requests to the 10 English mayors with control of skills budgets.
Most MCAs fail to routinely publish headline figures such as how much of their budgets are spent each year.
Others publish spending figures in different formats which makes comparison difficult.
Thomas said: “This is taxpayers’ money, and taxpayers have a right to understand how much is being spent and the impact of it. Some consistency of reporting would be helpful.”
Since being contacted for comment, MCAs including South Yorkshire have committed to publishing their spending performance “for all future years”.
Alex Stevenson, deputy director at the Learning and Work Institute, said: “As more devolution areas take on responsibility for adult skills it’s important to have transparency and accountability in how skills funding is spent.
“DfE should work to ensure a consistent approach to the reporting and publication of data at MCA level.”
The DfE, which agrees the terms of skills devolution with mayors, declined to comment.
Ethnic minority teachers and leaders in FE are paid more than their white colleagues – but there is a stark underrepresentation in top roles, an FE Week probe has found.
Never-before-published figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request show non-white teachers earned a few hundred pounds more than their white counterparts in 2022/23, equivalent to 1 per cent.
The FE ethnicity pay gap bucks the trend for the rest of England’s education sector, where pay gaps that favour white people were 7 per cent among school teachers and 5.2 per cent for university staff.
Jeff Greenidge, director for diversity and governance at the Association of Colleges, said the analysis shows a “positive reflection” of the dedication to diversity across the sector that makes FE a “welcoming sector to study and work in”.
The data provided to FE Week shows FE teachers from ethnic minority backgrounds earned an annual median salary of £34,927 in 2022/23 – the most recently available data – compared with £34,546 paid to white teachers.
The overall ethnicity pay gap for England stands at 2 per cent as of 2022 in favour of ethnic minority workers, but it differs amongst ethnic groups. Nationally, black workers earn on average 5.7 per cent less than white workers, but workers of mixed or multiple ethnicities outearn white employees by 7.2 per cent.
The data provided to this publication showed that ethnic minority teachers made up 12 per cent (7,206) of the FE teaching workforce. White teachers made up 77 per cent (44,553), and the rest (12 per cent) preferred not to state their ethnicity.
First-of-its-kind analysis
All FE colleges and training providers have to submit ethnicity and pay data to the Department for Education as part of its annual FE workforce data collection, which now covers two academic years.
The DfE held the data obtained by FE Week on ethnicity pay but it has never been made publicly available.
FE Week analysed the median pay of FE staff across all ethnic groups broken down by provider type, role, age, gender and geography.
However, pay figures were only provided for the 150,000 staff on permanent or fixed-term contracts, which is about 75 per cent of the FE workforce. The DfE also excluded data where fewer than 25 people were counted in any region.
Median pay, which is referenced throughout our analysis, shows a salary midpoint in the range.
Handle with care
The pay gap in favour of ethnic minorities was even higher among FE leaders, but this was largely skewed by London-weighted salaries and a lack of non-white leaders outside the capital and West Midlands.
The DfE’s workforce survey defines a leader as any provider senior manager, including directors, principals, vice principals, assistant principals, chief executives and managing directors.
Ethnic minority leaders in FE made up 7 per cent of all 5,748 recorded leaders and were paid 5 per cent more than white bosses (£65,576 vs £62,180).
This is an underrepresentation, however, as figures for 254 non-white leaders were not provided as they did not meet the DfE’s statistical threshold across individual regions.
And despite ethnic minority leaders being concentrated in London, they earned an average median salary of £67,586, 9 per cent below white leaders earning £74,307.
Meanwhile, Asian leaders in the West Midlands, the only other ethnic group with regional data provided, earned a median of £59,546, 4 per cent below white leaders in the area.
Paul Bridge, UCU head of further education, said: “This research highlights that too many institutions, be it through caution or complacency about pay inequality, must be well aware that black [ethnic minority] staff are dramatically under-represented at higher levels but have let it slip under the radar for too long.”
Greenidge said the data “highlights the areas we need to focus on for the future; inter-regional pay differences for example, and the consistent disparity between male and female pay across all ethnicities”.
Regional cold spots
FE Week’s analysis found differences in the ethnicity pay gap across the English regions.
Non-white FE teachers were paid more than the regional average in five out of nine areas of the country. They were paid less than the regional average in the east of England, London, south east, and the north west.
Teachers from “other ethnic groups” in the West Midlands earned the most out of the whole country, paid an average (median) salary of £44,256, outpacing the regional average of £36,376.
The DfE defines “other ethnic groups” as “any other ethnic group, Arab”.
In London, the highest paid teachers were from mixed/multiple ethnic groups, earning 5 per cent more than the regional average at an annual median salary of £43,582.
But black teachers earned 5 per cent less than their white counterparts in London (£39,821 vs £42,000). White teachers earned 2 per cent more than the average teacher in the capital (£41,317).
ONS data shows a 30 per cent ethnicity pay gap (an hourly median of £14.16) amongst black workers London-wide in 2022 and a 12.3 per cent gap for Asian workers (£17.71) compared with white workers (£20.20).
Some colleges report their ethnicity pay gaps and are making some improvements, such as Croydon College which reduced its ethnicity pay gap for all staff from 15.9 per cent to 13.6 per cent in 2023.
Meanwhile, Milton Keynes College group reported a 2.5 per cent ethnicity pay gap amongst its non-white staff, who made up 16.5 per cent of its 1,110 workforce in 2023-24. The gap widened from its prior two years of voluntary data, when it reported 2.1 and 1.9 per cent pay gaps respectively. Its published report details steps it is taking to close the gap, including internal leadership development programmes.
Bridge said: “All institutions must be prepared to radically examine their structures, policies and procedures and make changes, and employers must work with us to analyse all pay gaps, including ethnicity, gender and disability.”
Gender differences
Our investigation also found that men of all ethnicities working in FE are paid more than women.
Overall, female ethnic minorities were paid a median of £30,165 – 10 per cent less than white men, 11 per cent less than male ethnic minorities and 5 per cent more than white women.
The smallest pay gap amongst the same ethnicities was 8 per cent, between men and women from “other” ethnic groups.
The largest pay gap was from those who did not state their ethnicity at 15 per cent, followed by white men earning 14 per cent more than white women (£33,536 vs £28,693).
A DfE spokesperson said: “We want teaching to be a supportive and inclusive profession, and it’s important we attract and retain talented FE teachers and leaders who represent the communities they serve.
“We recognise there is still more to do, and we are working hard to support recruitment and retention of teachers from lots of different backgrounds, with equal opportunity for all.”
Interesting fact: Sam has a research interest in positive psychology and recently undertook an emotive study on Ofsted inspections and their effects on wellbeing of senior leaders. Sam is also a Plymouth Argyle season ticket holder.
Richard Turner
Head of Apprenticeships, Graduates and Industry Development, Network Rail
Start date: January 2025
Previous Job: Head of Apprenticeships, BT
Interesting fact: In his spare time, Richard creates history-based animations for over 400,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel
David Laws Chair, AQA
Start date: December 2024
Previous Job: Chair, Energy UK
Interesting fact: David is the only current or former UK politician who has helped negotiate two national coalition governments (the Lib Dem-Labour government in Scotland from 1999-2003 and the Lib Dem-Conservative coalition government of 2010-2015
A secret deal has been struck to end an 18-month legal battle between a major group of training providers and the government over a controversial adult education contract bid.
FE Week understands Learning Curve Group has agreed to withdraw its claim that the Education and Skills Funding Agency acted unlawfully when it didn’t award its seven subsidiary companies an adult education (AEB) contract in 2023.
Training providers rarely successfully challenge adult education procurement losses through the courts. Learning Curve’s apparent unprecedented win could open the door to more legal challenges from disgruntled training providers.
The case was due to go to trial later this year, with the group seeking a re-run of the 2023 adult education budget procurement evaluation, damages and costs.
Details of the settlement have not been disclosed. A re-run will not go ahead.
Learning Curve filed fresh evidence for its case in November in which it claimed its bid for a contract was not “evaluated or scored consistently with the published award criteria”.
A trial was initially due to take place in December but had been adjourned to a window between March 17 and August 1.
Learning Curve launched its case in August 2023 after its bid for a national AEB contract was rejected by the Education and Skills Funding Agency.
It centred on a dispute over a section of Learning Curve’s bids that asked for forecasts for training courses and learner numbers, known as the Q1B1 submission. DfE’s defence claimed Learning Curve’s tender “failed to provide the forecast of the number of learners per course, which is an entire deliverable asked for”. As a result, it couldn’t be awarded a contract.
Following an initial disclosure of procurement evaluation documents in November 2023, Learning Curve alleged that documents showed evaluators had initially scored its Q1B1 response as 100 – enough to be considered for a contract, but this was downgraded to 50 by “non-evaluators” that “did not apply the published award criteria”.
The DfE’s next defence admitted that the initial evaluators “failed to apply” the award criteria for that crucial question. As a result, the usual “consensus score” process, where two evaluators agree on a final score for a question, did not apply and a moderator decided the lower score.
The DfE repeatedly denied it acted unlawfully in its evaluation of Learning Curve’s bids that “deprived” the group “of a real chance of winning a contract”.
Mind the ‘minor gap’
Fresh high court documents, filed by Learning Curve in November, included new evidence it claimed backed up its argument that it was treated differently to other providers in the Q1B1 evaluation.
It included an anonymised list of 122 Q1B1 bid scores from providers’ bids and alleged each of them did not include forecast learner numbers per proposed course, a list of courses and/or breached the award criteria for another reason. Yet, each of those bids appeared to have been scored ‘good’ or ‘very good’ – enough to be considered for a contract.
The document suggests 22 of the 122 examples were awarded a contract. In one case, a score of ‘very good’ was awarded to one provider where the Q1B1 submission did not include forecasts for courses or learner numbers per course. That provider was awarded a contract.
Another example also scored ‘very good’ and was awarded a contract after submitting learner forecasts by subject and region, but not per course. In numerous other examples, missing learner forecasts were described by evaluators as “a minor gap.”
