In this week’s episode, former skills minister Anne Milton and Central Bedfordshire College CEO Ali Hadawi give their take on the failing Kickstart programme, the 2022 exams announcements and what the HE/FE ministerial split means for the sector.
Listen to episode one below and hit the subscribe button to register for updates.
Post-16 education reforms must be “agile” and help learners reskill as well as upskill to meet employers’ needs, according to a new report by education giant Pearson.
Former skills minister Anne Milton was commissioned by the awarding body behind BTECs to chair a series of roundtable discussions between April and March 2021, and the report also draws on polls of several thousand vocational learners, parents and employers.
It found that two thirds (62 per cent) of business leaders are worried about their ability to find recruits with the right skills for their vacancies. A third (36 per cent) of them revealed they have not been able to expand as a result of the skills gap.
The Association of Colleges, the Federation of Small Businesses and several MPs were among the attendees to roundtables, which discussed 16 to 19 qualifications, higher technical education, the lifetime skills guarantee and the lifelong loan entitlement.
Today’s report, Spotlight on Workforce Skills, contains a series of recommendations for those policy areas. Here are four key proposals…
The government’s lifelong loan entitlement, due to roll out in 2025, should enable learners to access funding for single modules of a qualification, as well as the full course.
This, it is reckoned, will “allow learners to reskill/upskill to support their career development,” and means they can “build up to full qualifications over several years”.
Funding will need to reflect this flexibility, the report adds, as the student finance system is not currently arranged to support a break in learning, to encourage learners to participate in learning more flexibly, or to enable “credit accumulation”.
A poll of working-age adults run for this review found over a tenth cited financial and time concerns as their reasons for not learning.
“Rigidity of funding” has driven people straight from level 3 to degree programmes, “and will require not just significant change to the system of finance, but also the behaviour and expectations of learners,” says the report.
A roundtable covering Yorkshire, the south east, London and East Anglia found that retraining the economy “requires” the government’s new lifetime skills guarantee to “include those with existing level 3 qualifications”.
The guarantee – announced last year by prime minister Boris Johnson – includes an offer to a free, full level 3 qualification for every adult without one.
Pearson’s report warns “many adults who achieved a level 3 qualification several years ago want to reskill, but are prevented from doing so”.
This is due to the Department for Education’s equivalent or lower qualification review, which mandates that anyone with a level 4 to 6 qualification cannot receive public funding to study an equivalent or lower course, except for part-time technical degrees and certain subjects such as healthcare or teaching.
This rule ought to be relaxed, the report says, to “help adults develop new, relevant skills”.
Two roundtables covering the north west and south west and looking into 16 to 19 qualifications found providers and employers want flexibility to develop solutions for their local skills and labour market needs.
National funding rules prevent them from achieving this goal, which “would improve local talent retention and development”.
Overall, the report reads, the “balance between national oversight and local autonomy needs to be better aligned”.
So, a “broad” policy framework would be set at a national level, with flexibilities allowing providers and employers to deliver strategies based on local circumstances.
Through the Skills for Jobs white paper, and the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill currently being passed into law by parliament, the government is piloting local skills improvement plans to make colleges align courses with local employer need.
Pearson says the plans could support the report’s aims, but “their emphasis needs to be on local need rather than accountability”.
Ministers have pledged to introduce new higher technical qualifications (HTQs) from September 2022, which will have to address employers’ skills needs and meet employer-led occupational standards.
Pearson says HTQs will “need to be agile enough to remain relevant in the face of rapid change,” citing the risk occupational standards “could become the reflection of a point of time,” so HTQs do not “equip learners for the jobs of today and tomorrow”.
Concerns have also been raised around government reforms to level 3 qualifications, following a two-year consultation on level 3 and below courses concluded this year, which could mean courses such as Pearson’s own BTECs become “rare” if they overlap with T Levels.
The Pearson report says the level 3 reforms “could exacerbate” a misalignment between the demands of the labour market and the need to be more agile to meet shifting skills and employment patterns.
This is because the “high-quality” qualifications, recognised and valued by employers, could lose public funding, Pearson says.
Lynette Leith, Vice principal for curriculum, Hull College
Start date: July 2021
Previous job: Assistant principal for technical education, Newham Sixth Form College
Interesting fact: She enjoys charitable work and has spent a few summers teaching children in Africa.
Fiona Aldridge, Head of skills insight, West Midlands Combined Authority
Start date: October 2021
Previous job: Director for policy and research, Learning and Work Institute
Interesting fact: She started learning to skateboard for last year’s Lifelong Learning Week, but after just one lesson she ended up in a neck brace for four weeks and hasn’t been on a skateboard since.
Sharon Smith, Principal and deputy chief executive, DN Colleges Group
Start date: August 2021
Previous job: Vice principal for higher, vocational and professional education, York College
Interesting fact: An avid fan of Lord of the Rings, her “beloved” labradors, Samwise and Rosie are named after two hobbit characters.
Ranjit Singh, Vice principal for quality and learner experience, Hull College
Start date: August 2021
Previous job: Director of curriculum and cross college teaching and learning, West Thames College
Interesting fact: He has represented his county in football, cricket and athletics.
A network of apprentices leading discussion groups on women’s issues and multiculturalism has helped earn its international training provider an ‘outstanding’ from Ofsted.
Multiverse Group Limited, formerly known as WhiteHat Group and operating out of the UK and US, is the brainchild of its chief executive Euan Blair, son of the former UK prime minister Tony Blair.
Inspectors were impressed by the “kind and inclusive” environment at the London-based provider, which has 3,000 apprentices.
Inspectors report that apprentices felt part of a “vibrant community” of their peers, through the provision of an online networking platform, which hosts both a women’s forum and a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender network.
There is also a multicultural group which has provided the opportunity for a range of panel discussions on diversity in the workplace.
The platform, called the Community Hub, is accessible through an app where apprentices can create a profile, join interest groups and sign up for events such as speed networking and seminars on self-promotion.
FE Week understands the platform to be almost, if not completely, unique for a private provider.
Multiverse’s vice president of community Clare Sutcliffe said the provider’s mission had been to build a “outstanding alternative to university”. That included “creating an experience that rivals the one you’d get at top universities and colleges,” and the hub with its interest groups “exists to deliver this experience”.
The community is “having a tangible impact” on attainment, she says, with apprentices who are active in the group being “more likely to achieve a merit or distinction as their final grade”.
Apprentices have found groups like the women’s and multicultural network are “vital for their professional and personal development and they really enable us to stand out as a provider”.
Ofsted reports Multiverse’s leaders ensure a “comprehensive set of online community opportunities” for apprentices to develop “personal and professional attributes”.
They also arrange high-profile guest speaker events, industry panels and apprenticeship forums to help learners explore possible careers.
Women’s group co-chair and Multiverse project management apprentice Niamh Briody told FE Week the group had been set up last year because it was a “topic of discussion apprentices found really interesting and obviously resonated with”.
It already has around 300 members, including male allies of women, and those who identify as female, and some of the provider’s US learners.
It has run events on personal safety following the killings of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa, in collaboration with the women’s safety volunteer group Strut Safe.
Niamh’s co-chair, digital marketing apprentice Eleanor King, said the “main thing” about the group “is inclusivity and to communicate with people who share similar beliefs to you,” but it also presented “amazing networking opportunities”.
Evelyn Koon, who is studying a level 4 data fellowship with Multiverse for the NHS, says she wants her group to “create a sense of psychological safety so people feel free to be themselves”.
Her group has a similar number of members and set up around the same time as the women’s group.
She is looking to have people from the NHS come in to speak about their experiences; and, during the joint interview between her, the women’s group and FE Week, suggested the two groups hold a film night together.
Inspectors also praised Multiverse’s “highly qualified” coaches, close collaboration with its 295 employers to build a curriculum to give apprentices “substantial” new skills, as well as its safeguarding.
Pictured top: Eleanor King, Evelyn Koon, Niamh Briody
Sector stakeholders are waiting to see if it will be trick or treat in this month’s spending review but hope that individual learning accounts and an expanded lifetime skills guarantee will be announced.
The deadline for submissions to the spending review was Thursday, and chancellor Rishi Sunak will outline to MPs the next three years of government spending on October 27.
FE and skills bodies, as well as employer groups, are among those that have made submissions.
For instance, the Association of Colleges called for a 50 per cent increase in total revenue spending on further education and skills in their submission, which they published last week.
FE Week has found that other sector bodies’ submissions ask for a return of individual learning accounts (ILAs), more cash for adult education and an expansion to the lifetime skills guarantee.
Here is what each body has asked the chancellor for:
AELP is one of the organisations pushing for a policy similar to the ILAs, which were introduced by the New Labour government in the early 2000s before being scrapped amid widespread fraud.
“Individual skills accounts”, as the association calls them, “are the ideal vehicle” for improving productivity and personal growth “by focusing on employer and individual choice”.
The training provider representative group also wants procurement of training services opened to all registered providers.
Also, it calls for apprenticeships and traineeships to remain nationally contracted and not devolved.
As the adult education budget has shrunk by “just over half” since 2010/11, going from £3.6 billion to £1.3 billion, the AELP argues the government should triple the current AEB to £4 billion every year.
Publicly funding 16-to-19 apprenticeships, unfettered access to the apprenticeship levy budget for levy payers and a standalone budget for nonlevy payers, plus extending incentives for employers to hire apprentices beyond September, are some of AELP’s other requests.
The CBI, which represents 190,000 businesses across the UK, has used its submission to the spending review to repeat calls for the apprenticeship levy to be turned into a lifelong learning levy.
The organisation called for the levy to be replaced in a report from October 2020, so businesses could use the money for short modular courses, pre-apprenticeship programmes, product training, professional courses and soft skills training.
Individual training accounts, similar to ILAs, are another of its asks. This £3.9 billion programme would be used by unemployed people and those needing retraining to access “accredited courses”.
The government should also align the lifetime skills guarantee and National Skills Fund, which includes the entitlement to an adult’s first, full level 3 qualification, and the skills bootcamps with occupations where there are shortages.
The lifelong loan entitlement, giving people four years’ student loan funding for
further and higher education, should be rolled out this parliament rather than in 2025, the CBI adds.
Adult provider network HOLEX wants Sunak to announce a lifelong learning levelling-up plan, a “framework for devolution of skills and education budgets and support for the post Covid-19 recovery”.
Government-wide strategies for skills training at level 2 in shortage areas such as healthcare, service industries, transport and basic skills in areas such as English as a second or other language is another ask.
The submission also calls for a national entitlement for maintenance grants for adults eligible for working tax credits, for level 3 and below courses – again, similar to how ILAs handed out grants for people to use on educational courses.
HOLEX also wants a £5.2 billion injection of funding for adult education, with a ten-year budget, an adult education centre in every town, and for that sector’s providers to be given access to the £1.5 billion DfE capital funding scheme.
Adult and community learning institutions, HOLEX argues, should also become the “funding vehicle” for the new UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which is replacing European Social Funding.
The SFCA has made two big demands for this year’s spending review.
The first is that it wants funding for 16-to-19 education providers to rise with inflation each year.
The second is for funding per 16-to-19-year-old student to rise from £4,188 to £4,760, in line with the demands of their Raise the Rate campaign.
The latter is “the most efficient and effective way to ensure every young person receives a high-quality education,” SFCA’s submission reads.
The “most important” part of the first demand, however, is for the government to continue to provide grant funding for FE providers to “meet the increased employer contributions to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme”.
The government has been providing this grant funding since 2018/19 and the SFCA wants ministers to “mainstream” this funding, just as they have with schools.
While the UCU was unable to send FE Week its full submission, the union said it will be calling on government to close the £9,000 pay gap between schools and college teachers.
This gap caused staff to take strike action, coordinated by the union, at colleges across the country this week.
The union also wants the government to move away from using student loans to fund further education provision and to ensure the lifetime skills guarantee included funding for subjects such as the creative arts.
“Proper” investment for independent careers information, advice and guidance is another of their demands.
The awarding body is asking the Treasury to fund new, local “employment and training hubs” to “address urgent labour-force challenges, at the same time as establishing a more consistent, joined-up and agile local/regional approach to meet immediate local skills needs”.
This comes after the big local focus of the skills and post-16 education Bill (with the local skills improvement plans and college business centres), which City & Guilds says is a “patchy” approach that is “yet to translate into a clearly understood operational framework which is responsive and easy to navigate”.
The hubs ought to be located on high streets, as well as online, to provide a “shop window for skills”, to bring together jobseekers, employers and training opportunities.
City & Guilds also wants the National Skills Fund and adult education budget to focus on transport and construction, areas that “will make a real difference in reducing our carbon emissions” and ensure the labour force is “developing at the pace of ambition and innovation”.
The NUS wants the base rate for 16- and 17-yearold students raised and adult education
funding to be ringfenced.
“Future college structures” should “prioritise the needs of learners and potential learners by protecting the status of small and specialist colleges and discouraging large-scale mergers and the formation of academies of colleges,” says the union’s vice president for further education, Salsabil Elmegri.
Businesses have slammed the government’s flagship Kickstart scheme as overly “complex, bureaucratic and slow” – as new figures reveal less than two-fifths of jobs created have been filled.
Numbers released by minister for employment Mims Davies showed that of the 196,300 Kickstart jobs made available across the UK, just 76,970 (39 per cent) had been started by September 22.
Sectors heavily impacted by the pandemic, such as hospitality, travel, retail and care, are among those that have struggled most to fill the wage-subsidised placements for the unemployed.
The north-east – the region with the highest unemployment rate in England – is the area with the lowest take-up.
Employers who spoke to FE Week described the process of signing up to the scheme as “clumsy” and surrounded by red tape, which has led to troublesome delays with payments and in some cases caused firms to walk away from it completely.
There is a cut-off date of December 31, 2021 for young people to start a Kickstart job. It means an average of over 8,500 young people will need to start on the scheme each week between September 22 and the end of December to fill all available roles.
That is more than double the average number (3,600) taking up a place on the scheme between August and September.
A target of 250,000 new jobs was set for the £2 billion scheme when it was first announced by chancellor Rishi Sunak in July 2020.
Federation of Small Businesses national chair Mike Cherry said Kickstart is a “great initiative” but there “remains work to be done”. He called for the scheme to be extended into 2022 and eligibility broadened to all ages who are long-term unemployed.
The Department for Work and Pensions refused to comment on the figures. A spokesperson would only say: “Kickstart continues to deliver vital jobs to help young jobseekers get on track and we’re providing local support to employers to help them apply and recruit.”
Kickstart was launched in September 2020 and offers six-month paid work placements to those aged 16 to 24 who are on universal credit and deemed to be at risk of long-term unemployment – with the government picking up their wage bill.
Initially, small employers had to seek help from “gateway” providers – which include colleges, chambers of commerce and hundreds of private companies – to sign up to the scheme where they have fewer than 30 vacancies.
Gateway providers in turn receive a £300 per-job placement fee and up to £1,500 for every young person they put through the scheme if they continue to help with job support and training.
However, a previous FE Week investigation revealed how firms based outside the UK or with no trading history had managed to become approved gateway providers – an issue that led to the DWP scrapping the requirement for small employers to use them from February 3, 2021.
Many smaller businesses continued to use gateway providers owing to the substantial and complex administrative task the Kickstart scheme encompassed.
Davies’ figures show that social care is the sector with the lowest Kickstart job starts (1,220) compared to available posts (4,800) – a recruitment rate of 25 per cent.
Raj Sehgal, managing director for ArmsCare Ltd (a group of care homes in Norfolk) and a board member of the National Care Association (NCA) which became a gateway provider, has not been impressed with the DWP’s handling of the scheme and was “surprised” the figures aren’t lower.
He worked with “somebody quite high up in DWP” on the NCA’s submission to onboard Kickstarters, but to “both of our surprise” the bid was initially rejected.
“We couldn’t understand why because I had followed the guidelines and even got somebody from the DWP to look it over and he said it was perfect, yet the powers that be refused it.”
His bid was put through again with “minor tweaks”, such as adding full stops to some sentences, and with the help of the DWP official it eventually got through.
But it took months from start to finish and required “incredible amounts” of information, such as locations, company names and registration numbers, number of Kickstart posts and for each, a job description. “We had to rewrite the book basically, and during the pandemic it was nearly impossible,” Sehgal said.
Philip Price, founder of recruitment firm WorkAdvisor (which has five Kickstarters itself and helped 240 others get on the scheme as a gateway provider), found other small employers “giving up” because of the complexity.
He told FE Week: “For some employers it is taking months to get approval, which is a big problem for sectors like travel and tourism that needed urgent customer service help.
“Then once your business is approved, there’s a next step where you have to get the job approved. Lots of small employers don’t know how to write a good job description that is going to pass DWP credentials. So the job gets refused as well, which is another barrier.
“Businesses have given up in some cases. It is very bureaucratic.”
UK Hospitality – a trade association for a sector that has filled 6,060 (28 per cent) of the available 21,900 Kickstart jobs – echoed Sehgal’s and Price’s testimonies.
“We’re hearing reports of poor screening of candidates, an overly slow process of putting candidates forward and businesses having to look elsewhere, or candidates looking elsewhere or losing interest as the process drags on,” a spokesperson said.
“It’s particularly bureaucratic for multi-site operators, who have to deal with individual job centres rather than having a central platform.”
The spokesperson added that given the “acute nature” of the staff shortages in hospitality, the low take-up is “concerning and frustrating”.
One example of bureaucracy that faltered Kickstart was shared by Price. He said: “We were approached by a very large travel business, one of the biggest organisations in travel to join the Kickstart scheme, with some excellent jobs. They were declined by the DWP because of a very specific tax situation. They would have been a brilliant Kickstart employer.”
Price also said there were delays to payments for his Kickstart youngsters when they were first hired in April, but this issue was eventually fixed by the DWP.
Some sectors have simply struggled to find the time to engage with the scheme or find willing unemployed young people to take part.
Claire Steiner, director and chair of education and training at the Institute of Travel & Tourism – a sector that has filled 230 (38 per cent) of the available 600 Kickstart jobs – said: “There are a handful of businesses that have taken advantage of the Kickstart scheme. However, the last 20 months have not been conducive to opportunities or training programmes for young people as travel and tourism companies have been focussed on survival, with limited business and income being generated.
“We are now seeing a change as international borders open up and businesses start to look at recruitment again, but there is limited time left on the scheme.”
Kickstart is trying to reinvent the wheel and buckled it
Raj Sehgal
Sehgal calculated that his own group of care homes could take on around 50 Kickstarters but has only been able to fill half a dozen places.
He explained that candidates and employers were confused by the scheme and questioned why the government didn’t try to develop the recognised apprenticeship schemes for the sector instead.
“Kickstart is trying to reinvent the wheel and buckled it slightly,” he said.
The retail sector has made 30,400 Kickstart jobs available but only managed to fill 12,580 (41 per cent).
Andrew Goodacre, chief executive of the British Independent Retailers Association, said that since retailers reopened following the third national lockdown, footfall has “never recovered to 2019 levels”, which has resulted in “more on furlough and no motivation to recruit”.
“The scheme states any Kickstart role cannot be at the expense of an existing employee. This makes sense, but limits the choice for retailers,” he told FE Week.
“I cannot see retailers turning to this scheme until they have more confidence in sales and footfall. I would like to be more positive but I just do not think this is a good scheme for retailers, especially independents.”
The north-east has the highest unemployment rate in England, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics. A geographical breakdown of DWP’s Kickstart figures shows the region has the lowest number of people starting a kickstart job (3,610).
The North of Tyne combined authority, led by Labour mayor Jamie Driscoll, is acting as a gateway provider but refused to say whether or not it was disappointed by the figures for the region.
A spokesperson did say the authority has this week launched a campaign featuring some of their 100-odd young people and businesses who have benefitted from the scheme to “encourage more employers to come forward and apply for Kickstart placements”.
Sam Windett, deputy director at Learning and Work Institute, said issues in “rollout and focus” have “frustrated” Kickstart’s potential to date. “Whilst employers struggle to fill record levels of vacancies, the number of long-term unemployed 16- to 24-year-olds has risen by a third over the pandemic,” she added.
“This points to the need to ramp up, not dial down, support for young people to move into work.”
The DWP did warn that the published Kickstart figures “might be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system, which has been developed quickly”.
They have also “not been subjected to the usual standard of quality assurance associated with official statistics, but is provided in the interests of transparency”.
The college boss at the centre of a community dispute about downgraded A-level results has defended keeping an internal review under wraps amid staff and MP outrage.
Students and parents picketed Havering Sixth Form College in August, claiming their teacher-assessed grades had been unfairly changed by leadership.
Following the protest, the college’s parent group, New City College, promised a “wholesale” review of whether grade boundaries were applied correctly.
This review concluded around a month ago, and while individual results have been communicated to students, the college has refused to reveal the overall outcome to staff and learners.
Labour MP for nearby Dagenham, Jon Cruddas, said he “finds it concerning” the overall results have not been shared because the situation requires “complete transparency”.
Hornchurch and Upminster MP Julia Lopez told FE Week her constituents had “recently” raised concerns with her about the matter.
Havering’s local National Education Union branch, which said it represents two-thirds of the sixth-form’s staff, said teachers had been left to “speculate” on the results.
Speaking to FE Week, New City College’s group principal Gerry McDonald said the college did not want to reveal the results of the review as it would affect their “competitive position”.
For example, revealing “everything about how many entries we have” would become known to competing providers.
He also said he and Havering Sixth Form College principal Janet Smith held meetings with 120 teachers to answer questions on how the review had been run once it was over.
FE Week has submitted a freedom of information request for the overall findings and McDonald promised a response within the 20-day statutory deadline.
After this summer’s GCSE and A-level exams were cancelled in January, watchdog Ofqual instructed school and college teachers to set grades for students based on evidence showing the standard at which they were performing. Part of that evidence base included internal tests and mock assessments.
Managers within departments then confirmed these grades.
Ofqual’s guidance states the heads of centres, such as principals, were meant to confirm that students’ grades are a “true representation of their performance”. Exam boards then compared a centre’s 2021 grade submission with their performance in 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to the guidance.
This year’s exam candidates, if they were unhappy with their grade, were able to appeal in the first instance to their centre and if the centre discovered an error, they would inform the awarding body so it could produce a final grade.
The Havering dispute arose following accusations the college leadership unfairly altered students’ A-level grades set by their teachers.
The NEU’s district secretary for Havering, John Delaney, said teachers had been “dismayed at the college’s lack of transparency” in how the results of the internal review were decided and how many appeals were successful.
He called it “unbelievable” that teachers and students could only “speculate to the actual results,” and said that this was a “professional as much as a public issue.
“The stakeholders have been bypassed: parents, teachers and the whole local community.”
The college, he added, “doesn’t seem to care”.
McDonald defended the college’s handling of the results, saying they had run “precisely the same process with A-levels as we did with GCSE English and maths”.
The college had entered 4,000 candidates for GCSEs and have only had 50 appeals, but would not reveal the figures for A-level appeals ahead of the college’s response to FE Week’s FOI request.
On appeals, McDonald said the college had seen a “bandwagon effect… For a particular student, there may have been no final moderation, no change in their original grade whatsoever.
“But they’re still appealing it because all their fellow classmates did,” and the “vast majority” of students had been able to get into their first- or second-choice university.
While his teachers had not “necessarily agreed with everything, they certainly don’t feel they’re not informed,” he said.
He also argued the college “had a duty” to “ensure there wasn’t too much inflation in the system” and it has now been recognised nationally there was “too much inflation” this year.
Ofqual and the Joint Council for Qualifications said they could not comment on whether they were investigating Havering’s A-level results.
The BAME Apprenticeships Awards returned in style last night as over 500 guests gathered in Birmingham in what’s believed to be the largest in-person sector event to take place post-pandemic.
The awards, delivered in partnership with Pearson, mark special achievements of black, Asian and minority ethnic apprentices and of employers of all sizes across ten economic sectors, including engineering, hospitality, logistics and health.
Special awards were also bestowed on a learning provider of the year, and a university of the year. All of this year’s winners are listed below.
Last year’s flagship ceremony had to take place online, but organisers ThinkFest used the return of in-person festivities to present both 2020 and 2021 winners with their awards.
Kasim Choudhry, managing director of the BAME Apprentice Network, said: “The team have worked really hard this year to make this event happen and we are so happy that people have finally been able to come together to celebrate apprenticeships.”
This year’s ceremony featured VIP speakers including West Midlands mayor Andy Street, who spoke about the important role of apprenticeships in the UK’s economic recovery.
Claire Rogers, acting senior vice president at Pearson, and Rachel Cooper, technical education strategy director at the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, also took to the stage. Both stressed the importance of celebrating diversity in apprenticeships and recognising outstanding leadership in employers.
Now in their sixth year, the BAME Apprenticeships Awards “showcase talent and diversity within BAME communities” and celebrate the “contribution of learning providers and employers who have assisted them along their journey”, according to its website.
Among this year’s winners is Justina Blair, who took home the overall apprentice of the year award. Judges said that Blair, a digital and technology solutions apprentice at NatWest, “shows a real passion for the women in STEM agenda” and “works hard to inspire others in innovative ways”.
The government and Ofqual have published a consultation on plan B should GCSE and A-level exams have to be cancelled next year.
While the government is confident exams will go ahead, they have published contingency plans after facing fierce criticism for not doing so last year and being caught out when exams were cancelled after the Alpha variant caused a surge in cases.
The consultation outlines that teacher assessed grades would be used again this year should exams be cancelled.
However schools and colleges are being asked to collect evidence throughout the year, with guidance on how internal assessments should be run, just in case.
The consultation adds that “assessing students in line with the proposed guidance would also support students preparing for the exams we expect them to take next summer”.
DfE and the exams watchdog are now seeking views on the guidance. The consultation closes on October 13.
Here’s what you need to know…
Before any plan B is implemented, the government wants to take further mitigation for students next summer.
As well as the optionality and advanced notice adaptations, exam boards have been asked to ensure there is at least a 10-day gap between exams in the same subject. This is to reduce the risk of students missing all exams in a subject.
Students who miss one or more exams in a subject will still be able to get a grade through the special consideration process “so long as they have completed the assessment for at least one component of the qualifications”.
Colleges have been provided guidance on how to conduct exams safely, and have been given “general advice” on contingency planning from Ofqual.
If new public health restrictions affect exams, the DfE will review its guidance and consider whether to put in place an Exams Support Service – as used in the 2020 and 2021 autumn series – to support centres with access to venues and invigilators.
The government and Ofqual say “if, and only if” the mitigations are not sufficient to allow exams to proceed it will use TAGs to “maintain stability”.
But they are proposing some changes to the 2021 system, which they admit had “significant workload implications for teachers”.
They acknowledge the flexibility given to schools and colleges last year to collect evidence saw students in many centres “assessed multiple times in a short timeframe, reducing the already limited teaching time available”.
Some students and teachers also “raised concerns that different approaches to gathering evidence were being taken in different schools and colleges, which they considered to be unfair”.
So they think this “tighter guidance” will have advantages such as reducing teacher workload and student anxiety, as well as greater consistency between schools and colleges. That is …
In the draft guidance, colleges should plan “assessment opportunities” for TAGs in advance, and secure some evidence early in the academic year – so before Christmas.
Teachers will want to “guard against the risk of over-assessment”, so a “sensible pattern” could be to plan to assess students once in the second half of the autumn term, the spring term and the first half of the summer term.
The tests should allow students an opportunity to show their knowledge and understanding across the full range of content they have been taught. Teachers should also think about “specific assessment opportunities which would provide evidence from a significant proportion of the specification”.
The tests will also help inform teaching and learning, the consultation says. Colleges should also support students to complete their non-examined assessments.
DfE and Ofqual say students should be told before they take the assessment that their performance in the assessment “would be used to inform their TAG if exams were cancelled to ensure they have time to prepare”.
They should be told the aspects of the content the test will cover, but not the specific questions.
Under the plans, students in the same cohort should be assessed using the same approach where possible and all the assessments taken should be used to determine the TAG – not just those in which students performed best.
As in 2021, the centre will have to document the rationale when consistent evidence is not used for a whole class or cohort. Reasonable adjustments should be made where possible for disabled students.
The consultation says teachers should mark work and carry out any internal standardisation of the marking, in line with exam board guidance where appropriate.
Students can be provided the marks and feedback, but teachers “must not determine a TAG unless exams are cancelled nor tell their students what their TAG might be”.
The original work should also be retained by teachers, and student can be given copies if it would help support their learning.
Where disruption does not allow for assessments or coursework to be completed, colleges should arrange to collect evidence “that provides equivalent confidence of authenticity” and of “equivalent breadth” where possible.
If that’s not possible, centres may also need to collect evidence that is not based on such assessments for either a whole cohort or for individual students. Coursework can also be marked if partially completed.
If this happens, colleges should record those decisions and the disruption experienced for inclusion in a centre policy.
DfE and Ofqual say that because exam boards provided past papers and test materials in 2021, they “do not believe” further material is necessary.
But they are “interested in views” on any additional support the boards could provide to teachers if TAGs are needed.
As in 2021, Ofqual proposes that a “national approach” should be taken to exam cancellation and contingency arrangements.
They “recognise that regional differences” in the impact of the pandemic could potentially “make it easier or harder for exams” to take place in certain parts of the country than others.
But they “believe that it would not be acceptable or command public confidence” to have difference approaches to awarding grades for the same qualifications.
“It would not be possible to align the standards of grades awarded to some students who had taken exams with the TAGs determined by teachers, without the use of a standardisation approach of the type that proved unacceptable in 2020.”
If exams are cancelled private candidates wanting to get a TAG would need to make arrangements with a centre to complete the assessments in supervised conditions.
DfE and Ofqual propose recommending these students discuss these arrangements with centres and take them into account when choosing where they want to register for exams.
Rather than having assessments spread out across the year, private candidates could undertake their assessments in a more concentrated period.
The quality assurance and appeals processes appear to be largely similar to the 2021 process.
The consultation proposes that colleges should only develop centre policies if exams are cancelled “to avoid diverting resources from other priorities”. The details of TAG quality assurance would be published after exams were cancelled.
Centres would also have to submit evidence again – perhaps for more students than 2021, the plans say.
It is envisaged that the same appeals process will be used, but as 2021 appeals are still ongoing “exam boards will want to ensure lessons are learned from that process”.
