Providers should be more creative about inspiring students into the labour market, writes Andrew Bernard

Imagine you’re just queuing up for a sandwich and you get a subtle nudge towards becoming a nutritionist.

Or waiting for the bus, you see a sign that piques your interest in architecture, or urban design.

Perhaps while you’re walking up the stairs towards the science block, the steps tell you the HE pathway you need to become a medical professional.

These are examples of “guerrilla careers hotspots”.

What I want to share is how easy and cheap it is to make subtle changes to your college environment to highlight future aspirational pathways – by catching your students off guard.

1. Stop before you start

Before you – a tutor, lecturer, careers leader, or member of the senior leadership team – start trying to do careers advice, just stop and think.

You’re looking for creative and innovative ways of getting careers information into the eyes and minds of the students in your college, aren’t you?

But you’re very busy. Why would you do this, if it’s not actually your job? Creating guerrilla careers hotspots is perfect to set as a student competition or work-experience project.

So if you can secure a budget or sponsorship from a local company or local business group, you can set this project for your students. After all, they know how to appeal to their peers.

2. Make the brief

Create a project brief and work with the design, business and art teaching teams to agree the scope of the project. Don’t make it too complex, and don’t forget it’s supposed to be fun.

Your brief could be linked to college assignments, work experience or an internal project.

Just decide team sizes and then get the competition promoted. Is it compulsory or voluntary, which groups, which subjects, what are the prizes? All the deadlines and details need to be clear.

3. Find local supporters

Get networking. Ask local designers, printers and marketing agencies to support your project. Would they come into the college and talk in person or virtually to share examples and provide inspiration? Could they mentor the winners?

4. Set the challenge

Announce the deadline, sign up teams and issue the competition brief, then wait until the entries come in. (Leave your door and inbox open for questions and send gentle reminders in the run-up to the deadline.)

5. Run pitches

Get your friendly designer back in, a governor and the principal or someone from SLT to listen to the teams’ five-minute pitches and their ideas.

6. Get active

When winners have been chosen, give them the freedom to work on the guerrilla careers installations, and see the impact around the buildings.

7. Run a review

What have students achieved? Hopefully, real-world creativity, feeling trusted in a realistic situation, teamwork experience, some external public relations for the college and partners, and thousands of eyes seeing careers messages in unexpected places.

Finally, I will leave you with some actual guerrilla careers ideas:

• Cubicle careers: posters in the loos about becoming a plumber or health professional.
• Look UP: stickers at eye level to stop people in rooms and corridors and make them look at posters/prints/projections on ceilings (positioned in areas of the building where it’s not going to be dangerous, of course).
• Look DOWN: let’s use this space for careers in engineering, maintenance, interior design, etc.
• Posters and stickers in changing rooms about careers in sport as physiotherapists, personal trainers or in coaching roles.
• Tray liners in the canteen with information about becoming a chef or nutritionist –this could also work with paper cup printing and cup sleeves.
• Digital displays resembling departure boards at airports, promoting careers that use geography and languages.
• A college-wide art show, where each exhibit is related to a career. The invitation card could have a QR code that integrates with an apprenticeship, university prospectus, the National Careers Week website, BBC Bitesize Careers or other source of information.

Now, go off and recruit some guerrillas to the cause today!

Collecting data on sex and gender separately is important for tackling inequalities, writes Sarah Hope

Suppose you’re asked to get involved in a project with your students? It champions a marginalised group – you’re keen.

However, there’s a catch. One or two students can’t be recorded correctly. Key information won’t be accurate.

Accurate data is important. FE providers use statistical information to measure everything, from recruitment to achievement. Precision is important, and I would say that means collecting data on both sex and gender.

A recurring difficulty for colleges such as the one I used to work with is the conflation of these terms. FE providers then also face the issue of deeply upsetting their students, whether trans students or non-binary students, when the college wishes to separate the two terms for the purposes of data collection.

Here’s the problem facing colleges: the Office for National Statistics states that ‘sex’ is the biological self, anatomy, chromosomes, and so on.

‘Gender’ is ‘personal, internal perception of oneself’ that may not match natal sex.

It’s not uncommon for the two to be confused. Perhaps even check the internal records of your own provider, and you can see the muddle.

Does this matter?

Let’s look at STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. FE providers have always been at the forefront of initiatives aimed at getting girls into STEM careers, with programmes of visiting mentors and trips to university departments.

However, there’s still a lot to do. According to the group Women in STEM, just 26 per cent of the STEM workforce is female.

In the future, similar projects may include students recently identified into womanhood. This will skew those figures.

It isn’t just a girl issue, though. Boys’ attainment has been a concern throughout the education system. In 2020, boys were seven per cent behind girls at GCSE grade 4 and higher, with those on free school meal data especially at risk.

There’s a lot of work needed to overcome the effects of poverty and family expectation.

So FE providers need to be able to collect both sex and gender information, so that they have as rich and informative a dataset as possible. It will allow them to tackle these kinds of inequalities, many of which start pre-school.

Importantly, this wider dataset would also highlight where trans students are particularly struggling as a group, by identifying which students are trans too.

Another instance is the gender pay gap among staff. Employers, including colleges, are required to report their pay gap and yet there is no clear guidance on how to record sex differences.

Many colleges have pay gaps on a par with the national average of 14 per cent, significant in a sector with a higher percentage of men in better-paid roles.

Should the EFSA follow the Higher Education Statistics Agency approach to data?

HESA uses two data headings, sex and gender, but under ‘sex’ there is a non-binary ‘other’ option, thereby potentially removing students from any sex-based analysis. Or would this have an unintended impact on data around existing sex inequalities?

Perhaps a proposal to register sex as the core demographic and add personal identities as a separate field is a better answer.

However, by following this approach, colleges risk upsetting trans and non-binary students, who can face significant persecution within society and need to feel welcomed and accepted in college life.

So, if my experiences are anything to go by, some FE providers feel confused as to how best to proceed.

I would argue for a distinction between sex and gender, explaining to trans or non-binary students that this is done in the spirit of helping identify challenges for all groups, including themselves.

But the solution should be clearer guidance from the government, rather than leaving it to providers to muddle through.

Editorial note 10/01/2022 – A reference to a campaign group was removed from this article after editors were made aware of transphobic speech linked to the campaign group.

Author name has been changed. Image is a stock image and not of the author

Traineeships are getting good outcomes but are being crowded out by other subsidised programmes, writes Jane Hickie

As we enter 2022 with sluggish economic growth, rising inflation and stubborn rates of youth unemployment, it’s more vital than ever that we equip our young people with the skills employers need.

All evidence shows that traineeships have fantastic outcomes. Young people undertaking a traineeship are far more likely to have positive outcomes than those that don’t.

But with such a crowded field of training and employability programmes, traineeships often get overlooked. That’s why the government should be paying young people to do them.

If the government is to reach its ambition of trebling the number of participants on traineeships, now is the time to incentivise learners.

What are the benefits?

Traineeships are intended for people aged 16 to 24 who aren’t in employment and have had little work experience. They offer work experience with relevant on-the-job training; and offer support to improve English, maths and key digital skills, too.

They’re also great for employers. Traineeships are flexible and designed to allow providers and employers to tailor them to the needs of local employers. They are shorter programmes than apprenticeships, so can be easier for smaller employers to commit to.

Employers need to be able to offer at least 70 hours of safe, meaningful and high-quality work experience. There is a £1,000 incentive per traineeship, and employers can claim for up to ten placements in each region they operate in. These incentives ensure taking on trainees is an attractive proposition for employers.

Around three-quarters of all trainees have successful outcomes (either taking on work, starting an apprenticeship or further study) within 12 months. This compares to fewer than half of all non-trainees.

Government research on traineeships shows that trainees are over six times more likely to take on an apprenticeship than non-trainees.

What are the challenges?

In 2020 the Treasury made a significant financial commitment to re-energise the traineeship programme. This commitment included increasing the core funding, as well as increased participation funding and a new employer work placement incentive payment – in place until July 2022.

However, the progress of the traineeship programme has been hamstrung by traineeship referrals remaining lower than expected. Too many young people are being automatically referred by Jobcentre Plus work coaches to competing provision run by the Department for Work and Pensions, such as Kickstart and now Restart.

At £7,000 per participant, the cost of Kickstart is more than twice that of the next most expensive employment support scheme. The obsession with referring all young people to Kickstart might help to meet internal departmental government targets, but it won’t necessarily offer the best outcomes for individuals. What matters most is the right pathway for the learner.

It would be too simplistic to look at low learner demand and suggest traineeships have no future. Quite the opposite: traineeships still produce exceptional outcomes ̶ whether that’s trainees moving on to apprenticeships, jobs or further study. This means that stimulating more demand from young people should be an immediate priority.

How can we solve this?

Given the pandemic, it is vital to ensure that the DWP and the Department for Education have a coherent and integrated employment and skills strategy.

However, there are concerns that the wage subsidy incentives for Kickstart participants – currently the national minimum wage for 25 hours per week for six months, as well as national insurance and pension contributions – causes other opportunities to be crowded out.

Limiting traineeships to those willing to take on an unpaid placement risks them being a last resort for our young people.

So a government-funded subsidy – perhaps similar to the apprenticeship rate, which is £4.30 per hour – for trainees would be a godsend for them.

It would also be a strong signal that traineeships are a viable way to move quickly into a job, further study or an apprenticeship.

It’s time to give trainees the support they deserve. Let’s give traineeships a fair chance to succeed by paying participants.

Writing off stranded learners’ debts is a good start, but there’s more to be done on access to adult education, writes Gordon Marsden

It is great news that the #SaveOurAdultEducation campaign, which I was proud to support at its parliamentary launch in February 2017, has had a fruitful aftermath, showing 500 debt write-offs worth almost £1.5 million for the learners concerned.

I think this campaign succeeded because of four things. It was a broad-based campaign ̶ backed by adult and community groups, and others, as well as the FE community. It spoke to common sense and natural justice ̶ that learners should not have to repay a loan for a course when providers, for whatever reason, failed to fulfil their obligation.

It also had the human factor. Around 200 people packed into a Commons committee room on the day of the campaign’s launch. Asim Shaheen, a man in his 40s who was deprived of completing his level 3 hospitality course but left with an £8,000 debt, confronted Robert Halfon, then skills minister, about that injustice. And we all kept it going, with questions in and outside of parliament, and lobbying, until two years later, Robert’s successor, Anne Milton (and all credit to her) announced in July 2019 that government would act on write-off debts.

This campaign must be seen, of course, in the context of the overall problems that advanced learning loans have had since they were introduced to replace grant funding. I visited learning providers and colleges and I spoke to adult learners (many of them women) who had got level 3s with grants, as well as to other people who were contemplating starting them on the new loans system. It became clear to me that taking on debt when they have complex obligations (supporting their own children beyond school, and older family members, for example) worried them more than the traditional cohorts of 16-21-year-olds.

That has been borne out as year after year statistics have shown (and as FE Week, myself and others have consistently pointed out) that at least half of the funding allocation for advanced learner loans has not been taken up. That’s hundreds of millions of pounds ̶ which could have helped fuel so many life chances and opportunities.

The challenges for adult education in the 2020s (of which FE is a vital and central part) have been turbocharged by the consequences of Brexit and the Covid pandemic. There need to be huge new initiatives to support new skills and retraining. This is not just to replace gaps in the service sectors from EU citizens who have left the UK, but also millions of other adults needing new skills, jobs and careers because their current ones have become obsolete or have evolved with the demands of the green economy.

That is why Right To Learn, the group I and others from the Lifelong Learning Commission set up just over a year ago, is campaigning so that government ensures that low-skilled workers don’t just get full protection when they take out advanced learning loans. Government must also make it a top priority for them to be able to get Level 3 and above apprenticeships, and other qualifications, in the first place.

That requires an urgent concentration on promoting levels 1 and 2, as well as traineeships, to disadvantaged adult groups and individuals. This must also include the estimated nine million people lacking basic skills. That needs to happen not just for maths (where the Chancellor made a modest start with the ‘Multiply’ initiative in his October budget) but also for spoken and written English and digital skills.

Such adult learner initiatives would give FE providers major new and life-changing markets and a sense of achievement, as well as contributing to a fairer, healthier and more proactive society. They might even want to try pilot schemes for grants, in which enterprising elected local mayors could participate.

Who knows? It might be an idea for another broad-based and successful campaign for the sector to get involved with in 2022  ̶  #SaveOurAdultEducation 2.0.