Latest news from FE Week

Nikki Davis, incoming principal, Leeds College of Building

After 62 years, the Leeds College of Building has just appointed its first ever female principal. Jess Staufenberg asks the incoming Nikki Davis what she’ll do to grow the vanishingly small proportion of female learners studying construction

Nikki Davis, currently vice principal at Leeds College of Building, is set to become its first ever female principal in August this year: a small watershed moment in the history of a college set up in 1960.

She will be joining the ranks of the 48 per cent of principals in FE who are women, swelling their number just a tiny bit. In many respects, that percentage is pretty impressive, and one the further education sector has every right to be relatively proud of – after all, that’s almost half.

That proportion is also ahead of other education sectors: according to the latest Association of Colleges figures, only 40 per cent of secondary school headteachers are women, and only 31 per cent of university vice-chancellors. Perhaps the traditional, academic sectors still revere the male brain more than the less traditional, vocational sector, whose whole raison d’être is to champion the underdog.

But the FE staff workforce is 61 per cent female, according to the Education and Training Foundation’s latest data from 2018/19. So men still disproportionally rise to the top role – and, partly as a result, the gender pay gap in the sector persists too.

Davis is clear: time and again in FE she has been encouraged by the professional women around her to be ambitious for herself, with three women acting as key role models. Now, it is Davis’s turn to act as a role model, not only for aspiring female leaders, but, just as importantly, for her students.

Davis with current principal and CEO, Derek Whitehead, and chair of governors Peter Norris

Her college is dedicated to courses in construction (and the only one of its kind in the country), but it has a vanishingly small female learner population: only eight per cent. It will be the biggest challenge of her impending leadership.

Before Davis tells me about the three women who mentored her, she recalls her own mum, a Yorkshire woman who brought up her, her brother and sister, first in Hampshire (Davis says she started off life “with a strong southern accent”) and then in Cheshire. Her father worked with IBM, the technology corporation, and her mum kept the home.

“She had that strength of character: she was definitely the one in charge when I was growing up,” smiles Davis.

Another key influence alongside her mum was sport, with Davis admitting to being secretly “competitive, but only about the things that matter”, doing everything from netball, tennis and athletics to county-level hockey. It was another arena in which she could build her confidence as a young woman.

But it was perhaps a move by her dad which deeply impacted on Davis’s self-belief and skillsets. It was New Year’s Eve, and the restaurant her older sister worked at rang to say they were short-staffed.

“My dad said, ‘Go and work with your sister,’ and packed me off. I had literally just turned 13!” she laughs. “I don’t know if that was allowed, and I don’t think I was meant to still be working at midnight, but I actually loved it.”

The story might shock some educators, but the sense of autonomy and challenge the experience gave Davis is arguably not what schools are known to excel at providing for their pupils. “At school, you’re sat down, you’re told what to do, what to think, but in the work environment you have to think for yourself. I look back now and I think, that’s where it all started.

“Hospitality gives you so many skills. You had to work under pressure, and it was busy and hectic and you’re talking to a lot of people. It was managed chaos.”

Davis (fourth from the left) playing hockey as a teenager

Davis muses that nowadays, many young people she knows are only just developing those skills aged around 16 or later. “There’s something missing,” she tells me, “around building up that experience and those skills earlier on.”

With those six years of restaurant experience, Davis then got into Leeds Beckett University to study hospitality and business management, with a plan to get into top roles in the industry.

This takes us into a brief sideline in our conversation in which she strongly criticises the Department for Education’s plans to prevent students who have failed English and maths GCSEs from attending university, as well as threatening to defund what they term as “Mickey Mouse degrees”.

“Who are they to say what those are?” she says bluntly. “If they want to limit access to university to those groups we should probably be encouraging to go, then this is how to do it. It’s completely wrong.”

Anyway- after her degree, the long and anti-social working hours in the hospitality industry seemed unfeasible, and so aged 24 Davis studied a PGCE at Leeds Trinity University in business and economics, specialising in 14-19 education. By complete fluke, one of her two placements was in FE, at Leeds City College.

“I didn’t like the school placement, and if it wasn’t for the experience of the college placement, I probably would have left.” This suggests that in order to recruit more staff to the sector, an obligatory teacher training placement in FE might not be a bad starting point for the DfE.

A cheque being presented by West Yorkshire deputy mayor, Alison Lowe

From then on Davis rapidly climbed the ladder, taking on big workloads and responsibilities as she went: first a lecturer in business and economics at Calderdale College in Halifax from 2002 until 2005, then head of department for business and enterprise at Park Lane College (now a campus with Leeds City College) until 2010, then another head of department role at Kirklees College until 2015, then vice principal at York College until 2019, before she joined Leeds College of Building.

En route, Davis met three important women. The first was Joyce Wilson, her mentor as a newly qualified teacher at Calderdale College.

“Joyce told me that if you want to progress, you need to move and keep moving, because experience in different places is important,” explains Davis. It was advice she clearly took. “She was also very supportive. Your first teaching role is hard, and she was brilliant.”

This more gently supportive approach was different to her next role model, Vicky Slater, her line manager at Park Lane College.

“It was a very different style of management, very straightforward, no nonsense, very black and white,” smiles Davis. “People might have thought she’d be difficult to work for, but she wasn’t. If you worked for her, you really enjoyed it, because she was very clear what the expectations were.”

Having experienced these two differing leadership styles, it was at York College, under then-principal Alison Birkinshaw, that Davis learnt the value of a leader being comfortable with their own style (on her retirement, the York newspaper The Press described Birkinshaw as “exceptional”).

“I learnt so much from Alison about what matters, especially that you do leadership how you want to do it, otherwise it’s not authentic to you.” The attention to detail and depth of experience when making decisions was amazing, says Davis.

You have to do leadership how you want to do it, otherwise it’s not authentic

Birkinshaw would email around, for instance, having spotted the only student out of hundreds off timetable. “You’d think, how did she see that?” Davis laughs. “It was an incredible level of detail. It was all about doing what was right for the college and the learners.”

Having been surrounded by challenging and high-quality environments – from her restaurant right through the FE sector – Davis has made it to the top in two decades. What are the challenges ahead?

The first, of course, is staffing. The college currently has 15 lecturing vacancies out of 200 lecturing staff, and it’s not helped by a booming construction industry trying to recruit for big national infrastructure projects, such as HS2.

“Our ability to compete with the construction industry is impossible, particularly with the cost of living crisis,” says Davis frankly. Because of the shortage of staff, the college is having to pay some staff overtime, or simply not lay on courses. One of her first tasks from September will be “looking at our people strategy in depth”.

Female students at Leeds College of Building

The other big focus will be increasing the diversity of entrants to the construction industry, partly by recruiting more female and minority ethnicity learners. To me it seems extraordinary that I’ve still never seen a woman in a hard hat on a building site.

That’s partly why it’s important to recruit more female staff, according to Davis: all of the female lecturers except one are on the “professional” courses, such as civil engineering, with only one female lecturer on a construction craft course, such as carpentry, joinery or plastering.

It’s about considering who you’re sending into schools

Meanwhile the college also wants to keep reducing its gender pay gap, which was 18.7 per cent in 2021. Across the sector, the college gender pay gap was 10.5 per cent in 2018/19, according to the ETF.

To tackle these inequalities, the college needs to do more to “challenge some of the norms of the industry,” says Davis. She wants employers to get much more involved in meeting school students, putting forward female and minority ethnic speakers as much as possible.

“It’s about considering who you’re sending in when you’re promoting the sector, and not reinforcing stereotypes.”

It means that appointing its first female principal, when current chief executive Derek Whitehead steps down, is a particularly important move for Leeds College of Building.

If Davis can lead the charge into schools, perhaps more young women will enter construction – and FE leadership thereafter – in the future.

Skills Bill: Government ‘compromises’ on careers but no delay to BTEC defunding

Moves to withdraw funding from level 3 qualifications that overlap with T Levels will continue as planned as the government sees off another attempt, through the skills bill, to force a delay.

An amendment to the skills and post-16 education bill, which would have prevented the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) from withdrawing funding for level 3 qualifications for at least three years, had achieved a majority in the House of Lords just last week.

However, the government was able to use its majority in the House of Commons on Monday to remove it from the bill.

That amendment was originally tabled in the Lords by David Blunkett, who served as Tony Blair’s secretary of state for education from 1997 to 2001.

Blunkett told FE Week that he “remains absolutely convinced that the introduction of T Levels should in no way be an excuse for withdrawing the choice and opportunity for young people who wish to explore more broad-based pathways to jobs”.

However, he believes there was a “feeling of inevitability that the government would get their way”.

James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association and a leading figure in the #ProtectStudentChoice campaign, said the government has “passed up a golden opportunity to adopt an evidence-based approach to qualification reform”.

“A delay to the defunding timetable would have given ministers time to consider the evidence on both groups of qualifications before making far-reaching, potentially irreversible, decisions about the funding of level 3 BTECs,” he told FE Week.

The bill must now return to the Lords to agree or disagree with the changes made by the Commons this week.

FE Week can reveal that Blunkett won’t push the issue of level 3 defunding any further. “In these circumstances, it would appear to be extremely challenging to continue the standoff with the Commons, but I don’t believe this is the end of the story by any means,” he said.

“All those with a real interest in the future of young people will eventually understand that those of us engaged in seeking to change the government’s mind were thinking about a very different employment landscape of the future, and not some nostalgia for the past.

“We are the futurists, predicting the kind of preparation for work which will be commonplace in ten years’ time.”

As this last remaining issue of contention now appears to have been cleared, the bill is free to receive Royal Assent to become law in the coming weeks.

Government bows to pressure on beefed-up Baker clause

MPs unanimously supported a government-backed amendment to the skills bill that will double the number of mandatory encounters schools pupils have with providers of technical education and apprenticeships.

Training providers and colleges have complained for years that the current law on careers guidance encounters in schools, known as the Baker clause, is not being followed.

Members of the House of Lords, opposition MPs and prominent Conservative MP Robert Halfon have been making the case for months that the government’s original proposal of three mandatory encounters wasn’t enough.

In fact, Halfon recently proposed that the government should insist on nine encounters over a pupil’s secondary school education.

Following this pressure, the government has now changed its own bill and settled on mandating six encounters in the wording of the bill.

Speaking from the despatch box, skills minister Alex Burghart said the skills bill will “boost productivity and level up our country”.

Burghart said the government’s new position “should help ensure that young people meet a greater breadth of providers and crucially should prevent schools from simply arranging one provider meeting and turning down all other providers”.

“The underpinning statutory guidance will include details of the full range of providers that we’d expect all pupils to have the opportunity to meet during their time at secondary school,” he said.

Government criticised for axing public sector apprenticeship target

The government has been accused of “throwing in the towel” after officials confirmed the public sector apprenticeship target is to be scrapped.

Under the target, public sector bodies in England with 250 or more staff had to aim to employ an average of at least 2.3 per cent of their staff as new apprentice starts over the period April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2021.

Figures published in November revealed this target had been missed as an average of 1.7 per cent of public sector employees started an apprenticeship over that period. This equated to a combined total of over 220,000 starts.

The armed forces performed the best, achieving an average of 7.9 per cent between 2017 and 2021, while schools were the worst at 1 per cent. The civil service achieved 1.8 per cent.

Last year the government announced the target would be restated for another year – from the period April 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022.

Ahead of the results of this extra year, the Department for Education confirmed today that the target would not be extended.

Toby Perkins, Labour’s shadow skills minister, criticised the move.

He told FE Week: “After the embarrassment of missing public sector apprenticeship targets last year, the government’s approach is now simply to scrap the target.

“It is typical of this government that, rather than working with the sector to drive up apprenticeships, to ensure that there are more opportunities in the sector, they are happy to throw in the towel.”

In-scope public sector employers will still be asked, but not mandated, to report their apprenticeship numbers. The data will be published annually to “support transparency and external accountability”, the DfE said.

Simon Ashworth, director of policy at the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said his organisation was “disappointed” by today’s decision.

“Encouraging, rather than mandating, publication of apprenticeship starts will reduce transparency at a time it is still needed,” he said.

“Given the public sector still needs to improve its record on the number of apprentices it takes on, we would question whether now is the right point at which this guidance should end.”

The target encompassed schools, local authorities, central government and their arms-length bodies, NHS organisations, the armed forces, and emergency services.

We have more unaccompanied asylum-seeking students, but not enough support

Vulnerable refugee learners are being moved around between local authorities, threatening their education, writes Beth Moore

At just 16 or 17 years old, imagine being alone in a foreign country, with no family or friends, few possessions, very little money and being unable to speak the language.

Imagine also that you had been forced to flee your own country due to war or another life-threatening situation.

This is the reality for 145 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) in our college, who make up four per cent of our total student population.

Many have come from countries such as Syria and Afghanistan, with little hope of returning, and are in the care of social services.

We have seen this college cohort not only increase in size over the past few years, but the issues we are dealing with have become far more complex.

The unimaginable experiences of these young people are leading to a manifestation of mental health problems, including PTSD, which require expert support.

However, accessing help can be extremely difficult due to the many social, cultural and language barriers these students face.

The complex bureaucracy involved in getting financial support and practical help is difficult enough as it is, let alone for vulnerable learners with very little English.

We work hard to support these students, playing a significant pastoral role alongside our primary task of teaching English. This requires close working with other agencies, including social services and charities.

Sadly, the problems don’t ease when the students reach adulthood. Take Talia (not her real name), who arrived in the UK two years ago. She is studying hard at our college and wants to work towards achieving a degree.

However, when she reaches the age of 18, she will be expected to live independently without the support of her current foster carer.

The problems don’t ease when the students reach adulthood

She is also currently awaiting a response from the Home Office regarding her immigration status. Understandably she is worried and distressed by the uncertainty of her situation.

Another student, Abbas (not his real name), has been struggling with his mental health, alongside possible undiagnosed learning difficulties. When he turned 18, he was offered accommodation with other traumatised and volatile young men – which wouldn’t have been a suitable setting for him at all.

He was then left to find alternative accommodation by himself, which is an almost impossible task for someone so vulnerable and equipped with few English language skills.

Meanwhile, some of our UASC are being moved to completely different areas mid-year – for example, we had one young man who was moved from Kent to Croydon.

This took him away from much-needed friendship and support networks and made it impossible for him to continue travelling to college. This relates to local authorities being under great pressure in terms of housing.

Developing proficiency in English and gaining a qualification is crucial for these young people to build a life for themselves and to integrate into their communities.

We must help them to do this in every way we can – but the ongoing practical issues with accommodation and transport is limiting.

We are living in difficult times, with the unfolding crisis in Ukraine having a wide-reaching impact across our whole college community.

Watching people having to flee their homes is particularly triggering for many of our own refugees, increasing anxiety and stress among students who are already struggling and alone.

We also know that the number of UASC students will continue to increase and this will undoubtedly impact college services.

These vulnerable young people need alternative and differentiated support from the standard processes for looked-after children.

For example, access to interpreters and counselling support in their own language is essential to overcome communication barriers.

Staff also need to be well trained in a trauma-based approach so they can support the students effectively.

Colleges work hard to improve people’s lives on many different levels.

But more recognition and understanding by government of this group of young people, and the complex issues they face, is now needed.

Lessons from a newcomer to further education

Agreeing on priorities, and working with other sectors on behalf of learners, can drive the sector forward, writes Naomi Phillips

I recently joined Learning and Work Institute as deputy chief executive. While LWI draws on a 100-year history, I’m new to the further education sector.

So, what have I learnt in the month or so since I started?

1. Speak as a collective

Leaders are passionate and driven, but I wonder if we can work together even more effectively to make the case for change.

Complexity and competing interests are found in every sector. But, to cut through, we need to be able to agree on priorities, describe them with clarity and be ruthless in pursuing them, speaking as a collective when it matters.

Influencing government, decision makers and budget holders, is tricky. However, if we can simplify the issues and offer practical solutions together, change is certainly possible.

2. Work outside silos

I firmly believe that to maximise our chances of making a real difference to people’s lives (which is what the FE and skills sector is all about ), people must be front and centre of what we do. This is about prioritising lived experience, including through co-design of programmes and fronting campaigns.

Recognising each individual as a whole person rather than a set of specific needs also means being ambitious and intentional in reaching out to other sectors.

The levelling up agenda’s focus on people and places gives an opportunity to do just that, demanding that we work outside of silos.

This is already happening with initiatives such as Learning and Work Institute’s Festival of Learning , an annual celebration of lifelong learning, or our New Futures pilots, where diverse partners, such as employers, local government, training providers and community organisations, are working together to build skills to match local labour market needs and to provide outreach, careers advice and capacity-building support.

Another example is NHS social prescribing into adult learning ̶ linking people to activities and services outside NHS services that help to address health challenges.

Let’s champion great cross-sector practice where we see it.

3. Think differently about the big issues

LWI’s charitable purpose (the advancement of adult education and the relief and prevention of unemployment and poverty) could not be more relevant to the big issues our society is grappling with.

How do we prevent people who’ve lost their jobs during the pandemic from becoming disengaged with the workforce?

How can businesses scale up their (pre)apprenticeships programmes to ensure young people from marginalised communities get a proper foot in the door?

How do the benefits of lifelong learning link to wider health outcomes, tackling inequalities worsened by Covid-19?

Answering these commits us to being prepared to do things differently.

I’m looking forward to strengthening and expanding our fantastic research and development partnerships to influence policy and practice – to get more people into learning and work that benefits individuals, families, communities and the wider economy.

4. Skills are on everyone’s mind

Whether it’s understanding the impact of the cost-of-living crisis , working with government to review employer investment in skills and the apprenticeships levy following Wednesday’s statement, or strengthening social connections, the FE sector clearly has a role in finding solutions.

This is a great time to join the efforts for recovery and renewal, and I’m excited to be part of it.

5. Face-to-face interaction is important

And my fifth reflection is more of a personal one. Moving job, organisation and sector can feel pretty lonely. My colleagues – and all the contacts I’ve met in my first month – are kind, clever and hardworking, and so generous with sharing their time and views.

But when the Zoom meeting is over, it’s back to being alone in the same bedroom office I’ve been in throughout the pandemic. I know this will change.

But I’ve also made sure that being visible (in-person where possible) and focusing on relationships are both built into my objectives, so I can be held to account on these important aspects of leadership.

There’s plenty of technical detail to learn too, of course, but I feel sure I’m surrounded by the right people in the sector to help me.

Why doesn’t Eton offer its ‘transformative support’ to all colleges in Dudley, Middlesbrough and Oldham?

Eton’s decision to reject a non-selective intake at its new sixth-form colleges says it all, writes Tom Richmond

For the famous Eton College to declare that they wish to spread opportunity and drive up education standards in deprived towns and cities is, on the face of it, a positive development. For me, the question is how many potential winners and losers their philanthropy will create.

The early signs are not encouraging. The proposal from Eton to give around £1 million a year to three new state-funded selective sixth forms shows that, far from expanding opportunities, they are seeking to limit the beneficiaries of their plans to the tiny number of students ‘lucky’ enough to attend these new institutions.

If Eton genuinely wanted to help young people across the Midlands and the north, wouldn’t they take a different approach?

For example, if the ‘speaker events’ that Eton promises students at their new sixth forms are so impressive, why not make them available online to all the schools and colleges in Dudley, Middlesbrough and Oldham?

If Eton’s support for their students’ university application forms and subsequent interviews is so beneficial, why are they not publishing their wonderful advice for everyone to see?

Why is Eton only interested in inviting students to a ‘summer residential’ at their new sixth forms, when low- and middle-achievers in these same deprived areas are surely more in need?

Shouldn’t Eton be aiming to advise all the local schools and colleges about how to run Oxbridge-style tutorials, academic essay prizes and debate clubs, instead of keeping these initiatives to themselves?

Remember, Eton’s motto is ‘May Eton flourish’

The sad truth is that Eton has no interest in sharing these new ‘opportunities’ with anyone else, because our competitive university admissions system privileges those with access to the extracurricular activities and covert application tactics that selective schools such as Eton employ to great effect every year.

For instance, the activities listed above will make for a much grander UCAS personal statement, and in the fight for a handful of Oxbridge places, they could absolutely tip the balance.

The assertion from Star Academies – Eton’s partner in the new sixth forms – that these institutions will dramatically improve outcomes “in the wider communities” around them appears baseless.

Meanwhile, Eton’s claim that the small class sizes in these sixth forms “will ensure that they do not disrupt the existing pattern of local post-16 education” is based on either naivety or duplicity.

Even at the best of times, spreading a cohort of students more thinly across a larger number of providers can undermine the viability of existing institutions – hardly a recipe for improving standards.

The best evidence we have on selective schools shows that creaming off high-performing pupils from other institutions may lead to a slight increase in the grades of those attending the selective institutions, but the performance of other local institutions decreases.

As a result, the overall net effect is zero. Eton has not even acknowledged this, let alone proposed a remedy. In this context, their decision to reject the idea of a non-selective intake speaks volumes.

This is not a matter of turning away Eton’s philanthropy, but rather asking why, if Eton truly wants to become part of the collective efforts to ‘level up’ the country, they are trying so hard to ensure that only 240 students a year in a town of tens of thousands of people will benefit from their supposedly transformative support.

What’s more, those 240 students in each new sixth form could be getting approximately double the amount of money invested in their education relative to other young people in the same community.

This is a curious interpretation of ‘levelling up’, particularly when the government has yet to address the miserly funding settlement for 16-19 education in recent years.

It is a great shame that Eton’s new selective sixth forms appear to be as much about their own branding and PR as they are about spreading opportunities to less fortunate members of society.

Perhaps I should not be surprised. After all, Eton’s motto is ‘Floreat Etona’ ̶ “May Eton flourish”.

Here are 5 ways ministers can improve prison education now

Yet another review has found that prison education fails learners at every stage. Action must be taken straight away, writes Francesca Cooney

The challenges of teaching people in prison to read reflect the challenges facing prison education as a whole.

Prison education is not organised in a way that supports people to improve their reading – and the Ofsted and HM Inspectorate of Prisons joint review of reading education in prisons describes a system failing learners at each stage of the process.

The findings are concerning, but not surprising. Prisons have been in crisis for years: underfunded, understaffed and overcrowded. This impacts on education delivery daily, with not enough officers to take people to classes, or to supervise activities.

Prisons have been slow to recover from lockdown. Although English courses could have been made available, education leaders have not always made this happen.

Education leaders have not always made English courses available

In most prisons, fewer than 30 prisoners were enrolled in any form of English education, which is a very small proportion of the prisoners who need reading support.

So, what needs to happen now? A strategic approach to education in prisons is long overdue, with a focus on equivalent provision to the community.

This should be part of the government’s “levelling up” agenda. But the promises in the prison strategy white paper remain vague and change is urgently needed.

The solutions are not all straightforward, but the Prisoners’ Education Trust has five suggestions that would lead to improvements.

1. Prison education contracts need more funding, and more flexibility

The current contracts are universally unpopular, being too bureaucratic and requiring intensive monitoring. They are too focused on qualifications and attendance, rather than teaching and learning.

Funding for prison education has remained static for many years and is way below levels for adult education in the community.

Without a significant increase in resources, and new commissioning arrangements, the picture will not improve and people will continue to leave prison unable to read.

2. The assessment process is ineffective

It is not dynamic, not detailed, and too focused on form-filling. Education staff do not have the capacity to interact with new learners and to take time to find out what their needs are.

This means that education teams are not assessing learners accurately and not really understanding their learning needs and skills gaps.

In addition, learners are not always allocated to the right-level class. Lack of space and lack of money mean that classes might not be available in all levels.

Ofsted found that provision of entry-level classes was particularly poor.

3. Prison libraries are undervalued and underused

People in prison are supposed to be able to access a library regularly but following lockdown prison libraries have been slow to reopen and hours are reduced. Opening at weekends or in the evening is very rare.

Sometimes education sessions clash with library opening times, and library stock does not always support the courses put on by the education department.

Teachers told Ofsted that staffing shortages caused by the pandemic made escorting prisoners to the library even more difficult.

4. Teachers need more support and training

Ofsted found that the curriculum was not well designed and didn’t focus enough on improving reading.

Teachers sometimes did not know how to teach adults to read or which resources would be appropriate to teach phonics and early reading.

Some resources used were unsuitable for adults and some teachers gave written resources to learners who could not read well enough to use them.

5. Additional learning support is essential

The report finds that prisoners with the greatest need generally received the least support.

ESOL classes are not always available and additional learning needs are not always identified.

People who cannot read at all need face-to-face teaching, because they are unable to make improvements on their own.

However, Ofsted found that through the pandemic and beyond, there has often been no one available to offer help and support to prisoners who cannot read.

If people leave prison unable to read, then we have missed a key chance to help them get a job and turn their lives around.

Prisons, and the Ministry of Justice, must urgently ensure that every prisoner gets a high-quality education that meets their specific needs.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: EDITION 384

Clare Boden-Hatton

Director of Operations – Employment and Skills, West Midlands Combined Authority

Start date: March 2022

Previous Job: Head of Skills Delivery, West Midlands Combined Authority

Interesting fact: Clare is an avid netball fan and, although she no longer plays, she is looking forward to watching England retain the gold at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham

Lewis Owens

Trustee, Prisoners’ Education Trust

Start date: April 2022

Concurrent Job: Trustee, Autism Centre of Excellence at Cambridge

Interesting fact: Lewis has one of the largest collections of original Magnet Magazines, dating from 1908, featuring the stories of Billy Bunter

Ken Merry

Trustee, Prisoners’ Education Trust

Start date: April 2022

Concurrent Job: Vice Principal (Quality), Barnsley College

Interesting fact: At the age of 13 years and 75 days, Ken was the youngest qualified football referee in Europe

Sunak’s ‘new austerity’: Spring statement offers no new money for education

The failure of the spring statement to address spiralling costs “signals a return to the austerity of the 2010s”, a union has warned.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak delivered his spring statement in the House of Commons on Wednesday, which began with a stark warning to leaders of public services hoping to see extra funding.

Interest on government borrowing next year is forecast to quadruple from last year’s payments to a record £83 billion, the highest on record.

“That is why we have already taken difficult decisions with the public finances, and that is why we will continue to weigh carefully calls for additional public spending,” the chancellor said from the dispatch box.

From the outset, framed against what the Office for Budget Responsibility described as “unusually high uncertainty around the [economic] outlook”, expectations for new money for education, had there really been any, will have dissolved.

While the chancellor acknowledged continuing skills challenges in his speech, the Treasury has made it clear that it won’t foot the bill and will assess what more employers could be doing to pay for training.

“We lag behind international peers on adult technical skills. Just 18 per cent of 25-to-64-year-olds hold vocational qualifications, which is a third lower than the OECD average, and UK employers spend just half the European average on training their employees,” the chancellor said.

Treasury documents state that “government investment alone will not address this challenge”, paving the way for its elusive ‘review’ of the tax system and how it can better incentivise employers to invest in “the right kind of training”.

Standout interventions announced in the spring statement were designed to ease the cost-of-living crisis facing households and rising costs to businesses. Policies included an immediate cut in fuel duty, raising the earnings threshold for national insurance contributions from April and a one percentage point cut to the basic rate of income tax in 2024.

Organisations with class 1 national insurance liabilities less than £100,000 will be eligible for a £1,000 increase in the employment allowance. From this April, this will allow those eligible to reduce their national insurance payments by £5,000, up from £4,000. This may bring some relief to smaller training organisations and charities.

There were, however, no measures in the spring statement to alleviate the broader funding concerns of colleges and training organisations, who have been warning of increased costs, particularly rising energy bills and inflation.

Inflation hit a 30-year high of 6.2 per cent in February this year. The OBR predicts even further price rises over the course of the year, peaking at 8.7 per cent in quarter 4 of 2022, and remaining above seven per cent until at least April 2023.

In a briefing for Association of Colleges members, its deputy chief executive, Julian Gravatt, wrote that the current predicted rate of inflation was “enough to wipe out the majority of the extra 16-to-18 funding announced in the 2021 spending review and to cause significant real-terms cuts in post-18 spending”.

The per-student national base rate for full-time 16- and 17-year-old students is set to increase from £4,188 to £4,542 from August 2022. However, in return for the increased funding, the Department for Education wants providers to deliver 40 additional teaching hours for students.

Increasing prices, energy costs and funding additional teaching hours will place even greater financial pressure on colleges and training organisations.

Yet the spring statement did not include any additional financial support for FE and skills providers.

Geoff Barton of the Association of School and College Leaders said he was “disappointed that the chancellor failed to address the financial pressures facing the education system amidst soaring inflation”.

And Mary Bousted, joint leader of the National Education Union, warned that the chancellor’s “refusal to increase education funding in the face of this inflation surge signals a return to the austerity of the 2010s”.