In the first study of its kind, the scale of the attainment gap for disadvantaged post-16 learners has been laid bare, writes David Robinson
In comparison to other education age phases, little attention has been given to the role of the 16-to-19 phase in delivering greater social mobility.
One reason for this is that it is very difficult for policymakers to measure the outcomes of disadvantaged students at college and sixth-form level, with students taking such a wide range of qualifications across different ages.
But in a new study – the first of its kind – the Education Policy Institute, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, provides new evidence to fill this space. The results from our exploratory research are deeply concerning.
‘Lower school performance carried to college’
We find that across all qualifications, disadvantaged college and sixth-form students are the equivalent of three A-level grades behind better-off students, on average.
In some parts of the country, this gap is as wide as five grades.
Much of this very large attainment gap can be explained by disadvantaged students’ lower performance at secondary school, which is then carried with them into college and sixth form.
We also see that the type of qualifications and the ability of students’ peers play a role in the gap.
But it also appears that on top of this, coming from a low socio-economic background itself may be contributing to the 16-to-19 gap.
If we look at poorer students and more affluent students who performed the same at GCSE, we see that disadvantaged students then face a further attainment penalty during college and sixth form – losing out by an extra half a grade.
‘Impact of pandemic on vocational grades’
And of course, the pandemic may be widening this gulf.
Learning loss resulting from the pandemic is felt most keenly by disadvantaged young people, as they tend to have poorer access to laptops or a quiet working space, and may be less likely to be doing online face-to-face teaching.
The impact of the pandemic on disadvantaged students’ attainment may also go beyond the effects of lost learning.
As disadvantaged students are more likely to take vocational qualifications, they stand to fall further behind as a result of the grading in 2020.
And while the government has moved to avoid these mistakes for 2021, it’s not yet clear that this will entirely address this new disparity.
Last week, the government did reveal it would extend the 16- to 19- tuition fund for an extra year.
This is to be targeted towards supporting students to catch up in English, maths and other vocational and academic subjects.
As soon as these details were released, there were immediate debates as to whether this amount will be enough to make up for the lost learning and to close the inequalities that emerged during the pandemic.
‘Budget plans are not enough’
To add to these concerns, the offer from the Budget has been mixed at best. The greater rollout of traineeships is something we’ve called for previously.
But proposals for greater increases in subsidies for adult apprentices seem at odds with the evidence ̶ it is apprenticeships and other employment opportunities for young people that have been disappearing the fastest.
One thing is clear: neither the catch-up plan nor the Budget proposals will do much to close the huge inequalities in 16-to-19 attainment that existed prior to the pandemic.
Taken together with our new findings, it’s imperative that urgent action be taken by government. We must go significantly beyond the current catch-up plans.
Before anything else, the government should introduce a student premium for the 16-to-19 phase, as part of its upcoming review of funding.
Given that average funding rates are low in historic terms, the premium should not be at the expense of other students in this phase and should represent a real-terms increase for sixth forms and colleges.
If the government is to realise the potential of the 16-19 phase for improving social mobility, it must get started on closing the attainment gap here at once.
New provider monitoring visits will resume from March 15 – and they will be conducted face-to-face, Ofsted has confirmed.
The inspectorate had hoped to restart the visits from January remotely but later announced they would be delayed indefinitely in light of the third national lockdown.
A spokesperson for the watchdog told FE Week today they have now agreed to recommence the inspections a week after learners return for face-to-face teaching from March 8.
They said the visits will require inspectors to be onsite to “provide the level of assurance they need to make progress judgements”.
“We consider new further education and skills providers who have not yet had a monitoring visit to be the highest priority for our return to face-to-face inspection activity,” the spokesperson added.
The watchdog has said a revised operational note for these changes will be published early next week.
Currently, Ofsted’s inspection policy states that providers can request to defer an inspection, and each case will be judged “separately and on its own merits”.
But “it is only in exceptional circumstances that we would consider granting a deferral”.
What about other inspections?
While new provider monitoring visits will be going ahead onsite form March 15, the rest of Ofsted’s current inspection activity – such as monitoring check-ups on grade three and four providers – will be conducted remotely.
On its rolling update page on Thursday, Ofsted wrote: “For the rest of the term, we will continue to carry out our monitoring inspections remotely by default (with the exception of new provider monitoring visits to further education providers, which require site visits).”
With coronavirus cases falling and providers due to reopen on Monday, the visits have been deemed safe to go ahead.
Watchdog ‘prioritising’ new provider visits
FE Week understands the Education and Skills Funding Agency has grown increasingly concerned with new apprenticeship providers operating for prolonged periods without oversight from Ofsted.
The watchdog has also admitted its worries about the quality of new providers’ training.
Its 2019/20 annual report, published in December, called apprenticeship training the sector’s “weakest” provision.
Ofsted’s deputy director for FE and skills Paul Joyce told FE Week after the report’s publication: “We remain concerned there are a number of new providers that have not yet had a visit.
“We will prioritise those providers, as soon as we’re able to do so.”
New provider monitoring visits will continue to result in a published report and Ofsted will judge three categories and say whether the provider is making ‘significant’, ‘reasonable’, or ‘insufficient’ progress.
If the provider scores ‘insufficient progress’ in one or more themes, they face having their starts suspended and being kicked off the register of apprenticeship training providers.
Interesting fact: She developed her passion for vocational training at the age of 18 when she left college before her exams to start her own floristry business.
Wayne Wright
Deputy principal for quality and excellence, Lambeth College
Several industries where project-based employment is the norm have struggled more than most to comply with the 12-month minimum apprenticeships rule, but their fortunes could be about to change.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced in the Budget on Wednesday a £7 million fund to run so-called “portable” or “flexi-job” apprenticeships in sectors such as creative and construction.
This “new approach” will involve organisations applying for money to start new agencies which employ apprentices and place them with multiple employers.
It is targeted at those industries that cannot offer a long-enough placement with a single employer for apprentices to meet the government’s minimum 12-month duration requirement. In the TV and film sector, for example, most roles are freelance and usually only run for two to three months.
The flexi-job model was lauded by prime minister Boris Johnson during a speech on adult skills last year, after a meeting between ministers and his influential skills advisor Professor Alison Wolf decided the government should press ahead with its
introduction. It also featured briefly in this year’s FE white paper.
The scheme will become the third agency-type model for apprenticeships, following Apprenticeship Training Agencies (ATAs) and Group Training Associations (GTAs), which have been established for many years but have arguably become neglected by policymakers.
The Department for Education, which is responsible for the scheme, has promised a consultation on the proposals.
Levy problems ‘particularly stark’ for creative industries
Flexi-job apprenticeships are being specifically targeted at industries where work is often patchy. Workers in the creative sector, for example, who are finishing off one high-end television show will often wait weeks before starting on a big-budget blockbuster, for instance.
As Mark Heholt, head of policy for representative body ScreenSkills, told FE Week, the problems the creative sector faces are “not unique, but it is particularly stark”.
About 50 per cent of screen sector workers – in film, TV, visual special effects, animation, games – are freelancers, and it is only “if you’re lucky that your jobs will join up, whereas when you’re an apprentice, you have to have a minimum 12-month contract with one employer. So, you can’t move around.
“If you were training to be a set builder, after you’ve built it you’d then have nothing to do until it’s time to take it back down again.”
This issue has led to the creative sector seriously underspending its apprenticeship levy. The Creative Industries Council (CIC), a representative body chaired by the culture and business secretaries and BBC director-general Tim Davie, estimates that out of a £70 million levy pot for the creative industries every year, about 20 per cent is used.
Both ScreenSkills and CIC are working closely with the government on the development of flexi-job apprenticeships.
Ian Woodcroft, policy and government relations manager for the construction training organisation CITB, told FE Week
his organisation had not been “directly involved” with discussions around the flexi-job scheme, but is “keen to understand more of the detail” around it, as they look to tackle similar problems. CITB runs its own shared apprenticeship scheme which has supported 300 apprentices so far.
To their credit, the government has recognised the problem and is acting to help these sectors utilise apprenticeships more easily.
The Skills for Jobs white paper, published in January, acknowledged that creative and construction face “barriers in making full use of apprenticeships,” due to their “varied and flexible employment patterns”.
It added that “sectoral apprenticeship agencies may offer one solution, giving constant employment to an individual during the life of their apprenticeship which allows them to move between work placements and continue their training”.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is also running a £100,000 pilot programme with ScreenSkills, Netflix and Warner Bros, which was launched in 2019.
The programme was halted by Covid-19 and is waiting for productions to start up again before resuming, but will involve training apprentices as broadcast production assistants and production accountants with placements at those two companies, which are match funding with their levy money.
Boris Johnson
Prime minister Boris Johnson, in his landmark speech on adult skills at Exeter College last September, said the government wanted to make more apprenticeships portable “so you can take them from company to company”.
FE Week understands, shortly before Johnson’s speech, Alison Wolf met with skills minister Gillian Keegan and DCMS’ digital skills minister Caroline Dinenage and decided that flexi-jobs – rather than other options, such as bulk transferring levy funds, or modular apprenticeships – would be the course of action.
Shortly afterwards, the spending review in November confirmed that during 2021-22, the government would “test approaches to supporting apprenticeships in industries with more flexible working patterns”.
How flexi-job apprenticeships will help
Although the Treasury has said employers will be expected to come forward and bid to set up the flexi-job agencies, Heholt expects it will be organisations like sector bodies and training providers instead.
ScreenSkills is itself planning to apply, and Heholt says it will be “critical the agency which employs the apprentices has a background and ability and the skill to look after them, to provide them with all the pastoral care, and all the rest of it.
Mark Heholt
“It also needs to have very good relationships and contacts with industry, so that it can arrange these multiple placements.”
The number of employers involved in each agency will “depend,” he says, on the role for which the apprentice is training.
If it is a set builder role, they may need five or six; if it’s a production accountant, with larger chunks of work, it may be only two.
The new agencies, he said, “will need to make sure they understand the kinds of roles, the typical duration of those roles. And therefore, how many placements the apprentice needs over the duration of the apprenticeship.”
Neil Hatton, chair of the CIC’s apprenticeship working group, believes there will be a rotating cast of employers: “You could easily get 20 or 30 employers and that may be a rotating 20 or 30.”
As well as scrapping the single employer precedent, the flexi-job apprentices will not be offered a job at the end of the programme, according to ScreenSkills and CIC – again due to the freelance nature of creative workers.
Hatton said, though: “If people come out at the end of the course and they’ve done well, they are going to be in demand.”
Ditching so many tenets of the reformed apprenticeship programme are likely to have implications for how providers report their delivery to the DfE.
When asked what the new scheme will mean for training providers, the department would only say it would consult on how “agency models can better support apprentices to complete their apprenticeships through a series of placements with employers”.
Reporting could be easier for providers under this model, reckons Heholt, as they will be dealing with one agency rather than any number of employers.
What about apprenticeship training agencies?
So far, much of what has been announced about these new flexi-job apprenticeships and their agencies sounds markedly similar to the pre-existing ATA and GTA models.
ATAs, which launched in 2009, employ apprentices and place them with a host employer, so the firms do not have to recruit an apprentice themselves.
GTAs, which started in the 1960s, are set up and governed by local employers who may not have enough resources on their own to train apprentices; so they club together to set up what Jon Graham, chief executive of group training association JTL, calls an “in-house training business”.
Why not use the structure that exists?
“The apprentice will be employed by the employer, but they send them to the GTA, and the employer will have some strategic direction as to what the training organisation does, and how they operate.”
The new flexi-jobs apprenticeship agencies model has provoked some bemusement from the GTA and ATA sectors. The DfE has even described the DCMS-ScreenSkills pilot as an “apprenticeship training agency model”.
Speaking to FE Week, Iain Elliott, who operates both an ATA and a GTA in Humber, asked: “Why not use the structure that exists?” He warned the government to not “reinvent the wheel”.
The Department for Education has said it “values the role good-quality ATAs and GTAs play in helping apprentices and employers access apprenticeships” and “wants to build on the success of existing models”.
But the creative sector has its own reasons why ATAs and GTAs have not been directly adopted.
Mark Heholt said ScreenSkills looked into the ATA model for the pilot, but found “there are none, which I’m aware of, which arrange multiple placements, over the course of the apprenticeship, which is where the all the cost and the complexity comes from”.
This is backed up by Elliott and Graham, with the latter saying they have occasionally used multiple employers informally where an apprentice’s “range of work might change” so they are suddenly working on one task such as cabling “and also need to do a bit of x, y, and z”.
Hatton has also said the creative sector does not have many ATAs, so there is not that existing infrastructure to work from, and he was unsure how ATAs could cope with the periods of little to no work in his sector.
The first flexi-job apprenticeships are expected to start in January 2022, with bids to the £7 million fund opening in July 2021.
It was hoped that the June event, which was cancelled last year because of the pandemic, would go ahead on its usual site at Wellington College in Berkshire. But plans have been adapted following government guidance.
The virtual festival will take place across two weeks between June 16 and 30, rather than over two days.
There will be daily keynote speakers and two CPD days, known as “Friday Fests”, that will include more than 50 workshops on June 18 and June 25. These sessions will follow a similar format to a traditional seminar or panel discussion and will cover a “wide range of topics within education”.
Shane Mann
Shane Mann, the festival director, said: “We were hoping to be able to return to Wellington College this summer.
“However, we are excited to be able to provide a Festival of Education online this June and that it will be free for all to watch and join in.”
Mann said organisers hoped it would be a “fun and inspiring festival” after an “unfathomably challenging year” for educators.
The event is free thanks to the support of Wellington College, headline partner Pearson and other sponsors.
The festival was launched by Wellington College in 2010 and is now held in partnership with Lsect, the publisher of FE Week and our sister paper FE Week.
In June 2019, the tenth festival hosted more than 5,000 teachers and 300 speakers across two days.
James Dahl, the master of Wellington College, said: “We were so disappointed that the event had to be cancelled in 2020. This year, if the grounds of Wellington cannot be flooded with a sea of white marquees, then we will deliver the next best thing and launch the event online.”
Registration for Friday Fests is now open. Registration for keynote sessions will open when the speakers are announced.
The education secretary has defended the controversial delay in distributing Covid-19 testing kits to independent training providers.
In an interview with FE Week, Gavin Williamson insisted that the providers have “not been left out”.
He said they can tap into the current local community testing regime until the supplies are made available to them through a “demand-led model” being developed by the Department for Education.
But he failed to explain why this process will not be up and running until the end of March – weeks after learners return to onsite teaching.
Williamson’s comments have been met with more anger from “livid” private providers, with one saying they tried to order 1,000 testing kits through an emergency line recommended by DfE but were allocated just ten.
The testing delay, described by the Association of Employment and Learning Providers as “madness”, has proven particularly controversial as colleges are receiving the kits ahead of a return to face-to-face training on March 8.
Guidance from the Department for Education states that it “expects” every 16-to-19 student will “attend their FE provider in person and will undertake the majority of their planned hours on site” from that date.
Private providers have warned that reopening without access to testing constitutes a “significant risk” and some fear they will now have to delay course starts as a result.
The DfE is yet to provide an explanation for why its “bespoke solution” for independent providers to order the kits is not yet available, or how it will work.
Asked who was to blame for this oversight, Williamson told FE Week: “As you can imagine, the range of independent training providers is extensive, and this is why we’re rolling out testing much more broadly.
“All independent training providers are able to benefit through the community testing regime, so they’ve not been left out. They’re actually able to tap into that resource straight away.”
He continued: “What we’re doing is we’re massively expanding our testing regime and taking off some of the burdens of those independent training providers, but they already have access to testing through community, local authority testing schemes and we really would encourage them to do that. But as part of our big expansion, they’re going to be included in what we’re doing as well.”
Jon Graham, chief executive of training provider JTL, described the situation as “such a shameful and immoral thing”. His provider trains around 8,000 learners, mostly in plumbing, electrical and engineering apprenticeships across 12 different sites in England.
JTL previously received a text from the Department of Health and Social Care saying JTL was eligible for free Covid-19 test kits, but when the provider tried to order 1,000 last week, they were only offered ten.
“Why is it that a college over the road gets all their 16-to-18-year-olds in safely with testing but for thousands of our learners I’ve got to choose ten of them to get a test?” Graham said.
“Apprentices are also moving around different sites and offices. If you are an electrician or plumber, you’re going into people’s homes and they could be vulnerable people and you might be asymptomatic – I’ve not been able to test them.”
As Williamson said, private providers are encouraged in the DfE’s operational guidance for reopening to use local asymptomatic testing sites until their kits arrive in April.
But as FE Week reported last week, not every local authority has one, and most are not easily accessible by public transport for students.
In the absence of testing, the DfE says providers can help ensure the safety of students and staff and minimise the risk of outbreaks by implementing their recommended “system of controls”.
This includes ensuring face coverings are worn as well as other personal protective equipment where appropriate, promoting the “catch it, bin it, kill it” approach, keeping occupied spaces well ventilated and maintaining social distancing.
Pilot schemes, such as skills bootcamps, are “counter-intuitive” to the Department for Education’s long-term goal of simplifying the FE system, Keith Smith has admitted.
The director for post-16 strategy at the DfE and mastermind behind the FE white paper conceded that introducing programmes with brand-new funding rules and methodologies do add further complexity to an already complicated system.
But he explained that schemes like this needed to be ramped up quickly to help the country’s recovery from Covid-19 and asked the sector: “Please don’t take anything that happens in the short-term as any sort of indication of where the future intent will be.”
Skills bootcamps are currently being piloted and are set for a £43 million national launch later this year. They are part of the prime minister’s “lifetime skills guarantee” and plan to get people quickly back into jobs following the pandemic.
They offer learners aged 19 and over the chance to take a 12-to-16-week level 3 or higher course with a guaranteed job interview at the end.
But as previously reported by FE Week, the new courses involve a totally new funding formula, with providers receiving 30 per cent to start the learner, 60 per cent for achievement and then ten per cent for eligible progression.
Providers also do not record learners through the individualised learner record and there are currently no plans for Ofsted to inspect the provision.
This is despite the DfE pledging in its FE white paper to “reform our funding and accountability system” of which “simplification and streamlining of funding” would be central.
Following this week’s Budget, Association of Colleges chief executive David Hughes said the job schemes that have been created or scaled-up to aid the country’s Covid-19 recovery, such as Kickstart, bootcamps and traineeships, need to be “aligned and funding simplified”.
“The programmes currently do not work well together, are confusing to employers and will not work effectively for many unemployed people,” he added.
“The key thing now is to join up jobs and skills initiatives to allow as many people as possible to benefit from them quickly.”
Quizzed during an FE Week webcast on the white paper this week about why the government appeared to start from scratch when designing bootcamps, Smith agreed they could cause more confusion for the sector.
He said: “Yeah, I can see that. There is always a balance in the short term about getting money into the system in a way that is being provided for. In this case, government is really keen to test it [bootcamps].
“I completely accept the challenge that some of this is going to feel a bit counter-intuitive in the short term, that we’re perhaps doing things that potentially aren’t necessarily always in keeping with the longer term.
“All I would say is that I completely recognise that. Those listening today will understand there is a lot of complexity here we need to sort out. So please don’t take anything that happens in the short term as any sort of indication of where the future intent will be.”
He added that the white paper’s promised funding and accountability consultation “really will be the place that we start to mock all this up”.
The consultation is expected to launch later this year.
New legislation will enable the education secretary to intervene where colleges refuse to deliver courses decided through local skills improvement plans, the FE white paper’s architect has confirmed.
But the extent of the powers is still being determined by ministers and there is currently no timeline for when the formal regulations will come into force.
Keith Smith, the director for post-16 strategy at the Department for Education, clarified the intent behind the legislation put forward in the white paper during an FE Week webcast on Tuesday.
Central to the reforms are new local skills improvement plans, which will be “led” by employers and “shape technical skills provision so that it meets local labour market skills needs”.
As part of this, “new accountability structures to underpin” the plans will be introduced, including legislation “to put the employer leadership on a statutory footing”.
“New powers” that allow the education secretary to intervene “where local providers are consistently unable to deliver the skills priorities for that area” will also be introduced.
There has been confusion about what this new power would mean in practice since the white paper was published in January, and whether it meant that the DfE’s intervention regime would in the future include college failure to comply with the local skills plans.
Smith confirmed this was the case during this week’s webcast.
“This will be for ministers to set out, which they haven’t yet done, but the intent will be to have a bit of the FE Bill about how we get employers involved in shaping the system. The other part will be about what do the secretary of state’s powers look like where the system is perhaps not working effectively as he or she would like,” he said.
FE Week editor Nick Linford, who chaired the webcast, pressed Smith to be clear that this legislation would give the education secretary more power to intervene where a college or training provider isn’t delivering the courses as laid out in the skills plan.
Smith confirmed there will be a “shift in the ability for the secretary of state to intervene where he or she doesn’t feel that the system is effective”.
“The legislative agenda is a really critical part of the strategy, but I should just caveat all this to say government has not yet laid its formal regulations in the House of Commons and so this is very much for ministers to determine to what extent what sort of articles they want to lay within the Bill,” he added.
College autonomy in deciding what courses they run has been a hot topic in recent years.
At the Association of Colleges conference in 2018, Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman controversially argued that some colleges choose to run courses for financial gain, such as in performing arts, despite the lack of opportunity for progression.
This, she said, is giving students “false hope” by putting them on courses where there are slim job prospects. Spielman repeated this concern in the watchdog’s 2020 annual report last January.
There have since been a number of reports from the likes of the AoC and former adviser to the skills minister and founder of the think tank EDSK Tom Richmond that suggest colleges should lose some autonomy.
And in November, Education and Skills Funding Agency director Matthew Atkinson told MPs he would “definitely like more power” to intervene in the running of colleges.
The local skills improvement plans mooted in the white paper are set to be piloted this year.
The education secretary has pledged to back teachers “all the way” in their efforts to award GCSE and A-level grades this summer, and accepted he will share the responsibility if there is a backlash on results days.
In an exclusive interview with FE Week’s sister title FE Week, Gavin Williamson said the government was putting its “confidence and faith in teacher judgment” and said a “robust appeals structure” would help deal with potential “challenges” with the system.
Exams have been cancelled this year following the decision to partially close schools and colleges in January. The government last week confirmed its plans to base grades on teacher assessments, prompting fears teachers could be left to shoulder the blame if there is another upset this year.
The government was forced into a last-minute U-turn last year on its decision to award grades based on centre assessments adjusted by computer algorithm.
Ministers have ruled out using an algorithm this summer, but there are concerns that relying on teacher assessment will lead to disparities between schools, colleges and grade inflation.
Williamson said the government was “absolutely supporting teachers” and pointed to plans to publish guidance to help with grading and for exam boards to provide additional support.
“It’s why we’ll be putting both the internal quality assurance and external quality assurance [in place] and absolutely backing teachers all the way on this,” he said.
“We want to make sure this works and, of course, everyone has a responsibility for the structures that have been put in place and, of course, myself included in that.”
However, the education secretary said the government would take a “very serious view” of malpractice. Exam boards are to look for this when they conduct the external quality assurance process, including via checks that will be triggered where schools and colleges have previously received sanctions for malpractice.
“People do have to have responsibility for what they’re putting forward and that’s why we’ve put those checks and balances in place,” he said.
“We’d expect everyone to adhere to the high professional standards that we always see within the teaching profession. But where there are things that aren’t quite right we will absolutely take action in order to be able to deal with that.”
Schools and colleges are due to reopen more widely from next week, with providers allowed to phase the return to facilitate requirements for mass testing.
However, the decision to bring all students back in the same week has prompted fears of a return to the situation seen last autumn, when schools and colleges were regularly forced to send large groups of students home because of a confirmed Covid case.
Williamson said he accepted that there “will be children and there will be teachers who will have to isolate, but that’s exactly as you would expect as we are still dealing with a pandemic”.
But he said the number of children having to isolate “fell dramatically over the first four weeks of full return in September, and we’d hope to keep a similar sort of level of practice there”.
Williamson said the country had made a “difficult sacrifice to not bring other parts of the country back before schools and colleges” in order to “safeguard education”.
“Anyone who understands what’s best for a child recognises that actually they learn best and they are in the best possible position to succeed by getting them back into the classroom.
“That’s where our focus has been and we’ve taken a decision not to bring anything else back other than children into the classroom because we’ve always said it’s our national priority to get children back into class.”
