The Annual Revaluation of Further Education and the Enrolment Process

Every year the further education sector spends an unlimited time working on Strategic Enrolment Management Plans.

The focus of these meetings is to enhance a range of outcomes, to make sure new students receive a smooth and positive experience, ensuring that there is a range of measurability reports including, the total number of enrolments taken, non-attendees, the value of enrolment intake, to name but just a few.

In 2020, the Covid-19 restrictions meant that FE colleges were forced into taking a new digital approach for their enrolment intake, a culture shift to the face-to-face interaction that the traditional method has to offer.

The digital experience has had both positive and negative outcomes. This year colleges will no doubt be assessing this before moving forwards. At the same time allowing, for the fact that the government roadmap may not effectively go to plan, and colleges may have to change the goalposts yet again.

IPS Ltd Provides Software Solutions for Traditional and Digital Enrolment

Established for over 12 years, IPS Ltd has been working with the FE sector to give them the ability to provide effective end-to-end solutions. Our software can enable colleges to capture the benefits of both the traditional and digital methods needed for the enrolment process.

“Our purpose for FE is to provide systems to assist with reducing staff workloads so that they can focus on their daily duties. With our systems we have built in reports that education providers require, better still our systems integrate with yours, from your MIS system to access control systems. The list of experiences that staff and students receive with our systems and integration is endless.”  Robert Powell, Managing Director, IPS Ltd.

North Kent College states:

“We have gained many advantages with the IPS Ltd systems, they are flexible, scalable, modern and web-based, meaning that the software is available everywhere and as a manager, I don’t need to be at a desk to look at information or reports, which is an effective and well-received change.

With the help of IPS Ltd systems, we know that our enrolment process is smooth and efficient across all North Kent College sites.”  Sean McCormick, Executive Director of Facilities and Resources, North Kent College.

Online Payment Platform

IPS Ltd’s i-Pay system; has a multitude of opportunities, is a central hub for staff, parents, and students. Integrated to your website and your MIS system i-Pay, can be used for new students to apply, and even pay for courses. The system has reporting features so that you can identify how many students have applied or enrolled on each course. It has document upload facilities for the necessary evidence required for the enrolment process completion.

This system keeps on giving. Out of the enrolment environment, it enables staff, students, parents, and guardians to top-up accounts, pay for trips, purchase from and online shop, pre-order food and better still with the current lockdown situation that students and parents face, this system will be able to offer them online therapy and mental health sessions.

ID Card Management System

Combining the i-Pay system with our i-Card system means that you also have a range of further strengths. Data from your MIS system is pushed into here and you also have the facilities to bulk print ID Cards or print on a one-to-one basis, the i-Card software as a print audit log with a dashboard that shows the ID Card printer status.

i-Card uses Mifare technology which means that you have the opportunity for an overall user experience, watch our video here to see a student’s journey.

Windsor Forest Colleges Group states:

“Out of all the systems, my preference is the i-Card system because of its flexibility. The opportunities with it mean that it is not just a standard card-based system. It is web-based and works with network printers, meaning that it is easy to use, and we can send prints directly to the nearest printer.

It also facilitates bulk printing, which we use during our enrolments, helping to reduce processing times. Last year we bulk printed between 800 to 1000 ID Cards per day, sorting, both by course and alphabetical by surname. All we need to do is monitor it and top-up the cards when needed, meaning that a staff member could continue to do their day-to-day work at the same time.” Roberts Disbury-Mockett, Group Director of Information and Business Systems, Windsor Forest Colleges Group.

Finalise your Strategic Enrolment Management Plans with IPS Ltd systems

If you have already started your Strategic Management Plans, then no doubt by now, you have a range of objectives to resolve.

On Thursday 25th March ’21 from 2 pm – 3 pm, IPS Ltd is hosting an i-Enrol webinar, and we would like to invite you and your work colleagues to join us. 

The event will give you a range of information, enabling you to resolve your objectives and provide you with solutions for both the digital and traditional methods of the enrolment process.

It will also give you knowledge of how our systems integrate into your college systems including, the MIS system, an overview of our i-Pay and i-Card software and there will also be an opportunity for you to ask any questions that you may have, click here for further information and to register your place/s.

If you would like to contact us for a one-to-one demonstration or have any questions please contact sales@ips.software or call 01202 006 677 where one of the IPS Ltd team members will be able to help.

All college leaders required to attend annual MOT meeting

New “strategic conversations” that require all college leaders to meet with Education and Skills Funding Agency and FE Commissioner officials once a year will begin from next month.

The meetings, which must be attended by the principal and chair, will be held with individual colleges annually to “look holistically at the college’s strategy”.

The ESFA has insisted this is not another form of intervention. It is not clear at this stage if a record of the meeting will be kept and published by the agency.

Announcing plans for the meetings in its weekly update today, the ESFA said they will be a “strategic conversation that rises above the normal day to day dialogue”.

“It will focus on current and future plans that the college has, and provide us with an opportunity to hear directly from colleges about their successful initiatives, as well as discussing risks and challenges, and possible solutions.”

The new conversations follow Dame Mary Ney’s review of the financial oversight of colleges, which recommended a more nurturing and pro-active relationship between government and colleges.

In its response to the Ney review, the ESFA did promise an action to introduce annual “strategic conversations”. This pledge was then reaffirmed in the recent FE white paper.

The meeting will be led by the ESFA, with an FE Commissioner representative, and include the “principal, the college chair, other governors and other college senior leaders as appropriate”.

The first of these conversations will start in the summer term, from late April 2021, the ESFA said, with the first full cycle completed by May 2022.

Meetings will be held either at colleges or virtually, depending upon Covid-19 restrictions.

The ESFA said the content of the agenda will be “jointly shaped with each college, and as the programme rolls out we will be in touch to agree a meeting date with each college and to agree the agenda”.

FE Week has asked the ESFA if the meetings are a funding requirement and what happens if a college refuses to take part.

The new conversations will involve all further education colleges, including specialist designated institutions, land based colleges and sixth form colleges.

Ofqual publishes proposals for autumn 2021 exam series

This year’s autumn exam series will be similar to the one held in 2020, but with GCSE exams potentially taking place later, Ofqual has proposed.

A consultation on plans for the series has also asked whether AS-level exams need to be offered this time, following low entries last year.

The government announced last month that an autumn series would go ahead for the second year in a row, for students unhappy with their teacher assessment grades.

It is proposed that the autumn series should be open to any student who entered or who had intended to enter exams this summer, with students able to use the better of their summer or autumn grade.

But Ofqual said it has not yet taken any decisions on the approach to grading. Last year, the “generosity” from the summer 2020 grades was carried forward.

Students will also not be given advance notice of topics, as was proposed for this summer before exams were cancelled.

 

Results based only on exams, not coursework

As happened last year, it is proposed that exam boards should only determine grades on performance in the autumn exams. Non-exam assessments will not be taken into account.

Art and design subjects, which do not normally have exams, would be assessed through students completing an exam board’s set task only.

Ofqual’s interim chief regulator Simon Lebus

Ofqual is proposing that A-levels would be sat in October, the same as last year and results issued before Christmas.

But GCSEs could be slightly later, in November and early December. GCSEs were run just wholly in November last year.

Exams would be in their usual form and number for each subject. But Ofqual proposes that boards will not have to offer exams in subjects where there are no entries by the entry date.

Will AS-level exams go ahead>

The consultation also asks whether it should “require” exam boards to offer GCSE and A level exams but “permit” them to offer AS exams if they choose to do so, after low entry rates last year.

Alternatively, Ofqual said they may “not allow” exam boards to offer any AS exams at all.

There were less than 2,000 AS-level entries in the autumn exam series last year, compared to almost 20,000 at A-level and almost 19,000 at GCSE.

The consultation acknowledges that providing an autumn series will increase costs for both exam boards, schools and colleges.

Last year, DfE provided a support package to help schools and colleges with “essential additional costs” from the autumn series, including exam fees, sites and invigilators. It is not known whether this will be provided again.

Today Ofqual said that, as entry numbers are “likely to be low”, exam boards “will be unlikely to recover their costs unless they significantly increase their entry fees”.

It added that although exam boards may provide rebates to schools and colleges for summer exam fees, the boards “can reasonably be expected to take account of costs of providing autumn exams when calculating the size of any rebate”.

 

No extra help in Autumn exam series

Ofqual is proposing that exam boards will not provide advance information or additional materials, as was proposed for this summer before exams were cancelled because it would be “disproportionately burdensome” to require them to do so.

Requiring them to provide advance information for the autumn exams would introduce “further additional burden – and costs” for boards, and “increase risk to the successful delivery of the autumn series”.

Ofqual said students who decide to take autumn exams are “unlikely to receive any additional teaching to support them to prepare for the exams”.

“There is a risk that the provision of advance information would advantage students who either continued to have access to their subject teachers or who were able to secure support in other ways, for example through private tutors. This would introduce a degree of unfairness that we believe should be avoided.”

 

Concerns advance notice could ‘narrow curriculum’

The regulator is also concerned that publication of advance information would make autumn papers less useful resources for teachers to use as mock exams.

Ofqual added that information about the topics in November might also have implications for summer 2022 exams.

“Students and teachers might conclude that topics identified for inclusion in the autumn series would not come up again in summer 2022 papers. This is not necessarily the case, but that belief might cause some early narrowing of the curriculum for GCSE and A level students.”

Ofqual is also proposing that exam boards will replace certificates showing only summer 2021 grades with certificates showing autumn grades, if students request them.

Normal reviews of marking and appeal arrangements would apply.

The consultation is open until April 9.

Full Ofsted inspections won’t return until September

Full graded Ofsted inspections will not return until the new academic year, with the watchdog instead looking at bringing in a “sensible and proportionate next step” as part of its phased return in the summer term.

Department for Education guidance states routine, graded Ofsted inspections “will resume in the summer term”, with the inspectorate “discussing the form and timing of inspections in the summer term”.

However chief inspector Amanda Spielman today confirmed that full inspections will not be returning this academic year.

Addressing the Association of School and College Leaders virtual conference, she added: “But I can tell you that what we’re discussing is a sensible and proportionate next step before returning to our normal inspection programme in the autumn.”

Ofsted has been conducting a new form of remote monitoring inspections of schools and colleges graded “inadequate” or “requires improvement” since January 25, after U-turning on plans to conduct inspections in-person.

But these visits for FE providers have now stopped so that the watchdog can focus on face-to-face new provider monitoring inspections, which recommenced on Monday.

As more normal service resumes within education, Spielman said she wants Ofsted to “play its part in helping schools and colleges get back on track through inspections”.

But she warned them against conducting ‘mocksteds’ or using inspection consultants in a bid to prepare.

“I want us to help not hinder and I certainly don’t want hard-pressed teachers spending time on fruitless exercises to prepare for Ofsted… just do the best for your pupils and students, in other words what you always do”, she added.

Profile: Asfa Sohail. Principal, Lewisham College

JL Dutaut meets a college principal for whom building resilience is a matter of building communities  

How are you? 

Good leaders ask this question often. The best stick around for the answer. But it’s their lot seldom to be asked the question themselves. 

It’s one of the changes Lewisham College principal Asfa Sohail has noticed among her staff and community since the advent of Covid. “My staff come and ask me how I’m doing. People never asked me before. Even my union colleagues asked me once!” 

Fostering a sense of community in an organisation may be the greatest challenge for a new leader. But for Lewisham College, being part of one is almost a given: campaigns to reverse cuts to its library and mental health support services and to save Lewisham hospital; local restaurants handing out 100,000 free meals during the pandemic; eight-year-old, Leila Miah making 100 hot meals for a local food poverty initiative; ‘Grow Lewisham’, a project to supply the community’s food banks with locally grown food. 

My staff come and ask me how I’m doing. People never asked me before 

All these are testament to a proud local history of citizen engagement that has only increased with the experience of Covid. The sense of shared responsibility and a relentless focus on wellbeing are palpable in the headlines alone. 

And it’s no wonder. The London borough has been hit by 499 deaths since the start of the pandemic, more than one in every thousand. Among Sohail’s staff, three have passed away in the past year. 

For Sohail, who last month marked two years in post, it has been a sobering experience. For the college community as a whole, losing members of staff with decades of service between them has hit hard. But, she tells me, the college and its lecturers are nothing if not resilient.

In true Lewisham fashion, a celebration of their colleagues’ lives may be on hold, but it’s certainly not cancelled. “I’ve got lots of suggestions people have put forward for what they want to do for their colleagues,” Sohail tells me. “We’re just waiting for this pandemic to be over and then we’ll do something special!” 

Sohail at the Lewisham foodbank

 

The challenge of the past year, here and across the sector, has gone far beyond being part of communities. Colleges have been instrumental in keeping them together and keeping them afloat. Not just their professional communities of staff and students, but in the broadest sense – families, carers, local businesses and frontline services. All have benefitted from college leaders who have redefined their roles and redeployed their resources to survive and beat the pandemic. 

For Sohail, putting values first comes naturally. Born and raised in Pakistan, she recalls with fondness the ethical grounding she got from her father. “He made me see life from both ends. I come from a middle-class family but he made me see the poverty nearby. I remember once there was a beggar and my dad brought food and asked me to sit down and eat it with him. He said to me, ‘You should feel what people go through.’” 

Sohail with siblings in Pakistan

After two years in post, the first spent in the heat of first-time principalship and the second in the crucible of Covid, it’s fair to say Sohail has found a home and a voice for her ethical leadership.

This year, she will begin leading a new committee as part of the Black FE Leadership Group, founded by former Cornwall College Group CEO, Amarjit Basi. “The purpose of that group is that we will set up a mentorship scheme for others aspiring to senior leadership roles.”

With relish, she adds that she’s soon to be part of another initiative that’s all about “giving back”, but that she’s keeping it under her hat until it’s official. 

But while fighting prejudice and giving back may be second nature to Sohail, education, it turns out, is another matter altogether.

Where she finds herself – on the cusp of using her position and platform to bring about systemic change while leading a college in London’s seventh most deprived borough –  is about as far as she could be from what she imagined a couple of decades ago. 

I said I don’t think I can be a teacher. I just don’t have the guts

Recalling more of her father’s ethical grounding, she tells me that, in a male-dominated society and with her heart set on a career in a male-dominated sector, her dad urged her to ignore prejudices and follow her passion. “Everybody was so critical of me at the time saying, ‘Why is she doing these males subject? What’s she going to do?’ Anyway, because I had his support, I just went with it.” 

So she signed up for a degree in maths and physics from the University of the Punjab in Pakistan. She was certain about one thing though: “I always used to say to my dad, ‘I’m never going to be a teacher’, and he used to say, ‘Never says never’. And guess what happened!”  

Sohail met her husband while studying for her degree. They were married by the time she was 20, to her mother’s serious misgivings. When they moved to England together as he launched his career as a civil engineer, she studied for a higher national diploma in software engineering in the evenings. 

Sohail at the Lewisham student awards

And so it began. “One day, one of my teachers came up to me and asked, could you cover a class tomorrow morning? I said I don’t think I can be a teacher. I just don’t have the guts.” 

A friend sitting next to her piped up: “You’d be really good at it. You should just give it a go.” Sohail’s answer: “Why don’t you go and do it?” 

But try she did and to this day she still waxes lyrical about the “amazing feeling” of running that class.

That was in 1997. She went on to complete a BSC in computing from the University of Westminster in 2001, all the while teaching as a lecturer at Newham College.

By 2004, she had completed her PGCE and was already Havering College’s curriculum manager for IT. By 2009, she’d completed an MBA with Anglia Ruskin and taken two further career steps to deputy director for the business, care and service sectors at Havering. That year, she also became an Ofsted inspector. 

I really love the passion the staff and community bring into this college

Sohail stayed with Havering until February two years ago, when she left her post as vice principal there to take on the role at Lewisham.  Another principal job was advertised simultaneously at Southwark College, which had, until their demerger and simultaneous absorption into the Newcastle College Group (NCG), been the other half of the same college.  

But unlike many of her competitors, Sohail only applied for the Lewisham job. “I did my research,” she tells me, and made her decision guided by “the values instilled by my dad. […] And I’m pleased that I did. I really love working for this community and the passion the staff and community bring into this college. I get my inspiration from these people.” 

Sohail with students

While the job of leading a college can be a lonely one – and has been especially so for many over the past year – she is grateful to be part of another, somewhat unique community.

She is in no doubt about the benefits of being part of NCG, the country’s largest and most geographically dispersed college group. “If I was a principal on my own, I probably wouldn’t have access to all the information or the kind of validation I have at the moment. People often say geography is an issue for us. But actually, it isn’t. We’ve become a cohesive team. We have communities of practice, where subject specialists come together. There are so many benefits that come out of it.” 

With the layers of community she’s built around herself and her team, it’s little wonder that at Lewisham College ‘how are you?’ is often asked, and the answer heard. 

So while Sohail is realistic about the pandemic’s impact on wellbeing, her optimism is well founded. “It’s a matter of making sure that if you’re down you come out of it quite quickly. Because it’s OK to be there, but not stay there for too long. That’s the mentality I’ve been fostering across the organisation.” 

“Once all this is over,” she adds, “I want to make sure we don’t lose all this unity.” 

Something tells me she won’t let us. 

More licences to practice would show England ‘values’ skills

The lack of jobs in England which require a licence to practice shows the country does not place a high value on skills, a leading academic has said.

Lorna Unwin, professor emerita in vocational education at the UCL’s Institute of Education, called for a “cultural shift” on the licences during an FE Week webcast on the Skills for Jobs white paper, held today.

Unwin, along with Federation of Awarding Bodies chief executive Tom Bewick and NOCN Group chief executive Graham Hasting-Evans, was discussing how England’s vocational system could “beat” Germany’s – which is a goal of education secretary Gavin Williamson.

Unwin said most of England’s politicians “never mention” Germany’s “regulated labour market”.

She called it a “huge stick and a carrot for employers to have a really good commitment to training” which involves a much wider use of licences to practice than in our system.

Pilots for licences to practice?

Licences to practice are where workers have to train and be certified at a standard set out by a professional body to fill a particular occupation, such as a doctor.

Unwin said England has “very, very, very” few licences to practice, which means: “I could set myself up as an electrician tomorrow, if I wanted to.

“I could certainly cut your hair and do toenails, with no training.”

This, she said, showed “we don’t value a lot of jobs, or we think for lots of jobs you just need a bit of induction and you pick it up as you go along”.

But Covid-19 had “exposed all of the occupations that the country relies on to keep going, that people generally just dismiss”.

Unwin said there needed to be a “cultural shift” around the licences, focusing on “to what extent we can develop the notion across more occupations”.

Her comments come after education secretary Gavin Williamson promised in his speech to the Conservative Party conference in 2019 that England would “overtake Germany in the opportunities we offer to those studying technical routes by 2029”.

FE Week editor Nick Linford, who was chairing the discussion, compared the lack of licences to practice in England to when a recruitment shortage for teachers led to a debate about recruiting unqualified staff.

“The downside is,” he added, “that anyone and everyone could potentially do it and what does that say about your kind of your belief in the value of your skills system”.

Unwin agreed, posing the question: “They wouldn’t withdraw training from brain surgeons, even if there was a shortage. So why do it for teachers?”

She proposed a pilot of licences to practice in some sectors, to figure out what they might look like and whether it could be linked to progression from level 3 up to level 5.

However, she did warn that it could create “bottlenecks” around entry into the labour market.

Construction ‘miles ahead of everybody else’

One area of England’s jobs market which makes heavy use of licences to practice is construction.

For instance, NOCN Group offers two “job cards” for the sector to “provide proof individuals have the required training and qualifications for the type of work they carry out”: one under the Construction Plant Competence Scheme, and another for the Construction Industry Scaffolders Record Scheme.

Hasting-Evans said certain sectors, such as construction, are “going miles ahead of everybody else” in using licences.

Pictured top (clockwise from top left): Graham Hasting-Evans, Nick Linford, Lorna Unwin, Tom Bewick

Watch the full webcast here:

 

Could your college capitalise on the new apprenticeships?

Apprentice reform has opened the floodgates for private providers to really get involved in delivering apprenticeships.  The new standards are starting to prove their worth to employers as the first cohorts of students have successfully navigated the improved – yet imposed – changes. Even the pandemic hasn’t held back the more entrepreneurial spirits from delivering and learning content, despite the series of lockdowns.

With such confidence growing, how can colleges capitalise on the opportunities offered by the new apprenticeships? Traditionally the ‘home’ of apprenticeship delivery and with unmatched skills in encouraging younger learners to fulfil their potential, colleges are very well-placed to make the most of the new standards. Yet some remain reticent, unsure of the changes or unclear how to implement the new standards. 

The changes can be daunting but here, Tad Chapman, Head of End-point Assessment at Active IQ. and Amanda Charlton, Sport & Protective Services Work Based Learning at Bridgwater and Taunton College, explain how their partnership has really made a success of the new apprenticeship standards.

Getting to grips with the changes

“I’ll be honest and say when we first saw the new apprentice standards, I didn’t know where to start – and that’s with the best part of 30 years’ apprenticeship experience under my belt,” says Amanda.  “So, I started by calling in Active IQ and together we navigated the process. Its reputation for moving and adapting quickly is deserved and has been a huge asset to us, firstly in getting to grips with the new standards and, secondly, working around the added complexity of lockdown restrictions,” she says.

“As one of the first End-point Assessment Organisations (EPAOs) to be approved on the Register of End-point Assessment Organisations, we have plenty of insight into the End-point Assessment process, the requirements for the apprentices, tutors, employers and assessors,” says Tad.  “Also, as a leading Awarding Organisation, we are well-versed in the ways of Ofqual and regulatory bodies and well-placed to support the transition from the old-style frameworks to the new standards. 

Even that being so, Tad agrees the new process required careful navigation and was as much a learning curve for Active IQ as it was for its college partners. 

“We learned a great deal by working closely with colleges and their cohorts to help them take on board the fundamental changes and acknowledging we were partnering on this journey was by far the best approach,” says Tad.

Plan for success

Bridgwater & Taunton College has over 20,000 students of which around 3,000 are doing apprenticeships.  Amanda manages approximately 100 students at any given time in her department which offers the following apprenticeships with Active IQ.

Level 2             Community Activator Coach

                           Leisure Team Member

Level 3             Leisure Duty Manager

                           Personal Trainer

                           Community Sport and Health Officer

                           Teaching Assistant

“The toolkits and e-learning provided by Active IQ are extremely good and provide the scaffold for the learners to understand what is required,” she says.  “Furthermore, the employer guides provide a really good overview and make it much easier to include national agendas and environmental changes into learning.” 

In addition, Amanda undertakes a mapping exercise with any new standard to match the toolkits to work-based tasks and activities to ensure that the apprenticeship standards’ competencies of knowledge, skills and behaviours, including English and maths, are covered in sufficient depth and detail.  Finally, Amanda aligns the Bridgwater and Taunton College MyBTC Advantage programme – that is used to support and underpin soft and transferable skills such as being more community minded, having higher aspirations and being a better communicator – to inform her Plan of Learning for that standard.

High profile employer partner

“We’re very proud to hold the national contract with British Gymnastics for apprenticeships,” says Amanda.  “Our programme provides clubs and individuals the opportunity to create full-time careers in gymnastics, supporting the development of young coaches who are already invested in the sport.”

The 18-month programme sees apprentices do on-the-job training within their club environment whilst completing learning outside of their club under the guidance of the college. Apprentices can choose to study for either the Level 2 Community Activator Coach Standard or an Apprenticeship in Level 3 Community Sport and Health Officer (both of which include a funded Level 1, 2 or 3 coaching course in a gymnastics discipline).

Perfectly placed colleges

Apprenticeships have always been an attractive option by offering a cost-effective and clearly mapped route for career success.  That concept is even more evident with the new standards offering pathways starting at Level 2 and going right up through junior and senior management roles to Levels 6 and 7.  While it’s always been good to know that an apprenticeship leads nicely into the world of work, after the recent uncertain and turbulent times, there’s even more to be said for the structure, reassurance and security offered by apprenticeships and the End-point assessment process. 

“Apprenticeships provide a supportive and guided route into the workplace to cushion the transition from school, or other settings, to the workplace,” says Amanda.  “As an apprenticeship provider, we can work with employers to structure and plan the off-the-job training and schedule in our on-line and face-to-face delivery so that the apprentice is managed and guided carefully to be the best they can be.”

But education is not only about classroom learning and skills acquisition, especially among younger learners aged 16-19.  As well as fulfilling an educational role, colleges are perfectly placed to support students in other ways.  “Colleges are able to offer substantial wrap-around support and services for students,” says Amanda.  “This covers everything from wellbeing and counselling support for learners in addition to careers advice, maths and English support and opportunities to learn from and experience other sectors.” 

Another concern for many youngsters and their families is the worry over accruing student debt and the concern they may not necessarily find work on completion of their further education.

Many students can see real benefit in starting their chosen career as soon as possible and for those who have a clear passion for a vocation, an apprenticeship is hard to beat.

Meeting employers’ demands

The Department for Education described apprenticeship training as “the key to unlocking productivity” while last month’s National Apprenticeship Week run under the theme “Build the Future”.  Both these bold statements are true. Today’s apprenticeships have the potential to attract strong candidates looking for a clear career pathway to the top and, importantly, have the power to retain top talent within an organisation.

With a grading system for apprentices now in place and assessments taking a more holistic view of the learner, the standards give employers more of what they need in terms of greater engagement, more focused work and more practical time with their apprentices.

FE colleges will naturally prioritise their student body but knowing the benefits for employers is a vital piece of the career jigsaw.  “Apprentices can be strategically savvy choices,” says Tad.  “Open- minded employers will see apprentices as an ideal opportunity to train people precisely to fit their business model while vetting their potential by seeing them in the workplace.  Employers who are prepared to invest time and energy in an apprentice will be rewarded by having the chance to take a learner from Level 2 up the career ladder to take a management role within a few years by completing Level 3, Level 4 and so on.”

Amanda has heard exactly this feedback from employers. “We’ve had employers build their short-term future business strategy around the individuals we bring to them. They identify skills and potential early on and can even plan where in their business an apprentice’s talent can be used to diversify, grow and develop to achieve a business aim as well as fulfil a career goal.”

Successful outcome

The new apprenticeships standards all build up to the End-point Assessment, itself an unfamiliar process to many. This is where Active IQ comes into its own by working closely with colleges and employers to ensure that each apprentice is appraised at regular intervals to ensure they are absolutely ready to be assessed. 

“Active IQ has a very high-quality resources, regular newsfeeds and webinars alongside, proactive account managers and named individuals who are always ready to answer queries and questions,” says Amanda.  “Its online portal (EPA Pro) is a fantastic resource which provides me with a dashboard to see exactly which parts of the EPA have been booked or completed.  They provide great post-EPA feedback to our learners which we are able to use to improve our own practice.”

Getting it right

You could argue that if you can successfully steer a cohort of apprentices through work-based learning at a time when many workplaces are closed and social distancing measures are in place, you can manage it under more normal education circumstances. 

Active IQ recognises that colleges, in the same way as other training providers, had their work cut out in the last year to keep learners on track.  Amanda agrees that when the pandemic hit just after Bridgwater & Taunton College had started to get to grips with the new standards, a combination of adaptations, swiftly implemented changes and a leap of faith were called upon to succeed.  But succeed they did: she kept all her students on track and lost none from the process through the pandemic.

“As a College we moved very quickly to using Microsoft Teams to successfully deliver both training and wellbeing sessions to support students in keeping their up with the apprenticeship commitments while safeguarding their mental and physical health,” says Amanda.  “We had to be creative and responsive to provide all our learners, not just our apprentices, with the same high quality Teaching Learning and Assessment as our face-to-face delivery. No-one was more pleased than me to see everyone pass their EPA and a few even gained distinction grades.  If you can achieve that for learners in the middle of a lockdown, you have to feel that you got it right!”

www.activeiq.co.uk

Active IQ is one of the first End-point Assessment Organisations (EPAOs) to be approved on the Register of End-point Assessment  Organisations. With unmatched expertise, it offers 15 End-point Assessments (EPAs) for the new apprenticeship standards including these  most popular with FE colleges:

  • Business Administrator
  • Community Activator Coach
  • Community Sport & Health Officer
  • Customer Service Practitioner
  • Facilities Management Supervisor
  • Personal Trainer
  • Teaching Assistant
  • Team Leader/Supervisor
 

College closes all campuses for a week following ‘major’ cyber attack

A Birmingham college has closed all its campuses to students for a week following a “major” ransomware cyber attack that disabled its core IT systems.

The eight sites of South and City College Birmingham will be shut and revert to online teaching from today while computer forensic specialists work to fix the problem.

The college has said the government and the Information Commissioner’s Office have been informed.

Students only began returning for face-to-face teaching last week following the national lockdown.

A statement posted on the college’s website and its Twitter page on Saturday 13 March calls the incident a “major ransomware attack” – which is where computer systems are encrypted by hackers, who say they will only release them if a ransom is paid.

From today, the college says, “we will revert to online teaching for the rest of the week for all areas.

“We are therefore asking students to access their online lessons from Monday as during the lockdown.

“There may be some disruption during this time and we ask that you bear with us and contact your tutor if there are any problems.”

The college has since confirmed to FE Week the attack on Saturday involved data “on a number of servers and workstations connected to our domain” being encrypted by ransomware, while “a volume of data has been extracted from our servers”.

“We proactively removed a number of systems from our network upon discovering the incident.”

The college is now in the process of investigating the extent of the outbreak and are working to ensure security and restore service “as quickly as possible”.

The college has around 13,000 students, according to its 2019-20 financial statements. It was formed in 2012 by a merger of South Birmingham College and City College Birmingham, and in 2017 took over Bournville College.

Principal Mike Hopkins tweeted about the attack: “As if COVID wasn’t enough, hackers have finally got through our system and taken down all our IT systems – a few weeks getting it all sorted and back up.

“Unfortunately we’ve had to shut the college for a week and revert to online! Staff can still work from home and emails are OK.”

 

ESFA warned about cyber attack

This is the latest in a number of cyber-attacks on colleges, which in August 2019 prompted the Education and Skills Funding Agency to publish advice on how colleges should protect themselves.

This included backing up data, training staff to verify email senders, firewalls, and a series of questions to evaluate “cyber” risk in their organisation.

Eighty per cent of further/higher education institutions identified a cyber security breach or attack in the 12 months prior to the end of 2019, according to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2020.

Cyber criminals hacked into the personal details of past and present staff and students at Swindon College in September 2019, triggering a police investigation.

Officers were also called in that same month by South Staffordshire College after “ethical” hackers maliciously broke into a senior staff member’s email account and sent doctored emails, purporting to be from the principal and using racist language, to staff, local politicians and FE Week itself.

The email account of a teacher at Loreto College in Manchester was also used by hackers in November 2019 to email students about a hoax terror attack.

The Chancellor did broadly the right thing with the Budget – now to delivery

The government will need to be much quicker delivering what it announced in the Budget last week than its record so far, writes Stephen Evans

Times have changed. Last week, we already knew most of the measures in the Budget in advance through Treasury press releases. But in 1947 Hugh Dalton resigned as Chancellor because a newspaper published leaked details of the Budget before it had been announced in the House of Commons!

The result of how we do things in 2021 is that there wasn’t much which was new last week that we didn’t already know about.

However, the Budget did shed light on the approach the government is taking and what the future might hold.

‘Right policies, right scale’

The Budget confirmed that the Plan for Jobs, first published in July 2020, is the government’s main answer to unemployment.

The Office for Budget Responsibility expects unemployment to peak at 6.5 per cent, which is lower than previously expected and testament to the success of the furlough scheme – now extended to September 2021.

However, that still means almost a million more people out of work than before the pandemic. Helping people back to work is going to be a big focus for us all for years to come.

Our research shows it takes three to seven years for employment to recover after recessions. Long-term unemployment is already up by 25 per cent on last year.

Government measures to tackle this include Kickstart (which is funding jobs for six months for young people at risk of unemployment) and Restart (which will help long-term unemployed people back to work).  

As pre-announced, the Budget also gave extra funding for traineeships in 2021-22 and increased incentives for employers to take on apprentices.

From my analysis, the government’s got many of the right policies and of broadly the right scale.

‘Delivery must be quicker’

But the challenge is in delivery. It took seven months to even decide which providers to allocate the extra traineeship money announced in July 2020.

We’ll need to be much quicker than that with the new money announced last week. Young people need help now.

And I worry that we risk having a list of initiatives rather than a coherent offer for young people and adults.

For example, we at the Learning and Work Institute have argued for a Youth Guarantee so every young person is offered a job, training place or apprenticeship.

The other thing to bear in mind is that Kickstart is currently due to close for new entrants in December 2021.

That’s just three months after furlough will end and likely a year before youth long-term unemployment will peak. Surely we’ll see an extension to Kickstart at some point?

‘More investment still needed’

The other key theme of the Budget was about building the economy of the future – looking beyond the pandemic. Here, there was lots of talk of green investment, infrastructure and levelling up.

All fairly sensible, particularly given economic growth has been poor since the last recession. Unless we boost growth and productivity, we won’t have rising prosperity or extra resources for public services.  

Skills drive economic growth, and have much wider benefits for health, wellbeing and citizenship.

The good news is that, after a decade of cuts, there is already new money in the pipeline, including in the form of the National Skills Fund.

But this won’t get us back to 2010 levels of investment at the end of the New Labour government, which weren’t high enough anyway. 

And we need much better joining up, for example, by ringfencing jobs and apprenticeships for young people and unemployed people.

It also means investing in public services such as social care, creating jobs where they’re desperately needed.

That all needs to be underpinned by a long-term investment plan in skills – from basic skills to levels 4 to 5 and beyond.

All told, the Chancellor has done broadly the right things in terms of emergency support, but we need a tighter focus on delivery.

And the ambitions for a future economy are good, but need to be backed by increased spending in learning, skills and retraining.  

All eyes on the autumn spending review to see if it delivers the goods…