Frances Wadsworth is set to be appointed as the interim FE Commissioner, FE Week can reveal.
The former college principal and one of six current deputy FE Commissioners will take over from Richard Atkins at midnight until his permanent successor is in post.
The government said this afternoon that an announcement on the new full-time FE Commissioner will be made “shortly”.
Wadsworth currently sits on the board of Ofqual and has worked in further education for over 20 years.
Her previous roles include principal of Croydon College, as well as principal of East Surrey College.
She became a deputy FE Commissioner in May 2018.
Today is Atkins’ last day as FE Commissioner after more than four years in post. You can read his final interview as commissioner here.
The chief executive of one of the country’s largest college groups has been appointed as the next FE Commissioner.
Shelagh Legrave, who has worked at Chichester College since 2003 and became leader in 2010, will succeed Richard Atkins on a permanent basis from October.
As FE Week revealed yesterday, current deputy FE Commissioner Frances Wadsworth will be in the post on an interim basis from today until Legrave takes the reins.
Legrave is a qualified accountant and currently chairs the Coastal West Sussex Skills & Enterprise Group as well as Bourne Community College and Stonepillow, a homeless charity.
She is also vice chair of the Collab Group and sits on the Chichester Festival Theatre board.
Chichester College has grown into one of England’s largest college groups under her leadership. She has led it through two mergers to achieve an ‘outstanding’ judgement from Ofsted in 2020.
Legrave, who was awarded an OBE in 2015, said it was a “great privilege” to be appointed FE Commissioner, particularly at “this critical time when skills will be vital to rebuilding our economy and communities”.
“As the FE White Paper has set out, colleges will be at the forefront of education and training that will enable social mobility and address the needs of employers,” she added.
“I look forward to supporting the Secretary of State and skills minister to ensure that further education and sixth form colleges across England are in the strongest possible position to change people’s lives for the better.”
‘I look forward to working with Shelagh to support and challenge the sector’
Education secretary Gavin Williamson, who announced the appointment today, said: “I am delighted to appoint Shelagh to this vital role. She is hugely experienced in the sector, with a track record of outstanding success and improvement.
“At this crucial time for the country, an outstanding further education sector will be more important than ever and I look forward to working with Shelagh to support and challenge the sector to be the best it can be.”
The FE Commissioner role was introduced in 2013 as a key adviser to ministers in the Department for Education. The commissioner intervenes in struggling colleges, where visits turn into published reports which assess quality and financial health, as well as the existing governance and leadership.
Its inaugural post holder was Sir David Collins, who was replaced by Atkins in 2016.
The FE Commissioner leads a team of around 18 deputy FE commissioners and FE advisers, made up mainly of former college principals or deputy principals and directors of finance.
The four-day week role will earn Legrave £135,000 per annum. It is a two-year term.
Williamson thanked outgoing FE Commissioner Atkins for his more than four years of service.
“He has made a huge impact in the role, which has developed significantly under his leadership and I wish him all the best in his retirement,” the education secretary added.
Colleges will not be allowed to submit a business case to avoid adult education funding being clawed back, the government has announced.
Sector experts had hoped grant-funded providers would be able to put forward reasons why they should cling on to the money if they did not reach the controversial 90 per cent threshold.
But in an update published this morning, the Education and Skills Funding Agency said there “will not be a business case process,” and the 90 per cent threshold will be “the final position for the 2020/21 academic year and will not be subject to change”.
Association of Colleges deputy chief executive Julian Gravatt said it seems “self-defeating” to have a “blanket line and not consider the context in which colleges got to the point where they under-delivered, especially when it’s evident that it was largely out of their control”.
“This does not help colleges, it does not help the government deliver its commitments, and it does not help our communities and businesses.”
Situation ‘still difficult’ for providers
FE Week exclusively revealed last week the threshold, much less generous than the 68 per cent allowed for 2019/20 allocations, was demanded by the Treasury.
This is after officials successfully argued colleges have had enough time to reorientate provision and run courses online, where needed, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
College leaders, and allegedly senior ESFA officials, were shocked by the decision, with many leaders saying they did not believe they could make the 90 per cent bar.
Leicester College said it forecasts using just 53 per cent of its allocation this year – and would lose more than £4 million to the clawback.
It is forecasting the clawback will set their finances back five years, and principal Verity Hancock said the college has already suffered consequences, having had to back out of a capital funding bid for T Levels. These are qualifications the provider is due to start delivering from September 2021. The bid was worth £6.6 million and would have involved the college match funding £3.8 million, which, Hancock says, “we can no longer afford”.
Leicester College, along with the rest of the city, has been in continual lockdown since March 2020.
So on the ESFA’s decision to rule out business cases, Hancock, a former Skills Funding Agency executive director herself, said she doesn’t “understand the basis for a decision that refuses to recognise the very exceptional position that Leicester College is in, given that it was the worst affected city in the country from continuous lockdowns, and has the largest AEB offer in the country, focused on those furthest from the labour market, who for very, very legitimate reasons have not been able to learn at Leicester College this year.”
Derby College Group has predicted it will use 65 per cent and lose nearly £1.8 million, and called the government’s decision “tremendously disappointing”.
The Association of Colleges has forecast most of its members will deliver between 75 to 85 per cent of their allocations, which would mean a total clawback of between £22 million and £62 million.
The ESFA said, when the threshold was announced, it was a “fair representation of grant-funded providers’ average delivery” in 2020/21.
Though they admit “the situation is still difficult for providers”.
Department hopes to recover money next financial year
Today’s update said the agency is “announcing this change now to help providers better plan their provision for the remainder of the 2020 to 2021 academic year”.
“Our primary aim is to support providers to continue to deliver as much quality provision as possible, including above the 90 per cent threshold.”
This provision can be face-to-face, online, or otherwise remotely, including through subcontracting in the case of AEB-funded provision.
The agency made clear that where providers deliver less than 90 per cent, they will recover the difference between their actual delivery and 90 per cent. For example, delivery of 85 per cent would result in a recovery of 5 per cent of the allocation.
Recovering funding will be scheduled from this December, and the agency will “preferably” recover money in full in the 2021/22 financial year.
It has promised to “work with providers that would like to request a phased recovery plan,” of up to four months.
“Where this would cause financial difficulties, we will consider cases beyond this with your ESFA territorial team.”
Also included in today’s update was confirmation the Covid-19 skills offer will have a 97 per cent threshold for 2020/21 – which is the usual adult education budget threshold.
The ringfenced offer includes funding for the new level 3 entitlement, which is rolling out with the National Skills Fund next month.
A college that has faced dire financial straits in recent years has appointed a qualified accountant as its new permanent principal.
David Alexander, currently vice principal at West College Scotland, has been named the new boss of Gateshead College.
He said the college’s “clear purpose to give students the employment edge is something I’m passionate about.
“And with such strong progress made towards its financial recovery, I’m looking forward to working with the board, colleagues and partners to develop an ambitious plan for the future.”
Forensic auditors were called in and the commissioner, Richard Atkins, set up a structure and prospects appraisal of the college.
Atkins and his team found Gateshead had been in deficit for years, but this had been disguised by a misstatement of certain bills. The college subsequently received more than £5 million in government bailout funding.
Then-principal Judith Doyle, once the highest-paid principal in the country, resigned in January 2020 shortly before the chair, John McCabe.
The college is currently being run by experienced principal Andy Cole on an interim basis. The college’s 2019/20 accounts are yet to be published.
Chair Sarah Stewart said of Alexander’s appointment: “We have a financial recovery plan that is well on track and, having been through a rigorous process which confirmed we will remain a standalone college, I am delighted we now have our new principal to lead us on the next stage of our journey.”
As well as being a chartered accountant, the new principal has held board positions for the Scottish Funding Council, Victim Support Scotland, and the General Teaching Council for Scotland.
The government’s commission on racial disparities has called for a new apprenticeship recruitment campaign “highly-targeted” at young people “facing discrimination or disadvantage”.
A report published today by the commission claimed ethnic minority families have a mixture of “ignorance and prejudice” about apprenticeships.
That contrasts with white families, who show “a mixture of stronger traditions of understanding and respecting the apprenticeship system”.
‘Evident’ race and age disparities in apprenticeships
In their report, the commissioners expressed concern about “evident disparities in the take-up of apprenticeships across age and ethnicity”.
They analysed data which showed young ethnic minority people “are under-represented in the apprenticeship system, including both school leavers and those who take up apprenticeships in their early 20s”.
The commission adds that in London, before the levy was introduced in 2017, those from the black ethnic group were “well represented in apprenticeships overall – however, they were also more likely to be clustered in lower level and lower paid apprenticeships”.
It quotes a survey by Youth Employment UK which earlier this year found that 33 per cent of black respondents had never had apprenticeships discussed with them, compared with 13 per cent of white respondents.
Exclusive analysis published by FE Week in October found that ethnic minority 16- to 18-year-old apprentices made up just 7.7 per cent of starts in the first three-quarters of 2019/20, a finding that sector leaders branded it a “national disgrace”.
The race commission, which was ordered by prime minister Boris Johnson and has been chaired by former schoolteacher Tony Sewell, recommends a new recruitment campaign to tackle this issue.
‘Highly targeted’ recruitment campaign for young apprentices
Its report says the campaign should be designed partly by the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions and delivered through colleges, Jobcentre Plus, and school career hubs.
It would use role models, employer testimonies, and data on potential earnings and progression, and would explore the factors which influence a young person’s career choices.
Tony Sewell
This includes parental engagement, peer influence, access to information, and employer links to students.
The campaign, the commission recommends, would be split into a pilot phase in “left behind” areas of England.
Followed by a national roll-out with a “well-evidenced, highly targeted” campaign, focused on getting young people into jobs in “growth sectors” as part of an apprenticeship.
There should also be “rewards” for providers for “successfully achieving this”.
DfE working to make role models ‘visible’ in campaigns
FE Week has reported over a number of years on the problems around, and the government’s efforts to rectify, the poor representation by ethnic minorities in apprenticeships.
The Department for Education’s public attempts to redress low ethnic minority take-up goes back to when Justine Greening was education secretary under Theresa May.
Greening was accused of being “all talk” after telling the Education Select Committee the government had a “big focus” on encouraging “a higher proportion of BAME [black, Asian and minority ethnic] young people going into apprenticeships”.
This was after FE Week found at the time just eight per cent of England’s young apprentices were BAME.
Since then, the DfE says it has “ensured that young BAME role models are visible in campaigns such as ‘Fire It Up’, and that we are hearing the voices of young apprentices (including BAME) through apprentice networks such as the Young Apprentice Ambassador Network, and the Apprentice Panel”.
And last month, the government has appointed former college lecturer and Grimsby MP Lia Nici as chair of the Apprenticeship Diversity Champions Network.
The Department for Education and Government Equalities Office, which is leading on the report, was approached for comment.
The government’s drive for colleges to focus on helping the economy goes against their “lawful purpose” of meeting the needs of learners, a governance expert has warned.
Fiona Chalk, national head of governance development for The Education and Training Foundation, told an FE Week webcast this morning there is an “inherent tension” between the two goals.
“It is colleges’ lawful purpose to meet the needs of students first and foremost,” Chalk said, and “you could argue that it is not a lawful activity for college corporations to have, as their primary purpose, meeting the needs of employers or indeed the local or national economy.
“Any benefit to employers or the economy has to come as an indirect outcome of corporations’ activity around meeting the needs of its students.”
Chalk, alongside the Association of Colleges’ governance adviser Kurt Hall, and lawyer Mark Taylor from Eversheds Sutherland, was speaking on the fourth chapter of the Skills for Jobs white paper.
The chapter sets out reforms intended to “strengthen” college governance, within the paper’s overall objective of “placing employers at the heart of defining local skills needs”.
Colleges operate as exempt charities, so for instance, do not have to submit accounts to the Charity Commission, but do have to apply to them if they wish to remunerate governors.
Under the white paper’s plans, employer bodies such as Chambers of Commerce are set to head Local Skills Improvement Plans, which will “shape technical skills provision so that it meets local labour market skills needs”.
Chalk, whose employer the ETF is one of government’s most trusted delivery partners in the FE sector, said she expected there to be “some synergies” between helping students and employers, but warned: “There’s a real, inherent tension here.”
A number of chairs, including for colleges focusing on sport, or which are “heavily involved” in creative industries, or which have “huge” adult learning provision have already been in touch with her, she said.
They are worried that “although they may be meeting the needs of their students under charity law, what happens if they’re not sufficiently fulfilling the local skills improvement plans?
“Does that mean they’re going to be under intervention?”
The Department for Education’s director of post-16 strategy Keith Smith confirmed during an FE Week webcast earlier this month an upcoming Skills Bill, based on the white paper, will enable the education secretary to intervene where colleges refuse to deliver courses decided through the plans.
But, Chalk questioned: “Which duty trumps which duty? Which voice in the boardroom is going to be louder, that of students or that of employers?”
She was backed up by Taylor, who said the government “is giving colleges a different mission, so how does that fit with that existing charity and its duties?”
“It’s even more complicated than that though,” he advised, as although governors “have an obligation to further the objects of the college, nobody tells them what those objects are.
“You actually have to look at what the statutory powers of a college are, and guess what their charitable objects are, which isn’t ideal at the moment, but this could make things even more complicated.”
After a challenging year for Colleges and providers, as everyone is now aware the ESFA announced that the Adult Education Budget threshold for colleges has been lowered to 90% rather than the normal threshold of at least 97% of their allocation. The reduction to 68% last year, owing to the impact of Covid-19, led to the expectation for many that a similar threshold might have been set for the current academic year however this was not the case (source FE Week).
Easter is rapidly coming upon us with many staff already on their knees and needing a well deserved break, after what has been an exhausting 12 months for everyone in the sector. For many the thought of having to find the learners and arrange the delivery to reach this threshold creates even more pressure. 4 months left and a mountain to climb is what we are hearing from across the sector.
Every college and provider is likely to be a different position – maybe with the staff to deliver but can’t reach the learners, or learners that can’t or won’t come to a physical location, or a desire to deliver online but without the resources to support, or just not having the capacity needed to deliver the volume of learning required.
The Skills Network work with hundreds of colleges and providers and offer a range of services to support in AEB delivery (as well as support for full time learners, traineeships, apprenticeships and corporate learning). Conversations over the past week have varied significantly depending on the individual circumstances faced.
Yes, we have the capacity to add to our sub-contracted provision, and that is an option, but time is running out to get learners through a programme so decisions need to be made quickly. For some an alternative might be a contract with The Skills Network that crosses over two funding years starting enough learners this year to reach that magical 90% and completing them the following financial year during the summer months. Our success rates are consistently over 90% with amazing learner and employer feedback with a growing number of colleges and providers returning each year as TSN become a core part of their quality offer.
But for many colleges, including those that subcontract, there are a range of services that we can provide to assist in their own delivery and support their own staff in delivering high quality online learning.
Here’s what we can do…
We are able to offer you a tailored package of products and services that are right for your organisation with unlimited advice throughout. Over the past year we have found ourselves in the fortunate position of having the resource, and more importantly the experience of 8 years of online delivery, to deliver ourselves and support others. Many of the challenges our partners have had to face, TSN has had to work through, often painfully, but with the benefit of time to resolve issues and refine the model, and of course not dealing with a pandemic and having to flip the model overnight.
So, what can TSN offer to you?
Learner Management System
EQUAL is a cloud-based, award-winning learning platform that enhances online learning delivery and training management. EQUAL brings together course management features, engaging online experiences and streamlined administration tools to help you achieve your online or blended learning needs. Your learners can access self-paced learning anywhere and at any time, and faculty staff are able to effortlessly track and manage their journeys. There are numerous ways your organisation can benefit from EQUAL, whether it is creating your own training programme, utilising our readily available nationally recognised and accredited qualifications, or implementing the tracking and reporting system as well as a powerful diagnostic tool and other functions. We have put a lot of effort into assuring that learners that use our system have a great experience, and that the evidence is their when Ofsted come a knocking with the Education Inspection Framework under their arm.
Learning Resources
The Skills Network provides high quality learning resources, both paper based and online, in a wide range of subject areas to support the delivery of a range of qualifications. Designed in-house by industry experts, our learning resources are currently being used by over 200 Colleges, numerous private training providers and corporate organisations to assist with the delivery of learning, via our award-winning online learning platform EQUAL.
CPD Short Courses
We have 50 CPD Certified courses available to upskill and enhance your learner’s knowledge.
Tutor Services
Although many colleges have a strong workforce ready to support their learners, some may feel that they need extra support in their delivery. Especially for new programmes such as Warehousing, where the expertise might not be immediately available. We pride ourselves on our innovative delivery model which includes learner support, quality tutor feedback and personal choice of learning method.
Subcontracting Services
We ensure that our learner find in strategic and in line with your organisations aims. If you have a delivery team ready to go and just need us to find learners, we can tailor your package cater for this. Our unique learner find technology means your hardworking staff can focus on that high quality delivery.
Mark Dawe, CEO at The Skills Network:
“Since the announcement, we have been talking to many of our College partners in very open conversations and we completely understand the challenge many of them face reaching even the reduced threshold of 90% just set by the ESFA, given the year we have been through so far. At The Skills Network we work with hundreds of providers and colleges providing learning resources and other services to assist in the online delivery of AEB and other learning and skills, as well as a range of sub-contracting of delivery to students in their local area. As much as this will be a distressing time for some providers, we are here to offer reassurance that we can provide a trusted solution to your funding queries.”
We can provide help and support on how to maximise your budget in efforts to make up that remaining allocation in the final weeks. We are a trusted provider with a unique offer. If you need help or advice on how to support the delivery of your AEB funding or any other aspect of online learning please contact us:
The skills white paper sets the lofty ambition of a “clear, all-age careers system”. Will a former academic be the man to deliver it? Jess Staufenberg reports
In 2013 Michael Gove had something of an outburst in an education select committee hearing. He’d just axed Connexions, the national careers advice service for young people aged 13 to 19, and retorted in the face of criticism there was “a lot of garbage talked about careers”.
Poor career opportunities for students, the then education secretary thundered, “comes down to our failure to ensure that they are literate, numerate and confident in subjects like science – not that we have had an insufficient number of well-paid careers advisers.”
Wind forward to 2021 and it would be tempting to say the government is now eating those words. In the recent Skills for Jobs white paper, the Department for Education admits “there is no single place you can go to get government-backed, comprehensive careers information”, adding the careers landscape can be “confusing, fragmented and unclear”.
It would seem to suggest the National Careers Service, set up by Gove the year he axed Connexions, might not be working as a single source of support as intended, and that perhaps the DfE’s careers strategy, published after much delay in 2017 as an “ambitious plan”, is struggling too.
It’s all something of a vindication for Robert Halfon, the education select committee chair, who has claimed “careers support is still far too fragmented” with a “confused mish-mash of offerings” and “wasteful spending and duplication” of services.
‘Challenges to alignment’
Now the skills paper sets the lofty ambition of a “clear, all-age careers system”. A sentence outlines the main strategy towards this: “We will improve both local and national alignment between The Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) and the National Careers Service (NCS)”.
Set up by Nicky Morgan in 2015, and with a new chief executive Oli de Botton at the helm since February, the CEC deploys volunteer “enterprise advisers” (often local employers) and helps “careers hubs” of schools and colleges support each other. On the other hand, the National Careers Service (NCS) works through subcontractors, who target specific cohorts of adults that worry the government – such as the long-term unemployed – while providing only phone and web services to those aged 13 to 19. Matching the two up sounds a daunting task.
The man appointed to crack it is Professor Sir John Holman, a chemist at the University of York and now an “independent strategic adviser on careers guidance” to Gavin Williamson. Holman himself came up with the eight Gatsby benchmarks for good careers guidance that the Careers & Enterprise Company encourages schools and colleges to meet. But can he do it?
Prof Sir John Holman
“They’re trying to line up two things that are completely separate and different,” says Jan Ellis, the chief executive of the Career Development Institute, a professional body for careers educators. “The Careers & Enterprise Company is an arms-length company of the government, there to help manage careers guidance. The National Careers Service is completely different, it’s a contracted-out organisation. Managing contractors is expensive, so it’s really difficult to say how you would join these up.”
Her words are echoed by Janet Colledge, a careers education consultant on the Quality in Careers Standards Board. “It’s going to be interesting to see how Holman sees the CEC and NCS working together, because until now the NCS has basically been trying to get people into jobs. It has a very limited remit with young people”.
Holman does give some hints as to what might be in store, expanding on the white paper’s mysterious claim that the DfE has developed “four principles for increasing alignment”. FE Week can reveal these are completing the national rollout of the careers infrastructure; developing an enhanced national careers service website; better collaboration at an area level; and complementary personal guidance for young people.
His first hint relates to the almost 50 career hubs in the country, which are meant to share best practice and develop local careers strategy. About half of FE colleges (155) and 45 per cent of secondary schools (2,090) are in a careers hub, according to the CEC. “The NCS has area contractors, and the CEC has a growing network of careers hubs, and I’m quite sure we can look at how we can get collaboration happening systematically between those two,” Holman says. It’s not absolutely clear what this means, but it looks like career hub leads in schools and colleges might play a part in linking up with the National Careers Service.
Data should also be shared, he says. “Labour market information, which is all those statistics about different jobs, vacancy rates, opportunities – if we could use that consistently across the two organisations, that would be a big win.” It sounds sensible, but can the DfE easily gather that data from its NCS subcontractors?
When FE Week asked the DfE for the numbers of young people who use the NCS each year, it responded that such information was not published and was not something the department could easily access or provide. More worryingly, the same response was given when asked how much funding the NCS has had since it was formed. Aligning data across both bodies sounds an easier task than finding it in the first place.
If you’re starting off, you really need that one-to-one support
Holman would also like a “single source of government-assured information used consistently across schools and colleges […] so schools, colleges and the NCS are all speaking the same language”. If the NCS website proves highly inspiring to students, that sounds sensible too. Given there’s no available data on whether young people find it useful or not, it might be a good idea to get feedback on its design first. A schools expert has previously called the site “as dull as dishwater”. It has to be said, the civil service-format homepage isn’t exactly engaging.
But as Halfon says, it’s a start. “This is a step forward and it’s a pretty big nod.” Yet he adds that “we need to radically reform careers advice”. He’s with the experts on that.
‘Lack of personal, professional advice’
Olly Newton, the executive director at the education research charity the Edge Foundation, similarly welcomes the “alignment”, but is clear the current ambition is too limited. “My worry about the connection between the services is making sure it focuses enough on face-to-face guidance. Lots of evidence suggests that telephones, the internet and self-help are OK for adults changing jobs. But if you’re starting off or thinking about a future career, you really need that one-to-one support”.
Here we arrive back at Gove’s original distaste for careers advisers. Deirdre Hughes, a careers policy adviser, points out that although Gatsby benchmark 8 says schools and colleges must make sure every student has “guidance interviews with a qualified careers adviser”, they have to buy this in themselves as qualified careers professionals have not been funded for schools since 2012. One helpful alignment would be for the NCS to offer its qualified advisers to students via schools and colleges, she says. At present “the model is to expect teachers to do more”.
Deirdre Hughes
It all puts the DfE under pressure to deliver. Worrying statistics are lining up: this week a survey of 10,000 primary school pupils by Education and Employers, a UK-based charity that “connects volunteers from the world of work with schools”, found the career aspirations of seven year-olds were “relatively unchanged” by age 18. UCAS has similarly found that 20 per cent of students said they couldn’t take the course that interested them because they didn’t have the relevant A-levels.
Clare Marchant, the chief executive at UCAS, says “the more we can do, earlier on, the better”, including year 6. Yet primary schools, and special needs schools and colleges, are not mentioned in the white paper.
All the while, select committees will keep their eagle eyes on the funding spent on the current model: £29 million for CEC last year, up from £19 million the year before (despite Morgan pledging it would be self-funding long term) and undisclosed sums on the NCS. It’s less than the £230 million spent on Connexions, Hughes says, but it’s creeping up – while funded, professional careers advisers in schools and colleges remain nowhere in sight.
In a last sentence, the skills white paper almost seems to guess a more wholescale approach might be needed. The “alignment” will take place over the next 18 months, it says – “as we work towards a longer-term review of the delivery system”. Will that “insufficient number of well-paid careers advisers” come to matter after all?
Ofqual VTQ consultation – what does this mean for the future of assessment?
Stewart Foster, Chief Operating Officer and Responsible Officer at NCFE
The past 12 months have certainly brought about their fair share of challenges, and from an education point of view, especially as an awarding organisation, the challenge of how to adapt teaching and assessment has been the biggest by far.
Education firmly in the spotlight
Earlier in the year, Oqual launched a consultation on alternative arrangements for assessing and awarding vocational and technical qualifications (VTQs) which received a staggering number of responses. The volume of interest in the consultation drives home the importance of getting the assessment model right, both for this academic year and for years to come. People are realising the economic and societal impact of the pandemic and the huge part that education will play in building back our economy and closing vital skills gaps.
In anticipating the outcomes of the consultation, we knew how incredibly important it was to ensure that we were ready for whichever scenario unfolded. Having the knowledge of how quickly the sector had to adapt last year gave us insight into how both centres and learners needed to be guided through the process. Centres look to us to provide the support and guidance they need to get through times such as these so being ready to implement the changes to assessment models was incredibly important, and communicating those changes and adaptations as clearly as possible to our customers was and is paramount.
Embracing change and collaborative working
The changes which have been brought about by the pandemic have meant that as a sector, we’ve had to work together more than ever. We’ve been working with sector bodies, awarding organisations, centres, employers and government to ensure that our offer is aligned and the validity and robustness of assessment is at the forefront of all decision-making. It’s been a time of unification and collaboration that we should embrace and continue to nurture.
What we now need to look at is how learners progress through not only this year but also the years to come, having missed out on significant milestones and experiences. There will not only be motivational and engagement barriers to learning, but also significant mental health issues that we cannot afford to overlook. As a sector, and as a society, we need to do all we can to support our young people in emerging from what has been an incredibly unsettling and stressful year for so many.
Using technology to transform teaching and assessment
One significant leap forward in the sector is the amount we have had to embrace and embed technology as part of teaching and assessment. The flexibility of things like remote invigilation and online learning have revolutionised how we operate and provided a whole new way of working with learners and teachers. This is something that we need to further develop, keeping assessment aligned with technological advancements to create more streamlined and agile processes. More flexibility with assessment also means more inclusivity, ensuring that learners can undertake their assessments where and when they’re ready.
VTQs are practical for a reason
Assessing VTQs is completely different from assessing traditional academic subjects. In adapting assessment practices, we need to ensure not only that knowledge is assessed, but that capability to undertake the practical skills required for the job/field of work are accurately observed, especially when a learner is preparing for a role where they would handle or be responsible for tasks where safety is at stake. Standards for VTQs are very closely linked to jobs and real-life experience so the assessment also needs to reflect this.
Final thoughts
I think we need to take a long hard look at how we work to shape the system moving forward; it’s clear that we need to appreciate the scale of this and change can’t happen overnight but we have proved that we can make huge strides when we work together. It’s up to us to keep this momentum going.
Ultimately what we want and need for the future of education is a system built on success and progression, and that is fundamentally what we are trying to achieve.
For more information on NCFE’s response to the alternative arrangements for awarding in 2020-21, please visit our Covid response hub.
