Daf Williams, just hours after a shock resignation from the position of chair to the board of Hull College Group, has denied there has been a failure of governance and instead accused the government regulators of failing to do their jobs.
Read the statement from Williams, sent to FE Week, in full:
“I am very sad to be leaving a role that I have thoroughly enjoyed. Hull College has some amazing people and I am very glad to have been involved. I joined the Board as Chair two years ago, with the College already two years into intervention by the FE Commissioner taking on the challenge as a volunteer to try to help turn around the College’s fortunes. I have since then put in countless hours for free, working alongside many other volunteers on the governing body, all committed to give our time to try to make a difference.
“Sadly balancing a busy working life and these commitments have proved too much.
“I am aware of the criticism of governance at the college. I believe Hull College has a very strong governing body which has been improved greatly in recent months, but whilst I do not accept there is a failure of governance it is clear that I have been chair for two years and improvement has not been at the pace we would have hoped in that time.
“I have a strong view that if the charge that we have failed as governors is to stick, then there is also a failure on the part of our regulators. They have had all of the same information as we have had over the last four years of intervention and if we have missed things not being done correctly then so have they. Whilst we as governors are all enthusiastic amateurs volunteering our time to try to help, they are specialist professionals from the sector, paid to spot these matters, which sadly they have not.
“As a former council leader, I have a good understanding of how intervention works in local government, where officials are embedded in the organisation they are seeking to turn around and where they genuinely work collaboratively to try to fix the problem. Sadly that does not seem to be the approach from the FE Commissioner team, where intervention is really just a form of regular inspection, making occasional visits to observe and make recommendations, then leaving for you to fend for yourself. I do hope in the future, the process for intervention is reformed, to offer more support for volunteer governors, to help them to get it right.”
Picture: Daf Williams at a Hull College Group graduation ceremony in October 2019
The chair of the troubled Hull College Group has resigned.
Daf Williams (pictured) has left the post just hours after FE Week revealed the college’s new interim chief executive had launched an investigation into a £240,000 rugby stadium naming deal.
The FE Commissioner was set to go into the college today as his intervention continues.
The college has seen a number of changes in recent times with new governors joining the board and four interim bosses since the last permanent chief executive left in 2019.
A statement from the college said: “This new era for the college is a good time for the current chair of the board (Daf Williams) to hand over the reins.
“Daf has worked tirelessly giving his time voluntarily to the role of chair during the last two years but the current pandemic pressures mean that finding the elusive balance of his professional and voluntary role as chair has proved increasingly difficult to achieve.”
Current interim chief executive Lowell Williams added: “On behalf of the college and the board our sincere thanks to Daf, I have only worked with Daf for a month, but rarely have I met such a committed individual to the success of the college and wider city of Hull.
“I know that Daf will continue to play a huge role in his professional capacity in the future of Hull and the Humber.”
Daf Williams has been chair of Hull College Group since December 2018. His day job is the head of policy, communications and economic development at the Associated British Ports (ABP) in the Humber.
He is a former leader of City of York Council with other political experience having previously worked for MPs and ministers in Whitehall.
Prior to joining ABP, Daf Williams was head of corporate affairs for Yorkshire Water.
The government has finally published its consultation revealing the plan to replace GCSE and A-level exams this year. In some quarters it has done little to quell the fear that we’re heading for another fiasco – but this time, with teachers left to cop the blame. FE Week investigates …
Move over mutant algorithm, we have a new scapegoat…
A key concern is that teachers are being primed to be the fall guy – in place of the so-called “mutant” algorithm which politicians blamed for last year’s fiasco.
Teachers will be tasked with coming up with a grade for each student based on evidence that includes coursework, potentially mandatory mini-exams.
While teachers have been promised support and guidance from exam boards, there are big concerns about how any sort of consistency across grades can be ensured.
There is also anger that this plan B hadn’t been enacted earlier in the year, rather than cobbled together this month.
Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary at the National Education Union, said collecting evidence across the country will prove “much harder now” than if schools and colleges had been supported to do it from the start of the academic year.
Simon Lebus
Ofqual’s interim chief regulator, Simon Lebus, admitted teachers have a “heavier responsibility” under the plan.
He said the quality assurance arrangements – whereby exam boards sample the approaches and grades set by schools and colleges – alongside support from the boards would be “so important” to help teachers in “what is undoubtedly quite a burdensome task”.
But Dame Alison Peacock, chief executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, said the risk is that “hardworking teaching profession is fed to the lions”.
‘Pandora’s box’ of appeals
Students can appeal to their school or college, but grades would only be changed if the original judgment was “not legitimate”.
The appeal should be considered by a “competent” person not involved in the assessment, which could include someone from another school or college.
If a student is still not happy, they can appeal to exam boards – but only if the school or college has “not acted in line with the exam board’s procedural requirements”, not to challenge the merits of the teacher assessment.
Mary Curnock-Cook
Mary Curnock Cook, former chief executive of university admissions service UCAS, said the “sheer volume of appeals might overwhelm the system.”
Tom Middlehurst, curriculum and inspection specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said it could put schools and colleges in an “extremely difficult situation” of having to organise an appeals system against “the grades they awarded, when common sense would suggest that this should be done by another body”.
Bousted said a “pandora’s box of appeals” could cause “great anguish and workload for seemingly very little benefit”, but suggested exam boards could instead run the process.
Lebus himself, in an interview with FE Week’s sister paper FE Week, admitted there are concerns over the extra workload, adding an “adversarial appeals process” would put schools and colleges in an “invidious position because it can be corrosive of trust and good relations”.
Meanwhile professor Barnaby Lenon, dean of education at the University of Buckingham, who sits on Ofqual’s standards advisory group, warned the timescales to achieve all this are too tight.
Ofqual is proposing to bring results day forward, possibly to early July, so that appeals could be submitted immediately.
‘Huge task for exams boards’
Under the proposals, exam boards would set papers for students, marked by teachers, to feed into the grading process. Ofqual is mulling over whether to make them compulsory, too.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of ASCL, said the papers would need to be “exceptionally well designed”, adding: “All of this adds up to a huge and complex task for the exam boards.”
The consultation suggested a combination of questions from past papers and new questions could be used.
Past papers have their advantages because exam boards already have the data on how children performed, to use as a comparison to how children perform this year. But they are complete papers and may not evenly cover all the topics students have studied.
It is also understood that the Joint Council for Qualifications has set up a working group to find commonalities between the exam boards to help create guidance.
But Middlehurst highlighted a conflicting issue in the plans. “On one hand, having common assessments would ensure greater consistency in how grades are awarded,” he said. “But on the other hand, it may be more difficult to take into account the differing extents to which students have lost out on learning during the pandemic.”
Lebus reckons the more frequently mini-exams are taken the “easier, I think, the task becomes of ensuring fairness across the piece and that students are being held to a consistent standard whatever school or college they are studying in”.
What about learning loss?
There has been little news on who will make up the DfE expert group, announced before Christmas, to help come up with plans on differential learning loss.
Sam Freedman, a former government advisor, said Ofqual has acknowledged a key reason exams had to be cancelled was the “huge and differential loss of learning suffered over the course of the past year”.
In last year’s centre-assessed grades, teachers were asked to come up with a grade they thought a student would have achieved had they sat their exams.
All of this adds up to a huge and complex task for the exam boards
This year, Ofqual wants the grade to be based on the teachers’ assessment of how they are performing now.
But Freedman sums it up like this: “In other words, it’s not possible to assess the course but the only way of providing a grade is to assess the course.”
Instead, Freedman says the government should – for A-level students – work with universities to ensure that offers are not conditional on precise grades, “but are much more flexible”.
Universities UK said universities will be actively considering any additional support needed for students to transition, with some universities already announcing they were going to lower A-level requirements.
On the issue of fairness, Lebus said exam boards would be key in providing quality assurance. He also signalled that the ambition is to keep outcomes broadly in line with 2020 and confirmed a final plan announced in the week of February 22.
Toni Rhodes, Principal, Sunderland College and Hartlepool Sixth Form
Start date: July 2021
Previous job: Vice principal of quality and access to learning, Barnsley College
Interesting fact: She has a background in social care.
Jon Collins, Chief executive, Prisoners’ Education Trust
Start date: April 2021
Previous job: Chief executive, Magistrates Association
Interesting fact: He lived in San Francisco for six months after university, where he volunteered for Project Open Hand, a food bank providing support to people with HIV/AIDS.
Paul Kennedy, Chair, WELL Training
Start date: November 2020
Concurrent job: Co-founder, Mood
Interesting fact: As group HR director for online travel company ebookers, he once visited five countries in a single day: the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria.
Nigel Duncan OBE, Deputy FE Commissioner, Department for Education
Start date: January 2021
Previous job: Further Education Adviser, Further Education Commissioner’s Office
Interesting fact: He has traced his family back to 1472 at the time of Edward IV and the Wars of the Roses
The new interim chief executive at Hull College Group has launched an investigation after FE Week revealed the organisation had signed a £240,000 three-year rugby stadium naming sponsorship deal.
The rugby club stadium was renamed Hull College Craven Park at a widely publicised ceremony in August 2019.
Lowell Williams, who recently joined the college as the fourth interim chief executive, has told FE Week there “may have been a breach of the college’s financial regulations when senior management at the time entered into the contract”.
Quizzed on whether the sizable deal was signed without the college chair and other board members knowing, as well as whether any spending rules had been broken, Williams said: “My view is that a contract of £240,000 plus VAT did indeed require board approval. I have asked for a legal opinion on this matter.
“There is no record of management bringing to the attention of the board the full value of the contract.”
Hull College Group is supposed to be carefully watched by the government as part of a formal FE Commissioner ‘intervention’ process following a well-reported £50 million bailout in 2018.
Government ‘fresh start’ budgets are meant to be carefully scrutinised and an observer from the Education and Skills Funding Agency attends board meetings. Several board meetings at Hull College have also be attended by the deputy FE Commissioner.
The college marketing budget has been a concern for the government since FE Week first revealed in October 2019 that thousands was spent by the husband of the then-chief executive of the college to hire the 80-piece Hull Philharmonic Orchestra to play computer-game music at the Hull City Hall in June 2019.
The FE Commissioner undertook an “analysis of marketing expenditure” in November 2019 and found more than £1 million was spent in a single year.
The draft report leaked to FE Week said: “2018/19 actual marketing expenditure was £1.077 million compared with a budget of £0.938 million.”
The final report published nearly a year later in October 2020 omitted the expenditure figures and this week the government declined to comment on when they were made aware of the Hull Kingston Rovers contract or value.
Williams said: “The contract with Hull Kingston Rovers was listed in a paper on college’s global marketing spend in a paper to the board on 18 December 2019 [four months after it was signed], but only at its in-year value without VAT with no reference to the three years.
“The paper was then deferred at the meeting and was considered at the following meeting on 29th January 2020.”
In addition, Williams admitted he was “concerned senior managers at the time did not make best use of legal advice they had obtained when negotiating the contract”, adding that “the college welcomes our educational partnership with HKR but I would not have recommended to the corporation entering into a contract of this value and nature in July 2019, if I had been in post.”
Hull Kingston Rovers declined to comment on all questions put to them concerning the stadium naming and educational partnership with Hull College Group.
It is understood that the FE Commissioner and his team is due into the college tomorrow (22 January).
When asked what action the FE Commissioner would take the DfE spokesperson said: “The ESFA and FE Commissioner’s team continue to work with Hull College through the formal intervention process.
“As an independent body the college has responsibility to decide how its marketing budget is spent. The department is clear that college leaders must treat taxpayers’ money in a way that benefits their students and represents value for money.”
In an email to all staff on Tuesday afternoon, seen by FE Week, Williams said the vice principal for learner experience and business development, who had worked at the college for two years and is responsible for the marketing department, had resigned to take up a job at Hull Kingston Rovers.
The lack of a long-term funding settlement for FE did not hamper the Department for Education’s white paper in terms of its boldness or scale of investment, the skills minister has said.
Speaking to FE Week following the launch of the white paper on Thursday, Gillian Keegan insisted there is an “awful lot to do” with the reforms put forward and an “awful lot to prove” and she wouldn’t “necessarily” want anything more to deliver.
In the Q&A she tackled questions about whether the Treasury’s switch from a multi-year to a one-year spending review had put a stop to “revolutionary” reforms and greater funding, as sector leaders have suggested. And she gave her opinion on why this attempt at embedding employers at the heart of FE will succeed where many past attempts had failed.
Q: Did the lack of a three-year spending-review hamper the white paper in terms of speed of reform and/or boldness?
A: “No, it didn’t. We have also had this focus on a need to recover as a result of coronavirus. There is a big recognition that skills are a key part to drive that recovery.
“Obviously having a three-year settlement is great because it gives visibility, it gives that long-term money, but a lot of the things we wanted to do we have either already been working on, such as T Levels, Institutes of Technology, the capital investment etc, but I think even if you look at what we have implemented and what we’re going to implement this year, such as the level 3 entitlement, the basic digital skills, the bootcamps, we have got the money to get going with all of those things.
“We have got a lot of things we need to do.”
Q: So even if there was a longer-term funding settlement for FE, the white paper wouldn’t have seen any further new policies or investment?
A: “The fact is, I don’t know. But I do know that trying to deliver a flexible, more modular approach with the lifelong loan entitlement, a level 3 entitlement, bootcamps, Institutes of Technology and T Levels, that is a massive programme in itself.
“To set ourselves the objective of closing the skills gap and deliver to business what they need, I can’t think of anything more ambitious, to be honest. I don’t know what else I would add to that.
“The reality is, we have got an awful lot to do and an awful lot to prove.
“The most important thing for me is to be able to deliver some of this stuff and prove we are capable of stepping up to this massive challenge.
“I feel there is a lot to deliver. Would I want more to deliver? Not necessarily. Sometimes there is a case of, well, if you argue for more stuff but you can’t spend it because you can’t actually deliver it, well, then that doesn’t always end well.
“I feel we have got the right type of investment to invest in some of the priorities, and I don’t see that holding us back at all.”
Q: In your opinion, what is the biggest new reform in the white paper that will affect the sector?
A: “I think it’s really embedding employers at the heart of the system. But it’s more than that, it’s turning those words into actions and I think what’s different is the fact that we’ve already started to build our confidence in this area with the apprenticeship standards and the work we’ve done with about 3,000 employers across the country and the development of T Levels which we’ve done with 250 leading employers.
“That has given us confidence to really embed the employers into our qualifications and our standards. And when you do that, we make sure that what people are studying is what employers want, which is what’s going to get them a job. It is that big a difference.”
Q: Why will this latest attempt to place employers at the centre of the FE system work where so many previous attempts have failed; and will a one-off £65 million strategic development fund make for lasting improvements?
A: “That’s a good question and it is the one we should always ask ourselves. The first thing I would say… I haven’t worked in the sector for a long time but I haven’t seen qualifications built with the DfE, the sector and with employers collaboratively before. I think certainly on the ones I’ve done, the employers were not at the heart of building those qualifications and making sure that they set out what were the knowledge, skills, behaviours and qualifications, and what they needed to do for the 21st-century work environment.
“We’ve got more in college estates, we’ve got more in strategic development, we’ve got business centres, we’ve got additional capital coming forward, and we’ve got the level 3 entitlement, obviously.
“I mean, some of it has been announced before. I don’t know why people get so obsessed about it being announced before ̶ it’s all part of the same strategy, some of which we’ve been working on to be able to start to get people ready to deliver it. But it’s all part of the same strategy, which is closing the skills gap, where we put employers at the centre of our qualifications and working with FE colleges and local skills improvement plans to basically make sure that we bring the system together to deliver it.
“I think the other thing that’s different now is timing. Timing is everything in being able to implement successfully. And what you’ve got now is employers need to grow, you know, they’ve got skills gaps, the skills gaps are global, with a lot of competition for talent. We’ve also had Covid and there’s going to be a recovery. Skills are going to have to power that. We’ve got Brexit. We will come together at a time when we have proven to ourselves that we can successfully implement employers into qualifications and into apprenticeship standards. Having all those together is what makes it different this time.”
Q: The white paper has been a year in the making and builds on various ongoing reform programmes. How would you rate the job that Keith Smith, your director of post-16 strategy who led on the white paper, has done?
A: “Fantastic. He has been involved for less than one year and he was dealing with the apprenticeship reforms before.
“There is an awful lot of work that has been done. To be able to land something that has been so universally welcomed as good news is fantastic. It was a relatively small team who have been working very hard to get this to the point that it is at. I think they have done an absolutely brilliant job.”
The FE white paper included more than 30 proposals but the majority repeat or build on current reforms rather than announcing radically new ones. In this handy explainer FE Week explores the most significant and newest plans.
1: Create ‘Local Skills Improvement Plans’ and college business centres
To ensure technical skills provision is “responsive to local labour market needs”, the Department for Education will pilot “new Local Skills Improvement Plans” created by employers, colleges and training providers in trailblazer local areas in early 2021.
They will be led by accredited Chambers of Commerce and will see employers setting out a “credibly articulated and evidence-based assessment of skills needs to which providers will be empowered to respond”. It is the DfE’s “intention” to legislate to put the employer leadership of Local Skills Improvement Plans on a “statutory footing”.
A £65 million Strategic Development Fund will be launched in 2021/22 to aid the plans and support providers to “reshape their provision to address local priorities that have been agreed with local employers”.
Proposals will be invited through the Strategic Development Fund to establish “College Business Centres” within FE colleges, which will offer capital and revenue funding to help colleges “respond to locally agreed priorities”.
2: New intervention ‘powers’
The DfE says it will introduce new powers for the education secretary, so the government can “intervene quickly and decisively in cases where there are persistent problems that cannot otherwise be addressed, either with colleges not delivering effectively or where local providers are unable to deliver the skills priorities for that area”.
Through legislation, this strengthened power would enable the education secretary to “intervene locally to close or set up college corporations, bring about changes to membership or composition of governing bodies or review leadership”.
Use of these powers is “envisaged only as a last resort, where agreement has not been possible through other means and there are no alternative options for resolution”.
3: Strengthened governance
The DfE plans to set out clearer expectations, requirements and support for governors to “empower weaker colleges” to address problems earlier.
This will include refreshing existing guidance on appointments to communicate a clear government position on what constitutes good leadership, and make it clear that an “independent person” should be included on college leader interview panels to ensure “objectivity and due diligence”.
There will also be new requirements for annual board self-assessment and regular external governance reviews, as well as consideration of the possibilities for enabling board chairs to be paid in “specific circumstances” within the confines of charity law.
4: Potential switch to outcomes-based funding
The government plans to reform the funding and accountability systems to “better support” providers by simplifying funding streams and giving providers more autonomy, such as by relaxing ringfences and reporting.
But the DfE will move to hold providers to account for the “outcomes that colleges are delivering to improve progression and respond to employer demand”.
The DfE will consult on how they can “best assess” the performance of providers, building on the “new progression performance metrics being introduced and considering effectiveness of employer engagement, quality of provision and the outcomes achieved, such as how well provision supports individuals to progress in their learning and secure good labour market outcomes”.
By taking an outcome-focused approach, the department says providers will be “incentivised to review their provision to ensure it leads to meaningful employment for their learners, scaling back where there is an oversupply of provision and expanding other areas in line with agreed Local Skills Improvement Plans priorities”.
5: Multi-year funding to be considered
The DfE says it wants to “give more certainty to providers” over their funding, including considering how they could “move to a multi-year funding regime which is more forward-looking”.
The idea would be subject to the government’s spending review cycle, the white paper says, and does not give a timeframe of when this could be introduced.
6: Implement the flexible lifelong loan entitlement from 2025
As part of the previously announced lifetime skills guarantee, which is enshrined in the white paper, the government plans to launch a lifelong loan entitlement.
The DfE describes this as “new transformative funding provision”, enabling people to access four years’ worth of student loan funding across further and higher education providers throughout their lifetime.
Details of this new policy will be consulted on in 2021, but it will not be rolled out until at least after the next general election.
7: Central role for employers to design technical courses
The white paper pledges to give employers a “central role” in designing “almost all” technical courses by 2030, to “ensure that the education and training people receive is directly linked to the skills needed for real jobs”.
This will include aligning the “substantial majority” of post-16 level 4 and 5 qualifications to employer-led standards set by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, as is the case for apprenticeships.
8: New national teacher recruitment campaign
“Significant new investment” to improve the FE workforce will be provided in 2021/22.
This will include a “nationwide recruitment campaign to get more talented individuals to teach in further education and investing in high-quality professional development including a new Workforce Industry Exchange Programme”.
The campaign, expected to be launched this year, would “reach millions of prospective teaching staff, targeting those with experience and skills in industry, who can train the next generation of technical experts”.
The campaign would direct potential teachers to a new ‘Teach in Further Education’ platform, which, alongside a dedicated telephone helpline, will give potential applicants “all they need to take the next step into teaching, with information on how to access relevant training, for example the Taking Teaching Further programme, and financial incentives such as training bursaries”.
It will also signpost current vacancies and help existing teachers and lecturers find professional development opportunities.
“New powers” for the education secretary to intervene in colleges and plans for funding reform have been revealed today as the much-anticipated FE white paper is published.
While the Department for Education has claimed the plans are “revolutionary”, sector leaders say that it “falls a bit short” of this ambition as it mostly builds on existing aspects of the sector.
FE Week understands the Treasury put a stop to transformational changes owing to its switch from a multi-year to a one-year spending review in 2020.
The white paper’s reforms (see list below), released to the press ahead of publication, include a greater role for employer groups, such as Chambers of Commerce as previously reported by FE Week, in developing courses on offer, new college “business centres”, and further details on a new lifelong loan entitlement, which will not kick in until after the next general election, as part of the prime minister’s lifetime skills guarantee.
The white paper also sets out plans to “overhaul” the funding and accountability rules for the post-16 sector, which will be consulted on later this year. The DfE was already planning to run a consultation for its new £2.5 billion National Skills Fund in the spring.
As part of the reforms the DfE says it will “introduce new powers to intervene when colleges are failing to deliver good outcomes for the communities they serve”.
The DfE has long-running concerns that there are colleges and areas across England with “persistent weaknesses” that they do not have the power to resolve until it is too late.
This can result in costly intervention measures, such as hefty bailouts and even insolvency as the sector saw with the Hadlow College Group which involved tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer money.
The DfE told FE Week the new powers to be drawn up will enable preventative action to be taken, ahead of failure, or “where there is an area-based failure rather than simply that of an individual college”.
“This represents an improvement on existing statutory powers which only apply when the failure has already occurred, and cannot be used in a preventative capacity, or where the problem is a collective weakness, not just the failure of an individual institution,” a spokesperson said.
Longer periods of “active support” post-intervention will also be implemented, as will more regular dialogue about emerging risks to help prevent failures.
The white paper also sets out plans for colleges and training providers to be “accountable for the outcomes they achieve with funding to ensure value for money for the taxpayer”.
Skills minister Gillian Keegan hinted that a move to an outcomes-based funding model was on the cards in September when she told an Association of Employment and Learning Providers conference that the FE sector should judge the quality of their training programmes on the jobs that learners end up in.
The white paper sets out plans for the currently complex FE funding system to be simplified and streamlined, relaxing ringfences and reporting, strengthening governance and subcontracting, and will consider a move to a multi-year funding regime.
Tom Bewick, chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, “cautiously” welcomed the white paper, saying it is “perhaps not quite as comprehensive as it could have been in terms of covering the range of transformational reforms of post-compulsory tertiary education that the [Augar] review panel envisaged”.
“Overall, what has been announced today is very much a restatement of what has already been agreed — a useful ‘work in progress’,” he added.
“We look forward to the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review for the more ‘revolutionary’ aspects of what was promised previously.”
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said the white paper is an “ambitious package of measures which can deliver a significant shift in how we support the lifelong education”.
He added that the reforms “build on what colleges already do well so it’s not about taking a wrecking ball to existing infrastructure or making colleges start from scratch, but investing in them to play a bigger part in supporting local businesses and local communities”.
Association of Employment and Learning Providers managing director Jane Hickie added that strengthened accountability for provider performance is “supported but we have been here a few times before.
“We hope that real teeth are evident from now in tackling poor quality and that a good track record of delivery is properly recognised in future contract awards, whether the funding system is local or national.”
The key measures in the white paper, in the words of the DfE, include:
. Business groups, including Chambers of Commerce, working alongside colleges to develop tailored skills plans to meet local training needs; supported by a £65 million Strategic Development Fund to put the plans into action and establish new College Business Centres to drive innovation and enhanced collaboration with employers.
. Giving employers a central role in designing almost all technical courses by 2030, to ensure that the education and training people receive is directly linked to the skills needed for real jobs.
. Boosting the quality and uptake of Higher Technical Qualifications – that provide the skills that many employers say they need and that can lead to higher wages – by introducing newly approved qualifications from September 2022 supported by a government-backed brand and quality mark.
. Changing the law so that from 2025 people can access flexible student finance so they can train and retrain throughout their lives, supported by funding in 21/22 to test ways to boost access to more modular and flexible learning.
. Launching a nationwide recruitment campaign to get more talented individuals to teach in further education and investing in high quality professional development including a new Workforce Industry Exchange Programme.
. Overhauling the funding and accountability rules, so funding is better targeted at supporting high quality education and training that meets the needs of employers; and introducing new powers to intervene when colleges are failing to deliver good outcomes for the communities they serve.
Verdict on the White Paper? Fine start but requires improvement, writes Stephen Evans
“We must put employers’ needs for skills centre stage. We must make colleges and training providers more responsive to employers’ and learners’ needs, reaching out to more businesses and more people, and providing training in ways that suit them.
“Creating a truly demand-led approach means reforming qualifications, reforming the way we fund colleges, and reforming the way we deliver training.”
It’s difficult to argue with this quote from the White Paper. Unfortunately, it’s from the 2003 Skills White Paper.
Will this latest publication be the moment we look back on as when we finally “cracked it”?
Short answer: only with investment, more radical change, and sustained commitment.
The good
Perhaps the White Paper’s main contributions are to put further education centre stage, which matters after the last decade, and to provide helpful hooks for future change.
For example, I welcome plans to focus more on the outcomes of learning. We’ve long argued for that and worked with the Greater London Authority on it, though the details will be key.
The intention to look at multi-year funding is great too and, while there’s a balance between simplicity and targeting support, it would be good to simplify the current complex funding and accountability arrangements.
The Lifetime Skills Guarantee, focus on apprenticeships, and commitment to increase investment, while already announced, are also really welcome – there’s more to do, but it’s great to be talking about how to invest rather than what to cut.
A point, though, about language. When I worked in government, I was advised not to describe reforms as “radical”, as discussion of this White Paper often has: people would notice if they were, otherwise you’d be over selling.
No White Paper can solve everything, so it’s important the government doesn’t over claim its impact: better to argue there’s a big plan, moving in the right direction.
Missing or more needed
This White Paper aims to align provision with local economic need and deliver better outcomes.
But how will the new Local Skills Improvement Plans, to be agreed by colleges, employers and others, fit with devolution in parts of England?
What traction will these plans have? Isn’t this what Skills Advisory Panels were meant to do?
Similarly, the White Paper would have benefited from more recognition of the wider benefits of learning (health, citizenship etc) and breadth of provision.
And while there’s lots of talk of employer leadership, I can’t see very much about how we raise their demand for and investment in skills.
Now here are four areas where the White Paper must go further:
Investment
We need substantial and sustained investment after a decade of cuts that have left millions fewer adults taking part in learning. There’s little new money here, so let’s hope the government is working on a long-term funding settlement for the next spending review.
Basic skills
Nine million adults have low literacy or numeracy, but participation in learning has plummeted. More than 20 years on from the Moser Report, which drove a significant focus on this challenge, it’s disappointing not to see greater ambition.
Retraining
The Lifetime Skills Guarantee is great, but its focused on a first level 3, so we need more help for those needing a level 2 or to retrain at level 3, as well as with maintenance costs. With longer working lives and a changing economy we need to be think bigger.
Joining up
How will we align skills with employment support, like Kickstart and Restart? What about local government. There is little mentioned apart from Mayoral Combined Authorities, for instance.
Verdict
It’s great the White Paper puts further education centre stage – there’s lots of positives already in train to shout about, and some interesting new ideas.
But to avoid becoming another footnote in the history of skills policy, we’ll need long-term funding and commitment to more radical action.
Perhaps not a giant leap, but hopefully several steps in the right direction.
