We have arrived at the ‘third revolution’ for FE marketing – but colleges will have to make some serious changes, says Lee Parker

With government taking a detailed look at the role and function of FE and with the Covid crisis reshaping our world in every conceivable way, the time is ripe for colleges to rise to the challenge and to recognise that it’s more important than ever to power up their brands.

We are the “good guys” and we have to let our communities know that. With the arrival of T Levels and Institutes of Technology, colleges can occupy a different place in the technical skills market.

Viva la brand revolution!

Over 15 years in FE marketing I’ve seen two fundamental revolutions. First was the emergence of social media from 2008.

From the days of “but should we have a Facebook page – people can comment and others can see it!” to today’s multi-channel engagement strategies, social media allowed us to talk to potential customers directly, without schools or employer gatekeepers barring the way.

The second revolution was the emergence of all the rich content enabled by these platforms. The college prospectus, once the cornerstone of the campaign, is now relegated to a bit part as we develop a suite of case-study videos, live streams, quizzes, interactive microsites and BAFTA-worthy promotional films.

These rapid revolutions have required innovation and improvisation but have been largely a marketing thing.

Brand is inherently strategic. It needs whole organisation buy-in

The next revolution – the third revolution – requires the whole organisation to see marketing as a strategic function, not just a way to reach customers with attractive materials.

Brand is inherently strategic. It needs whole organisation buy-in.

I’ve spent six months researching brand in education for a masters degree and have found that in many colleges, marketing and comms remain outside key decision making.

Too often, the outcome is that brand suffers. In mergers, ambiguity is often sought in the group name – after all, an acronym can’t offend anyone if no one really knows what it stands for.

In doing this, colleges sacrifice hard-earned brand equity, developed over years of existing within and supporting local communities.

Consumers now have never been more brand conscious. We all use brands to create identity, to define what we stand for and develop how we want to be perceived.

Many of us are justly frustrated by the perception of colleges as a second choice, but what exactly are we doing about it?

By not concentrating on developing brand, setting out what makes us unique – our inclusiveness, our openness to embrace new ideas, our community partnerships, the employers we work with and so much more – we’re failing to transform the impression of what FE is and redefining colleges in the public mind.

So, what can be done? A 2006 study by Jon Hulberg showed how promoting the corporate brand rather than products can allow organisations to show how they differ from the competition without just competing on product merits.

This explains why buying something from Harrods feels different, more luxurious, than buying the same product from a high street chain. 

If colleges focus on making their brand really aspirational and inspirational, they can stand out from competitors and spend less money promoting individual programmes.

It isn’t easy. Developing a corporate brand strategy requires significant work

If our audiences believe that our core purpose is to use skills to create opportunity and a fairer society, we will be pushing at an open door!

It isn’t easy. Developing a corporate brand strategy requires significant work.

Meanwhile, regular research is essential to ensure that consumers are seeing what a brand is intended to represent.

Most importantly, it’s crucial to focus on a college’s people. Ultimately, if students haven’t bought into the cause, it will lack the authenticity required to deliver the brand strategy.

Brand is the new education marketing revolution. Unlike those that preceded it, it will raise fundamental questions about how colleges operate as commercial enterprises.

If embraced, we can ultimately redefine colleges, allowing them to take their rightful place within the education landscape.

As the government rolls out the national retraining scheme, a publicity drive is needed to promote adult learning, writes Ann Marie Spry

The UK education system emphasises younger people, with the majority of funding directed towards pre-18 compulsory education, and the immediate post-18 education the next most supported.

We can see this reflected in the media’s coverage of the coronavirus crisis in education, with countless articles on the GCSE and A-levels debacle, university places and young disadvantaged learners.

Although these are all important issues, it’s not right that there is negligible media coverage of how the crisis has impacted opportunities for adult learners.

We know that adults who left school at 16 or younger are half as likely to take part in learning as those who stayed on in full-time education until at least 21.

Adult learning is as much an issue of social mobility and disadvantage as it is for any other age group. To add to this, in recent years the education sector has not been able to prioritise adult learning.

While Downing Street has often said that further education and skills are a priority, lack of investment has left millions in the UK without basic skills and unable to access education and training. Five years ago, the Association of Colleges warned that continued cuts to the adult skills budget could risk eliminating adult education and training in England by 2020.

Today, we are feeling the effects of the 47 per cent cut in government spending on adult education, excluding apprenticeships. The number of adult learners continues to fall and adult learning has plummeted by nearly four million since 2010.

Meanwhile, in the first two quarters of 2018-19, participation in government-funded adult further education fell by 3.5 per cent. I think we can all agree that adult education needs to be revitalised. And it will need a great deal of political support.

The introduction of the national retraining scheme, first launched in 2019 and rolled out this year, will be pivotal in helping adults across the country get on the path to a new, more rewarding career. This scheme will be needed more than ever, given the rise in unemployment in the past few months as a result of Covid. However a national campaign to promote adult learning needs to be launched at the same time.

During the lockdown, there was a reduction at Leeds City College in the number of new adults wanting to start learning during the summer term. We are offering more online courses to try to mitigate this.

However, in reality, only a few courses are currently available wholly online and tend to focus on skills needed in “white-collar jobs”.

In reality, only a few courses are available wholly online

While the crisis has helped boost remote learning, training for crafts-related occupations or a work-based component remains difficult to deliver online.

At the same time, the current basic skills training tend to be more focused on the qualifications people gain, and less on the outcomes such as whether they secure work, further training or increase their earnings. The government needs to look again at how the success of adult learning programmes is measured.

At Leeds City College, we’ve also noticed that more learners are opting for longer, more comprehensive and expensive courses. Yet not everyone has the financial capacity to study full-cost courses and the government needs to create a strategy that accounts for this.

Incentives are needed to allow adults with a level 2 or 3 qualification to retrain in certain priority sectors, perhaps through a subsidised offer.

Finally, a national approach is required to ensure that adult learning is not left on the sidelines. There is not enough publicity or coverage on the benefits to adults of lifelong learning.

Strategic messaging around the value of adult learning in terms of job prospects, retraining, upskilling and mental health is vital. The government must have adult and lifelong learning at the forefront of its mind – now more than ever.

Whether it’s providing farm placements or much-needed structure through digital platforms, putting SEND learners front and centre always makes sense, writes Paul Phillips

Since 2001, my mission has been to place inclusive practice at the centre of Weston College. When offered the chance to run a college “my way’” it was daunting – miles from home, failing and in poor financial health.

But these circumstances allowed me to fulfil my vision of placing SEND learners at the heart of my strategic plan. The reason?

I believe that if you get teaching right for these learners, then you get it right for everyone. Outstanding teaching and learning is about a “personal individualised” approach, and the best practice we have developed for SEND learners here has gone on to benefit everyone.

I had some inspirational staff. ahead of their time regarding SEND strategies. However, it was not easy to convince governors and wider staff of the direction of travel. Back in 2001 the college had eight SEND learners, taught in dilapidated facilities at the back of the site.

I placed these learners in the most visible location to set the scene for the new college mission, “creating brighter futures”. To their credit, staff quickly got on board. Since then we’ve transformed ourselves from an FE provider offering pockets of inclusion to a fully inclusive organisation delivering FE.

This has been achieved through investing in continuous professional development to degree level, a motivational career structure, SEND support hubs at every campus and about £2.5 million invested in specialist facilities, such as an autism residential training facility and sensory learning base.

Today we have more than 1,300 SEND learners (511 with high needs) on employability, apprenticeship and degree programmes. Progression rates are exceptional (97 per cent) with 33 per cent into employment (compared with six per cent nationally). We’ve won the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Inclusive Practice and became one of only three National SEND Centres of Excellence in the country (the others are Derby College and City College Norwich).

The aspirational place that SEND holds within the college’s strategic plan has been even more evident during Covid. The senior leadership team designed our lockdown EdTech strategy to focus on “digital inclusion”; the impact of this meant over 90 per cent virtual attendance from SEND learners throughout the pandemic.

We launched a #MyVirtualCollege concept, which meant all learners and especially SEND learners still felt part of the college through digitally accessible courses, timetables, support sessions, tutors and the wider college community.

Even the most anxious learners have finally returned because of our latest innovation

Innovative virtual teaching operated through Microsoft Teams, involving fun team challenges and activities including mindfulness to reduce isolation. This provided learners with a much-needed structure to establish new routines.

In using these real-world technologies, learners maintained friendship groups and developed wider skills and behaviours that will be transferable to the workplaces of the future. For some, removing the distractions and anxiety of a classroom setting has had an extremely positive impact on achievement and is a lesson learnt for our future curriculum design.

However, coming back to college presented its own challenges. Anxiety has been high – many have not left their home for six months. To help, we ran transitional programmes throughout the summer. We quickly realised that a “recovery curriculum” focused on mental health and reducing anxiety was needed. In the main, learners have settled into the new environment and are excited to be back.

We have been taken aback by their resilience and adaptability. Even the most anxious learners have finally returned because of our latest innovation.

We’ve invested in Butcombe Farm, a nearby chilli farm, as an alternative classroom to provide a pathway to the “new normal”. Here, working with specialist practitioners, we use the concept of “Engagement to Employment” to nurture the talents of SEND learners as employees for the future.

It’s crucial that SEND learners are not lost at this critical moment in their education. If colleges prioritise them, these learners have brilliant opportunities ahead of them.

Pilots of Ofsted’s autumn visits suggest that the FE and skills sector is more than rising to the challenges of these highly unusual times, writes Paul Joyce

In July we announced that we would be carrying out visits across all the areas we inspect this Autumn – schools, further education and skills, early years and children’s social care.

The visits are not inspections and won’t result in a graded judgement. They have a simple but important aim – to reassure parents, learners, employers and government about what providers are doing to get education and training back up and running, and to make sure that learners are safe.

Over the past fortnight we’ve been piloting these visits across FE & Skills providers, testing our approach before the full visits begin in earnest later this month. From my point of view, it’s been striking just how receptive the sector has been to the visits and how well providers have engaged with the process.

Learning from our pilots

The pilots were about making sure that our approach is sound. We’ve done 14 pilot visits, covering a range of providers at all grades, across each of Ofsted’s regions.

We visited independent learning providers (ILPs), one major national provider, community learning and skills providers, further education and sixth form colleges, and an independent specialist college. Thirty inspectors took part, around a third of our HMI workforce. These inspectors are now back in their regions, sharing their perspective and helping to train their colleagues.

Overall, the pilots have been very successful. They show that our methodology works, and that the visits work in practice, despite the unusual circumstances we all face. We’re confident that we can carry out the visits safely, with minimum disruption to provider’s day to day business.

Our inspectors have been made to feel very welcome. Providers taking part really understood our rationale and embraced the visits as a constructive and collaborative process. Leaders and other staff were rightly proud of what they’d achieved, and what they have done to get learners up to speed after so long away. Some found the visit a relief, others said it was reaffirming – a chance to have their hard work acknowledged.

Safety is our priority

The pilots also allowed us to see what the visits would be like with social distancing rules in place. Arrangements will obviously vary from provider to provider, so our visit teams will abide by whatever providers have put in place to keep learners safe. The safety of our staff, and that of learners and provider staff is, of course, our utmost priority.

This example from one large college group gives an indication of how a visit can work in practice. Our visit team (two inspectors) were set up in a large meeting room that allowed for social distancing. They stayed in the room for the whole day, while small groups of senior leaders, teachers and learners joined them for discussions – around 9 meetings over the course of the visit. The room was cleaned between meetings. We didn’t make any learning observations, carry out deep dives, or move around the college.

What will the visits focus on?

Visits will be based around three themes, a set of conversations with leaders and staff. First, we’ll be asking about the strategic actions taken to maintain the curriculum or get it back up and running. Second, what have you been doing operationally to deliver online and face to face learning. And finally, we want to talk about safeguarding. How are you making sure that learners are safe in these unusual circumstances. We’ll summarise these discussions in a published report, although for our pilot providers this won’t be published.

The visits will take place over two days, but these will be shorter days – starting later than an ordinary inspection and finishing earlier. This frees up provider staff in the mornings and keeps disruption to a minimum.

The way forward

There’s no doubt that colleges and other providers have been up against it since the lockdown in March. In the ILP world (largely apprenticeships and adult training) the situation is very tough. Some providers have ceased training, and we know that some apprentices haven’t been able to return to their jobs after furlough.

We are acutely aware of how difficult the past few months have been, and our visit teams are sensitive to this. We are not here to make life difficult. Ultimately, we want to understand the challenges the sector faces, so we can help government and policymakers understand them too. And we hope that our published reports will be useful to providers as they consider their own approaches, sharing good and innovative practice. 

Given the hunger for more information about effective online learning, we’ll also be using our visits to add to the debate about what works. In July, we published some interim findings from our online learning review. The visits will build upon this work, and we hope to publish some more findings early next year. 

It’s really good news that those taking part in the pilots were positive about their experience. This, combined with the fact that parents, learners and employers want to know how well prepared providers are, reinforces the importance of our visits. And while it’s a small sample, our pilots suggest that the further education & skills sector is more than rising to the challenges of these highly unusual times.