Offering employers incentives regardless of an apprentice’s age in the Budget was completely the wrong call, writes Tom Richmond
“Our country’s future will be built by the next generation, so it’s vital that we harness the talent of young people as we rebuild from the pandemic,” said Chancellor Rishi Sunak in November last year, and he was right.
Younger workers aged 16 to 24 have accounted for nearly half of the total fall in employment during the economic slump. Previous recessions have shown it can take years for raised unemployment levels among young people to recede.
On that basis, you might assume that the Chancellor would seek to unashamedly boost the employment prospects of young people.
If that is what you were expecting from the Budget, you were in for a bumpy ride.
‘Make incentive payments permanent’
In the heyday of traineeships in 2015-16, they were creating around 24,000 opportunities a year for 16- to 24- year-olds, so they could go on to start an apprenticeship, new job or return to education.
But by 2020, the number of traineeships had fallen by half. So seeing the Treasury invest in traineeships last summer, in the spending review last autumn and now again in the Budget is a long-overdue but welcome recognition of the potential of this programme.
The additional £126 million to expand traineeships next year – including for the recently-introduced employer “incentive payment” of £1,000 – will provide enough funding to support tens of thousands of young people during these difficult times.
Going forward, there is a strong case to make these incentive payments a permanent feature of the traineeships programme in future.
‘No justification for extra cash for adults’
On the other hand, employer incentive payments for apprenticeships are nothing new. That is where we get to the not-so-good news from the Budget.
The incentives for hiring apprentices were first introduced in August and offered employers £2,000 to take on apprentices aged 16 to 24 and £1,500 for apprentices aged 25 and over.
From April to September, these incentives will become more generous at a £3,000 per hire – regardless of the apprentice’s age.
That is the wrong call.
Incentive payments can help employers build their capacity to support, mentor and supervise younger apprentices.
But there is no such justification for throwing money at employers for recruiting adult apprentices.
Indeed, it contradicts existing government policy that requires employers who do not pay the apprenticeship levy to contribute 5 per cent towards the cost of an adult apprentice’s training and assessment.
It is hard to see how offering £3,000 for recruiting adults will do anything other than undermine the interests of young people who desperately want and need their first step on the career ladder – even more so in these turbulent times.
To make matters worse, the deadweight costs of these adult subsidies are likely to be sky high – wasting tens of millions of pounds.
This precious funding could have been put to much better use by increasing the subsidies for young people to, say, £5,000 or even creating new subsidies for hiring disadvantaged young people such as those with low or no qualifications.
‘Lack of clarity on different schemes’
When sandwiched between traineeships, adult apprenticeships and the new Kickstart scheme, it is not clear how apprenticeships for younger learners are supposed to thrive in 2021.
The Budget offered no clarity on how these schemes are supposed to interact with each other.
Yet the potential consequences for the number of apprenticeship opportunities this year are obvious enough.
The overall focus on jobs and employment in this year’s Budget was entirely necessary. Attempts to generate new education and training opportunities as the economy begins to emerge from the national lockdown should therefore be commended.
Nonetheless, the Chancellor was correct to say that we must harness the talents of young people as we rebuild our economy in the coming months.
It is a great shame that one of his flagship policies might achieve precisely the opposite.
Until Sunak realises there’s a preference in the apprenticeship system for existing employees over young people, his Budget announcements won’t help, writes Andy Norman
Today’s Budget is all about repairing the damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, particularly for young people.
The measures announced by the Chancellor attempt to kickstart demand for apprenticeships.
Yet they fail to acknowledge that the pandemic has simply exacerbated the more fundamental problems that have plagued the apprenticeship system for years now.
Until Rishi Sunak undertakes structural reform, his efforts are doomed to fail.
‘Bonus payment too small’
Apprenticeship starts fell by 45 per cent during the first lockdown. They recovered slightly between August and October, but they were still 28 per cent lower than the previous year.
The young have been hardest hit. During the first wave of the pandemic, apprenticeship starts for under 19s fell by 68 per cent, compared to 39 per cent for over 25s.
Low-level apprenticeships have also borne the brunt of the damage, which is particularly concerning because they offer the first step onto the skills ladder. Without them, many low skilled people will be cut adrift.
While level 2 apprenticeship starts plummeted by more than 60 per cent between March and July, starts at level 4 and above fell by just 3 per cent. Meanwhile between August and October, starts at level 4 and above actually grew by about 300.
To try to repair the damage, over the summer the government announced an apprenticeship bonus payment.
Starting from last August, employers have received £2,000 for taking on an apprentice aged 16 to 24 and £1,500 for those over 25.
However, as CPP pointed out at the time, the bonus payment was too small to make a significant impact, amounting to just 13 per cent of the first year of a young apprentice’s wages.
This has since been proven correct. Between August and January, there were just 25,400 starts under the scheme, only a quarter of the 100,000 budgeted for by the Treasury.
‘Apprenticeships going to existing employees’
But there is more going on here than meets the eye.
Looking more closely at the data, employers claimed the bonus payment for only 18 per cent of starts between August and November.
Why would employers not claim incentive payments for more than four-fifths of starts?
The reason seems to be that the bonus cannot be claimed for existing employees. This strongly suggests that currently the vast majority of apprenticeship opportunities are going to people already working at the organisation.
It is unsurprising that the Chancellor has used this Budget to announce an increase in the bonus scheme, with apprentices of all ages now coming with a £3,000 bonus payment from government.
Will this be enough to shift the dial on apprenticeships?
If employers were not willing to take on a young apprentice with a 13 per cent wage subsidy, it seems unlikely that they will now that the subsidy is closer to 20 per cent.
That’s why CPP has argued that the subsidy needs to be 50 per cent of wages.
But increasing the bonus payment can only get us so far.
The preference for existing employees and the exclusion of young people speaks to the more longstanding problems with the apprenticeship system.
Before the pandemic, system reforms – principally the apprenticeship levy – shifted opportunities away from young people looking to take the first step onto the skills ladder and towards highly qualified existing employees.
The pandemic has simply exacerbated this trend.
‘Ringfence levy funds’
So as well as a larger apprenticeship bonus, we need much more fundamental reform of the levy.
Some have argued that reform should give employers more flexibility over how they spend their levy funds, but the opposite is true. Levy rules must reflect that apprenticeships should be a gateway into skilled employment for young people and adults stuck in low-skilled work.
This means ringfencing a proportion of levy funds to be spent only on young people at lower qualification levels.
It also means heavily restricting the share of funds that can be used on existing employees.
The Chancellor was right to recognise that the apprenticeship system is in trouble.
However, the policies Sunak has announced amount to little more than a slightly larger sticking plaster. Actually what the patient really needs is comprehensive surgery.
Public bodies may be “less willing” to use statistical models to support decisions in future after the system to award exam grades last year failed to “command public confidence”, the statistics watchdog has warned.
A review by the Office for Statistics Regulation, the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority, found the grading system prompted “widespread public dissatisfaction”, and that “limitations” of the statistical models used were not fully communicated.
Although it found qualification regulators and exam boards “worked with integrity” to develop the system used, the watchdog warned that “guidance and support” from government should be improved.
Exams were replaced by a system of centre-assessment grades standardised by computer algorithm last year, but the approach was abandoned after a fierce backlash over the downgrading of results, with students instead issued with the grades provided by their schools and colleges.
This week, in a report on lessons learned from the fiasco, the OSR said it feared public bodies will now be “less willing to use statistical models to support decisions in the future for fear of a public acceptability backlash, potentially hindering innovation and development of statistics and reducing the public good they can deliver”.
The watchdog said this was illustrated by the emphasis placed on an algorithm-free approach in 2021, with education secretary Gavin Williamson promising in January to “put our trust in teachers rather than algorithms”.
But the OSR found that teams in regulators and exam boards in all four UK nations “worked with integrity to try to develop the best method in the time available to them”.
“In each country there were aspects of the model development that were done well, and aspects where a different choice may have led to a different outcome.
“However, none of the models were able to command public confidence and there was widespread public dissatisfaction of how the grades had been calculated and the impact on students’ lives.”
The OSR’s main conclusion is that achieving public confidence in statistical models is “not just about the technical design of the model – taking the right decisions and actions with regards transparency, communication and understanding public acceptability throughout the end to end process is just as important”.
It also concluded that guidance and support for public bodies developing models “should be improved”.
Government has a “central role to play in ensuring that models developed by public bodies command public confidence”, the OSR said.
This “includes directing the development of guidance and support, ensuring that the rights of individuals are fully recognised and that accountabilities are clear”.
‘Limitations’ not fully communicated
The OSR said regulators and exam boards faced “numerous challenges” in developing the system last year, which meant it was “always going to be difficult for a statistical algorithm to command public confidence”.
However, the “limitations of statistical models, and uncertainty in the results of them, were not fully communicated”.
“More public discussion of these limitations and the mechanisms being used to overcome them, such as the appeals process, may have helped to support public confidence in the results.”
And while regulators undertook activities to communicate information about the models to those affected by them and published technical documentation on results day, full details around the methodology to be used “were not published in advance”.
“This was due [to] a variety of reasons, including short timescales for model development, a desire not to cause anxiety amongst students and concerns of the impact on the centre assessed grades had the information been released sooner.
“The need to communicate about the model, whilst also developing it, inevitably made transparency difficult.”
‘Limited professional statistical consensus’
Although regulators drew on expertise in the qualifications and education sector, there was “limited professional statistical consensus on the proposed method”.
The methods were “not exposed to the widest possible audience of analytical and subject matter experts, though we acknowledge that time constraints were a limiting factor in this case”.
There was also “limited public discussion ahead of the release of results about the likely historical patterns in the underlying data and how they might impact on the results from the model”.
Regulators carried out equality impact analyses, which were “based on the premise that attainment gaps should not widen, and their analyses showed that gaps did not in fact widen”.
Despite this analytical assurance, there was a “perception when results were released that students in lower socio-economic groups were disadvantaged by the way grades were awarded”.
“In our view, this perception was a key cause of the public dissatisfaction.”
‘Key lessons’ for government
The OSR said there were “key lessons to be learned for government and public bodies looking to develop statistical models to support decisions”.
It said that for statistical models used to support decisions in the public sector to command confidence, the bodies developing them need guidance and support “to be available, accessible and coherent”.
“Our review has found that there is a fast-emerging community that can provide support and guidance in statistical models, algorithms, AI and machine learning.
“However, it is not always clear what is relevant and where public bodies can turn for support – the landscape is confusing, particularly for those new to model development and implementation.”
Ofqual said it welcomed the OSR’s work to “build public confidence in statistical approaches”, and said the report “recognises the challenging task Ofqual – and our counterparts in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland – faced in awarding grades in the absence of exams last summer”.
“We have learned lessons from last summer. We continue to work with other government departments to make data available for wider scrutiny and we recently set out, jointly with the DfE, our approach to awarding grades in 2021, after our largest-ever public consultation.”
There’s much that’s encouraging in the skills white paper – but we can’t wait another decade for the reforms to fully roll out, says Graham Hasting-Evans
The Skills for Jobs white paper is one of the most fundamental initiatives around further education we have seen in the last decade.
It builds upon the reforms kicked off by Professor Alison Wolf’s review of vocational education in 2011 and the subsequent changes to apprenticeships and vocational and technical qualifications.
There are a lot of good ideas in the white paper and I know people will be keen to get into the detail – where the devil always lies.
I want to touch on the need to ensure further education is properly funded, can continually change to meet fast-paced demand, supports all people across all our communities and enables upskilling. We also need to think about standards and timescales.
Personally, I welcome the direction of the white paper and believe we as a sector need to embrace it, whilst improving on some of the detail.
I’m sure there will be lots of debate on a wide range of topics including the “local skills improvement plans” and how to support staff.
A particularly challenging aspect will be employer involvement in delivering the improved system.
Let’s turn first to need.
‘Level 2s are backbone of the workforce’
We have a great academic system and enjoy worldwide recognition for the quality of our education sector and qualifications. Many of our universities are in the global top 100. All this is very positive.
However, the vast majority of people do not go into ‘academic’ occupations. They go into practical jobs.
If our economy is to be highly productive and enable levelling up, we must ensure our FE technical and vocational system is world-class.
And this system must support all the occupations in our economy, not just those at level 3 and above.
We know some 11.2 million (30 per cent) of jobs in the economy are at level 2 and below, with essential pathways at entry and level 1.
We badly need to upskill this part of the workforce – a significant challenge if we want to improve productivity.
In many important sectors such as business administration, construction and hospitality, roles at level 2 and below are the backbone of the workforce.
In some sectors these roles make up three-quarters of all jobs, and this is not going to change any time soon.
So, we should be funding training and qualifications for level 2 and below as part of the whole system in order to truly level up.
However, the white paper does not make mention of this – it only commits to funding for level 3 and above.
So I recommend the government does commit to continue the funding for entry, level 1 and level 2 for 16 to 19 year olds, as well as adults who need upskilling in the workforce.
‘Internationalisation of standards’
Now on to standards.
In the UK we have disaggregated standards across the various nations. For many occupations we now have an English, Northern Ireland, Scottish and Welsh occupational standard.
This flies in the face of what is happening in the rest of the world.
Elsewhere we see an internationalisation of standards, with many countries now seeing the standard at the WorldSkills competition as the bar to aim for.
As we update our skills system we should aim for international standards across the four nations.
Timescales are also crucial.
‘Take big steps more quickly’
I appreciate that at the moment we need to focus on the implications of Covid and the challenge of lost learning.
But afterwards we must focus on making the ideas in the white paper a reality as soon as possible.
We must reflect on the fact that our current programme of reforms kicked off 10 years ago, and we still have around five years more implementation ahead of us to fully complete the current T Level roll-out. It has taken a long time.
When technology is radically changing every three to six months, skills reform must keep pace. We need to make the big steps forward very quickly, in years not decades.
And we must have a system that we can easily and readily update and revise.
If we don’t we will not succeed. With persistent low productivity, we will lag behind our competitors.
Now is the time to embrace the ideas in the white paper to build a world-class, agile FE system.
The cash bonus scheme for hiring apprentices aged 25 and over is set to double to £3,000 and will be extended by six months.
Financial incentives were first introduced by Rishi Sunak in August and currently offer firms £2,000 to take on apprentices aged 16 to 24, while those that employ new apprentices aged 25 and over are paid £1,500.
But take-up has been low. Latest Department for Education data shows that 25,420 employers have submitted claims for the bonus as of 1 February 2021. The Treasury had budgeted for up to 100,000 incentive payments for new apprentice hires.
The current scheme ends in March, but the chancellor has new plans which will be unveiled in his budget next week to extend it until September 2021.
Jane Hickie
From April, the incentives will become more generous with a £3,000 payment per hire, regardless of the apprentice’s age.
This is on top of the £1,000 payment provided for new apprentices aged 16 to 18 and those under 25 with an Education, Health and Care Plan, meaning that some employers could receive £4,000 in total.
Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Jane Hickie said the financial incentives boost could be a “game-changer” and prove to be “particularly attractive to smaller businesses”.
“But if we were in the Treasury’s shoes, we would have channelled the increased incentives to focus on 16- to 24-year-olds only, because that is where the support is really needed and where the stimulus is required,” she added.
The chancellor is also expected to launch a new “flexi-job” apprenticeship on Wednesday.
Under the plans, individuals will be linked to an agency, instead of a single employer, and take on different jobs with multiple businesses in one sector.
This scheme is targeted at industries with more flexible working patterns, such as the TV and film sectors. These industries have struggled to spend their levy funding over the years because most roles are freelance and usually only run for two to three months, rather than the 12-month minimum duration needed for an apprenticeship.
The Treasury said that from July, employers will be able to bid for money from a £7 million fund to create new agencies, with the first “flexi-job” apprenticeships expected to start in January 2022.
Hickie pointed out that the flexi-job proposal builds on a prior announcement about portable apprenticeships which the chancellor announced at the last spending review and “looks like a rebadging of the existing Apprenticeship Training Agency model”.
Sunak is also set to announce in his budget next week an “additional” £126 million to further increase traineeship numbers by an extra 40,000 in 2021/22.
This will include £22 million to continue the employer incentive payment of £1,000. It builds on the £111 million the chancellor set aside in 2020/21 to triple the number of traineeships.
Sunak, said: “Our Plan for Jobs has spread opportunity and hope throughout the crisis – helping people back into work and harnessing their talents for the future.
“We know there’s more to do and it’s vital this continues throughout the next stage of our recovery, which is why I’m boosting support for these programmes, helping jobseekers and employers alike.”
David Gallagher tells Jess Staufenberg how he pulled back from the brink of a reckless life to focus on building progression routes
David Gallagher, chief executive of huge awarding organisation NCFE, got suspended three times during his A-levels. He can’t remember why exactly for two of them, but he does remember the third. He’d finished his exam paper very early, as usual had got bored, and so left.
“I was sitting in the exam, I’d finished the paper in half the time and I thought, I’ve done enough, so I walked out. The teachers weren’t OK with that, I think that really annoyed them,” he laughs, grinning ear to ear.
The thing that seemed to frustrate the long-suffering staff was that no matter how few lessons the young Gallagher turned up to, or for how short a time he sat down for an exam, he did pretty well. He says one of his college reports stated rather snidely: “David seems to revel in non-conformity, but no doubt his natural ability will get him through.”
It’s not unusual for maverick chief executives to be school tearaways, but it does make quite a nice symmetry that Gallagher, so close to being kicked out of formal education for quitting an exam, now heads up the country’s oldest, and one of its biggest, exam boards.
NCFE, once known as the Northern Council for Further Education until a name change in the 1990s, was the first awarding organisation with Pearson to be awarded contracts to deliver T Levels. The charity has been around for about 170 years and has access to some of the top tables for decision-making on vocational and technical qualifications around.
It’s also outside the London bubble, with headquarters in Newcastle, and appointed Middlesbrough lad Gallagher, who had only been with the organisation for seven months, to its top role about two years ago.
‘Totally fed up’
But although Gallagher tells his life story with the smiling charm of a true north-easterner, the disengagement – even, as he puts it, arrogance – needed to actually leave an exam tells a more serious story. The youngest of six siblings, Gallagher recalls his dad working away on rigs in the North Sea and his mum retraining hard as a social worker when he was little.
“Parental responsibility” for Gallagher fell somewhere across them and his five siblings, and his earliest memories are everything from his mum teaching him the Periodic Table before he even went to school, and serving himself breakfast aged four because everyone was at work.
“I learnt how to debate, how to fight, how to look after myself. I did what I wanted from a really early age. I’m pleased: I developed a really strong sense of independence and self-reliance.”
Gallagher with his family
But that was out of step with school, where Gallagher makes an interesting observation I imagine would echo with many bright children not being properly stretched. He’d already taught himself to write from magazines – his ts and ds are still the wrong way round – and he read encyclopedias.
“I never really felt like I needed teachers, I just needed work setting. What I needed was a mentor, not a stand-up teacher, someone who could give me a kick up the backside.” Aged 14, Gallagher was “totally fed up” with school.
Then his beloved mum was diagnosed with a brain tumour. The tumour, which was the size of a grapefruit, was followed by a stroke. She was no longer able to work.
“Before my mum was ill, I’d been bored. But then when Mum was ill, I went off the rails.” He looks frankly into the camera. “I became an arrogant little shit, to be honest.” A decade later, aged 24, Gallagher sounds fairly lost. He had decided against university – certainly the right decision – and was working for BT, which he describes as “brilliant”, although his work ethic still needed improving. But a self-destructive streak was getting the better of him.
“I was a high-functioning lunatic, really. You’d have thought if you’d met me that I was normal, but my whole lifestyle was not conducive to relationships or work.” He says a “natural ability” to solve problems was getting him by, but he was out at night too much and getting into debt.
‘I wanted to make it up’
Then a series of awful events happened in quick succession. He lost his job, a best friend’s dad he was close to died, his girlfriend’s mum died, and then his girlfriend dumped him. “It was a horrific period. I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror, and I didn’t like what I saw.”
It’s not often an education leader tells me guilt drove them into the sector, but Gallagher is refreshingly clear on this. “I thought, I want to be a decent human being again. It wasn’t wildly altruistic. It was almost like a penance thing. I thought, I’ve been shit for ten years. I want to make it up.”
I thought, I want to be a decent human being again. It wasn’t wildly altruistic
The experience seems to have given Gallagher a great belief in training, in qualifying, in progressing. While trying to get himself back on the rails, he got a job as a “personal advisor” on New Labour’s Welfare to Work programme, helping those whose lives had careered completely off them, much more so than his own.
These were people “with the most awful lives: abuse, neglect, in and out of prison, the care system, who’d lost parents, had cancer”, he says, adding the role was “somewhere between social worker and recruitment consultant…My experiences paled into insignificance.”
Determined to do something but unable to progress in the role, his big break came when he was hired by Petrina Lynn, then-head of skills for the north-east at the Learning and Skills Council, the forerunner to today’s ESFA.
“I describe Petrina as my second mum. She was the matriarchal figure in my career who genuinely cared about me. I’d had bosses before, but that was the first time I worked for a real leader.” He got his personal life sorted, and has worked with training providers and employment support organisations since.
Institute of Employability Professionals
But he didn’t forget the frontline of working with those outside the system – people so much in need of support Gallagher had got into the habit of getting up two hours before work to “drag them out of bed” so they’d make their appointment with him.
Some years later he was interviewing for a job at Working Links, a subcontracting company for employment services, and his boss-to-be asked him what one thing he would introduce. “I said I’d love to get professional recognition for those on the frontline of Welfare to Work. I find it baffling people have to have a licence to fix my boiler, but there’s no qualifications for people who can have a massive impact on someone sorting their life out.”
Quite extraordinarily, Gallagher set up today’s Institute of Employability Professionals. Opened in 2011, it now has a level 2 qualification for frontline advisors, through to level 3 and level 4 for management, as well as an apprenticeship standard. “It’s probably the thing I’m proudest of. It was a job that really mattered to me.”
‘Education should be that great leveller’
At NCFE, Gallagher has done a similar thing. He says when he first took the role, the organisation’s purpose had become a bit unclear, as demonstrated by him gathering 13 senior leaders in a room to ask them why they did the job. “I got six different answers, and seven people who didn’t know.”
Gallagher on his 40th birthday
So he launched a consultation across the company, and found a top priority for staff was feeling they were supporting and investing in educators. Gallagher has since convinced the board to pour half a million pounds into a “Centre of Excellence” developed with WorldSkills UK to “share best practice, CPD, masterclasses, even schemes of work and lesson plans”. It’s not a physical centre, but involves supporting staff in 20 colleges this year, with more next year.
Like the Institute of Employability Professionals, Gallagher seems happiest when he’s seeing people gaining confidence and progressing on the ground.
He’s very excited about the world-class expertise that has been poured into T Levels – but deeply critical of a general rhetoric from government in which “the primacy and emphasis is only on technical skills”, knowing from his own experience that a sense of purpose, confidence and joy is the real driver behind life change.
I point out that no one in formal education was able to teach him that.
“But education should be that great leveller. If you don’t have the family, or life experiences, that build those characteristics, education should be the means through which you get that chance.
“That’s where we still go wrong – and we need to get that right.”
We need to rethink the implications of the pandemic on wellbeing, writes Stephen Corbett
The costs of the pandemic for the further education sector are at present largely unknown. FE institutions may already be able to identify the initial costs, such as the amount spent on PPE for health and safety procedures and on IT equipment.
However, cost is not limited to the purchase of new equipment. There is the significant cost of staff wellbeing.
The FE workforce is engaging in activities far beyond anything ever expected before the pandemic.
The pressure placed on staff at all levels is significant and further exacerbated by the limited time to ensure equipment, training and support could be put in place before lockdown hit.
‘Wellbeing in the sector already low’
Prior to the pandemic, we already knew that British teachers and educators reported the highest rates of work-related stress, depression and anxiety of all occupational groups in the country, according to Health and Safety Executive statistics.
So it is vital that senior leaders are given the information and support to better understand the potential impact on their workforce.
Otherwise it’s very likely that workforce retention, organisational performance and student experience will all go into decline.
As noted in the 2019 Ofsted report into wellbeing at work, lower levels of staff wellbeing can lead to a demotivated workforce, higher rates of staff sickness and poor staff retention, all of which impact negatively on the student experience.
It is, therefore, rather unsurprising that Ofsted found ‘outstanding’ providers have the highest levels of staff wellbeing.
‘Efforts to tackle the issue’
Leading voices in FE have sought to produce materials to make a difference.
For example, the Association of Colleges’ mental health and wellbeing charter seeks to create work environments that support mental health and promote wellbeing. The AoC also offers training and support for the sector.
Meanwhile, the Education and Training Foundation commissioned research into staff wellbeing in the sector, and put forward three important recommendations.
It firstly called for the supportive supervision of teachers (particularly those supporting students in difficult circumstances) to help them manage work-life balance and student engagement and to share their experiences.
Secondly, the ETF recommended that senior leaders should review workload content with staff to reduce the number of hours needed to fulfil their job.
And thirdly, employers should offer greater flexibility, such as working at home and uninterrupted administration days.
Unfortunately, the sector had insufficient time to fully consider this report. Three months after its publication the world experienced the global Covid-19 pandemic.
‘A new national survey’
The pandemic does not mean that the fundamental need for research into wellbeing of the FE workforce has gone away. In fact, it is likely that it is needed now more than ever.
In part, this is illustrated by the government’s pledge of the £8 million “wellbeing for education return” announced in summer for September 2020.
This initiative provides funding to local authorities, who are expected to use the funds to develop training for staff in schools and colleges to manage the emotional impact of the pandemic.
But it won’t solve the deep-rooted problems.
The pandemic has wrought such changes in our professional and personal lives that we need to rethink the research.
We need to consider the implications of working from home more frequently, diminished workplace social interactions, home schooling, caring responsibilities and more.
It is for this reason that academics at the University of Portsmouth are launching a new national survey of those working in the FE sector. This survey seeks to replicate previous research into work-life balance and wellbeing – but crucially, this time it will be done in the context of the pandemic.
This new research will seek to better understand the extent to which FE staff can balance work and non-work roles during Covid-19.
Have the boundaries between work and non-work roles became blurred? How is work-life balance managed? What is the impact upon the FE workforce’s wellbeing?
These are the questions we hope to answer. Only then will the true cost of the pandemic be better known.
International investors will only help us build back better if the International Education Strategy shows off our workforce skills, writes Neil-Bentley Gockmann
The launch of the government’s updated “International Education Strategy” before the half-term break was very welcome. But there is a missed opportunity in it.
The strategy was updated to include the new Turing Scheme, through which young people will be supported to take up training opportunities overseas. This is good news as we have seen repeatedly the positive impact that periods of training in other countries can have for young people’s confidence and future success.
So we welcome that our international competitions-based training programme is included in the qualifying criteria for funding.
The updated strategy also rightly seeks to boost export opportunities designed to leverage the quality of the UK offer to help improve the skills systems in other countries.
We are keen to leverage our WorldSkills global network in over 80 countries to support these discussions alongside our partners in the UK Skills Partnership, supported by the Department for International Trade.
But the strategy as it stands should do more to demonstrate the quality of skills being developed across the UK, to encourage international investors to finance new ventures here.
‘Mismatch in skills supply and demand’
This would align with the recent Skills for Jobs white paper, which wants colleges and training providers to work more with employers and so recognises that skills quality and local economic development go hand in hand.
For example, Jaguar Land Rover’s owners in India have recently announced the company will soon produce electric vehicles from its Midlands base. The skills and innovation ecosystem that surrounds their plants, including Warwickshire College Group and Warwick University, made this a good opportunity for more investment.
Yet the opportunity to showcase skills quality of this kind is missing in the strategy.
This is despite management consultancy EY’s annual “Attractiveness Survey”, which assesses a country’s appeal as an inward investment destination, repeatedly highlighting concerns about the UK’s skills pipeline.
In May 2020, EY’s research showed the “skills of the workforce” was deemed more important by international investors than government support and infrastructure.
‘Closer work with local colleges’
To help meet this challenge, we are working with partners in three new ways. EY’s survey showed a clear investor interest in digital potential, so firstly we explored this in our report published in July last year, titled Answering the Call for Digital Skills Excellence.
We identified a geographic mismatch in the demand for, and supply of, high-quality digital skills. We are exploring this further with new evidence due next month and are planning further work to develop the clean tech and advanced manufacturing sectors.
Secondly, we are continuing our work on benchmarking quality against other major global economies. In line with the priority countries set out in the International Education Strategy, we are working on a number of new partnership deals with our WorldSkills peers in major economies, including in Asia Pacific.
These represent a commitment to share global best practice in skills development and enable us to bring innovation back home.
Thirdly, we are working to deliver more impact locally with clear demand from college leaders.
Through our Centre of Excellence, which launched last year in partnership with awarding organisation NCFE, and our new Innovation Network, which we announced in January, we are working with some 160 partner institutions across the country.
The aim is to equip teachers with the knowledge to bring world-class standards and global best practice into the mainstream curriculum. This will support the development of over 40,000 young people and boost economic development.
‘Export the UK’s credentials overseas’
By working on improving skills quality with our partners we are helping to realise the government’s ambitions for recovery.
We must improve the UK’s credentials by exporting our skills know-how and showcasing our high-quality skills base to attract more long-term inward investment.
That’s why we are keen to work with colleagues in government to make sure high-quality skills development is factored into the new International Education Strategy.
It must become a core part of the UK’s strategy for building back better.
Combined authorities and colleges working closely together can help reduce the risk of youth unemployment, write Julie Nugent and Gina Patel
Since the pandemic emerged in the UK last year, the economy has taken an unprecedented hit. National unemployment now stands at five per cent, while one-fifth of people are not economically active or seeking work.
For many people, the government’s furlough scheme has been a crucial life raft during this challenging time. However, what the future holds once this comes to an end is much less certain.
It is likely to mean even higher unemployment rates across many of our local areas. Armed with this knowledge, we have a duty of care to support the communities we serve.
In the West Midlands last month there were 169,835 claimants, either on unemployment benefits or those on universal credit or jobseeker’s allowance – a staggering increase of 79 per cent from the same time last year.
Additionally, almost 7,000 16-to-17-year-olds were not in education, employment or training (NEET) in the West Midlands in 2020 – lower than the national average, but still a lot.
Setting up a ‘Young Combined Authority’
Experience tells us that the most effective solutions to addressing unemployment are those that reflect regional and local contexts, co-designed with employers and local partners.
A regional Jobs and Skills Board has allowed us to work with colleges, providers, local authorities and the Department for Work and Pensions to develop the best responses possible.
Importantly, these responses have been designed with young people, for young people. We know that our careers advice and FE engagement programmes will have much greater reach and uptake if we integrate the views and insights of those they are intended to support.
So last September at the West Midlands we set up a Young Combined Authority (YCA), which is a forum of approximately 30 young people aged between 16 and 25 who are representative of different backgrounds and experiences and can feed into wider policies.
It’s still in its infancy, but we are developing a wider community of 100 young people to drive wider outreach across the region.
It has helped to launch a new online platform, which is a one-stop-shop for young people to find training, employment and volunteering opportunities in their local area.
Youth hubs in colleges
Support for young people has been further bolstered following the Chancellor’s announcement of the creation of Youth Hubs, as part of the “Plan for Jobs”, in July last year.
Physical “youth hubs” have been established across the region to engage more young people and give them access to localised advice and support, including support from a DWP work coach. These youth hubs provide co-located support for young people in youth-friendly spaces such as Sandwell College.
During Covid-19, many of these have moved to providing support online through webinars, as well as supporting young people via text and email.
There are other initiatives that we think can add to a national blueprint of increasing employment and decreasing economic inactivity among younger people.
Strengthening the combined authority’s connections with colleges and local authorities is important, to effectively track and reduce the number of those young people at risk of not being in employment, education or training.
This is achieved by working closely with colleges and their respective local authorities to share data on young people which helps identify those who are at risk of disengaging.
Colleges can then provide enhanced engagement and recruitment activities for specific students to ensure they start and stay on course.
The youth voice is an important piece of the puzzle for the country going forward. It should be amplified when decision-makers are thinking about jobs of the future, the Covid-19 economic recovery and employment support.
Creating the YCA forum, and linking it up with colleges, will help to make sure local employment and training initiatives can be regionally focused and more effective.
