A troubled college group is set to lose another one of its campuses at the end of this academic year, FE Week can reveal.

Hull College Group has taken the decision to close Goole College after finding that it is running at a loss and deeming the premises to be of “low quality”.

The move will involve Hull College dropping the word “group” from its name, as it will now only consist of one site having demerged from its other campus, Harrogate College, in 2019.

Former Dudley College boss Lowell Williams was employed by Hull College Group earlier this year as a consultant to work on an estates strategy, and has now taken the reins as interim chief executive.

In an interview with FE Week he said: “There is no need for the Goole College site.

“It is running on a loss and there are better options for young people and adults locally, so the college has made the decision to stop trading at the end of this academic year.”

A statement from the college added: “The detailed arrangements will be made available in due course as we work with East Riding Council and other local providers to ensure an ongoing place for all of our Goole College learners.

“The corporation have identified that Goole College is not in a position to best meet the future needs of learners and having maintained this loss making provision for some time, the college is no longer in a position to do so.”

Goole has been a part of Hull College since before the turn of the millennium, and according to its website, currently runs courses up to level 3 in areas such as hairdressing, mechanical engineering and welding, and health and social care; as well as ESOL, foundation courses, and higher education courses in teacher education and early years.

Williams said the college was informing staff of the decision this morning and insisted there are “significant redeployment opportunities” to the college’s main site, so he is “hoping but cannot guarantee” that there will not be any redundancies.

The interim chief executive said the college will speak with stakeholders about the decision, including the Conservative Brigg and Goole MP Andrew Percy, who has been approached for comment.

Recently published board minutes for October 2020 for Hull College also suggest it is looking at moving away from its city centre campus. The minutes said: “Governors discussed whether the college should consider a move away from its current city centre site with the interim chief executive explaining that this was not yet a theme that had been explored but he was preparing to engage in those conversations with key stakeholders.”

Hull College Group has run into a number of problems in recent years and received a £42 million bailout from the government in 2018 as part of a Fresh Start process.

Its financial troubles were what led to Harrogate College being transferred to the Leeds-based Luminate Education Group in 2019.

FE Commissioner intervention is ongoing at the college.

Bidders to the government’s traineeships tender are now being informed of their outcomes following a slight delay.

In decision letters sent out yesterday, seen by FE Week, the Education and Skills Funding Agency tells providers that they will be observing a ten-day “voluntary standstill period” from 19 January before entering into the contracts on 1 February 2021.

A total of 215 awards have been made from almost 400 bids, with the total funding standing at £64.4 million.

The funding is being split across the nine regions in England – ranging from £20.8 million for London providers to £2.6 million for the south-west. Forty five providers in London were successful in their bids (see table).

The contracts, which are just for 19 to 24 traineeships, are hoped fund around 20,000 new starts between February and July 2021.

The ESFA had planned to notify bidders of outcomes on 11 January, but previously said the “high volume of tenders received” had “necessitated having to inform you that notifications of award will be delayed slightly”.

The tender is one way the government plans to triple the number of traineeships starts this year – as pledged by chancellor Rishi Sunak over the summer as part of his plan to combat youth unemployment amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Employer cash incentives of £1,000 have also been made available, as has growth funding for providers to deliver 16-to-19 traineeships.

As FE Week revealed last week, Sunak was said to be personally “annoyed” at how long the tender took to get off the ground, considering he announced the plan to triple numbers in July.

The rollout of daily Covid contact testing in schools and colleges has been paused amid fears over higher rates of transmission from the new variant of the disease and following widespread concern over the accuracy of tests.

Public Health England announced today that “in light of this changing situation, we now recommend that the rollout of daily contact testing within schools is paused, other than for schools involved in further evaluation”.

The Department for Education then confirmed that it has accepted PHE’s recommendation to pause this programme in both schools and colleges, but made clear there is no change to their “main rollout of regular testing”.

Schools and colleges have been told to continue to test their staff twice-weekly where possible and test pupils twice upon their return to in-person teaching – as has been the case since January.

The key part of the mass testing scheme was daily lateral flow tests for students and staff who had been in close contact with a positive Covid case. Those who tested negative could stay in the classroom rather than have to isolate.

However new guidance from PHE explains that as the new variant of Covid has “higher rates of transmission and hence generates a higher secondary attack rate … the balance between the risks (transmission of virus in schools and onward to households and the wider community) and benefits (education in a face-to-face and safe setting) for daily contact testing is unclear”.

PHE said: “Since the announcement of the schools testing programme in December, we have seen the emergence of a new variant of the virus which has become dominant in the UK. The variant has been shown to have increased transmissibility and causes higher secondary attack rates. This increases the risk of transmission everywhere, including in school settings.”

NHS Test and Trace and PHE will now conduct “structured evaluation of daily contact testing as part of a wider evaluation of daily contact testing in a range of private and public settings”.

The Department for Education will support the evaluation so that the findings can “contribute to further public health advice on daily contact testing in educational settings”.

PHE has asked for schools or colleges who have found daily contact testing helpful and would like to take part in the evaluation to contact the NHS Test and Trace evaluation team at dct-pilotpmo@dhsc.gov.uk

A college is selling one of its only two campuses to repay debt after being warned it could “face insolvency”.

Coventry College will lose its hospitality and catering provision and put 23 jobs at risk under plans to close its Henley campus by the end of August. All remaining courses and the “majority” of staff will transfer to its city campus two miles away.

Principal Carol Thomas said the sale was “in order to generate revenue” and create a “financially stable further education college which is fit for the future”.

Coventry College’s 2018-19 accounts, show that it breached the conditions of a loan from Barclays Bank, meaning the full balance of the loan – £9.4 million – was due within one year.

The college scrambled to refinance that loan by August 2020, with an FE Commissioner report from a visit in March last year warning if the college could not reach an agreement with the bank, it would have to meet its loan obligations and without government or other third-party support, that “will not be possible and will leave the college facing insolvency”.

The college told FE Week the loan has been extended from the August repayment date, and “expects to be cash generative after loan repayments in this financial year”.

A spokesperson said there are therefore currently “no solvency issues”, but confirmed the sale of Henley was to help repay debt.

The college said it had looked at refurbishing the former Henley College site, which has been running since 1964 and merged with City College Coventry to form Coventry College in 2017, but concluded that “is not possible as it would require significant financial investment”.

Coventry College received £1 million in capital investment from the government earlier this year. The board had explored further “funding options” with government education agencies, but this did not materialise.

The Henley campus was said to be “under-utilised” and in “a poor state of repair with ineffective and inconsistent quality of digital access,” so moving to one campus means all the college’s capital funding can go towards “the development of one modern further education campus,” Thomas said.

Local Labour MP Colleen Fletcher is protesting the Henley closure. She has written to education secretary Gavin Williamson to say she is “concerned this decision was in-part predicated on government failing to offer an appropriate level of financial support”.

“This example in Coventry may well be being repeated up and down the country,” she added.

“While I of course understand why colleges may wish to amalgamate, I am concerned that this may well represent a loss of opportunities for many.”

This is the latest bump in the road for Coventry College. It was rated ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted in 2015 before achieving two consecutive ‘requires improvement’ grades in 2016 and 2019.

Thomas took over last August, following a string of short-term leaders over the previous five years, and told FE Week in September the latest grade three had meant staff had: “Lost heart, they’ve lost passion, and they’ve lost confidence in their own ability.”

Coventry College is planning to move most of Henley’s provision, including courses in sport and public services, to its city campus at the end of the academic year, so no course is interrupted mid-term.

Aside from the fewer than 80 catering and hospitality learners, the decision will affect around 30 per cent of the college’s learners.

Alternative providers were being discussed for the hospitality and catering learners, the college added, but no names were provided to FE Week.

Of the 23 staff at risk of losing their jobs due to the move, six are full-time and the college says it is working with all of them to find new employment.

The college ran two staffing restructures last year, leading to 33 staff taking voluntary redundancy.

Fletcher is set to meet with the college about the closure, where she said she will raise concerns about losing provision from the Henley site.

Members of parliament protesting the ending of provision at their local campuses has become a common occurrence recently, as colleges seek to offload estates to balance their books.

Just last week FE Week reported on how a group of Cumbrian MPs, Conservative and Liberal Democrat, had written to Boris Johnson, asking for his support to save the county’s Newton Rigg College from closure. Similar situations occurred when site sales were announced for Cornwall College Group, RNN Group, and Warwickshire College Group.

Pictured top: Coventry College’s Henley campus

Government plans to remove funding for thousands of courses, such as BTECs, that compete with T Levels and A-levels risk destabilising the qualifications market and adversely narrowing learner choice, Ofqual has warned.

The exams regulator has today raised a number of concerns in response to the Department for Education’s level 3 qualifications review.

The DfE claims there is currently a “confusing landscape” of over 12,000 courses on offer to young people at level 3 and below, with multiple qualifications in the same subject areas available – many of which are “poor quality and offer little value to students or employers”.

Ofqual says it recognises the “potential benefits” of creating a “clearer landscape and “greater confidence in the currency of the qualification they achieve”, but warned of the scale of disruption this could cause under current recommendations.

“The DfE estimates that the qualifications that may no longer be funded could account for around 62 per cent of current non-A level 16 to 19-year-old enrolments at level 3 – and yet we know that the number of learners using qualifications other than A-levels to access higher education is growing, in particular the use of a combination of academic with smaller vocational and technical qualifications,” the response said.

“We can see from UCAS data about 2019 undergraduate admissions that the number of applicants accepted to higher education with A levels alone has fallen from 63 per cent in 2017 to around 60 per cent in 2019.

“While this accounts for more than 145,000 learners, nearly 22,000 learners were accepted with BTECs only in 2019 along with almost 18,000 learners who combined A levels with BTECs.”

Ofqual says this is “not an insignificant number” and “we should consider the impact on learners who may not be able to benefit in such a way when the reforms introduce an apparently more binary choice around qualification purpose and content”.

One key intention of the DfE’s proposed reforms is to establish two clearer pathways of study with A-levels and T Levels as the “programmes of choice” for 16 to 19-year old learners.

The exams regulator said they see a “potential risk” in relation to T Levels in that “some of the design features may appear to learners as barriers to accessing the programme of study, in particular the size and structure of the T Level programme”.

While providers and awarding organisations are “required to ensure qualifications are accessible”, some learners, including those with SEND or caring responsibilities, “may find T Levels less well-suited, too big or not sufficiently flexible for their individual study needs,” Ofqual warned.

The exams regulator added that the qualifications that appear more likely to be removed from funding currently have a higher proportion of learners with “particular protected characteristics”, such as disability, ethnicity or gender, or who are disadvantaged.

It is therefore “important to consider how the qualifications funded in future can be designed to continue to allow a diverse range of learners to access level 3 qualifications effectively and successfully”.

Ofqual goes on to predict that defunding existing qualifications will lead to “some market instability in the years after the reforms as a number of centres will choose to change the qualifications they offer, particularly if they are reliant on public funding”.

The response reminds the DfE that government has a “responsibility” to identify where there are risks to learners if, for example, an awarding organisation becomes “financially fragile or market instability causes a fall in confidence in regulated qualifications”.

It concludes by calling on the DfE to consider delaying the proposed reforms as 2021 will be an “exceptionally demanding year for awarding organisations because of the pandemic”, including the new arrangements that now need to be implemented following the cancellation of exams.

“We would ask the department to consider whether there are aspects of the proposed reforms for which implementation could be delayed by a year, in recognition of these exceptional circumstances,” Ofqual said.

Under the DfE’s plans, funding for the “majority” of qualifications that “overlap” with A-levels and T Levels would be removed by autumn 2023.

The deadline for the consultation was extended last week and is now 31 January. You can read it in full here.

The exams regulator Ofqual has finally revealed its plans for replacing exams this summer.

Two consultation documents have gone live this afternoon: one for GCSEs and A-levels; and one for vocational and technical qualifications including BTECs and functional skills.

Both have a two week deadline for submissions of 29 January 2021.

 

GCSEs and A-levels

For GCSEs and A-levels, the consultation document proposes that students’ grades in each subject “will be based on their teachers’ assessment of the standard at which the student is performing”.

Final assessments will be made “towards the end of the academic year, at about the time students would have taken their exams”.

Ofqual has also said that to help teachers make “objective decisions”, it is proposing that exam boards provide “guidance and training”, and make available sets of papers for teachers to use with with students “as part of their assessment”.

The consultation is seeking views on “whether such papers should be provided and, if so, what form they should take”.

One question being considered is whether the papers could use materials from past papers. The consultation also asks when the papers should be made available and whether their use should be mandated.

The use of such papers “would support consistency within and between schools and colleges”, Ofqual said.

“The teacher, through the marking of the papers, could consider the evidence of the student’s work and use that to inform their assessment of the grade deserved. The exam boards could also sample teachers’ marking as part of the external quality assurance arrangements and to seek to ensure this was comparable across different types of school and college, wherever students are studying. The use of exam board papers could also help with appeals.”

Ofqual is also proposing that teachers should draw on a “range of broader evidence of a student’s work in making their final assessment”, and that all students should be able to appeal their grades.

Under the proposed plan, students would be assessed by their teachers in a period beginning in May into early June. Teachers would then submit grades to the exam boards by the middle of June.

External quality assurance by the exam boards would be “ongoing” throughout June and results would be issued to students once that process is complete – most likely in early July. Students could then appeal immediately following the issue of results, and appeals would first be considered by schools and colleges.

 

Vocational and technical qualifications

Ofqual says that where practical exams and assessments which are “required to demonstrate occupational competence for employment and apprenticeships” should “continue to take place throughout the academic year where they can be delivered in line with public health guidelines, including remotely”.

Where these assessment cannot be delivered safely, they should be delayed.

The consultation then states that VTQs which received calculated results in summer 2020 should “fall in scope” of the proposed policy for replacing GCSE and A-level exams this summer.

Under Ofqual’s existing regulatory arrangements – The Extended Extraordinary Regulatory Framework (Extended ERF) which it introduced in October 2020 – awarding organisations have the flexibility to adapt their assessments and qualifications to mitigate against the disruption the pandemic has caused.

Ofqual is now proposing to issue a revised version of the Extended ERF. This would allow awarding organisations to “continue to offer adapted assessments for those qualifications in scope, and award qualifications where exams have not taken place and learners have not been able to complete all other assessments”.

The consultation document suggests that calculated results could be used where assessments cannot be sat, including for functional skills. FE Week is seeking clarity from Ofqual on this point.