The pandemic is forcing us to adopt new ways of working, and if we remain flexible, we have much to learn from the emergency procedures we have had to put in place, writes Paul Phillips.

A great tidal wave of change is leaving no part of our sector untouched, and those who are found to be too unyielding will snap. Like so many reeds in its path, the key to success is flexibility. For example, I always thought I was an accessible principal, but my newly acquired skills in digital communication have opened up new avenues.

Meanwhile, my staff have gone above and beyond looking for new openings every time a door closes.

Life’s entrepreneurs are emerging from all areas of the college, and the best testament to that is that learners from local academies want to join our online provision.

Weston College is relatively unique in its composition, so we spin a lot of plates. Frankly, it makes life difficult from a training offer perspective, but it is a good insurance if one plate breaks, which is sadly inevitable.

Our planning uses a multifactorial set of indices, including an almost pick-and-mix approach for learners and employers. That’s why, on top of transforming and sustaining our provision, we are also able to deliver vital training and resources to help the NHS, and why many of our staff and learners (many of them young apprentices) are able to be on the frontline delivering desperately needed health and social care support.

As a sector, we are more than used to managing crises

The question on everyone’s minds is what we’re going to do when we reopen. We are already on to that, and we have gone back to grassroots to plan. There is inevitable change ahead, and while the current period is no walk in the park, the near future will not be a time for the fainthearted.

Before my career in colleges, I ran hotels, NHS research and businesses, and I have learned that planning strategically is always about starting with a blank sheet of paper, analysing the benchmark issues and making your desired destination explicit. For now, planning through the impacts of Covid-19 is more reminiscent of those cookery programmes where you are given a couple of ingredients and asked to concoct something special in record time. But the stakes are high, and we shouldn’t underestimate the mental health impacts, both of our immediate situation and as we return and readapt to a new era for FE.

As a sector, we are more than used to managing crises, delivering against all odds and taking calculated risks. That’s why I am sure we will survive this.

But Covid-19 is not an excuse for finding ourselves in a difficult situation: it is the catalyst for change. Of course, there will be a tendency to blame the pandemic for not achieving some targets.

For example, I don’t think we will hit target on 16-to-19 this year, simply because our NEET and traineeship provision has been hit.

But equally, our adult provision is doing very well out of the expansion of distance learning, and we’ve already noticed healthy green shoots of success in our digital mindshift. Moreover, recognition of the potential of a new digital college is impacting other key issues: minimising bureaucracy, producing succinct remote solutions for teaching and learning, and a more in-depth questioning of work-life balance.

Could this lateral thinking also engender change with funding and quality regimes?

When I first came to the college, self-belief was at a low ebb. A few years later, one of my team commented that I had instituted change by “dragging them into a new era”. This time, all together, we are riding a tsunami of change. Of course there is trepidation and excitement in response, but if you take the time to notice it, a lot of creativity too.

When the wave rolls back, we will find there’s a whole new breed of digital college in town – more flexible and more robust, more community-centred and more self-assured. Because nothing, least of all a virus, should threaten our responsibility to deliver outstanding teaching and learning.

Financially vulnerable people without household internet access are unable to access remote learning during the Covid-19 crisis, writes Anna Ambrose.

The move to remote learning in response to the Covid-19 crisis has been a moment of profound evolution for the adult skills sector. The extent to which online platforms were being used to deliver learning varied between providers before the start of March, rendering the level of readiness for such unexpected events hugely variable.

The sector has responded with a move en masse to digital delivery in an impressive effort to sustain training provision. As is the case in many a crisis, we may well look back and reflect that this moment accelerated a trend that was already in train.

In apprenticeships, an increase in remote learning could be particularly attractive to employers looking for more flexible ways to incorporate the required 20 per cent off-the-job training. This is a positive
development, because retaining apprentices and offering new apprenticeships will be of key importance for businesses and individuals once the recovery from this crisis is under way. The London Progression Collaboration (LPC), the initiative I lead, supports London employers to offer and sustain apprenticeships in the badly hit retail, hospitality and construction sectors. Their need for the right people with the right skills will be paramount.

However, the think-tank IPPR, which hosts the LPC, last week highlighted the extent to which the delivery of remote teaching to the nation’s school-age children risks widening the persistent gaps in achievement between disadvantaged young people and their better-off peers. So too, this move in adult learning risks
leaving behind those already experiencing in-work poverty and other disadvantages.

Whilst the ONS found that 99 per cent of UK adults were recent internet users in 2019, this disguises the fact that a proportion of this internet use takes place outside the home. Around one in ten adults does not have internet access of any form at home on any device, rising to almost one-third of those categorised in the lowest two social grades.

Three in ten of the group classed by Ofcom as “most financially vulnerable” live in households without any internet access, while eight per cent have access only via a mobile phone.

While it’s easy to assume these stats are weighted towards older people, in fact more than onethird of 16-24-year-olds live in mobile-only households. Due to the ongoing lockdown restrictions, places such as libraries, colleges and cafes – where those without internet access can get online – are closed. That means that those who we most want to reach with apprenticeship levy funds and other skills investment will have real difficulties accessing online learning.

So, while it’s great news that many apprentices are able to continue their off-the-job learning while furloughed, without further support those with the most need and most to gain will simply be
unable to do so. Without action, a move to greater online vocational learning risks expanding the barriers to training and in-work progression.

The impact on other groups also needs serious consideration, in both the short and longer term. For those with some physical disabilities, remote learning could improve accessibility and indeed has been requested for some time; but for those with some learning difficulties there could be additional challenges in accessing content remotely. While colleges and other training providers offer support to learners to increase accessibility and inclusivity of courses in myriad ways, their resources are already stretched.

To avoid perpetuating the progression gap, funded support to access online provision is needed both during this crisis and beyond. The government must work with service providers to ensure sufficient free home internet access for learners on low incomes.

A digital access fund should be established to ensure all adult learners can benefit from remote learning with suitable connections and digital devices.

Once the Covid-19 crisis eases and the economy begins to reboot, businesses will look to these key individuals and their skills to bolster the recovery. Action now will determine if they are equipped to do so.

Unemployment is liable to jump sharply in the coming months. How should FE respond to the needs of young people and adults?

Young people tend to suffer worst when there is a recession and the labour market slackens. They find themselves competing with displaced adult workers, who can demonstrate relevant work experience to prospective employers. Research shows that employers are using experience as an increasingly important filter in the recruitment process, and are also ever keener to use various forms of work trials (agency work, internships, gig work) to assess the suitability of applicants for their workplace.

Transitions from learning to earning have lengthened, and become more precarious and uncertain. In other words, a major recession runs the danger of worsening pre-existing problems with the youth labour market.

For young people not going into HE, there is the added danger that under-employed graduates will cascade further down the occupational hierarchy, taking openings that might otherwise have gone to non-graduates.

What can FE and vocational skills providers do? First, be modest in what they promise. The past, not least the recession of the early 1980s, tells us that policy debates about youth unemployment often come to blame a “lack of skills”, despite the fact that the underlying cause is a lack of job openings for new entrants to the labour market, and adult workers losing their jobs as demand for the goods and services that their organisations deliver collapses.

Most Covid-19 unemployment will not primarily be due to lack of skills

The education system runs the danger of setting itself up to fail if it promises too much by way of its ability to ameliorate the employment impacts of Covid-19. If underlying demand for labour falls and policy fails to counteract this, most of what education can do is move individuals up and down a job queue for what limited openings are available. The majority of the unemployment created by Covid-19 will not primarily be due to individuals’ lack of skills.

What can be done presents itself as a fairly predictable list. Revitalise our mechanisms for tracking young people’s labour market outcomes and those at risk of becoming NEET.

Re-think the support we can give them in terms not just of careers advice and guidance, but also wider scaffolding for transitions, and ask some hard questions about DWP and Jobcentre Plus’s ability to deliver this.

Expand traineeship provision for those most at risk of becoming NEET, and look to government (national and local) to work with employers to create pathways into work experience and then work. Wage subsidies for young employees may be needed.

For adults, when it becomes clearer in which sectors and occupations employment growth potential resides, re-training and re/upskilling schemes (often probably delivered in bitesized chunks, rather than full qualifications) will be needed.

Two key resource constraints loom. The first is the public funding. Public finances will be under huge strain in the wake of the pandemic. Tax revenues will be sharply down, spending to shore up the economy sharply up. Universities have already constructed their initial pitch to the UK government for support to tide them over the looming collapse in the overseas student market, which has cross-subsidised large amounts of activity in HE.

The second is employers’ willingness to cooperate. Before Covid-19 struck, we had ambitious targets to expand apprenticeships, expand work experience for undergraduates and many other groups of students in FE and schools, as well as find the new T-level work placements. Employers in many sectors are disorganised and lack the means to work together on skills issues; and the levels of employer-provided workforce training have been falling steadily since the late 1990s.

New collective mechanisms to engage with employers will be needed, and a new consensus about the rights, roles and responsibilities of employers will have to be constructed.