Jane Ide, Chief executive, Creative & Cultural Skills
Start date: November 2020
Current job: Chief executive, NAVCA
Interesting fact: Formerly a registrar of births, deaths, and marriages, she oversaw the marriages of a reformed bigamist, a Catholic priest, and the lead singer of Def Leppard (though not all on the same day)
Jim Sharpe, Principal, Dv8 Sussex
Start date: September 2020
Previous job: Principal, East Sussex College Hastings
Interesting fact: He is a keen south coast surfer
Air Commodore Suzanne Natalie Perkins CBE, Principal, Brockenhurst College
Start date: January 2021
Current job: Deputy commander and chief of staff, British Forces Cyprus
Interesting fact: She has recently been awarded a CBE in the delayed Queen’s Birthday Honours for her contribution in Cyprus and to the RAF over more than 30 years
The digital skills bootcamps announced with the prime minister’s Lifetime Skills Guarantee could lead to adult education budget provision being elbowed aside by training paid for through the National Skills Fund.
A total of £8 million is being spent on the short courses in IT subjects such as cloud services, digital for advanced manufacturing and cyber security with links to job interviews to help people aged 19 and over gain employment in the digital sector.
“We are going to change that right now,” he promised, saying that at the bootcamps, “you can learn IT whatever your age”.
At first, bootcamps will be funded through the Department for Education’s (DfE) unallocated resources; with a further expansion, which will include sectors such as construction and engineering, being paid for using the National Skills Fund from April.
The bootcamps build on pilot programmes run by the West Midlands and Greater Manchester combined authorities with established providers such as Dudley College and QA.
The first wave will be run by those two authorities as well as Lancashire Digital Skills Partnership and Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, and will shortly be joined by a second wave of providers in west Yorkshire, the south-west, and Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.
Speaking this week at an FE Week roundtable on the Lifetime Skills Guarantee, skills minister Gillian Keegan emphasised the employability, rather than educational, purpose of the bootcamps: “It’s 12 to 16 weeks, so it’s quite intensive training, and is really trying to get people to get some quite valuable skills, which will lead them to employment in the digital sector and digital-based roles in particular.”
Bootcamps are just one of the already announced programmes being paid for over five years by the £2.5 billion National Skills Fund, which will also cover an entitlement to a first, full level 3 qualification for every adult, and now the National Retraining Scheme.
That is on top of a series of initiatives to triple traineeship starts in 2021. A tender went out last week from the DfE inviting bids for providers to start delivering traineeships for 19-to-24-year-olds.
Unlike adult education budget provision, the DfE has set much stricter stipulations on how these bootcamps ought to be run, mandating the length, linked job interview and subject focus.
Bootcamps could also be subject to quality checks as stringent as those for AEB courses, as Ofsted has said it will be reviewing, with the DfE, “whether such programmes would fall into our inspection scope in future”.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson uses a trowel to build a brick wall during a visit to Exeter College, where he made a speech outlining the Lifetime Skills Guarantee
The DfE will be using information the bootcamps gather to inform the design and delivery of the National Skills Fund, and FE Week understands the bootcamps have been divided into a first wave for local authorities, and a second wave, where the DfE tendered for providers directly, to test which model works better, ahead of the expansion next year.
Recruitment for the bootcamps started on September 29 and the courses must be completed by the end of March.
The pilot project West Midlands Combined Authority’s (WMCA) bootcamps are building on was called the Beat The Bot fund, run with £5 million from the National Retraining Fund.
This programme involves 20 providers training local people to move into tech jobs, or to retrain if they are at threat from redundancy due to automation.
One of the participating providers was Dudley College, which delivered tutelage in areas such as coding and digital media to over 140 people.
Running from March to July, it was delivered in a number of ways: across four weeks for full-time learners, and 16 weeks for part-time learners.
“Early evaluation indicates the programme was highly valued by learners,” a college spokesperson said, but “a full review is now taking place so lessons learned can inform future activity”.
The WMCA has been given £1.5 million by the DfE to run these new bootcamps, which the authority says will reach “hundreds” of people.
How intensive the bootcamp will be will vary between each of its 20 component courses, which include full-time, part-time and remote training, with a mix of faceto-face and online sessions – adapted for Covid-19.
The GMCA, meanwhile, has said it will announce the funded projects for the next bootcamps by mid- to late October, and they will be paid for with £1.5 million from the DfE.
Their key requirements, a spokesperson said, will be to deliver the skills and wider competencies that employers require to recruit to specialist digital roles and that a learner gets a job at the end.
Training does not need to be qualification-based or accredited, though it can be if that is important to enter employment.
The bootcamps will have a mix of online and face-to-face learning and will be taught in smaller groups than those for AEB-funded provision as the new courses will be much more focused on work-readiness.
GMCA’s original programme, the Fast Track Digital Workforce Fund, was run in partnership with the Lancashire Digital Skills Partnership, and was funded with £3 million from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Although Covid-19 has created “significant and widespread challenges in the employment market”, the spokesperson said around one-fifth of learners have progressed into employment from the course.
Technical skills training provider QA was one of those involved in delivering GMCA’s pilot. Sales director Adam Jones told FE Week said it was a 12-week programme which taught participants, for example, how to work on operating systems such as Linux and the software development tool Jenkins.
“These are all really specific technologies with established skill shortages within the Lancashire and Greater Manchester region.”
Adam Jones
He stressed the importance of attracting and recruiting candidates as “just as important a part of meeting the digital skills gap need as the training intervention itself”.
The Lancashire Skills Partnership, which is delivering the bootcamp for their county, worked with GMCA on its pilot, but said they are “excited to work with the DfE digital bootcamp programme to extend this work and support even more residents”.
The development and running of their bootcamps will run along the same lines as GMCA, and the DfE has said Lancashire will share the funds allocated to Manchester, but would not say how much they would be given.
Liverpool City Region Combined Authority will be running bootcamps with £1 million in funding, and providers can register their interest in taking part via the Digital Skills for the Workplace website.
“We are very keen to hear from creative and proactive providers who can work with us to provide training content that will meet the needs of our regional employers and the individuals seeking to re enter the workplace,” a spokesperson said.
Once they believe they have the supply to meet employer demand, the registration process will be closed.
What is required by employers will dictate many aspects of their course, including the intensity and the delivery method of the course, even down to the number of people who take part: if employer demands are quite expensive, fewer people can take part.
The DfE has said it will announce which providers will deliver the second wave of digital skills bootcamps early next month.
Employers, local authorities and providers had to bid as a group for the £4 million contract by October 2.
Successful bidders have to design and deliver training courses of around 12 weeks to “provide a pipeline of individuals” to guaranteed interviews with employers.
The DfE “expects” at least 75 per cent of learners will move into a new job or role, the document states.
One organisation which took part in a bid, for the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire leg, was the D2N2 local enterprise partnership.
Head of people and skills Rachel Quinn said the bid they are part of has 20 providers lined up to deliver a 12-week course, which they hope will reach up to 800 people.
She added: “There is a clear steer that this should absolutely focus on identified skills shortages, thereby maximising the impact the funding can make in securing progressions. In D2N2 we are specifically including aims to increase female participation.”
The Department for Education looks to have relaxed the requirement for public bodies to publish their progress towards the 2.3 per cent apprenticeship target, claiming it is merely “good practice”.
It comes after FE Week found scores of multi-academy trusts, councils and hospital trusts had failed to publicise what percentage of their staff had started an apprenticeship in 2019-20 on their websites by the deadline set by government.
Since the apprenticeship levy was introduced in 2017, public sector bodies with 250 or more staff in England have had a target to employ an average of at least 2.3 per cent of their staff as new apprentice starts over the period of April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2021.
Under statutory guidance, the bodies must report their annual progress to government and make the information “easily accessible to the public”, for example, on their website.
The data for how many apprentices start at each body is due on September 30 each year.
Where they do not, the Department for Education should hold them “fully accountable”, he demanded.
Robert Halfon
However, representative bodies have called on the government to ease off enforcing the rule owing to the pressures the public sector is facing from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite its own rules, the Department for Education told FE Week that while public bodies “must” report the data to central government so that overall performance against the target can be published, it was simply “good practice” for the bodies to publish their own data on their website.
Recognising the challenges organisations are facing this year, the department also said that where data is submitted after September 30, “we will endeavour to take account of it when we publish annual performance data in November”.
Out of the 20 largest academy trusts in England, FE Week could only find the data for one trust in the first week of October.
United Learning, the largest multi-academy trust, which has 72 academies and even has a former Department for Education director general – Jon Coles – as its chief executive, was one of the trusts not complying with the DfE’s rules. A spokesperson said the trust makes the information available “on request” and reports the data annually to the Education and Skills Funding Agency.
The general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders union, Geoff Barton (pictured), said he imagines MATs have not hit the deadline as “they are having to spin so many plates at the moment to manage Covid safety measures, keep their schools open, and reintegrate children back into the classroom”.
He would expect the government to be conscious of these “huge pressures”, and called on the DfE, which enforces the data publication rules, “not to insist upon fairly arcane accountability measures being met to the letter”.
The one trust that did publish its data, Delta Academies Trust, had a workforce of 3,208 as of March 31, 2020 and 0.56 per cent of those were apprentices. A spokesperson said that while they were able to publish the data on time, this “clearly continues to be an exceptionally busy period for everyone working in schools” so it was “inevitable” that some work would be delayed.
Aside from MATs, FE Week also looked at a random sample of local councils in the first week of October and could only find up-to-date apprenticeship target data for one of them, Cornwall Council.
A spokesperson for the Local Government Association, which represents councils nationally, said it encourages councils to publish their progress, and while the LGA does not have a position on whether the rules should be relaxed during the crisis, “we do recognise councils have competing priorities at the moment”.
A random sample of five hospital trusts again only turned up figures on apprenticeships for one organisation, University College London Hospitals.
Health Education England, which commissions apprenticeship training in the health service, said it “does encourage trusts to publish their figures, but clearly there could be delays given current circumstances”.
Those of us who have been offering free partial qualifications and short courses for years know how crucial they are, writes Kurt Hintz
Not all of Boris Johnson’s “radical” changes to further education are that new. They’re welcome – but let’s get them right.
His biggest announcement was that adults over the age of 23 in England without a full level 3 qualification can get one for free from April.
However, the announcement does not include partial qualifications or unitised provision used on short courses. This is a huge missed opportunity.
We at Capital City College Group (CCCG) know how important this is, because we already offer all our courses for free up to level 2 for adults and free short courses up to level 3 at our three colleges across London. We’ve learned a few things.
When I was vice principal of the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London (CONEL), we saw the number of adults entering education dropping every year from 2014.
For many learners, a free short course is just the start
For people on the lowest incomes having to pay for their education, the choice was stark – either pay the rent or pay for a course. This is no choice at all. Our adult enrolments kept falling.
By 2016, the most common search term on our website was “free course” so it was clear the appetite for learning was as strong as ever, but cost was the barrier.
A small but important change in funding rules for adults in August 2018 meant that anyone below the minimum wage could get a fully funded course. That was the catalyst we needed.
With many of our learners on low incomes, we did the maths and took the decision to offer all courses up to level 2 for free regardless of people’s circumstances, even if they weren’t on the minimum wage.
In September 2018, CONEL announced itself as London’s first free college. Later that academic year we also began running hundreds of free short evening, daytime and weekend courses.
Thousands applied for free courses in the first year, from accounting and engineering to healthcare and science, and the college’s enrolments increased by one-third.
I used to despair when I walked down our empty corridors in the evening, but suddenly the life of the community returned and the corridors were as busy at 6pm as they were at 9am.
The huge success of our free courses has seen them extended to the other two colleges in the group, City and Islington College and Westminster Kingsway College.
For many learners, a free short course is just the start. Nearly half of ours have used them as a springboard for higher level courses. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of short course enrolments have been in STEM subjects.
One of those formerly on a short level 3 free course with us is now running her own plumbing business and has even returned to CONEL to help teach the course!
So in a way, the government’s decision to offer fully funded courses up to level 3 is a vindication of the work we have been doing locally for several years.
It is more urgent than ever now, with universal credit claims in some of the boroughs that our colleges work in up by 300 per cent.
But many adults will now want something short and sharp to get them into a ‘lifeboat job’ before committing to a more significant qualification for full reskilling.
That makes it critical that Boris Johnson includes partial qualifications or short courses in his full-funding pledge. Otherwise he could seriously fail to hit the mark.
We’d also like the funding to be allocated to the local adult education budget (which in London is devolved to the mayor) and not the National Skills Fund. This would offer more local accountability and make it easier for colleges to access the money.
Meanwhile, the funds must be urgently made available – much sooner than April.
A focus on removing financial barriers is a very welcome shift from government. But let’s learn from where this is already happening and get this right.
The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education is right to remove duplication from apprenticeship assessment, writes Iain Mackinnon
Despite all the effort that goes into safety, 13 British seafarers lost their lives at work last year. Absolutely nobody in our sector is looking to weaken the scrutiny of apprentices’ learning, but what makes no sense to us is for two different government-backed regulators to go over the same ground.
That’s why we very much welcome yesterday’s announcement by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) that for some occupations it is looking into how to align its end-point assessment requirements with those of other regulators.
It’s why we have been working with the IfATE since the beginning of this year (and talking for longer) about how they can recognise the existing assessment regime of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), our regulator.
And it’s why I convened a meeting at the MCA’s office in Southampton in February so that three representatives of the IfATE and a senior MCA policymaker could understand the different, but certainly complementary, requirements they each apply.
Both organisations want to be sure that apprentices are competent (which, for the MCA, very much means “and safe”). Both have robust mechanisms for testing, at the end of a period of training, whether an apprentice is competent. Both want those tests to be rigorous and unbiased, fair to the individual and to their employer. Neither has any self-interest in any particular individual passing or failing (both are Government agencies after all) – so, to answer one query raised in FE Week’s article – there is not the slightest prospect here of anyone “marking their own homework”.
But neither, also, have much scope to recognise the other and simply accept their assessment. What we’ve been talking about since is how that might be done.
The MCA is an agency of the Department for Transport and the modern face of a regulatory regime for British seafarers which goes back to the Middle Ages, today applying rules set by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) (the only UN body with its headquarters in Britain).
Because those rules are enshrined in international law the MCA cannot say to the IMO – during its five-yearly audit, for example – “we let the IfATE assess these people for us because they want very much the same as us and also have strict rules”. Any more than the IfATE can say to DfE “we let the MCA assess these people for us because they want very much the same as us and also have strict rules”.
Caught in the middle of course is the apprentice (and their employer), tearing their hair out that two agencies of the same government with closely-aligned ambitions cannot find a way to work together.
Meanwhile, duplication it is.
If you are an apprentice Boatmaster training for a job as skipper of a large pleasure boat on the river Thames, you first do the IfATE-approved end-point assessment – a practical observation and a professional interview (“oral” is the maritime word for very well-established practice) – and then to get your licence to practice as a Boatmaster you must also go to the MCA for, yes, you guessed it – a practical observation and an Oral.
Unless you get your Boatmaster licence from the MCA you cannot work as a boatmaster. Unless you pass the EPA as well the apprenticeship is void.
We appreciate that there are some awkward issues for the IfATE to work through internally, particularly as it is a new body. We support its ambition to set high standards, and very much don’t want them compromised. We’re looking for the eradication of duplication, not to be let off lightly.
So discussions are taking a while, and that’s frustrating for employers who want to crack on, in a couple of cases to create a wholly new apprenticeship. But the IfATE are good partners, listening carefully to tease out the differences between different occupations. We are confident that we’ll get to a good solution – and impatient to see it.
New Institutes of Technology (IoTs) will require greater collaboration between colleges and set more ambitious student recruitment targets, FE Week can reveal.
A bidding process for wave two, to open a further eight IoTs, on top of the 12 existing institutes, was launched by education secretary Gavin Williamson (pictured) last week with the backing of £120 million.
The goal is to ensure every area of the country has an IoT, after FE Week revealed that wave one had left a number of cold spots. The Department for Education plans to announce winners of the current twostage procurement in summer 2021, with the rollout of the successful bids to get under way that autumn.
Tender documents, not available in the public domain but obtained by this publication, show that eligibility criteria have been bolstered this time round.
One of the most notable changes is that all bids must now have at least two FE and three employer “core” partners, along with one university. Wave one applications only required one FE provider and two employers to be what the DfE then called “anchor” partners.
Four successful bids in wave one involved only one FE partner. These were bids led by: Barking and Dagenham College; Dudley College; HCUC (Harrow College and Uxbridge College); and Queen Mary University of London.
Student number targets have also been increased, from a goal of achieving 1,000 learners by the end of the fifth academic year for wave one IoTs, to 1,500 for wave two. Last week, FE Week revealed that Covid-19 was being blamed for recruitment concerns among wave one IoTs.
Other changes to eligibility criteria include setting a target of 85 per cent of provision at level 4 and above by the end of year five of each IoT’s operation (up from 80 per cent in wave one), and only allowing bids from areas of the country that do not currently have an IoT.
As with wave one, each FE core partner must be rated at least ‘good’ by Ofsted, and they will also need to meet the DfE’s definition of being “financially credible” – which will be detailed in stage two of the bidding process.
A DfE spokesperson confirmed that the eligibility requirements “have been strengthened” and developed “based on the typical wave one IoT performance and wider lessons learnt”.
“We have developed the guidance in close consultation with the sector, including the eligibility conditions,” the spokesperson added. “They have raised no significant concerns around meeting the wave two eligibility conditions.”
Julian Gravatt, deputy chief executive at the Association of Colleges, said it is “too early to tell” if these additional requirements will cause a problem.
He told FE Week: “Colleges have made a good start with the first wave of IoTs but the DfE requirements were already quite complicated and this contributed to the long period of time between the invitations to bid in 2018 and the launch in 2020.
“It’s too early to say that these additional requirements are a problem, particularly as the latest prospectus provides more detail on other issues, but let’s hope that the DfE can stick to the newer timetable to get the wave two institutes up and running by 2021/22.”
IoTs are a flagship government programme. They involve collaboration between colleges, universities and employers, and specialise in delivering higher level technical training at level 4 and 5 in STEM subjects, including digital, advanced manufacturing and engineering.
The decision to open up a further eight was announced at the Conservative Party conference last year after FE Week revealed geographical issues with the first 12 IoTs – there were none planned for the north-west and the east of England.
Bids for wave two will only be open to parts of the country without an IoT, including the north-west, Midlands, east of England and parts of the south-east.
The deadline for applications is noon on December 14, 2020.
A multi-million-pound flagship national retraining service has been scrapped by the Department for Education after several mayors, including London’s, declined the opportunity to take part, FE Week can reveal.
The Get Help to Retrain website was the first of several “products” planned to make up the national retraining scheme pilot, which was announced to much fanfare in the 2017 budget with the backing of £100 million.
The Get Help to Retrain website, which acted as a course and job directory, took two years to get off the ground and then was only piloted in six areas of England.
On October 15, the DfE added a note to the website that reads: “This service will no longer be available from November 11, 2020. You can continue to access services for support with skills and training through the National Careers Service.”
Tender documents suggest the firm chosen to pilot the Get Help to Retrain website held a nine-month contract for £1.8 million, which started in May 2019.
Around 3,600 people used the website, according to the government, but their outcomes, such as enrolling on a maths or English course, are not known because the site does not capture contact information.
The DfE confirmed to FE Week the service would now cease to exist following a move to merge the national retraining scheme with the £2.5 billion national skills fund to “reduce complexity” in the skills system.
The news comes just weeks after prime minister Boris Johnson announced major plans for a Lifetime Skills Guarantee to help adults retrain.
But it appears the writing was on the wall for Get Help to Retrain six months ago.
Tender documents seen by this publication show that plans were afoot to roll out the Get Help to Retrain nationally as well as to develop a “find and apply for a job” service at a cost of between £5 million and £6 million.
And according to the national retraining scheme timeline (pictured in full below) there would be further tenders for the remaining products, which never materialised, at a total cost of £20 million over the next 24 months.
FE Week has spoken to insiders close to Get Help to Retrain who said the DfE had approached various regions of the country asking them to sign up to the service, but relevant authorities rejected the pleas after hearing that it had faltered in pilot areas.
The Greater London Authority is one of those areas and confirmed that “we didn’t feel the pilot would add value beyond the important [adult education] work already being done in the capital”.
The DfE said it chose to pause the further rollout of Get Help to Retrain at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic but that it remained open to users in the six existing locations.
The department would not say how much funding has been spent on the service overall.
A spokesperson said the digital tool was developed to “support individuals who may be at risk of losing their job as a result of automation” and that while this is “still a challenge”, DfE needed to “refocus” its efforts following Covid-19 to “make sure as many adults as possible are supported to gain the skills that we know employers value and that will in turn help our economy to recover”.
Sector leaders have hit out at the government over the fiasco, insisting the funding would have been better spent on existing and proven provision.
Labour’s shadow apprenticeships and lifelong learning minister Toby Perkins said this is “another example of the government devoting a great deal of time and resources to a scheme that has been made available to a tiny minority of individuals, whilst largely neglecting the rest of the sector”.
Association of Employment and Learning Providers managing director Jane Hickie said that after the “disastrous” employer ownership pilots under the coalition government, there were “always going to be serious questions about repeating something similar, and AELP is not at all surprised that a line has been drawn on another sorry chapter for skills initiatives”.
Susan Pember, a former director of FE at the DfE and now policy director of adult education network HOLEX, added: “Although I can appreciate why DfE were keen to establish a new targeted education programme to reach the adult learners who most needed support, it would have been more effective and a better use of public funds to go through the established routes, such as the adult education budget.”
Susan Pember
Get Help to Retrain allowed users to identify and input their current skills and then based on those skills, offer suggestions for training and alternative employment. The service then directed users to vacancies in their area based on the suggestions provided.
It was trialled in the West Midlands, the north-east, Liverpool City Region, Leeds City Region, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority, and the Heart of the South West LEP.
But a “question and answer” pack with the tender documents for expanding the service from earlier this year suggested the government did not have a tight grip on its plans.
“Products are not yet very clearly defined. We have a theory of change we are developing, which involves a lot of assumption testing throughout the lifecycle to get the outcome we want,” it said.
“In terms of departmental digital maturity, we are more reliant on suppliers than we would like at this point… The department is open to what the solutions look like.”
The Confederation of British Industry and Trades Union Congress were key partners in the development of Get Help to Retrain and the national retraining scheme more generally. But neither would shed more light on the decision to scrap the service.
Matthew Percival, CBI people and skills director, said: “The government’s engagement with businesses and trade unions provided key insight into individual retraining needs. The National Skills Fund must build on the National Retraining Scheme pilots, adding investment in skills provision as well as helping learners to navigate the system.”
TUC head of organising and services, Kevin Rowan, said: “A crucial part of the design of the National Retraining Scheme was the partnership between government, business and unions. This must be continued through the National Skills Fund.”
The DfE said they are considering how they can provide further details of how else the £100 million earmarked for the national retraining scheme has been spent.
A spokesperson told FE Week that the “valuable insights and evidence we have gathered, and the engagement we have had with employers and stakeholders” from the scheme has “already helped inform the development of new initiatives” including The Skills Toolkit (a page on the National Careers Service website that signposts visitors to existing free courses) and “digital bootcamps” announced by the prime minister last month.
“We now have an opportunity to build on this further by using the evidence and insights to help shape the National Skills Fund and make sure everyone can get the skills they need, at every stage of their life,” they added.
A college representative body has marked the start of an annual celebration of the sector with a survey highlighting the plight of small-to-medium enterprises trying to access skilled personnel and training for employees.
A survey of 503 such businesses by the Association of Colleges (AoC) comes ahead of Colleges Week on Monday, and as education secretary Gavin Williamson thanked college leaders and staff “for their dedicated efforts during these unprecedented times”.
Forty per cent of SMEs were found by the survey, conducted by Opinium, to believe it is more difficult to find employees with the right skills now than it was five years ago.
Meanwhile, 53 per cent do not think enough is being done to help their businesses skill and reskill their workforce as Britain nears the end of Brexit transition period in December.
Once that transition period ends, 45 per cent believe it will become even more difficult to hire people with the right skills.
But Brexit has been supplanted as businesses’ greatest worry by Covid-19, with 53 per cent citing the virus as most present on their minds.
“Skills gaps did not emerge in this pandemic,” says AoC chief executive David Hughes, “they are long-standing challenges that have been exacerbated by Covid-19 and the UK nearing the end of the transition period”.
David Hughes
Forty-four per cent say the skills gap in their sector is likely to increase because of threats like the virus, and 54 per cent believe they will need to train workers to adapt to it.
This need has been reinforced by the British Chambers of Commerce head of people policy Jane Gratton, who said employers will need to invest in upskilling and reskilling their workforce “to remain competitive in a global business environment”.
She added that the business communities want to see a “more agile” skills system, which is “more responsive” to their training needs.
Colleges are “key to boosting skills levels,” she said and the SMEs agree: more of them would turn to colleges to train their staff than would turn to universities or online learning.
Hughes commended the government for committing to prioritising skills, following announcements of £1.5 billion in college capital funding and the £2.5 billion National Skills Fund, but said: “We need the investment to flow quickly to the right people and places. People and businesses need skills and training as an urgent priority if they are going to survive the coming months and thrive in the coming years.”
Williamson acknowledged it had been a “difficult and uncertain time for businesses, particularly SMEs”.
“We need to make sure we can unlock talent in every corner of the country, which is why the prime minister announced the Lifetime Skills Guarantee.”
Colleges Week, a national celebration of the college sector, is this year running between October 19 and 23.
Each day of the week will revolve around a theme, including rebuilding the economy and responding to Covid-19.
To mark it, Williamson has said the sector has “gone above and beyond to make sure their students are supported, can continue learning and return to onsite delivery”.
Colleges, he added, would be at the “centre” of the effort to “teach the skills that learners and communities need, while also matching businesses with the talent they need for the future”.
As well as local events colleges will be running, there will be a debate in the House of Commons on “the role of colleges in a skills-led recovery”, hosted by Peter Aldous MP, vice chair of the all-party parliamentary group for further education and lifelong learning.
The chair of the education select committee Robert Halfon has also put forward a motion for the House to “recognise the unique role that colleges play in supporting people, employers and communities”.
Colleges in high and very high Covid-19 risk areas will be forced to close entire campuses to cater for “substantially high” GCSE resit student exams in November, the Association of Colleges has warned.
In a letter to schools minister Nick Gibb today, AoC chief executive David Hughes (pictured) said the resits for maths and English pose “potential public health risks”.
He explained that normally there are over 50,000 GCSE English and maths college entries in each subject in November, but a number of colleges and awarding organisations were reporting “substantially higher entries” for next month, with several in the “500 plus bracket”.
Many of those colleges are in “high or very high tier areas in the North West, Yorkshire and West Midlands”, Hughes continued, saying that while they will apply the social distancing and health measures, for “many” it will result in the “closure of entire campuses to other students on the exam days to manage numbers safely”.
“Controlling entry and exit points will be a particular issue because exams have fixed start and end times.”
Hughes added: “We have serious concerns about the potential public health risks this presents and would welcome urgent discussion about whether going ahead with this series of exams is the right thing to do.”
Earlier this week, advice made on 21 September by scientists from the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) was released and recommended that teaching at all colleges and universities should be online unless “face-to-face teaching is absolutely essential”. The government has since maintained that all colleges should stay open for face-to-face delivery.
Hughes said the rapid spread of the coronavirus second wave, and the SAGE advice “are worrying college leaders who want to make the right balance between safety of students and supporting them to take these [resit] exams.
“If the November resits do go ahead, we would welcome a rapid review of the guidance, particularly for the highest risk areas and I would ask you to extend the support funding available for the autumn series to include post-16 ‘Condition of Funding’ (resit) candidates.”
The general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders union, Geoff Barton (pictured), said he imagines MATs have not hit the deadline as “they are having to spin so many plates at the moment to manage Covid safety measures, keep their schools open, and reintegrate children back into the classroom”.
