Rapid mass coronavirus testing has been hailed as a potential “game changer” for keeping campuses open and courses running, as trials get under way in colleges.

A pilot that tests all students and staff, as much as once per day, began this week with the help of the army at the City of Liverpool College – as part of the country’s first city-wide mass testing scheme.

Newcastle Sixth Form College is also set to launch its own trial for staff and students using lateral flow tests, which give a result in less than an hour, on Monday as ministers develop plans for further field tests in education settings across the country.

The Department of Health and Social Care would not say how many colleges in total have been asked to participate in the trials, but principals have said the these will make a “huge” difference to keeping students in the classroom and in tackling the anxiety around keeping their sites open during the pandemic.

However, questions will be raised about how a wider rollout of the tests would be staffed, and a recent evaluation of the speedy antigen tests being used has prompted concerns that cases could be missed.

Speaking exclusively to FE Week following the launch of the government’s first mass testing pilot in Liverpool last week, health secretary Matthew Hancock said: “We should all applaud the level of collaboration we’re seeing in Liverpool between colleges, the council and NHS Test and Trace in a common mission to tackle coronavirus.

“We must learn from what goes well in Liverpool and roll it out across the country.”

Under the scheme, which involves around 2,000 army personnel, regular or repeat tests are offered to everyone, whether or not they have Covid-19 symptoms, in an effort to self-isolate those found to be infected and drive down the rate of transmission.

For schools and colleges, it also means that for students who have come into contact with someone who has Covid-19, instead of self-isolating at home for ten days they can be tested daily and continue to come into campus as long as they return a negative test.

The lateral flow tests involve a handheld kit that can produce a result within 15 minutes without the need for a lab. Fluid from a nasal swab or saliva goes on one end, then a marking appears if the person is positive.

A new Covid-19 testing site exclusively for the 500 staff and 12,000 students at the City of Liverpool College opened on Tuesday.

The British Army was deployed to open the site, which has the ability to conduct 84 tests per hour and will be running for 12 hours each day initially from November 10 to 16.

City of Liverpool College principal Elaine Bowker said: “As Liverpool’s largest college, we’re clear on our responsibility to contribute to the safety of our community.

“The wellbeing of our students and staff is our absolute priority, and we welcome the opportunity to take part in this mass testing pilot as a means of controlling the spread of coronavirus.”

After hearing about the mass testing trial in the college, Stuart Rimmer, chief executive of East Coast College in East Anglia, said: “We should welcome this step at City of Liverpool. If this approach could be rapidly scaled up for colleges nationwide it could be a game changer ahead of a vaccine, increasing staff and student confidence to fully participate in learning.”

The City of Liverpool College appears to be the only college in the city that has its own site.

Carol Nield, vice principal at Merseyside-based Hugh Baird College, told FE Week the college “would welcome the opportunity to participate in mass testing” but has not been approached to trial it by government.

She added that the college is “fully supportive” of the idea of mass testing in education as a “vehicle for keeping our communities safe and preventing the spread of Covid-19”.

While a city-wide trial is currently running in Liverpool, the government has announced it is issuing a further 600,000 tests to local authorities, with many choosing to deploy them to schools for mass testing of students.

Sign-off has almost been given for a mass testing site at Newcastle Sixth Form College in the north-east exclusively for its 1,223 students and 100 staff.

The college was approached by government officials last week and is waiting for official approval, expected on Friday, before beginning to test on Monday.

Principal Gerard Garvey told FE Week that he expects between 15 and 20 army personnel to be deployed to the college each day from Monday until Christmas to administer the tests.

The college plans to test each student and staff member who consents each week for the remaining five weeks of this term – which means they’ll conduct over 6,000 tests.

“For as long as they return a negative test, they will be able to come into college,” he said. “This will enable us to minimise the numbers who have to self-isolate when they are worried they have come into contact with somebody who has had a positive test.”

Garvey added that students were “excited” to be part of the trial because they have “seen the impact that coronavirus can have on their education and they want to help to reduce that impact”.

No discussions have yet been had about training staff to administer the tests, but the principal said they are straightforward and the army personnel will be there to “hand materials to the students and collect in samples”.

“It is a very short test and we think it will have a minimum impact on learners. They will be asked to come from class and return to class.”

Newcastle Sixth Form College will use a student IT open access room on the ground floor of its building because it is “easy for students to get to and runs an existing one-way system so we can control and easy route in and out to keep contact with others minimal”, Garvey continued.

He thinks the difference mass testing in college will make is “huge”.

“We have had just 23 student positive cases so far this year but this led to us having to self-isolate 130 students and work from home. We believe that with A-levels in particular, the best place for learners is in the classroom, with expert teacher guidance. The more learners we can continue to do that for will only benefit learners as they head towards exams in the summer.”

Garvey added that the testing should provide peace of mind for staff, students and parents: “There has been anxiety around the pandemic and I think our students and parents have felt reassured by the way we have been operating, but this pilot will give us an extra level of assurance for parents that we are looking to minimise, in particular, asymptomatic transmission. This benefits not just the college community, but the wider community in the north-east.”

Despite excitement around the rapid lateral flow Covid tests, a recent study by Public Health England and the University of Oxford found that while false positives were rare, the tests were found to have a 76.8 per cent sensitivity rate, meaning they do still miss nearly a quarter of cases.

On Thursday, a record 33,470 people tested positive for coronavirus in the government’s latest daily figure. It was the highest daily number since mass testing began in the UK, and brings the total number of cases to more than 1.29 million.

Schools and colleges are still waiting to hear if or when the lateral flow tests will be rolled out nationally, including how they would be staffed.

Association of Colleges chief executive David Hughes said he was “pleased to see colleges included in the mass testing pilots because reliable testing will augment the plans already in place”.

“With testing, we expect young people and adults to be even more confident about attending college face to face, allowing them to get the education and training they deserve,” he added.

A college has been praised by the FE Commissioner for making “significant strides” towards ensuring its campuses safe, after Ofsted accused it of safeguarding failures that led to a grade four.

Such improvements at Shrewsbury Colleges Group include employing additional security personnel as well as enforcing the wearing of lanyards by all students and staff.

The college was downgraded by Ofsted from ‘good’ to ‘inadequate’ in March, following an inspection in November found “not all students feel safe in the college,” and a small number of vulnerable students felt “intimidated” around the college.

Leaders and managers were criticised for having “not taken sufficient steps to help ensure the safety of students”, and were told to develop “as a matter of urgency” a detailed and effective safeguarding risk assessment for the college’s estates.

That ‘inadequate’ grade was challenged by the college group, but this fell flat following a second visit from Ofsted in March.

The subsequent grade four report triggered an intervention by FE Commissioner Richard Atkins, who assessed the college with his team through an onsite and a virtual visit in September.

His report, released today, said the college group’s leaders and board “responded well to the safeguarding issues that were raised by the Ofsted inspection and have improved onsite security”.

New measures, such as employing extra security and “consistently” enforcing the wearing of lanyards by all students and staff, means students say “they now feel safer and it is now not possible for unidentified persons to access the college sites”.

Additional security measures, such as barrier security in the car parks, are also in the pipeline, and funding received from the group’s partnership with grade one Newcastle and Stafford Colleges Group on the College Collaboration Fund will “seek to address any remaining challenges with safeguarding”.

In a letter attached to the report, dated for yesterday, apprenticeships and skills minister Gillian Keegan commended the “significant strides towards addressing areas for improvement identified by Ofsted”.

The college had to implement further safety measures for the Covid-19 pandemic, and the commissioner’s report says senior leadership “responded well” to measures which were observed during the intervention visit as “rigorous and appearing to be working well”.

Its finances were also assessed as being in good shape, with the board even predicting performance in 2020-21 will be “slightly improved”.

Principal James Staniforth said: “The commissioner’s report reflects the dedication of staff throughout the college in continuously improving safeguarding and their hard work to ensure the health, safety, and wellbeing of students during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The commissioner makes a number of recommendations in relation to strategic planning and leadership development that we are working through.

“We look forward to another visit by the commission in March 2021.”

The college has been handed a list of recommendations, including a new strategic plan, which must review its current designation as a sixth form college, and develop a comprehensive estates strategy.

The commissioner’s report said “significant” extra work is needed to “establish a single culture across the group which combines the expectations and culture of a sixth form college, with those of a general FE college”.

The “aging” estate also needs “significantly” more maintenance and investment, if “costly problems are not to be stored up for future years”.

Shrewsbury Colleges Group was formed in August 2016 from a merger of Shrewsbury Sixth Form College and Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology.

A-levels are delivered at two sixth form campuses in Shrewsbury town centre, while technical and vocational programmes are based at the former FE college site on the edge of town.

Six “leading skills and labour market economists” have today been appointed to the Department for Education’s new skills and productivity board.

Led by chair Stephen van Rooyen, an executive vice president at international broadcaster Sky, the team will aim to provide independent “expert advice” on how courses and qualifications should align to the skills that employers need post-Covid-19.

In a letter to the chair, education secretary Gavin Williamson said the board should prioritise answering the following questions over the next 12 months:

• Which areas of the economy face the most significant skills mismatches or present growing areas of skills need?
• Can the board identify the changing skills needs of several priority areas within the economy over the next 5-10 years?
• How can skills and the skills system promote productivity growth in areas of the country that are poorer performing economically?

The DfE will also “welcome the board’s advice on what ‘good’ looks like across the globe”.

Williamson said the evidence and analysis the board produces will play a “significant part in addressing the most pressing gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the labour market, helping to rebuild our economy post-Covid-19 and deliver a bold skills agenda”.

The six members are:

• Arun Advani – University of Warwick: Assistant Professor, IFS Fellow
• Claire Crawford – University of Birmingham: Reader in Economics
• Andrew Dickerson – University of Sheffield: Professor of Economics and Director of Sheffield Methods Institute
• Ewart Keep – Oxford University: Emeritus Professor in Education, Training and Skills, Department of Education Oxford University
• Grace Lordan – London School of Economics: Associate Professor & Founding Director of the Inclusion Initiative
• Sir Christopher Pissarides –London School of Economics: Regius Professor of Economics and Nobel laureate

Investigations by the government’s insolvency watchdog into the former leadership of two bankrupt colleges are still ongoing – as one of the individuals at the centre of the scandal takes up a role at the colleges’ former auditor.

The Insolvency Service confirmed this week its inquiry into the conduct of directors at Hadlow College and West Kent and Ashford College (WKAC), the first two colleges to enter education insolvency, last summer, are “continuing”.

It comes as the former deputy principal of both colleges, Mark Lumsdon-Taylor, has rejoined the accountancy firm MHA MacIntyre Hudson as a “senior corporate consultant”.

MacIntyre Hudson employed Lumsdon-Taylor from 1997 as an audit manager and director of education until 2003, before he moved to Hadlow, according to his LinkedIn profile. The accountancy firm was internal auditor for Hadlow and WKAC in the years leading up to its collapse.

The company was also the internal auditor for eight different colleges in 2018/19, and the external auditor for 11, according to the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s register of college accounts for that year.

It is not clear at this stage if Lumsdon-Taylor is back working in MacIntyre Hudson’s education department.

His LinkedIn profile says he has “returned to the financial corporate world in 2020 after stepping down following a 15-year career in rural business and education in which he built a £50 million institution employing over 1,000 staff and oversaw multi-million-pound investment and regeneration projects.

“As a result, Mark is seen as leader in the finance, HR, education and corporate landscapes.”

It also says he has been seconded as a chief financial officer for a “world-class business”, but does not specify the name of the company.

Lumsdon-Taylor declined to comment, saying he would only comment after the Insolvency Service’s investigations are complete. MacIntyre Hudson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

It was revealed in November last year the Insolvency Service would be investigating the “conduct of relevant personnel in the period leading up to the onset of insolvency”, after Hadlow entered administration in May 2019, followed by WKAC the following August.

If their investigation does find evidence of misconduct, and if it is in the public interest, the service may pursue enforcement measures, such as director disqualification.

They have a three-year window from the date of insolvency “within which to issue disqualification proceedings should there be evidence of wrongdoing”.

Administrators, which in the case of Hadlow and WKAC is BDO, have also prepared a report on the conduct of “relevant persons” at the colleges in the three years prior to administration, according to the latest administration progress reports for both colleges.

BDO could not say when the conduct report would be published.

The principal of both colleges Paul Hannan, Lumsdon-Taylor, the chairs of both colleges, as well as several governors, all resigned after having to apply for emergency funding from the government to keep the colleges open, as Hadlow had run up £40 million in debts, while WKAC owed over £100 million.

Last week, North Kent College confirmed 90 staff are at risk of redundancy under plans to cut 44 posts, following its takeover of Hadlow College and the West Kent campus of WKAC in August.

EKC Group (East Kent College) said it had cut three jobs when it closed a motor vehicle centre as part of its takeover of the Ashford campus and Hadlow’s Canterbury site in April.

Capel Manor College, which took over Hadlow’s Mottingham campus in January, confirmed it had not made any redundancies, nor does it plan to.

Pictured: Paul Hannan (standing) and Mark Lumsdon-Taylor

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Ministers are drawing up plans to extend a controversial cost-cutting advice scheme for schools into the FE sector.

According to a job advert posted last month, the Department for Education is recruiting an individual to “scope and design a brand new programme of work” aimed at “strengthening efficiency and value for money in further education”.

This would form the “next phase” of the department’s School Resource Management (SRM) strategy which will undergo a “formal relaunch” and form a new division in the DfE in early 2021.

The advert stated this is a “fast-paced, high-profile” area of work and a “top policy priority” for ministers and HM Treasury.

FE Week’s sister paper FE Week revealed in August 2018 how the DfE was to spend £2.3 million on up to 250 money-saving advisers who were parachuted into struggling schools to help them cut costs. This was part of a trial led by then-academies minister Lord Agnew, who is now a minister in the Treasury and Cabinet Office.

But the SRM consultants caused controversy, with FE Week reporting one school, for example, being advised to replace experienced teachers with support staff on term-time contracts, while another was urged to limit lunch portions for pupils.

An evaluation of the trial was published in January and revealed how during the visits, advisers found savings of £35 million across 72 schools and academy trusts. But they failed to identify savings at more than one in ten of the schools they visited.

The DfE would not reveal any more

details of how the SRM programme might work in further education. A spokesperson would only say that the department is “exploring how this approach can be applied to all parts of the sector to ensure every penny counts towards excellent educational outcomes for all”.

Stephen Morales, chief executive of the Institute of School Business Leadership (ISBL), which accredits SRM advisers, told FE Week it was always Agnew’s goal to expand the programme into all parts of the education sector, but said the move into FE was at “very, very early stages”.

“The DfE is developing the thinking that they developed for the mainstream schools sector into FE but it is super early,” he said.

“I don’t think they know what the controls would look like yet – so will it be retraining the existing army of SRM advisers, or will it be seeking those that have direct experience in the FE sector? They are a long way away from that.”

He added that that resource consultants are one aspect of the SRM strategy, which includes a “whole series of toolkits and benchmarking information that schools can use to compare themselves with similar schools”, that FE could get involved in.

Morales also said that the “formal relaunch” of the SRM strategy for schools is also in its early developments, and discussions around how much extra funding will be thrown at it or if any more advisers will be recruited are yet to happen.

He added that the emphasis on the SRM strategy has shifted under Lord Agnew’s successor Baroness Berridge away from the “cost-cutting, efficiency type narrative to one of reinvestment – so ‘let’s see where we can find potential savings and let’s look at resource optimisation to put back into the classroom’.”

But Julian Gravatt, deputy chief executive of the Association of Colleges, warned about the dangers of adding further oversight to an already complex FE system.

“The school resource management model is collaborative because it uses existing finance staff to advise their peers on good strategies,” he said.

“However, we already have a complex oversight, intervention and support system in colleges and the 100 published FE commissioner reports are full of financial management advice already.

“The priority in the next 12 months should be to simplify the external scrutiny and sort out funding arrangements so that those running colleges can get on and do what they need to do in the national interest.”

Julie McCulloch, director of policy at the Association of School and College Leaders, said that while the SRM scheme was “often helpful in schools” there were “misgivings about some of the advice given, and it will be important to ensure that lessons have been learned from this experience”.

The government is set to move closer to meeting a manifesto commitment to reform the higher education admissions process.

Earlier this week, UCAS put forward two new “radical” options, one of which is a “post-qualification offers” model where all students, including those on technical and vocational routes, would be offered college and university places at the same time, after their final qualification results in the summer. UCAS made clear this model was its preferred approach.

The other is a “post-qualification application” model, where all students would start the whole application process after their results came through. To allow time for their applications to be submitted, assessed, and for offers to be made and decided upon, the university term would need to begin in January.

Currently, applicants to college or university are given predicted grades by their current education provider, from which colleges and universities can decide whether to offer them “conditional” or “unconditional” offers, and the applicants can then rank their offers in order of preference.

This system has created concerns around the accuracy of predicted grades, especially for disadvantaged applicants whose grades are more likely to be under-predicted, and “conditional unconditional” offers, which offer applicants an unconditional place as long as that university is their first-preference choice.

Writing for FE Week, John Cope, director of strategy, policy and public affairs for the admissions service UCAS, said the current system also creates an “unhelpful split” between academic and technical results and offers, and so “life-changing decisions” on whether to pursue a place at college, university or elsewhere can be made on “imperfect information”.

Reforming the admissions system was a commitment in the Conservative Party’s manifesto, which pledged to “improve the application and offer system for undergraduate students”, with an approach “underpinned by a commitment to fairness, quality of learning and teaching and access”.

Cope argues a post-qualification model could “significantly” level up the playing field for further education and skills providers and create an “offer window” where they and universities could attract applicants at the same time.

UCAS’s modelling coincides with publication today of an 18-month review from Universities UK (UUK), the representative organisation for vice-chancellors, which recommends further consideration be given to reforming undergraduate admissions, based on a post-qualifications model.

This comes after their poll of 1,500 adults who applied for college or university in the UK between 2015 and 2019 found 56 per cent of recent applicants feel universities and colleges should only make offers after people have received their results.

Responding to the report, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, Geoff Barton, said there was “growing consensus” in favour of ending the reliance on predicted grades, and moving to a post-qualification system.

Also commenting on the report, the Office for Students, which has banned “conditional unconditional” offers until next September, warned that while there is “widespread recognition” that the current system is not working, a post-qualification admissions system “is not a magic bullet for fair access”.

UPDATE: Hours after this article was published, the education secretary Gavin Williamson announced that he plans to launch a consultation on changing the HE admissions process so that students receive their offers only once they have obtained their final grades.

No date for when the consultation will launch was given.