A bitter dispute that involved extensive strikes at Nottingham College has officially ended after a deal was reached which will ensure no staff see their pay cut as a result of new contracts.
The agreement will also retain workload protections and rules out proposed cuts to sick pay and annual leave.
Staff who are members of the University and College Union walked out for 15 days in September and October and passed votes of no confidence in their chief executive and chair of governors.
They were due to strike for a further 14 days this month, but last week agreed to suspend the action after college leaders offered a new deal.
The dispute centred on what the UCU said were the college’s attempts to impose “inferior” contracts that would have cut holiday entitlement and left some staff over £1,000 worse off.
UCU head of further education Andrew Harden said the dispute should never have got to this stage and questioned why students had lost 15 days of lessons at such a crucial time of year.
“Nobody ever wants to take strike action, but this deal is a testament to members’ determination to fight threats to their pay and working conditions,” he added.
“The college has finally recognised that it needs to work with its staff and not against them and we hope this deal will now pave the way for more positive future negotiations on pay and conditions at the college.”
A spokesperson from Nottingham College said: “The college is pleased to confirm that the dispute with UCU has been resolved and further strike action has been called off.
“We now have the opportunity to put the industrial action behind us, learn from the experience and work together, as one college, to deliver the excellent teaching and learning and create the outstanding college experience that our students deserve.”
Two healthcare providers have been told to get in shape while one college was found to be ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted this week.
Divad Training will likely be struck off from new apprenticeship starts after inspectors found it had made ‘insufficient progress’ in two areas.
It trains 425 learners in mostly health and social care and childcare sectors, but inspectors said leaders and managers do not ensure the apprentices, recruited by brokers, “understand they are on an apprenticeship programme”.
The inspectorate also found Divad’s tutors and managers have been adapting training and assessment from frameworks to their equivalent standards by redesigning paperwork, rather than developing high-quality training.
The independent training provider did make ‘reasonable progress’ in safeguarding.
Fairway Training (Healthcare) Ltd was also delivered some bad news this week, making the same progress as Divad.
Inspectors found most of the provider’s 14 apprentices make slow progress and “leaders and managers do not have a clear oversight of apprenticeship training”.
The report reads that although appointing a well-qualified and experienced trainer has improved this area, “for almost a year apprentices did not receive high-quality off-the-job training”.
This week marked the first grade one for a further education college – Newcastle and Stafford Colleges Group – under Ofsted’s new inspection framework.
Principal Karen Dobson called the result “absolutely brilliant” and a testament to the “hard work, talent and total commitment of our staff team”.
Elsewhere, Leeds College of Building went up from a grade three to a two, with inspectors writing it is “well-led” and students and apprentices enjoy their time there and “the inclusive environment in which they study and learn”.
The curriculum meets the specific needs of the construction and the built environment sectors, and is informed and developed through “highly-effective” links with employer groups.
Birmingham Metropolitan College has recovered some ground from its grade three with a monitoring visit that found it making ‘reasonable progress’ in all areas.
A new chair has led the board to “increase its level of focus and scrutiny of the actions being taken by leaders and managers to raise standards and promote improvement across the institution”.
Specialist provider Strathmore College, which has 35 learners, received a grade two this week after previously receiving a grade three.
This was attributed to strong leadership and governance having led to rapid improvements since the previous inspection.
National College for the Creative and Cultural Industries earned a grade three this week from its first full inspection.
The report also exposed how the college, which received a £600,000 bailout in 2018, had only 24 classroom students.
Meanwhile Stoke-on-Trent College was slapped with its third consecutive grade three.
Leaders and managers have not had enough time to develop their curriculum for the 2,600 learners and 583 apprentices, so “too many courses are not sufficiently challenging for learners’ ambitions”.
But most learners enjoy their time there and inspectors noted how leaders have now created a sound financial basis to improve the quality of provision.
Several independent providers scored grade two this week, including Firebrand Training with its 558 apprentices.
Those 558 were studying IT courses and were reported as being “exemplary,” with “an appetite to learn” and “impeccable” conduct which earned their provider an ‘outstanding’ grade for behaviour and attitudes.
Ginger Nut Media, which has 180 apprentices, scored ‘good’ across the board in its first full inspection.
Many apprentices progress in their careers because of the training, the report reads, gaining greater responsibilities or promotions.
JCB Academy’s strong reputation for supplying well-trained engineering apprentices, of which it has 258, would not have been hurt by a grade two this week.
“Owing to the thorough preparation and precise delivery of theory and practical training,” inspectors wrote, the apprentices “make good progress and achieve good results”.
Another independent provider which earned a grade two this week was Skills North East.
Its 91 adult learners hone their skills in professional salon and gym environments by performing treatments on each other or paying clients.
Aside from Birmingham Metropolitan College, the other providers which received all ‘reasonable progress’ ratings in monitoring visits were Training 4 Careers (UK), Guard Business Solutions, Clifford College, Eden Training and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.
Previous job: Executive director, Royal Statistical Society
Interesting fact: He sits on a charity board which meets on the grounds of Windsor Castle.
Daniel Fenwick: Assistant principal, DN College Group
Start date: September 2019
Previous job: Associate director, North Lindsey College
Interesting fact: He used to work as a builders’ labourer.
Neil Thomas: Chief executive and principal, Dudley College of Technology
Start date: January 2020
Previous job: Principal, Dudley College of Technology
Interesting fact: He pursues extreme challenges to raise money for charity i.e. abseiling down the college’s tallest building and walking the country from coast to coast.
Technology has transformed further education. But at what cost, asks JL Dutaut. The history of edtech is after all a story of failures
Paul Feldman, chief executive of Jisc, further education’s main technology body, wrote last month of the sector’s role in addressing the demands of a changing world of work and the importance of technology in meeting the challenges (FE Week, 25/10/19). But neither Jisc nor the Independent Commission on the College of the Future (ICCF) that it supports are the first to consider them.
In November 1982 Margaret Thatcher announced the creation of a technical and vocational education initiative (TVEI), the first major intervention in curriculum by a British government.
Its drive? Amid high youth unemployment and a changing world of work, “to improve our performance in the development of new skills and technology”.
TVEI was in effect for 14 years. It was responsible for pushing forward the success of the BBC Micro computer; some credit it for the development of the UK’s thriving animation industry. More than that, it is cited as an example of positive change management.
TVEI was implemented regionally. Local authorities were responsible for developing curricula that were tailored to local employment sectors, and they did this in partnership with educators and industry. It was a curriculum-led model focused on innovation, rather than an assessment-led model like the GNVQ policy that grew to replace it. It saw the advent of computer rooms in schools and staff training to make effective use of them.
Command and control
When I began my teaching career in an FE college in 2004, the media department was a far cry from one in which students worked on “industry-standard” technologies. Wrong hardware and software were just the start.
The popularity of the media courses secured us some investment, and before long we had two bespoke specialist computer suites. The impact on the quality of the learners’ experience and the work they produced was immediate, but it wasn’t sustained.
The reason? Redundancy.
Given the option of an ongoing investment – an operational expenditure – in the form of a favourable lease agreement (much like a mobile phone contract, and even including set-up and servicing), the college chose a one-off purchase instead.
Failure to grasp the systemic nature of technological progress was endemic
Whether colleges buy or lease their technology is specific to each college and each investment. No specific regulation prescribes how they spend their core funding in this respect.
Technically then, this was a leadership decision. It meant that the college could catch up with industry in costly lurches and spurts, but could never keep up at a steady pace. The assets depreciated at an alarming rate the moment they were purchased. Worse, rather than support learning, they quickly began to hinder it.
A catch-22 arose. Dependent upon their attractiveness to prospective students, the courses couldn’t run without repeated injections of large capital expenditures. No capital, no students. No students, no capital. The victim, either way, was curriculum.
But it isn’t quite right to place this at the door of college leaders alone. The Sixth Form Colleges Association’s James Kewin notes: “As capital funding from government is limited to bricks and mortar, colleges have been forced to use their dwindling core funding to invest in technology.”
That core funding is based on lagged numbers, and consistently fluctuating per-student rates and programme costs. If equipment is non-specialist, or a course is perennially popular, it’s easier to make sustainable investment decisions, but this is much harder for specialist equipment and courses where student demand might fluctuate. Kewin states: “The uncertainty of year-on-year funding coupled with how low it is means it is very hard to be strategic about any of this.”
It is also an approach to technological investment modelled by politicians. The year we got our Mac suites, Charles Clarke, then education and skills secretary, demonstrated exactly what not to do when he announced a now broadly derided £25 million “investment” in interactive whiteboards (IWBs) for schools. Gone was any pretence of change management. Failure to grasp the systemic nature of technological progress was endemic.
All the while, technology had nonetheless transformed leadership in other ways. Since 1997, the policy paradigm of Tony Blair’s government had been reducible to one word: deliverology. Technology had empowered the collection of data for assessment and monitoring purposes on a previously unimaginable scale.
Today, it is dwarfed by the potential of big data, but by 2004 new practices had already emerged that still shape the sector. The summary judgment of classroom practice using tick-box proformas, for example, was already routine.
The monitoring of every aspect of lecturers’ practices is one effect of technology that has been sustained. By 2016, among the top 20 contributory factors to teachers’ workload in a major University and College Union (UCU) survey, five could directly be put down to the impact of technology, including the top-ranking, “increased administrative work”.
The major selling point of the first wave of technological ingress into education had been the streamlining of workflows. Instead, where any time was saved, new tasks had filled the gaps, made possible by a technologically empowered managerialism and evidenced by swelling email inboxes. The second-most cited cause of workload in UCU’s 2016 survey: “Widening of duties considered within my remit.”
There’s an app for that
If the first wave of edtech was characterised by placing terminals in front of teachers and plugging them into the zeitgeist of an industrial revolution that required the sector’s response, the second wave can best be understood as an era of loosely supervised free play. It is a shift with which policymakers are only just getting to grips.
It was at the BETT show in 2004 that Clarke announced his IWB policy. It was with reference to the same event – a buzzing marketplace of solutions looking for problems as much as the other way around – that Damian Hinds wrote in The Daily Telegraph last year: “With around a thousand tech companies selling to schools, it’s by no means easy to separate the genuinely useful products from the fads and the gimmicks.”
A year after Clarke’s announcement, a DfES paper entitled Harnessing technology – transforming learning and children’s services encouraged the use of virtual learning environments (VLEs). Moodle, an early platform, and still the one with the largest market share in the UK, grew exponentially in England’s FE sector.
There is an often unseen investment of time and energy by lecturers
Ofsted’s 2009 review of VLEs concluded that “there was no consistency”. In the colleges surveyed, Ofsted found “substantial duplication of effort”, a “waste of the potential of VLEs”.
Worse was the waste of teachers’ potential. Ofsted found no provider with a quality assurance system for its VLE; such arrangements were left to tutors and heads of department. The common factor in effective VLEs was “the enthusiasm of the subject teacher”.
Today, the VLE market is more diverse and the infrastructure and functionality greatly improved. But the same problems persist, and they do so across a much bigger field than simply VLEs.
The second edtech wave introduced a plethora of other start-ups and apps to simplify and gamify almost all aspects of teaching and learning. Each adoption represents a much greater investment than subscription costs – an often unseen and under-appreciated investment of time and energy by lecturers.
Meanwhile, with all the support and investment of leadership teams, the second wave also brought management information systems such as Capita’s UNIT-e. While technology to support teaching and learning has splintered into a baffling array of consumables of varying quality, tools to monitor every aspect of educational institutions have concentrated and sharpened.
The third wave
Before ICT was cool, the initials didn’t stand for information and communications technology but for information and control technology – the DES referred to it as such in its 1981 pamphlet, The School Curriculum. That pamphlet would ultimately shape Thatcher’s 1982 announcement.
In a sign that the shift hasn’t quite happened, the pamphlet uses the same language of curriculum as Ofsted’s newest framework, some 38 years apart – fundamental values, intent, implementation and impact (or synonyms thereof).
By and large, since 2010, governments have stopped the centralised control of edtech. It may be a welcome respite for the sector, but a lack of leadership can be just as problematic and the market pressures on the profession have continued.
Only a year ago, Hinds published a workload review that, while admonishing leaders to “ditch email culture”, also urged technology companies with a £10 million bait to innovate ways to reduce teacher workload.
The third wave is already barrelling over the education sector
As politicians still play in the receding waters of the first wave, with the crash of the second wave still in the distance, the third is already barrelling over the education sector.
With big data and algorithms, eye-tracking goggles and attention-monitoring headsets, facial recognition and body cameras, and exponentially more powerful tools to “personalise learning”, deep ethical concerns should give pause.
Published today, the ICCF’s progress report states that edtech “will require a radical shift for colleges away from course delivery towards a more personalised service”. If it is to avoid the crystal-ball gazing and Silicon-Valley utopianism that have become clichés of policymaking in this area, it must consider these successive waves and the emerging patterns in the sand as they recede.
Dystopias are just as likely as their idealistic opposites, and the unsustainable toll that the first two waves have wrought on the profession suggests they may be even more likely. The human-centred education that Paul Feldman is calling for may just have to start with teachers, and rebuild an ethos of change management.
Ali Hadawi left FE for business. But as the principal of Central Bedfordshire College tells Jess Staufenberg, something just didn’t feel right
Ali Hadawi tried to leave teaching once. It didn’t go well.
He was in his third job in FE after starting off as a lecturer at Sheffield Polytechnic (as it was then) during his PhD before moving to Peter Symonds College in Winchester as a computing lecturer. At 30 he became head of computing at Barton Peveril College in Hampshire. “That was my first go at management. But after a few years, I had at the back of my mind that education wasn’t really my destiny. I wanted to be out there in industry as a computing engineer. So I went to see the principal . . .”
And therein lies a story.
Things were going well for Hadawi, who had left Iraq to study briefly in the UK, but were already far from the original plan. Arriving in England at 18 and unable to understand English well, he had been expected home by his father within a few years. In his new language, he gained A levels at what is now South Gloucestershire and Stroud College in pure maths, further maths, statistics and physics. Then he won funding for a doctorate at Sheffield Polytechnic, now Sheffield Hallam University, in artificial intelligence neural networks.
“That was the point when my dad wanted me to go back. My argument was I’ve got this fantastic scholarship, can I finish that? And he thought, yes, why not.” But circumstances again forced Hadawi’s hand as, back at home, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, triggering the start of the Gulf War in 1991. Despite a “magical” childhood, Hadawi says, “it wasn’t wise to go back. It wasn’t safe.”
So there he was, 30 and a head of department in FE in England, and wondering if he’d made a mistake. Colleges had never been the plan. “Education wasn’t on my radar as my career growing up. My father is a businessman. My two older brothers are engineers.” He has four sisters, one of them a senior banker. Teaching was not in the blood. So he quit.
After all these years, Hadawi says he’s never forgotten the conversation with his principal, Godfrey Glynn. “I went in to see him and explained that my aspiration in life was not to be in education, but in industry. And he said, ‘that’s a big jump, why don’t you go away for a month and think about it’. So I did, and I came back and said ‘no, I’m determined’. He said he’d give me a year’s leave without replacing me, and after that I could write to him to say if I wanted to stay in industry. He removed all the risk for me. He was a great man. I’ve never forgotten it.”
Hadawi wrote to Glynn after a year to say he wanted to continue as a computer engineer. But slowly, despite the better pay, something didn’t feel right.
“By 2002, it just dawned on me that I wasn’t really enjoying what I was doing. I was working across London, Dubai and Oman, and the technical aspect was interesting, but at the end of a project, I just didn’t have that ‘yes’ moment. I missed the bit with students where their eyes light up.”
I missed the bit with students where their eyes light up
Had Glynn anticipated this? Hadawi considers this. “Yes, indeed. Perhaps.”
He began searching for jobs in FE. Why FE over schools? There is no hesitation. “There’s something about FE. In FE you’ve got a lot of students who might not have the self-esteem or the right level of challenge and support at home. It’s the age group I want to work with.” He’s also clear about the special expertise of staff in FE. “There’s the aspect of dual professionalism. If you’re teaching mechanics, you’re a motor mechanic and a teacher. So that helped me a great deal, because I’d worked in industry and respected that.”
In his next role at Greenwich Community College he improved the Ofsted grade for the maths, science and technology department from ‘inadequate’ to high progress. By 37 he was vice-principal. He then spent five years as principal at Southend Adult Community College, galvanising a “demoralised” staff. “It got me really interested in the whole notion of people motivation and leadership.”
In 2011, he became principal of Central Bedfordshire College. The same year, he received a CBE for his services to FE and for the successful partnership work he had done with FE colleges in Iraq. He was here to stay.
Hadawi is one of the calmest, most concise interviewees I’ve met. When we reach the point in his story where the college, having been graded ‘good’ twice, dropped to ‘requires improvement’ in 2018, I have rarely heard such a sanguine, scientific response from an education leader.
“I thought I’d be safe to experiment, and naturally with an experiment things don’t always work.” What was he trying to do? “We had built a system in the college in which everyone had to conform, with 100 per cent compliance. So if you’re a poor quality teacher, it raises you up to good. But if you’re a brilliant teacher, it dumbs your work because you can’t be creative.”
Hadawi wanted to give all teachers more autonomy, so he reduced the requirements for lesson plans and student reviews. “It was right to loosen out these requirements. The mistake was to treat everyone with the same level of autonomy. We were still convinced about what we were doing and hadn’t picked up the signals in some areas it wasn’t working so well.”
Like any good scientist, Hadawi has turned to research to get the college back on track. His main blueprint is The role of leadership in prioritising and improving the quality of teaching and learning in further education, a report by Professor Matt O’Leary at Birmingham City University. It discusses “structured autonomy” – exactly the tricky balance Hadawi wants for his college, and, indeed, FE as a whole.
As well as an ability to focus on small areas for improvement in telescopic detail, Hadawi can step back and look at the stars. I ask what FE needs. “Two things. The first is a properly formed sector voice – it doesn’t exist. It means that while we usually agree with policymakers’ intentions, the sector voice isn’t there helping decide how to do it.”
We don’t tap into research to inform our practice
Isn’t that the Association of Colleges? “They are a voice in the sector. They’ve done particularly well on funding. But when we had T-levels, institutes of technology, university technical colleges, where was the sector voice in actually creating that policy? The sector never really said, that’s how it should be done. We react once the policy is decided.”
But Hadawi doesn’t think any idea from the sector is de facto good.
“The second thing is research evidence. The issue is not just with policymakers, it’s with FE itself. Though there is this big body of research out there, we don’t tap into it to inform our practice. It’s not because we’re too busy, it’s because we’re not used to it. So we need to have a proper sector voice, backed by research evidence, to take to policymakers.”
He points me to four places with a “great repository” of evidence on FE: the Association for Research in Post Compulsory Education, the British Educational Research Association, the Education and Training Foundation and the Learning and Skills Research Network.
“You should set something up,” I say.
Hadawi laughs. “When I retire.”
For now, this scientist and leader has work to do. Thank goodness he stayed in the sector.
Colleges across the country have been entering more students for GCSE maths and English re-sits than government policy requires.
The Department for Education’s condition of funding rule means all students in England aged 16 to 19 who have achieved a grade 3 in English or maths are required to retake the subject while those with a grade 2 or lower have the option of taking Functional Skills qualifications instead.
These “forced re-sits” have been controversial in the sector, so FE Week investigated the reasons behind colleges’ decisions to go above and beyond the regulation.
Analysis by this newspaper showed 18 colleges entered more than 1,000 students for GCSE maths re-sits and 26 colleges did so for GCSE English in 2017/18, when the DfE’s latest national achievement rates tables were available.
Colleges claimed they did not want to “to limit our learners’ progress” and highlighted “the strong emphasis that employers and education establishments put on GCSEs” as part of their reasoning.
Criticism was also directed towards the alternative Functional Skills qualification for its “cliff-edge pass or fail”.
Even the Association of Colleges conceded that the “jury is out” on the appropriateness of the new Functional Skills qualifications.
Leeds City College entered the most students for re-sits in both subjects in 2017/18.
Bill Jones, the college principal, said: “Although Functional Skills is a viable option for many of our students, we recognise the strong emphasis that employers and education establishments put on GCSEs.
Tweet by Jeanne Rogers of Leeds City College’s GCSE English exam
preparations on June 7 2019
“With this in mind, it’s in our students’ interest that we provide as many of them as possible the opportunity to resit English and maths GCSE to increase successful destinations upon completion of their courses.”
According to the government’s tables, only 8 per cent of the 2,560 students at Leeds City College who re-sat GCSE maths and 15.3 per cent of the 2,320 students who took GCSE English gained an A*-C (grades 9 – 4).
The general FE college is now part of the Luminate Education Group.
Jeanne Rogers, vice-principal for quality teaching and learning, tweeted photos of the college’s preparation for GCSE English exams this summer and said there were “3,332 students sitting English today. Attendance has been high, stress levels low; as a result of a college ‘I’m In’ approach”.
Under Education and Skills Funding Agency rules, any student aged 16 to 18 who has a grade 3 as their highest level of achievement, one grade off a 4 (C) in their English and maths GCSEs, must retake the subjects.
Colleges who fail to enrol 95 per cent of eligible students have funding withdrawn from a future allocation. South and City College Birmingham entered the second-most students for re-sits in maths and English in 2017/18.
Principal Mike Hopkins said the college put “nearly all” its students aged 16 to 18 and young adults who are hoping to go to university into GCSE re-sits rather than Functional Skills because it recognised this was “an examination and course that students are already familiar with (in the main) and we are looking for progression over time for those students with grade 1 upwards”.
However, just 7.7 per cent of the 2,340 South and City College Birmingham students who re-sat GCSE maths were awarded an A*-C grade and 15.1 per cent of the 2,200 who re-sat GCSE English received an A*-C grade.
Hopkins said the college planned to review this policy “in light of the introduction of technical courses” to determine whether studying Functional Skills English and maths would better serve students in those areas.
Click to enlarge
Students who join Activate Learning without a grade 4 “normally” re-sit the core subjects because the general FE college based in Oxford does not “wish to limit our learners’ progress”.
A total of 1,940 students re-sat GCSE maths and 1,670 students re-sat GCSE English in 2017/18.
Francis Lawson, Activate Learning’s director of English, told FE Week: “The rationale for the strong focus on GCSE is that our data shows learners from modest starting points often make greater progress on a GCSE than a Functional Skills pathway.
“Some learners improve several grades to achieve GCSE grade 4 within a year.
“We do not wish to limit our learners’ progress because of modest prior achievement, which might not fairly reflect their capabilities.”
However, only 12.6 per cent of maths entrants and 21.4 per cent of English entrants achieved an A*-C grade after their re-sits.
Lawson added that Functional Skills was available to learners “for whom it is most appropriate,” highlighting learners on apprenticeship programmes and in supported learning environments.
Data provided by Activate Learning showed 314 16-18-year-old students, excluding apprentices, took Functional Skills English in 2017/18 and 483 were entered into Functional Skills maths in the same year. The figures supplied by the college include Bracknell and Wokingham College, which merged with the Activate Learning in January 2019.
Capital City College Group entered the fifth-highest number of students to re-sit both GCSE maths and English respectively in 2017/18, with 14.1 per cent of 1,810 students achieving an A*-C in the former and 27.4 per cent out of 1,750 doing so in the latter.
A spokesperson for the group said: “What the data doesn’t show is that, in addition, we enrolled just over 2,000 16 to 18-year-olds on a Functional Skills course that year.
“We would generally put a student in for whichever level qualification they are most suited to. For us it’s about what level the student can best work at, rather than the qualification per se.”
The South Essex College entered the sixth and seventh largest number of students to re-sit GCSE maths and English in 2017/18.
Around 8 per cent out of 1,500 South Essex College students achieved an A*-C in GCSE maths while 17.1 per cent of the 1,460 entered into GCSE English received an A*-C.
A spokesperson told FE Week: “The majority of students who gain a grade 3 or below in GCSE English and or maths are entered for English and maths qualifications at the college.
“Some students do gain a grade 4 or higher in GCSE English literature, but not in English language.
“In this case, the students are offered the opportunity to take English language even though they are not eligible for government funding.
“We do this because of the fact that English literature is not as widely recognised for university entry compared to English language and it offers our students better progression opportunities.
“We have made this decision to benefit our students and give them the best opportunity to progress on to their chosen careers or higher education study programmes.”
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A spokesperson from the Colchester Institute said the reason behind its decision to enter more pupils into the two GCSEs was that the college found “the cliff-edge pass/fail in Functional Skills did not recognise progress, and was demotivating for those who did not pass”.
In 2017/18, 1,310 students re-sat GCSE maths with a 7.5 per cent A*-C success rate and 1,300 re-sat GCSE English with 13.4 per cent achieving grades A*-C.
“While the GCSE grading system has imperfections, it does at least allow us to demonstrate and recognise incremental improvement,” the spokesperson added.
HCUC, a merger between Uxbridge College and Harrow College, entered the fourth and eighth-most students to re-sit GCSE English and maths respectively in 2017/18.
A spokesperson said: “Our intention is that students will be appropriately stretched to support their progress, progression and aspirations through GCSE and Functional Skill pathways.”
Moreover, a spokesperson from NCG, which has seven colleges across the country, told FE Week that the curriculum at each was “designed to respond to the needs of the students at each individual college”.
“In some cases this does include entering students with a grade 2 for GCSE exams if their progression route requires them to have GCSE.”
Tweet by Jerry White of City College Norwich’s GCSE exam preparations on June 9 2016
A spokesperson for BMet in the West Midlands added: “Like other colleges we believe it’s important that all of our students have access to GSCE maths and English and have the opportunity to re-sit their exams, which is why we have adopted this approach.”
A Nottingham College spokesperson also said: “The College continues to refine its approach to meet the needs of individual learners and maximise their opportunities to achieve English and maths qualifications. This includes offering a range of study opportunities including GCSE and Functional skills.”
Figures for City College Norwich reveal that 1,200 studied GCSE Maths and 1,150 took English. When asked why more were re-sitting the exam than the government policy required, a spokesperson said: “In many cases, GCSE English and maths are the correct qualifications for their intended destination as they are widely recognised and understood by employers and often a formal entry requirement of Higher Education providers.”
The Association of College’s senior policy manager, Catherine Sezen, said the reasons for entering students into the exams varied according to individual profiles: “For some, re-taking GCSE and improving your grade, even from a grade 2 to a grade 3, can be seen as a positive step in the right direction.
“For others, re-taking GCSE several times is regarded as a negative, demotivating experience.”
She said “the jury is out” on how appropriate Functional Skills specifications are in meeting students’ needs.
Cheshire College South and West was approached for comment.
A move to campus-level Ofsted grades for college groups is back on the cards and they could be introduced as soon as next September, FE Week can reveal.
The education watchdog will shortly meet with college leaders to discuss the move and a consultation will be run early in the new year.
If support for it is there, Ofsted will not wait for a new inspection framework to launch the change.
“College voices may not get fair representation in a single report”
Campus-level grading was first mooted in 2017 but chief inspector Amanda Spielman (pictured) ruled it out last year as the inspectorate needed “more granulated performance data”.
Paul Joyce, Ofsted’s director for FE and skills, has now acknowledged that data should no longer be a barrier, but affordability and resource might be.
Big college groups, including the likes of NCG and Luminate Education (formerly known as Leeds City College Group), said they would support the move, stating that it would be more useful for students, parents and employers “to see separate reports for their colleges”.
Joyce revealed the plans during an FE Week event last week after he was challenged on the set-up of current inspection reports and the issues they hold for college groups.
Tresham College in Northamptonshire, for example, was awarded a grade four based on an inspection in June 2016. On 1 August 2017 it merged with Bedford College Group and had its Ofsted rating wiped.
It still exists with its own website and Tresham College branding with its main “iconic campus on Windmill Avenue” in Kettering and a “modern £36 million Corby campus”.
Tresham College campuses are 25 and 35 miles from Bedford College. Bedford College Group, including Tresham College, was inspected in September 2019 and received a grade two for overall effectiveness.
But the now very short report, which only has three pages of feedback, tells the reader nothing about Tresham’s previous grade four, nor does it say anything that identifies provision at the college’s two sites.
Just this week Newcastle and Stafford Colleges Group was given the first grade one for a college under the new inspection framework. It was the first full inspection of the group since it was formed from a merger of Newcastle-under-Lyme College and Stafford College in 2016.
The latter was rated as “inadequate” at its previous inspection in February 2016, but the new report said nothing about the previous grade or about the specific provision at the Stafford site.
Paul Joyce
A similar situation will occur for NCG. Among the seven individual colleges in its group are Lewisham and Southwark, which are London-based and located 300 miles away from NCG’s headquarters in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Asked what a resident in south London would find out about the quality of the learning experience at Lewisham College in NCG’s report under the new inspection framework, Joyce admitted that it would be “next to nothing”.
Liz Bromley, chief executive of NCG, said her group was “concerned that our college voices – with their variation in scale and size – may not get fair representation in a single, brief, group-level report”.
Bedford College Group declined to comment on the potential move to campus-level Ofsted grading, other than to say it was “delighted to gain a group-wide ‘good’ status in our latest inspection”.
David Corke, director of education and skills policy at the Association of Colleges, said his organisation was in favour of campus grades as they are “important for large college groups and multi-site colleges to be inspected fairly”.
He added that Ofsted was now engaging with the sector through pilot inspections to “make sure that the model used to inspect and/or grade colleges is fair, proportionate and avoids the prospect of limiting grades”.
The idea of campus-level grades was brought to the table two years ago, and the prospect was heightened in August 2018 after the Department for Education (DfE) confirmed that it would introduce campus-level performance reporting from the 2018/19 academic year.
Government data now identifies a “campus within a college group” that is “no longer a separate legal entity”.
“The problem is getting greater as more colleges merge”
While official achievement rate data is no longer a barrier to include campus grading under the new Ofsted framework, which was rolled out in September, the watchdog will probably have to gain extra funding from the DfE to make it happen.
A similar deal was struck in September 2018 for Ofsted to visit all new providers entering the apprenticeships market. The DfE handed over £5.4 million, which is being used until March 2020 to carry out as many as 1,200 two-day monitoring visits.
Joyce acknowledged that the problem of overall college group grades is getting greater as more and more colleges merge.
The DfE launched post-16 area reviews in September 2015, which have led to the number of general FE colleges in England shrinking from 241 to 193 as of April 2019, according to an “end of programme report” published by the government.
And data produced by the Association of Colleges states that there are currently 248 further education and sixth-form colleges in England, compared with almost 450 when colleges were incorporated in 1993.
What do the five largest college groups in England think about campus grading?
LTE Group
Number of individual colleges: 1
Overall staff numbers: 3,227*
Total income: £183,877,000*
Current Ofsted grade: 2
Despite being the college group with the largest income, the LTE Group only has one college: The Manchester College.
The group is a not-for-profit social enterprise that also encompasses two independent training providers – UCEN Manchester and Total People – as well as a commercial provider called MOL, and a prison education provider, Novus.
John Evans, vice principal at The Manchester College, said Ofsted should “distinguish between multi-site colleges like ours and groups which include several distinct colleges, often geographically dispersed and previously separate institutions”.
“Common sense suggests inspecting the latter separately would lead to more useful reports when identifying the individual and relative strengths and weaknesses of each constituent college,” he told FE Week.
“They probably serve different localities; therefore their responsiveness to different local economic priorities should be evaluated in inspection.”
He added that a single inspection of a whole group of colleges, particularly given the “narrower range of judgments contained in much shorter reports”, does not make differences in areas such as safeguarding and curriculum “clear enough to a reader looking for help in deciding whether or not to enrol at one of the colleges”.
Evans said the LTE Group, on the other hand, comprises a number of “complementary” providers including just one college, which currently has nine sites or campuses. They all “share a curriculum responsive to the same local employment priorities, the same localised governance arrangements and broadly the same safeguarding challenges”.
He added: “Our biggest challenge is ensuring provision is consistently high quality across every site, so inspection of the whole college makes much more sense.”
NCG
Number of individual colleges: 7
Overall staff numbers: 2,399*
Total income: £158,234,000*
Current Ofsted grade: 3
NCG, formerly known as the Newcastle Colleges Group, is the largest group in terms of the number of individual colleges.
Its divisions include Carlisle College, Kidderminster College, Lewisham College, Newcastle College, Newcastle Sixth Form College, Southwark College and Lewisham College.
Liz Bromley
Liz Bromley, chief executive of the group, said her group would “fully support campus-based inspections” as they “will give our local learners, partners, stakeholders and employers important information about our colleges”.
“We have been monitoring the early inspection reports with interest, particularly in relation to the changes in format, content and intended audience,” she told FE Week.
“The curriculum-based focus is welcome, and appropriate, even though it presents a challenge to a college group such as ours. We are concerned that our college voices – with their variation in scale and size – may not get fair representation in a single, brief, group-level report.
“We are delighted to have the opportunity to give our feedback directly to Ofsted through an AoC working group, where we will show both our support for the campus-level inspections and raise our concerns about the complexity of group-level reports.”
Capital City College Group
Number of individual colleges: 3
Overall staff numbers: 1,474*
Total income: £111,987,000*
Current Ofsted grade: 2
The group encompasses three colleges – City and Islington College, Westminster Kingsway College and The College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London – spread across 11 sites across London.
It also runs an independent provider called Capital City College Training.
On the prospect of campus-level inspections, a Capital City College Group spokesperson said: “We have 11 main sites across five London boroughs that between them teach a wide range of courses and levels from culinary arts to construction, animal management to rail engineering, to over 24,000 students aged from 14 to 89.
“As such a complex organisation with so many students and subject areas, we feel that it’s important that inspections can provide as complete a picture of college life – as well as adequately assessing the quality of teaching and learning – as possible.
“So we would welcome a consultation by Ofsted that looks into expanding their inspection regime so that it can provide much richer information to current and potential students, their families and all our stakeholders.”
Luminate Education Group
Number of individual colleges: 4
Overall staff numbers: 1,265*
Total income: £98,588,000*
Current Ofsted grade: Not inspected as a group yet
Leeds City College Group changed its name to the Luminate Education Group this year.
Its divisions now include Leeds City College, Keighley College, Harrogate College, and Leeds College of Music. It also runs the White Rose Academies Trust.
Colin Booth
Colin Booth, the group’s chief executive, said campus-level inspections would be “helpful”.
“Luminate Education Group would welcome campus-based inspections. Ofsted inspections provide feedback and help us to focus so that we can ensure that all our colleges and schools continue to improve,” he told FE Week.
“We think that it would be more helpful for Leeds City College, Keighley College and Harrogate College if we were to receive separate Ofsted reports for each college. We also think that it would be more useful for students, parents and employers in Leeds, Keighley and Harrogate to see separate reports for their colleges.
“For education (or college) groups long term, we also think that it would be a good idea to receive short reports on how well the group is performing as a whole. This shouldn’t be difficult – it could easily be based around how well we are supporting each college and school to improve.”
Bedford College Group
Number of individual colleges: 5
Overall staff numbers: 812*
Total income: £82,375,000*
Current Ofsted grade: 2
The Bedford College Group encompasses Bedford College, Shuttleworth College, The Bedford Sixth Form, and Tresham College. It also runs the National College for Motorsport.
When asked if they would welcome campus-level inspections, the group said it did not wish to comment at this early stage of the process.
A spokesperson did say that they were “delighted” to gain a group-wide ‘good’ status in its latest Ofsted inspection.
*This data has been taken from the groups’ latest available accounts, for 2017/18.
With manifestos being furiously written and further and adult education in the spotlight, national policymakers could be missing an important factor in getting sector policy right, says Anna Round
Manifesto authors seeking recommendations for post-compulsory education are not short of material. They might even be forgiven some weariness on hearing about yet another blueprint for reforming the skills system. But they would do well to put the interim report of the Future Ready Skills Commission, published last week, near the top of their reading list.
While many of its themes echo the existing literature – employer engagement, careers guidance, and the need for simplification of the vocational education landscape – these are set alongside some important fresh perspectives.
The most prominent of these is the second call within a week for greater local control of skills provision and funding. The Northern Powerhouse Local Enterprise Partnerships grouping (NP11) also lists this among its “game-changers” in its Manifesto for the North.
In both cases, the vision for localisation goes beyond the relatively limited reach of the adult education budget to encompass “technical education” across the board. Economic development has long been a central rationale for devolution in England, and the stubborn centralisation of one of its essential inputs, human capital formation, looks increasingly odd.
The mayors of metro areas have made extensive use of their “soft” powers to drive developments, building on the effective partnerships formed under city and growth deals. The commission proposes a place-based logic to bring much-needed coherence to skills policy and provision. Labour market trends and opportunities vary considerably between and within regions; greater local control can facilitate agile responses, as well as linking communities and individuals to learning and work.
A localised approach also has the potential to transform employer engagement, effectively positioning businesses as stakeholders in their local economies alongside learners and local government. Effectively managed, it can also resolve the issues that limit engagement by hard-pressed SMEs, and by potential competitors within key sectors.
A localised approach has the potential to transform employer engagement
The report’s broad framing of “employer engagement” encompasses not only input into the design and delivery of provision, but factors such as collaboration to encourage good practice in building learning cultures and improving skills utilisation. This latter has long been neglected in English skills policy.
A major strength of devolution is its capacity to break down policy silos, and this is especially important for skills. The report identifies crucial ways in which skills can be fully integrated with policy on housing, transport and the environment, as well as health, employment and work progression. And it touches on the need for a strong local dimension in the skills element of emerging local industrial strategies.
The interim report is clear that government and employers (with appropriate incentives) must invest in skills to a “sustainable” level and across the workforce. Alongside this, “affordability” for learners is highlighted; the cost of vocational learning should not be a barrier to entry. For people making the “leap of faith” to invest time and resource in vocational training, a localised skills offer and better affordability will help to make it a more attractive and realistic prospect.
Another key theme is the need for an excellent skills infrastructure, including strong institutions, a skilled and secure workforce, and appropriate facilities for learning, especially advanced and specialised technical provision. Some of the proposed innovations will require new kinds of support; for example, local leadership will need powerful systems of data gathering and skills forecasting on which to base credible decisions about what does and doesn’t get funded.
Other intriguing directions include a boost for “fusion skills”, including “creative thinking, social skills” and entrepreneurship, as well as openness to lifelong learning. The report is explicit that these must be nurtured throughout the skills system, including academic and technical provision, and opportunities for learners with disabilities and others in danger of missing out.
The report is well-timed to influence national policy. Developed through a partnership of stakeholders, including local government, business and civil society, it exemplifies the local collaboration and capacity that will transform effective skills devolution from aspiration to reality.
A looming Brexit makes it easy to see why adult education is at the centre of election policy battleground, writes Sarah Waite, but a comprehensive vision for this vital sector is yet to be articulated
I can’t remember when adult education last featured so prominently in the election pledges of two major parties. While discourse in education policy has increasingly moved towards “the-earlier-the-better”, adult education has long been forgotten as a key route to social mobility.
This doesn’t impact adults only. Don’t forget: about a third of the attainment gap for a child aged 3 is linked to their parents’ level of education and the environment for learning created in the home. Failure to reach adults – parents – through education perpetuates a cycle of disadvantage that keeps pressure on early intervention.
This week, the Liberal Democrats announced plans for “skills wallets”, a £10,000 grant for every adult in England to draw on to pay for higher education courses throughout their working life.
Labour then laid out its stall, announcing that it would extend the free entitlement to study A levels while offering up to six years of free adult education for higher-level courses. It also promised to give workers the right to paid time off for education and training.
It’s refreshing and encouraging to see two major parties not only with policies on adult education, but framing them as a key plank of their education plans. Any of these policies would help some learners. Access to level 3 qualifications is key to progressing into higher-level qualifications, which will then address key skills shortages. A lack of paid time off is also a substantial barrier to working adults being able to enrol in education or training.
However, both parties have sadly missed the opportunity to tackle the biggest challenge.
Our education system almost completely divides at 16 between those who achieve five “good” GCSEs and those who do not. Of those who do, 88 per cent go on to achieve A-levels or other level 3 qualifications by the age of 25. More than half have degrees by this age.
As good as these new policies are, they simply won’t reach those that need them most
For the young people who miss out on five “good” GCSEs, only three in ten achieve A levels or other level 3 qualifications by the age of 25. Just 6 per cent have a degree. For young people who do not already hold level 3 qualifications, it is already free for them to study these until the age of 23. Despite this, more than two-thirds never do.
Why not? Because a substantial proportion – one in three – don’t get beyond level 1 qualifications (education below GCSE level). For these young people, the cost of level 3 courses isn’t the real barrier. Lacking the GCSE gateway qualification to meet entry requirements or the literacy and numeracy skills required to keep up with many of the courses pose far more of a barrier.
This matters because people in this group are disproportionately disadvantaged. Every year, half the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve the GCSE benchmark compared with those from wealthier backgrounds. These young people then enrol in further and adult education on lower-level courses. As good as these new policies are, they simply won’t reach this group. Instead, the majority who will benefit, yet again, are those going into higher education and studying higher-level qualifications.
With the looming impact of Brexit on skills, I am not surprised that adult education features more prominently in politics. But according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the sector has been cut by 45 per cent in real terms since 2010, hampering its efforts to provide the support that young people and adults with low-level skills need to progress. What the sector needs is a wide-reaching vision that tackles the root of the problem. And it deserves the same quality policy development and scrutiny that schools receive. Good intentions sit at the heart of these announcements, but without serious plans to tackle this issue, the political parties will not achieve what they hope.
