AoC Student of the Year Award winners announced

A learner with hearing and speech difficulties who also works as a carer for his twin sister is among the winners of the Association of Colleges’ Student of the Year Awards 2019.

The gongs, which include Young Student, Adult Student, Apprentice and Higher Education Student of the Year, were given out at the annual AoC conference gala dinner in Birmingham tonight.

They followed the introduction of the first-ever AoC President’s Award, earlier in the day, which was handed to a team of students from Brockenhurst College for their petition during the Love Our Colleges campaign.

Steve Frampton, AoC President, said: “Each year the level of applications is extremely high, and it goes to show the fantastic work that students are doing in colleges as well as the lengths colleges go to support their students.

“They have done amazingly well to win and should rightly be proud of their achievements.”

Billy Gibbons, from South Essex College, claimed the top prize for ‘Young Student of the Year’.

The student, who has profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, speech and language delay, developmental delay and an auditory processing impairment, achieved a D*D* in his 90 Credit Diploma in public services.

Gibbons, who also helps as a carer for his twin sister, obtained a distinction in every assessment.

He recently went to Buckingham Palace to receive his gold Duke of Edinburgh award and has completed training as a fire cadet within Essex County Fire and Rescue Service.

The runners-up in the category were Sibgha Amin, from Stoke on Trent College, and Macy Sheil, from Trafford College.

‘Apprentice of the Year’ was won by Tia Whelan, from Leicester College.

Whelan completed a three-year plumbing course before starting her property maintenance operative apprenticeship at UK Gas, where she is the first female in the team.

She now takes on her own work experience students and has visited 10 schools and colleges over the last six months to speak to students about the construction industry and promote the programme to female students.

Leicester College staff said Whelan, who is dyslexic, is also working at distinction level.

Lauren Polson, from London South East Colleges, and Luke Leech, from Bournemouth & Poole College, were both runners-up.

Ryan Kimber, from the Isle of Wight College, beat Roxanne Willoughby, from the Northern College and Malcolm Thwala, from Hugh Baird College, to win ‘Adult Student of the Year.’

He achieved D*D*D* in his Extended Diploma Engineering Level 3 BTEC after being diagnosed with brain and spinal cancer in 2016.

Kimber was headhunted by GKN Aerospace to design a project for their craft apprentices as a result of successful work placements.

He also volunteers for CLIC Sargent.

The college’s chair, Nicholas England, said: “It has been a privilege to see how much this young man has developed during his time at the college.”

The Higher Education Student of the Year was awarded to Benjie Kusita, from Bradford College, who is studying a BA (Hons) Media Makeup with Special Effects, ahead of Matthew Chilvers, from Loughborough College, and Henry Green, from Weston College.

Earlier in the day Frampton announced a new prize, the President’s Award, which was established to recognise those who have made a unique and lasting impact on the further education sector.

Brockenhurst College were the first ever winners, in recognition of their work in the Love Our Colleges campaign.

The college’s online petition gathered more than 70,000 signatures, which paved the way for a debate in Westminster about college funding.

 

AELP fear funding agency considering outright subcontracting ban

The Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) has today recommended a new, more “robust approach” to subcontracting in an effort to avoid an outright ban.

Subcontracting in FE, the practice of one provider paying another to deliver the training, has never been far from scandal and controversy. It has already been banned for advanced learner loan funded courses.

In what the AELP describes as a “last chance saloon” for subcontracting apprenticeships and adult education budget funding, its chief executive, Mark Dawe, claims “by incorporating the recommendations in our submission into its rules, the agency can avoid ministers demanding a ban”.

“Examples of subcontracting malpractice do not justify at all a call for an outright ban on subcontracting”

The ESFA announced plans last month for a radical overhaul of its subcontracting rules amid high-profile cases of fraud, while Ofsted has launched research into the practice.

In its submission, the AELP said the “vast majority” of subcontracting is “high quality” and officials must not take a “damagingly blunt” approach to address the behaviours of a small number of providers.

The requirement and expectations of main providers who subcontract out government funding should be “much more robust” in order to ensure integrity.

AELP has produced a checklist of the “minimum expectations” of the main provider, which they say is significantly above and beyond the current ESFA rules and “should be adopted across the sector”.

This includes: acceptable fees, charges and additional services, quality monitoring and quality assurance, MIS, audit and ILR services, and contracting management (read the full report here).

The association says there also needs to be clarity on the “different types of subcontracting and what is and what isn’t a subcontract to help alleviate confusion across the sector, including with employers”.

AELP has used its submission paper to again call again for fees and charges not to exceed 20 per cent of the funding – a recommendation that has been adopted by the Greater London Authority and other mayoral combined authorities with devolved adult education funding.

This maximum cap would “block the profiteering of a small number of providers who commoditise their privileged access to government funding and ensure value for money”.

AELP adds that there should be a clear policy on management fees and charges being only applicable to core funding and not additional funding “designed to support specific groups of learners or to support certain additional needs”.

ESFA should also procure funding from providers that is “continuously subcontracted out on a transitional basis”, the association’s submission said.

“Recent examples of subcontracting malpractice do not justify at all a call for an outright ban on subcontracting in the sector, but a much more robust approach on the part of the ESFA and Ofsted would make a huge difference in stopping further examples occurring,” Dawe (pictured) said.

“Over the last ten years, AELP feels that the ESFA has rather dragged its heels in making the required changes needed in its funding rules to put the issue to bed and we are probably now in the last chance saloon.”

“Let’s have no more prevarication around this issue”

He added: “Let’s have no more prevarication around this issue which has been damaging the sector’s reputation for far too long. Change the rules now.”

Eileen Milner, the chief executive of the ESFA, sent a sector-wide letter last month warning of rule changes to subcontracting and that she will take strong action against any provider that abuses the system.

She said there are currently 11 live investigations into subcontracting, with issues underpinning them ranging in seriousness from “complacency and mismanagement”, through to matters of “deliberate and systematic fraud”.

She revealed the government will review its current subcontracting rules later this year.

Ofsted’s research will mainly look at whether management fees, which have controversially grown to as much as 40 per cent on subcontract values, are having a detrimental impact on learners’ education.

There have been a number of high-profile subcontracting scandals in recent years. The most recent involved Brooklands College and resulted in the ESFA demanding a £20 million clawback.

Labour will create 320,000 green apprenticeships, Corbyn to tell CBI conference

A Labour government would train 80,000 people a year in a new climate apprenticeship programme, Jeremy Corbyn is expected to announce today.

It is part of a raft of apprenticeship reforms being unveiled; including allowing levy funds to be spent on a wider range of accredited training and extending the time allowed for employers to spend their allocation.

Labour has said it would also double the amount of money businesses are allowed to transfer to non-levy paying small and medium-sized businesses.

The climate apprenticeships programme, which is intended to help the UK pivot to a green economy, will be paid for by diverting 25 per cent of the apprenticeship levy and “by any dividends over the cap paid into Labour’s Inclusive Ownership Funds – expected to be £700 million by 2024”.

Jeremy Corbyn will tell the Confederation of British Industry conference today: “Climate apprenticeships will offer training to school leavers and workers looking to change jobs mid-career, creating the engineers, technicians and construction workers we need to transition to a green economy.”

Labour says they will deliver 320,000 apprenticeships in England during their first term in government, and by 2030, the programme will have created 886,000 apprenticeships.

Corbyn will argue only Labour “will deliver real change” as the government has “failed to deliver apprenticeships” after a 20 per cent fall in starts since the levy reforms were introduced in 2017.

Apprenticeships on the climate programme will be trained as engineers and technicians in renewable energy and transport; civil engineers and skilled tradespeople in sustainable construction; designers, welders and fabricators in low carbon industries; and sustainable agriculture and forestry specialists.

Labour said the global green economy is currently valued at $4 trillion, and is projected to grow to $9 trillion in value by 2030.

Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Mark Dawe said: “Labour have obviously given careful consideration to reforming the levy and the climate apprenticeships target for a whole term doesn’t seem unrealistic.  These apprenticeships are vital for the future and we support investment in the training of our young people and workforce for this important sector.”

Although it is not yet clear how much extra time Labour will grant, employers currently have 24 months to spend their levy allocation.

But one area Labour might run into more difficulty is widening the levy: the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education has estimated the apprenticeships budget will be overspent this year and by up to £1.5 billion by 2021/22.

The National Audit Office has also warned of a “clear risk” to the financial sustainability of the apprenticeship programme, after finding the average cost of training hit double what the government had predicted.

Dawe said it is “premature to start talking about the levy being used for other forms of training” considering the levy is already being overspent on apprenticeships.

College with ‘failed’ Grenfell-style cladding to remain open for 16 to 18-year-old residents despite Bolton fire

This evening the Department for Education (DfE) has said there remains “no immediate safety concerns” at a college halls of residence with cladding that has failed a safety test, despite a university student halls catching fire.

It is understood that around 100 people were evacuated and two people suffered minor injuries at a Bolton University halls of residence last night.

An investigation by FE Week in October revealed Highbury College, in Portsmouth, has requested up to £5m in financial support from the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) to replace Grenfell-style cladding that had ‘failed’ a safety test.

The DfE spokesperson also said tonight that they are still considering the funding application and a decision “will be made in due course.”

A spokesperson for Highbury College confirmed The Tower, which is clad in the same aluminium composite material as the Grenfell Tower which caught fire in June 2017, has had resident students under 18-years-old since September 2016.

Students under 18-years-old in onsite residential accommodation would be in-scope for an Ofsted social care inspection.

But when FE Week asked Ofsted last month why they had not inspected the residential provision at The Tower Ofsted said the ESFA had not made them aware of it.

Highbury College also blamed the ESFA for not telling Ofsted that they had resident students under 18-years-old on the premises, because they claim they had “declared in the college Individual Learner Record from 2016/17 onwards and as such would have been accessible to the ESFA.”

The college had also been telling parents that the Tower was regulated by Ofsted.

And with Ofsted not being made aware, the college has saved around £5,000 over the past three years in what the inspectorate calls an “annual routine fee, set in regulations by the DfE, for the inspection of the college’s residential provision.”

This afternoon Ofsted told FE Week that the DfE had still not asked them to undertake an inspection of the residential provision at The Tower.

A spokesperson said: “We inspect residential provision in colleges at the request of DfE. When they inform us that a college has residential provision, we will inspect it within the timescale in our policy. But, if they want us to go in sooner, they can ask us.”

The fire at Bolton University halls, which is understood to have involved a different type of cladding, prompted the Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, to write “to all university vice chancellors” this afternoon.

Williamson tweeted that he had asked them to “review fire safety procedures and safeguards across residential, teaching & research accommodation.” And “report back to me as swiftly as possible.”

Punishing strikes at Nottingham College officially end

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.”

Ofsted watch: Healthcare providers criticised in ‘outstanding’ week for colleges

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.

GFE Colleges Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
Birmingham Metropolitan College 15/10/2019 11/11/2019 M 3
Leeds College of Building 22/10/2019 12/11/2019 2 3
Newcastle and Stafford Colleges Group 22/10/2019 14/11/2019 1 N/A
Stoke-on-Trent College 08/10/2019 11/11/2019 3 3

 

Independent Learning Providers Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
Clifford College 15/10/2019 11/11/2019 M N/A
Divad Training Limited 22/10/2019 15/11/2019 M N/A
Eden Training Limited 16/10/2019 15/11/2019 M M
Fairway Training (Healthcare) Limited 23/10/2019 11/11/2019 M N/A
Firebrand Training Limited 08/10/2019 13/11/2019 2 M
Ginger Nut Media Limited 17/09/2019 14/11/2019 2 M
Guard Business Solutions Limited 29/10/2019 15/11/2019 M N/A
JCB Academy 08/10/2019 13/11/2019 2 N/A
Skills North East 22/10/2019 13/11/2019 2 3
Training 4 Careers (UK) Limited 03/10/2019 11/11/2019 M N/A

 

Employer providers Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust 23/10/2019 13/11/2019 M N/A

 

Other (including UTCs) Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
National College for the Creative and Cultural Industries 08/10/2019 13/11/2019 3 N/A

 

Specialist colleges Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
Strathmore College 22/10/2019 12/11/2019 2 3

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: EDITION 297

Your weekly guide to who’s new and who’s leaving.


Hetan Shah: Chief executive, The British Academy

Start date: February 2020

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.

The future of colleges: Can edtech deliver its utopia?

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.