Ofsted chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver talks to FE Week senior reporter Josh Mellor about the next inspection framework and why accountability measures in further education (FE) mean it’s complicated to “unpick” one-word judgements.
Q: At last week’s Confederation of School Trusts conference you said some school leaders were “putting pressure on inspectors and making the inspection process more adversarial”. Have you seen the same issue in FE?
A: No – I’ve been really clear with my staff that they should be professional, courteous, empathetic and respectful, and I wouldn’t expect any one of our staff to deliver a standard less than that. I expect and hope that we receive that in return.
If I look holistically across all of the 97,000 providers we inspect, where we see the greatest challenge more recently is in the multi-academy trust world where sometimes the tension between a headteacher and an executive can lead to a heightened dynamic on inspection.
But in colleges, we find a much more collaborative, cooperative inspection model. In FE it’s really quite empowering to see the nominee on an inspection who I think is the bridge between the inspectors and the inspected.
Something I’m thinking about is: is that something I should consider for other remits? It helps us significantly with the professional relationship we have in FE.
Q: So FE provider inspections are less adversarial despite the fact that the stakes are higher due to one-word judgments still being in place, unlike for schools?
A: It’s something that we’re committed to removing. It’s just that in state schools, the law, the Education and Inspections Act 2006, still requires Ofsted to identify an acceptable, and therefore an unacceptable, standard of education, and schools that are in special measures and require significant improvement – we call it serious weaknesses.
Despite the removal of the single-word judgment, the law requires us to make that decision and the law isn’t changing at the moment.
Now, in the FE world, it’s in the contract as well as intervention from the DfE and the regulator. So, unpicking the financial contract requires them to make a determination on the back of an Ofsted grade. That has to be worked out and can’t just be a unilateral decision because that would leave providers and the DfE unsure of what to do if they had a poor inspection outcome.
Ofsted is working to develop an inspection framework which meets the needs of the sector but doesn’t thwart government in its right to develop a contract with FE and to intervene as the regulator.
Q: Data shows there hasn’t been an ‘inadequate’ report in FE since Ofsted dropped overall judgments for schools in September. Is that a coincidence or has there been a conscious decision to avoid giving the lowest grade internally?
A: No, we don’t do anything like that. We’re really pleased by the quality of what we see out in the FE world. It’s really encouraging, and so I’m delighted at the quality of consistency in our training. Our inspectors will find what they find.
No one is ever put under pressure to change a grade or to meet a quota. We have a clear, standard framework, which is consulted on.
Inspectors inspect against that framework. We quality assure their evidence gathering against the framework, their judgment is their judgment.
Q: Ofsted is set to consult on a new inspection framework next year – will there be a separate framework for FE?
A: My intent is to look at providing frameworks which meet the needs of individual remits, from early years through to FE and eventually children’s services and social care. The challenge, which we will want to talk about in the consultation, is do parents want to see a coherent system that they can easily understand?
I really want to focus on the links between different areas because I think we’ve become too compartmentalised.
Q: Report cards are due to be rolled out next September. Are they definitely going to happen for FE and skills?
A: Let’s be clear, the report card is something that the secretary of state has talked about. I’m talking about a report card inspection framework.
Now, whether or not the secretary of state and the Department for Education choose to add over time and build upon a minimum viable product to make the report card even more sophisticated, to provide more information to learners, to parents and to providers – I’m sure that’s something they will want to really think hard about.
Holex chief executive Caroline McDonald is on a mission to increase education opportunities for those who missed out on the best start in life
As a young graduate living in South Africa, Caroline McDonald was walking through Cape Town one morning listening to music on her portable CD player, on her way to the homeless boys’ hostel where she was a volunteer.
At the time (2001), she was working as a night manager at a backpackers’ hostel while also volunteering at the hostel.
Some boys from a local street gang approached and asked if they could listen to what was, to them, her strange musical contraption (she was playing “Travis on repeat, in between Phil Collins”).
She handed it over and they “popped it in their ears and laughed”. Onlookers “didn’t know what to make of it” in a city where muggings were common. “But I trusted them”, she says. They repaid her trust and handed it back.
The story is typical of McDonald’s faith in human potential and the importance of giving opportunities to those who lack the best start in life. These days she draws on those values while leading Holex, representing the country’s 140-plus adult community education providers who are themselves busy turning lives around.
McDonald on Table Mountain overlooking Cape Town
Her experiences in South Africa, where she confronted “off the charts” poverty and young gang members “fighting for survival”, were the catalyst that compelled her to carve out a career helping adults to access education.
In August she became the first chief executive of Holex, leading three staff including Sue Pember, “the queen of adult education”, who has been its policy director for the past nine years.
The team has no office building – McDonald speaks to me on her son’s laptop (hers is being fixed) from her living room in Maidstone, Kent. But, while small in human resource, Holex is mighty in clout.
In “every meeting” that McDonald has had with key sector players, including the FE commissioner and DfE officials, she has been told that “Holex punches above its weight”.
But McDonald has been taken on to help it grow – “not just in our reach, but the representation of our membership”.
Her job description explains how the infrastructure supporting adult education has “reduced and changed”, with members looking to Holex for “added advice and guidance. In response, Holex is now ready to grow into a new form.”
The mice and the pumpkin
It has already come a long way since being formed in 1993. A year earlier, general FE was removed from local authority control, leaving councils with responsibility for adult education services that were then (bizarrely) known as “large external institutions”.
Holex was formed to support their heads, and the somewhat clunky name it was given – heads of large external institutions – stuck.
For the next 10 years adult education providers saw cash pouring in from central government and the European Social Fund (ESF), with public spending on adult skills in England peaking at £6.3 billion in 2003-04. By 2022-23 it had shrunk by 30 per cent to £4.4 billion, with adults’ classroom-based learning decreasing by two-thirds, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
In 2016 Holex’s members included over 700,000 learners. By last year that had shrunk to 400,000.
“Trying to run a service within a local authority is incredibly hard when they’re being squeezed from every angle,” says McDonald.
While some see adult providers as the “Cinderella of the education sector”, she believes they are “the mice and the pumpkin, scrambling around for the scraps. Yet, we’re the ones that magically make things happen on the tiniest crumbs.”
While children’s education “resonates with the public on a higher level”, sometimes “it feels like working with adults is not the sexiest of jobs”. It’s very difficult to engage in an emotive fight for funding when “no one wants to take away money from children”.
Despite this, providers have somehow managed to improve the quality of their services: 97 per cent of Holex’s members are rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, up from 88 per cent four years earlier. Yet there is little public awareness of how adult education is being run locally.
Almost 70 per cent of the country is now devolved, with regional combined authorities equipped to manage their own adult education budgets.
Control over the budget is a carrot being dangled in all the new devolution deals. But the “classic electoral rhetoric” of combined authority mayors tends to be around public transport and jobs – not adult education.
Last week, Holex ran a webinar called “influencing the influencers”, helping its members to “speak to this new tier of politician, policymaker and commissioner, particularly in mayoral combined authorities”.
Providers within local authorities “don’t have comms teams or policy advisers – experts at their fingertips to write a paper and pop it on the mayor’s desk – so we’re trying to help them”.
There is also the challenge of delivering local agendas while being “dictated to on a national level through wider budgets and policy decision-making”.
In a recent survey, over 90 per cent of Holex members saw the interpretation of new government policy as a “high” or “very high” priority when it comes to the support they need.
A Brum start
McDonald has spent the past two decades watching policy shifts in adult education from a different angle, in roles that involved community outreach and engagement work for the university sector.
The eldest of four siblings, she was the first in her family to go to university, studying politics at Leicester. She hails from Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders territory of Small Heath but believes she “must be the only person” in the city not to have watched the show.
As a “huge Aston Villa fan”, she never misses watching Match of the Day with her 13 and 10-year-old sons, Glenn and Shaun.
Watching Aston Villa with kids Glenn and Shaun and dad Pete
McDonald’s mum was only 19 when she was born. Her parents split up when McDonald was 12 and she lived with her dad, Pete, a former marine who left school at 16 but encouraged his children to push themselves academically.
He discovered a love of learning history and geography later in life, which influenced McDonald’s conviction that “it’s nonsensical” to believe that “education should be closed off because you’re no longer classed as young”.
After graduating and moving to Cape Town, she met her husband, a Dutch engineer travelling the world. She checked him into the hostel where she worked. They have been together ever since.
Human jigsaws
On returning to England a year later, McDonald moved to London, where she ventured into outreach work for Kilburn Into Training and Employment (KITE). The now defunct charity benefited from “loads” of ESF money targeting neighbourhoods needing skills improvements.
McDonald helped local people to develop their CVs and interview skills. One single mum, Deli, was “highly capable” despite having mental health problems. She was determined to be a positive example to her son.
McDonald put support around her that enabled her to do a level 2 course. This provision was “hyper-local” – a really important factor in getting many adults learning again – and provided “at a pace suited to her”.
She thinks that adult education has felt the cuts “most acutely” in the loss of such “hyper-local providers and charities … Without them, you just take away opportunities to engage with adults.”
McDonald learned to reject the misconception that adults “only have ambition for their children, not for themselves”. She saw them as “human jigsaw puzzles”.
Typically, adults cannot progress in their education and training until “every single piece of their puzzle is in place”. This might include “childcare, benefits, or sorting their mum out on a Wednesday… then, they’re absolutely ready to rock”.
Outreach for HE
She spent the next two years as a community outreach manager for South Bank University in London, boosting its local community relations. She had “an absolute blast” on information stands at Elephant & Castle shopping centre, directing locals to careers guidance and taster courses.
Sometimes, people “just wanted to be heard and told, ‘you’re not incapable’”. Others wanted help finding pathways to their dream careers.
McDonald spent the next 18 years at Birkbeck University, starting in a role heading up a new outreach project in pre-Olympics Stratford. The area’s demographics were completely different to the Bloomsbury-based university’s traditional intake.
Birkbeck had received significant funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to take a “more flexible approach to learning, in a part of London where HE participation was really low”. McDonald was “proud as punch” to have been part of a venture that “really changed Birkbeck”.
She also got involved in applying for funding and developing access agreements at a more strategic level. But she became painfully aware of the difficulties involved in “continuing the mission to be a mature learning institution”, when “that market was diminishing”.
“How do you keep your values going when all the pressures around you are saying, ‘don’t do it?’ That was really hard.”
She started working with local authorities, including Camden and Barking and Dagenham, to explore the “hyper-local perspective around what their residents needed”, then tailoring Birkbeck’s programmes around those needs.
A free community leadership programme was launched to help local volunteers to become “advocates and activists”.
It helped them to “identify and tackle a problem at a community level, while also giving them analytical thinking and research skills. At the end, you’d say to them, ‘look, you’ve just done a university module’ and they wouldn’t even know it.”
The golden thread
When she joined Holex, McDonald was already familiar with the adult education sector, but she was still surprised by the “sheer volume of what they do that isn’t talked about enough”.
She has taken the helm at a time of great need for more investment in adult education; the national retirement age keeps creeping upwards, and the employment rate of the over-50s has decreased each year post-pandemic (from 72.5 per cent in 2019 to 70.7 per cent in 2023).
Meanwhile, the rate of 16 to 24-year-old NEETs (not in employment, education or training) was up last year. McDonald is concerned that higher wage bills as a result of post-budget tax changes will see it spiral further, piling pressure onto adult education providers.
While at Birkbeck she prepared the university for the lifelong learning entitlement, which had initially been due to launch in February 2025 but has been pushed back to January 2027. She even held a presentation for Holex members on the issue. But she worries that the entitlement “won’t benefit adults unless you have an adult education system that prepares them for study”.
She finds it “hilarious” that there is currently no national lifelong learning strategy around the entitlement. She and Pember “talk all the time” about the need for one.
Just as championing adult education has been a golden thread running through her career, McDonald is now passionate about making it a “golden thread running through this government’s policy decisions”.
She gets frustrated on her members’ behalf, that the “security of funding and longer-term planning that could really make a difference in communities just isn’t happening the way it should.
“There’s incredible provision that exists up and down the country. But you don’t always know it’s there until you need it.”
A sixth form college in Leeds has received its third consecutive ‘outstanding’ grade from Ofsted.
Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College was awarded a grade one in all six areas for students’ “exceptional behaviour” and “ambitious” leaders, according to a report published today.
At the time of inspection, the college had 2,744 enrolled students, mostly on level 3 qualifications, predominantly A-levels and a smaller group on T Levels.
The college first received a grade one rating from Ofsted in 2008, and then again in 2022.
In its third ‘outstanding’ report, Ofsted inspectors highlighted how Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College made a “strong” contribution to meeting skills needs.
Inspectors found the college works with local employers, universities and community organisations to “plan their provision precisely”.
To develop the local health workforce for example, the college linked up with the local NHS trust, universities, local college leaders and community groups to ensure that the work placement for its T Level health course gives students exposure to clinical settings.
“Early in their placements, students have a range of experiences, including sterilising equipment and observing surgery,” Ofsted observed.
In college, leaders place a very “strong focus” on the quality of education, the report said. They gave students work-related experience in simulated environments, such as mock courtrooms for criminology students.
As a result, inspectors found “students develop the skills, habits and virtues that they need to thrive in life and work, becoming well-rounded individuals with a strong sense of citizenship”.
The report also highlighted the sixth form college’s “experienced and well-qualified” teachers who “blend the development of relevant skills seamlessly through their planning and approach”.
The watchdog said teachers frequently revisit past content and use a range of innovative methods to engage students and ensure they achieve “very well”.
For the college’s 300 SEND students, inspectors said leaders designed an inclusive curriculum that “very effectively” meets their needs.
“Students progressively develop their knowledge and skills while increasing their independence and autonomy. As a result, they make excellent progress, achieve their qualifications and, where applicable, the targets in their education, health and care plans,” the report said.
The report also commended Notre Dame for fostering a culture of “high expectation and ambition” that students thrive in.
“Staff create an ethos in which every student is supported to reach their academic and personal potential, regardless of their starting points. This ethos is firmly rooted in the college’s Catholic values and a commitment that every student becomes the ‘best they can be’,” the report said.
Principal Justine Barlow said: “We are immensely proud to share this outcome. This success reflects the dedication of our staff, the hard work of our students, and the distinctive ethos of Notre Dame. Our commitment remains to help every student reach their full potential, guiding them to become ‘the best that they can be’ and preparing them for bright and successful futures.”
Previous Job: Director of Young People’s Essential Skills, South Bank Colleges
Interesting fact: Asma was in the territorial army and worked as a security guard while doing her degree
Helen Wooldridge
Vice Principal Growth, Planning & Performance, Bishop Burton College
Start date: October 2024
Previous Job: Campus Principal, East Riding College
Interesting fact: Helen is a big fan of heavy rock/metal music and has seen over 250 bands live in concert
Scott Forbes
Managing Director, EducationScape
Start date: January 2025
Previous Job: Acting CEO, Skills and Education Group
Interesting fact: In his younger days with the British Council’s global changemaker programme, Scott recalls attending international summits with world leaders and celebrities like the Crown Princess of Norway, President Clinton, Gordon Brown and Annie Lennox
The Association of Colleges held a closed session at this week’s conference to debate the pros and cons of a pay review body for colleges. Afterwards, FE Week spoke with chief executive David Hughes to find out how discussions for this “complex” but “seductive” proposal had progressed.
While the creation of a pay review body for further education is “seductive”, leaders are “quite nervous” about the proposal, says David Hughes.
The chief executive of the Association of Colleges said his organisation had informally consulted members about the prospect of a pay review body in recent months as a vehicle to close the £9,000 pay gap between school and college teachers.
He told FE Week the AoC began canvassing opinions when it anticipated a change in government, since it considered Labour was “more likely” to support the setting up of independent pay review bodies that make pay recommendations for public sector workforces.
The first evidence of this came last month when the government unveiled plans to revive the School Support Staff Negotiating Body and set up an adult social care negotiating body.
Seductive but complex
The arguments for a FE pay review body were strengthened after the Department for Education excluded FE colleges from a £1.2 billion pay rise pot in July and used the excuse that colleges did not have their own pay review body like schools do through the School Teacher Review Body (STRB).
Hughes said: “It’s a seductive idea, because you go, ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if we just had one’, and it said colleges need a 35 per cent pay award and then DfE went, OK, we’ll do it,’ and Treasury gave the money.”
But even if the money was there for universally funded pay rises, an FE pay body would have an “enormous” job to standardise wages across the sector because pay scales vary between colleges.
“We know that a lot of colleges will pay a premium for a construction lecturer, for instance, because they need to recognise the labour market as it is,” Hughes explained.
In September, education secretary Bridget Phillipson instructed the STRB to consider the impact on FE when making recommendations on teacher pay. Sources at the time speculated that official advice from the STRB on the gap between school and college pay would be harder for the Treasury to ignore.
Ultimately, Hughes thinks a new FE pay review body is unlikely given the “number of years it would take to implement something that made any sense”.
A London university has been awarded an ‘outstanding’ rating by Ofsted in its first full inspection.
In the watchdog’s report published today, Queen Mary University of London received top marks across all areas after inspectors found the leaders worked “effectively” with big-name employers to tailor its apprenticeships to meet skills needs and recruited students from under-represented groups.
At the time of inspection, Queen Mary University of London had 436 apprentices studying standards from level 4 to level 7 in sectors such as digital, healthcare and financial services.
Queen Mary University of London has been delivering degree apprenticeships since 2015, when it was one of the first higher education institutions to do so.
Ofsted inspectors praised the Russell Group university for working “very effectively” with prestigious organisations to tailor the content of its curriculum to meet skills gaps.
Dr Philippa Lloyd, Queen Mary’s VP policy and strategic partnerships, said: “We are very proud of the employers we partner with on our degree apprenticeship programmes, including Goldman Sachs, Amazon, KPMG and PwC and the NHS.”
The watchdog also found the university designed its recruitment processes to ensure apprentices from under-represented groups and disadvantaged backgrounds have access to higher education.
“As a result, some apprentices embark on careers that they did not think were open to them such as being senior economic advisers,” the report said.
Professor Colin Bailey, president and principal of Queen Mary University said he was pleased that Ofsted recognised the university’s efforts to promote social mobility, diversity and inclusion.
“Our vision at Queen Mary is to open the doors of opportunity to any student with the potential to succeed,” he said.
Bailey added: “This independent in-depth evaluation by the regulator demonstrates the excellent education that is delivered by our staff.”
Degree apprenticeship students were found to have “exceptionally positive” attitudes towards their studies, develop substantial new knowledge and skills and are fully included in the university community.
Ofsted also noted that leaders have made “significant investments” into their apprenticeship provision and accountability and scrutiny at the highest level results in leaders responding “swiftly” to make improvements.
Inspectors also praised the provider for delivering “demanding and ambitious teaching” that challenges apprentices and for employing “highly qualified” tutors with extensive industry experience.
The report said: “Tutors use their knowledge and experience to inspire apprentices. For example, they give expert guidance to digital and technology solutions professionals to help them evaluate software projects and develop holistic perspectives on software engineering.”
Professor Stephanie Marshall, Queen Mary’s VP education said: “It demonstrates the quality of our educators who teach our degree apprentices alongside our undergraduate and postgraduate degree students. I could not be more proud.”
The FE commissioner has urged colleges to stop running their cash reserves down “too fast”.
Shelagh Legrave spoke to FE Week about the key trends her team found when investigating the reasons behind the latest batch of government financial notices to improve.
Rising costs have had an impact, as have restrictions imposed on the FE sector from reclassification to the public sector, namely the ban on revolving credit facilities. But the main cause leading to intervention is cash flow pressures caused by poor strategies.
Legrave said: “The key reason is a lack of focus on cash. Colleges have run their reserves down too fast and then something unexpected happens and they don’t have a contingency.”
She pointed out it’s also not only small colleges working on the tightest margins that are running into trouble.
Warwickshire College Group (WCG) with a turnover of £50 million was hit with a notice to improve this year due to “serious cash flow pressures”.
The FE Commissioner’s team will publish their report after investigating the reasons for WCG’s issues in the coming months. Legrave said the college’s financial strategy was “interesting” and “wouldn’t be one that I would have followed”.
Revolving credit ban
She also told FE Week that one of the biggest challenges she sees is capital cash, and restrictions on using a revolving credit facility from a bank has “really hurt colleges”.
Legrave said the Department for Education had “done its best” by introducing the college capital loans scheme to fill this gap, but admitted this is not a “proper lending facility”.
The FE Commissioner acknowledged a lack of pay settlement for FE was also an issue as there is a “necessity” to pay certain teachers “a lot of money” in skills shortage areas.
“Very high” agency costs are a related problem. She said: “They [leaders] can’t persuade the individuals to come on to the books of the college, but at the same time, it’s costing them an enormous amount.”
Legrave said her message to colleges seeking avoid financial intervention would be: “Try to ensure you have a reservoir of cash that you won’t go below. Also ensure that you are very clear on your financial strategy. If you combine both of those you should be OK. If you’re really worried about it, please ask for help early.”
Severance pitfalls
The commissioner also called colleges out for falling foul of severance agreement rules, imposed as a result of the 2022 public sector reclassification.
Approvals must now be sought for severance payments of £50,000 or more, where they are equal to three months’ salary or more, an exit package of £100,000 or more, or where the employee earns over £150,000.
FE Week reported earlier this year on how waiting times for approvals from the Treasury were taking months longer than expected.
Legrave suggested that some colleges are confused about when to apply for severance approval and have run into trouble with the government.
She said: “If the severance payment is over and above three months’ salary, then you have to get Treasury clearance for it.
“I know as a previous principal that you have tricky cases occasionally, and it could be somebody, let’s say a teaching assistant who is earning quite a small amount of money. So if you multiply three months, even if it isn’t a huge amount of money, you still need to get approval.
“It’s just understanding the rules. Where some colleges have fallen foul, they didn’t read the financial handbook and realise that they needed approval before they did it. Lack of knowledge isn’t a defence.”
A judicial review into the decision to snub colleges from this summer’s 5.5 per cent school teacher pay award has been launched, FE Week has learned.
The legal challenge was filed by the Sixth Form Colleges Association in a bid to “redress the imbalance” ministers created.
The body, which speaks for 80 members but is fighting for all 200-odd colleges in England, will claim the government’s decision to award £1.2 billion to schools to increase pay in 2024/25 but not their counterparts in colleges was unlawful and irrational.
SFCA will challenge ministers’ defence that the government is not responsible for setting pay in colleges, namely because FE is outside the scope of the School Teacher Pay Review Body, and could not afford to include colleges in the funding.
A key argument will be that academies were counted in the settlement even though they, like colleges, are not in the remit of the pay review body.
The action comes as sixth-form college teachers prepare to hold three days of strikes over the fiasco, led by the National Education Union.
SFCA chief executive Bill Watkin (pictured right) said: “SFCA has been working hard to reach a satisfactory solution in this matter but we took the decision to seek a judicial review on the basis we had been left with no choice.
“This is not a course of action that we embarked on lightly, and it is one we have tried to keep confidential.”
An email from the association to members, seen by FE Week, said there was “emphatic and unanimous support for bringing a claim for judicial review” during a meeting of its council on October 10.
FE Week understands the case was officially filed on October 25 and the government’s lawyers must provide a response by Wednesday. At that point, unless SFCA is satisfied by the nature of the response, the claim will be laid before a judge, who will rule after a process that can take months.
‘Farcical situation’
On July 29 chancellor Rachel Reeves accepted the School Teachers’ Review Body’s recommendation of a 5.5 per cent pay rise for school staff, equivalent to an increase of over £2,500 for the average teacher.
To help fund this the government handed out £1.2 billion in additional cash to schools, starting from September 1. Colleges were offered no funding for pay and fear the already large £9,000 pay gap between their staff and schools will be exacerbated.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson (pictured left) and her team of ministers’ excuse has been that colleges are not in scope of the pay review body’s remit and the government therefore does not decide pay in further education settings.
Despite this, academy schools and 16-to-19 academies, which are also not in the scope of the pay review body, were included in the £1.2 billion settlement. The pay-rise funding is also for support staff, who, again, are not part of the pay review body.
It has led to what the NEU called a “farcical situation” where staff in England’s 40 sixth-form colleges that converted to academy status benefit from the 5.5 per cent pay award but 40 autonomous sixth-form colleges do not.
On top of this, sixth-form colleges along with general FE colleges were reclassified as public sector institutions by the government in November 2022, imposing a series of strict controls around borrowing, governance and other areas, similar to what schools have to abide by.
Reeves did announce an additional £300 million for FE at last month’s budget, but the funding isn’t expected to kick in until the start of the new financial year in April and is likely to fund projected demographic increases in 16-to-19 students.
SFCA told members it had hoped the government would take the opportunity to also fund the pay rise in colleges “without losing face” but has found “no choice but to press ahead” with the judicial review.
It added: “Both schools and colleges deliver a state-funded education to young people, and sit in the public sector. There is no logical reason to distinguish between them.”
Watkin told FE Week that colleges need an “urgent solution” and “simply cannot wait for the spending review” to see if their institutions are offered new funding for pay.
The next steps for the judicial review, likely to cost tens of thousands of pounds, include gaining formal permission from a judge to move towards a hearing.
On 10 October, the government released their plans to ‘make work pay’ in the new Employment Rights Bill. Now, in partnership with Workwhile, Youth Futures Foundation has released a new definition of ‘good work’, uniquely shaped by young people.
In the words of young people who participated in this co-creation project:
Good work means feeling valued, fulfilled and supported. It means being respected and treated fairly in a workplace that is diverse and inclusive, where there is open and honest communication and decent pay.
Good work is done to a high standard and gives you a sense of achievement. It happens in a place where you can make change happen, and where everyone has a voice.
Good work protects your health and wellbeing. You’re excited to tell your friends and family about good work, not because they ask but because you’re proud of it.
A staging post
The past decade has seen increased attention to the concept of ‘good work’ and its importance for wellbeing and living standards.
As the national What Works Centre for youth employment, we know that young people, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds, are disproportionately affected by barriers to accessing and maintaining good jobs.
In 2024 in the UK, 1 in 8 young people are not in education, employment or training. Yet, until now, young people’s experiences have been largely absent from discussions of what constitutes ‘good work’.
That’s why Youth Futures commissioned Workwhile to collaborate with a diverse group of young people to co-create this definition. It is a foundational staging post in our ongoing work to develop a comprehensive, data-driven understanding of what makes good work for young people and how it can be accessed.
A complex picture
Between now and the implementation of the proposed Employment Rights measures in August 2026, youth voice and the ever-growing evidence base on what works in youth employment has a vital role to play.
Several of the proposed reforms will impact young people more than other groups in the labour market. Namely, the rise in minimum wage for young people; the introduction of greater day-one rights; and the ban on exploitative zero-hours contacts.
Evidence shows, for example, that while 1 in 50 older workers are employed on zero-hours contracts, this figure soars to 1 in 8 for young people.
And the situation is complex, with many young people sharing that the option of flexible working arrangements is important for them despite the risks that exist, especially for those in low-wage occupations.
Youth voice will be vital in facilitating the effective implementation of such policy changes.
A policy crossroads
With young people’s experiences and perspectives front of mind, and accompanied by effective job support and skills development, the proposed measures have the potential to improve equality and job security, ensuring more young people can achieve good work.
Evidence compiled in our Youth Employment 2024 Outlook Report shows that this will in turn bring huge benefits for employers and the economy. If the rates of young people not earning or learning are reduced to those seen in the Netherlands, UK GDP could be increased by £69 billion.
But, without sufficient attention to young people’s needs or the value they bring, the new measures could have the opposite effect: a reduction in young people accessing and thriving in good work, and a further increase in youth unemployment.
We are pleased government is committed to continued consultation and that they will introduce other welfare and skills reforms like the youth guarantee. We will consistently strive to keep youth voice front and centre, to seize this opportunity to improve job prospects and employment rights for marginalised young people.
One thing highlighted by the new definition and through our project with Workwhile is that young people want to make a difference and do a good job.
This should spur employers and policy makers to continue listening to young people, and to develop policy and practice that supports them to thrive and reach their full potential.
