Chief Executive, Federation for Industry Sector Skills and Standards
Start date: September 2024
Previous Job: Head of Insight – Employment and skills, West Midlands Combined Authority
Interesting fact: Fiona is busy learning about sector skills bodies for this job, particularly IMI as her daughter just started a motor engineering course at Loughborough College
Paul Drew
Apprenticeships director, JBC Skills Training
Start date: October 2024
Previous Job: COO, Apprentify Group (still a shareholder)
Interesting fact: Paul once appeared on This Morning in the 90s as a model for a new young fashion trend linked to BritPop
Worsening school absenteeism piles pressure on colleges to provide lower-level post-16 courses
Mickey Symes, 18, wanted to be a plumber. But after missing out on a grade 4 in his maths and English GCSEs the previous year and feeling doubtful as a dyslexic about his prospects of ever passing, then finding his preferred college course was oversubscribed, he instead joined the growing wave of young NEETs.
The 16 to 18 NEET (not in employment, education or training) rate rose from 5.5 to 6.8 per cent of the population between the first quarters of 2022 and 2023, while the 12.2 per cent of 16 to 24 year olds who were NEET from April to June 2024 was up 0.9 percentage points on the same period last year.
In 2013 the law changed requiring all young people to continue education, employment or training until they turned 18, but the 16-18 NEET rate is no lower now than it was back then.
Mickey Symes
And turmoil in the school system, with soaring rates of exclusions, absenteeism and learners being educated at home, could spell trouble for future NEET numbers.
The rise has profound implications not just for those young people’s mental health and social isolation, but for loss of future tax revenue and increased welfare payments.
And the government’s plans to tackle the problem with a “youth guarantee”, promising opportunities for training, an apprenticeship or help finding work for all 18 to 21 year olds, could be scuppered because the demand for low-level provision is already outstripping supply.
Swamped by demand
New College Swindon was almost caught short this year after getting 56 per cent more applicants (200 more students) than it expected for its courses at level one and below.
Its vice principal of commercial, skills and partnerships, Matt Butcher, blamed the larger-than-expected rise on more young people being missing from the school system, and more “slipping below” their expected GCSE grades.
Accommodating the influx was “difficult”, he said, and involved being “creative with curriculum planning and utilisation of rooming”.
It “could have proved impossible with much higher demand”, but next year he’s predicting demand for level one and below courses to be double that of two years ago.
Similarly, Newcastle City Council found a lack of level one post-16 study programmes was “a national issue”, as such programmes have “not been an attractive financial option for training providers”.
It criticised the new North East Combined Authority (which controls local adult education budgets) for a “lack of funding for part-time alternative provision for young people at age 16” to meet “growing demand” for it in the city.
Luminate Education Group of providers in West Yorkshire says projections for Leeds indicate a shortage of at least 2,000 places for courses at level two and below. The group’s Leeds City College now operates waiting lists each year for such courses.
Luminate’s chief executive Colin Booth says the college is now “very clearly full to capacity in all of our buildings”. It will work with other providers to grow provision, but if Leeds City College and Leeds College of Building cannot “secure additional physical capacity very quickly, we are very likely to see a further rise” in young NEETs.
Leeds City College’s 14-to-16 provision which supports NEET reduction strategies is “incredibly oversubscribed, with well over 1,000 enquiries and applications for 120 places available each year”, says Booth. He claims that if those learners were not in college, “many would be in alternative provision funded at three times the cost to the DfE”.
Colin Booth, CEO of Luminate Education Group
GCSE-retakes deterrent
Mickey is not alone in his angst over retaking GCSE maths and English. Newcastle City Council found that “disillusioned” young people used their failure to pass those subjects with a grade 4 as a reason “not to enter education and training programmes”.
They were also “concerned to hear” that “many apprenticeship vacancies ask for young people to have already gained a grade 4 in maths and English”, and that “there is a disincentive for employers to accept young people who are undertaking resits”.
The post-16 grade 4 pass rates are particularly woeful for boys, with only 16.6 per cent passing maths and 17.3 per cent English last year (compared with 18.2 and 25.9 per cent for girls). The overall maths pass rate is down 3.8 percentage points on 2019, with English down 9.4 percentage points.
The exam pass disparity may help explain why the rise in NEETs is starker among 16 to 24 year old males, of whom 13.5 per cent in the second quarter of this year were NEET – in contrast to global NEET rates which are twice as high for young women as young men (28.1 per cent compared to 13.1 per cent).
The NEET rate for boys aged 16 to 17 (5.4 per cent) is more than double that for girls (2.6 per cent).
Liverpool City Region said the region’s relatively low GCSE pass rate “restricts post-16 choices for between 40 and 50 per cent of young people seeking an appropriate post-16 destination”.
Liverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram bricklaying at City of Liverpool College
The Local Government Association says that as no single organisation is responsible for coordinating this locally, it makes it “difficult to target and join up provision for learners, unemployed people, career changers and businesses”.
Before Brexit, a “strong focus” of the European Social Fund in the UK was helping NEETs into work. But the UK Shared Prosperity Fund that partially replaced it was used to fund the Multiply scheme (focused on boosting numeracy skills), with the rest devolved locally for a broad range of purposes. The future remit of the funding is currently uncertain.
In Kent, a council report blamed the European Social Fund’s removal for a reduction in provision for 16 to 19-year-old NEETs.
Challenges reducing the NEET rate are particularly stark in Kent, where an average of 80 pupils were permanently excluded from secondaries every month in 2023-24, more than treble the council’s target, and there were 5,228 children missing from education in June 2024 (compared to 2,710 in 2021 and 3,600 in 2022).
Some of the provision losing funding is “very niche alternative provision”, and there is “little existing rolling provision for students needing to access education later in the academic year”. Between three and five of the county’s 12 districts have no NEET provision available at any time.
The council says the reduction in provision, along with the “regrading of GCSE boundaries”, has led to NEET rises “across Kent”.
In Liverpool City Region, mayor Steve Rotheram pledged four years ago that every young person out of work, training or education for more than six months would be offered a job, apprenticeship or training programme – similar to Labour’s youth guarantee.
He’s now offering £3,000 wage incentives to local employers recruiting young people, and expanding mentoring services. But he has a considerable task ahead, with the 16 to 17 year old NEET rates rising across all its six council areas in the year to 2023, and local authorities since then “indicating a continual rise”.
The combined authority blames the withdrawal of traineeships last year as “undoubtedly having a negative effect” on those not achieving a level-two equivalent by age 16, and criticises the “national desire to move away from entry-level apprenticeships for young people to higher level apprenticeships”.
The region has seen a “significant fall” in 16 to 18 year olds starting apprenticeships – down 40 per cent on 2016-17 levels.
The combined authority raised concerns that training providers are under “significant financial pressure”, with “many” “trimming their provision” and “some leaving the market altogether”.
School absence links
The current worrying rise in pupils’ persistently absent from school (missing 10 per cent or more sessions) could see NEET numbers spiral further.
Numbers of key stage 4 children persistently absent more than doubled between 2017-18 and 2022-23 (from 172,368 to 367,720), while the numbers ‘severely’ absent (50 per cent or more) more than tripled (from 15,881 to 51,791).
Persistent absentees are 3.9 times more likely to become NEETs aged 16 to 18, research by the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre found. Persistent absence was the biggest predictor of NEET status – bigger than SEND support or free school meals eligibility.
Liverpool City Region says the rise in young people persistently absent in year 11 is “presenting challenges with accessing the appropriate support and provision for them when they reach 16”. It also linked previous persistent absenteeism in schools to a recent rise in 19-24 year olds needing “additional help” getting into work, because of “their complex and multiple barriers”.
Furthermore, the rate of permanent exclusions has not only risen in schools (from 0.06 to 0.11 per cent between 2013-14 and 2022-23) but in the alternative provision intended to give troubled youngsters a fresh start in life – from 0.10 to 0.34 per cent in that time.
Those exclusions, along with a lack of available alternative provision placements, has contributed to a 23 per cent yearly rise in children missing education (not registered at school or receiving any other suitable education), to 30,400 on census day 2023.
The numbers being electively home educated were up 14 per cent to 92,000 that year, while the share of local authority alternative provision placements that were one-to-one tuition was up from 3.9 per cent in 2017-18 to 11 per cent in 2023-24.
There’s evidence that being educated at home makes it harder for some young people to make a subsequent jump into further education or work, due to their lack of social interaction.
Newcastle City Council found a third of those educated at home went on to become NEET in November 2022. Officials had recorded a “significant rise” in young people in the city being educated at home, and it said “many” of those “out of mainstream education for some time” need “additional support to re-enter education, training or employment”.
Butcher says the rise in young people not in the school system means “we’re struggling to get access to some learners – they come through very late as and when the local authority or other agencies become aware of them.”
In the last 18 months, his college has ramped up its communication with Swindon Council and the police, who have “young people they’re aware of who they would want to be in college for their own wellbeing and safety”.
He says colleges like his are also engaging more with schools than they’ve ever done previously, giving them “early lines of sight of who’s coming through, their school attendance and potentially significant mental health challenges”.
Because many NEETs “aren’t ready to engage” in full-time programmes, his college is “looking at much more part-time provision as a route back into education”.
Learners Cameron and Corey at Engineered Learning
Alternative provision
One alternative to a rigid study programme is the sort of vocational alternative provision provided to NEETs by Engineered Learning in Derby, which is turning youngsters’ lives around and helping to plug skills shortages.
Its workshops in fabrication, welding and vehicle maintenance gained the approval of equalities minister Seema Malhotra, who visited earlier this year (when she was shadow skills minister).
Its chief executive, Dan Read, has however fallen out with at least one local headteacher in Derby as he “won’t be told what to do by someone who hasn’t left school”.
But Read’s eyes well up as he describes how he couldn’t give up on Aaron, a boy excluded from school, because “all I could see was a mirror image of me at his age”. Aaron has since built an “incredibly successful” career in welding, and “always knows he can come back here anytime he wants”.
Another student, Taylor, who “tried to chuck himself under a train”, later “ended up welding on HS2”. “I’m insanely proud of those young people,” Read says.
He is looking to franchise his model to other areas and there appears to be ample demand for it; Placements by local authorities into alternative provision rose 108 per cent between 2017-18 and 2023-24, from 23,086 to 48,133, although work-based placements such as Read’s made up only 0.62 per cent of the total.
In Stoke-on-Trent, where an astonishing 16.5 per cent of 16-17 year olds are NEETs, the cost of alternative provision for excluded pupils rose from £2.3 million in 2022-23 to £3.1 million in 2023-24.
Cameron, 17, used to “skip school a lot” and “wasn’t allowed on school premises” to take his GCSEs. He says: “I can be myself at Engineered Learning.”
Corey, 17, was “kicked out of many schools”. He wanted to do a “hands-on” engineering course at school but was given “no opportunities”.
He spent a year as a NEET “doing a lot of things I shouldn’t have been doing”.
“I actually look forward to waking up now and doing something, because Dan believes in us 100 per cent.”
2nd from left Derb North MP Catherine Atkinson with current DfE equalities minister minister and then-shadow skills minister Seema Malhotra and Engineered Learning CEO Dan Read
A trusted adult
Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, told FE Week she would like to see “far more help” for NEETs, including “support from trusted adults in schools or colleges”.
The government has pledged to provide 1,000 new careers advisers in schools, and make two weeks’ work experience mandatory.
Having a “trusted adult” providing careers mentoring was “the key to success” in preventing 14 to 17 year olds from becoming NEETs, a project by the Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) found. The pilot, running in 10 areas over the last three years, also highlighted the importance of young people meeting people they could relate to from the world of work who shared similar backgrounds and had faced similar barriers.
Of the more than 1,000 pupils on free school meals who took part, 94 per centsuccessfully transferred to college or training upon leaving school at 16 (compared to 88 per cent of disadvantaged young people nationwide) and only around 1 per cent had quit the course six months later.
Oli de Botton, CEO of The Careers & Enterprise Company
Each of the 10 projects had a different focus based on local needs.
In Liverpool, the programme’s focus was on young boys disengaged from school. It enabled them to meet local self-made entrepreneurs – “adults they could actually relate to”, explains Gill Walsh, Liverpool City Region’s hub lead.
In Leicester, the project focused on young people with SEND. They built a “really strong relationship” over two years with their careers advisor, who they would meet with twice a term, explains project lead Laura Sherlock.
“That meant that if courses were dropped, which can happen quite frequently with entry level post-16 qualifications, they have somebody helping them transition to new courses. That careers advice was central.
“Some of our young people aren’t going to access paid employment. But we wanted to help them understand how they could meaningfully employ their time. That might start voluntarily, but progress to paid employment once they’ve built up skills.”
Zack Johnson who benefitted from a NEET prevention project run by CEC
East Sussex’s project supported 105 persistent school absentees, as the council found high school absence to be the biggest indicator of later NEET status.
Zack Johnson, 17, says his “head was a whirlwind” when he tried to go back to his school after Covid lockdowns as he was “riddled with anxiety”.
From year 10 the project provided him with three hour-long sessions a year with a coach, Anna, to set career goals. He was inspired to apply to a music production course at DV8 College in Bexhill-on-Sea, after being introduced by Anna to local jazz musician Neal Richardson, and now has his sights on becoming a singer songwriter.
CEC’s chief executive Oli de Botton sees that “connection” to role models for young people as “crucial”.
“Everyone’s got passion for something, you’ve just got to find it.”
The college sector was snubbed by Labour when it handed schoolteachers an inflation-busting pay rise. Would the formation of a pay review body help? Anviksha Patel investigates
The merits of a pay advisory quango for FE has topped the sector’s agenda since schoolteachers got £1.2 billion of government cash to raise their pay 5.5 per cent.
College leaders and unions have begun talks about how a separate pay group could close the near-£10,000 salary gap between school and college teachers.
The Department for Education’s decision to exclude FE colleges from the £1.2 billion pot in July sparked sector-wide anger.
And a kick in the teeth for many was the fact £80 million of this was earmarked for school sixth-form teachers.
Why did Labour ministers do this? Their excuse was because colleges do not have a pay review body – independent panels that evidence and provide the government with advice each year on public sector pay.
“Funding for further education, as with other workforces which do not have a pay review body, will be taken as part of the forthcoming multi-year spending review which will set out funding for 2025-26 and beyond”, the DfE told FE Week.
That spending review won’t conclude until spring.
Meanwhile, the government unveiled plans last week to revive the School Support Staff Negotiating Body (SSSNB) to “ensure all school staff have access to fair pay and conditions”.
The great pay gap
Funding cuts have squeezed college pay for over a decade.
Research published last year by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that in 2010-11, the median salary (at today’s prices) was around £48,000 for a school teacher and £42,500 for a college teacher. But median pay is now around £41,500 for a school teacher and £34,500 for a college teacher.
Last week the Association of Colleges (AoC) recommended colleges offer staff a “disappointing” 2.5 per cent pay rise for 2024-25.
The move strayed from the membership body’s previous ambition to achieve parity with schools by matching the 5.5 per cent pay recommendation made by the arms-length School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB).
Put simply, most colleges cannot afford a pay rise equivalent to schools without extra funding.
Labour’s new team of education ministers have repeatedly expressed their sympathy with colleges and recognised the huge pay gap they suffer.
Two weeks ago, education secretary Bridget Phillipson told the STRB its 2025-26 recommendations should consider the impact on the FE teaching workforce in England.
David Hughes, chief executive of the AoC, said Phillipson’s amendment to the STRB’s remit was a “helpful step” that will highlight the “enormous discrepancy which has no justification”.
But there is no sign ministers are considering an equivalent pay review body for FE.
In the soon-to-be-legislated employment rights bill, the SSSNB will be reinstated to negotiate on matters relating to the remuneration, terms and conditions of employment, and training and career progression of school support staff.
The then education secretary Michael Gove abolished the quango in the advent of the 2010 coalition government, citing it did “not fit well with the government’s priorities for greater deregulation of the pay and conditions arrangements for the school workforce”.
Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said Labour has “perhaps observed the damage caused” by the abolition of the SSSNB, which “cemented systemic low pay for support staff”, adding that a “consistent approach on pay will help ease the support staff recruitment crisis”.
What is a pay review body?
There are currently eight supposedly independent pay review bodies – soon-to-be 10 with the addition of the reinstated SSSNB and an adult social care negotiating body – which consider the pay and professional duties of half of the public sector workforce, including NHS workers, the armed forces, police officers and senior civil servants.
Pay review bodies (PRBs) consult with trade unions, employers and local authorities before making recommendations to the government on pay, which the government can accept or not.
They have existed since the 1960s and the education sector has seen various iterations over the years such as the Interim Advisory Committee and Burnham committees from the 1980s, which conducted collective negotiation of teacher pay.
The School Teachers’ Review Body was set up in 1992 and marked the rollout of pay review bodies to “displace” collective bargaining and “undermine” existing non-statutory PRBs, according to a report by the Institute of Employment Rights.
The STRB delivers an annual report of pay recommendations to the education secretary and prime minister. The panel’s members are appointed by the prime minister and the secretary of state, which has concerned unions.
Kebede claimed the STRB’s reports have been used as a “political football”, with the previous government “routinely leaving its publication for many weeks – and too late for heads to plan their next-year budgets accordingly”.
He added: “Government requires it to work within the existing inadequate funding envelope. This means the STRB does not undertake an objective review of pay and conditions.”
Is a PRB right for colleges?
Colleges have been able to negotiate pay with the National Joint Forum – made up of the five FE unions – for almost 30 years since they came out of local authority rule and formed independent statutory corporations in 1992.
But since the reclassification of FE colleges into the public sector in 2022, questions have been raised as to why FE doesn’t have its own pay review body.
PRBs seek to publish recommendations that address longstanding workforce issues.
The STRB last year introduced a starting salary of £30,000 for young graduates to attract teachers into schools.
The government also accepted the NHS pay review bodies’ 2023 recommendations in full, awarding a 6 per cent pay rise for most doctors, between 8.1 to 10.3 per cent for junior doctors and 5 per cent for senior leaders. While “expensive”, the acceptance was necessary to “stem the flow” of staff out of the NHS into the private sector, the Institute for Government said.
Meanwhile, the AoC is talking with unions about moving to a binding collective bargaining agreement and has gathered views from its members before it lobbies for changes.
AoC pay recommendations are non-binding. Depending on what is agreed between the parties, changes could make it legally binding for colleges that are part of negotiations.
However, if pay awards are negotiated through a statutory pay review body, all colleges would be “bound” to implement whatever is recommended and accepted by government, lawyers say.
“If this is the government’s proposed route, colleges should seek assurance that any nationally imposed pay increases are fully funded,” said Jean Boyle, head of education at Stone King.
The University and College Union said the current non-binding recommendations were “broken and need replacing”.
“We need functioning national pay talks that are fully funded and implemented by all colleges,” it said.
Hughes said: “The unions have been clear they want to see colleges come under a pay review body and believe that will be the best way to secure the investment colleges need to put pay back where it should be.”
However, college leaders are “nervous” about this as they “fear losing the freedom to set pay at a level which maintains their financial viability”.
Hughes admitted the chancellor’s decision to “find £80 million or so for school sixth forms for teacher pay and nothing for comparable colleges was wrong on several counts, and has heightened interest in how a pay review body could work for colleges”.
He said: “Any changes will need to be fully understood, assessed and analysed before decisions are made that would impact around 180 independent college corporations.”
In the sixth-form college sector, teacher pay is agreed between the National Joint Council, a body for collective bargaining, and the Sixth Form Colleges Association (SFCA).
Graham Baird, director of HR Services at the SFCA, said: “The issue at hand is a funding issue and should not be sidetracked by whether current collective bargaining in FE could receive additional government pay funding if it were covered by an unrepresentative pay review body approach.”
Anne Murdoch, senior adviser in college leadership at the Association of School and College Leaders, said policymakers must address the oversight of pay discrepancies between college and schoolteachers, “whether that is through a new pay review body or another mechanism”.
“Something has got to change,” she added.
The drawbacks
Hughes said establishing a PRB could be a long process. It requires ministers to select and appoint members, decide on a remit and enshrine it in law.
“Ultimately, English colleges make decisions with the system they operate within, and there is a lot of variation between pay arrangements and contracts between different colleges,” he said.
“Both Scotland and Wales have more standardised arrangements but moving towards this would be a long process.”
Lawyers told FE Week the new employment rights bill comes as a warning to colleges as legislation will bring support staff in academy trusts into the SSSNB’s negotiating remit, which is going to be “hard” for academies to transition.
“Academies have been doing their own thing in relation to support staff pay and conditions for the last 15 years,” said Boyle. “If they now suddenly transition to a nationally agreed pay structure, what happens? You would expect the funding to come with that.”
Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute, said while the idea of a pay review body was “certainly worth exploring”, it’s not “inevitable” that having one would guarantee more money and higher pay for colleges.
“Ultimately, having a pay review body doesn’t mean the government will find extra money to meet its recommendations, and the government can set the remit for the pay review body (to say, for example, that it must take account of the public finances),” he said.
He added that there would be a trade-off of colleges having local flexibility over pay versus the collective weight of an independent body saying college pay should rise.
Imran Tahir, research economist at the IFS, said local flexibility would mean principals were better able to respond to local labour market conditions.
Members of the Royal College of Nursing last year, whose pay is under the remit of the NHS Pay Review Body, voted to no longer submit evidence to the PRB as it wanted “more direct and effective negotiations with employers”.
When Morgan Freeman was asked about Black History Month in an interview with The Guardian, he replied: “You’re going to relegate my history to a month?” He was right, and we owe our learners more.
A few years ago, when working at West Suffolk College, I was awarded the President’s Award from the Association of Colleges (AOC) for being the first FE lecturer to incorporate black history into the curriculum and enrichment events throughout the entire year.
Now, many more are embarking on this work. Colleges across the country are embedding Black history into their curriculum. So here’s what I’ve learned to help them on their way.
Start small, then build
The best place to start is to look at what you can achieve in your own department. As you plan and develop ideas, get everyone in the organisation engaged in what you are trying to do.
Have conversations with students and colleagues. Some of these may be uncomfortable, but they’re all crucial in taking those first steps in the right direction.
Then you can start to work on training programmes for staff based around equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) as well as starting to develop anti-racism training. (Start with your staff before moving on to students.)
There is still much work to be done to achieve true cultural change, but I have found that many people across the sector are passionate about EDI. They can help support plans and become your champions and ambassadors, across the college and further afield.
Reach out
Through this work, I’ve had the honour of meeting many fascinating people over the years. For example, interviewed award-winning author, writer and lecturer Ashley Hickson-Lovence as part of my work with the AOC.
In that interview, Ashley highlighted the importance of ensuring young people see themselves as writers, in films, on the stage and in creative roles in general. His journey inspired the young people who heard it, and he has recently co-written a book with a former student.
So reach out to your sector, find the diverse voices making a difference there, and bring them before your students.
But it’s not all about reaching for the stars. People in your local community also have stories to tell that can be so powerful and inspirational.
And when it comes to outreach, don’t forget your learners themselves. We can learn so much from them, and they can learn so much from each other. Creating space for this is crucial to supporting the next generation of gamechangers.
A launchpad
I encourage everyone to engage with Black history month. Getting the whole organisation involved is an important step in bringing about culture change. But once engaged, it’s important to build momentum.
Ask them for one action a month to promote diversity, then one a fortnight, and eventually one a week if necessary. Before long, EDI will be a normal part of the year-long conversation about curriculum and staff development.
Finally, to institutionalise it, you will need to embed what you are doing into your policies, strategies and action plans too.
Colleges like West Suffolk College, Birmingham Metropolitan College and Inspire Education College, on their own or with partners like Citizens UK, are taking great strides in this work. Every college can and should.
Knowing more
Henry VIII, The Battle of Hastings, Neil Armstrong, Queen Victoria… If I expected you to learn all of White history in a month, would you be able to?
Of course not. Black History Month is a chance to start to know more, but a truly rich curriculum should be underpinned by representation throughout.
And if you don’t know it all yourself (None of us do!), then don’t be afraid to ask for help. It’s likely you’ll get things wrong along the way, but external organisations and community networks can propel you forward.
It’s time for FE to come together to increase the momentum of work on EDI, and sharing best practices is key. If Wales can embed Black History into the curriculum, why can’t we?
As Martin Luther King said, “Its’ never the wrong time to do the right thing”.
Ellisha Soanes will be launching a podcast about gamechangers in the FE world with the Association of Colleges later this year.
The first Mechanics Institutes were a symphony of bright minds and willing hands, forged in the fires of industry. In Darlington, their purpose was clear: engineers for the railways, artisans for the steelworks of the Tees Valley.
These institutions were free, independent; they charged what they wished and governed themselves as they saw fit. Their lifeblood intertwined with the community they served.
But education, free education, became a political darling. The government, ever watchful, sought to bring these renegade institutes to heel.
Thus, the technical colleges were born, tethered to local levies. Freedom, however, came with strings, and those strings multiplied over the next century. Colleges were pulled away from their communities and into the grip of government oversight.
FE had become a house of two masters: the government and the community.
Like a puppet guided by two right hands, with very different ideas of where and how to move us, the sector has met key moments in our national story either pulled in different directions or in a complete tangle.
Now, we find ourselves on the precipice of another struggle for control. Skills shortages, an economy struggling for growth, seismic shifts in the workplace and record-low levels of investment in the workforce demand action.
But who is leading the dance? Who will accept the responsibility?
Bridget Phillipson’s recent announcement was a disasterpiece. A 5.5 per cent pay rise for school teachers left FE staff with nothing.
Unions crying out for clarity and a path forward were met with silence, save for murmurs of abandonment. Social feeds now buzz with a pattern too deliberate to ignore: the DfE preparing to cut us loose, to hand the controls to another.
Enter Skills England, with Baroness Jaqui Smith at the helm. Another string for the marionette? What does this mean for us, the lecturers, support staff, technicians and curriculum planners?
The optimist’s view
This could be a string that binds us closer to our communities.
Imagine greater access to funding and materials that cater to local needs. IT departments no longer shackled to outdated specs, engineering programs thriving with local manufacturers, green industrial revolutions fuelling our net zero aims and economic objectives.
Skills England could be a regulatory body that understands us, not as an afterthought but as a vital service to our communities. A smaller, more agile entity could mean greater adaptability and a focus on real-world skills.
True: without proper pay, better conditions and adequate funding, we won’t attract the skilled lecturers we need. But it’s a dream worth having.
The pessimist’s lament
The DfE’s takeover was supposed to include us in the national conversation, to elevate our pay and provide funding stability. Instead, we became curiosities, our efforts met with surprise and misunderstanding.
Politicians from all parties still assume our work is well-paid, easy and selective.
As an English resit teacher, I’ve met many who didn’t realise we don’t teach English literature or even read books in English language courses.
Our colleges are inspected by Ofsted, yet remain outside the scope of the one-word judgement ban designed to reduce fear and stress.
Why believe Skills England will be different? Another central system, blind to our sector’s nuances, likely to hand us over once again. Experience has taught us this outcome is probable.
A flicker of hope
Who knows what the future holds? What little control we have is in our contributions to the curriculum and assessment review consultation. Here, at least, there is a focus on our sector – and we have a voice.
Skills England has the potential to at least untangle our strings, set us straight and centre-stage, ready to play our part.
And that alone could begin to reverse the fortunes of the working class. Baroness Smith, despite the grandiosity of her title, may be the catalyst for change we need – the change our communities need. It’ll be tough, expensive, but oh-so necessary.
So let’s ready the bricklayers and mechanics. There are foundations to lay and an economic engine to fine-tune. Let’s ready the chefs too, because this omelette won’t get made without breaking some eggs.
And let’s ready the creatives and the activists. Because this puppet needs some clear direction and some political certainty.
The average Premier League manager is in post for just under two years before they lose their job. Les Reed managed just 41 days at Charlton Athletic. In that context, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) reaching seven years old is an achievement.
But in the context of meeting the long-term learning and skills needs of our country, it’s not very long at all.
IfATE now follows a long list of predecessors including the Manpower Services Commission, Learning and Skills Council, Skills Funding Agency, Skills Advisory Panels, UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), Training and Enterprise Councils and more into the lengthening history of skills acronyms.
The government says it wants Skills England to give a clear picture of the country’s skills needs, join up support to deliver that, and work with bodies like the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to help deliver national priorities.
But will it have the power to deliver real change?
Unlike IfATE, it won’t have a founding in legislation. Instead, it will be a Department for Education agency, with the Secretary of State deciding which of IfATE’s powers it can have.
Having a legislative base doesn’t mean you will succeed or survive (ask UKCES, among others). But it is one way in which you have clout.
And will Skills England be too narrowly focused?
If it is limited to producing skills forecasts, encouraging everyone to deliver them and approving apprenticeship standards and training allowed under the Growth and Skills Levy, it will fail.
The narrowness of the legislation (focused on transferring IfATE’s powers) means there is a risk Skills England will lack both power and breadth – a sort of IfATE-lite.
The good news is it’s early days. So what would it take for Skills England to be a success and avoid becoming the latest addition to the acronym scrapheap?
Independence and breadth of remit
A legislative base, including a duty to promote lifelong learning of all types, would be one way to cement the body’s independence. If not that, then its board and leadership will need to demonstrate it.
Skills England needs to focus on perhaps our biggest challenge: underinvestment and underutilisation of skills by employers: our research shows they’re spending 26 per cent less on training per employee than in 2005.
It also needs to look at learning at all levels and for all reasons. Medr, Wales’ new post-16 skills body, has a statutory duty to promote lifelong learning at a variety of levels and range of ways, including higher education. Will Skills England do likewise?
Real powers
These should include:
working with the MAC to agree plans with employers to increase their training and recruitment investment. That could be underpinned by a higher Immigration Skills Charge for sectors with highest demand for visas, with Skills England controlling the extra funds raised.
agreeing with sectors binding ways to increase employer training investment. That includes building it into the planned Fair Pay Agreement in social care to increase the pipeline of workers for that sector, and encouraging the introduction of additional skills levies (as in construction) in sectors where employers don’t increase their investment voluntarily.
overseeing devolution deals in England, signing off outcome agreements that show how many more people will get into work or improve their skills through greater local control of a single pot of employment and skills funding.
Looking out for skills
The government wants to move to clean energy by 2030, build 1.5 million homes in five years, cut NHS waiting lists and boost economic growth. Skills England must ensure workforce and skills plans are built into those, as well as ensuring the skills system delivers for industrial strategy priority sectors.
Skills England will not operate in a vacuum. The government’s manifesto commitment to a post-16 strategy offers hope of an open discussion about what a simplified system with sustained investment might look like.
No Premier League manager lasts forever, but for Skills England to succeed, it needs to be a lot less like Les Reed, and a lot more like Arsène Wenger.
Autumn budget, 2021. I was prising the cork out of a bottle of Lidl Cava and texting my mum to turn on her TV. Rishi was about to announce £559 million of funding for a side project I’d been working on.
We’d all laughed at the first attempt at official branding for Multiply that alternated ketchup-red and mustard-yellow lettering like a seven-year-old let loose with a bubble jet printer.
Then, laughter was replaced with slack-jawed disbelief when we’d finally scrolled further down the email to see that the then-chancellor’s reverence for maths was bringing half a billion pounds of new money to our national problem with adult numeracy.
There will be differing views of the merits and success of Multiply, but after indulging myself in that unusually exciting moment in the work of a civil servant, I returned to my day job on 16-19 policy. I let others get to work on dragging us up from among the lowest levels of adult numeracy in the OECD and reversing the decade-long decline we’d seen in take-up of adult maths.
I looked on with great interest though. £100 million of that money was earmarked for an online maths tuition platform.
I imagined one approach could have been building on the best of existing products’ industry-contextualised video lessons, low-stakes practice exercises and adaptive diagnostic assessments, quickly re-skinned for an older audience. Those elements could feed into the free entitlement to sessions with remote tutors which made up most of the hefty price tag.
In the back of my mind was how it could be used to supplement maths delivery to apprentices, mitigating one of the most common complaints from the sector.
And it wasn’t a huge leap from there to see it becoming a resource to support teachers of those continuing maths in their 16-19 study programmes; a sort of ‘Oak for resits’, eventually expanding to English too.
It won’t have escaped your attention that we don’t have a £100m online maths tuition platform. The project was shelved in 2023.
You will be forgiven for thinking this is a crap system
Perhaps two years and £100 million just wasn’t sufficient to set up a website. Admittedly, all I had to go on when I conceived it was the profitable X Files fan site I ran when I was fourteen years old.
Another big chunk of the Multiply millions was to fund research trials into effective approaches to adult maths. Three years later, those are just beginning.
The rest was devolved to local areas to experiment and innovate. It was hoped that the decline in participation could be reversed by offering more flexibility. FE rose to the challenge, teaching everywhere from buses to food banks.
But March 2025 brings the end of the three-year spending review period, meaning a funding cliff-edge. Right now, provision is winding down while local areas rush to spend the last of the cash.
You will be forgiven for thinking this is a crap system.
While I can poke fun at it taking years to set up a website, more complex projects such as local delivery require periods of procurement, implementation, staff recruitment, participant on-boarding and scaling up. Add six months of wind-down time to that and three years doesn’t seem too long after all.
Which is why my heart sank to see that our new chancellor, Rachel Reeves is set on running two-year spending reviews from now on. It guarantees continued inefficiency, ineffectiveness and chaos.
One solution, of course, would be to speed government departments the hell up.
Yes, I made myself laugh there too.
There is another option. Empower departments and local areas to offer five-, or even seven-year, contracts regardless of SR length. All you need is a three-month termination clause (which government contracts should have anyway) so that if priorities change, taxpayers’ money isn’t left committed.
That would shift the mindset of delivery to long-term, embedded quality, rather than this quick-buck, pop-up shop approach to government spending that we’re stuck in.
Ministers have been told any imminent national insurance hikes must be fully funded for both schools and colleges.
Reports this week suggested the government will increase NI contributions for employers when it presents its first Budget at the end of this month.
The BBC said this could be done by charging NI on an employer’s pension contributions, which are currently exempt.
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union, said it was “incumbent on the chancellor to protect public services from a further wave of cuts”.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves “should reimburse public sector employers for additional costs, and at the same time use money raised from the private sector to increase funding for public services”, he said.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “We would expect the government to compensate public sector employers in the event of a rise in NI employer contributions, as has happened in the past, and for this to be new funding, not taken from money meant for children’s education.”
In 2021 under the Conservative government, schools were given help to deal with NI rises but FE colleges were left out.
Di’Iasio added: “If employer contributions do rise, it’s vital that the compensation covers the full cost of the increased contributions and that it is provided to colleges as well as schools.”
When quizzed about NI reports this week, education secretary Bridget Phillipson said she would not “engage in speculation”, but “recognised the pressures that have been there in recent years”.
Almost 2,000 fewer people started adult care apprenticeships last year despite “exceptional” funding boosts.
Two care standards were among 10 popular apprenticeships chosen for an emergency government review of funding in late 2022. Those in scope were in skills shortage occupations and priority sectors where costs of delivery were hardest hit by inflation.
Funding band increases of between £500 and £5,000 were finally implemented the following summer ahead of the 2023/24 academic year, but training providers warned at the time that the rises fell short of what was needed to make the courses affordable.
FE Week analysis of new 2023/24 provisional government data shows that six of the 10 apprenticeships saw their starts decline despite the funding increases (full table below).
Adult care worker apprenticeships suffered the steepest fall in terms of volume. The level 2 standard dropped from 7,460 to 6,286 and the level 3 lead standard slumped from 10,180 to 9,541. Both programmes had their funding bands increased from £3,000 to £4,000.
Level 2 large goods vehicle (LGV) driver C and E dropped by the largest proportion of 33 per cent, falling from 1,380 in 2022/23 to 931 after its funding band was boosted from £7,000 to £8,000.
Starts on the level 3 motor vehicle and maintenance technical (light vehicle) apprenticeship fell 18 per cent from 3,730 to 3,066. The funding band for this standard went up from £15,000 to £16,000.
The remaining apprenticeships that dropped in starts were heavy vehicle service and maintenance technician, which fell from 1,260 to 1,125 despite a £5,000 funding boost to £20,000, and the production chef standard which sank from 2,360 to 2,225.
An FE Week investigation in March found nearly 200 training providers had ceased delivery of adult care worker apprenticeships since 2019 and annual starts on the programmes had nosedived.
The Association of Employment and Learning Providers believes the data shows the “consequences of not having a fully responsive system”.
Deputy CEO and director of policy Simon Ashworth said: “This means we see vital delivery capacity lost and high-quality providers leaving the market unnecessarily and through no fault of their own. Skills England must learn these lessons so that the skills system evolves into something that is more responsive to both demand and supply factors – not just on funding, but also on content and wider currency.”
He added that the challenge of having to successfully pass English and maths functional skills was another aspect affecting starts.
“From our own research, we know that as DfE tighten their focus through provider accountability, tough decisions are then made by providers in terms of who gets recruited onto programmes such as adult care.”
Apprenticeship funding bands are said to be the government’s best estimate of the typical cost of training and assessment.
Reviews of the bands usually happen as part of revisions to apprenticeship content, which can be a lengthy process. The exceptional funding band review removed the need for content to be reviewed so that monetary decisions could be accelerated.
Twenty apprenticeships were originally chosen for the emergency review but only 10 ended up benefitting from it after the employer-led trailblazer groups for half of those in scope opted out.
Of the four apprenticeships in the review that had their starts increase, the level 2 engineering operative standard rose by the largest proportion of 19 per cent, shooting up from 1,500 to 1,790.
The level 3 senior chef production apprenticeship boiled up from 600 to 675, while the level 3 chef de partie standard rose from 240 to 251 and the level 2 commis chef simmered from 1,610 to 1,620.
A spokesperson from the Department for Education said:“We are committed to supporting high-quality delivery of apprenticeships. Spending on the apprenticeship programme is demand-led and employers can choose which apprenticeships they offer, how many and when.
“These increases have provided real benefit to providers and to support continued high-quality provision.”
