Time for FE to shine ahead of crucial Budget

EuroSkills

Almost seven years ago the world descended upon London’s Excel arena for the 41st WorldSkills competition – my first experience. At the time it was hailed as the largest ever skills competition, and the first single event to fully occupy the Excel centre. Transport for London even used the event as a drill for the upcoming Olympic Games.

 In the months following the event we worked with the National Apprenticeship Service, which was then operating skills competitions in the UK, to improve the profile of WorldSkills in the UK.

As a sector we often reflect on the lack of media attention FE receives. The work of WorldSkills UK and the successes of Team UK is something we should be extremely proud of, not just as a sector, but as a nation.

 We took the decision to accept an offer of becoming media partner later that year – a role which would embed us with Team UK and follow their journeys as they prepared to compete on the international stage.

At the time I was wee lad and about the same age as the competitors, in fact some were older. For two years I worked alongside Team UK and observed our world class education system in operation as the team got set to compete at WorldSkills Leipzig.

As my hairline has receded, other members of the FE Week team have had the opportunity to report and be inspired. My whole organisation is fully committed to investing in WorldSkills UK to ensure an increasing number of people are able to learn about their work and successes. We have now renewed our media partnership with WorldSkills UK for a further two years.

In recent years the national media has finally shown more of an interest in WorldSkills, from the BBC to daily newspapers. It’s great to see, and provides a great representation to the public of what our sector achieves.

Team UK’s successes are only possible thanks to the infrastructure provided by colleges, providers and employers across the country.

What the FE sector now needs to do is shout about it more. More than ever before. Get on social media over the coming few days and wish the team good luck, using the hashtag #TEAMUK. Share the news articles on our website with your colleagues and stake-holders.

It’s great to see more of the sector engaging with WorldSkills UK than ever before, but it’s not nearly enough! There is so much more we could do.

WorldSkills UK and Team UK are some of the best ambassadors for the FE sector we have. They and the sector deserve to be celebrated and recognised!

Colleges Week

Keeping with the theme of championing the sector, we have also this week thrown our weight behind the “Colleges Week” campaign, led by AoC. You might have noticed we’ve added the campaign logo to our masthead, both on our website and this newspaper.

The week provides a focused opportunity to showcase and celebrate the inspiring work colleges provide their local communities and beyond, alongside this highlighting the government’s underinvestment in colleges.

 We at FE Week fully support the mission of Colleges Week and hope it is a great success, with impact.

We would encourage all in the sector to support the campaign and hope that it has a positive impact for all providers. On the eve of the Chancellor’s autumn statement, we need a united voice arguing for an increase in the rates paid to ensure the entire sector can continue to provide a world class education for learners.

 Next week we will undoubtedly be showered with platitudes from Damian Hinds, when he speaks at his party conference, about the great work the sector does and its importance. Don’t let him and the Chancellor get away with their being no substance. This is a long overdue opportunity for them to put their money where their mouth is and cough-up.

But they will need a nudge.

What Labour plans for further education could mean for colleges

The shadow skills minister has refused to rule out bringing colleges back under local authority control, as part of Labour’s plans for a national education service.

But, speaking to FE Week on the third day of the Labour party conference this week, Gordon Marsden (pictured above) hit back at criticism that his party lacked FE and skills policy – calling such comments “nonsense”.

Mr Marsden said that, under plans set out for the NES, local communities would be “collectively responsible” for the education institutions within it, including colleges, and would be “empowered, via appropriate democratic means, to influence change where it is needed”.

The “appropriate democratic authority” would “set, monitor and allocate resources” ensuring that they “meet the rights, roles and responsibilities of individuals and institutions”.

When asked if this meant bringing colleges back under local authority control, Mr Marsden simply said: “It means what it says”.

He did not rule out such a proposal even when asked directly if he would do so.

The position he outlined, which was set out in Labour’s charter for the NES, “represents the party’s current and settled position on the basis of the consultation and responses received in it”, he said.

Mr Marsden’s remarks follow comments made by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in an interview with FE Week at last year’s Association of Colleges conference in November.

“We feel there’s a danger with the independent model of college education that they get too far away from local communities and local education authorities,” he said.

“And what we’re looking to is a model that will bring them closer to that, but not removing the important connection with local industry,” Mr Corbyn continued.

Labour faced criticism this week for failing to shine a light on its plans for FE, after shadow education secretary Angela Rayner’s speech to conference on Monday stopped short of going into any detail.

She spoke about the formation of a commission for lifelong learning, which would be led by Mr Marsden, but this was not new, having previously been announced in the party’s 2017 election manifesto.

The lack of detail prompted criticism from the Confederation of British Industry, among others.

Its head of education and skills, John Cope, said businesses wanted to hear more about what the NES “means for the issues that matter” which included improving “often woeful careers advice” and “technical education through apprenticeships and T-levels”.

Such criticism was “nonsense”, Mr Marsden said.

“You’re not going to get masses of detail in a seven-minute speech,” he said.

“If people want a 60-second soundbite on everything then they would have been disappointed. But there were clear indications of the direction of travel and who was taking them forward,” he added.

There were “a lot of things out there already” on Labour’s policy on T-levels and apprenticeships, through the “large number of short-term critiques that we are making”.

These needed to be distinguished from “our vision for the medium term and the longer term” which is being set out in its commission for lifelong learning.

The commission would “straddle both HE and FE, and existing methods of lifelong learning and future ones”.

It would focus on issues such as barriers to access, including the “damage that has been done particularly for older learners with the non-take up of advanced learner loans” and the “under-funded, under-represented” English for Speakers of Other Languages.

The “long-term aim” is to “integrate HE and FE in lifelong learning and give parity of esteem”, Mr Marsden said, and the commission would look at “systems of credit transfer” between the two.

It would also look at the role of institutions in delivering lifelong learning, “not just the colleges and training providers, but also looking at the potential for initiatives being done under devolution with local authorities, and the role of local enterprise partnerships,” he said.

Ofsted says sorry for carrying out wrong kind of inspection

Ofsted has been left red-faced after carrying out the wrong kind of monitoring visit and incorrectly publishing a report, before quickly deleting it.

Inspectors visited Wiltshire Council’s adult and community learning service on July 7 this year, after the provision was given a grade three rating by Ofsted in December 2017. A letter detailing the outcome of the visit was published on August 8.

Despite being written about online by this newspaper and by Wiltshire Council, the report has now vanished entirely from Ofsted’s website.

When questioned by FE Week, the inspectorate admitted that both the visit and the published report were “undertaken in error”.

A spokesperson said: “In line with Ofsted’s current policy, a further visit will now be arranged after which we will publish a letter. We have apologised to the provider for our error.”

Previously, when an FE provider was rated ‘requires improvement’ inspectors would arrange a ‘support and challenge’ visit before the next inspection.

These visits could include meetings with governors, visits for senior leaders to another provider or joint observations of particular lessons, after which the principal or chief executive would receive a reporting letter outlining actions to be taken and timescales agreed. Crucially, these letters were never published online.

However, at the end of last year Ofsted ran a consultation into scrapping the support and challenge visits and replacing them with monitoring visits, which would include a published report and judgements on how the provider was progressing with improvements.

This was approved, meaning that any FE provider which has been inspected by Ofsted since November 10, 2017, and receive a grade 3 rating will now receive a published monitoring visit.

Wiltshire Council was given a ‘requires improvement’ rating after a full inspection between December 5 and December 7, 2017. But despite changes to the rules, inspectors carried out a support and challenge visit on July 7. Curiously, a reporting letter was subsequently published online on August 8, even though this is never supposed to happen for support and challenge visits.

Although the report no longer exists online, it was picked up in Ofsted Watch, FE Week’s weekly round-up of published inspections, when it was first published.

FE Week reported then that the council was found to be making “good progress”.

 “Tutors have received appropriate training and are now taking a qualification to equip them to provide advice and guidance more effectively to learners before they start their courses and to prepare them for their next steps,” inspectors said.

“Managers now routinely and regularly undertake formal and informal observations of teaching and learning.”

A week after the report’s publication, an article on Wiltshire Council’s website said Ofsted had found it was making “good progress” in all areas.

 At the time Laura Mayes, the council’s cabinet member for education, said the report “positions us very well for our next inspection, anticipated in the autumn”.

Wiltshire council will now have to go through another monitoring visit before the next full inspection.

A spokesperson said plans were in progress for the next visit, and added that all visits from Ofsted “are a great opportunity to reflect and showcase the important work the team carries out in our communities.”

Since the November 10 cut off point, 48 FE providers have been rated ‘requires improvement’. Wiltshire Council’s short-lived report is the only one to have been published so far.

EuroSkills 2018: FE grandees fly out to support Team UK

Two grandees of the FE sector landed in Budapest today to witness “the best of the best” and cheer on Team UK at EuroSkills 2018.

Sir Gerry Berragan, chief executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships, and Sue Husband, the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s director of employer engagement, touched down in Hungary this morning to attend their first ever international skills competition.

They toured around the Hungexpo arena where 22 competitors from the UK are competing against representatives from 28 countries in trades ranging from mechatronics to hairdressing.

“I was really energised by the competition and captured by the range of skills on display, how good they all were and how competitive it all was,” he told FE Week.

“These young people are the best of the best in what they do and I hope they take their skills and knowledge back to the UK to share it.”

He added that WorldSkills plays a “really vital part in highlighting and getting that message out to employers and potential apprentices”.

“These competitions raise awareness,” Sir Gerry said. “In the UK we’re a really high-skilled economy and have some very skilled people in our different sectors and routes and why wouldn’t we want to showcase that here?

“Why wouldn’t we want to come and represent ourselves on the European and ultimately the world stage? We finished top 10 last year in the world so we would be crazy not to be here.”

He said it’ll be “interesting” to see how other countries approach skills.

“We can’t be complacent, we’re all facing similar challenges so how much emphasis they give it will be interesting to see.”

Ms Husband, who is a learner herself currently studying a chartered management degree apprenticeship, said she has “loved the experience” being out at EuroSkills.

“I knew this was going to be on a slightly different level so I’ve always been keen to witness it,” she told FE Week.

“One of the things you can see when walking around these competitions is how much the competitors have honed their skills and are focused on the task and that is hats off to WorldSkills UK because it shows their training has gone well.”

WorldSkills UK has struggled with government investment in recent years while the likes of Russia and China have invested heavily.

Ms Husband said the Department for Education and ESFA are fully behind supporting skills competitions, but it also needs help from employers.

“The government has been investing in these competitions for a number of years and I think we all now know more than ever that skills are vital to the economy.

“We have different cultures [to Russia and China] and different ways of investing in individuals. The UK model is very much about the government making the investment but I also think there is an ask on employers to share that investment.”

She continued: “I think that model works better with our culture and also there is a fine line between how much you might push the end goal of a medal versus the appropriate way to develop the individual to get world class skills.

“The key thing for me is making sure there is wider impact, not just on the 22 competitors here but across all of our colleges and training providers and employers.

“We want this lot to be the cream of the crop when actually there is a really big effect across the wider working population.”

FE Week is proud to be the official media partners for Team UK and WorldSkills UK.

Re-levelling of first aid course boosts level 3 qualifications

An extra 400,000 people taking level three qualifications this year, and a corresponding fall at level two, can be largely attributed to the decision to ‘re-level’ a popular first aid course.

The Emergency First Aid at Work qualification has been reclassified from level two after a “review” of the qualification from the First Aid Awarding Organisations Forum (FAAOF).

Chris Young, chair of the forum and chair of the board of directions at awarding organisation FutureQuals, said the group felt the qualification would be “more appropriately levelled” as a level three. The skills required to complete the course have not changed, in line with requirements from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), and nor has the price.

 Figures published by Ofqual earlier this month show the QA level three award in Emergency First Aid at Work had the highest number of certificates during the second quarter of this year (April to June).

It was also the most popular qualification in the first quarter, with another first aid qualification – the FAA level three award in Emergency First Aid at Work – coming in third. The same qualifications also came in first and third in the last quarter of 2017.

Accompanying notes to the statistics added: “A number of qualifications have high numbers of certificates this quarter, including new level three qualifications, which were not available to certificate in the same quarter in the previous year. Many of these are first aid qualifications.

“This is due to the FAAOF review of the Emergency First Aid at Work qualification and that these should be re-levelled from level two to level three in England.”

Approximately 400,000 people take the Emergency First Aid at Work qualification each year. If the trend continues this year, the number of people with a level three certificate will grow 33 per cent (1.2 million to 1.6 million), and level two certificates will drop 17 per cent (from 2.4 million to 2 million).

FAAOF does not have any website or online presence.

Mr Young said: “Emergency First Aid has been around for a long time, and it’s just a natural progression. We did some work on the Paediatric First Aid course a couple of years ago and it just led to a natural review, from a validity point of view, that we needed to look again at the Emergency First Aid.

“The autonomy and the requirements to carry out that role unsupervised suggested it should be level three rather than level two. It’s more appropriately levelled, based on the autonomy and the responsibility associated with the qualification.”

 For first aid in the workplace, the HSE only requires a suitable course which meets its guidance. There is no requirement for the course to be regulated by an awarding body, or what level – if any – it should be.

Building a National Education Service: What’s Labour’s vision for skills?

Labour has taken two years to flesh out its National Education Service plans – so what do they mean for FE? Joe Dromey shares his thoughts on what was shared at party conference

In the Labour leadership election of 2015, Jeremy Corbyn set out a vision for a National Education Service. Evoking the founding tenets of the NHS, he pledged education that was free at the point of use, from cradle to grave.

Over the past two years, Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, has been putting the meat on the bones, and setting out what a National Education Service might look like.

There is relative consensus on technical education and apprenticeships. Labour supports T-levels, though the party has called for additional capital investment to deliver the ambitious reform. On apprenticeships, Labour has pledged to retain the levy, but has focused more on quality than quantity. 

Beyond these areas, it is on further and higher education that Labour’s vision differs most from the government’s. Central to this is Labour’s pledge to scrap fees for further and higher education.

Tuition fees – introduced by the previous Labour government and tripled by the coalition – are capped at £9,250 a year. This has helped protect universities from the austerity that has hit other public services, and it doesn’t appear to have put off people; participation has continued to inch up. However, shifting the cost from taxpayer to students has led to soaring student debt; the average graduate emerges with debt of over £50,000, with poorer students facing greater debt. Just one in four students will pay off the full amount.

The coalition introduced a similar system – advanced learner loans – for further education. While debt may not have deterred many from going to university, fees have had a huge impact in FE. Participation in FE fell by nearly a third after the introduction of advanced learner loans.

For Corbyn’s Labour, education is not seen as a commodity but a human right

At the heart of this debate is an ideological divide about what education is for. For the government, education is primarily about advancing individual opportunity. So, as the individual benefits, it is reasonable for the individual to pay. While the government has commissioned a review of education funding, it has baked in this principle; insisting recommendations must “maintain the principle that students should contribute to the cost of their studies”. For Corbyn’s Labour, education is seen not as a commodity, but as a human right and a social good. Because everyone benefits from a higher skilled society – the party argues – it is reasonable for everyone to contribute.

Labour’s pledges do not come cheap. In the party’s costings of its 2017 manifesto commitments, scrapping tuition fees and restoring maintenance grants came to £11.2 billion; nearly a quarter of all additional spending pledges, and four times more expensive than scrapping FE fees, equalising 16-19 funding and restoring EMA put together. Scrapping fees would be regressive – in narrow distributional terms – as young people from wealthier families are more likely to go to university.

On the distributional impact, Labour would argue that if this was paid for by progressive taxation, the overall impact would be progressive. On the cost, many in Labour would say that what matters is not the headline cost, but the long-term economic and social impact. Corbyn argued in 2015, when he set out his vision for the National Education Service, “the extra tax revenues brought by a high skill, high productivity and high pay economy will fund further expansion”. But in the short term, with a dire need for additional investment in other areas – from health and care to prisons and policing and social security – there is a real question about whether this is the highest priority for constrained resources.

Beyond the false binary of learner vs public funding, there are other options. Labour could deliver education that is free at the point of use by – for example – introducing a graduate tax, as Melissa Benn has outlined in her recent book Life Lessons. These options would be worth exploring.

National Health Service founder Nye Bevan once said that “the language of priorities is the religion of socialism”.  In fleshing out its plans for the National Education Service, Labour should bear this in mind.

IfA and Open Awards reach deal on EQA contract extension

The Institute for Apprenticeships has reached a deal with the organisation that delivers external quality assurance on its behalf to extend its contract for a further six months – but will go out to tender for a “longer term contract” after that.

Open Awards first won the contract to deliver EQA on behalf of the IfA in August 2017. Its initial contract ran until March 31, but was subsequently extended for six months.

FE Week reported on Tuesday that the IfA was at risk of losing its EQA provider, as the two parties had failed to reach an agreement on a new contract just days before the old one was due to expire.

“We are pleased to announce that we have today extended the current contract in place with Open Awards to deliver external quality assurance on our behalf until March 2019”, an IfA spokesperson said.

“We intend to run a procurement exercise for a longer term contract to deliver EQA from April 2019 in the next few months,” she said.

Further information on the procurement of the new contract will be published “shortly”, she said.

Open Awards’ initial contract was valued at £160,000 for eight months.

At the time, the IfA’s share of the EQA market stood at just 19 per cent, but since then it has more than doubled.

According to the latest Education and Skills Funding Agency figures, the IfA is named as the EQA provider on 44 per cent fully-approved standards, or 150 out of 342.

“We will continue to review our model for delivering EQA and the resource behind this as end-point assessment numbers continue to grow,” the IfA spokesperson said.

“We are in regular dialogue with Open Awards to ensure that they have the resources in place to deliver a high quality EQA service.”

The fallacy of our ‘employer-led’ skills system

If employers are to be given the driving seat in workforce development, they have to be given the keys to the car, says Tom Bewick

The mantra coming out of Whitehall is that our country operates a skills and apprenticeship system owned and “driven by employers”. In fact, just about every government white paper since the 196Os has promised to address Britain’s historic weakness in technical education and work-based learning by giving employers a far greater say over how workforce development is executed.

Employers are in the back seat of a bureaucratic machine

This ideology reached its apotheosis in November 2011 when the then prime minister, David Cameron, announced the employer ownership pilots (EOP). The design of this wheeze to get more firms training was incredibly simple. By giving employers direct access to £350 million of public money it was thought that all ministers had to do was sit back and watch the skills revolution unfold. After all, employers were now designing, as well as purchasing, the training they actually needed.

Unfortunately, independent evaluation of the pilots over five years has concluded: “There is no evidence to suggest that EOP has changed attitudes towards training or that it led to subsequent increases in the number of staff trained.” In other words, the Treasury would have achieved just as much success if it had simply taken a helicopter stuffed full of £50 notes and dropped them somewhere over an out-of-town industrial estate. The EOP was an abject failure because massive deadweight costs occurred from the fact the employers selected to take part would have done the training anyway.

It seems we never learn. The apprenticeship levy, reformed standards and now T-level route panels are trumpeted as great examples of “employers in the driving seat”. Of course, they are nothing of the sort. At best employers are travelling in the back seat of a bureaucratic machine that decides for them the journey they will be taking.

A more accurate description of England’s current skills model is that it is “technocrat-led”. Like puppet masters, parents play this kind of trick on their offspring all the time. The education secretary, who recently struggled to tell FE Week a single employer that supported the Institute for Apprenticeships, in fact highlights a much wider problem. We’ve allowed bright and extremely well meaning, but nevertheless unaccountable bureaucrats, to take over the running of our whole skills delivery model. Civil servants devise policy; they decide funding and procurement exercises; they regulate and enforce sanctions on anyone that steps out of line. Seriously, where are the recognisable and accountable employers in this model?

In Germany, which Damian Hinds visited recently, it is the mandatory membership of chambers of commerce that means employers are directly accountable for the decisions they make. Quality assurance is handled by industry bodies and the equivalent of the institute, BIBB, plays the supporting more technocratic role. So, it is worth asking policymakers, where is the meaningful involvement of employers in the English system? If the standards are wrong, or the assessment plans difficult to test (in theory all of these were developed by industry groups), how are these employers held to account when things don’t quite work out as planned?

People retain mixed views about the performance of sector skills councils that were introduced in the early Noughties. But at least the public had someone to blame and there can be no doubt the secretary of state knew exactly who the employer chairs were, because regular meetings would take place between them.

Ironically, countries around the world want to emulate sector skills bodies or something like the German chambers of commerce. Why? Because putting employers in the driving seat is about handing over the keys to the car, owned and funded, by the very firms that rely on and use the skills system. Handing out taxpayer funds and labelling it employer ownership or sticking ten worthy employees on a T-level route panel, is not an employer-led skills model. It’s a fallacy.

Complexity is a strength of FE, not a weakness

We shouldn’t be ashamed of the complexity of FE – we must embrace it and start explaining it to people in power, says Ruth Silver

Analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies demonstrates the extent of the cuts further education has had to endure over the past two decades. Its 2018 annual report on education spending in England found that spending per student aged 16-18 in further education had fallen by 8 per cent in real terms since 2010, while 19+ spending on adult education and apprenticeships had collapsed by 45 per cent since 2009 because of a dramatic drop in student numbers.

These appalling figures are an indictment not only of the chronic short-termism that afflicts public policy on education, and on further education in particular, but also of the failure of politicians and policymakers to grasp the value of further education or even, in many cases, to understand what it does. The same point might also be made of the mainstream media, which only rarely reports on FE (with a few honourable exceptions) and understands it just as poorly.

We do great work and we should be unapologetic about it

The chief executive of the Association of Colleges, David Hughes, suggests that the failure of colleges to develop a “national brand” has made it easier for government to overlook their needs and “under-invest in their potential”. Certainly, the level of understanding of FE and its mission within the corridors of Whitehall is ludicrously low. For the most part, they have little personal stake in it. Most politicians and civil servants have no direct experience of the sector and new ministers usually face a steep learning curve in coming to terms with a sector that does so much so well and yet is so utterly overshadowed by the schools and universities systems.

This has to change and sector leaders have a highly important role in making this happen. We should not wait to have a collective identity imposed on us from outside. The mission we project must be created by the sector if we are to take ownership of and lead it. It must be true to what we do while also presenting a narrative that can engage outsiders and win their support.

Commentators often point to the daunting complexity of the college sector as an obstacle to communicating effectively what we do. This is true to an extent – further education offers everything from foundational skills programmes through to higher apprenticeships and degree courses – but I think the issue is more to do with how we talk about this complexity than with the complexity itself.

Further education as a whole needs to be confident about what it does but also comfortable with it. We do great work and we should be unapologetic about it. Most fundamentally, we are leaders of learning, something that can get lost in the competing pressures to lead organisations, businesses and budgets. But we do not lead just any learning. We provide learning that is importantly local, not just in the sense of serving the communities in which we are based, but also in operating at the interface between the world of learning and the wider world of work and social and cultural life. The story we tell in our strategic plans is the story of what we will become as a result of the coming together of changing national, community, learner and employer needs.

I often describe FE as the “adaptive layer” of the education system. I mean this not as a criticism but as a compliment. It is in our DNA to change because we operate at the nexus of important civic, political social and economic change. We live and lead in service. There is a great story to be told about that and we need to be better at telling it. That means leaders talking more clearly and comprehensively about what they do, to more and different people, particularly the ones who can be relied on to start banging on doors when funding is cut. But it also means being comfortable about our complexity and taking ownership of it. It is, after all, our story, and we cannot expect anyone else to tell it for us.