Colleges are on the frontline of a growing youth mental health emergency. Recent NHS data reveals record numbers of children and young people across England needing specialist treatment for severe mental health crises, but this escalating need is outpacing the painfully slow rollout of mental health support in both schools and colleges.
NHS data analysed by YoungMinds shows a concerning 10 per cent rise in emergency, very urgent and urgent referrals for under-18s, with the total increasing to 34,793 between April and October 2024. This is up from 31,749 in the same period the previous year.
While the government has a target to reach 50 per cent of school and college learners by March 2025, no spending has been allocated to guarantee the rollout will continue beyond that.
Labour pledged to provide access to mental health professionals in every school in its manifesto, but disappointingly we’ve seen no concrete details on how or when this will be achieved.
But we know the quality of support is just as crucial as reach. Schools and colleges must have access to professionals who are equipped with the skills and knowledge to support the young people who need them most.
FE remains the lowest sector to take up a £1,200 grant to fund the training of a senior mental health lead. Sixty per cent of colleges completed their grant application as of March 31 2024, compared to 81 per cent in schools.
Even where MHSTs are in place, they are only trained to support young people with “mild-to moderate” mental health issues. An early evaluation of the programme found that schools desperately needed more support than MHSTs could offer, especially for young people with more complex needs.
The next stage of the rollout must ensure that no young person falls through the gap between school and college-based support and the high thresholds for accessing NHS services.
But tackling this crisis will require deeper reforms to address the root causes of poor mental health.
Growing up today is incredibly tough, with young people experiencing multiple pressures, including poverty, inequality, climate emergency and around the clock social media. Having lived through the COVID-19 lockdowns and now confronting an uncertain future, it’s no wonder so many are struggling.
The emphasis on meeting rigid attainment targets has made it increasingly difficult for schools and colleges to prioritise wellbeing.
Deeper reforms needed
Young people tell us they want to re-imagine the education system to move beyond a narrow focus on academic achievement. They want an education shaped by their own voices, one that prioritizes care, support and community. They feel that the endless hours of revising for high stakes, closed-book exams does little to equip them with the skills needed to excel in their future careers and adult life.
FE colleges already play a crucial role in opening different pathways to meet young people’s ambitions. But reforms are still needed to ensure young people can begin developing vocational and creative skills at an earlier age.
With the independent curriculum and assessment review underway, we have a real opportunity to make wellbeing a priority, and ensure young people feel fully prepared for life beyond college. YoungMinds will be working closely with young people, school and college professionals and the wider sector to make this vision a reality.
A former apprenticeship training provider boss has avoided a second director disqualification after arguing almost £1 million in erroneous funding claims were submitted without his knowledge.
Carl Roderick, who was banned and jailed in 2012 due to fraudulent mobile phone insurance trading, faced another case brought by the Insolvency Service after Insight Development and Consultancy, which traded as Levytate or Levytate Skills, went bust in October 2019.
In a High Court ruling last month, a judge dismissed the Insolvency Service’s bid to disqualify Roderick, who was the former managing director and co-owner of the apprenticeship provider.
The Insolvency Service, backed by the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), alleged Roderick was “unfit” to direct a company after Levytate submitted “inaccurate and unsupported” apprenticeship funding claims totalling £956,946 between April 2018 and May 2019.
An insolvency and companies court judge dismissed the case after finding that “primary responsibility” for submitting claims was “delegated” to his delivery manager, Christine Barton.
Barton has since claimed she was not approached to give evidence by the Insolvency Service ahead of the hearing and alleged the ruling contains “inaccuracies” about her role.
‘Not a details man’
In his evidence, Roderick – who was disqualified from being a director for three years in 2012 – said he was “not a details man” and suffered from “medical difficulties” including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which made it hard to manage operations.
Judge Mark Mullen concluded that while there were “undoubtedly errors” in claims that resulted in a net loss of £447,934 to the ESFA, he could not “infer” misconduct by Roderick on the evidence before him.
He added the Insolvency Service’s arguments that Roderick should have “liaised further” with staff to prevent errors came “nowhere near” convincing him.
Concluding his judgment, the judge said the claimants “failed to demonstrate, on the balance of probabilities, either misconduct on the part of Mr Roderick or, in any event, that he is unfit to be concerned in the management of a company.”
Judge Mullen added that the Insolvency Service’s investigation “inadequately” considered how responsibilities were divided between managers and “whether there were deficiencies in the supervision of Ms Barton and her team.”
What happened?
In February 2019, an ESFA funding review of apprenticeship claims Levytate made for 2017-18 and 2018-19 alleged a lack of evidence of apprentices’ start or end dates, issues with learning evidence, incorrectly calculated hours, and individual learner records “inconsistencies.”
Combined with audits later that year, the ESFA arrived at £956,946 in over-claimed funding, with £447,934 remaining owed.
It terminated Insight’s funding agreement in August 2019, resulting in the company entering liquidation that October.
The Insolvency Service didn’t file it’s director disqualification claim against Roderick until October 2022, alleging his conduct at Insight made him “unfit to be concerned in the management of a company.”
It tried to argue Roderick “cannot escape personal responsibility” for funding claims as the ESFA account was linked to his email address and payments were made into an account controlled by Debann Limited, a company he had sole control over.
The service also claimed Insight’s insolvency “could have been avoided” with “appropriate controls,” and there had been “significant harm to public finances” due to the irrecoverable £447,934.
Those arguments failed to convince the judge, who concluded that operations director Barton held “principal responsibility” for ensuring the accuracy of funding claims, not Roderick.
Barton’s denial
Barton adamantly denied having any role in claims made by Levytate when contacted for comment by FE Week.
She said: “I categorically refute the inaccuracies contained within the court papers.”
“Neither I nor any other individuals named in the documents, except for Mr Roderick, held operational responsibility for the day-to-day running of the business.”
“Any suggestion to the contrary is entirely false and misrepresentative of the facts.”
Her junior, “director of performance” Gemma Beech, also called the judge’s understanding of events “factually untrue” and denied ever working on ESFA claims.
Both Barton and Beech claimed the Insolvency Service failed to contact them for a statement ahead of the disqualification trial.
A spokesperson for the Insolvency Service refused to confirm whether or not Barton or Beech were contacted to give evidence about Roderick, claiming that this could impact future proceedings such as an appeal.
The ESFA, which investigated Levytate’s claims and provided the Insolvency Service with evidence, said: “We do not comment on individual cases.”
Roderick declined to comment.
Who is Carl Roderick?
Roderick, 50, has run a series of businesses over the last decade, including in education and e-sports – with several entering liquidation.
He first hit the headlines in 2012 after he was jailed for 33 months alongside his two brothers and banned from being a company director for three years for selling fraudulent insurance policies, according to a Birmingham Live article which was confirmed by Roderick.
The businessman resigned as a director of training provider AMS Nationwide, where Barton was also a director, a year before it shut its doors after having its ESFA funding terminated in 2018.
In early 2018, Roderick purchased Levytate.
A year later, the ESFA said it “had no record” of a change of ownership of the company, which is required by the apprenticeship funding rules.
After Levytate collapsed due to the ESFA’s investigation and contract termination in 2019, he founded e-sports company Adamo Gaming in 2021, which reportedly employed more than 30 people through the government-funded Kickstarter scheme.
When Levytate went bust, Roderick continued to own the holding company of Levytate, called Insight Development (Holdings) Ltd, and another e-sports company now known as Tenstar, which entered insolvency last August.
Seeing ministers use the fanfare of National Apprenticeship Week to announce the removal of the English and maths exit requirement for adult apprentices, I could only assume DfE officials had advised that the move would be universally applauded. Given the thousands of functional skills tutors with suddenly uncertain careers, plus those working for awarding bodies with qualifications that are now unviable – and not forgetting the apprentices now denied vital qualifications – the reality was in fact brutal.
I have talked before about education policy being driven by non-teacher lobbyists whispering to non-teacher civil servants and the accuracy of it couldn’t be more perfectly illustrated than in the CEO of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers winkingly acknowledging the DfE officials “you know who you are” dancing on strings for him.
Optimistically, we might hope there is a strategy to redeploy the thousands of apprenticeship functional skills tutors this affects, to support with the growing 16-19 resit population.
Actually, that would be wildly optimistic. FE workforce planning doesn’t seem to happen. But there is an opportunity here for DfE to learn from past mistakes.
Lockdown learning
In the first week of Covid lockdown, I got calls and messages from college resits teachers around the country. Whole teams were being opportunistically let go. Although in fairness to DfE they later increased the funding stream linked to English and maths precisely to avoid mass lay-offs, its unshakeable habit of putting leaders ahead of learners meant no ringfencing so mass English and maths lay-offs happened anyway. Even a rabid anti-resit lobbyist confided that they realised these redundancies had been “shortsighted” when the rising demographics of 2023 came around.
The 16-19 tuition fund ended last year without government having done any thinking ahead about retaining and retraining staff. All while, the same demographic climb was causing a recruitment nightmare for FE English and maths. Based on the £80 million a year tuition fund spend, there must have been well over a thousand FTE English and maths tutors delivering it nationally. How many staff, experienced and interested in delivering essential skills to learners, did we lose from the sector? It was DfE’s responsibility to make the case for the tuition fund. As the Education Endowment Foundation is confident of the evidence that both small-group and one-to-one tuition “are particularly likely to benefit” lower attainers, it shouldn’t have been an especially hard case to make.
When they failed anyway, DfE had a responsibility to colleges and those on the frontline to have some support in place. It failed them twice. You know who you are.
Hanlon’s razor
The shock immediacy of the woeful policy decision on apprenticeships at least did show that the civil service is able to move uncharacteristically rapidly on occasion – but perhaps only when the race is to the bottom. The same urgency should have been put to delivering a workforce solution for affected English and maths tutors. For those needing to polish up their teaching qualifications, an accelerated version of the new teaching apprenticeship could have been coordinated, ready to transition staff into 16-19 classrooms. There would then have been a more natural synergy in announcing eight-month apprenticeships in the same breath as binning jobs.
A former college lecturer is seeking nearly half a million pounds after winning a disability discrimination tribunal case which ruled she was harassed by colleagues and suffered false racism claims.
A judgment published last week sided with Dr Sharon Turton, who was a psychology teacher at MidKent College before taking voluntary redundancy in 2022.
The tribunal agreed that counts of harassment related to disability and direct disability discrimination were well founded, as well as her complaint of a failure to make reasonable adjustments for her disability.
Turton’s legal representative told FE Week £450,000 in compensation will be sought at a remedy hearing later this year.
John Horan, an anti-discrimination lawyer representing Turton, said the ruling was an “extraordinary result”.
He added: “After all the discrimination had gone on, the only way out for her was to take voluntary redundancy.”
‘False racist remarks’ led to investigation
Turton was a specialist psychology lecturer at the college from August 2014 until August 2022.
The report noted she has Asperger’s syndrome, severe complex post-traumatic stress disorder and ADHD, which she was open about with her students and staff.
Her complaint of disability discrimination began in September 2021, when she experienced a number of “difficult social interactions” with a new lecturer hired to cope with rising student numbers.
In early 2022, the lecturer made several critical references about Turton to students and mocked her disabilities by tapping her head to indicate that she had “mental problems”, causing students themselves to report the incident to the college’s curriculum manager.
Meanwhile, a formal investigation was launched into Turton after a student complained they were told by the same lecturer that Turton deleted her work and disliked them “because of your family background and that all Gypsies should not be allowed to have an education”.
The judge concluded Turton’s colleague spread “fabricated” information of “false racist remarks” which led to rumours and the investigation into Turton.
“It was an attack on Turton’s reputation and could, and indeed did, turn students against her,” the tribunal concluded.
Soon after, Turton was signed off work with “stress-related illness”.
She returned to work in March 2022, working mostly from home, which she had requested to avoid the lecturer and another colleague she did not get on with.
When Turton was working in the Medway campus, she encountered the two teachers in the staffroom, who shouted at her to “force her” to communicate. Witnesses said this was “very confrontational”.
“We considered that the actions were done to humiliate Turton,” the court ruled. It found this encounter amounted to harassment related to disability.
Turton later took sick leave after being diagnosed with a heart condition.
‘No option but to take redundancy’
Before the end of the academic year, Turton and the two other lecturers were informed they were at risk of redundancy “due to a reduction in student numbers”, which Turton disputed.
She was invited to a redundancy selection interview whilst she was signed off sick. HR offered to delay the interview and conduct the meeting online or accept answers via email if she was not well enough to attend.
Instead, Turton accepted voluntary redundancy due to her health.
She told the HR department: “This whole year has been utterly traumatising for me and I can no longer cope with everything work-related. I will be taking early retirement from teaching because of it.”
The judge heard in evidence that she was “having a breakdown” and could not go through the redundancy selection process at all.
“She felt that she had no option but to take redundancy saying she believed if she stayed she would have died,” the report said.
The tribunal found “considerable evidence” that decision makers considered Turton to be difficult and internal HR emails suggest that they may have seen redundancy as an “opportunity” to dismiss her.
Simon Cook, principal and chief executive of MidKent College, said the college takes the findings “extremely seriously”.
He added: “Throughout this time, the college has continued to learn and grow, strengthening its policies and practices to foster a more inclusive workplace.
“We are reviewing our internal processes to ensure that all concerns raised by staff are appropriately addressed and that our commitments to equality, diversity and inclusion are upheld in all aspects of college life.”
Chief Executive Officer, Institute for Employment Studies
Previous Job: Director of Policy and Research, Learning and Work Institute
Interesting fact: Naomi discovered Jobs Plus, an employment support programme for public housing residents, during her 2014 Churchill Fellowship. Now in its second year, the UK pilot she leads seeks to replicate its success in US communities.
Karl Bentley
Director of Funding Assurance (Education and Skills), Validera
Start date: February 2025
Previous Job: Associate Director, RSM UK
Interesting fact: Karl has appeared in BBC and PBS documentaries on the D-Day landings. For BBC, Karl can be seen in D-Day: The Lost Heroes, for PBS, D-Day 360. For both programmes Karl can be seen in the role of a 29th Infantry Division soldier landing on Omaha Beach.
Rien Sach
Chief Executive Officer, Aptem
Start date: February 2025
Previous Job: Deputy CEO and Chief Technology Officer, Aptem
Interesting fact: Outside of work, Rien has a terrible/lovely Pomchi dog called Pablo and enjoys staying active. He is currently training for the London Marathon in April and the Berlin Marathon in September.
An international company that raked in millions of pounds to run online coding bootcamps in England tried to charge learners for training that was supposed to be fully funded by the government.
An FE Week investigation has uncovered cases of CoGrammar Ltd demanding students pay up to £4,950 for not recording a “job offer” after the course, or face legal penalties.
Most refused to pay after a Department for Education warning about this behaviour, but at least one unemployed learner handed over cash.
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government allocated over half a billion pounds to spend on its skills bootcamp programme between 2022-25, to train up thousands of people in up to 16 weeks for industries where there is a shortage of workers.
CoGrammar, which traded as HyperionDev and has much of its operations based in South Africa, landed contracts worth up to £22 million from the DfE to train students in England in subjects such as data science, web development and software engineering. It secured similar contracts from mayoral authorities across the country.
Funding rules state: “Individuals must not be charged for any element of the skills bootcamp.”
CoGrammar admitted to charging some students for the course when FE Week presented the company with evidence. A spokesperson claimed students had been offered an apology and promised to refund anyone affected in full, plus £25 in compensation.
Attempts to charge students were made after the Department for Education terminated the company’s contract due to performance concerns.
CoGrammar, which also paid employers to offer job interviews that are required to secure milestone payments, is currently attempting to sue multiple funding authorities including the DfE for non-payments.
‘I was so stressed out’
FE Week spoke to multiple students on tech bootcamps run by CoGrammar. The courses are supposed to be fully funded by the DfE and the company was paid in stages.
Providers can claim payments when learners start a course, complete their training, obtain a job interview and then secure employment.
CoGrammar secured partnerships with multiple Russell Group universities, which attached their names to the courses, taken by thousands of students. All training was delivered online.
The DfE suspended payments to CoGrammar last April after it “notified” the company of “concerns regarding its performance under the contracts” and began an audit, court documents state.
Contract termination followed in September, amid claims the company had committed an unspecified “prohibited act” and a “material breach” of its contract, the court documents add.
CoGrammar, which is now trying to claim almost £6 million in unpaid bootcamp payments from the DfE, tried to charge students a month later.
An email from CoGrammar, seen by FE Week and sent to multiple learners, said: “Our records show that you have failed to submit a job offer by the deadline of 30 September 2024, and due to this, you are liable for a fee payment of £4,950 for your bootcamp as stated in the student undertaking agreement you entered into.”
The company then offered a 75 per cent discount if they paid the fee upfront, or a 50 per cent discount if the student paid 12 monthly instalments via direct debit.
The last sentence of the email said: “Take action now to avoid any legal penalties.”
CoGrammar email to students demanding payment
Laleh Haidari, 42, a senior business analyst from High Wycombe, Bucks, signed up for a DfE fully-funded data science bootcamp with CoGrammar last year. She said she trusted it was a reputable course because it was listed by the DfE as one of its providers.
After completing the course, she said she was shocked when CoGrammar sent her an email saying she must pay thousands of pounds, offering her a discount if she paid by the end of the month.
Laleh said: “I was so stressed out… I was unemployed, and it’s a big chunk of money to pay. And the reason I rushed into paying the discounted fee was that I didn’t want to pay the full fees.”
She paid CoGrammar £1,245 the same day but then received an email from the DfE, several days later, advising participants not to pay.
After Laleh complained and asked for a refund, emails seen by FE Week show that the DfE told Laleh there was “no practical advice we can give”. She had not received a refund at the time of publication.
Zainab Alam, 28, from Stockport, Greater Manchester, also received one of the emails demanding payment but didn’t pay. She started one of the bootcamps while seeking a career change from teaching.
She was terrified the bailiffs would come round as she couldn’t afford what CoGrammar was asking her to pay.
“It’s downright terrifying when you’re not able to get a job due to the job market out there and then being asked to pay back thousands of pounds that I don’t have because I have my parents to support financially as well as two younger sisters,” she said.
Pawel Werbowy, 39, from London, immediately challenged CoGrammar’s attempt to charge him for his course, telling the company “we can see in court if needed” before posting about the issue on social media.
A student experience manager for CoGrammar later “proposed” that Pawel had no payment obligation, but said in return the learner should delete his social media posts.
DfE warning message to concerned students
CoGrammar’s defence
CoGrammar told FE Week a clause was added to student enrolment agreements in 2024 which made learners liable for tuition fees, even though they signed up for a fully funded course, if there was a “lack of evidence on my residency, guided learning hours, interview, or final job outcomes” which leads to the funding authority withholding payment.
The company claimed there had been previous cases where students provided “false information” about their residency or prior training that made them ineligible for bootcamps and led to contractors stopping payments to CoGrammar after it incurred costs.
A CoGrammar spokesperson said the email demanding payment was sent with “erroneous wording to fewer than 0.5 per cent of skills bootcamp students that CoGrammar believed the DfE would not fund due to eligibility issues”.
They told FE Week: “The email did not accurately state the reason for the request, and requested payment at a 75 per cent discount of the maximum amount agreed in the student enrolment clause, which is an amount that is less than CoGrammar would receive for a funded skills bootcamp student that completes only milestone one and so would not even cover CoGrammar’s full cost of delivering a programme.”
The spokesperson claimed that “shortly after” CoGrammar sent this email, the DfE “finally confirmed the eligibility of such students and the process by which they would be evaluated for milestone payments”.
CoGrammar said that it sent affected students an email within 30 working days of the initial payment request, which “contained the corrected context of the payment request, and apology, and offered” students the choice to take a course with a partner organisation or a “full refund plus an additional £25 goodwill payment for the inconvenience”.
The spokesperson said: “CoGrammar regrets having to take the step of adding a clause to its student enrolment forms to protect against non-payments and receive confirmation of their eligibility from the DfE, and in late 2024 removed this clause from its agreements, and will not ever request payment from any student enrolled on any programme intended to be a skills bootcamp, regardless of eligibility confirmation or non-payment.”
Suspicions raised
Some bootcamp participants also raised concerns about job interviews they were offered while on courses.
One employer confirmed it had been paid “a modest reimbursement for a multi-week programme” to interview students, and did not proceed with hiring due to “our immediate project needs and workforce dynamics at the time”.
Paying employers to conduct job interviews is not against DfE rules. Securing a job interview is a key payment milestone for each bootcamp learner.
CoGrammar told FE Week it confirmed with the DfE that it could work with employers to gather feedback on curriculum and conduct interviews and that paying “market-rate rates” was “allowable”, adding that this is “common practice at other skills bootcamp providers”.
It added the company identified fewer than 0.2 per cent of the 1,803 employers it worked with on skills bootcamps were paid to offer job interviews.
FE Week found multiple cases brought by CoGrammar against public authorities over non-payment for skills bootcamps.
West Midlands Combined Authority terminated CoGrammar’s contract after the company allegedly “failed to submit individual learning records”, according to court documents.
CoGrammar said the cited reason for termination was student withdrawal rates that supposedly exceeded a 20 per cent threshold. The company believes termination was “unlawful” and is now suing for non-payment. WMCA said it could not comment as legal proceedings were live.
West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) also challenged the company’s performance and withheld payments.
CoGrammar said that WYCA later re-procured for a cloud engineering skills bootcamp it had previously been awarded, which was legally challenged by CoGrammar under the procurement act.
This matter has now been settled, the terms of which are confidential.
Ofsted’s high praise
CoGrammar’s CEO Riaz Moola, who has been dubbed the ‘Steve Jobs of South Africa’ in the country’s Sunday Times, was invited into discussions with members of the previous UK government.
In April last year he met with the then-deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden and education secretary Gillian Keegan to discuss the future of artificial intelligence in children’s education.
He set up CoGrammar in 2016 to offer commercial training for the tech industry before entering publicly funded training in 2022.
Ofsted conducted an early monitoring visit to inspect the company’s publicly funded skills bootcamps in early 2024, issuing one “significant” and two “reasonable” progress judgments, highlighting that learners develop “highly relevant skills that are in high demand”.
Freedom of Information requests showed that the DfE has received complaints regarding almost a quarter of all its bootcamp providers since August 2023. Numerous complaints involved CoGrammar.
FE Week spoke to multiple participants who said they had lost confidence in how their complaints had been handled.
The DfE declined to comment due to live legal proceedings with CoGrammar.
Students will be turned away this September unless ministers stump up “exceptional” funding increases to cover “unprecedented” rises in student numbers, college leaders have warned.
The Department for Education revealed on Wednesday that colleges will only receive two-thirds of the in-year growth cash they were expecting to accommodate a huge rise in 16 to 19 year olds this year.
It comes as colleges and training providers brace themselves for further cuts to adult education budgets from September.
Data from the Association of Colleges shows 35,000 more 16 to 19-year-old students enrolled in colleges this academic year. They estimate a further 25,000 will come their way in September.
The rises stem from a widely reported demographic bulge in young people leaving school in the next few years.
The DfE described this year’s wave of additional students as “unprecedented” and said a previous plan to fully fund in-year growth was now unaffordable.
Officials use November data returns on student numbers to determine over-delivery against previously agreed allocations for places in 2024-25.
This week a new step was added to the way colleges calculate how much in-year growth they can claim. The so-called “affordability factor” means only two-thirds of eligible growth funding will now be paid.
Nottingham College was funded for just over 7,000 students aged 16 to 19 this year, according to published allocations. The college enrolled an additional 600 students and, based on government guidance published in August, expected £1.5 million in-year growth funding. The college now believes it will get £500,000 less than planned.
Nottingham’s additional students have largely enrolled on lower-level courses, which the college said “reflects the needs of our city” but who need “a great deal of wraparound support”.
Janet Smith, principal and CEO of Nottingham College, said the £500,000 reduction comes at a time of unparalleled demands for investment.
She told FE Week: “We need more space. We need to pay our staff fairly. We need to invest in AI and digital. We need to expand support services. We need to meet spiralling costs and demanding building maintenance. A reduction of £500,000 in in-year growth must be balanced by reduced investment elsewhere.”
Smith added there “is a very real risk” of the college turning away additional students next year.
Institutions will be told their growth payments for this year by the end of March, ahead of payments starting in May.
Rate rise isn’t enough
While colleges have no guarantees on what next year’s in-year growth arrangements will be, they will receive a 3.78 per cent increase to the per-student base rate for the 2025-26 academic year.
Most 16 to 19 year olds at colleges will be funded on study programmes which are arranged by funding bands depending on the student’s age and number of learning hours.
At the top end, for 16 and 17 year olds with 580+ planned hours, the base rate will increase from £4,843 to £5,026. This also applies to high-needs students aged 18 and over. For students aged 18 and over who are not high needs the rate will increase from £4,006 to £4,157.
The rise comes from the remaining £250 million announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves in October.
Sixth Form Colleges Association chief executive Bill Watkin said next year’s rate rise was “good news… particularly at a time when public services are under enormous pressure to find savings”.
NCG has the largest funding allocation for 16 to 19 year olds in the country. It recruited an additional 500 students on top of its allocated 12,886 places for this year.
The mega-college called out the government for using Colleges Week – a week created to highlight colleges’ contribution to the economy – to “once again ask [colleges] to deliver more for less”.
NCG estimates its extra students, and a shift to larger programmes, adds around £5 million in costs to their budget for this year. While the college group had planned to fund some of that from its own coffers, stronger recruitment and lower growth funding than anticipated leaves them “being penalised for our success in attracting and supporting learners”, a spokesperson said.
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said the increased funding rate for most 16 to 19 year olds next year “will not cover what we expect to be another 25,000 extra young people wanting to start college in September, and I fear that without in-year funding, colleges will have to turn many away”.
Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) has risen to a decade-high of 987,000.
Hughes added: “With a tight labour market, many 16 year olds will struggle to find work, and a place in college is their best option to set them up for a successful working life.”
Colleges at their limits
Luminate Education Group told FE Week it had to cap additional recruitment of 16 to 19 year olds this year. It could only physically accommodate an extra 637 students after recruiting over 1,000 extra last year.
The Leeds-based group plans to add 500 additional places for September 2025, but that too is limited because of capacity.
Colin Booth, chief executive, said the proportion of NEET 16 to 18 year olds in Leeds, currently at around 10 per cent, will rise further without “significant investment to create more spaces”.
He added: “Growing by 500 and paying for teaching and additional equipment without significant in-year funding will continue to put significant pressure on our short-term cash flow.”
Booth added that colleges’ capacity limits are compounded by public sector spending rules barring colleges from borrowing commercially.
“The problem with lack of physical space and no access to capital grants or loans to help increase space adds to the challenges we face.”
The Association of Employment and Learning has previously made the case for independent training providers to fill capacity shortfalls before the population bulge subsides in order to avoid over-capacity in colleges in the future.
Funding vs rhetoric
There is increasing frustration among FE leaders over funding snubs despite seemingly positive rhetoric around the sector’s importance to the government’s growth missions.
Providers of contracted national adult education provision have also been told by the DfE they will not be paid as much for in-year growth this year as they were expecting due to affordability issues.
And mayoral combined authorities have been told to expect cuts to their adult education budget of between 2 and 3 per cent.
NCG’s spokesperson said: “Alongside the proposed cuts to the adult skills fund, colleges are once again being asked to deliver more for less, despite the government’s stated missions of prioritising skills, education and employment.”
The DfE is yet to confirm its funding approach to non-devolved adult education for 2025-26, but colleges are braced for more cuts.
Hughes said: “The picture for adults is even more stark, with a cut to the adult skills budget suggesting that the government does not recognise how vital investing in skills is for their missions, and in particular for economic growth.”
The UK will make its debut in two new competitions at next year’s global WorldSkills competition in Shanghai, China.
WorldSkills UK has announced the UK’s best and brightest will step up to the plate in the logistics and freight forwarding and software testing competitions at the 48th WorldSkills finals.
The skills charity also confirmed the UK will rejoin three competitions it had previously withdrawn from: cloud computing, bricklaying and graphic design technology. WorldSkills UK said these were added in response to increasing employer demand in these sectors.
The UK last competed internationally in bricklaying and cloud computing in 2019 at WorldSkills Kazan, Russia. Graphic design technology was last contested when London hosted WorldSkills in 2011.
The new competition in logistics and freight forwarding involves organising shipments of goods from the supplier or manufacturer to the point of distribution or final marketplace.
WorldSkills UK brings bricklaying back to global stage
Competitors can be assessed on their knowledge of different countries’ export and import regulations and quizzed on details of documents needed during the shipment process.
China and Singapore won joint gold in logistics and freight forwarding at WorldSkills Lyon last year.
Meanwhile, software testing is a new competition for WorldSkills Shanghai.
The contest will involve analysing software needs, creating test plans and cases, coding and writing reports.
The new competitions come with the backing of Pearson UK which has renewed its sponsorship of Team UK.
Ben Blackledge, chief executive of WorldSkills UK, said: “It is fantastic to be working with Pearson once again as we build up to the ‘skills Olympics’.
“Together we will showcase and celebrate the young people preparing to represent the UK at WorldSkills, demonstrating that technical education and apprenticeships can both change lives and drive economic growth.”
Freya Thomas Monk, managing director of Pearson Qualifications, said: “Pearson is proud to sponsor Team UK.
“Boosting the profile and prestige of technical and vocational education is incredibly important to us – it plays a crucial role in driving both personal success for learners as well as economic growth at a national level.”
Route to Shanghai
WorldSkills UK is currently picking talented young people to be part of Squad UK.
They will undergo training and pressure tests, the next being EuroSkills Herning in Denmark this September.
EuroSkills Herning is expected to bring together 600 young professionals to compete in 38 skills.
Team UK is then selected from the squad, to compete in 30 skills in Shanghai.
The UK came in 11th place for total medal points at WorldSkills Lyon last year out of the 60 participating countries, and 10th for average point score.
They brought home two silver medals and a bronze.
Following an appeal, the bronze medal – won by Luke Haile in refrigeration and air conditioning – was upgraded to a silver by the WorldSkills Board.
The Department for Education has announced it can’t afford to fully fund “unprecedented” requests for in-year growth to cover this year’s rise in student numbers.
Instead, the department said it could only fund two-thirds of what colleges expected based on previously published guidance.
In an update this evening, the DfE said a “very large” increase in 16- to 19-year-olds in colleges this year is “positive” for young people but “significantly above the budget for in-year payments, so we cannot fully fund this growth.
“Because of the size and distribution of this growth in student numbers, it does create an unprecedented amount of in-year growth. We will fund all students through the lagged student number methodology in future allocations as normal. However, the current growth is significantly above the budget available for in-year payments, and so we cannot fully fund this growth.”
Officials use November data returns on student numbers to determine over-delivery against previously agreed allocations for funded student numbers.
For this year, a new step has been added to the way colleges calculate how much in-year growth they can claim called “the affordability factor”. This means once over-delivery has been calculated and any previous under-delivery removed, only two-thirds of the growth award can be claimed.
Institutions will be told their growth payments for this year by the end of March, ahead of payments starting in May
Colleges have been told not to assume these rules will apply to in-year growth for 2025-26 as no decisions have been made.
Raise the rate
Today’s announcement does however confirm a 3.78 per cent funding rate rise for 16- to- 19-year-old students, bringing the top funding rate for study programme students to £5,026.
This increase comes from the £300 million package announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in October’s budget.
Around £50 million of that has been committed to “one-off grants” to further education and sixth form colleges to help with pay awards this year from April to July.
The remaining funding has gone towards the rate increase for 2025-26.
Funding details for adult learners, and payments covering next month’s employer national insurance rise, have not yet been released.
The base rate increase applies to each study programme funding band, which is calculated using annual planned hours.
At the top end, for 16 and 17 year olds with 580+ planned hours, the base rate will increase from £4,843 to £5,026. This also applies to high needs students aged 18 and over. For student aged 18 and over who are not high needs, the rate will increase from £4,006 to £4,157.
Additional payments for disadvantaged students and care leavers will be frozen at current rates: £570 for bands 4 and 5 students and £772 for T Level students.
A 10 per cent uplift on T Level funding applied for this year has not been applied for next year. DfE said it would “confirm the position” on the uplift “in due course”.
Today’s update confirms that the September 2024 intake of T Level onsite construction will be the last.
Funding for students on the T Levels in the legal services specialisms will be reduced for 2025-26. This is because it was previously “over-funded” and there was an error in previously calculated guided learning hours for the courses. They will attract £10,456 for the two year course rather than £12,060.
Funding for the new T Level in marketing, which begins teaching for the first time in September, has been confirmed at the lowest funding band, £10,456.
These include the 100 hours over-the-year requirement, asking institutions for their “best efforts” to deliver an extra 35 hours of maths on top of that, and reducing the non-compliance tolerance threshold from 5 per cent in 2025-26.
