Latest news from FE Week

Construction’s risk-based assessment foundations to be copied across sectors

A risk-based approach agreed with the construction industry will be extended to apprenticeship assessment reforms across all sectors, Skills England has confirmed.

The move means concessions secured by construction employers following months of lobbying are not unique to the sector. Skills England will assess each apprenticeship occupation according to its level of risk, allowing assessment requirements to be tailored across safety-critical sectors including engineering, manufacturing, food and drink, automotive, nuclear and life sciences.

A Skills England spokesperson told FE Week: “Risk profiling is an important part of the apprenticeship assessment reform process and will continue to be moving forward for all sectors.

“We have learnt a lot from our work with the construction industry on how we can deliver these reforms in a way that meets sector needs.

“There will not be a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, we are looking at risk within each occupation to understand the nuances and how we can best support learners and employers.”

The government’s original reforms prompted opposition from a coalition of construction and built-environment organisations, which warned the changes risked “dumbing down” apprenticeships and allowing unqualified learners to pass.

A wider alliance of employers from the government’s industrial strategy priority sectors later lobbied ministers over concerns the reforms could weaken assessment across other safety-critical industries.

The reforms replace the end-point assessment model with new assessment plans that introduce sampling of knowledge and skills, give mandatory qualifications a stronger role in some standards and remove the independent assessment of behaviours.

Skills England paused the reforms for construction in December and established a construction taskforce involving industry bodies, the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), the Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS) and the Building Safety Regulator.

The taskforce this week said it had now agreed a methodology that uses risk profiling to tailor assessment requirements according to the level of occupational risk.

Occupational groups will be able to mandate assessment methods, reduce the use of sampling for higher-risk skills, set tolerance levels and align assessment plans with industry competence standards and card schemes where appropriate.

Skills England told FE Week it had adopted a risk-based approach throughout the reform programme, but said its work with construction had helped refine the model and improve consensus-building between occupational groups and government officials.

No special treatment

Rob Nitsch, chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, said the outcome reflected months of coordinated lobbying.

“Whilst it has been overly painful and taken too long to shape up, it is pleasing that we are now seeing a standard-by-standard approach across all sectors that reflects the risk profile of individual apprenticeship occupations,” he said.

“The construction taskforce has been a significant contributor to the wide-ranging alliance that has got us to this point; employers and apprenticeship assessment organisations, with support from the federation, have also stood up to ensure that we now have an approach that is safe and appropriate.”

England has around 700 apprenticeship standards. Around 300 have already begun or completed the assessment reform process this year, and the rest – including those deemed to be a safety-critical occupation – are due to start in the coming months.

Several employer bodies said they either expected or had already begun adopting risk-modelling approaches with Skills England.

Louise Cairns, chief executive of the National Skills Academy for Food & Drink, said her sector had not yet received formal confirmation but expected risk profiling to be applied.

“The food and drink sector is highly regulated and high risk in many occupations,” she said.

“Risk profiling should not be exclusive to construction but done for all sectors and occupations as a matter of course to retain the credibility of apprenticeships.”

However, she warned several food and drink assessment plans had already been reformed.

“My concern is we have already had several apprenticeship assessment plans go through the process, where if risk profiling was done I am certain Skills England would have allowed us to mandate more knowledge and skills. I will be going back to them to seek guidance.”

The Institute of the Motor Industry also welcomed Skills England’s confirmation.

“It is encouraging to hear that, prompted by enquiries from FE Week, Skills England is now committed to building on its work with the construction industry to ensure that safety-critical apprenticeships are fit for purpose for other sectors,” an IMI spokesperson said.

“We look forward to working with them to discuss how automotive apprenticeships must take into account the ever-increasing complexity of vehicles on UK roads – from high-voltage electric systems to connected digital technologies and emerging hydrogen powertrains.”

‘Skills England actually listened’

Meanwhile, Enginuity has spent recent months working directly with Skills England to develop a separate risk-profiling model for advanced manufacturing.

Chief executive Ann Watson said discussions began after employers feared engineering could become “the next construction” in terms of widespread employer concern.

“We did, I think very positively, get to a point where Skills England were actually listening,” she said.

Enginuity has since developed a model that allows employers and Skills England to jointly assess occupational risk before determining appropriate assessment methods for each standard.

Watson said highly safety-critical occupations, such as aerospace, would require robust assessment, while lower-risk occupations could justify greater use of sampling.

She added that the model had deliberately been designed so other sectors could adopt it rather than being limited to manufacturing.

Cogent Skills, representing nuclear and science employers, said Skills England had advised it was developing a risk-based approach and the sector anticipated the construction model would be rolled out more widely.

The organisation said employers now wanted clarity on how the approach would work in practice where apprenticeship standards span industries with very different levels of risk.

For example, engineering standards can be used in workplaces ranging from vending machine servicing to nuclear facilities, meaning any risk model would need to reflect widely differing safety requirements.

Trethewey guides AQA into the vocational skills landscape

For most people, AQA is synonymous with GCSEs and A Levels, processing 3.6 million GCSE, AS and A Level entries each year from 1.1 million students.

But lately, England’s biggest awarding bodies have been making headlines for all the wrong reasons; looming strikes at AQA, controversy over executive bonuses at City & Guilds, and a rebuke from Ofqual over exam breaches at Pearson.

Former teacher, Ofsted deputy director and self-confessed policy nerd Anna Trethewey wants to shift that narrative. She is leading AQA’s most significant strategic shift in years: expanding beyond its academic heartland into technical education, apprenticeships and adult skills.

AQA has “huge ambitions” to deliver the first wave of V Levels and new level 2 qualifications, and is eyeing future T Level contracts.

For an organisation with a reputation built on academic examinations, it is a bold move. But Trethewey insists it is an obvious one.

“Hand on heart, we’re a big education charity. We have the resources and the social commitment. Why wouldn’t we be working with young people and adults across education?”

A vocational vocation

This will not be its first venture into vocational qualifications; an attempt over a decade earlier was a “damp squib” because AQA still spoke “academic language”, Trethewey says.

This time feels different.

In 2022, AQA acquired Training Qualifications UK (TQUK), an awarding and end-point assessment organisation which works with around 120 colleges.

“We’re known for our scale and trusted for our credibility,” Trethewey says. “But TQUK really understands the FE sector and wider adult skills landscape.”

The partnership is gathering momentum. TQUK recorded 173,000 registrations in 2025-26, with registrations increasing by 21 per cent in the first quarter of this academic year, and it enjoyed its strongest ever spring.

Construction EPA Company joined the group in 2025, shortly followed by the major apprenticeships and adult skills training provider Realise.

Anna Trethewey at Realise training centre in Cleckheaton

Squiggly career

Trethewey understands how life-changing adult education can be, as her own mother left school with just two O Levels and returned to education in her 50s to retrain as a counsellor.

Mother and daughter would “sit there grumbling together” over their essays while Trethewey studied for her A Levels.

While her mum taught her about “the power of second chances”, her father was head of learning technology at the local Bromley College, championing online learning years before digital education became fashionable.

Performing arts was the hook that kept Trethewey engaged at school, and she is proud that AQA continues to offer loss-making qualifications such as GCSE dance which might otherwise disappear.

Last year, 63 of AQA’s 114 qualifications operated at a loss, creating an £8.2 million deficit.

“That’s the right thing to do,” she says. “Nobody else will offer some of them, and it’s critical young people continue to have access to those qualifications.”

Trethewey still somehow resembles a rock musician (she used to sing in a band called Starry Smooth Hounds) with her distinctively edgy style.

She speaks about education with the calm assurance of someone who has viewed it from many angles in her “squiggly” career; teacher, researcher, think tank director and Ofsted deputy director.

Yet a common thread exists: trying to understand why some young people flourish while others quietly fall behind.

Her LinkedIn background is not the standard corporate image but shows her accompanied by young people from AQA’s student advisory group that she chaired.

Anna Trethewey singing as part o Starry Smoot Hounds band

Teach First

Trethewey was a poetic practice master’s student at Royal Holloway when she landed a poet-in-residence placement at a primary school in Slough.

That led her to the Teach First programme, which placed her in a secondary school in Lewisham where fewer than one in ten pupils achieved five good GCSEs.

Like many trainee teachers, Trethewey arrived believing education could solve almost anything.

“I was idealistic – you throw your heart and soul into it.”

The reality proved more complicated. She quickly realised schools could not compensate for problems beyond their gates.

But there were victories. One pupil, newly arrived from overseas, barely spoke despite being “incredibly bright”.

After almost three years of patiently building trust, he agreed to read to her during a library lesson.

“It was quite profound,” she says. “He decided he trusted me enough to use his voice.”

Trethewey helped establish a sixth form with a particularly vocational flavour. It began with a small sports qualification, which “gave young people a pathway they weren’t going to get otherwise”.

More importantly, it kept young people in an environment where they felt safe.

“They didn’t always have that in their wider lives.”

Anna Trethewey with her former band Starry Smooth Hounds

Answering the burning questions

Trethewey later moved to the City of Norwich School, where she was made deputy head of English, before leaving the school sector to join education researcher Loic Menzies as the first full-time employee at his fledgling think tank, LKMco.

She was partly driven by a sense of injustice.

Ofsted’s then chief inspector Michael Wilshaw had described some teachers as “lazy”, suggesting they “do not know what stress is”, but Trethewey felt that curriculum reforms had caused teachers’ workload to “grow and grow” during her seven years in teaching.

These days she is a “voice of caution around the AQA table”, warning about the pitfalls of the “change load coming onto schools and colleges”.

The move set her on an exciting career journey, but Trethewey admits that even now she misses pupil “banter”.

LKMco (later rebranded The Centre for Education and Youth (CFeY) and closed last year due to funding constraints) had no political patrons or large institutional backers. Everything depended on securing individual research commissions.

“We punched above our weight,” she says.

This independence gave it “freedom” to pursue awkward questions without worrying whether it aligned neatly with political agendas.

“We didn’t have a board that would push us in a particular direction, or say, ‘could you not look at that? It’s politically awkward for me’.”

Among the think tank’s most influential work was its research into teacher recruitment and retention, as Trethewey tried to answer the workforce questions that had frustrated her as a teacher.

She thought that staff incentives should be wider than “golden handcuffs”.

Her husband benefits from working at a London primary school that offers free childcare to the children of staff, which Trethewey believes “drives loyalty”.

Her research around flexible working, workload reduction and childcare support later appeared in the government’s teacher recruitment and retention strategy.

“You don’t always know where the breadcrumbs will lead,” she reflects.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills.

More ties

Trethewey then joined Ofsted on secondment in a strategy role, intending to later move into “a grown-up corporate job”.

Instead, she stayed at Ofsted for over two years and later returned as deputy director with responsibilities covering SEND, alternative provision and local area partnerships.

There were “a lot more ties” being worn in Ofsted meetings than she was used to, but beneath the boardroom formalities she discovered an organisation wrestling with many of the same dilemmas that policymakers, school leaders and colleges face every day.

SEND was “a really hard, fraught space”, she says.

And one children’s services director told her they almost wished inspectors would simply judge their area ‘inadequate’ to strengthen their case for additional funding.

The conversation “resonated” with Trethewey.

She was troubled by rising numbers of children educated in unregulated alternative provision beyond the reach of Ofsted inspection, with some operating without proper fire escapes, qualified teachers or adequate safeguarding arrangements.

“Some local authorities’ safeguarding audits of those wider alternative provisions are brilliant, some are thinner,” she adds.

While welcoming recent legislation giving Ofsted stronger powers to investigate illegal schools, Trethewey worries that significant loopholes remain.

Tackling the “corners of education where the most vulnerable are often hidden” is “critical for any government… but it goes down the to-do list when there’s so much going on”.

No afterthoughts

Trethewey is now preparing for AQA’s biggest transformation in its 123-year history.

V Levels, and new level 2 foundation certificates and occupational certificates are due to arrive from September 2027.

The timetable for these new qualifications “feels punchy,” but “deliverable”.

But she hopes level 2 foundation certificates and occupational certificates will not become an “afterthought”.

“If we don’t get the design right because we’re rushing, they risk undermining the very purpose we’re trying to achieve,” she says.

Pearson currently holds 16 of the 20 T Level licences, but future procurement rounds will be an open market.

“Watch this space,” Trethewey says. “If it’s in the best interests of learners and we think we can do something of quality, why wouldn’t we?”

AQA is not short of potential cash to expand; it has over £88 million of free reserves.

Trethewey believes there is also a “real need” to look at introducing more vocational pathways for 14 to 16-year-olds, which incoming prime minister Andy Burnham reportedly has his eye on.

“If you wait till 16, you might have lost them along the way,” she says.

She worries that while new qualifications may enable young people to keep their career options open, apprenticeships are in short supply and higher technical routes are “patchy”.

“It becomes a difficult conversation with young people if we’ve told them we’re keeping every door open when, actually, some of those doors aren’t there”.

Eye on AI

Meanwhile, AI poses a growing threat to the integrity of qualifications.

Two years ago, AQA broke new legal ground by securing injunctions against social media influencers promoting exam cheating online.

AQA is “always looking for ways to clamp down” on them, but Trethewey takes a pragmatic view that “there will always be bad actors looking to make a fast buck”.

The scourge of AI-generated coursework has strengthened her belief in the value of supervised assessment.

Yet AI also presents opportunities.

AQA has been trialling AI systems capable of identifying unusual marking patterns across live GCSE papers. Where anomalies are detected, senior examiners review the scripts before any decision is made.

Trethewey is emphatic that humans remain responsible for every final mark.

Elsewhere, AQA is experimenting with technology that improves the legibility of handwritten scripts and streamlines burdensome administrative tasks, such as ordering new certificates.

This “low-hanging fruit” is where AI’s immediate value lies.

“But if you lose confidence in public examinations, you’ve lost everything,” she says.

Devolution drama

Trethewey also sees potential in devolution. Realise already works closely with several mayoral combined authorities, delivering programmes ranging from bus driver training to smart energy skills.

Burnham may allow qualifications to be shaped at a regional level, and this week Reform UK’s education spokesperson Suella Braverman said their “skills revolution” would have “regional dedicated qualifications at their heart”.

But Trethewey does not believe that qualification content should be decided regionally; “it is right that there are national benchmarks, and my certificate here in London means the same thing as your certificate in Redcar”.

She would like to see the “moratorium” that has been in place on new adult skills qualifications since 2020 overturned, because “we need to inject energy in that space”.

But she fears a “race to the bottom” as the government launches new programmes tackling NEET numbers.

Realise has an adult skills centre near Bradford, where the community had previously become sceptical of providers delivering “one-off courses and leaving”.

“How do we stitch together something genuinely sustainable, rather than just chasing the latest funding pot?” Trethewey asks.

“It’s so important [these providers] stay and get the trust of the community… as AQA moves into this space, we’re only doing it if we can do it properly.”

Trethewey sees her role leading AQA’s vocational expansion as “a bloody privilege”.

If she succeeds, the organisation best known to GCSE and A Level learners may soon become just as familiar to colleges, adult learners and apprentices.

She claims AQA has no need to abandon its charitable status to achieve its goals.

“I’m not having to run for short-term profits – that’s a really privileged place to be in”.

England’s apprenticeship rethink should look across the Atlantic

When skills minister Jacqui wrote to Skills England on June 22 to commission an urgent review of apprenticeship funding, she did something British ministers rarely do. She admitted a well-intentioned policy produced the opposite of its intended result, concluding “…the apprenticeship system is in need of reform.”

Apprenticeships among 16–24-year-olds fell by 40 per cent over the previous decade. More than half of new apprenticeships went to learners over 25. An employer levy to open the career ladder became a way to subsidize incumbent workers. The first rung of the career ladder was missing.

Across the Atlantic, the U.S. was watching, though not carefully. It never had a national apprenticeship system. It has a patchwork of federal goals that shift with presidential administrations, federally registered programs, state agencies, and industry intermediaries.

The National Apprenticeship Act hasn’t been substantially updated since 1937. Yet, as England resets, the U.S. experience offers something useful. It’s not a model to copy, but a set of contrasts illuminating what England got wrong and possible alternatives.

The U.S. model avoided England’s specific failure by design and historical accident. Because there’s no single national levy that employers pay against their payroll, the U.S. system never developed the English dynamic, where employers use training funds to retrain current workers.

American employers must choose to sponsor or join a registered apprenticeship program. That creates different problems. For example, scale is harder to achieve. But the system isn’t captured by the most convenient participants at the expense of young people starting work.

The U.S. has also unevenly invested in youth pathways. High school apprenticeship models in states like Colorado, South Carolina, and Indiana allow students to earn and learn before graduation, with pathways into postsecondary programs. These aren’t yet mainstream. But they represent the logic that England’s new foundation apprenticeships and relaunched level 2 route want to recapture.

The American weakness flips the English one. Where England over-centralized and allowed a levy-funded system to be captured by the most powerful participants, the U.S. under-centralized and produced a fragmented landscape that employers find difficult to navigate.

One analysis shows U.S. completion rates remain below 50 percent. At least four states have fewer active apprentices today than in 2016. Despite a manufacturing reshoring agenda that depends on skilled workers, manufacturing accounts for only about 4 percent of active apprentices.

Youth access is where both countries clearly fall short, in different ways. In England, levy money drifted away from young people to existing employees. In the U.S., the first step on the career ladder was always harder to find. Those aged 16 to 18 are particularly underrepresented. The term “youth apprenticeship” has no consistent federal definition.

Three things are worth considering as Skills England rebuilds the system.

First, employer incentive structures matter more than levy design. The new commitments, 100 percent training cost coverage for 16–24-year-olds at small firms and a £2,000 hiring payment, are steps forward. They target employers most likely to hire young people new to work. U.S. intermediary models show that reducing employer burden can be more important than increasing employer funding.

Second, the pathway matters as much as the program. U.S. states making the most progress have built connected sequences from secondary school through registered apprenticeship to degree-level credentials. Adding entry-level programmes without aligning schools, colleges, employers, and credential bodies isn’t enough.

Third, completion deserves as much attention as starts. The U.S. processes more cancellations each year than completions. Britain’s target of a 70 per cent achievement rate is the right priority. Hitting it requires addressing the practical reasons apprentices leave early. For example, there are weak mentoring, financial pressure, and transportation problems. Measuring outcomes after the fact isn’t the same as preventing the exit before it happens.

Britain’s June 2026 reset and America’s current debate over apprenticeships are attempts to solve the same problem with different tools. The first rung of the career ladder is the hardest to build. Neither country has yet made it reliably available to every young person who needs it. There’s more to learn from each other’s mistakes and accomplishments than either side acknowledges.

FE has lost something primary schools get right

In primary school, every student has a person.

A teacher who knows them, their moods, their friendships, their worries, the way they walk in when something isn’t right. There is consistency, familiarity, and a clear sense of belonging.

By the time students reach further education, that person has disappeared.

Instead, they are passed between subject specialists, registers and reporting systems. Known in fragments. Tracked in spreadsheets. Measured in attendance percentages and submission dates.

And yet, we expect more from them than ever before.

As a college teacher, I teach around 90 to 100 students across multiple levels. I might see each group once or twice a week, often for a limited number of hours. In that time, I am expected to track attendance, monitor wellbeing, understand who has an education, health and care plan (EHCP) and everything about it, notice friendship dynamics, support academic progress, chase coursework, and produce meaningful reports multiple times a year.

All while delivering lessons, meeting targets, and feeding data into systems that suggest I “know” my students.

The truth is, I know parts of them.

But not enough to be their person.

Further education sits in a strange, often overlooked space. Students are no longer children, but they are not yet fully independent adults. This period is marked by significant personal changes, identity development, fluctuating confidence, increasing mental health challenges, and growing external pressures.

This is not just anecdotal, it is ecological. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory reminds us that development does not happen in isolation. It is shaped by the systems around a young person, relationships, environments, and daily interactions. When those systems become fragmented, so too can a student’s sense of stability and belonging.

And yet, this is the stage where we remove consistency.

We assume independence means distance.

It doesn’t.

What if FE borrowed something simple from primary education?

A “college class teacher” model.

Each group would have a consistent, central teacher, someone who sees them regularly, not just to deliver content, but to know them. A person responsible not just for data, but for connection. Someone who notices when attendance dips before it becomes a statistic. Someone who understands the quieter students, not just the loudest voices.

This is not about adding another layer of administration. It is about refocusing what already exists.

Belonging is not a soft outcome. It is a predictor of engagement.

Abraham Maslow reminds us that belonging sits at the core of human motivation. Without it, progress in learning becomes harder to sustain.

Students who feel known are more likely to attend, more likely to participate, more likely to ask for help, and more likely to stay.

We talk endlessly about retention, attendance, and outcomes, but rarely address the simplest question:

Do students feel like they belong to someone – and somewhere?

From a teacher’s perspective, this is not about reducing workload. It is about restoring purpose.

Most of us did not enter further education to become data managers. We came to teach, to guide, and to support. But when relationships are fragmented, so is our impact. We are left trying to piece together a full picture of a student from limited snapshots, while being held accountable for outcomes that depend on connection.

Give us the space to know our students properly, and we will do what teachers have always done best: show up, notice, care, and make it count.

Because spreadsheets do not change lives.

People do.

System needs to catch up with young people’s growing appetite for technical education

Skills minister Jacqui Smith recently described apprenticeships as “tougher to come by than Oxbridge places”. Her assessment points to a striking paradox. At the same time as young people’s burgeoning awareness of – and interest in – apprenticeships, starts among young people are down 40 per cent over the past decade and more than one million young people are not earning or learning.

Awareness is rising

The legislation requires schools to provide at least six encounters with approved technical education or apprenticeship providers for all students from years 8 to 13.

Data collected by The Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) offers, for the first time, a national picture of delivery.

Across England, the disruptive effect of schools thinking actively about promoting all routes is strengthening links with technical and apprenticeship providers.

81 per cent of schools now deliver at least two PAL compliant encounters for most key stage 4 students – up from 71 per cent in 2022-23.
91 per cent of schools say most of their pupils had encounters with FE Colleges, up from 86 per cent in 2022-23.
Reporting has increased significantly: over 95 per cent of eligible institutions now submit data – around 400 more schools than when the legislation was enacted.
Most young people in year 11 (79 per cent) report understanding apprenticeships. This finding has been consistent since 2021-22 and mirrors increasing compliance with PAL among schools.

This shift in awareness and understanding is changing the profile of young people considering technical pathways. For too long, vocational pathways were viewed as second-choice options and lacked the prestige parity of A-Levels and higher education routes.

The challenge now is ensuring the system has the capacity to meet this growing ambition.

Can colleges cope?

Many FE colleges are already experiencing significant pressure on places, facilities and staffing, resulting in students being turned away as demand outstrips space.

Success in raising aspirations cannot be accompanied by a shortage of opportunities. If we want more young people to choose technical education and apprenticeships, we need to ensure colleges and training providers have the resources, infrastructure and workforce required to support them.

As touchpoints increase, so too does recognition of routes

Recent DfE research shows every year 11 student surveyed had heard of apprenticeships, while 81 per cent were aware of T Levels. CEC data from more than 330,000 students show understanding of apprenticeships more than doubles between year 7 and year 11. By the end of key stage 4, understanding of apprenticeships is almost on a par with A levels. Last year, nine in ten schools reported that the overwhelming majority of learners had meaningful encounters with colleges.

This is no accident. It reflects sustained collaboration between schools, colleges, employers and training providers to ensure young people encounter these pathways early and often.

Where this approach is embedded, the impact is clear. The Cheshire and Warrington Careers Hub shows what’s possible when schools and post-16 providers work in partnership.

By bringing together colleges, sixth forms, training providers and employers, it has expanded access to high-quality encounters and challenged misconceptions about technical routes.

Awareness is not enough

Apprenticeships offer promising routes into skilled employment, but increased awareness among young people must be matched by greater participation from employers.

UCAS and Sutton Trust research finds that nationally, three in five learners do not pursue apprenticeships due to lack of availability.

Reasons are complex and multiple, ranging from transport barriers, skills mismatches and limited access to training options. Equally, if employers create roles but young people are not prepared or supported to access them, those opportunities remain unfilled. Strong transitions depend on all sides moving in step.

Wider access is needed to make the system work

Recent government support through foundation apprenticeships, new V Levels and wider incentives, is a welcome step forward.

But more can be done. The industrial strategy sector jobs plans offer an opportunity to align growth sectors with entry routes for young people. Proposed reforms to social value in public procurement could help stimulate more diverse, local talent pipelines.

Access must be inclusive. Alan Milburn’s review is clear that work-based learning helps young people get into work. But as Milburn points out, the upward drift in level and age narrows opportunity for young people who need it most, especially those leaving school with lower levels of attainment and those at risk of becoming NEET.

Andy Burnham’s long-standing call for a closer line of sight between education and employment makes the case more urgent than ever.

We also need employers to work more closely with SEND institutions to ensure effective job matching and supportive pathways for their learners into employment. Strong examples already exist, including brilliant collaboration between McDonalds and Catcote Academy.

The direction is clear: awareness is rising, and access needs to keep apace.

Tutoring can help GCSE resit learners – but only if they turn up

At EEF, we generate evidence about what works to improve outcomes for learners, particularly those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. We also help the education sector put that evidence into practice.

We’re always searching for programmes and approaches that will help leaders and teachers make the most of their limited time and budgets. So we’re actively looking for what will help learners resitting their GCSE English and maths exams achieve a grade 4.

One approach with a strong evidence base in other phases is tutoring. Overall, research consistently shows that tutoring can be an effective method for improving attainment. We wanted to understand tutoring’s impact in a 16-19 context, and how tutoring programmes can be most effective.

To do this, we’ve funded evaluations of tutoring programmes for GCSE resit students.

What we’re finding points to a central implementation challenge for colleges: despite some suggestions of positive impact for pupils who did engage, poor attendance and low learner engagement is limiting the impact of tutoring programmes. In other words, while tutoring has the potential to improve outcomes, initial evidence shows securing consistent participation can be difficult.

This suggests that for colleges investing in tutoring, the starting point is not the design of the tutoring itself, but a clear, deliberate strategy to support attendance and engagement.

Our study

This week, we’ve published findings from a pilot of a tutoring programme for resit learners led by Tutor Trust: a charity with a track-record of delivering high-quality tutoring to socio-economically disadvantaged children and young people with a positive impact on their attainment.

Tutors were typically local university students or qualified teachers. The programme included training for tutors on coaching strategies that focus on relationships, confidence and motivation building. The pilot targeted learners in 20 settings in disadvantaged communities.

The findings show a mixed picture. Just over a quarter (26 per cent) of the 117 learners for whom GCSE grades were received achieved a grade 4 or higher, which is higher than the national average pass rate for GCSE resits. However, retention proved challenging: 31 per cent of learners withdrew before tutoring began, and only 24 per cent completed the minimum 12 hours of tutoring.

Key barriers included limited learner motivation and timetable constraints. This is consistent with challenges faced retaining learners for other 16-19 tutoring, such as that had been provided via the implementation of the 16-19 tuition fund.

Implementation and student engagement was most effective when there was a proactive and engaged partnership lead in the setting, who monitored student attendance.

Creating an attendance strategy

These findings do not suggest that tutoring is ineffective for resit learners. Rather, they underline a more fundamental point: tutoring only works if learners actually attend and engage with it consistently.

For colleges considering investment in tutoring, the key question is therefore how to create the conditions that make sustained participation more likely.

Based on the wider evidence, there are some practical considerations for colleges thinking about how to support attendance at tutoring sessions:

Develop clear communication about why tutoring is taking place. Learners may perceive tutoring as an ‘optional extra’ and not core to their qualification. Explaining to learners why these sessions matter, how they will directly contribute to meeting the learner’s goals and the costs of missing opportunities for study can help them understand why attendance is important.
Where possible, build tutoring into existing structures and routines. We heard that for many learners, tutoring session were more likely to be missed when they stood apart from other learning. For example, taking place on a day where someone wouldn’t otherwise be in college or in an unusual location that the learner may not know how to reach. Making it easier to attend – bringing it closer to the ‘default normal’ – should increase engagement.
Consider incentives. Depending on your context, positive incentives may be appropriate to create a ‘pull factor’ to sessions. For example, earning ‘points’ towards a reward that demonstrates the incremental build-up of benefit.
Consider other practical barriers to attendance. It would be easy to assume that lack of attendance is due to lack of motivation. But it’s important to interrogate that assumption and explore what other factors may be at play. Are there caring responsibilities, work commitments, lack of funds for transport, medical limitations, or home circumstances playing a role? Of course, no setting can solve all of a leaner’s problems. But being aware of them may help small adjustments to be made to maximise tutoring impact.

Being evidence-led is a crucial practice for improving attainment and reducing disadvantage. That means following the evidence where it takes you. That may to a new programme, but it may be towards removing the barrier that’s preventing further progress. Improving engagement with tutoring can unlock its potential.

Ofqual’s doing fine with record annual penalty haul

Ofqual issued £2.5 million in penalties last year, the highest total since it gained power to fine rule-breaking awarding organisations in 2012.

The qualification regulator’s 2025-26 annual report for the year to March 31, published today, shows fines more than tripled from £805,000 the previous year and surpassed the previous high of £1.35 million in 2022-23.

Six monetary penalties were issued against four awarding organisations in 2025-26. Pearson was hit with £2 million in fines in December 2025 for “serious” rule breaches that affected tens of thousands of students taking language qualifications, including GCSE resits.

That alone was enough to break Ofqual’s previous penalty record.

The year also saw financial sanctions on WJEC worth £350,000, University of West London was fined £350,000 and ProQual paid out £15,000.

Fines are not retained by Ofqual but are paid to the Treasury. But the regulator does keep funds it recovers in costs, which amounted to £63,000 in 2025-26, up from £15,000 the year before.

Slowly at first

FE Week analysed every monetary penalty Ofqual has imposed since the power came into force on May 1, 2012.

The regulator did not impose a fine for more than four years. Its first was £38,000 against City & Guilds in August 2016, over the late release of results for 22,229 learners.

In total, Ofqual has fined awarding organisations £5.63 million. Almost half of that, £2.52 million, came last year, and £3.33 million came in the last two years.

Ofqual issued no fines in three of the past ten years: 2015-16, 2020-21 and 2023-24. In four more, the annual total came to less than £405,000.

Last year’s number of penalties – six – topped the previous high of five issued in 2024-25.

Fine words

Ofqual’s strategic enforcement committee met once during the year and scrutinised how fines were determined, alongside the regulator’s fining history, the new report said.

The committee also examined the chief regulator’s rebuke, a new enforcement tool introduced in October 2025 for breaches serious enough to require a public outcome but which fall short of meriting a financial penalty.

Ofqual did not use it during the reporting year, but has used it twice in the current financial year.

WJEC was rebuked in April over centre declaration forms that were missing across three subjects between 2019 and 2025, seven months after being fined £350,000. Pearson was rebuked in May over the design and delivery of its 2025 A Level maths exams, sat by around 75,000 students. That rebuke was published earlier this month, having been held back while this summer’s exams were running.

Meanwhile, Ofqual imposed special conditions on awarding organisations on 23 occasions in the last financial year, covering 19 existing organisations and four newly recognised ones. It opened four investigations, up from one the previous year.

A separate regulatory efficiency report, also published today, sets out how Ofqual has cut the burden it places on awarding organisations.

Among the efficiency measures it lists is the introduction of the rebuke, credited with streamlining investigations and enforcement routes.

A head start

The financial fines record is unlikely to survive the year. Ofqual has already imposed £1.145 million of fines in the first quarter of 2026-27, with penalties of £270,000 against Cambridge OCR in April and £875,000 against Cambridge English in June.

That is more than the regulator imposed in any full year before 2022-23.

DWP swerved apprenticeship overspend with mid-year cash boost

The government narrowly avoided a second consecutive apprenticeship budget overspend in 2025-26 thanks to a mid-year funding boost, figures show.

Annual accounts for the Department for Work and Pensions, published today, also reveal ministers expect apprenticeship spending to peak at almost £3.3 billion next year before falling in each of the following two years.

It raises questions about how a £725 million pot committed for the growth and skills levy over the rest of this parliament will be spent, considering only around half has been committed so far.

Overspend near-miss

The government overspent its apprenticeship budget for the first time in the 2024-25 financial year, forcing ministers to inject £345 million and push the total allocation above £3 billion in 2025-26.

Last year’s original budget was set at £3.075 billion but was boosted by £43 million mid-year to £3.118 billion to meet higher-than-expected demand.

Today’s accounts show the total apprenticeships spend in 2025-26 was £3.095 billion – £20 million higher than the original budget, but £23 million, or 0.7 per cent, lower than the topped-up budget.

FE Week revealed in March that the 2026-27 apprenticeships budget had risen further to £3.3 billion.

Today’s DWP accounts show the department expects to spend 99.9 per cent – £3.298 billion to be exact – of this year’s budget.

Ministers have been under pressure to rein in costs on apprenticeships since the pandemic saw soaring spend on higher-level apprenticeships, mostly taken by older learners, which are more expensive to deliver.

The government has already defunded level 7 apprenticeships for people aged 22 and older, and will this year defund 16 other apprenticeships, including popular management standards, that are mostly taken by existing and older workers.

The changes form part of a wider reform of the apprenticeship levy into a broader “growth and skills levy”. This has expanded the scope of funded provision, including the rollout of short courses – dubbed “apprenticeship units” – and new foundation apprenticeships in sectors such as hospitality and retail since April.

Ministers have an ambition to deliver 50,000 additional apprenticeship starts for young people by March 2029, reversing almost half of the decade-long decline in participation among 16 to 24-year-olds. Apprenticeship starts in that age group have fallen by around 40 per cent over the past decade.

Skills minister Jacqui Smith last month commissioned Skills England to provide urgent advice on which apprenticeship standards most used by under-25s are not funded at a “sufficient” level to incentivise take-up among training providers and employers.

No new money was announced to fund recent band uplifts, stoking concern that further savings would need to be found within the existing apprenticeships budget, which is fully spent.

Spending forecast to fall from 2027-28

DWP’s accounts show that officials expect apprenticeship spending to start dropping after 2026-27.

Total planned outturn sits at £3.195 billion in 2027-28 and then £3.161 billion in 2028-29.

This fall is be the anticipated effect of restrictions on level 7 and management apprenticeships, DWP confirmed.

If the apprenticeships budget does reduce after next year, it raises questions about the £725 million additional funding committed over the next three years for the growth and skills levy in November’s budget.

Taking the baseline for 2025-26 as the outturn figure of £3.095 billion, an additional £203 million will be added to the apprenticeships budget in 2026-27, another £100 million for 2027-28 and £66 million for 2028-29.

This leaves £356 million of the £725 million unallocated.

DWP refused to provide details of how the remainder of the £725 million will be divvied up.

Top-slice to grow

If apprenticeship spending does fall, then the issue of the Treasury’s top-slice will intensify.

Money raised through employer levy contributions isn’t hypothecated in the sense that it doesn’t determine the apprenticeship budget – this is separately set by the Treasury.

The top-slice is the amount the Treasury keeps after collecting the funds paid by employers and dishing out budgets for apprenticeships to the DfE and devolved nations.

Employer levy contributions are forecast by the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) to generate £4.5 billion in 2026-27. Of this, around £500 million will be allocated to the devolved nations. Combined with England’s £3.3 billion apprenticeship budget, this leaves an estimated £700 million not returned to the system.

Levy contributions are expected to rise to £4.7 billion in 2027-28 and then to £4.8 billion in 2028-29. If the DWP’s apprenticeship spending estimates are accurate, this means the Treasury top-slice will increase to £1 billion and £1.14 billion respectively.

Simon Ashworth, Association of Employment and Learning Providers deputy CEO and director of policy, said: “It is welcome that the apprenticeship programme budget has been topped up further to avoid another overspend. However, the department appears to have allocated only around half of the additional £725 million announced in the 2025 spending review.

“With the levy itself generating record receipts, it would be a kick in the teeth for employers if this comes to fruition. It would also fly in the face of government priorities to deliver economic growth and tackle the NEET challenge.”

He added: “Looking ahead, the figures also raise important questions about funding in future years.

“Ministers will shortly enter an even more critical spending review period amid intense pressure on public finances. They must resist the temptation to hold back investment in one of the few programmes that delivers across multiple government priorities.

“Given the challenges the country faces, this would be the worst possible time to shy away from maintaining a sustainable, high-quality apprenticeship system.”

AI’s biggest threat is to those trying to get their careers started

We need to be honest about AI. It is not a distant threat or a future disruption. It is already reshaping the way work is organised, who gets hired, and what skills are valued.

But much of the national conversation is focused in the wrong place.

The assumption is that AI will mainly threaten established workers. That people in mid or later career will be hardest hit as automation reshapes roles around them. There is some truth in that. But it misses a far more profound risk.

The greatest disruption will be felt by those trying to enter the workforce in the first place.

For decades, careers have been built from the ground up. Entry level roles, junior tasks, and early responsibilities have provided the bridge between education and employment. They are where people learn how organisations work, build relationships, and develop confidence.

These are precisely the roles that AI is now beginning to replace.

If the first rung of the ladder disappears, the whole structure of career progression is put at risk. It becomes harder for young people to gain experience, harder to demonstrate capability, and harder to build the networks that sustain a career over time.

By contrast, those already established in work often retain something AI cannot easily replicate. They have trust, relationships, context, and credibility. These things matter more, not less, in an AI driven economy.

This creates a very real danger. Not simply of job displacement, but of exclusion. A generation of capable young people who find themselves locked out, not because they lack potential, but because the route in has narrowed.

This is where education must lead.

FE colleges sit at the centre of this challenge. Not just as providers of qualifications, but as active partners in shaping opportunity. We must work far more closely with employers to design pathways that do not rely on outdated assumptions about entry level roles.

That means building new kinds of experience. Real projects, employer-led learning, and practical environments where students can demonstrate value before they are hired. It also means focusing on the skills that matter most in an AI enabled workplace. Communication, problem solving, adaptability, and the ability to work alongside technology.

At the same time, schools need to shift much earlier in the journey. If we continue to define success through exams alone, we risk preparing young people for a model of work that no longer exists. Learning must feel relevant, applied, and connected to the real world.

This is not about abandoning standards. It is about ensuring that what we value reflects what the future demands.

There is also a role for government. Investment in further education is essential, but it must be targeted towards building genuine pathways into employment. That means supporting partnerships between colleges and employers, and recognising the critical role FE plays in economic development.

AI will undoubtedly reshape the workplace. But the most important question is not how we protect what exists today. It is how we ensure that the next generation still has a way in.

If we get that right, we will not simply respond to change. We will shape a more inclusive and resilient economy.