Having been involved in the successful campaign to elect a Labour MP for Darlington, I felt compelled to reach out to Bridget Philipson. So I wrote two letters, one for the secretary of state and one for my local MP.
Two days later, they were on the University and College Union’s ‘New Deal for FE’ page as ready-to-go email templates for anyone to send in. It felt like we had a movement!
I watched in horror as Teesside University’s library windows were smashed and its sports centre raided by some of those who had the most to gain had they chosen to enrol there instead.
Invariably, FE will play a vital role in repairing the social fabric torn by these events. But in truth what has been laid bare is nothing if not the festering societal wound caused by the underfunding of further education.
People of all ages across the country have been let down by education and government alike. Adrift and vulnerable, they are increasingly falling prey to the toxic influence of online disinformation and far-right ideologues.
The inadequacies of the system – overcrowded classes, under-resourced teachers, under-valued courses – create a breeding ground for discontent.
Our sector works with a purpose that defies our burden. From managers wrestling with ever-changing financial constraints to lecturers facing unsafe workloads to student support advisors donning myriad roles to extend lifelines to these students, staff sacrifice their own health and wellbeing to keep the show on the road.
But how long can they keep darning the social fabric before their own thread breaks?
We need a new deal for FE, and we need it urgently
During the election campaign, Keir Starmer spoke about the importance of colleges in providing the technical skills to power the country’s growth. The expectation: to finally be seen, funded and supported. The actuality: Silence and a cold shoulder.
For those asking why, the answer is simple: We need cold hard cash, and the conventional wisdom is that there isn’t any.
Perhaps, but cash takes many forms. For example, fairer funding streams and dedicated capital budgets would mean colleges weren’t forced to pay out huge amounts on payroll at the expense of equipment.
Another simple but impactful change: Make colleges VAT exempt. No one questions why FE, which typically serves the least affluent, has been paying VAT for years. And it’s in this context that we’ve had to watch this summer’s backlash against imposing VAT on private schools (which serve some of the UK’s most affluent). It is beyond irony. It is hypocrisy.
We need a new deal for FE, and we need it urgently.
Why shouldn’t we be paid commensurately with the vital job we have been given of upskilling the nation? And why should we accept that we are worth some £9,000 a year less than school teachers?
Why should we have to continue to administer GCSE English and maths resits that we know are failing our students? And why should we put up with only a short pause and review on the defunding of applied general qualifications when we have spoken out in one voice about its dangers?
Why should we put up with endemic ignorance of our sector among politicians and policy makers? And why should we continue to accept occasional distant platitudes from a dispatch box in lieu of genuine, collaborative development of solutions for the communities we serve?
In spite of a brief ray of hope in the lead-up to the general election in July, it’s been an overcast summer for this FE observer (with the occasional outburst). But there is still time – just – to offset a winter of discontent.
Bridget, if you are reading, come to Darlington College. Sit with us. Talk policy with those who deliver it. Champion our students. Show them and the world that they and their skills are needed. Because giving people purpose keeps them out of the hands of extremists.
That’s what FE does, but we can’t keep doing it with our hands tied behind our backs.
The tears have dried. The shock has faded. The photos of students jumping in glee are, if we’re honest, best forgotten. Everyone has moved on from GCSEs. Everyone, that is, except the thousands who will need to resit them.
So many of them fail that we shouldn’t put them through this, say the Association of Colleges and ASCL. They would like to see the policy scrapped. It’s well-meant, no doubt, but as a resit teacher, I dissent from their opinion.
I sympathise with the view. After all, this year’s benchmark for GCSE English resits at 17+ is 20.9 per cent, against an overall English pass rate of 61.6 per cent. It seems to make sense to cut our losses. But it doesn’t.
In our college in Stoke this year, our English resit pass rate was 63.3 per cent. Extrapolating, that is equivalent to a whole cohort pass rate of 80-85 per cent over two years. Include those who never resat at all and we’re still probably at around 75 per cent. That is ridiculously high.
It is also entirely predictable. We do it again and again, year after year. And this in a city which has perennially had a problem with pass rates. A population that’s been written off again and again. We do not think we are wrong in saying that our Stoke students consistently have the best English resit pass rates in the whole country.
Did our students want to resit English? No! Would they have opted to if they’d had a choice? Never. They did it because they had to. And now look at them.
Some have progressed onto level 3 courses. Others have moved on to degrees which would otherwise have been inaccessible to them. I would not want anyone to take that away from them.
We should never leave our young people in their failure
We all know that there is a hidden curriculum behind what we teach. A while ago, resilience was the buzzword. Resilience. Tenacity. Determination. Character. Grit. Our students do not just walk away with a well-won qualification. They walk away with character. I’d swear they even walk away taller.
They come to us with crushed dreams, burning disappointment and bruised self-esteem, but they leave us knowing they are better than they were told. They walk away with far more than a pass mark. They leave with a life lesson: They failed once, yes, but then overcame.
And if that’s the lesson, then consider what future students will learn if we cut and run: it was too hard, so we walked away.
There are ways to raise aspirations and the resit pass rate. They aren’t magic or arcane; we simply give them our best. If you come and visit, I dare say you won’t be surprised by us or our students. But come back on results day and you will be as surprised as they are themselves.
So we cannot take this chance away from them. By forcing them to resit, we might be delaying their progress. We might even be frustrating them. But we would do them a disservice by taking this opportunity to prove themselves away. Some people simply need more time.
We should never leave our young people in their failure. (And whatever you may say, they themselves will always call it a failure.) Surely we should teach them that they are more than an initial stumble?
So we will not be advocating writing students off and giving up on them. Why would we ever do that? Some of these students have been written off all their lives. We refuse to perpetuate that.
We will show them who we know them to be. And we will keep on making them resit English. I know that most of them will pass, whatever they believe at the start. Because they always do. Our students are their own proof.
Every single year, I see previously jaded and broken students leaving college like toddlers skipping from playgroup, bursting with joy and full of surprise. And that is worth the world. It’s certainly worth the work.
As a sector, we may not yet be delivering on the policy’s promise, but we deserve better than our representatives throwing the towel in on our behalf.
Apprentices who have excelled in every other aspect of their training, demonstrated exceptional skill and proven their competence in their technical fields risk of losing everything simply because they struggle to pass a maths exam.
This is not just unfair; it’s a fundamental flaw in the apprenticeship system with profound consequences for apprentices and employers alike.
Members of the Fellowship of Inspection Nominees (FIN) witness this daily. They value maths and English as essential skills, so FIN is not seeking the removal of functional skills qualifications (FSQs) as an exit requirement of a successful apprenticeship programme
However, providers have reported that functional skills maths leads to unfunded training provision and poor retention rates.
Ofsted often highlights delivery and achievement of functional skills as an area for improvement at inspections, affecting learner progress and overall programme achievement. This not only drags down providers’ qualification achievement rates (QAR) by as much as 20 per cent, but also erodes confidence in the programme as a whole.
One particularly troubling trend is the increasing reluctance of employers to take on apprentices who do not already have a GCSE grade C or 4 in maths or English. This is a direct consequence of over-emphasis on passing FSQs, which many employers see as an unnecessary distraction from vocational training.
The content of functional skills maths is overly academic, often irrelevant to the roles apprentices are training for and, as a result, demotivates learners and frequently instils fear. The irony is palpable: a qualification meant to assess functional abilities is anything but functional.
The questions in the exams are often so complex that they resemble comprehension exercises more than maths assessments. For many learners of all ages, this unnecessary complexity turns the end of their apprenticeship into a nightmare.
Providers say that they end up ‘teaching to the test’, sapping any fun from learning. One FIN member has been coaching a deputy headteacher who has failed the maths test numerous times. Elsewhere, young apprentices have faced a question based around skirting boards when many don’t know what a skirting board is.
They drag down achievement and erode confidence in apprenticeships
Learners also face wellbeing challenges as a result of these tests, particularly stress and anxiety caused by the non-calculator section. In other words, a skills programme that is supposed to promote social mobility is instead reinforcing barriers.
In part frustrated by inspectors focusing only on FSQs, FIN members have submitted a series of recommendations for major reform to the government.
We want to see a radical overhaul of content, a change in the style of test questions and a review of assessment.
None of what FIN proposes should spook ministers who may be anxious about dumbing down. Instead, the submission includes practical examples of what needs to be addressed.
For example, the maths questions which carry the larger marks are often criticised for being too academic and for consuming too much test time. We have shown how a complex problem-solving question can be transformed into manageable steps.
Another important aspect of reform should be to review the syllabus to be more relevant for employers in different industries.
Changes could include a core syllabus and employer-led module approach appropriate to each sector. It could be project-based, asking the apprentice to produce work that is relevant to their industry.
For instance, we recognise that the water industry values the inclusion of algebra in level 2 maths while other employers seriously question its relevance. Why can’t we make both happy?
Furthermore, providers are picking up the tab for what 11 years of statutory education couldn’t deliver and expected to put this right in 12 months. They should not be penalised financially for supporting apprentices who need to retake their exams.
Ministers apparently want the emphasis to be on growth in the new Growth and Skills Levy after another academic year of flatlining starts in apprenticeships. They should recognise that functional skills is a misnomer, and that the qualification is doing more harm than good.
If we are serious about raising standards, improving achievement rates and supporting apprentices in their careers, then the requirement must be made truly functional.
Hours after the general election result in July, something strange happened. The Department for Education posted an advert for half a dozen strategy jobs. It went viral, as far as DfE job adverts go. I saw it all over social media and had friends texting me about it: “I’m guessing Bridget has six mates at a loose end.”
But it was still very early in the honeymoon period and it was seen as a sign of hope. Bringing fresh blood into the department’s strategic thinking was surely a good idea, right?
Then in August, the same concerning detail emerged with every advert from junior policy posts to Skills England leadership recruitment: the jobs were open to London-based applicants.
Many may have missed the significance of that, but as part of its ‘levelling up’ agenda, the previous government had all but banned London recruitment, pushing civil service jobs into the regions.
I personally benefited. A provincial FE teacher would never have made it into a meaningful policy role before Covid and the great leveller of Microsoft Teams. Not without leaving the place he was doing it for.
To explain: meeting the bar for advertising a London DfE role externally required months of proving that no other option, whether internal managed move or transfer from another government department, would yield a suitable candidate.
For those first six shiny new posts to go live the day after the election, either someone senior within DfE went out on a limb or a new minister directly intervened.
I live in the south west, and our DfE regional office is in the most north-easterly bit of the map they could credibly push a pin into.
Now is not the time to retreat within the M25
My teaching career was defined by the wan, malnourished challenge among the green and golden beauty of rural and coastal communities. I learned so much from DfE colleagues in London, but I hope what I brought to the table was the experience of classrooms from Torquay to Taunton and of the working-class poverty we saw whipped into groundless hate and violence on frightening summer news clips.
Interviews with those committing bewildering acts showed something more terrifying than mindless thuggery. They had been too-easily manipulated.
Listening to clips, trying to understand, it was hard to escape the tragic ignorance on display. While it was heartening to see counter protests disavowing the notion that this racism and xenophobia represented their communities, it is an uncomfortable truth that our well-intentioned educational policies are not reaching all corners of England equally.
I worry that this is a reflection of a metropolitan-centric mindset that assumes what is working for poor children in the capital is the right approach for the Sunderlands, Lancasters and Weymouths of our nation.
“Poorer children in the south west have the worst educational outcomes in the country,” according to the South West Social Mobility Commission, with “pupils across the peninsula missing lessons at a higher rate than pupils anywhere else in the country.”
Having said that, the north east beats us for the grim prize of “the highest numbers of children from long-term disadvantaged backgrounds” and the starkest disadvantage gap.
I was lucky enough to be awarded funding from the brilliant charity SHINE in the years before I joined the DfE, supporting an intervention for students in my college as well as other colleges nationally.
When SHINE moved from London to Leeds to focus on the north of England, I admit I felt a little left behind at the opposite end of the country. But damn, I admired them having the courage of their convictions.
It’s time for the department to show the same courage.
Let’s take those precious taxpayer pounds and bulletproof government jobs, and let’s move them to Plymouth, Hartlepool, and Blackpool. Let’s give their heroic frontline educators a direct line to shaping the intelligent and lived-experience policymaking we so badly need.
Now is not the time to retreat within the M25. There’s a whole country out here. Our diverse and difficult and delightful contexts need to be understood by those making decisions for our young people.
FE colleges, universities and training providers will have all four sub-judgments displayed alongside overall effectiveness grades on Ofsted’s website for the first time, following an update to schools’ profiles earlier this year.
As of today, sub-judgments like quality of education, leadership and management and apprenticeships are now visible for further education settings for all graded inspections from September 2019.
Until now, only overall effectiveness was visible on the front page of an organisation’s page on Ofsted’s website.
The move comes four months after the watchdog made the same change to schools’ profiles, in new chief inspector Martyn Oliver’s bid to give parents a more “rounded, contextual picture” Ofsted’s evaluation of performance.
At the time, Ofsted said it excluded post-16 providers from the move because updating every education providers’ profile at once was a large and complex technical change.
Provider profiles on the watchdog’s website now show sub-judgments below the overall outcome
The announcement also comes shortly after Ofsted responded to its “Big Listen” consultation, which confirmed it will scrap single-phrase headline grades with immediate effect for schools.
However, this change will also exclude FE and training providers until a future date due to the “time and capacity” needed.
It is likely that overall headline grades will not be removed for the FE sector until Labour’s proposed “report cards” replace them in September 205.
Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Ben Rowland had a lukewarm reaction to the scrapping of Ofsted’s single-phrase judgments in his newsletter to members this week.
He said that while the change lifts the threat of a “professionally stigmatising over-simplified ‘label’,” the Department for Education and mayoral combined authorities will continue to use Ofsted grades as trigger points for “snap or (even worse) automated decisions” for all types of training providers.
Rowland called Ofsted’s future introduction of report cards and inspection frameworks that would be specific to FE and skills “a potentially much more positive development”.
An Ofsted spokesperson said: “We are pleased to now be able to display the sub-judgments for all [further education and skills] providers who have had a graded inspection since September 2019.
“It will allow parents and learners to see a broader picture of the provision at first glance on our website.”
Vice Principal: Curriculum and Skills, Luminate Education Group
Start date: August 2024
Previous Job: Director of Client Services, Firebrand Training
Interesting fact: Natalie is a proud former apprentice at Park Lane College (now part of Luminate), started her career at British Gas and progressing from level 2 through to degree level study
James McIntosh
Managing Director, Cogent Skills Apprenticeship Training
Start date: July 2024
Previous Job: Chief Operating Officer (Director of Skills), CATCH
Interesting fact: James is an avid rugby league fan – when he isn’t championing apprenticeships he can be found cheering on his beloved Hull KR, travelling home and away each week (and even as far as France) to support his team
Jon Ridley
Principal, Newcastle College
Start date: August 2024
Previous Job: Deputy Principal, Newcastle College
Interesting fact: On a Saturday and Sunday, you’ll also find Jon on the side-lines of football pitches across the North East of England coaching his son’s football team
Can the new quango really fix our broken skills system when so many previous attempts at national skills bodies have failed?
The new Labour government says Skills England will bring together the “fractured skills landscape” of employers, unions, providers, universities and local government to boost the nation’s skills.
You’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve heard all this before.
Skills England’s oversight of the skills system is tipped to have a much broader remit than the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) which it’s replacing. Skills needs “will be aligned” with the government’s industrial strategy and it will identify training the new growth and skills levy will pay for.
But there’s still a lot we don’t know. Legislation to form Skills England, announced in the King’s Speech, is expected to be debated in parliament soon.
What lessons can Skills England learn from previous incarnations to ensure it isn’t just rearranging deckchairs on a sinking skills ship?
Tom Bewick
Cut the red tape
Since the Manpower Services Commission was created in 1974 to manage training schemes, Tom Bewick, who is researching the history of skills policies for his upcoming book Skills Policy in Britain, says we’ve “always had a very strong, centrally directed national quango of one sort or another”.
What united them all, “regardless what the plaque on the wall says”, was “bureaucratic market centralisation”, he adds.
While in the 1990s the average college principal only dealt with one quango – the Further Education Funding Council – now they must deal with around five, as well as the Department for Education directly.
Bewick says: “Skills England will have to demonstrate that it isn’t just another part of the furniture getting in the way of a sector that already feels quite overburdened.”
The seven-year itch
Like marriages, skills quangos often succumb to a seven-year itch.
So says Lesley Giles, who was commissioned last year by the Association of Colleges (AoC) to draw up a blueprint for a new arms-length skills body.
She knows all about their short shelf life, having worked for two formed by the previous Labour government: the Sector Skills Development Agency, and then the body it morphed into, the UK Commission for Employment & Skills where she was deputy director.
Neither lasted more than eight years; IfATE has been around for seven.
Giles believes the rise and fall of recent quangos has meant the loss of “a lot of institutional memory”. UKCES conducted “regular, robust analysis of the labour market” (including a 2015 survey of 91,000 employers), which “we just don’t do anymore”.
Sue Pember, policy director of adult education body HOLEX, had to close several quangos as a senior civil servant under the coalition government.
She recalls how these quangos often suffered from “mission drift”. Their chief executives “wanted to do other things than what they were set up for, and often fell out with ministers”.
She believes therefore that Skills England needs to have an “understanding right at the beginning of how the organisation will be successful, to prevent fallouts… otherwise, you’ve got a short lifespan”.
Power and influence
There is broad enthusiasm for a skills body with powers to influence policy and delivery across government.
AoC’s public affairs and campaigns director Lewis Cooper believes that how Skills England contributes to Labour’s cross-government missions on economic growth and immigration is a “key governance question” which is “complicated, but critical”.
Sue Pember, policy director of Holex
He warns of a “real risk that Skills England collapses into being just a body sitting within the DfE, without that real clout across government”.
To avoid this, Skills England’s new chief needs the authority to speak directly to secretaries of state and “raise the red flags” – to warn the health secretary if the NHS workforce plan isn’t deliverable because of a lack of college staff to train them, for example.
A source close to the DfE claims it is looking at ranking the new Skills England chief as a director-level position rather than as a director general. Their status will be a “key bellwether on the degree of freedom and power they’ll enjoy”.
“Influential permanent secretaries from other departments won’t see directors, they see them as being too junior.”
The source believes a clipping of their wings in this way may be a deliberate ploy by officials to “contain” the new body. “They’re worried it could get out of control, it may well be critical of the DfE. Senior civil servants would prefer to have it boxed in.”
The DfE says the seniority of the chief’s role is yet to be decided.
But Robert West, head of education and skills at the Confederation of British Industry, dismisses such concerns.
He believes Skills England’s “clout” will come from the “secretary of state talking to other secretaries of state about their skills plans, and offering Skills England as an opportunity to help”.
There are also signs that Skills England will simply undertake much of the work the DfE does already.
The DfE’s Unit for Future Skills, formed in 2022, has already been transferred to Skills England, along with a number of other existing DfE and IfATE officials.
This worries Pember. “Where are they going to bring in new people with new ideas and new ways of working if they’re just transferring in existing staff?”
Long arms
Skills England’s influence is also limited by the simultaneous creation within the Department for Work and Pensions of the Labour Market Advisory Board. It will, among other things, advise the DWP around the establishment of its ‘youth guarantee’ to offer training, an apprenticeship, or help finding work to all those aged 18 to 21.
Ben Rowland, AELP chief executive
And a new Industrial Strategy Council (the previous one being dormant since 2021) could potentially also tread on Skills England’s toes when highlighting the skills gaps required to deliver the government’s promised house-building boom and green energy transition.
Ben Rowland, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP), says he is “nervous that the requirement for better coordination across the system has been met by the creation of not one, but three new potentially competing coordinating bodies”.
The DfE is currently said to be seeking to make £1 billion of savings, which may reduce Skills England’s headcount and “further chip away at the edifice of independence”, says FE Week’s source.
“Will it become just another division of DfE’s skills directorate, with a Skills England sign on the door?”
They pointed out how “different arm’s-length bodies have different lengths of arm”, with Ofqual’s arms being “eight miles long” and IfATE’s “eight inches”.
“There’s real discussion needed about how long its arms are. I hope the vision is for something that works across government, really brings people together, and has the authority to decide which horses we’re backing in the economy.”
Core functions
The core functions of Skills England, Cooper says, should be intelligence, coordination and oversight, informing and working across different arms of government, key agencies and mayoral combined authorities.
He says oversight is currently lacking when it comes to the local skills improvement plans, which have “input in working out individual areas’ future skills needs, but not the oversight to ensure those gaps are being addressed”.
Bewick believes Skills England offers the English system a chance to “end the binary divide between FE and HE”. How Skills England interacts with (or against) the powerful HE regulator, the Office for Students, remains to be seen.
Pember says Skills England also needs to consult with students themselves, because “motivating the learner is something we’ve forgotten completely about in the last 20 years”.
Running the show
The government has yet to announce who Skills England’s chief executive will be.
While Giles believes they should have “standing” with the business community, she warns of having seen chiefs brought in from the private sector who were “like bunnies in the headlights” when grappling with the inner workings of the public sector.
“It will require a senior leadership team with a combination of education, public service and some industry skills,” says Bewick.
Cooper believes that leaders from across colleges, universities, trade unions and employers should all be given seats on its board, which are currently being advertised. Doing so would, he says, give credence to education secretary Bridget Phillipson’s multiple recent comments about reforming the government’s relationship with sector leaders, and “could reshape a partnership of ‘doing with’ rather than ‘being done to’”.
But there will be “huge pressure on civil servants and ambitious ministers to move quickly” which “sometimes means we don’t work as effectively in co-constructing. There’s a massive risk they get off on the wrong foot by not working really seriously in partnership with the sector.”
The CBI has attended recent roundtables on Skills England and been “assured” it would not just be “IfATE in disguise”, says West. He is therefore feeling “quite positive” about it.
But there is concern within the training sector over a lack of consultation around Skills England’s remit.
Our source claims the DfE has a “fixed view” on what the new body should look at, which is “very much a DfE-generated impression”.
The DfE is not planning a formal consultation, but sector engagement will follow the publication of Skills England’s first report in the autumn.
Distraction from funding
Cooper says current government funding constraints makes the role of Skills England all the more important in helping decide where to prioritise spending, to fill the biggest gaps.
Rob Nitsch
Rob Nitsch, former director of skills delivery at IfATE and now chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, believes a significant opportunity will be missed if there is a failure to eliminate overlaps between the activities and functions of IfATE and other institutional bodies, including the DfE.
But Pember sees the new body as a “red herring”, “distracting” the sector from the real issue of a general lack of funding.
“We’ve got a billion less funding in the adult world, even without the mess that we’re in at 16 to 18. We now haven’t got enough staff to actually educate the people who want to be educated.”
Giles believes that the first step for Skills England should be to “grasp the nettle” with a consensus on what the shared national skills priorities are, aligned to the industrial strategy, how they will play out regionally and, crucially, include a sector perspective which is currently lacking.
Another source expressed concern that by making colleges “much more influential” the new body would “drag us back to being a supplier-led system”.
“We used that playbook previously and ended up with a skill system which was not giving people skills that were wanted in the workplace.”
Despite some reservations, the overall mood about the potential of Skills England is one of optimism.
Cooper is “hopeful” it will lead to a “step change”, despite “risks of status quo-ism”.
Giles hopes that the body will be “apolitical and not attached to a particular government administration”, because its missions will be “hard and take a long time”.
“If you’re endlessly closing down and setting up institutions, things won’t ever really change,” she warns.
Ministers have refused to share the terms of reference for a “short review” into controversial level-3 qualification defunding plans.
Announced by education secretary Bridget Phillipson in late July, the review will examine the Conservatives’ planned cull of BTECs and other vocational courses, which aimed to shift students towards studying T Levels.
But since the announcement, the government has not confirmed who is conducting the review or published terms of reference, leaving the exact aims and scope a mystery. Despite this, findings are expected by the end of the year.
In contrast, the government published details of its longer-running curriculum and assessment review, including its chair and terms of reference, in late July.
‘Safe space for policymaking’
The Department for Education refused to share details of the level 3 short review with FE Week following a freedom of information request.
Officials in the technical education and qualifications reform division cited section 35 of the FOI Act, which is designed to “protect good government” by providing a “safe space for policymaking”.
They argue the government needs a “self-contained space” to consider its options and that sharing the review’s terms would “have a potentially corrosive effect”.
They also refused to confirm which staff in the department were responsible for the review, arguing this is “third-party personal data”.
FE Week has asked the DfE to carry out an internal review of its FOI response, arguing that releasing details would enhance public understanding without undermining the government’s ability to govern well.
In a recent letter, skills minister Jacqui Smith said the short review would assess “how best to improve” the qualifications landscape and ensure learners have “high quality options”.
The DfE has told FE Week it will shortly begin engaging with a “representative sample” of providers, awarding organisations and other key stakeholders as part of the review.
Withholding review terms ‘unusual’
Maurice Frankel, director of the UK Campaign for Freedom of Information, said it was “unusual” for a government to withhold the terms of reference of a policy review, which may indicate the options the short review will consider are “constrained”.
He added: “By announcing the review, the case for disclosing the terms of reference may have been strengthened.
“It’s also not clear that identifying who is carrying out the review will be unfair to the individuals involved.
“Disclosure might not be unfair if the individuals are senior or if they hold publicly facing roles.”
‘Half of students affected’
Campaigners say BTECs and other level-3 qualifications play an “invaluable” role in helping young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education or employment.
James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, which has led the Protect Student Choice campaign, said the review should be conducted in a “transparent way” given its impact on an estimated 54 per cent of students in England.
“That might at least help to dispel the widespread perception that the objective of the review is to boost T Level numbers at any cost, rather than ensure that every young person has access to an appropriate, high-quality qualification in the future,” he added.
“Government decision-making in this area has been dysfunctional precisely because it has taken place in a ‘self-contained space’ and has ignored the views of students, colleges and schools, and employers.”
Colleges hamstrung by delay
An urgent concern for campaigners is the timing, which makes it difficult for colleges and schools to plan what vocational qualifications they can offer in the next academic year.
“No government would decide the future of A Levels by conducting a four-month internal DfE review and this approach should be considered equally unacceptable for applied general and other qualifications,” Kewin said.
“Providing this information in December is far too late, and that’s why the plan to conduct a rapid review without a pause is so unhelpful.”
Refusal to budge ‘disrespectful’
The public debate over the qualifications cull has become increasingly heated in recent weeks.
The government’s refusal to budge in response to a last-ditch public plea from more than 450 school and college leaders backing the Protect Student Choice campaign was described as “disrespectful” by Kewin this week.
When in opposition, the Labour party promised to “pause and review” the Conservative government’s plan to scrap applied general qualification (AGQ) courses.
But in July, the Labour said it would only pause the defunding of a limited number of level-3 qualifications set to be scrapped from August this year – which had minimal enrolments and were already removed from most school and college rosters.
Campaigners have called this a “betrayal” of Labour’s commitment.
Phillipson has said pausing future defunding of qualifications at this stage could “prejudice the findings” of the short review.
A DfE spokesperson said: “Too many young people leave education without the qualifications they need to get into high-quality apprenticeships, higher level education and good jobs, and the post-16 skills system is confusing for everyone involved.
“Our short, focused review along with other measures like the curriculum and assessment review and the creation of Skills England, will allow the government to improve skills training, unlock opportunities for young people and harness their talents to drive growth and fulfil the government’s missions.”
While WorldSkills UK chief executive Ben Blackledge is hoping for medal glory in Lyon next week, his broader aim is for sustainable excellence in the skills sector
As Team UK’s 31 WorldSkills competitors prepare to do battle next week, the group’s chief executive Ben Blackledge must juggle another challenge.
When we spoke, Blackledge’s wife was just days away from giving birth to a new member of their young family.
And now their baby son has arrived, he must support him, his spouse, his daughter and a global skills competition. So how is he managing?
“It’s the joy of balancing,” he laughs. “I’m manifesting that he’s going to be a good sleeper. That’s the plan.”
Blackledge tells me he started his two-decade journey to his current job after landing a temporary job at the Learning and Skills Council.
He doesn’t have a Starmer-esque vocational claim to fame. His mother was a primary school teacher at his school in Essex, which he says was “completely humiliating” at the time.
Young Ben Blackledge
Meanwhile, his father was a salesman who sold smoking sundries and lighters, then made a “slightly surreal career choice” when Blackledge was a teenager and set up a business importing tree ferns. Blackledge and his friends would spend their summers doing back-breaking work hauling 12-foot plants.
“You used to find the dust from tree ferns everywhere, so you have it in your nails and your ears and your nose,” he says. “The smell of tree ferns still brings back memories.”
Going to Cardiff University to read business, he says, is one of Blackledge’s “biggest” regrets. Whilst he enjoyed debating the merits of the European Union he now wishes he had a “verifiable” skill set such as engineering, medicine, or law.
But his degree choice allowed him the time to enjoy a proper university experience, a “game changer” for his confidence. He also spent time volunteering through his church which would include organising weekend trips for people from deprived backgrounds.
His temp job at the Learning and Skills Council (before it became the Skills Funding Agency and subsequently the Education and Skills Funding Agency) involved carrying out admin for its prison offender team in the south east of England.
He says: “The repetition of learning was an issue when I was involved. We were looking to make sure if someone did a learning course and was moved from a prison, how did that follow them?”
Finding his future
After a couple of years, Blackledge moved on to working for the Learning and Skills Council’s individual learner accounts pilot, a New Labour policy that gave purchasing power to learners.
Then aged 24, his task included talking providers into adopting a new digital solution.
He says: “I got some fairly hostile responses from people. Some of that was completely justified because individual learner accounts had been a bit of a nightmare before.
Young Ben Blackledge
“And I was this 24-year-old kid coming in and telling them how this was going to help them and their learners. They were like, ‘You don’t know anything’, and they were right.”
Blackledge moved into careers policy after a few years, and that’s where he got his first experience of WorldSkills – then called Find a Future – although he didn’t realise the significance at the time.
Working at the National Careers Service, he helped set up careers advice hubs in London’s Excel centre at WorldSkills 2011 when the global competition was staged there.
“When I went for an interview for my first job at Find a Future, that was my pitch. You’ve got these competitions, I was there for four days, and I didn’t even really know about them.”
For the last decade, Blackledge has been at the forefront of recalibrating WorldSkills UK towards showcasing and benchmarking technical training standards through competitions.
He says: “We want to make sure that we are benchmarking the UK and showing the level of skills that we’ve got across the UK and internationally,” he says. “The Olympic Games are a very visual example of how you do that through these kind of events.”
WorldSkills UK has been around since 1953 – that’s over 70 years of experience of what world-class quality can look like.
Blackledge joined Find a Future in 2014 to run the flagship Skills Show, the organisation’s annual careers event in Birmingham.
“I realised there was so much more to the work of the organisation,” he says. “Getting to know the large network of people we work with, and who are passionate supporters of our programmes, has given me a greater insight into the sector.”
Climbing the career ladder
Blackledge rose through the ranks, running its national competitions and working with industry and government to expand and embed the charity’s remit into FE, eventually becoming deputy chief executive in 2019 before taking the top job last year.
So how is he finding life at the top?
“I do feel very lucky to be working with so many passionate and talented people both in WorldSkills UK and across the sector, it makes the job that much easier and a lot more fun.”
He adds the chief executive position is “always challenging”, partly because the organisation has received a shrinking budget from the government for several years.
Blackledge says for many years WorldSkills UK has urged the government to view its grant funding as a “must-have”, not a “nice to have” for the sector. Yet its government grants have fallen by a third in the last nine years to £8.3 million in 2022-23.
Under Labour, the Department of Education appears to be maintaining a policy commitment to WorldSkills, proved by the skills minister Jacqui Smith flying out to Lyon to see the competition next week. But WorldSkills UK only has grant funding secured from the DfE until 2024-25.
As a result, the organisation has sought commercial backing and has partnerships with NCFE, Pearson, Autodesk, BAE Systems and Skills and Education Group.
“We can demonstrate that if you invest in us, we can see an increased level of employability of young people, or an increased wage earning of young people,” Blackledge says. “That’s obviously beneficial for the individual and the economy as well.”
Boosting college involvement
Looking at recent UK team cohorts, just a handful of colleges consistently send students to competitions – they include Northern Regional College in Northern Ireland, Coleg Gwent in south-east Wales and Trafford & Stockport College Group in Greater Manchester.
So how can WorldSkills UK drive up involvement from within the sector?
“I do think it is a leadership issue within the sector, not that it’s an issue with leaders, but that they need to grasp this and examine how they look at quality,” Blackledge says.
Talk of excellence isn’t about being elitist
Large college groups such as NCG, he adds, are beginning to think about excellence and competitions in a big way.
Additionally, WorldSkills UK has seen a “big uptake” in registrations for national finals from English colleges. Around 70 per cent of English colleges are now involved.
The byproduct should be a wider geographical spread of competitors who make up Team UK and Squad UK. But it will take time to feed through.
“For the first time we are laying a sustainable approach to develop excellence more broadly across the sector,” Blackledge says.
It’s clear the chief executive is passionate about the word ‘excellence’ and what it means to young people and their education.
“There’s a misunderstanding about when we talk about excellence, and it’s not about being elitist,” he says.
“Excellence isn’t restricted to certain people. If you are an entry-level learner or a level 7 learner, or have special education needs or an academic background, what does excellence look like for you in that space?”
Hosting WorldSkills ‘not ruled out’
Turning to Team UK, Blackledge hopes the UK will rank in the top 10 league table at WorldSkills Lyon next week and bring home plenty of medals.
“I think we’ve got some really strong competitors,” he says. “I think we’ve got some good medal hopes. It’s one of those things that I’m always nervous about, because you never know how things will play out.”
Behind the scenes at Lyon, the WorldSkills general assembly will vote on a host for the 2027 event – which is between Japan and Canada.
Blackledge hasn’t ruled out bidding for the UK to host sometime in the future, but it must “form part of a longer-term plan”, with the government, employers and education providers backing a pitch.
“The time is possibly now, though I’m not sure with the conversations about austerity – talking about an 80-nation event in London might not land quite yet,” he says.
“I wouldn’t rule it out, but it’s not something that we’re actively pursuing at the moment.”
So for now, Blackledge’s focus is on supporting the UK’s competitors in Lyon. Their areas of expertise include auto paint spraying, hairdressing, cyber-security and cooking.
And if things go well he hopes the country’s winners will receive a hero’s welcome similar to those given to our Olympic and Paralympic champions.
He says: “Do I want them to be celebrated and recognised on the BBC Breakfast sofa with their medals? Absolutely.”
FE Week is the media partner for WorldSkills UK. Follow our coverage of WorldSkills Lyon next week.
