MPs consider investigating the state of FE loans

The student loans system will come under parliamentary scrutiny – an investigation which may include FE.

The Treasury select committee’s inquiry into student loans, launched today, will focus on a range of issues including raising the repayment threshold, and how effectively the government is managing the loan book.

The initial remit focused on higher education, rather than advanced learner loans for FE learners, which have struggled with low take up since they were launched in 2013.

“The committee is scoping its inquiry at the moment and given the DfE’s advanced learning loan budget is administered by the Student Loans Company in the same way as HE loans,” a source told FE Week. “They may also be of interest to the committee as part of their student loans inquiry.”

FE loans, originally known as 24+ loans, were introduced in 2013/14 for learners aged 24 and older and studying courses at levels three or four.

Unlike HE loans, FE loans are only available to cover course fees, and not living costs.

Their introduction corresponded with a drop in adults studying at these levels – from 273,400 in 2012/13, to 169,400 in 2015/16.

Despite this fall, loan eligibility was expanded in 2016/17 to include 19- to 23-year-olds, and courses at levels five and six.

FE Week reported last month that almost £1 billion in loans funding has gone unspent since they were introduced, as FE learners have been reluctant to get into debt to pay for their education.

That’s not the only problem to plague the system: apprenticeship loans, originally introduced alongside the FE loans for apprentices aged 24 and older, were quickly scrapped after adult apprentice numbers plummeted.

Just 404 people took out an apprenticeship loan in the seven months after they were brought in, leading then business secretary Vince Cable to execute a quick U-turn on the policy.

The first evidence session of the inquiry will be held on Wednesday, October 18, and will hear from Dr Helen Carasso, a lecturer in higher education at Oxford, and Dr Andrew McGettigan, a freelance writer and researcher on higher education – both of whom have written extensively about student loans.

It will focus on the impact of student loans on the public finances, the success or failure of fee funding to act as a “market” for higher education, and the impact of student finances on students.

Further evidence sessions will be announced in due course.

“Student loan debt is projected to be around £160 billion within six years, and the government has announced that it will review the whole student finance system,” said former education secretary Nicky Morgan, who is now chair of the Treasury committee.:

“The committee will scrutinise the current system and any future developments closely.”

SPONSORED: Colleges should embrace blended learning

To remain competitive in an ever-changing FE landscape, colleges must provide an exceptional learning experience – which means investing in learning technology. 

We know there are huge differences among teaching staff in the use of digital technologies to support learning. Some hardly use technology at all, others create a few resources for the virtual learning environment, while innovators integrate educational technology as part of a richer approach that we call “blended learning”. We’ve produced a new toolkit on the subject to help colleges embed EdTech into courses.

Under this approach, traditional face-to-face methods are combined with online, often interactive, activities and content for study, feedback and assessment. It can be a powerful tool as colleges strive to implement the recommendations of the FELTAG report and become learner-led organisations. 

Blended learning enables learners to access a wealth of resources, take more control of how, when and where they study and develop the digital capabilities that they will need in the workplace. Integrating EdTech into the curriculum also helps clear obstacles to education for people who have previously found themselves excluded, including those with disabilities or caring responsibilities. 

Used imaginatively, blended learning can also develop skills in collaborative working and team-working, for example through project-based learning. In turn, it can improve both engagement and attainment – and so boost the reputation of any college. 

What do students want from learning technology? 

First, colleges must understand where to invest. Does your college know how students use technology to study, what they feel about using it and what they expect from it? One of the best ways to secure answers to these questions is to involve students in the discussion.

Some colleges took part in our pilot student digital experience tracker project, and you can sign up now for the 2018 tracker survey.

The latest tracker survey results from 2017 reveal that, when technology is used on their courses, more than 70 per cent of students feel it enables them to be more independent in their learning and that study fits more easily into their lives.  

Students expect to be able to access study tools and resources remotely from their personal devices as well as using technology in the classroom or the library, and for feedback and assessment.

What sort of education technology is available?

Enriching learning content with images, audio and video that have been labelled for reuse can add variety and impact. Our inspiring learning blog includes a post on copyright-free resources, while our accessibility blog includes a post on how to add variety of media without adding barriers. We have also put together some of our favourite tools and techniques for making presentations interactive, engaging and accessible for the audience.

Teachers who need help understanding EdTech can benefit from free online courses, such as the blended learning essentials MOOC on FutureLearn, delivered by the University of Leeds. Or choose another free course from FutureLearn or Coursera.

Don’t forget, through Jisc, your college has access to free and heavily discounted digital resources via Jisc Collections. This includes free, curriculum relevant e-books for FE (covering A-level and BTEC courses plus GCSE English and maths), and diverse teaching and learning multimedia content which includes:

Furthermore, we provide a suite of library management tools that will enable staff and learners to find and assess the content and resources they need. 

There’s lots more help, and case studies, in our quick guide to developing blended learning content.

Developing digital capability
College staff need to be proficient and confident in the use of technology so they can make the most of resources, present an enhanced learning experience and realise a good return on digital investment.

Our building digital capability project provides guidance, tools and resources to help equip staff in a variety of roles with digital skills. We also provide a variety of events and training; for example, a digital leadership course supporting senior leaders. College leaders may also benefit from our blended learning consultancy service.

For comprehensive information about integrating digital practice throughout a college, see our guide on developing organisational approaches to digital capability, where you’ll also find case studies illustrating best practice.

We have the experience and expertise to support colleges transform digitally, a process that can be particularly valuable for newly merged – or merging – colleges, which often have to cope with complex issues around integrating different learning management systems across multiple sites. 

Jisc is already working with colleges across the UK supplying expertise and services to drive the changing FE landscape. To find out more, get in touch with your account manager and check out our new blended learning toolkit.

Employer-ownership isn’t compatible with social justice

We now know that the first three months of the new apprenticeship funding regime went as badly as some were predicting.

The Department for Education’s response to FE Week suggested it was unfazed by the 61 percent fall in starts, although requests for an interview with the minister Anne Milton went unanswered.

But the DfE is probably right that many big employers will, given more time, work out how to use their levy pot and more through the 90 percent subsidised co-investment model.

But the figures the DfE refuses to share (we did ask) are the starts in May to July within each industry sector.

Anecdotal evidence suggests lower-level heath and care apprenticeships have been decimated while generic team leader and higher-level management qualifications and degrees are picking up unstoppable steam.

Do we really want to switch funding away from job creation in health and care to management skills for existing and often already senior employees?

FE Week exposed and warned about the unstoppable rise in management apprenticeships over a year ago.

I’ve repeatedly said that employer-ownership simply isn’t compatible with social justice – so at some point levy funding will need ring-fencing so it is only spent only on priorities.

Priorities which, according to the Conservative manifesto commitment, include three million apprenticeship starts for YOUNG people.

DfE ‘watching it closely’ as management becomes England’s second most popular apprenticeship subject

Management has soared in popularity to become the second most common apprenticeship framework, FE Week analysis can reveal.

According to statistics released by the DfE, the management framework had 46,640 new starters in 2016/17, a figure which grows to 64,480 when counting standards (see full figures at end of article).

The data shows management has narrowly overtaken the business administration framework in popularity, while health and social care still reigns supreme with more than 85,000 new starters last year.

These figures will only give further validation to concerns raised by sector figures that the government’s new apprenticeship levy, which started on May 1, would encourage businesses to draw down funding for management courses for existing employees instead of offering lower level apprenticeships to young people.

The question of the apprenticeship levy being used to fund executive MBA’s was mentioned at a public accounts committee meeting on October 12, when chair Meg Hillier MP raised a concern about companies trying to use the qualifications to “get a chunk of the apprenticeship levy back”.

The interim chief executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships, Peter Lauener, told the committee it had been expected that businesses would use the apprentice levy to pay for higher and degree apprenticeships, which he described as “a rapidly growing element of the programme”.

He said: “Levy paying employers will be able to fund any degree apprenticeship standards that have been approved.

“It’s certainly the case that that levy paying employers can use their levy to pay for degree apprenticeships.

“We’ve done a lot of modelling, as you would expect, about the levy budget and it’s quite difficult modelling to do because there are so many variables that might be changed by the changed behaviour of employers paying a levy.

“But we certainly modelled an expectation that there would be an increasing number of degree apprenticeships in the system as a result.”

DfE permanent secretary, Jonathan Slater, added: “This is very early days in the new levy and we are watching it closely.

“The [public accounts] committee at a previous hearing was keen to make sure there was a definite switch from level two apprentices to three, four, five and six. That’s what is happening. We need to make sure that is manageable.

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we found that some of the early assumptions we made are a bit different from the reality. We will keep that under review and we will be happy to report back as we go.”

Is it wrong to make GCSE grade 4 our college entry requirement?

Dr Sue, director of policy and external relations at Holex, answers your questions on college governance, backed by her experience as principal of Canterbury College and in senior civil service posts in education and skills.

Question One: GCSE grade 5

You have previously urged colleges to set the new GCSE grade 5 as their entry criteria for English and maths. We debated the issue but went with management’s recommendation of grade 4. Were we wrong?

Answer: I wouldn’t go as far to say you were wrong and I don’t think a single college in an area can take a solitary stance. This has to be done with all your feeder schools and other colleges. However, I think it is a lost opportunity to collectively raise achievement.

The changes were brought in to raise standards and while I appreciate that many educators in our colleges don’t like the focus on end examinations and cannot see why grading has been changed to numbers, it is now in operation and we need to work with it.

The basic issue is that schools are judged on how many of their pupils get “5s” and 5+ is better for pupils’ prospects, so setting entry requirements at grade 4 (and letting pupils know that nine months before they take their exams) sends the wrong message.

This undermines schools when they are saying and working with children to get a grade 5 or above. This is an area where schools and colleges need to work together and not undercut each other.

 

Question Two: Valuing governors

Is the government prepared to acknowledge and value the work governors do in supporting adult education?

Answer: It does sometimes feel like that the sector isn’t valued. This year, however, there has been much more interest in adult education. The Financial Times and the Economist have both covered it. The Joseph Rowntree Trust is calling for five million adults to receive support for basic skills and all three political parties talk about lifelong learning in the post-Brexit world.

We are waiting for DfE to announce what the National Retraining Scheme will look like and we still have the commitment to English and maths entitlement for adults.

But this is not enough. We still do not have a national ESOL strategy or a political narrative on adult education, when both Scotland and Wales do.

On whether governors are valued, we know that DfE is doing further work on governance and we are always told that government does value the work they do. But it would be good to see some evidence of that, maybe in speeches or annual letters – something for the minister’s speech in November perhaps?

 

Question Three: Link Governor

How can I as a link governor spot where teaching quality may be declining before poor results make it apparent?

Answer: You need to follow the relevant policies. Before you make a visit, you should look at recent performance data and the latest self-assessment report and speak to the head of that subject area about any issues you think you may come across. One of the purposes of the visit is to triangulate information given to you and reality.

When you make your visit, speak to the teacher and the students; both are normally forthcoming with information especially when they are not happy. If you feel that the class lacks focus or students are not confident in talking about their goals, discuss with the programme lead whether this is normal. Remember you are not there to inspect but to feel secure that the senior leadership has a handle on any issues you encounter.

Ex-ITP boss on trial for alleged Sunderland College fraud

The ex-chief executive of a training provider and her former colleagues are on trial for allegedly defrauding a college and private provider out of almost £460,000.

Joanne Mounter, aged 46, from Willington, Paula Bolan, 45, from Gateshead, and Kym Adrian Norman, 53, from Sunderland, stand accused of fraud by false representation against Sunderland College between July 2014 and December 2015.

The trial, which is expected to last two days, has been set for December 14.

It is alleged that the trio, who appeared before Sunderland Magistrates’ Court on August 8, “dishonestly and intending thereby to make a gain for themselves or another” made representations to Sunderland College through invoices for a total of £304,858, “which was and which they knew was untrue”.

Ms Mounter and Ms Bolan are also accused of defrauding an independent training provider, Springboard Sunderland Trust.

They are alleged to have made representations to Springboard “through invoices presented, namely that a total of £154,674.01 was payable, which was and which they knew was untrue”.

As reported by the Sunderland Echo, it is understood the charges relate to their roles at Team Wearside, a training provider and charity based in Sunderland.

Ms Mounter was its chief executive, while Ms Bolan was quality and compliance manager, and Ms Norman was an assessor.

Team Wearside, a training charity, provides mainly apprenticeships and traineeships in a range of sectors including health and social care, and hospitality and catering.

According to Education and Skills Funding Agency figures, it had an apprenticeships and traineeships allocation worth £1.16 million in 2016/17, with an additional £99,000 for delivering adult education.

Team Wearside is also listed as a main provider on the register of apprenticeship training providers, and a subcontractor for both the lead providers that were allegedly defrauded, according to the ESFA’s most recent list of declared subcontractors.

That list, dated May 5, showed Team Wearside’s subcontract for Springboard Sunderland to be worth £182,000, while its subcontract for Sunderland College was worth a much smaller £29,146.

However, both confirmed this week that Team Wearside is no longer subcontracting for them.

Team Wearside declined to provide a comment for this article, stating that it “would be inappropriate to comment while the case is ongoing”.

 

FE Week asks: Neil Bentley on the vital role of WorldSkills

As Team UK packed their belongings and headed to the sandy deserts of Abu Dhabi for WorldSkills 2017, FE Week’s senior reporter Billy Camden caught up with WorldSkills UK’s boss Neil Bentley on the importance of the event given our country’s prominent new skills agenda.

The government’s desire to turn the UK into a nation of skills was made clear last week when Theresa May spelt out plans to create a “first-class” technical education system “for the first time in our history”.

WorldSkills UK’s chief believes this pledge shows just how important an event like the one taking place in Abu Dhabi is to the prime minister’s goals.

“This is bigger than just a competition,” he said.

“These contests are a means to an end but more importantly they act as a platform for government and business and young people to come together, and from a UK perspective, showcase the young talent we’ve got and who we are nurturing and developing.

“There is no better way of role modelling what the UK’s young people can achieve than by demonstrating it through skills competitions.”

He added that “inward investors won’t invest anywhere” if they can’t see a country has got the skills workforce, so WorldSkills in Abu Dhabi is the “perfect platform to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we have got what it takes to succeed post-Brexit”.

It has become well-known that WorldSkills UK needs more funding to keep pumping out the hot talent it does year-in, year-out.

Worryingly, government grants for the organisation have dropped by almost half over the past four years.

But Mr Bentley says he has cause to be upbeat about the company’s future.

“I would say the government really does get the importance of skills competitions and their interest has been increasing over the past year and that has no doubt been to do with the alignment around the agenda of
apprenticeships and technical education,” he explained.

“We have agreed with government to tighten our belt and have set a five-year business plan to bring more commercial funding to the business.

“At the moment, 60 per cent of our funding comes from government and the other 40 per cent from the private sector and other sources. We now need to balance that up so that more is coming in from the commercial side.”

He added that with skills minister Anne Milton visiting Abu Dhabi during competition it shows “we are all in this together”.

With a final word on the competition ahead, Mr Bentley said “success” for him in the Middle East would be for Team UK to maintain its top-10 position in the medal rankings.

“We know we will have a tough fight on our hands and the competition will be as hot as the temperatures in Abu Dhabi but we are gunning to do our level best to maintain our top 10.”

Machiavellian advice for college principals

Principals are often maligned, but they’re only mirroring government policy, argues Damien Page

It is not hard to find criticism of college principals: academic literature is littered with it, the trade press is awash with it, social media thrives on it, and the staffrooms of colleges mutter it constantly. Principals are greedy, overpaid, uncaring, narcissistic, ignorant of pedagogy, anti-autonomy, and a barrier to professional practice. In short, principals embody the worst excesses of neoliberalism.

Yet what is forgotten is the difficulty of being a principal. The environment is unstable, perpetually in turmoil, tossed on the winds of fortune by ministers that never quite know what to do with the FE sector. Colleges are complex organizations containing myriad tensions, be they financial, human and technological.

When people engage in disparaging commentary about principals, they forget about the external environment. Their criticism often positions principals in a vacuum where they are masters of their own fiefdom, governing capriciously for personal gain.

Yes, principals may make massive cuts to their staffing and they may impose new contracts that increase contact hours or make more use of zero-hours contracts; they may even create environments where teachers are continually surveilled and evaluated. But let us remember that these are not the voluntary acts of managerialist despotism that they may at first appear. The principal acts not in a context of governmental concern for the FE sector but in a context where FE is an afterthought, an easy target of austerity cuts that create little public outcry.

Colleges are not isolated outposts in control of their destiny. They can be merged as a result of area reviews, they can have whole sections of a curriculum removed through financial strangulation, they can have GCSE retakes foisted upon them to the detriment of vocational education. The principal’s sole responsibility is the survival of their college and the education of their students, and if that is threatened they must take whatever action is necessary, and pacifism in the face of an invading force is rarely successful.

Colleges are not isolated outposts in control of their destiny

Principals must engage fortune on its own terms: neoliberal responses for neoliberal times, autocracy for an autocratic government. The lamentations of academics’ insightful criticism of policy in peer-reviewed journals have not halted the march of funding cuts to colleges; the wailing of the left-wing press at the redundancies resulting from forced mergers has not stalled the march of devastation. No, principals are the ones keeping the neoliberal wolf from the door and ensuring students continue to be educated. The question is how. Machiavelli had a clear answer to this question: “I believe also that he will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of the times, and that he whose actions do not accord with the times will not be successful.”

What is required from leaders is that they choose a strategy that is congruent with the context. Machiavelli himself was a product of his times and The Prince was written in a dangerous context of intrigue, political manoeuvring, torture and assassinations. It was no time to recommend virtue, fairness and pacifism; it was a time to choose behaviours and strategies that could adequately combat the dangers of political life.

Principals, then, similarly need to select their actions according to the context, adopting a bullish neoliberalism to combat the invading horde of neoliberal governmental aggression. If colleges are forced to operate within a marketised topography, principals would be foolish if they didn’t in turn ground their strategy within the most marketised strategy of marketisation possible; when they are faced with performativity, the prudent strategy is to fashion the most performative institution they can create. In this context the principal who survives, whose college survives, is the one who becomes a paragon of neoliberalism.

In times characterized by ferocity of competition, where colleges have become players within the commodified education marketplace, where the government imposes throttling systems of performativity, where the sector continues to be stripped of resources, there is no place for lambs; there is only a place for foxes and lions.

This is an abridged version of a chapter in The Principal: Power and Professionalism in FE, edited by Marie Daley, Kevin Orr and Joel Petrie.

Damien Page is dean of the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University

SPONSORED: What does the future hold for functional skills?

Functional Skills are changing, and NCFE is ahead of the game.

NCFE Functional Skills come with a fantastic range of resources to support learner achievement rates. With free access to ForSkills Initial Assessment and Diagnostic Tools for every learner, and a guaranteed turnaround of results in six working days, we’re confident that NCFE is the number one choice for Functional Skills.

Looking to the (very near) future, we are continuing to improve our English and Maths resources and will be introducing interactive, editable and customisable resources to allow for differentiated learning. We also have a new resources platform, Study Hut, which gives you a short-hand, quick and easy way to access online resources that have been moderated, categorised and summarised by us. 

We are passionate about the importance of Functional Skills being widely recognised and appreciated as high quality

We have exciting plans for Functional Skills feedback for online assessments in that we plan to offer free, automated, individual, electronic feedback for all learners sitting a Functional Skills Assessment online. The feedback will map directly to the Functional Skills standards, giving you and your learners a chance to look at performance in different areas, and a basis for preparing for future resits.

With all of the new developments both in the sector and in our offer, we’re really looking forward to what the future will bring for Functional Skills. Our core commitment is that our customers are at the heart of everything we do and we can ensure them that we will be with them every step of the way.

You can find out more about NCFE Functional Skills and our wider portfolio of qualifications on our website.

What are Functional Skills?

In their simplest form, Functional Skills are practical qualifications in English, Maths and ICT which provide learners with essential knowledge, understanding and skills that will enable them to operate confidently, effectively and independently in life and work. On paper the offer makes sense, but historically the problem has been that rather than Functional Skills qualifications being given the recognition they deserve as technical and practical alternatives to traditional academic routes, there has been an ongoing disconnect in gaining that recognition from employers and industry. 

At NCFE we are passionate about the importance of Functional Skills being widely recognised and appreciated as high quality, robust qualifications and we are continually working to improve our offer for both learners and centres delivering our qualifications. We welcome the reform and are doing all we can as an active member of the Functional Skills Working Group to ensure that learners are at the heart of any changes made. 

The Functional Skills Reform

Ofqual’s Thematic Review of Functional Skills across all Awarding Organisations (AOs) in 2015 identified a need to make the qualifications more valid and more reliable. The review found that Functional Skills weren’t broken, but that work could be done to improve their relevance and content, as well as improving their recognition and credibility in the labour market. Alongside that, the Department for Education (DfE) commissioned The Education and Training Foundation (ETF) to consider how Maths and English provision and qualifications available to those over 16 are understood and meet the expectations of employers. 

Thus began the Functional Skills Reform.

Recognising that reform would only work if there was clear communication and teamwork, NCFE and most of the AOs offering Functional Skills qualifications voluntarily set up a working group to help support the process. In December 2015 the FAB (Federation of Awarding Bodies) Functional Skills Group was created and NCFE became an active member looking to ensure that our knowledge and experience of Functional Skills was heard by those involved in making key decisions.

NCFE and the review of Functional Skills

The DfE commissioned its own review of Functional Skills in 2016 with the aim of proposing new qualifications better suited to the needs of the industry, practitioners and learners in post-16 education. The ETF, working with Pye Tait, then launched its consultation consisting of surveys and focus groups on the opinions of employers, providers, practitioners and learners.

After the consultation process, the ETF revised the National Adult Literacy and Numeracy Standards and worked on the revised Functional Skills subject content. During this time, NCFE engaged through our subject experts to provide detailed feedback on the content and ensured our Chief Examiners and EQAs took part in the reviewing of materials proposed by Pye Tait and the ETF. NCFE had a presence at all of the review events to ensure that we could relay feedback from our customers and help shape the future qualifications.

In January of this year the ETF submitted to the Minister the standards, subject content and a short report with recommendations and Ofqual stated that the new qualifications would go live in September 2018. However, with the snap General Election this summer, the DfE has asked for more time to review the standards and the decision has been made to put back the go-live date to 2019.

Ofqual and the DfE will be consulting further with AOs, employers and providers in the coming months on a range of areas including amongst others, assessment structure, policy requirements, stakeholder confidence and subject content.

We want to ensure that as well as meeting the requirements set out by governing bodies, we also exceed the requirements of our learners, and as such are constantly developing our Functional Skills offer. 

Find out more about on the Functional Skills section of our website.