Green-fingered students from Bridgwater and Taunton College have assisted in planting 33,000 tulip bulbs at the historic Forde Abbey in Dorset.
A group of level three horticulture students planted the bulbs, which will form the spring display at the Abbey’s formal gardens.
As well as planting, students also received a tour of the rest of the grounds which span 30 acres, from head gardener Danny Burlingham.
Mr Burlingham said: “We are very grateful for the assistance that the horticulture students offered with the mass bulb planting. We have designed a new scheme within the formal gardens and it will be a fantastic spring display.”
Forde Abbey dates back 900 years, with the gardens originally used by monks to grow large quantities of vegetables, before being taken over by Sir Francis Gwyn during the early 18th century, who created the beginnings of the garden that remains now.
Tom Cunningham, course leader for horticulture at the college, said: “It was a pleasure to be able to assist Forde Abbey gardens with the project, and it offered good practical experience for the students. We are always keen to get involved in the local community projects.”
Two students from Doncaster college have taken first and second place at the 20th annual Paperhanging Apprentice of the Year competition.
Painting and decorating apprentices Mitchell Scott and Thomas Mills took home the top awards in the competition, which was open to all registered apprentices in the UK.
Applicants were assessed on their wallpaper-hanging skills, and the finalists were decided after a series of heats which concluded at the college’s Hub campus in October.
Seventeen-year-old Mitchell Scott, who currently works for G Heaton Painting and Decorating, was named Junior Apprentice Paperhanger of the Year, with Thomas Mills taking second place in the senior category, receiving a £150 prize and a trophy.
The competition has been a long-standing fixture on the industry calendar, and it was the first time there have been separate categories for juniors and seniors, with the winners announced during a gala dinner.
Speaking of his award, Mr Mitchell said: “It feels amazing to have won the competition and to be named the Junior Apprentice Paperhanger of the Year”.
Featured picture: Paper boys: Thomas Mills, left, and Mitchell Scott
The Royal National College for the Blind (RNC) has appeared in a BBC documentary presented by a former student who attended the college 30 years ago. Samantha King reports.
When alumni return to college, it’s unusual for them to bring a BBC documentary crew with them, but that was exactly what happened when Ian Hamilton approached his former college in Hereford about a documentary he was making on inclusive education for children with disabilities.
First aired on BBC Scotland on December 21, and still available on the BBC’s iPlayer, the film ‘Am I Included?’ explores the difference between mainstream and specialist education, and looks at the debate on whether young people with disabilities should be taught in mainstream schools, or if specialist schools are the way forward.
Recalling his own experience of the college, presenter Hamilton used the RNC as an example of specialist support that had a lasting and positive impact on his life, and caught up with current students to see how much things had changed.
Students play blind football. The ball contains loose ball-bearings so it rattles when it moves, allowing the players to locate it.
One of the pupils interviewed, Thomas, has reportedly had requests for autographs since his appearance on the show, which he has been more than happy to oblige.
Speaking of the college’s debut on BBC Scotland, principal Mark Fisher said “The benefit for us is to really remind people what specialist education is about. We get frustrated sometimes when it’s seen as outdated, when it’s actually very modern, and very much part of providing learning solutions for people who have barriers.”
Principal Mark being interviewed
Mr Fisher who has been principal at the college since December 2015, worked for disability charity Scope for 15 years, before joining the RNC as a deputy residential manager in 2002.
His views in favour of specialist education were aired during a segment of the documentary, when he was interviewed by Mr Hamilton.
“Young people need to be independent learners and where it goes wrong in mainstream is where people sometimes are over-supported and they become dependent on others. We need to make sure that we address that,” Mr Fisher explained.
“Ian’s experience is the same we find now, in that a lot of our students need confidence more than anything else. They need to have community participation and feel included beyond the class – it’s not just what happens in the classroom, it’s a 24-hour provision”.
The Royal National College for the Blind was established in 1871, and currently has 85 students who are blind or partially-sighted. With a maximum capacity for 90, Mr Fisher insists that the college is “exactly where it needs to be”.
“The thing to bear in mind is the only thing our students have in common is visual impairment,” he added. “We have the most diverse range of students you can imagine for a small college.”
Four cows at Chichester College have been presented with awards by agriculture students for over 10 years of service.
Three dairy shorthorn cows, named Brinsbury Margot, Digitalis and Symphony, have each spent 10 years at the college, while Rantonhall Baroness has completed 12 years of service, producing a grand total of 68,092 litres of milk between them.
The four cows, who are the matriarchs of the herd, with daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters all at the college, were recognised during end-of-term celebrations at the Brinsbury campus.
Dan Stamper, the farm manager at Chichester College, said: “We felt it was important to mark the achievement of these four cows and to highlight how seriously we take animal health and welfare on the farm.
“It is absolutely vital to get this right to ensure our cows enjoy healthy, happy and long lives.”
The college is home to 150 dairy cows, and students are involved in all aspects of dairy farming, from measuring grass to milking the cows twice daily.
Featured picture: Agriculture students with Brinsbury Margot
Sometimes it’s worth challenging an Ofsted report, says John Evans.
One of the many dilemmas that principals must struggle with is when to appeal against an Ofsted decision. You have to balance the emotional response to the feelings of being unfairly treated with the knowledge that Ofsted seldom admits to being wrong.
My college was inspected in October 2016 and we had been prepared for over a year. The wait is always worse than the actual inspection, but within a couple of hours of receiving the phone call, the lead inspector had been sent position papers, 2015/16 SAR and data, timetables and our strategic plan. We were ready.
The words were inaccurate and emotive
The week went well. We’d hoped for some grade ones but got all twos; however, strengths identified at the final feedback meeting included high learner-outcomes, English and maths, high quality work experience, and excellent partnerships and employer engagement.
It was with great surprise, then, that the written report sent for factual checking included some new additions. The words “college leaders have tackled the lack of pride and ambition that existed in the college” appeared on the front page – in fact, in the second bullet point. These words were not used at any point during the week and the statement is untrue and extremely emotive.
It also said “leaders and teachers should ensure that a higher proportion of learners attend their English and mathematics lessons and achieve their qualification”.
Again, this had not been mentioned as an issue by any of the inspectors.
Also on pages one and two of the report, and listed as part of a significant recommendation, was the statement that there were “lower levels of success for the small group of 16- to 18-year-old learners with mixed heritage”.
The total group of mixed-heritage learners was 22. The percentage difference in success rates compared with other groups was equivalent to two learners. This is important but hardly significant.
As the nominee, and an Ofsted inspector myself, I would have been able to challenge these statements if they had been fed back during the inspection process.
I challenged the statements through the Ofsted accuracy-check process to the lead inspector. I explained that the words were inaccurate and emotive, and that there was no evidence base for the assertion about poor attendance in English and maths. I also pointed out that the mixed-heritage data was not significant.
His formal response was simply this: “No change required”.
For the first time in my career, I was left with a decision: whether to challenge Ofsted or not. Would it be worth it?
Following discussions with the chair of governors, we agreed to put in a formal complaint – the Ofsted term for an appeal. It is not easy to do, as it is based entirely on an electronic form, with a choice of three types of complaint: conduct (inspector behaviour), process (did inspectors follow the handbook?) or judgement (does the evidence match the decision?).
I submitted all of my points under the process category.
As an Ofsted inspector myself, I would have been able to challenge these statements if they had been fed back during the inspection process
An Ofsted investigating officer was appointed and spent time reviewing the evidence and interviewing relevant people.
I asked to have the report suspended until the investigation was completed, as I felt the emotive words would upset many of our excellent existing staff and governors. Ofsted refused and published the report on November 16.
On December 22 I received the formal response. Ofsted had upheld the three complaints. They removed the emotive words from the report and replaced them with: “College leaders have improved the quality of provision. They have created a culture in which staff work resolutely in the best interests of their learners and the college is a purposeful community.”
All reference to poor attendance at English and maths was removed due to insufficient evidence and the mixed-heritage recommendation was removed from pages one and two as it was not deemed significant.
I am left with mixed feelings. I am pleased that Ofsted has proved to be what I always thought it was – a quality-assurance organisation. However, I am disappointed that the initial report went public with an unfair flavour.
But I did learn something: Ofsted isn’t always right first time!
Your weekly guide to who’s new, and who’s leaving.
David Byrnehas been announced as principal-designate for the proposed merger of Barnet and Southgate College with Waltham Forest College.
Byrne has been the principal and CEO of Barnet and Southgate college – itself the result of a previous merger – in North London since 2012.
In the new role, Mr Byrne will initially be responsible for leading the public consultation on the proposed merger, and gathering views from the communities and stakeholders served by the colleges.
As principal-designate, he says he has plans to “strengthen ties with neighbouring colleges”, alongside developing the college curriculum in order to “deliver more high quality courses that meet the needs of young people and businesses”.
He added: “FE colleges need to continue to adapt and respond proactively to meet the needs of young people and employers.
“The principal of Waltham Forest College [Penny Wycherley] has done an amazing job at leading her college through a period of significant improvement. She has helped shape this merger and I am proud to be working with her to make it happen.”
The awarding body YMCA Awards has made two new appointments to its senior leadership team as it looks to become a global education brand, it has revealed.
It specialises in health, fitness and wellbeing qualifications and is monitored by exam regulator Ofqual. To date, it has awarded more than 500,000 qualifications.
Dr Fiona Summers has now been appointed as its head of quality and compliance.
In the role, she will work closely with learning providers and businesses to help deliver qualifications to those aspiring to a career in the active leisure sector. She will also oversee a range of new learning services including training days and webinars throughout 2017.
Before taking up her new role, Dr Summers worked at another awarding body, the charity Ascentis, and hopes to bring her experience in quality assurance with her.
Also joining YMCA Awards’ leadership team is Simon Titley, who will take up the position of head of centre support.
He joins from Pearson, where he has worked for three years as its senior delivery manager. Before this, he worked as its digital content manager for two years.
There he was responsible for designing customer experience initiatives, and supporting leaners and businesses throughout their training.
Rob May, the director of YMCA Awards, said: “We’re delighted to welcome Fiona and Simon to the team.”
He continued: “They will be instrumental in ensuring our qualifications and new digital learning tools meet the highest quality and usability standards, while we continue to maintain strong relationships with our new and existing customers.”
The new appointments establish a five-strong leadership team at the organisation, as it works on growing the brand, and working with an increased number of fitness centres throughout 2017.
If you want to let us know of any new faces at the top of your college, training provider or awarding organisation please let us know by emailing news@feweek.co.uk
FE was poorly represented in this year’s honours not because it was overlooked, but because the sector failed to submit enough nominations, says Dame Asha Khemka.
The FE sector was sadly lacking profile in the most recent new year’s honours. Some point to this as yet another example of how the sector generally lacks profile and positive reputation with government, seeing it as just another indication of how the sector will fare now that it is part of a combined Department for Education.
Our sector has unsung heroes in abundance
I don’t agree. As a member of the education honours committee, directly involved in overseeing and approving applications for nominations, we have been wrestling with ways to increase nominations from all sections of society.
There is a dearth of nominations coming from black and minority ethnic communities, from working class communities, from nominees with disabilities and from the LGBT+ community. This is not because there aren’t tremendously worthy recipients within these groups, or that there is some conspiracy afoot whereby thousands of nominations from these groups end up in the bin. The problem lies in the number of nominations received from them, and I suspect the issue with our sector is not much different.
Is it a lack of awareness about the process, or a perception that the honours system is elitist and exclusive? Or is it perhaps because not all sections in society are as good about shouting about their triumphs as others? I suspect it is a combination of factors that can be addressed.
The FE sector is rich with worthy nominees for honours. All of us can think of at least one person within our own institutions who has made a huge difference to the lives of the communities that we serve; who has gone over and above any reasonable expectation to ensure that lives are made richer through education.
Amazing things happen in our sector every single day. Perhaps we take too much for granted over the extraordinary things our colleagues do, until they become ordinary. These individuals are not just in our senior leadership teams. Honours are not just for principals and governors.
Perhaps we take too much for granted over the extraordinary things our colleagues do, until they become ordinary
Perhaps it is time we shouted about the unsung heroes within our own organisations. Our sector, more than any other, has them in abundance. Perhaps every single organisation should make their new year’s resolution to put forward one of their heroes for an honour this year. Let’s look beyond the confines of senior leadership and governing body teams for worthy nominees. What have we got to lose? Maybe then we will see the number of nominees from within our sector reflect the amazing work that we do.
How widely do we currently share the call for nominations within our own institutions? Is it something that goes no further than the senior management team?
With the best will in the world, senior managers can’t know every single thing that is happening in institutions; we should seek suggestions for nominations from a far wider group of individuals.
Not only will this enable us to develop a far richer bank of potential nominees for honours, but it will also help us better identify the organisational stars whom we need to nurture and develop.
Is awareness and support also an issue? How many of us know how to go about putting an honours nomination together? Further information and guidance is available at www.gov.uk/honours.
In the same way we support our sector through nominations for Beacon Awards, we should do the same for honours nominations. Perhaps those colleges which have been successful would be willing to share the secrets of their success with others. This is where representative bodies such as the Association of Colleges and the Education and Training Foundation can help. Let’s develop a bank of resources that can help the sector as a whole write successful nominations, so that the process itself becomes less daunting.
It is easy to point fingers, to see the lack of FE representation as yet one more example of a maligned sector. But let’s look within ourselves first, and at what we can do collectively to ensure that our sector is fairly represented in the number of nominations that are put forward. You never know, we might be pleasantly surprised.
Dame Asha Khemka is principal and chief executive of West Nottinghamshire College, and a member of the education honours committee
An unnecessary change, it was littered with mistakes and lacked essential elements of the old QAR system – which also had better terminology. Information system managers up and down the country expressed their dissatisfaction publicly.
It was expected that the 2017 update would address these concerns, yet the new QAR, released over the Christmas break, is once again highly problematic.
Last year’s concerns were mostly limited to the unhelpful – almost unusable – format of the dashboard. On this point, sector-wide negative feedback has been ignored and the format remains largely unchanged. The dashboard is slow and unreliable, lacks key information and is set up in a way that will cause further delays in producing information that was previously readily available.
But this year has also brought a host of new problems we are struggling to resolve due to the lack of accessible, accurate data.
At this point it may be helpful to insert a quick reminder of the (baffling) terminology changes from last year:
1) ‘Success rates’ (SR) no longer exist. These are now ‘achievement rates’.
2) The old ‘achievement rates’ are now called ‘pass rates’.
3) ‘Learner starts’ are now known as ‘leavers’ (don’t ask).
The latest QAR contains the ‘confirmed’ achievement rates but these seem to be wrong. Some colleges are reporting achievement rates on the QAR’s first release up to five percentage points lower than they had predicted, which could be at least a grade’s difference in Ofsted’s eyes. It seems the reason for the differences is that the software hasn’t picked up on the ‘90-day rule’, i.e. that achievers count if they pass within three months of the end date.
Colleges need national rates at course level upwards to make meaningful quality judgements against their own performance
Another key difference is that we are unable to see either national averages (they have been promised as part of the National Achievement Rate Tables next month), or the overall AR for our college. And while we are able to calculate our overall figure from the 16-18 and 19+ breakdowns, the QAR doesn’t contain the data that would allow us to work out the national overall AR.
Using weighted averages by sector subject area is a concept that even some Ofsted inspectors we know and love struggle with, yet they are the best objective measures of quality available.
We should also be able to see achievement rates for UTC and school sixth forms – we should all be working to the same rulebook.
Other problems include a time-consuming export function, which produces poorly formatted, often unusable PDFs (we’ll have to resort to screen printing) and a lack of clarity about raw data downloads.
While colleges have been supplied with a csv download of the data used in the QAR dashboards for validation purposes, there have been a number of issues with the files, including no date of birth populated to allow analysis by age band and no clear guidance on the filters that need to be applied. This means it takes a significant amount of time to match the QAR data, and colleges are reporting many leaver number differences.
No wonder reports are bland
The QAR dashboard also states that due to “changes in business rules” it is “not directly comparable with last year’s dashboard”, which is singularly helpful for measuring quality over time.
I encourage all information system managers to feed back to the powers that be.
Colleges need national rates at course level upwards to make meaningful quality judgements against their own performance. Without validated data and the ability to compare correct achievement rates with national averages for the same year, how can informed decisions on quality be made both internally and by Ofsted?
How could any college in this year’s Ofsted round be reasonably assessed without accurate 2015/16 benchmarks?
No wonder reports are bland. Consider appraisals like “this college’s performance is in line with the rates for colleges nationally”, which presumably refers to those from 2014/15. Reports used to be informative and give ideas on how to improve. Not now.
My advice? Fight the good fight. We’re not finished yet.
Graham Taylor is principal and chief executive at New College Swindon
The first ever procurement process for adult education budget contracts has been given the ministerial green light and is expected to begin within days.
FE Week understands the plan has been given the go-ahead by the secretary of state for education, Justine Greening (pictured).
The Skills Funding Agency first wrote to training providers in October and told them that their current AEB contracts would come to an end this July, rather than having them automatically renewed as before.
It said that changes to contracting regulations, which came into force in February last year, meant that the SFA could no longer automatically renew contracts when they ended and instead would have to “procure future training provision”.
The exercise had been expected to take place this month, but the government told FE Week on January 11 that there was currently no timetable in place.
The Department for Education had no official update as we went to press, but FE Week sources confirmed that the Skills Funding Agency wants the tender put out as soon as possible, and will start looking as early as next week.
Around 500 training providers will now battle for a share of the AEB, which totals around £1.5 billion.
Around 500 training providers will now battle for a share of the AEB, which totals around £1.5 billion
Only around £250 million of the budget is up for grabs however, as colleges, local authorities and universities – which contract with the SFA through a grant funding agreement – are not affected by the changes and will not have to tender.
Since hearing about the procurement process in October, Mark Dawe (pictured), chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, has lobbied for all providers – including colleges – to have to compete to deliver AEB provision.
At the time he said that, without a tender, the process seemed “incredibly biased against large independent providers”.
After hearing that the government would continue only to tender for private providers, Mr Dawe told FE Week: “Not going out to tender for the whole £1.5 billion is another of example of the government using the adult education budget to prop up some colleges.
“It is far better to tender the whole budget to get value for money at the highest quality, regardless of provider type.”
As previously reported by FE Week, the new procurement procedure resulted from changes to European Union law.
They were first revealed in an SFA document entitled ‘Adult Education Budget: Changing context and arrangements for 2016 to 2017’, published last January, which said: “In advance of 2017/18, changes to EU procurement regulations will require us to procure the adult budget provided to ITPs.
“This means that the AEB will be subject to competition as part of a procurement process.”
The new contracts were to be ready for 2017/18, “with an option to extend … for a further two years, which we will review on an annual basis,” according to the letter sent to providers in October.
The change will not affect apprenticeship provision, which will be procured separately through the new register of apprenticeship training providers.
