For too long, further education has been the ‘Cinderella sector’ of education. This is not just in terms of funding for provision, but in terms of investment in high-quality research to inform its practice.
The news this week that the Education Endowment Foundation will spend the largest injection of cash in post-16 research to date signifies the start of a break with this convention.
I began my career teaching maths in a secondary school in Leeds. I remember the 16-year-olds – disproportionately those from lower-income backgrounds – who just missed out on a grade C in their GCSE.
This setback caused their options to narrow significantly. Many ended up dropping out of education altogether. Despite having the same potential as their wealthier peers, this moment shifted their life outcomes.
Witnessing this has shaped my belief in the importance of meaningful lifelong learning opportunities; 16-19 education has the potential to transform outcomes for young people who have had the misfortune to fall behind at school.
With the proper support, the overwhelming majority still have the potential to achieve gateway English and maths qualifications, regardless of their background or what happened earlier in their education.
That’s why I set up Get Further, a charity that supports students from disadvantaged backgrounds to secure English and maths qualifications in further education through high-quality, small-group tuition.
Tutoring is one of the most effective interventions for improving attainment, and wealthier families often source a tutor for their children if they fall behind. But those from low-income backgrounds are typically priced out of accessing this tailored support.
Get Further began with a small pilot programme in late 2018. Since then, we have dramatically scaled our reach, working with 5,000 students at over 90 campuses across England. Between 2021-23, the pass rate for students who attended a term or more of our GCSE tuition was 92 per cent higher than the national average for maths and 73 per cent higher for English.
I am proud that Get Further is now forming a key part of the further education landscape. But we don’t just want to be a part of the landscape; we want to lead the way in raising standards in post-16 English and maths education.
We hope this will help make a compelling case to government
Recently, we launched our new five-year strategy with an uncompromising focus on quality and impact. Our strategic goal for 2029 is to drive up pass rates for students from disadvantaged backgrounds undertaking gateway English and maths qualifications in the further education sector, setting a new standard for excellence on a national scale.
Strengthening the evaluation of our programmes is central to achieving this. As a key milestone in our new strategy, I am thrilled to announce that in 2025-26, we will partner with the Education Endowment Foundation and the University of Warwick to evaluate the impact of our GCSE resit tuition programme via a randomised control trial (RCT).
This trial will offer valuable insights into our work, helping us strengthen our tuition programmes further, but it’s not just the potential for improving our programmes that makes this trial exciting. This is one of the first studies of its kind in the UK to be conducted with 16-19-year-olds.
While further education has a vital role to play in ensuring that young people achieve the gateway qualifications they need to unlock opportunities, the sector is impeded by underfunding and understaffing. Funding for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds falls off a cliff at age 16.
We hope this trial will provide the evidence needed to make a compelling case to government on the potential of young people in FE and the urgent need to address the chronic lack of funding and resources in the sector.
With additional investment, such as a 16-19 Student Premium, further education settings would be able to put in place interventions to better support their students and improve pass rates for courses like GCSE English and maths.
In turn, this would provide thousands more young people with the qualifications to access opportunities for further study, high-quality training and career progression.
Colleges across England can make this vision a reality. We want to partner with you to deliver our innovative programmes to your GCSE resit students and, together, build an evidence base that will pave the way for meaningful policy change across the further education sector.
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