Wigan & Leigh College
‘New College Swindon’
A sixth form college that hadn’t received an inspection for 10 years sank from ‘outstanding’ to ‘requires improvement’ – in a mixed week for FE Ofsted reports. Governors at Holy Cross College, in Manchester, were criticised for their failure to recognise the “significance of the decline in standards” at the SFC. The new report, published […]
News
Do colleges feel picked on? You bet. Funding cuts over the last 10 years and the difficulties in dealing with less money, annual redundancy rounds and adapting to a declining market have led to us being put under the cosh by government and Ofsted in a number of ways, some unfairly. There isn’t a level […]
Opinion
Swindon’s university technical college will join the Activate Learning Education Trust, after being hit by an ‘inadequate’ grade in its first ever Ofsted inspection. UTC Swindon, which specialises in engineering and business entrepreneurship for students aged 14-19, will be the fifth school to join the multi-academy trust. Other members of the multi-academy trust include ‘outstanding’-rated UTC […]
The post-16 skills plan heralds a major change to work experience in the current system. The government wants college-based technical education programmes to include an entitlement to a one- to three-month “quality work placement” with an employer in an industry relevant to the learner’s study. Yet as revealed by the Department for Education’s recent consultation, […]
Colleges need to insist they are given the right data to make meaningful quality judgements about their own performance, says Graham Taylor. Last April I wrote about the bother over the production of the 2014/15 Qualification & Achievement Report (QAR), received after an interminable delay on April 5 and well documented in FE Week. An […]
FE colleges have been targeted by a spate of attempted frauds in the past few weeks – including several attempting to capitalise on the fact principals were attending the recent Association of Colleges’ annual conference. Finance officials at four FE colleges have all received emails purporting to be from their bosses, and asking for transfers […]
If A-levels are big business, why don’t we allow more consumer choice, asks Graham Taylor. A-levels are still big business and the main choice for 16-to-18s at level three. Over six times more learners take A-levels than advanced apprenticeships. Yet they are being gutted. Historian and author Simon Schama has described the cull as a […]
The new mandatory post-16 resit policy for GCSE English and maths is setting young people up to fail, and government should allow other progression routes, says Graham Taylor. Mandatory English and maths aren’t going away. They are vital and underpin most things we do. But any way you slice it, this year’s GCSE resit results […]
Why are apprenticeships singled out for special treatment? The benefits of other qualifications are enormous and can be tested, says Graham Taylor, if we let levy payers to decide where to put their money. We’re currently obsessed with apprenticeships and the emerging minutiae, which sometimes means we can’t see the wood for the trees. So […]
