York College
‘apprenticeships’
An apprenticeship provider has hit out at how Ofsted conducted an early monitoring visit, and said the ensuing report is based on “factual inaccuracies” and “questionable judgements”. Watertrain Limited, a private provider in Warrington which has delivered apprenticeships as a subcontractor for 10 years, has been making “insufficient progress” in two of the three headline […]
News
The government is on the defensive one day before the latest apprenticeship figures appear, expected to show a continued year-on-year drop. An open letter signed by skills minister Anne Milton, Institute for Apprenticeships boss Sir Gerry Berragan (pictured above) and dozens of senior figures from business schools, businesses and other organisations wants the sector to […]
Two studio schools in Stoke-on-Trent will close by next summer amid dire problems with recruiting students. Stoke-on-Trent Studio College for Construction and the Built Environment (CaBE) will close this August, while its sister college for Manufacturing and Design Excellence (MaDE) will close the following year. These are the 25th and 26th of this type of […]
The FE and skills sector is well represented in the Queen’s birthday honours list this year, in which Ofsted’s chief operating officer has been made a Companion of the Order of the Bath. Matthew Coffey, who joined Ofsted in 2007 and was appointed COO in 2014, has made a “huge contribution” to the education watchdog, […]
The Institute for Apprenticeships should be scrapped, according to an influential committee that sits in the House of Lords. The Lords economic affairs committee has also poured scorn on the government’s target of three million apprenticeship starts by 2020. “The IfA should be abolished,” it said in a new report. The role of the institute […]
The deadline on the latest T-levels consultation has been extended yet again, and the Institute for Apprenticeships will now give the sector until the end of the month to submit views. The FE community was outraged last month when they were at first given just five working days to respond to the draft content of […]
The big guns of the awarding organisation world are drawing the battle lines in the imminent struggle for ownership of the first T-levels. Despite numerous concerns from across the sector, the government is ploughing ahead with its controversial plan to deploy just one AO per qualification when the first three pathways are launched in 2020. […]
The Institute for Apprenticeships has appointed yet another military person to its leadership team – and they’ve been given the unenviable task of running T-levels. Carmel Grant OBE, who had been the head of army reform at the Ministry of Defence since January 2016, has taken on the role of deputy director of technical education […]
An employer-provider has boosted its grade to ‘good’ in a mixed week for the FE sector, as Highbury College dramatically dropped two ratings from ‘outstanding’. Be Wiser Insurance Services was rated grade two across the board, up from its previous ‘requires improvement’ rating. The main reason for its achievement was put down to a reduction […]
