Windsor Learning Partnership
‘apprenticeships’
Your weekly guide to who’s new, and who’s leaving. Lizann Lowson has been appointed assistant principal for further education at City of Bristol College. She joins from her previous role as head of young people at Hull College Group, where she lead the further education curriculum for 14 to 19-year-olds. She brings a total of […]
Movers and Shakers
The new apprenticeship programme was designed to put employers in the driving seat, but the contract the SFA will make them sign places them in a risky situation, says Smita Jamdar. As the jedi master Yoda once observed, “always two there are, no more and no less: a master and an apprentice”. If only life […]
Opinion
UTCs perform a valuable function – don’t write off the whole enterprise based on misleading statistical comparisons with schools, says Nick Crew. The success of University Technical Colleges has been called into question lately, with several closing down, and even Michael Gove, who introduced them, weighing in to label them a failure. Yet UTCs perform […]
Employers in the retail, hospitality and travel sectors are actively preparing to exploit a loophole that will allow them to grade their own apprentices, FE Week can exclusively reveal. Our findings have caused concerns that the independence of end-point assessments is being seriously compromised. The rules, which will be upheld by the new Institute for […]
News
The Department for Education has admitted to a “loophole” in the Skills Funding Agency qualification achievement rate calculation, which until now “artificially” boosted the rate for around 10 per cent of providers. In some cases, providers benefited by more than 20 QAR percentage points. Figures published on February 16 in the updated January Statistical First […]
In case you were in any doubt, the reforms to the apprenticeship system are complex. You might think that there would be one single place that you could access to get all the information you would need, but there isn’t (unless you include gov.uk but not all the documents are on one page or even […]
Resources
Questions surround why publication of a ‘good’-overall Ofsted report was delayed until 90-days after the recently created FE college was inspected. The report on Basildon-based Prospects College of Advanced Technology was published this morning, after it was inspected between November 15 and 18 last year. Its performance is of key interest to the government and wider […]
With just weeks to go before the apprenticeship levy and the apprenticeship standards come on line, we are in urgent need of a proper regulatory framework, says Graham Hasting-Evans The government has made it clear the Institute for Apprenticeships is to be a regulatory body for two critical parts of our new skills system. But […]
Three colleges have insisted they will stand by a multi-million pound subcontractor, despite it entering into insolvency arrangements. JTJ Workplace Solutions Limited owed more than £500,000 to HM Revenue and Customs, and £246,000 to Pearson. This is according to the report of a meeting approving it entering into a corporate voluntary arrangement, published on Companies […]
