Search Results for

The following 3591 results have been found to match your search query:

‘ofsted’

Lib Dems pledge £10k ‘skills wallet’ for adults

The Lib Dems have pledged to give every adult in England £10,000 to put towards education and training. In what the party called a “new era of learning throughout life”, the cash would be placed into a “skills wallet” over a 30-year period. They would put £4,000 in there by the age of 25, £3,000 […]

News

Workers told to repay thousands for construction course they ‘did not take’

Grzegorz Bogdanski is being forced by the government to repay a £5,421 loan for an FE course he claimed he never started, or even realised that he had signed up for. The 34-year-old construction worker said that all those involved have “washed their hands” of his case and described the Department for Education (DfE) as […]

News

Ofsted watch: Inspectors find learners unaware they are on an apprenticeship

A new provider that has learners on its programme who did not even know they were apprentices overshadowed a ‘good’ week for FE, especially colleges. Welcome Skills Limited received three ‘insufficient progress’ grades in an early monitoring report, with inspectors finding leaders do not “design or plan” programmes that enable its 329 apprentices to make […]

News

We are all responsible for acting on sustainability

Colleges must put sustainability at the heart of their teaching – and that means far more than tweaking the curriculum, says Cerian Ayres Recent protests around the world demonstrate that communities are unifying on the need for sustainability in how we interact with our environment. But how should education respond, and what does this mean […]

Opinion, Climate Change

Ofsted praise environment in new inspection reports

“Two acres of peaceful gardens create a calm environment and help them relax, enabling all to concentrate fully on their studies.” That might sound like a line of prose or a review for a relaxing country retreat – but it is in fact an excerpt from an Ofsted report under the new inspection framework. Language […]

News

Revealing the human cost of a disastrous FE policy

This week we report the case of Grzegorz Bogdanski, who was duped into a taking a £5,000 FE loan by a Southampton based training firm. The firm, Edudo, had persuaded West London College (WLC) they could be trusted to be a subcontractor for this new source of funding. So technically, Grzegorz Bogdanski and others like […]

Opinion

Ofsted to research subcontracting in FE

Ofsted is launching research into FE subcontracting – off the back of government plans for a radical overhaul of these rules amid high-profile cases of “deliberate” fraud. Inspectors will carry out pre-arranged visits this autumn to a variety of subcontractors that have contracts with providers who have been recently inspected. At the same time, Ofsted […]

News

Sixth form college leaders failed to spot ‘terminal’ finances

A sixth form college principal and governing body failed to identify its “now terminal” financial position, the Department for Education has revealed today in an FE Commissioner report dated June 2019. Richard Atkins’ team was sent into Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College after leaders asked the government for emergency funding to enable it to […]

News

Pre-election rules delay Ofsted’s annual report

Ofsted will delay publication of its annual report as it seeks to avoid making any statements that relate to its own performance. Civil servants and public bodies cannot publish anything that could be considered political in the period before an election, known as purdah. But the watchdog is particularly hamstrung this year as Labour, the […]

News