Blog posts for author:Lindsay Plumpton

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What came out of Ed Miliband’s keynote address?

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Tuesday 02 October 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

This afternoon, Labour Party Leader Ed Miliband spoke at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester to galvanise the party in moving towards the 2015 General Election. The speech was anecdotal in style, looking at his own past as he delivered a speech which praised his teachers, drew on an example of an unemployed woman sending her CV to 137 employers, and set out a policy direction focusing on the Disraeli spirit of ‘one nation’.

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Students to rate colleges online

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Monday 24 September 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

Further education students are being invited to rate their college on a new website, ‘Learner View’, run by education watchdog Ofsted. The questionnaire particularly focuses on how well college courses prepare students for their next steps in work or study. The initiative stems from Ofsted’s Skills for Employment report, which suggested that some college courses aren’t challenging enough and are too focused on the achievement of qualifications rather than providing learners with job specific skills.

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Tackling youth unemployment - what’s the answer?

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Thursday 20 September 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

According to a report this week by the Work and Pensions Select Committee, the Government's youth contract is “insufficient” to tackle the scale of youth unemployment on its own. The youth contract provides £1bn for a range of initiatives aimed at getting young people into employment. Measures include providing 160,000 employers with a "wage incentive" of £2,275 to take on an unemployed 18-24 year-old, 250,000 work experience placements and also additional support from Jobcentre Plus.

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The biggest overhaul of exams in a generation: what do you think?

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Tuesday 18 September 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

GCSEs are set to be replaced by an English baccalaureate certificate from September 2015, it was announced yesterday. The key reforms include the scrapping of modular exams in favour of a final 'tougher' exam, with pupils no longer be able to re-sit to improve their grades. It is expected that only 10% of pupils will achieve a Grade 1 with the new system, compared with the third who are currently awarded an A or A*. There will also be only one awarding body per subject area.

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Apprenticeships: what could we learn from Switzerland?

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Wednesday 29 August 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

With the steep rise in tuition fees, increasing amounts of young people are applying for Apprenticeships rather than turning to higher education – the National Apprenticeship Service (NAS) says applications are up 53% on last year. Yet in the UK, the vocational route is not always as highly valued as the academic alternative. In Janet Murray’s recent article, she explores the education system in Switzerland – a country with one of the most successful apprenticeship systems in the world with a youth unemployment figure of just 7.5% (in contrast to 21.9% in the UK).

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Vocational training – a credible alternative to university

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Wednesday 22 August 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

Despite the news that top A Level grades have fallen for the first time in 2 decades, August’s news has been filled with images of delighted A Level students, clutching their well-earned results with pride. But what does the future hold for these young people as they move on to the next chapter of their lives? It seems that many of them are opting out of university and choosing an alternative path - university applications have dropped by 8.8%, representing 15,000 students who have taken a different route. It is thought that the drop is a direct result of the rise in tuition fees (the cost of a degree is set to increase to an average £8500 per year by 2013).

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Is enterprise the key to economic growth?

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Tuesday 31 July 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

We all like a bank holiday, although chances are George Osborne may be disappointed we have had so many this year. The news, last week, that Britain was experiencing its first double-dip recession since the 1970s was in part blamed on the additional bank holiday in June.  Not great news for a Chancellor steering a struggling economy through its third quarterly contraction in a row. But whilst these latest figures present a picture of doom and gloom, other factors seem to be painting a more positive outlook.  The recent drop in unemployment and a slow but steady housing market would point towards an improving economy (albeit slowly).

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Funding changes – hiding the wiring?

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Thursday 26 July 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

You will have seen in recent weeks the usual media coverage of challenges facing the education sector in the UK; Michael Gove’s numerous announcements, comments regarding the merit of some of the qualifications on offer and changes to the funding system.   The most recent of these was the Education Funding Agency’s 16-19 Funding Formula Review published earlier this month.  The review outlines how the Department for Education and the Education Funding Agency (EFA) plans to fund 16-19 year old students from September 2013, with all full time programmes to be funded at a single funding rate per student, per year.   

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Work Programme – a positive impact on employment

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Tuesday 17 July 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

Data published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) this week suggests that the Government's flagship welfare-to-work scheme, the Work Programme, has had a positive effect on the long-term unemployed. The figures reveal that 48% of people who joined the Programme at its launch in June 2011 had a break in benefit claims by the end of 9 months, and almost 25% had stopped claiming benefits for at least three months. The latest stats are encouraging after a National Audit Office (NAO) report earlier this year indicated that only 15% of over-25s would get jobs through the Work Programme in contrast to the official government estimate of 40%.

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Delivering employment outcomes in FE – what’s the answer?

By Lindsay Plumpton, Communications Leader, Friday 13 July 2012

Lindsay Plumpton

It’s hard to ignore the challenges faced by unemployed people in the UK today – we’re confronted with an almost daily stream of bad news related to the issue. This week, Ofsted published its report Skills for Employment.  The report was a direct response to the government’s plans for FE providers to offer work-based training to help the unemployed into work and was critical of FE providers. According to the report, only 19% of students were successful in finding a job when leaving college.

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