Blog Archives: January 2017

We offer lots of resources to support your delivery of our Functional Skills qualifications. These include Qualification Support Packs, Chief Examiner Reports and Amplification Guides to equip you to deliver the qualifications in a way that will ensure the best results for you and your learners. You’ll also get free access to ForSkills’ initial assessment and diagnostic tool, which supports learners’ progression and prepares them for their external assessment. This tool is vital for ensuring that your learners are learning at a level appropriate to them, and automatic signposting to interactive resources provides targeted teaching for each learner to address any skills gaps detected by the assessment process. This helps to ensure that they’re able to achieve the qualification.

However you view it, 2016 was certainly an eventful year with significant repercussions on the national and international policy stage, and we’re now left with the political aftermath of last year. The invocation of Article 50 is due in the first quarter of this year. Although the government is keeping its own counsel on the precise nature of Brexit, restrictions on the movement of workers from the EU into the UK will mean skills gaps will grow in the UK workforce. In this instance, technical education will be more important than ever to support employers in plugging these skills gaps. Schools will play a key role in offering technical education options to young people looking to broaden their employment or study options after completing their studies.

However you view it, 2016 was certainly an eventful year with significant repercussions on the national and international policy stage, and we’re now left with the political aftermath of last year. The invocation of Article 50 is due in the first quarter of this year. Although the government is keeping its own counsel on the precise nature of Brexit, restrictions on the movement of workers from the EU into the UK will mean skills gaps will grow in the UK workforce. In this instance, technical education will be more important than ever to support employers in plugging these skills gaps.

The government made a commitment in its 2015 manifesto to overhaul national school funding. Since then, we’ve had a new Prime Minister and Education Secretary, and progress on the issue has been slow. We are starting to see firm proposals on how the new National Funding Formula will look. The nature of what the government is seeking to achieve makes this a very technical and complicated issue. The Education Secretary said that 10,700 schools will benefit from more funding under the fairer funding formula, while 9,128 will be funded at a lower level. It’s anticipated that rural schools will be among the big winners, whilst those in London will be more likely to see reductions.

On 7 April, the government will take the historical step of charging all UK employers (with a pay bill of £3 million or more) a 0.5% tax on that pay bill. Branded as the Apprenticeship Levy, this is a central component of the apprenticeship reform programme that began back in 2012 with the Richard Review of Apprenticeships. A fundamental driver of the coalition – and Conservative – governments’ ideology to increase the profile and uptake of apprenticeships has been employer ownership, or, as a former skills minister put it: ‘for employers to have skin in the game’. In order to achieve this, the Levy was proposed and will be enacted this year to ensure that employers have a stake (their own payroll) being invested in apprenticeships, with the ultimate intention that employers will be looking to recoup this tax through negotiating a price with providers to offer apprenticeships in their industry. According to the Department for Education, ‘the levy will allow us to double investment in apprenticeships by 2020 from 2010 levels, to £2.5bn.’

Today, Theresa May set out her overarching vision for Britain as it leaves the European Union. After receiving criticism for a number of general statements about her negotiation strategy, the Prime Minister set out a ‘truly global vision’ of a British future of working outside of Europe.

Planning your curriculum? We’re here to help! The below infographic features qualifications to consider for this year in a variety of sectors, plus details of our Study Programme and Functional Skills offers. Just get in touch with us if you’d like more information on any of our qualifications.

With less than three months until the launch of the Institute for Apprenticeships, and six months since the hunt for permanent board members began, the government finally wants your feedback on what the Institute should do. But you won’t find any questions or options to choose from in the ‘Draft Strategic Guidance’, something we are accustomed to from previous apprenticeship ‘consultations’. It seems we’ve moved into a new and pragmatic phase of policy making, where feedback should simply be emailed before the end of January to an old BIS account: [email protected]

At the Charity Commission annual meeting, the Prime Minister pledged to help schools and companies in the UK deal with the ‘burning injustice’ and stigma surrounding mental illness. Demanding a new approach from government and society as a whole, Theresa May said that mental health had been ‘dangerously disregarded’ as secondary to physical health for too long. Mrs May outlined proposed measures to transform the way we deal with mental health problems across society, with a focus on children and young people.

‘Skills’ is a slippery term in English public policy.  Read a story about investment in skills and you often find a report of government investment in universities.   Read about devolution of skills however and it’s unambiguous – skills in this context equals FE, though oddly only FE for adults.  Devolution is an even more slippery concept so the two combined spell double trouble. The government has agreed that the ‘commissioning’ of adult skills will be devolved as part of a number of ‘deals’ cut with local authority areas covering nearly half the country; but not all the FE budget will be devolved even there.