Further education and skills: Are colleges meeting skills needs?

In this episode, Mark Leech (Director of Strategy and Engagement) talks to Richard Beynon (Senior HMI, FES Policy) and Kate Hill (Specialist Adviser, FES Policy) about enhanced inspections and how colleges are meeting skills needs. 

 

Transcript

Mark Leech

Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Ofsted Talks, the Ofsted podcast. My name is Mark Leech and today we're going to be talking about an area of work in our further education and skills inspections. We're going to be talking about enhanced inspections of colleges. So this is inspections that particularly are focused on how colleges are meeting skills needs. Today, I'm joined with two colleagues from our further education and skills team, Richard Beynon, and Kate Hill, welcome to you both. Let's start with you Richard, perhaps we can have a little chat about why this is important and what the expectation is on colleges in terms of meeting skills needs. 

 

Richard Beynon

There's a growing force behind this I think that we've seen developing across the past three or four years and it came to a head I suppose in 2022. There was some legislation that actually directed colleges to think about their skills work but colleges have always been the engine of skills in our economy. They've always dealt with vocational skills, they've always dealt with personal skills for a lot of learners. They've always been responsible for the upskilling of adults who come back to learning after a pause or a gap in their education. So colleges have always been there with this skills work. I think it's just that in the last couple of years, government has focused attention on that area of colleges work.

 

Mark Leech

Is it sort of looking nationally or more regionally? How wide are they supposed to be casting their net?

 

Richard Beynon

It's both really, because some colleges for example, land based colleges or specialists dance and drama colleges, serve a national need.

 

Mark Leech

That's really interesting. Kate, so that's what we expect colleges to be doing, our role obviously is to go out and check that it's happening on the ground. How do we go about doing that?

 

Kate Kill

We actually have usually two dedicated inspectors, one will lead on the skills aspect, and then they'll have a colleague that will work with them. What they'll do is they'll spend some time talking to different stakeholders attached to that particular college. We came up with some headings and they were community, education, employers, and civic. When we make a call to plan the inspection, we ask that the leaders arrange calls with their main stakeholders from those four groups so we start to get a picture of how they're contributing to the priority sectors in the region or area or nationally. At the same time, our team inspectors are deep diving into some chosen subjects. If we looked at health and social care, for example, we would ask the Curriculum Manager to arrange for a couple of calls with some health and social care stakeholders that might come in and talk to learners, might be involved in designing the course and having a say in what they think would be useful for them to learn, or in what order they might need to learn things. 

 

Mark Leech

Thanks Kate. I suppose the big question then is what are we finding on these inspections? We've been doing them now for a little over a year. How many have we done and what are we finding?

 

Kate Hill

We've completed 65 of these enhanced inspections, that's as of the end of the academic year. Out of those, we have found that four of those colleges or providers, we judged them to be making a limited contribution to meeting skills needs, 40 were reasonable, and 21 were strong. Overall, 94% percent were strong or reasonable.

 

Richard Beynon

It's worth saying we use a three scale criteria for this skills judgement. We don't use the normal four scale grades that we use for other things on inspection. We just say that a college is either strong in its contribution or reasonable or limited.

 

Mark Leech

So what's the difference? If you're strong, what are you doing that the others aren't?

 

Richard Beynon

For college that strong, typically you'd find that they have a good range of stakeholders that cover different fields. They might be employers, they might be civic stakeholders, they might be community groups. So there'd be a diversity in that range of stakeholders. Also, those stakeholders would have a good contribution to the strategic thinking and positioning of the college's curriculum. So senior leadership teams might involve stakeholders in discussions about where the college positions itself and where it's heading in the broadest top level terms. But also to be strong, a college would need to have curriculum engagement with stakeholders. And that could be, for example, engineering staff when they're devising their curriculum, work with local engineering employers who come in and deliver a bit of the curriculum or who revise the curriculum each year with the teaching staff and make sure it's up to date and captures all of the things necessary for the sector. It would vary depending on the curriculum area. For sixth form college with A-levels, the stakeholder group might be universities who might come in and deliver talks to students about the sorts of things they do at university if they were studying law, or accountancy, or whatever it might be. So the nature of the stakeholders is different depending on the type of college. But with that strong judgement, we want to see the top level strategic stuff going on, and the curriculum input. It's very important to see it both in the classroom and at the top level strategic thinking.

 

Mark Leech

Kate, so looking at the other end of the spectrum, I'm sure if there are college leaders listening, they'd be interested in where colleges are perhaps falling down on on this measure. So where we have found that they've not been up to scratch, what typically isn't happening that should be?

 

Kate Hill

I think it would be fair to say that most of the colleges are making a reasonable contribution to meeting skills needs. Where they are not quite meeting the strong criteria, generally they're not consistently involving those stakeholders in the design and implementation of the curriculum to make sure they're preparing those learners for future work or future education. And that's one of the criteria that we see repeatedly that it's not consistently done. It might be happening brilliantly in A-level psychology, but there's nothing really happening in the engineering level three course. The other area is making sure that not only is that curriculum well planned and well taught, but those learners including apprentices are actually learning skills they need.

 

Mark Leech

Do we talk to the learners and apprentices to get their perspective on their training and how well they feel prepared? 

 

Richard Beynon

Yes very definitely and to the employers of apprentices as well. So we'd ask the employers, what are the skills that the apprentices bring to the workplace and are they up to date and current and useful? And we'd ask the apprentices how they feel about the skills they're learning. Are they learning them in a coherent way? The usual kind of curriculum questions.

 

Mark Leech

I'm interested in this area of how we're preparing learners for the local economy and the national economy. We talked a little earlier on the balance between the two. To what extent are we reflecting what's already there broadly speaking in terms of job opportunities I guess. And to what extent are we trying to move that market to create more skills in the economy in certain priority areas? So I'm thinking about a green technology, for example, now how much of that plays into our work.

 

Richard Beynon

Well, as inspectors go into each college for an enhanced inspection they receive from our data and insight teams in Ofsted, a very detailed skills analysis which looks at the part played by the LSIP in the area, the Local Skills Improvement Plan. It looks at skills shortages across the region, sub region, and in the local economy. So the inspectors are very well briefed about the way the college positions itself and about the needs of the local and regional economy as well. Often we'll find that, colleges have identified a shortage area with their stakeholders. And maybe they haven't put courses in just yet, but they're planning those things. Not everyone can react to a skills shortage or a skills need instantly. It takes several years to perhaps develop programmes and develop expertise amongst staff, but we recognise work in progress where it's happening.

 

Mark Leech

And how much of this sort of enhanced element feeds through into the overall grade that we give a college. How does it stack up with the other aspects that we look at on inspection?

 

Kate Hill

There's always an influence very much. When we're talking about skills and making sure that learners are developing the skills that they need. There is of course, a crossover with the quality of education. Then there is of course, a crossover with how well the leaders and managers are leading and managing that aspect. But as Richard already said, we make a sample judgement using a set of criteria, which will give them a separate judgement separate from the overall effectiveness and the key judgments, even though there will be an element of it that will filter into at all.   

 

Mark Leech

You can certainly see why this area is so important because ultimately it is about people leaving college with something that's really useful to them in terms of the future economy and in terms of its future health. 

 

Kate Hill

And it may be that, you know, we find that for example, construction is a particular need and a sector priority in an area and the college we go to doesn't offer construction. But they will say to us in one of our many conversations, well the reason we don't do it is because the college down the road are doing a jolly good job of it. And so therefore, we work with them and they do construction and we focus mainly on engineering because that's where we are experts. And so the conversations we have with the leaders and managers make sure that we understand how the sector priority is met if it's not directly themselves.

 

Richard Beynon

It's important in a metropolitan area or a large city that we take into account the other providers in the neighbourhood in the kind of locality. And we look at the way providers map their provision across one another to make sure there's no overlap and no unnecessary duplication.

 

Mark Leech

That's really interesting and thanks very much. I think that's been a really good look at this area of work. It's clearly really important and growing in importance. So thank you for your time Richard and Kate and thank you to everybody who has listened to this podcast. If you want to hear more from us, do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and listen out for the next episode.

 

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