Post 16 Skills Plan: 9 things the new Skills Minister should consider
21 July 2016
Congratulations to Robert Halfon on being appointed the new Skills Minister.
Lurking somewhere in his very full in-box will be the Sainsbury Report on Technical Education and the accompanying Post 16 Skills Plan put together by the now defunct BIS.
Here are 9 things about the plans we’d like him to consider:
- Take care to preserve the 'Applied General' route
The Sainsbury Review talks about two choices at 16 - a technical route designed to lead to employment and apprenticeships, and an A Level route designed to lead to Higher Education. The skills plan states: 'we plan to review the applied general route and will publish decisions later in the year'.
'Applied General' courses include vocational qualifications or a mixture of vocational qualifications and A Levels both leading to HE courses and they represent the fastest growing route to university. According to a recent Social Market Foundation report, Applied General qualifications are taken by more than 150,000 students every year. They are widely seen as an important contributor to social mobility and as the main pipeline to higher level vocational skills. Ministers tinker with them at their peril.
- Make sure choices at 16 aren’t too final and can accommodate everyone
We need escape routes for those who discover they made the wrong choice at 16. This is acknowledged in the Review which proposes 'bridging courses' to enable students to move from one route to another. This may be the answer but the design of such courses will take great skill and there will need to be widely available, funded provision for those who need it.
The review also acknowledges that not everyone at 16 will be ready to embark on any of the available routes. It proposes a 'transition year' to give such students the time to develop the skills and maturity of outlook they need before choosing a route that is right for them. Although this is not a new concept it is encouraging to see the transition year presented as a clear and nationally available option. The question remains, however, as to whether the technical and academic routes outlined in the review would be appropriate to a large number of struggling learners, even after a transition year.
- Reconsider the remit of the Institute for Apprenticeships
The Institute for Apprenticeships is to be expanded and retitled so that it becomes "the sole body responsible for technical education". This is incredibly ambitious. Overseeing the development and implementation of technical qualifications and apprenticeships is a far, far bigger and more complex programme than, say, the current GCSE and A Level reform programme.
The track record of the 'shadow' IfA does not bode well. New trailblazer apprenticeship standards are notable for being too narrow, of mixed quality, and for their quixotic assessment models. Ultimately, the reforms have spawned programmes that lack coherence and scalability. And the Sainsbury Review seems to agree: "[We are] concerned that some existing apprenticeship standards, at least at face value, seem to overlap significantly with others, be firm- rather than occupation-specific, and/or contain insufficient technical content".
Significant resource, expertise and attention to detail will be required of the new body if it is to succeed and it is difficult to see how it stands a ghost of a chance given the inevitable fiscal constraints and the compressed timescales.
- Involve all the suppliers and stakeholders from the outset
Ofqual barely gets a mention in the skills plan. We haven’t always showered Ofqual with plaudits but it has martialled its resources and taken on board the expertise and rigour that is needed to underpin a qualifications system. The expectations Ofqual has of an assessment strategy, for example, are set out clearly and in detail and with an internal logic that puts the equivalent BIS guidance on apprenticeships to shame. The DfE would benefit from their close involvement from the outset.
Awarding organisations get but one mention in the skills plan (and not a flattering one at that). But they have a level of knowledge about assessment design and mass implementation of assessment that is internationally recognised. Teachers will also need to have early input. The interests and motivations of students are assumed without any suggestion that they should be consulted.
In the spirit of learning from past mistakes, consider the following from a very old select committee report on 14-19 Diplomas (remember them?): "The approach to designing the first five Diploma lines was highly unorthodox, in that it granted a large degree of initial freedom to the Diploma Development Partnerships in terms of what they produced. This undeniably created problems further down the line, when the transition from content to workable learning programmes and qualifications was attempted. A key issue appears to have been the late involvement of teachers, lecturers and awarding bodies - with the result that their practical experience was not sufficiently harnessed in the earlier part of the development process".
- Develop a full and detailed programme plan with realistic timeframes
Institutions will need to be reorganised so we have sufficient specialist colleges with the full range of facilities (which means factoring in the impact of the current Area Reviews of FE); appropriately skilled staff will need to be in place and trained; robust, informed local employer networks will be needed; the syllabuses, and support materials really do need to be in place at least a year before first teaching; funding needs to be allocated; advice and guidance for young people has to be developed; and all stakeholders will need to be engaged. This will be a hefty programme and the current target for first teaching in September 2019 is already alarmingly close.
- Get the budget agreed now
None of the above will come cheap. Just before his departure, Nick Boles, the previous Skills Minister, accepted the recommendations of Sainsbury providing there is the cash to deliver them. There are alternatives and 'do nothing' is an option if we recognise that all 14-19 vocational qualifications have already been completely redeveloped to meet the detailed requirements of Professor Alison Wolf’s report on vocational education (yes, that’s the same Alison Wolf who also contributed to the Sainsbury Report).
- Make it work
Let’s not waste money on reforms if we can’t make them stick. Remember NVQs, GNVQs, Key Skills, 14-19 Diplomas, the Qualifications and Credit Framework and the recent Wolf report recommendations… When 14-19 Diplomas were first proposed by the last Labour government we were told it was a once in a generation chance to put right our vocational offer and that we were ‘drinking in the last chance saloon’. Presumably we are now doing the washing up in the self-same saloon.
- Stress-test the 15 routes
There has already been debate about whether the 15 technical routes set out by the review are quite the right ones. Some have wondered why Lord Sainsbury of all people didn’t include a route for Retail. Sport doesn’t quite fit. Mark Dawe of AELP recently argued: "On the basis of the figures provided, we believe that 57% of jobs in our economy are outside the recommendation’s scope, so we are in danger of creating an elitist system that would deny many young people a work based learning route to level 2 or 3".
Whatever routes we end up with for post 16 technical learning, they will always mask a great deal of the inevitable complexity that sits behind them. For example, we are told that the Creative and Design route includes the following typical job roles: Arts producer, graphic designer, audio-visual technician, journalist, upholsterer, tailor, and furniture maker - one route, many, many destinations.
- Don’t worry, though…
All of this might look a bit daunting for a new Skills Minister but he can take some comfort in the fact that no minister ever had to walk the plank for a catastrophic mismanagement of the vocational qualifications landscape. Politicians, the media and the general public really aren’t that interested in vocational education. That’s why we are able to have such frequent and such dramatic reforms. On the day the Sainsbury Review came out the BBC website managed one totally inaccurate story about it on its education pages ("Some 20,000 vocational courses are to be scrapped and replaced with 15 new qualifications"). In stark contrast another education story - Nick Gibb’s proposals to roll out a 'mastery' approach to teaching maths in primary schools - made the front page and set the twitter feed alight. And it had hardly been a slow news day.