Minister confirms Functional Skills will be mandatory in all Apprenticeships
Posted on | November 7, 2011 | Comments Off
John Hayes MP, the Minister for Further Education and Skills, has confirmed in a letter to Jonathan Wells that Functional Skills will definitely replace Key Skills as a mandatory component of all Apprenticeships by September 2012.
Full details of the letter are here.
Provisional GCSE data out now
Posted on | November 1, 2011 | Comments Off
The link below takes you to the first provisional statistical release of GCSE data for 2011.
The data does not yet cover other level 2 qualifications such as Functional Skills nor is it listed down to school level yet - expect this level of data around January 2012.
Apprenticeships - quality vs cost
Posted on | October 23, 2011 | Comments Off
When we mention apprenticeships, most of us probably think about the traditional 1 or 2 year training programme with some day release at college. That’s changing quickly, and not necessarily for the better.
Can online careers advice work?
Posted on | October 21, 2011 | No Comments
The role of employment advisers is diminishing as web-based services come to the fore, but what about the personal touch?
Margaret-Anne Mackenzie left school in April without any qualifications. “I didn’t get any careers advice at school,” the 16-year-old says. She’s not alone – one in four 15- to 19-year-olds said the same in a survey published recently by vocational qualifications provider City & Guilds.
The teenager, who cares for her mother in sheltered accommodation, has also had to cope with the recent disruption of a move from Scotland to south Wales, which left her feeling “quite scared” of starting out again in a new place where she had no friends or contacts.
But Mackenzie may have just got lucky, because at a summer drop-in session run by the Newport Careers Centre, she was linked up with a personal careers adviser who took the time and trouble to get to know her.
With a lot of encouragement, she mustered the confidence to attend a pre-16 youth gateway course run by Careers Wales Gwent. Having said she wanted to be a hairdresser, her adviser’s assessment that Mackenzie needed to improve her communication and basic life skills led to some intensive one-to-one support to help her get on to a vocational access course.
Seeing her adviser a couple of times a month over the summer, she was then helped to apply for educational maintenance allowance (though no longer available to new applicants in England, EMA is still paid in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) and a college bursary, and put in touch with an organisation for young carers.
This ongoing relationship with an adviser who got to know her was clearly important. Without it, says Mackenzie, “I’d have been worried, because I wouldn’t have known what to do and I wouldn’t have been able to do my course. I’d have just been staying at home.”
With hard work and probably a fair bit more guidance as she navigates her way through future training options, Mackenzie hopefully won’t end up adding to the youth unemployment numbers. Figures from the Office of National Statistics show there are now almost one million young people under 25 who are out of work. If you are 16 or 17, the picture is bleaker still – fewer than a quarter have jobs.
Add in mid-career public sector employees being made redundant in their tens of thousands – 111,000 in the second quarter of this year to be more precise – and you have 2.57 million people out of work.
Given that Jobcentres do not do much for professionals who have been made redundant, their advisers are not available to anyone under the age of 18, and Connexions centres which did cater for the 16-19 age range are being closed en masse, many are confused as to the kind of advice available to the huge variety of differently skilled and experienced people seeking new career and training pathways.
Come next spring, when two national careers services will be launched in England and Wales (Scotland’s, a web portal called My World of Work, has just gone live), what is available may well look very different to what is on offer now.
A “blended” approach now seems to be the official mantra to describe the shape of careers services to come. Translated, that means more automation with websites and helplines being heavily promoted. Put more bluntly, careers websites are cheaper than trained and experienced advisers, meaning more of the former and fewer of the latter.
Cheaper, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean less effective. Jane Artess, research director at the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (Hecsu), who is overseeing the revamp of its graduate careers website Prospects.ac.uk, says the increasing automation of careers services has the potential to work very well for certain segments of the population, but only if a good support mechanism is put in place around it. “The web is a fantastic place for information, but it’s not such a great place for guidance,” she says. “It is not sufficient on its own.”
Her view is shared by Ciaran Wrynn, head of programme design and delivery for career transition at recruitment consultants Hays. “There’s no way the internet can tap into motivation or challenge beliefs,” he says. “But a blended approach means people can enter the job market more effectively.”
At Skills Development Scotland, director of service design and innovation, Jonathan Clark, points out that because the workplace has become more complex and varied, “the notion that one person could be a gateway to all the opportunities in the world of work is not very realistic any more”.
Those who will benefit most from the new web portals, he says, will be self-motivated, with the personal skills and resilience to enjoy the experience of exploring and planning their career direction.
However, Paul Chubb, director of Careers England, the membership organisation for careers professionals, says many of his members are concerned that over-reliance on web portals and call centres will disadvantage those who are already struggling to break into the jobs market. “The idea of taking responsibility for their own career planning may be unthinkable for some younger and more vulnerable people without a great deal of one-to-one support,” he says.
Imagine you have literacy problems. Or don’t have a computer at home. Or you can’t afford a new computer and the one you’ve got won’t run Flash, so websites look weird and you can’t access certain pages. Or you’re 16 and left school with poor qualifications; you may not have the confidence to even get started, let alone the motivation to keep going when you realise how much self-directed research you have to do.
For many unemployed aged under 19, this last point may prove the biggest obstacle. In England, anyone over 19 is currently eligible to talk to an adviser face-to-face. But when the national careers service launches next year, those aged 16-19 will not have the right to personalised careers guidance. The £200m that pays for this advice service will disappear into the Department for Education’s coffers. Personalised careers advice will remain available to adults because the Department for Work and Pensions will continue to fund it.
The Education bill proposes that for those still in school, headteachers will need to buy in careers services from private providers, although no extra funding will be made available. A recently published Careers England report into the impact of career guidance in England claims that, because the bill does not require much in the way of quality assurance, bought-in services are “likely to have neither a guarantee of professional competence nor labour market intelligence” and raises “serious concerns about impartiality”.
On the other hand, there is not much out there for those leaving school at 16, other than a website and a phone number.
“If you’re just sitting typing at a computer it’s not really going to build your confidence – you need to be able to ask loads of questions,” says Shaun Donald, 18, from Dundee.
He left school in 2009 and, after a work placement at office supplies retailer Staples, began a college course in art and design. After five months when he realised he couldn’t afford the cost of travel, he dropped out. Since then he has been looking for jobs, but with no success: his experience of short work placements and a false start at college is exactly why, say careers experts, he needs personalised guidance rather than a website to help him.
“There’s a million different sites,” Donald says. “You spend hours and hours ploughing through jobs, and when you find one you’ll be directed to another site and it’ll be gone.”
Just a few weeks ago however, once he hit 18, he started to get some one-to-one help at a job club, during which he was introduced to the Scottish web portal My World of Work. “The job club people have given me more confidence to search for jobs, and the website helped me find out what my skills and strengths are and helped with my CV – it looks amazing now,” he says. Using the website has been enjoyable he says, but once you’ve done your CV “you need to be able to talk things through as well”.
Ministers who want to direct more people towards websites “are confusing information with guidance”, according to Adrian Fayter, trade union Unison’s representative for young people’s services in York, and a qualified careers adviser.
“Would the public accept only a web-based consultation with their GP? Would anyone seriously suggest psychotherapy services operate via a call centre? A guidance interview is an in-depth discussion – a mix of counselling, job interview, pep talk and a way for young people to reflect on their skills. For some, it challenges their misconceptions, and also the misconceptions they’ve been fed by other people. My opinion is that it would be disastrous for young people who are Neets [not in employment, education or training] to find that there was no expert help.”
Those with a degree may have rather better prospects, but unemployment is still high with one in five recent graduates out of work.
University careers services have had a mixed press which, believes Hecsu’s Jane Artess, stems partly from students failing to understand the myriad ways that careers officers work to increase their employability behind the scenes – for example, by building relationships with companies that come to recruit at jobs fairs.
However, with students soon to be paying more for their degrees and needing to see a concrete return, Nadim Choudhury, head of careers at the private London School of Business and Finance (LSBF), thinks university careers advisers will have to up their game.
“At LSBF we have totally repositioned our school to being career focused,” he says. “We offer a proactive training and development programme – there are 12 workshops that students must attend – and from the first day they start university, from their induction, the careers service is part of that planning.”
LSBF has a very different student profile to the University of the Arts London (UAL), where Steve Beddoe, director of student enterprise and employability, says many creative graduates wanting to become sole traders or work in micro-enterprises face problems that orthodox careers services simply don’t address.
To give students the skills and knowledge they need, a new, interactive UAL website now shows updates on training courses, peer-learning opportunities and short films demonstrating how artists have moved into their chosen careers.
Whether you are a creative or professional or manual worker, straight out of university or facing redundancy in your 50s, with a few qualifications or none to your name, it seems that will soon be using a variety of automated means to find work – online forums, text alerts, interactive personality tests and online CV assessment tools to name just a few.
But whatever a jobseeker’s level of skill, experience or qualification, every careers expert Guardian Work spoke to for this article agreed an automated careers service would not work without also offering f ace-to-face support.
The Scottish and Welsh national careers services give everyone the option of talking to a qualified, impartial professional. Will the English service change tack to do the same?
Useful careers sites
Thousands of school leavers applying to join the Army are being rejected because they cannot spell or solve simple English and maths problems
Posted on | October 16, 2011 | Comments Off
Thousands of school leavers applying to join the Army are being rejected because they cannot spell or solve simple English and maths problems.
Full story from the Daily Mail here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2046995/School-leavers-rejected-Army-spell-simple-sums.html
DfE recommends Functional Skills
Posted on | October 10, 2011 | Comments Off
Based on level of rigour, assessment arrangements, skills taught and views of employers, the qualifications that we recommend to providers are: functional skills and free standing maths qualifications.
The above comment is taken from the DfE consultation paper about 16-19 study programmes.
The DfE consultation entitled “study programmes for 16-19 year olds” published on 6th October and ending 5th January follows Professor Alison Wolf’s report. One of the key elements of that report was to recommend that students aged 16-19 who did not have an A*-C GCSE pass in English and maths should continue to study those subjects through to age 19.
In response to that recommendation, DfE says:
6.3 It is clear that providers will need to adapt their English and maths offer depending on the needs of students. For example:
- Some young people will need an immediate, focussed intervention to turn a near miss into a GCSE pass at the first opportunity
- Some may require more intensive help over a longer period (and possibly taking other qualifications en route to act as stepping stones to the GCSE)
- Some, for whom GCSE success is a long way off, might be better served by taking other qualifications or programmes.
6.4 For those who need more intensive support to move towards achieving a C grade GCSE providers are best placed to determine what will meet their needs and enable them to progress. Based on level of rigour, assessment arrangements, skills taught and views of employers, the qualifications that we recommend to providers are: functional skills and free standing maths qualifications.
So there we have it, the DfE recommends Functional Skills as the qualification of choice for students progressing towards GCSE, or unlikely to achieve GCSE. Click here for the link directly to the consultation paper.
Apprenticeships redefined?
Posted on | October 3, 2011 | Comments Off
Thanks to the “Big Vocational Debate” for drawing our attention to this piece from This is Money. The great apprentice racket: Some jobs fall short of skills as firms collect millions
But it isn’t quite as clear cut as this piece suggests. All apprenticeships frameworks have to include Functional Skills (or Key Skills until Sept 2012) as part of the learning and that’s a good thing.
60% of employers unhappy with literacy and numeracy skills of school leavers
Posted on | September 20, 2011 | Comments Off
Radio 5 interview with Chris Kirk of GEMS commenting on the PWC report into the skills of young people entering the workplace. Click here for the interview.
One in four young people get no careers advice, survey shows
Posted on | September 20, 2011 | No Comments
Poll shows 28% of those studying apprenticeships, BTecs and GNVQs are missing out on careers counselling
A quarter of teenagers say they have never received any careers advice, according to a poll.
The survey of 1,620 15- to 19-year-olds found those on vocational courses were least likely to have been given guidance.
Some 22% of those studying for A-levels and university courses said they had not received careers advice; this rose to 28% for those taking apprenticeships, BTecs and GNVQs.
The survey, conducted on behalf of City & Guilds – an exam board for vocational courses – also found teenagers were far more likely to ask advice from parents if they had been to university.
Just 30% of teenagers would turn first to their parents for advice if they had no more than GCSE-level qualifications. Some 45% would ask their parents for career help if they had degrees.
Nick Grist, head of the City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development, said the survey showed deprived teenagers would be further disadvantaged in future.
The government plans to create a new National Careers Service by April next year. However, it will not provide face-to-face guidance for those aged under 19. Instead, schools will be given a legal duty to offer careers advice to their pupils.
Grist said this could lead to “computer-generated” advice replacing students’ face-to-face conversations with career advisers.
“Young people depend on effective guidance to help them choose career and learning options that suit their interests, talents and aspirations,” he said. “It’s not enough to hope that a remote telephone operator or website will be able to give them the personalised support they need, or that hard-pressed head teachers will be able to find space in their budgets for top-quality, face-to-face guidance services.”
A spokesman from the Department for Education said it was a “sad fact … that too much [careers advice] … is poor quality and patchy”.
“That’s why we are giving schools responsibility for providing independent, impartial careers advice. Schools know their students best and they are the ones best placed to decide what provision is right. That’s why they have complete control over their budgets to buy in the face-to-face support that pupils need.”
Core subjects are key to education reform
Posted on | September 16, 2011 | No Comments
Schools must specify compulsory subjects up to the age of 16 if Britain is to close the gap with its international peers
The indicators are not good. This week’s OECD performance measures, Education at a Glance, suggests the east is starting to overtake the west in skills. In the PISA league tables, the UK has dropped to 28th in maths while the Asian tigers hold the top spots. Today, five Conservative MPs set out what can be done in After the Coalition, a new book which suggests an agenda for the future of the Conservative party. We do not believe that falling down international league tables is inevitable. But to arrest decline, a radical change in our attitude to education is required.
The British education debate frequently focuses on how the ability or background of students has an effect on their attainment and outcomes. Some argue for a “mixed” catchment so that peers can have a positive influence, others argue for wholesale selection so that bright students from low-income backgrounds can benefit. Bright, low-income students do need a clearer path to success, but a system has to reward work as well as flair.
In the most successful countries, Canada and Germany for example, all students are required to work hard to “pass the year”, and if they don’t there is the sanction of being held back. Those who work hard and achieve can progress faster through the system, for example taking a harder maths class or additional courses in new subjects. Britain should adopt this “escalator” policy to motivate students to work.
Many students cut off career options at 14 when they drop critical subjects such as the single sciences and modern languages. The numbers studying these subjects has plummeted in the last decade. Those from low income backgrounds have been worst affected; only 24 per cent of students on free school meals took a language at GCSE.
In the modern world a core general education is a requirement of most employers and universities. Virtually all the countries that bypass Britain in league tables specify these subjects until 16, including Canada, France and Germany. We should and must expect more. A rigorous core including maths, English, single sciences, a language and history until 16 should be combined with an A-level Baccalaureate of high quality A-levels that gives students a clear signal about what universities want. A strong technical or arts Bacc with employer or institutional sponsorship should also be available for 16- to 18-year-olds. This will provide students with a clear path to success.
The current examination system is costly and lacks public trust. We are the only country in the world with an “independent regulator” because the structure is so complex. I am a free marketer, but this is no free market with heavy government specification and perverse incentives. The competition has been to try and lower the bar.
Before the state started interfering in examinations in the 1960s and 70s, universities did an excellent job of keeping standards high because they had an interest in quality students entering their institutions. There should a single exam board under the control of universities. Examining bodies should be banned from the production of textbooks, a clear conflict of interest which has exacerbated “teach to test”.
Measures to increase the rigour of exams, strengthen the academic core for all students and reward hard work are all a vital part of catching up the world leaders in education.
• Elizabeth Truss is the Conservative MP for South West Norfolk
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Functional Skills
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