PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Further Education: Training (12 December 2017)

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to ensure that the post-16 educational sector has the capacity to train young people to find employment in a post-automation jobs market.

Asked by:
Mr James Frith (Labour)

It is essential that we have training providers that are able to deliver the high quality training that employers and learners need. Following a series of locally led Area Reviews, significant recommendations have been made that will deliver a more efficient post-16 system.

Our focus is on further improving the quality of the education provided through a risk-based Ofsted inspection programme, a robust intervention framework where failing colleges are referred to the Further Education (FE) Commissioner, who will also have an extended role by working to support improvement. We have introduced a new Strategic College Improvement Fund, worth £15 million over two years, to enable weaker colleges to access support from their stronger peers and a National Leaders Programme for FE, to help drive improvement across the sector. These initiatives should help us to achieve our ambition of a further education sector comprised of high status institutions, which can confer the same advantages as academic institutions.

Having the best-quality teachers and leaders is also key to delivering high-quality provision across FE. We have invested £40 million in the FE workforce since 2013. This has provided bursaries to support over 1,200 graduates to train to teach maths or English in the FE sector. It has also funded training for thousands of teachers in FE institutions to help them improve their teaching of English and maths.

To complement further education colleges and other training providers, and to support wider reforms to technical education, government is establishing five new post-16 specialist providers. The department is investing £80 million alongside contributions from business to establish National Colleges which will target sectoral skills gaps, where existing providers are not able to equip people with technical skills the sector’s employers need. We are also providing £170 million capital funding to create prestigious Institutes of Technology (IoTs) to deliver the higher-level technical skills employers demand, with a Call for Proposals to establish IoTs being launched on the 15 December. IoTs will be a prestigious and high quality employer-led institutions delivering hig

Answered by:
Anne Milton (Independent)
20 December 2017