19
Examination of witnesses
David Holloway, Gary Hyndman and Ellen Atkinson.
Q121 The Chair: Welcome to this hearing of the Public Services Committee on the inquiry into the transition from education to employment for young disabled people. This is a public evidence session. Before we begin, we have three witnesses today and I would just like to ask each one to say where they are from. David, I will start with you.
David Holloway: Thank you. I am from the Association of Colleges, where I am the senior policy manager for special educational needs and disabilities.
The Chair: Thank you. Gary?
Gary Hyndman: Hello, I am the principal of Sense College, which is a small independent specialist college based in Loughborough.
The Chair: And Ellen.
Ellen Atkinson: Afternoon, everyone. I am from the National Development Team for Inclusion. I have been involved with the delivery of the Preparing for Adulthood programme for the last 10 years as part of the SEND reforms that came in in 2014. I am now involved in the Internships Work programme, which is a DfE funded programme to support young people into employment.
Q122 The Chair: Thank you for coming today. We are looking forward to having this discussion with you. We are obviously concerned with the transition from education to employment, but I appreciate that, in order for it to happen, lots of other things have to happen as well.
Keeping the focus on employability, to what extent do you feel that employability is the key focus for post-16 educational courses for young disabled people, and is your general feeling that this is appropriate for all groups that fall into that category, or for some?
David Holloway: Employability is the focus for general FE colleges as a whole. With regard to level 3 qualifications, for example, we probably have 100,000 students in colleges doing A-levels, but we have more like 250,000 students doing vocational qualifications at the same level. So vocational qualifications leading to particular careers are our main activity, and the same is true at lower levels in colleges, levels 1 and 2.
What is true of all our students is true of disabled students and, in fact, disabled students are part of our core activity. We believe that 28% of students in colleges who are funded through 16 to 18 funding now have a special educational need or a disability. It is a much higher figure than in schools, and those students are working at all levels. In effect, it means that every class has disabled students in it; every subject has disabled students studying the subject for the job they want to do. It is absolutely at the centre of what colleges do.
The Chair: Can I just check that 28%? Is that the figure for which you would receive the extra funding from the local authority, or is that a lower figure?
David Holloway: The figure for which we would receive extra funding from the local authority is much lower. The figure for the local authority is around 5%.
Another 3% of students have education, health and care plans, but we do not receive local authority funding for them. Another 20% to 21% of students have a special educational need or a disability but do not have an education, health and care plan. In some ways, they are equivalent to what the school sector refers to as SEN support students.
Gary Hyndman: My college is a small college. We usually have 115 to 120 learners on the roll each year, and we operate across three pathways to the curriculum. Everyone will have some degree of careers training, but it will be at an appropriate level for those young people. Paid work will be a realistic outcome for the young people on one of those curriculum pathways, but perhaps 80 out of the 115 to 120 people on our roll will not necessarily be working towards paid employment. However, everyone gets careers learning as part of the offer, and most of our people are also working at level 1 and 2 qualifications on that vocation pathway.
The Chair: Where are the young people before they come to you? Where are they usually educated between 11 and 16?
Gary Hyndman: All our people have EHCPs, and they are all high-needs funding. The vast majority come through special schools.
The Chair: Is the quality of information that is passed from the special schools to you better than might often be the case from mainstream schools to colleges in general?
Gary Hyndman: That is a really interesting question, and preparing for this Committee got me thinking about it. This is the time of year when we look at a lot of consultations from local authorities, so we get lots of young people’s EHCPs and supporting evidence coming through.
I commented to some of my staff team that we get lots of information about people’s curriculum support and behavioural support needs, but there is very little evidence coming through about what career training they have had, so there is very little for us to build on. There is no platform to jump off and continue. So no, not necessarily. In my experience, and I have read a lot of them over the last few weeks, there are not a lot of career targets or aspirations built into EHCPs.
Ellen Atkinson: Many FE providers do consider employment as an option. In the last 10 years, we have had the opportunity to develop practice to progress young people into employment, but the system really was not supporting it. Gary is quite right: education, health and care plans do not have enough information about employment pathways or progression into employment for young people. We had employment grants from the DfE in 2015 and 2017, but they were not ring-fenced.
Through the Internships Work programme that we are currently working on, which is a DfE-funded programme for three years—from September 2022 until the end of March 2025—we are seeing a lot more focus on employment. We are encouraging the use of vocational profiles and thinking much earlier about work experience and employment as an outcome beyond education, and really understanding how a supported internship as a study programme can be tailored to individual needs. However, it depends on the FE providers. We are doing a lot of work at the moment on helping local authorities and FE providers to build up their provision and to think about their curriculum to include employment and pathways into employment.
I am hopeful that this Internships Work grant will make a difference to the practice that we are seeing, particularly as it is linked to supported internship quality assurance framework, which most local authorities and providers will buy into or will do self-assessments related to it.
Q123 Lord Laming: Thank you. That is a most helpful introduction to our discussion. I want to inquire about the preparation for work. We had evidence earlier from witnesses that indicated that the preparation for continuing in education seems very clear, whereas assessments for the preparation for employment are not full, as Ellen has just said, and the decision is made very early on, as Gary said. Do you think the decision about whether a child with a disability will be employable in future is made too early and on too little information?
Gary Hyndman: Again, that is a really interesting question. We have quite high success rates on our vocational programme. It is a more traditional route to employment. People will do level 1 and level 2 courses, and they will go on to supported internships.
We also have a lot of internal work-based learning. Careers is pretty much embedded throughout our curriculum, which we can do because we are a FE provider. We have lots of opportunities for people, and we can turn decisions around. Expectations are definitely an issue, but there are low expectations across the board from schools. Sometimes the students themselves will come in and have no idea where they would like to progress to, and do not feel that they have the skills to progress. We are quite successful in finding a pathway into employment for these people.
Ellen Atkinson: My background is supported employment, and my first job when I left university was as a job coach, as they are now called. I would say that aspiration is the thing that really makes a difference.
We see parents who have quite high aspirations for their young people, but the support is not there to encourage a young person to think about employment. Through the National Development Team for Inclusion and the Preparing for Adulthood programme, we developed lots of resources around good person-centred discovery meetings with young people to make sure that we understood what they aspired to and how we could get the right support in place.
However, it is fragmented. Parents need to know that the support is there so that they have confidence that, when a young person is moving into employment, any support will be substantial and consistent: if you have a supported internship in Newcastle, it will be the same in London.
We need to look at our processes and make sure that we are consistent in our approaches. If parents and young people have high aspirations, we need to be able to meet those expectations, and make sure that, when we are looking at the number of young people coming through, we have the provision to assist those who need extra support from a job coach to ensure that they are there and available.
One reason why we have not seen much of an increase in employment for young people with additional needs at the moment is the lack of job coaches. Through the British Association for Supported Employment’s Internships Work programme, our task was training 760 additional job coaches to be available for young people to go on to supported internships; making sure that we have the provision to meet the vision. Most young people can work if we figure out the right job and how to support them.
I have supported young people over the years in my time as a job coach. Young people who did not use words to communicate may not have been in a job with 37 hours a week, but they were able to do something that was work-related and meaningful to them. That is the sort of person-centred approach we really need to take.
David Holloway: Are decisions taken too early as to whether somebody can or cannot work? It is hard to generalise. Young people arrive at college at different stages of their own development, and sometimes learning disabilities in particular are referred to as developmental disabilities. That is often very accurate. Ellen is right in that part of the job of education is to support aspiration, and even to foster it where the young person has not really started to develop their aspirations themself. Ellen is also right in that even young people who do not necessarily have much spoken language can still move into meaningful activity that is economic and, in some sense, a job. Microenterprises can be very powerful in that respect. I do not think that decisions are taken too early, but colleges and other institutions do their best to try to develop those aspirations.
Q124 Lord Prentis of Leeds: Good afternoon, everybody. My question centres on the role of FE colleges but also on the Sense written evidence which refers in detail to the system having low aspirations, and whether that in itself is a barrier to young disabled people entering the world of work.
What are the main barriers to delivering high-quality courses that could lead to employment for young disabled people? Obviously that is directed at David to begin with.
David Holloway: Thank you. There are two parts to that question. One is the barriers to the courses being good-quality courses, and the other is whether those courses then lead to employment.
I would like to give separate answers to those two parts. The Committee will probably not be amazed to hear me say that one of the big barriers to developing those high-quality courses is the level of funding that FE colleges receive. We know that, in comparison to schools, FE colleges have had a lack of investment for years from a funding point of view. We can see that in the pay gap between college teachers and school teachers. The pay gap is now standing somewhere greater than £9,000 a year for a teacher’s salary. I have never been able to understand why that is: 17 year-olds are not easier to teach than 15 year-olds, and teaching somebody to do a profession is not easier than teaching them to do geography and history. There is no logical reason for that gap.
Last year, both school teachers and college teachers got substantial pay rises—we are very glad of that—and the percentage was almost identical. However, if you give two groups of people the same percentage increase, you widen the gap in absolute terms, and that is what happened. That gives us a practical difficulty in recruiting and retaining the right staff. It applies to teachers, but it also applies to support workers, classroom support workers, out-of-class support workers, and the job coaches Ellen mentioned earlier and who are vital in supporting students when they are learning work in the workplace.
That funding gap is a huge barrier, and I could go into more detail about it. VAT is another issue. Schools and colleges both pay VAT, which schools can reclaim but colleges cannot. So even when we are receiving the same funding, we are not getting the same use out of that funding. Again, it makes no sense: 16 to 18 year-olds are educated in schools and they can be educated in colleges, yet the funding deal is completely different. Despite that, colleges do a brilliant job in raising aspirations and having very high expectations for their students, but they are doing it on a shoestring and have terrible difficulty retaining staff.
The last time we surveyed colleges about the retention of support staff, we found that a huge number of our members had long-standing vacancies, vacancies for two or three months. If a student has it written in their EHCP that they need a certain level of support and yet we cannot hire the staff to give that support, we are placed in an impossible position. That is the biggest barrier.
There is then the problem of whether students who have been educated, developed skills, had work experience and learned the skills they need to work can actually get work. The labour market is literally a market: it has a supply side and a demand side. If we have a problem as severe and seemingly intractable as the disability employment gap, I do not think we can solve it by supply-side measures alone. In a way, FE colleges are a big supply-side measure. We are training up the next generation of employees, but in order to remove that disability employment gap we need something to happen on the demand side. We need employers to change their behaviour and be more willing to make reasonable adjustments to the selection process and to make adjustments to how work is divided between individuals in a workplace and how training takes place in the workplace.
We can solve the problem as a society, but I do not think we can expect education to do all the heavy lifting in preparing students for work unless employers can be persuaded to alter their behaviour.
Ellen Atkinson: FE is in a really difficult situation, as David has said, particularly with funding. It often gets young people who have never been asked about work before they attend college, which brings us to where we need to be encouraging collaboration between schools and colleges. That relationship has to be fostered, probably by local authorities, so that they can understand the pathway that a young person needs to progress on to. That takes us back to early planning, good-quality careers advice, and developing vocational profiles earlier so that when a young person gets to college, the college has an understanding of what that young person has tried and what work experience they have had.
We are not seeing work experience happening as a matter of course for many young people, particularly in special schools, although some special schools quite often do a really good job with work experience. Work also needs to be done with parents so that they understand that when a young person goes to college it is a different environment, it is a more adult environment, and they should be encouraged to be more independent. That has to start earlier too, especially in independent travel training, so that when a young person goes to college and out to work opportunities, they can travel independently.
We also need to think about why a young person is going to college and about the exit strategy, what we are planning with them, and why they are going to college. In the past, we have seen young people start a college course, finish that one, then start another one, then another one, and there is no progression. The majority of colleges would like to see young people attending a course, doing a course with purpose, and moving on into the next stage of their life.
The other element that David talked about is raising awareness among employers. We see big recruitment drives around apprenticeships but not a lot of recruitment drives by employers to employ a diverse workforce with people with disabilities. There is an employment gap. Currently, fewer than 5% of people with learning disabilities are in a paid job. The highest figure I have seen in the time I have worked with and for disabled people is 7.8%. That was back in 2008-09, and here we are now. I know we have had Covid, but we now have a bigger gap of fewer than 5% of people with a learning disability in paid employment. If you are on the autistic spectrum, if you want to call it that, the figure sits at around 16%, and if you have a disability under the Equalities Act it is around 50%. We have a high employment rate, and people with disabilities should be equally represented in the employment statistics, but they are not.
It is really a case of looking at how we encourage people to work together. It is not the responsibility of just one person, just FE, just schools, just employers; we need to look at how we encourage people to work together and understand what works.
Gary Hyndman: I would add something to what David said. Staffing is an issue. We are a small college. We have 115 to 120 learners, and we have just recruited two job coaches. We decided to have a dedicated careers team, so we have a careers lead and trained job coaches; we have a team of five of those.
We are a member of the National Association of Specialist Colleges. Lots of independent specialist colleges are much smaller than us and would not necessarily have the resources to have a dedicated team, and you need a dedicated team. Our team has built up a base of about 50 local employees that we work with, which allows us a whole range of vocational opportunities such as work placements, supported internships, and lots of routes into employment. Even with that—Ellen touched on this earlier—we find employment opportunities for the more able of our learners, but there is a cohort each year of about 40 people who are accessing work placements and who could find work but are not quite ready when they leave college. Employers just do not have the confidence to provide employment for this group of people. So there is definitely some work to be done on the more complex groups.
Q125 Lord Prentis of Leeds: I am not going to say that everything about FE is wrong, or that it needs reform; there are some really good examples of FE colleges and the work that they do. But young disabled people have also put it to us that some FE colleges are running courses devised by themselves and marked by themselves which are not subject to any external assessment and are not accepted by employers.
I understand all the points that David is making about FE—the cutback in expenditure and the way it has been treated over a number of years—but if we are looking at how we can improve access to work for young disabled people, FE is an area where education is paramount to get those courses run. Obviously, that would be in partnership with other organisations, but at the same time there is a lot of criticism about the standards being set by FE and whether those are a barrier.
David Holloway: I am surprised to hear you say that. I am certainly not aware of colleges attempting to issue their own unregulated qualifications, not least because there is a great range of regulated, approved qualifications that operate at all levels, from entry level 1 all the way up to level 6. I do not see why colleges would want to do that when there is no shortage of regulated qualifications to choose from.
In terms of the purposefulness of college provision, colleges are rightly very proud of destination-based planning. That is partly because we have high aspirations for students and because students tend to be with us only for a couple of years, so we are almost forced to think, ‘Well, what are we preparing this student for?’
People sometimes talk about college places, or having a place in a college, but really a college is a very brief phase in someone’s life; it is a journey rather than a place. Colleges carry out destination-based planning partly because it is what we believe in, but also, I have to admit, because we are accountable, particularly to Ofsted. The Further Education and Skills Handbook and the Education Inspection Framework are both very strong on special educational needs and disabilities, on provision being ambitious and aspirational, and on setting targets for students that are genuinely stretching.
If you want to see evidence of this, I would point you to hundreds of Ofsted reports on colleges up and down the country that say, ‘This provision is ambitious’, and, ‘This provision is succeeding’. On the few occasions when that is not true, the college is pulled up and obliged to change its ways. So we do have purposeful provision, and I am very surprised to hear what sounds like some very disappointing experiences that have been relayed to you.
Lord Prentis of Leeds: Not every FE college is like this. There are some excellent FE colleges, but if there is bad practice it can undermine the overall approach.
The Chair: It is worth sticking with this, because it is something we have been told a number of times. Given that you have a different point of view, it is worth trying to learn more. I will give you an example: a student might do a good vocational course for, say, six months, but then go on to do another. They might do catering, then administration, then gardening. It is not a career, there is no plan, such as, ‘I want to go into catering’. Yesterday, it was described to us by somebody as ‘a circus of activities’, like you do in school where you might do a term on each subject. That is the first issue, but we were also told that it is far less of an issue than it used to be.
The other thing is accreditation. If all the students are on accredited courses, they will all get reported in your results.
David Holloway: Yes.
The Chair: On the whole, not to the letter, are most children with disability featured in the results table that is published by the relevant authority at the end of the year? That would imply that they were doing an accredited course. There are two bits to that question, but does that make sense?
David Holloway: It makes sense as a question, but the answer is not straightforward. In colleges, we think of a student as doing a study programme, which will often consist of more than one qualification. Typically, there will be a core qualification, and some additionalities. For instance, a student may be doing, let us say, a level 2 BTEC in health and social care. They may also be doing maths and English on the side. On a results table, there would be three separate qualifications attached to that one study programme. There are also different ways of presenting that data, of course, because sometimes you would weight the qualification by hours to give more weight to the main element, and sometimes you would just count up literally every qualification.
At the lower levels—entry levels 1, 2 and 3—you can also claim course funding for what is called non-accredited learning. For adult learners, this is also called tailored learning, new terminology that has just arrived in the last 12 months as a matter of fact. The notion of non-accredited learning is that you can claim funding when someone is not pursuing a qualification within those hours. The purpose is that in those hours the student can be heading towards personal targets generally derived from the education, health and care plan.
So there is space for non-accredited learning, both in the funding system and in the method of reckoning up results. A lot of colleges strike a balance, so that students at particularly low levels may have some hours doing, say, entry 1 maths, entry 1 English, perhaps entry 2 catering, a couple of units there, and some hours for non-accredited learning.
There is a tension in education for students with education, health and care plans between the notion of a curriculum, which almost by its nature means that you have a whole class of people following the same programme of learning, and the idea of an EHCP, in which students have personalised goals. So there is always a tension between, ‘Are we following Khadija’s goals in her EHCP while also following the curriculum?’ Through the modest use of non-accredited learning hours, you can achieve both those things and satisfy that tension.
Whether the non-accredited learning hours are purposeful depends on the target setting, and this is one thing that Ofsted is particularly keen to investigate. When Ofsted visits a college, especially a college that has a lot of EHCP provision, it says, ‘What targets are you setting these students? Are they SMART, are they stretching, are they genuinely moving that student on, or are they too easy to achieve and therefore the student is in some ways not necessarily making progress?’ Ofsted is right to do that because such information reveals, in finer detail than the choice of qualifications, whether this programme, this whole course of learning, is purposeful and ambitious or falls short.
You are absolutely right that college provision is not universally good, and any analysis of Ofsted’s findings would show that. There are four grades, and sometimes the high-needs judgment could be ‘Requires improvement’, but when improvement is required, colleges do make those changes.
Ellen Atkinson: I would like to come in here. We have study programmes because they can be bespoke to a young person’s education, health and care plan. At one end of the scale, you might have young people with an education, health and care plan who are cognitively quite able and who can achieve qualifications. At the other end of the scale, you will have young people who will not achieve a qualification by standard measures, but by looking at levels within non-accredited learning they can achieve really well and be progressed nicely through the college course, whatever that looks like for them as an individual. They may then progress on to a supported internship.
The supported internship approach allows young people to have an outcome at the end of their college course, and that outcome is a paid job. There is not necessarily an accredited element of learning, and they may follow English and maths at whatever level is appropriate, but the approach for that study programme is for them to move into employment, rather than try to get qualifications that may be out of their reach. It is a way for them to achieve and progress into a meaningful life outcome beyond education.
Gary Hyndman: I agree with David and Ellen. When students say that colleges make up their own programmes, that might refer to study programmes and to unaccredited learning, but all that is covered by RARPA—Recognising and Recording Progress and Achievement—a quality assurance framework, and a big feature of specialist colleges’ curriculum, providing a common set of standards.
We take a very personalised approach to learning, and where qualifications are not the right educational route for a student we follow personal targets derived from the education, health and care plan. For instance, someone’s main focus may be independent living, experience of the workplace and moving them closer to the workplace, so provision will be about communication, mobility training, sensory awareness and all those sorts of things. When Ofsted visits a specialist provision, it will judge us against the RARPA framework, testing whether we are assessing students appropriately, whether we are setting good targets that move a person forward, and whether we have aspirational outcomes for the young person linked to their education, health and care plan.
Q126 The Chair: Presumably you report destination data. Do you do that when the students leave, or six months after, or when?
David Holloway: That is a really important question, and I am glad you asked that, because yes, we do. We report it through the ILR—the individualised learner record—which is the college equivalent to the school census, if you like, but it could be more useful if it were done differently. It provides a snapshot of what happens almost at the moment of departure. We would like more longitudinal data. We would like to know not just whether that student has moved into work, but whether they are still in work six months later. Are they in work three years later?
I wish I had an answer for the best way to collect that data. I think an agency would need to do it, but of course you would have the difficulty that people are perfectly entitled to say, ‘Go away. I’m not telling you what I’m doing’. So I do not know how we would obtain that data, but it would be a measure of success if we could.
Q127 Baroness Stedman-Scott: Just going back to that last question about whether people are still in work three or six or nine months later, when I was recording the destination and whether people were still in work, you could ask HMRC whether the individual was paying tax or NI, and that would give some indication of whether they were in work. You could also ask the DWP whether they were claiming benefits, and that would give you another indication. However, the best way I found was to set up a system of regular contact. If you contact people on their birthday and keep the relationship going, if they have fallen out of work you can pick them up—if you have the resources, of course. I hope that is a helpful point.
The question I would like to ask is: how far does the SEND and AP plan address the challenges that young disabled people face during the transition from education to work?
Ellen Atkinson: The SEND and AP improvement plan is definitely raising some inclusive practice and training issues. It is about preparing for adulthood, but within the SEND and AP plan it is also about raising aspirations and looking at appropriate provision. Some measures have been put in through the plan, one of which is the Internships Work programme, but considering how supported internships and the supported employment approach can work for all is also within the SEND and AP improvement plan.
We have a pilot at the moment where about 12 sites around the country are working with local authorities in respect of young people who do not have education, health and care plans and looking at supported employment approaches to help those young people. That will also reach out to young people from other disadvantaged groups, not just young people with SEND but maybe young people who are leaving care or who are disadvantaged in some other way.
The plan is addressing some better-planning issues and looking especially at how government departments work together and at how the DfE and the DWP can collaborate more effectively to make sure that we have more support available. It is trying to move us away from a medical model of disability to a social model of disability and to look at how things like adjustment passports can be used.
So there are lots of things within the SEND and AP improvement plan that are good, and it is also good to have conversations with employers about the support they might need from trained job coaches and how we make more job coaches available for the workforce in an employment setting. Ideally, we should have a pool of job coaches who sit within jobcentres and are funded by Access to Work through the DWP and who can then be called on when there is no supported employment organisation available. That is something we need to look at.
A separate part of this question is how work coaches within jobcentres are supporting pathways into employment. Jobcentres do not provide in-work support; it is all about signposting and sanctions and what benefits are available, rather than offering practical support. I do not know whether the Universal Support programme will make a difference, but there are lots of things in the improvement plan that could.
Baroness Stedman-Scott: Thank you. That is very helpful.
Gary Hyndman: I do not have much more to say that has not already been said. There is not a lot about transition, and the plan is very much focused on schools, so there is not much to comment on from a FE position. David might have a different view.
David Holloway: The SEND and alternative provision improvement plan is a good thing, and it is addressing many of the right issues. Its analysis of the problems in the system is, by and large, correct. In a lot of cases, some things that are proposed are correct. Whether those proposals would work depends on the detail, and the detail is not there yet. For example, there is a suggestion that every local authority area should produce a local inclusion dashboard measuring the effectiveness of its local SEND system. It is a good idea, but whether it would work would depend on the metrics used.
As Gary said earlier, students sometimes arrive with not very informative education, health and care plans that do not say a great deal about their future aspirations and destinations. There could be a way of measuring that. If EHCPs are to be digitised, you could measure at the year 9 annual review of the EHCP whether aspirational destinations are identified. It is quantifiable. If the EHCPs are to be digitised, you would have data on each local authority. You could say, ‘This local authority is doing very well, this one not so well’, in much the same way as the issuing of EHCPs is measured now, but we could apply the same logic to the upkeep and to the aspirational quality of EHCPs. Something like those dashboards is a good idea in itself, but it requires the detail to be right in order for it to address some of the problems that we are talking about here. What is missing is the detail.
It is right that these reforms are being piloted in a variety of areas—there are nine SEND change programme areas—and that is a sensible approach. Some lessons of 2014 have been learned, because there was a widespread feeling in the SEND system in 2014 that it was good legislation badly implemented.
In this case the approach has been to try out the reforms first, to pilot them, to learn some detail from these quite varied areas, and to legislate last, whereas in 2014 the legislation came first and the implementation second. So there is a lot of wisdom in that approach.
However, as I have already mentioned, what is missing from the improvement plan is the issue of funding, other than high-needs funding, and the issue of employer behaviour and labour demand-side measures. At the centre of the improvement plan is this notion that there should be national standards for what students with disabilities can expect to receive in education, but it is illogical to have national standards of delivery without nationally consistent funding.
One example is the notional SEN budget that each school has for students with SEND who have no EHCP and high needs. It is indicative, it is not completely ring-fenced, but the school knows how much they have to spend on those students. In colleges, there is no equivalent to that. We are in the dark. There is something called the disadvantage fund, but that covers so many different things. It is calculated on the basis of postcode disadvantage and English and maths results and is just included in that college’s allocation of 16 to 18 funding. We did some analysis of this at AoC and worked out how much each college gets and how many students they have with SEND but without high needs. The amount per head varied from less than £1,000 to about £5,000. There was no relationship between the funding and the need.
Having national standards of delivery when the funding mechanism is so different pre- and post-16 does not make a lot of sense. It is the larger things like employer behaviour and funding mechanisms that need to be included in the SEND plan in order for it to succeed.
The Chair: I take that point. On the guidance on transitioning from education and on the substance of the metrics, are you aware that the Government are consulting? The guidance is a few months late, because it should have been out already. Is that right?
David Holloway: Are you talking about the dashboards?
The Chair: No, I was talking about the guidance on transitioning from education to employment. I thought I read somewhere that it was due out at the end of last year. Have I got that wrong?
David Holloway: My understanding was that the guidance on transition will be part of the plan, but it was not one of the early parts that was supposed to be in 2023.
The Chair: It did not have a time limit.
David Holloway: There was a road map published at the same time as the plan in March 2023, which set out times for some things, including the dashboards and digitisation, but not transition guides.
The Chair: So it is not late.
Q128 Lord Carter of Coles: Good afternoon. My question is on the recent changes to the curriculum and assessment processes, particularly how that might affect the changes of transitioning into work. Do you think these are making it easier, or is it too early to tell? Lord Shipley may like to come in on T-levels as part of this, and perhaps you would like to kick off, Gary, because you are a practitioner and possibly closest to it.
Gary Hyndman: For the specialist sector and for our college, when changes to the qualifications are introduced we usually take an intake of breath, because in our experience they usually mean that they will restrict our young people’s access to qualifications. For our college, and within the specialist sector particularly, there is some concern about BTECs being squeezed and scaled back because they have been proven to be a good pathway and a springboard into employment for people with additional needs, so that is a shame. We and other specialist colleges are not yet quite as confident that we will have the same access to T-levels, or that they will be as beneficial to our young people.
That is people at the top end, but we are also experiencing that many of the qualifications that would be a springboard into employment seem to be the ones that the Government deem of low value and cut quite quickly, or the awarding bodies themselves have low take-up and they are dropped, and we lose access to those. When we are looking at getting disabled people into employment—we work with the more complex people with disability and additional needs—it would be really useful to think of more creative qualifications and ways into employment, not just focusing on English and maths. Although these subjects are really important and are taught to all our students, they need to be appropriate to the individual and to the workplace and specific jobs. I am not sure we get that right.
Lord Carter of Coles: Thank you. Ellen?
Ellen Atkinson: Qualifications can sometimes be quite exclusive for young people with additional needs. Some young people with additional needs can achieve T-levels, A-levels and GCSEs, but often they do not gain qualifications, so the shift towards exam-focused assessment could mean that they are excluded more. The supported employment or supported internship model allows young people to go into the workplace and show employers what they can achieve with the right support. That is without qualifications but following good English and maths at an appropriate level. It is really about looking at the appropriate pathway for that individual, and it should be identified early enough so that they can be prepared. If it is a T-level, or elements of a T-level, fair enough, but if it is not, it should be whatever pathway is identified for them as appropriate and can lead them beyond education into paid work.
Lord Carter of Coles: Thank you. That is very clear. David?
David Holloway: I completely agree with what Ellen and Gary have said. T-levels are a very good thing for the students who can access them. The emphasis on work experience, the greater amount of work experience within the course, the greater number of hours altogether per year, the parity of esteem between vocational and academic learning that is implied are all very good for those students.
Gary was absolutely right to mention English and Maths. Just over 60% of students aged 16 get a grade 4 in English and maths: they are literate, they are numerate, they are set up and have the golden ticket, if you like. However, that leaves 40% of students who do not have both English and maths; some have neither, some have just the one. It is those students who need curriculum reform the most. We have made an error in producing new qualifications for the students who need new qualifications the least.
From the point of view of students with disabilities who are in that 40%, T-levels in many cases are not accessible. Ellen has mentioned the higher exam load, the higher assessment load and the shift towards more exams as part of the assessment method. All these things make it very difficult for students to progress. At the moment, we have 60,000 students on level 3 vocational qualifications who do not have that golden ticket of English and maths.
The question arising then for the equivalent cohort in two years’ time is: what will exist in the exam system for them? Some students may be ready to work, and that is fine, but many of them would rather progress to a higher level and would get better jobs and contribute more economically if they could. It is dangerous to have such a large volume of people for whom we are simply not providing the education they need. These are the students without the golden ticket, and students with disabilities are overrepresented in that group. They are not all disabled by any means, but students who are disabled are over-represented there and will miss out if other qualifications are defunded too hastily.
Q129 Lord Shipley: I found what you have said about T-levels so far very useful, but can I press you on the work placement element? Twenty per cent of T-levels are based on a place of employment. What evidence is there that young disabled people can get access to T-levels, given the employment requirement?
Could you also talk about the BTEC issue and the defunding of qualifications, which has worried a lot of people? Is there any sign that young disabled people might get better benefit from a change of decision about that defunding? I would draw your attention to written evidence that we have received from Newfriars College claiming that: ‘The way that qualifications are assessed can be a barrier for young people with SEND however they can still develop the day-to-day skills and knowledge to be successful in employment. Assessment using practical/observational assessed methods are more inclusive than written assessments’. It is really about trying to establish a level playing field for young disabled people. I am just trying to get better knowledge of what you think the sense of direction now is.
Gary Hyndman: Assessment is something that a lot of our students will struggle with. We have good access to work-based placements, and I am sure we could make that work. Our students would, and do, progress really well with a qualification that relies on the appropriate levels of English and maths being studied, work-based learning with observations and assessment taking place in real time and in real settings. We are right next door to Loughborough College and work quite closely with it. Some students do a hybrid programme between us and Loughborough College. They will do some vocational qualifications with Loughborough College, but we support the work placements because we have work coaches who have experience in working with young people with additional and special education needs, so it works quite well. But if those young people fail courses, they tend to struggle, and they fail on the written and assessed elements of the course.
Ellen Atkinson: I agree with Gary. Young people could probably do the practical element of a T-level, but the assessment level is beyond their reach in many cases. BTEC gave young people an opportunity to come in at quite a low entry level, whereas T-levels require a higher entry level. I feel that some consideration should be given to the loss of BTEC, because that gave young people with additional needs more opportunity to achieve at various levels.
The Chair: I sense there is probably an agreement on the BTECs, but part of the question was whether you sense any change of mind.
David Holloway: Certainly the day before yesterday the T-level in hair, barbering and beauty, which was due to begin delivery in September, has been indefinitely postponed.
The Chair: That is interesting.
David Holloway: Our view is that that is the right decision, but it has been taken far too close to the point where courses were going to begin. Colleges were already in the process of enrolling students and employing staff, and of course these are practical subjects which you need practical facilities for. So taking a decision seven months before a course is due to start is not great for people trying to run a college, or for students who are intending to enrol on those courses. Whether that indicates more general willingness to take things perhaps at a more measured timescale, I do not know.
Q130 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Thank you. First, my apologies for joining you late. I particularly wanted to be at this session. I want to ask you something that gets glossed over very quickly. You mentioned that 40% of young people will not have the relevant English and maths qualification in order to access level 3 and in many cases not even level 2 maths and English. They are fundamental to youngsters with disabilities of whatever sort in gaining access to employment and, in further education, to the sorts of courses required in order to meet employers’ needs.
This week I have been looking for, and failed to find anywhere, any attempts there may have been to redesign the English and maths in order to make it much more applicable certainly to these youngsters but also to the vast array of youngsters who do not necessarily have special needs but who fail miserably in English and mathematics. Our Chair, when she was Secretary of State for Education, introduced the numeracy hour at an early stage, which made a fundamental difference to the way in which maths was treated in primary schools. I do not see that at FE level at all. It is very much a case of saying, ‘Well, that was the job of schools, so it’s not part of our responsibilities’.
I just wondered whether in a specialist college, Gary, you have dealt with that question, and what advice you could give the Committee to say, ‘These are issues that should be made compulsory in any future government policy’.
Gary Hyndman: We have a fairly small teaching team, but we have a dedicated teacher for English and a dedicated teacher for maths, and they must have had the hardest jobs on our staff, pretty much, over the last five or six years. A number of our students would be exempted from following English and maths because they are pre-entry levels, and it is really about developing communication skills, so qualifications would not be the most useful way forward for those guys. But there were a number of stepping-stone qualifications, and there was access to functional skills qualifications, which just keep getting reduced.
We have good English and maths teachers here. Lots of people work on personalised English and maths targets, which are English and maths targets that are important for them, linked to education and healthcare plan targets. We find ourselves scrimping around for qualifications. At the moment, we use a lot of National Open College Network English and maths courses at entry levels, but it is difficult. Students want to be following qualifications and want some accreditation for the English and maths skills that they are developing. It can be quite dispiriting for those guys to hear that employers do not recognise them, that they are deemed not valuable and not good-level or high-quality qualifications. It is hard to find the appropriate qualifications, and it definitely needs to be focused on. There needs to be more access to qualifications.
Q131 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: I have spoken to a number of universities over the last week on another issue that I raised to see whether there was any research going on in these particular areas. I found that there is virtually nothing going on, and so nothing will improve until we can make some sort of radical change. In other countries—Germany, for instance—you will find it very different and very much tied up with employment issues. I just would like some advice as to what we as a Committee should be advising Government to do.
Gary Hyndman: It needs almost turning on its head and come back into specialist provision. What is working and what works well? The young people who come through our college develop maths and English skills, and their communication and their ability to solve problems using maths improves, but they do that through a range of meaningful activities and through vocational experiences. We have a café, a shop and an eBay shop. People are learning these skills all day, every day, but they would not necessarily be doing them in a way that could be assessed in a structured GCSE-type approach. We can set challenging and aspirational targets and we can evidence progression in English and maths, but at the moment the framework does not sit for a qualification to apply that to.
David Holloway: I thoroughly agree that these fundamental subjects should be compulsory for students in further education, and happily they are. There is a device called the condition of funding, which is that if a student does not have grade 4 in either of those subjects, they must study that subject until they achieve that grade or its equivalent. If they do not do that, no funding at all can be claimed for that student. That is something we thoroughly support, because these subjects are the gateway not only to work and further study but to living a rich, full life as an adult.
You are absolutely right, though, that the qualifications themselves, both at college age and at key stage 4, need to be reviewed, because if 40% of students are not passing that subject, something is going wrong.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Yes, spot on.
David Holloway: There have been various views on what a better way of learning and accrediting maths and English might look like. I would point you towards a Nuffield project in 2020, I think, where they developed an alternative course, like a GCSE but slightly more modular, which gives slightly more latitude for doing small projects that could be related to the student’s vocational studies. That works well at college: if a student is studying bricklaying, it would be nice if they could study maths in such a way that they could see the relationship to their trade.
I am not saying that this particular Nuffield project is the perfect solution, and I am sure there are others, but it is a good one, and I am happy to share the details with the Committee, because Nuffield worked it out in the kind of detail that an awarding body would need if it was going to run it. We would simply like to see more options.
Going back to T-levels, the whole problem of access to level 3 courses is the problem of the students’ pathway. If we want to solve that problem at level 3, we need to look at level 2, at key stage 4 and maths and English. If anything, maths and English are the part of the qualification system that needs to be reformed most urgently.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Thank you very much.
The Chair: Ellen, I do not think you have spoken on this. Do you want to come in on this very important issue of English and maths?
Ellen Atkinson: I do not think I can add anything, apart from the fact that we need to look at the appropriateness of the level of English and maths in relation to the individual. Quite often, English and maths at a higher level are not needed for a young person to enter employment.
If you look at how we support young people into employment through the supported employment model, you are looking at working interviews and young people demonstrating what they can do. It is not based on qualifications or English and maths, unless it is needed for that particular employment setting. We need to look at the appropriateness of English and maths in relation to someone negotiating and navigating their way through life and employment.
The Chair: Thank you for staying later than we asked. This has been really interesting and has given us a lot of information and helped us to piece together the bits of a very complicated jigsaw. If you could send us the research that you just mentioned, and if anyone else has any other evidence about the things we have discussed that you think might be useful, or anything that you feel you have not had the chance to say, please do send it to us. It can be admitted as evidence.
You will receive a transcript of this hearing, which you will just have a chance to look through and make any corrections that you want to. Other than that, I am very grateful to all three of you for the time and for the expertise that you have brought to us today. Thank you.
