Like the average teacher I’m very cringey and late to meme culture – forget your ‘girl math’ or ‘boy math’, we are instead going discuss ‘FE math’. Specifically funding for maths and English within the sector. What I will talk about here has zero bearing on my day job, I’m not in a position of responsibility of having to worry about these things directly, however I am passionate about the sector and what high quality offers colleges can provide young people from across the vocational, technical and academic spectrum – and I feel when looking at difficulties of school teaching and funding, FE is often overlooked entirely.
Maths and English from 2024
Late last year, following the announcement of the Advanced British Standard (which has a proposed mandatory maths and English component for all students) the government indicated that elements of funding were to be put towards short term improvements in maths and English between 2024-26, a figure of £600m being pushed across the media (a figure I will discuss later).
However, on the 13th of February they retrospectively added significant caveats to both this specific maths/English funding, but also general study programme funding, without consultation or deliberation with the sector. From 2024 there is going to minimum requirements for students on a study programme without GCSE Maths or English at grade 4 to study;
- 4 hours of Maths per week
- 3 hours of English per week
The tolerance of an acceptable number of students who can be beneath proposed learning hours is to be phased out as well, which has the potential to have a huge detrimental effect on college budgets, but to avoid talking about too much I won’t talk about this here.
I will say I am in support of the policy of studying Maths/English introduced in 2014, we live in a time where having those GCSE or equivalent qualifications can open a lot of doors for young people (and for future retraining), and prior to this policy functional skills streaming of students was often done in an inappropriate way, such that students weren’t actually progressing in skills. However I do feel greater flexibility in pathway should be allowed and encouraged, not a simple ‘streamed’ system based on 3/not 3 at GCSE. The implementation is always going to be a challenge regarding engagement – it’s not what they ‘signed up for’, particularly in vocational areas.
For the GCSE resit provision the minimum hours, at least on the surface, aren’t a significant change. I suspect most institutions will be running at 3 hours per week, or close, for those students. However, there being no distinction between GCSE and Functional Skills is definitely a conundrum. FS timetabling varies significantly from experience, I’ve heard of 2.5 hours a fortnight to 2 hours a week – but never 3 (and 4) hours for general student populace. The Guided Learning Hours on the recent Pearson reform specification is 55 hours across all levels!
David Hughes, the chief executive of the Association of Colleges lays out that in order to satisfy this demand FE colleges will need approximately 800 additional maths teachers and 400 English teachers for the increase in hours alone, all before fixing current staff vacancies. This is approximately 4 maths staff and 2 English staff per institution that need to be found to satisfy this increase in hours by this coming September. There is a huge shortage of staff, particularly maths at all levels of education, but looking at FE, the pay and conditions are far from attractive given the alternatives available to eligible staff elsewhere – https://www.aoc.co.uk/news-campaigns-parliament/aoc-newsroom/government-funding-condition-for-english-and-maths-unworkable-says-aoc.
Money, Money, Money
There’s money though – £600m ring fenced for the next two years – however all isn’t as it seems. This Maths/English funding is merely a rebranding/reshuffling of the ‘Level 3 programme maths and English payment’ which was introduced in 2020. It is to be extended beyond students on L3 programmes, which is positive, but it’s not a substantial overhaul of the system, it’s not £600m of NEW money.
Funding in the sector has been an issue for over a decade. A 2019 Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis shows that between 2010 and 2019 the real-terms spending per student in Further Education fell by 12% during that period. Budgets were squeezed further with the demand for growing study programmes to encompass Maths and English resits in 2014, following the 2011 Wolf Report, where condition of funding was tied to those with GCSE Maths grade C/4 to pursue towards those or equivalent Functional Skills qualifications (if an E/2 or below).
This required significant new expertise to be brought into the sector – more maths and English staff with GCSE expertise, resourcing, logistical and timetabling issues for colleges to work with – often having to extend contact hours. An uplift in funding to do this was essentially non-existent, instead the feeling funding for a students main programme of study (e.g. plumbing, health and social care, computing) was instead held to ransom to make sure this provision was provided instead.
Only post pandemic did a specific funding scheme get allocated towards supporting Maths and English, the aforementioned funding for students on significant level 3 qualification without a 4 or above in maths and/or English allowed for a £375 uplift per subject, per potential year of study for their main study programme. This developed on top of a stream of disadvantaged funding that had sat at about £480 for each student without a GCSE Maths/English grade 4, funding that had remained stagnant through the decade, but has subsequently had an increase as well, although has most definitely not caught up with inflation increases through the time period.
In 2020-21 the base payment for a student was £4188, the proposed funding for next year is £4843. Accounting for inflation from 2020 and projections, institutions are going to be roughly £200 per student worse off in real-terms than 2020 for these base figures. We are not seeing new or more money, simply shuffling of things around, and whilst a large number of Colleges have been able to ‘FE Math’ their way out of things for the last 10 years, it’s hard to see how that can continue.
The State of FE
Whilst colleges have always been enterprises involved in diverse community and business projects with adult focussed training, I still however think for those not in the sector (and arguably some who actually are and don’t look beyond classroom level) it would come as a surprise that we’ve reached a point where a traditional model based on 16-19 learners is legitimately not a sustainable business model for the significant majority of colleges.
For the school teachers who have made it this far, I want you to truly think about that for a second. I know schools have huge budget concerns as well, but imagine that your school essentially has to develop a variety of ‘side hustles’, diversifications and business partnership delivery in order to survive – then the core purpose of the institution begins to blur. Yes this has always been a purpose of colleges, working on local economic needs, but effectively these are the contracts and relationships that are keeping the sector afloat.
In part due to the financial constraints, the sector is not attractive for recruitment and retention of staff. At a recent AoC governance event it was shared that the 10-year retention rate for staff in FE is only approximately 25%, the comparative measure for secondary schools is 60%. 3 out of every 4 teaching staff in FE leave in 10 years. How is that sustainable? Even if you factor in ‘teach out’ schemes within trades, it’s still an outrageous figure.
You can see why though. Pay has fallen dramatically in comparison to schools in the last decade, such that the AoC puts it as a £9,000 discrepancy currently, on average. Despite being back under the public sector, there is no collective bargaining for workers – there’s no universal strike action and pay recommendations aren’t from the same advisory body. Instead the AoC makes recommendations (which can be seen in the table below), colleges are under no obligation to see these put in place – in fact 60% of institutions failed to adhere to these, even before the 6.5% uplift proposed in 2023. Elsewhere pay has fallen dramatically behind certain trades as well, such that it’s no longer an attractive option and teachers have returned to industry.
With this in mind, how are colleges expected to legitimately recruit the staff needed to implement this policy, in this short notice? There’s a maths teacher recruitment crisis across all levels. How are we going to recruit appropriate staff with pay offers £9,000 beneath competitors in the education sector?
What is the policy trying to do?
The argument put forth is that this is required in order to boost maths and English performance. On the surface this makes sense, looking at the figures the GCSE resit grade 4 rate has really not recovered since COVID-19, and even then breaking 1 in 4 ‘passing Grades’ in Mathematics is a high point. There are issues with the reformed Functional Skills which centres have voiced, but this has also coincided with much weaker level 2 performance as well.
This has led to some centres switching more learners to GCSE, where successful achievement is measured as a grade 1 in college performance measures, whereas a Functional Skills qualification is simply pass/fail, with only the pass leading to successful achievement. Interestingly I can see this new policy incentivising college leaders, well those less scrupulous at least, to pursue this more. Struggling to recruit staff to successfully aid progress in young people, the system encourages GCSE classes to be piled high to compensate, with the hope that the overwhelming majority will get a grade 1, and thus are positive within key performance measures. The systems in place potentially de-incentivising colleges from pursuing actual progress in the development of young people’s Maths and English.
The sector is also plagued with significant barriers often stemming from the pandemic; lost learning, changing of values in learners, and significant student mental health challenges. During a recent University College London roundtable event, the following graph was shared, showing year12+/age 16+ persistent absence has increased to a level where above 30% of the cohort nationally were persistently absent in 2022-2023 (double the value in 2019), and anecdotally this only seems to be getting worse, even discussing with colleagues in school based sixth forms.
Is adding additional Maths and English hours going to be what entices young people back into college? It’s another barrier to young people engaging in meaningful education. One that also brings a logistical nightmare to colleges, who need to find rooms, timetable space etc for all of this. The ultimate conclusion coming from the chief executive of the AoC that it will likely mean that the students requiring maths/English will have their main programme hours cut to facilitate this, when arguably these are the students with lower prior attainment who often need the highest level of support on their main programme.
The funding stream for the additional hour in maths also comes from previously ring fenced funds – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/16-to-19-funding-additional-hours-in-study-programmes/16-to-19-funding-additional-hours-in-study-programmes-for-2023-to-2024 – however maths was only a small component of what this money was originally for, where it also had fewer restrictions being able to be used for wider support and resourcing beyond traditional classroom teaching. However, this was also funding for additional main programme catch-up and to develop wellbeing services and mental health support programmes for students.
The small amount of this funding that colleges were able to put towards mental health, wellbeing, attendance, enrichment and counselling services – the bevy of support to help young people engage in education, are all going to cut, or at least have money reclaimed from elsewhere. It’s also worth pointing out that this funding stream closes, it isn’t in perpetuity. But the paradox of a government vowing to get young people to engage in education and wishing to improve outcomes, whilst redirecting money they had ring fenced for the services that support is inescapable.
It’s another paradox like we have ‘Skills’ based education. ‘Skills’ has been front and centre of Governmental messaging around post 16 education for the last few years. Ofsted framework for FE now includes specific inspectors for a skills judgement and they have been at loggerheads with the university sector, pushing FE/apprenticeships to be viewed as parity and a true alternative. How does this stack up with that idea? They care about trades, technical skills and vocations – but only when it’s to deflect from something else. Are you truly valuing technical education if you are willing to put a student in a position where the technical education they have chosen to pursue is essentially going to become just over half of their timetabled hours? And you are threatening the institutions providing this education with slashed budgets for not being able to magically conjure teachers out of thin air.
Where is the plan?
I admit I have a few common refrains and tropes I seem to weave into a lot in these types of posts; FE pay, encouraging social mobility, the idea of ‘playing politics’ and one that really sticks with me about a
how successive Governments have essentially been able to reposition themselves as the ‘customer’ of the education sector, not the provider – all stemming from this amazing journal here – https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2023.2193066
It’s led to situations like this, where there is literally zero plan at all for this. How can this even possibly be done? The government does not know, they don’t care, they’ve said this is what will happen, it’s not their problem now, but it SHOULD BE! There is literally zero suggestion or support or indication of how on earth to make this policy possible. It’s actually insane!
It’s a policy equivalent of 1989’s “Field of Dreams” – starring Kevin Costner.
Well, how about a suggestion then ranty-man?
I do sometimes feel a bit bad with these posts. I will critique, but don’t really look to solve the issue. Then again, who on earth am I to actually think of anything to solve the problem? However, I do have one thought of a longer term provision to develop FE Maths and English teaching, it’s based on nothing but intuition, no market research or reaching out, but hey, it’s an idea.
We are arriving at a time where the peak primary school numbers are transitioning through the school system, leading to potential ‘surplus’ of staff within the primary system. These are primary teachers with content expertise that would suit well particularly to the lower levels of Functional Skills. The challenge is dramatically different, and a lot would need to be done to convince teachers to take up the challenge – but as a government I’d be proposing a programme to retrain and transition maths and English focussed staff from primary to FE. If pay can be brought to parity, there are potential perks to the sector for some, such as potential for higher flexibility in working pattern, which some may seen as a positive.
This is not an immediate fix, and would be a hard sell, as the learners are dramatically different – but thought I’d at least finish with an idea!