The Ofsted reports that raise questions about the wider tertiary system

A private college that describes itself as a “well-established, and award-winning, independent higher education provider” – and which is on the Office for Students’ register – was found by Ofsted inspectors to have too many trainee teachers who “complete their teaching in restaurants and other business organisations” rather than appropriate educational settings.

A different private college – one that in its HE provision went from 460 first degree students in 2021–22 to 5,700 in 2022–23, according to OfS size and shape data – was inspected by Ofsted in January 2023. Staff were found to “draw on outdated educational theories”, have a “very simplistic awareness” of the professional standards of the sector they are training students to work in, and “not provide feedback about the knowledge and skills that trainees need to improve.”

The teacher training offer of another private provider inspected earlier this year – which received silver overall in the most recent Teaching Excellence Framework – was adjudged to “not provide trainees with a broad or ambitious curriculum” and “not ensure that trainees learn enough about how to teach their subject.” It was required to “urgently improve what trainees are taught about safeguarding.”

Now the issue here is that all these inspections relate not to undergraduate or postgraduate teacher training – or apprenticeships, or schools, or other areas where Ofsted operates – but to further education and skills initial teacher education (FES ITE).

But surely it’s a clear cause for concern that pockets of manifestly inadequate provision in one area – to use Ofsted’s judgement – do not have an obvious way to translate to attention from quality and regulatory systems in others, when the institutions are the same?

Overall, the findings of Ofsted’s inspections of five private colleges over the last couple of years were summarised thus:

Trainees on these courses were not being prepared for their teaching careers. These providers were wasting trainees’ time, draining public money, and failing to build the pipeline of FE and skills teachers that the sector needs.

All of these private colleges are on the OfS register, and four offer undergraduate degrees in partnership with established English universities. You wonder to what extent activity in other parts of the tertiary space reaches the attention of both England’s higher education regulator and those partnering institutions – and how it informs the decision-making of both. It certainly feels like it should.

Skills in England

When these inspections were commissioned the FES ITE sector was essentially unregulated – a symptom of its important but largely ignored role preparing teachers for the perennially overlooked further education sector. But it does receive government funding, and (aware that something was awry, you’d imagine) the Department for Education (DfE) commissioned Ofsted to take a look at a small number of providers not previously known to them.

Ofsted’s annual report for 2022–23 said it was “deeply concerned” about teacher training at the two providers it had seen in that period. The commission from DfE continued into 2023–24, and the overall findings quoted above snuck out in the Big Listen response, hidden away among the inspectorate’s attempts to reset its terrible relationship with schools.

The five inspected providers all used a direct delivery model for level 5 FE teacher training diplomas – “off-the-shelf” qualifications designed and awarded by organisations such as City and Guilds or Pearson.

At the same time as the inspections, over the last academic year DfE ripped up the rulebook for further education ITE, drawing on the findings of Ofsted’s annual report and generally with the support of the wider colleges sector, so that from this academic year only trainees at English higher education providers with degree awarding powers, or their validated partners (including FE colleges), are eligible to receive student support funding for FE ITE courses.

So all five of these private colleges are basically no longer able to offer new standalone FE teacher training diplomas, and from looking at their websites they all seem to have stopped taking on new enrolments.

So: regulation in action, right? Well, perhaps – but the fact remains that these providers are still active in other areas of the tertiary space, and it’s not clear how concerns in one translate to regulation, or even awareness, in others.

Getting in and getting on

The Ofsted assessments are not just a curio in a long-neglected part of the sector (one that Ofsted has been finding fault with for more than 20 years, in fact). Rather they speak to a lack of join-up in quality systems across tertiary and – funnily enough – the inspection reports have interesting parallels with those reported to OfS regarding franchising, as seen in the insight brief it published the same day as the Big Listen response.

There’s no suggestion that any of these private colleges are the subject of Office for Students regulatory action or scrutiny for their HE provision – indeed the emphasis in the higher education sector, in particular in the Public Accounts Committee inquiry, has been on providers who are not on the OfS register and in some cases had been refused registration.

The five colleges were all rated “inadequate” in every area by Ofsted (one was reinspected with the same result, though lots of issues had improved, and students numbers had fallen), but some are more egregious than others. Throughout the reports there are issues with lack of safeguarding training, unambitious curricula, problems in arranging placements, and relevance of course content to the FE sector.

But in many of them there is a clear concern over recruitment and admissions, in ways that are similar to the questions of mis-selling raised in conjunction with HE franchising. Here are some examples, from three of the colleges which currently deliver degrees in partnership with English universities (again, there is no evidence here to suggest this type of practice is happening in these providers’ HE recruitment):

Leaders and managers do not do enough to check the suitability of trainees for an ITE programme. They do not question the prior qualifications that the trainee has or whether the trainee has achieved sufficient levels in English and mathematics. In addition, leaders do not arrange for trainees to complete Disclosure and Barring Service checks before joining the programme or starting their placement. Therefore, they can not be certain that trainees have the appropriate qualifications or are cleared to work with young people in the FES sector.

They incorrectly recruit trainees who want to teach in schools onto the Diploma in Education Training (DET) programme, which is designed for those wanting to teach in the further education and skills (FES) sector [though when this provider was reinspected a year later this had ceased to be a concern].

Leaders do not recruit trainees with integrity. They do not check whether trainees are suitable to work in a teaching role or whether the trainees are able to meet the academic requirements of the DET programme.

There are also problems raised concerning paperwork:

The teaching logs that trainees produce do not evidence 100 hours of practical teaching to groups of learners in a relevant FES setting.

Quality of feedback:

The observations of trainees in the workplace are isolated events that lack coherence, and trainees receive only minimal comments about the quality of their teaching.

Course design:

Trainees need to complete an assignment that requires them to reflect on their practical teaching before most have started their placement.

And programme evaluation:

Leaders do not routinely collect or monitor data about the progress that trainees make to ensure and assure themselves of the suitability or quality of the curriculum. For example, leaders do not know enough about the number of trainees without placements or what trainees go on to do after finishing the DET programme.

Again, not all the inspection reports contain all the same issues, but clearly Ofsted felt comfortable in coming to an overall judgement of “draining public money” on the provision it saw. Student numbers were typically between 50 and 150 at time of inspection, though one had almost 1200. While information on these courses has largely been removed from providers’ websites, in one example we can see that the course had a tuition fee of £7000.

Not so integrated

It’s worth stressing once again that these are teacher training diploma courses, not degrees – and the previous government (for once!) successfully changed rules to remove what it viewed as low quality provision.

But at the very least it’s a worrying oddity that, for example, a private provider can display a TEF silver award on its website – gold for student experience! – while Ofsted has been finding serious flaws in its (separate) FE teacher training. This has been a curio of the Office for Students’ ongoing quality inspections as well, where certain providers with excellent TEF results have at the same time been found to be demonstrably falling short in certain subject areas (and ones with large numbers of students).

Quality enthusiasts and regulatory optimists might see a possible opportunity from the more joined-up tertiary system in England that seems to be Labour’s aspiration. Better coherence of qualification provision and a regulatory read-across could be possible, though the work involved in getting there from where we are now should not be underestimated. Scotland, after all, now has the beginnings of a harmonised quality assessment regime across FE and HE – but there is a stark difference from England in the role of private provision in the system.

The fact remains, it’s a rum old state of affairs to have one arm of DfE and its associated regulatory body say that a set of institutions are “draining public money” and then change the rules to freeze them out of the system, while another branch has been endorsing the same institutions’ quality set-ups and enabling their access to the student loan book.