Martyn Oliver at the AoC conference: working together to shape the future skills system
Sir Martyn Oliver, Ofsted's Chief Inspector, spoke at the 2024 annual conference of the Association of Colleges (AoC) in Birmingham.
Introduction
Hello and thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.
It’s great to be here with you. And let me just start by saying thank you to David, and everyone at the AoC, for all the work you do to support colleges and their students.
I would also like to thank David for the numerous meetings we have had since I started in role, and I hope that we continue to work together in the coming months and years.
Thank you also to Minister Smith, who you’ve just heard from.
It’s really encouraging to hear about the government’s commitment to further education (FE) and skills.
And we will look forward to working with the government to ensure that the further education system works for all learners.
I was particularly pleased to hear about the government’s plans for Skills England – and I’m looking forward to seeing those plans develop.
The FES sector and its impact
Since taking up this post 11 months ago, I’ve been struck by the sheer scale and diversity of the FE and skills sector.
As well as colleges, Ofsted inspects provision ranging from ballet schools and football academies, to degree-level professional apprenticeships, Ministry of Defence training establishments, and education in prisons and youth offender institutions.
But, across all our varieties, the sector underpins employment and growth.
During my career as a head teacher and leader of a Muti-Academy Trust I worked alongside FE and skills providers, and I appreciate the real world impact the sector has in developing learners’ career pathways, meeting local skills needs and boosting productivity.
As you know, in September 2022 we made some changes to our handbook that introduced a new sub-judgement for colleges on how well you are contributing to meeting skills needs.
Of the 152 enhanced inspections we have done over the last two years, 94% of colleges have been found to be making a reasonable or strong contribution to skills needs.
Which is a reflection of the important and effective work that colleges do to support our regional and national economies.
The government has now made growth a national mission as it aims to deliver a decade of national renewal.
An FE and skills system that continues to develop the right skills and opportunities will be crucial in achieving this.
And for the FE and skills sector to improve, Ofsted needs to improve too.
Single word judgements and changing the framework
I know a lot of you responded to our Big Listen earlier this year and I want to thank you for that.
It was Ofsted’s largest ever consultation and hopefully you have already heard about the changes we are making as a result.
One of those changes concerned single word judgements.
I understand that many of you may be puzzled or frustrated by the fact that we have removed the overall effectiveness grade for state schools inspected from this term onwards, but we have not removed it for colleges and further education providers – yet.
If I can explain why that is:
It was one of the Labour party’s manifesto commitments to remove single word judgements from school inspections, and the Secretary of State made it an immediate priority when she took up her post.
We were able to make this change quickly and relatively easily in the state school sector, but it is more complicated in the other areas we inspect and regulate.
Specifically, in FE and skills, the overall effectiveness judgement has consequences in terms of both funding and intervention, and it will take a little longer to unpick those links.
But I can assure you that we have heard your feedback about the single summary grade.
During the Big Listen you told us that it’s overly simplistic, that you want more relevant and meaningful judgements that would give a more rounded view of a provider, whilst focusing on things like teaching and outcomes.
So, we are working with the government to remove the single word judgement for colleges from next September.
And it will be replaced by a more nuanced inspection report card, describing what the quality of provision your learners experience is really like.
The removal of overall effectiveness grades and the shift to a report card is part of a wider renewal of the Education Inspection Framework.
Now, I’m sure many of you are wondering why we want to change something that is only five years old, and which, for the most part, is working well.
So let me reassure you that I am not changing the framework for change’s sake. Much of what we do now will continue.
I’m talking about an evolution, not a revolution.
But it’s a fact that a lot has happened in the last five years, and, along with the removal of the overall effectiveness judgment, we now have an opportunity to build an inspection and regulation model that works for all the sectors and provider types we inspect.
One that really promotes improvement.
I’ve frequently talked about wanting Ofsted to be ‘of the system, by the system’, for learners.
Because we all share a common goal in what we want for students.
So, as the inspectorate, we should be working with you to achieve that goal.
That means moving as far as possible away from a system of uncovering and detecting failures, towards an approach where improving standards in further education and skills is intrinsic to the inspection process.
The future lies in supporting college leadership to plot their improving performance against clear standards.
And those standards should not be dreamt up by Ofsted.
They should be inherent in professional standards, regulations and statutory guidance, co-constructed with the sector and with evidence at their heart.
Such a system must be built on data.
But data alone cannot tell the story, the context, the journey that providers are on.
And leaders’ ability to improve can only be judged through high quality, professional, courteous, respectful and empathetic conversations.
We’ll be consulting on the new framework in January.
As well as improving how we inspect and report, we want to continue to reduce the pressure of inspection.
Because I am acutely aware of the vast amount of pressure the FE and skills sector is already under and the last thing I want is for inspection to unnecessarily add to them.
With the Big Listen, I promised to take on board your views before I made any changes and I will continue this approach with January’s consultation.
Again, working with you to make sure it is right for colleges, right for us and most importantly right for children and learners.
And on that note, I want to return to what you told us in the Big Listen and the other changes we’re making in response.
The Big Listen – what we heard and how we’re changing
Amongst the many challenges, some encouragements came out of the Big Listen, which we want to build on – 56% of further education and skills providers told independent researchers that they trusted Ofsted, which I realise is only just over half – sadly in the schools sector the figure was much lower.
However, 7 out of 10 respondents said inspection accurately identified strengths and areas for improvement, and 6 in 10 said this helped them understand how to improve their provision.
That was encouraging to hear.
Most importantly, the public consultation and independent research also highlighted a number of areas where we need to do things differently and improve.
I’ve already talked about the single-word judgement, which was one of those things.
Another common criticism we heard was that we took a one-size-fits-all approach to our FE and skills inspections, and that our current approach is not flexible or consistent enough across the range of provision we inspect.
More specifically, we heard that inspection does not always feel as applicable to independent specialist colleges, apprenticeship training and adult learning as it does to courses for 16- to 18-year-olds.
Providers said they wanted a more bespoke inspection model for each of those different types.
We were also told that we needed to understand the context that providers are working in, to reflect the challenges of geography, economic context and learners’ needs.
To help address this, we’re developing a new area insights service, which will visualise local area data and enable inspectors to better understand local context.
It will also help them to assess how providers are contributing to local, regional and national skills needs.
And as part of January’s consultation on the new inspection framework, we will look at how we can transform the process of inspection so it is better tailored to the diverse range of FE and skills provision, adaptive to the different contexts providers are working in, and takes account of learners’ ages, their stages of development and the nature of the provision.
We want to make sure inspection works as well for classroom learning as it does for employer-led vocational and technical training.
Notification periods were also brought up as an aspect of our work that caused frustration.
Many respondents said notice periods were too short, particularly for more complex provision, and new and small providers.
We have already introduced a 5-day notice period for colleges and large and complex FE and skills providers, which I hope has been a positive change – we will obviously keep this under review.
In January’s consultation, we will ask whether the size of our inspection teams is proportionate to the size and complexity of your provision.
In the AoC’s own response to the Big Listen, you told us that current reports are too concise to be useful for either the inspected college, or for other colleges to learn about good practice.
You also said our reports needed to do more to signpost strengths and suggest improvements, because providers want to hear more about what they do well and what they can build on.
I’ve already confirmed that we’ll be introducing report cards from next September.
Exactly what they will look like will depend on what comes out of next year’s consultation.
But I can tell you that our aim is that they will provide greater insight into an individual provider’s strengths and weaknesses, with a sharper focus on outcomes – including providers’ contributions to meeting skills needs.
As part of my drive to be ‘of the sector’ and to better share best practice, we’ve introduced the Ofsted Academy.
This is transforming how we recruit, train and develop all our staff, including improving our recruitment of inspectors from the FE and skills sector.
Finally, we’ve also set up six national hubs to improve consistency across all of our regions.
These hubs will gather insights from across our work and feed into our training through the Ofsted Academy.
Earlier this month we published the first batch of inspector training videos – something that we have been asked to do for a while.
These show how our school inspectors are trained, and we’ll soon be publishing training materials for other inspection remits, including FE and skills.
To clarify, these are not meant for your staff – we provide tailored webinars and other information aimed at the sectors we inspect.
But I’ve committed to being open and transparent about what we do, and the training videos we have released are a big step in that direction.
Inclusion and the most vulnerable
Since I joined Ofsted, I have repeatedly stated my mission is to focus on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged young people.
Because if you get it right for them, then you get it right for everyone. Improving standards for all will be at the very heart of our work.
You will have heard me talk about my focus on disadvantage and vulnerability before, I often call it inclusion.
In the Big Listen I committed to putting inclusion at the heart of our new framework.
But what do I mean by inclusion?
I am aware that it’s a term that can mean different things to different people.
In order to look at inclusion in our work and ensure that we are all working off the same definition, we want to gather information on how others in the education and social care sectors understand vulnerability.
This is why I have commissioned the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) to look at how vulnerability is currently understood in the sectors we inspect and how we can better consider it in our work.
Of course, the further education sector has a proud tradition of supporting the learners that need it the most, not only disadvantaged and vulnerable young people but those with learning difficulties as well.
We know that vulnerable young people and those with learning difficulties are overrepresented in the FE sector, and because of that you are really, really good at supporting those children that need the most help to access their next steps.
The NCB will be engaging with professionals from the FE sector in their work and I hope we can capture some of the expertise you all have as we start to work on our own definition of inclusion and how it will be considered in our framework.
We want to look at how colleges and other FE providers are removing barriers to opportunity for disadvantaged learners, because – and I will say it again – if you get it right for the most vulnerable learners, you get it right for everyone.
Thank you
So I want to end by saying thank you.
Thank you for all the work that you do supporting learners to reach their potential.
You are a vital part of the education sector, and I look forward to working with the AoC and its members to make inspection the best it can be.
Thank you.