Recent speeches by education secretary Gavin Williamson and the universities minister, Michelle Donelan, have been rightly welcomed as a shift in government attitude towards all post-16 education. 

As a parent with a son at university now and three teenagers who may follow him, it worries me that official data shows that only 41 per cent of graduates secure full-time employment, and often in non-graduate roles. 

There could well be some serious conversations in the Dawe household in the future about doing an apprenticeship instead.

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Some seasoned commentators have pointed out a sense of déjà vu in respect to the education secretary’s speech. 

And so, AELP has been dusting off various reviews from the past 20 years to see how much this observation stacks up. We’ve gone through Tomlinson (2004), Foster (2005), Leitch (2006), Wolf (2011), Richard (2012) and Augar (2019). We have also scanned through the area reviews process (2015-17) and looked at parliamentary committee recommendations.

It seems the commentators were correct but the real disappointment is that, if some of the key recommendations from these reviews had been implemented, Mr Williamson could have made a speech about something else.

The Wolf Review

Rather than in chronological order, let’s begin with Baroness Wolf’s review of vocational education - in her current advisory role in Downing Street, she undoubtedly influences what comes out of Sanctuary Buildings.

Nearly 10 years ago, Professor Wolf was recommending that the DfE should review policies for the lowest-attaining quintile of pupils at key stage 4 with a view to greatly increasing the proportion who can progress directly on to level 2 programmes at age 16. 

The data shows, especially in relation to maths and English attainment, that we are still a long way from achieving that objective. Looking at recent reforms, making the leap to a level 2 programme has been made harder by the poor funding of functional skills, compulsory GCSE resits and the strange decision to make T levels only open from level 3.  

We’ve seen a crash in level 2 starts in apprenticeships since the levy was introduced in 2017, but, thankfully, the government has now woken up to the effectiveness of traineeships with the chancellor’s summer statement injecting £111 million into the programme.

The Wolf review also advocated a time-based entitlement to education, including an apprenticeship, by the time a young person is 19 with the possibility that it could be turned into a credit for use at a later date. Virtually every AELP pre-Budget submission since then has urged the government to introduce skills accounts without the obvious flaws inherent in individual learning accounts at the start of the millennium.

The Tomlinson report and Foster review 

The panic in the Blair government following the CBI’s reaction to the Tomlinson report proposing a 14 to 19 diploma to replace GCSEs, A levels and BTECs, etc, has been well documented.  

Strongly supported by the Ofsted chief inspector, Mike Tomlinson dismissed the subsequent White Paper by saying, “What is being proposed risks emphasising yet again the distinction between the vocational and the academic”, adding that it failed to address the needs of those who struggled to get good GCSE grades. AELP is not alone in believing that Tomlinson was a great opportunity missed. 

The Foster review in 2005, on which AELP was represented, was primarily focused on the future role of further education colleges and it included recommendations which, if fully implemented, might have avoided the issues which recent ministers and the FE Commissioner have had to address. 

Naturally, we supported the working group’s call for successful colleges and providers to be allowed to grow “through an increasingly more contestable and open learning market”. Since then, by officials’ own admission, a clunky funding agency contracting system has not properly rewarded good performance while often protecting under-delivery or poor performance. 

Another battle that we have yet to win on a sustainable basis concerns the Foster recommendation that local provider networks should be financially supported. This support was available for a while but there is an urgent need to bring it back to aid the economic recovery across all areas of the country.

The Leitch review

Leitch doesn’t get mentioned much in polite society these days - it was probably far too New Labour for some palates. Its laudable aims included a major expansion in apprenticeships, which was achieved, and a big focus on adults qualified to at least level 2. 

The sacrilege was to propose that “all publicly funded, adult vocational skills in England, apart from community learning, go through demand-led routes by 2010”. Heaven forbid and in the 10 years since, and despite years of underspends, only 10 per cent of the national adult education budget and about 20 per cent of devolved AEB have been contested. Ministers and the metro mayors really do need to grasp the nettle now and put the whole budget out to tender as part of post-pandemic response. More recently, Augar has recommended that all adults should be entitled to their first level 2 and 3 qualifications for free, and this should be considered as part of this autumn’s spending review.  

A grade C for Gavin Williamson

I can only give a C mark (or should I be saying grade 4?) on the progress made since these reviews were published, and the limited progress explains why Gavin Williamson risked sounding like a scratched record played by his predecessors.  

Apprenticeships are on the verge of becoming entirely demand-led and whether it’s through skills accounts or more procurement, we need to get far more radical about how the rest of post-16 provision is supplied.

Mark Dawe is chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers