As colleges slowly recover from the impact of the pandemic, there is plenty of talk about the various catch-up programmes available. Most of these, such as the 16 to 19 tuition fund, are government-led and have clear parameters that colleges need to follow.

However, there are also plenty of teachers working in the further education sector who are developing grassroots projects to help some of the most vulnerable learners go on to achieve their potential in the aftermath of Covid.

Some of these teachers have recently been recognised in this year’s Let Teachers SHINE awards, which offer funding to pilot projects designed to help disadvantaged learners in the North to succeed in education.

We spoke to the three FE sector winners to find out about the projects they are working to make a reality.

Flipped tuition

Doug King, assistant principal at Oldham Sixth Form College, is on a mission to get parents more engaged with their children’s post-16 learning - and is turning to tech to do it.

His programme, Flipped Tuition, will make use of text messages and web-based resources to build the knowledge and confidence of parents so that they can havepositive discussions at home about studying.

“It’s about communicating what effective learning strategies are and how students can use them,” he says.

“When we were having conversations with parents, we were finding that they want to help, but they can’t really give direct help and advice on things like A-level physics or A-level history, unless that’s their area of specialism, which often it isn’t.

“But there’s a lot of information now in schools and colleges about research-based methods of studying, on what works, and it’s not necessarily always shared with parents when it could be.

“Things like spaced retrieval practice and metacognition: they will be quite useful things for parents to be aware of in helping to support their children.”

Rather than chiding young people to study more, it’s important that the tone of these conversations be positive, says King.

“Sometimes, conversations at home about learning can be quite negative or reactive, whereas we’re trying to foster positive conversations about learning and studying.

“I think the other big part of it is not just the knowledge itself but giving parents the confidence to understand how important their engagement is, even in post-16. Parental engagement is a massive leveller, particularly when working with disadvantaged students.”

The project is still in the planning stages at the moment, he explains, but the pilot is set to begin in September and it’s intended to be a staged approach, with parents receiving text messages across the year.

“The first one would be a message to highlight the importance of parent engagement; a motivation message,” he says. “The second one would be more to do with some basic advice and guidance on whatever the topic is for that particular week.

“The third message would have an embedded link to an activity or resource that parents can have a look at to help develop their understanding of it.

“We’ll probably look to do 12 topics throughout the whole of the academic year, aligned with the different stages of the year.”

Considering how to space out the messages is a vital part of the approach, so that parents do not feel overwhelmed by being bombarded with more information than is useful at the time, he adds.

“Presenting it in the right way is really crucial and making the research accessible for parents is key. Sometimes with letters from school or college, it can be three or four pages long, and a lot of key stuff can get lost.

“The idea of the text resources is just to make it as accessible and interactive as possible.

“A lot of the evidence shows how important parental engagement is at all levels. In the early years, it’s really quite high, but it does tend to tail off as students get older and that’s what we want to address.”

Soft skills

Luke Helstrip, a chemistry teacher at Leeds Sixth Form College, is determined to revolutionise students’ understanding of their soft skills, so that when they come to apply for jobs or university places, they will be able to sell themselves more effectively.

“It’s an area that students tend to just be expected to know,” he says. “But when they write things like personal statements, they need to talk about these skills and give examples of when they’ve demonstrated them, and they just can’t do it. They understand what the skill is - teamwork, for example - but they don’t know how they’ve demonstrated that while learning.”

Helstrip has devised an approach that helps students to recognise soft skills, such as creative thinking, communication, problem-solving and teamwork, and when they are using and developing those skills in class.

“The idea is that we are going to get students reflecting on their soft-skills development, making a point of having those conversations: ‘Have you developed this? How is it going so far? What needs to improve?’

“I was raised and educated within an area of high deprivation, so I understand the struggles and lack of knowledge that students face in relation to their applications and own progression through education,” he explains.

However, Helstrip is also aware of the risks of what he calls “initiative overload” for staff, so is being careful in the design of the project to make sure that it doesn’t add to workload or feel like a source of stress to teachers.

“I didn’t want to make it too different to what staff are already doing, because when things like this get introduced, the response can be ‘I can’t do that because I’ve got to change all this stuff and I don’t have time’.

“So the idea is that we’re going to be making those things more overt, highlighting what’s going on with students in terms of which activity is developing which skills. The big change will be around how teachers are talking in lessons - making that more obvious - and then, at the end of each week, students will be given time in lessons to reflect on those skill developments.”

The project is still in the planning stages at the moment, he says, and is expected to be piloted in September with his two AS classes.

“The plan is that if it works - if it shows positive impact in applications and student reflection - in January, it will be introduced to a couple of other members of staff, so maybe five or six members of staff in different subject areas, to see if the process can be transferred across and expanded.”

The five Rs online

Maths trainer Julia Smith is all about the five Rs: recall, routine, revision, repetition and readiness.

And it’s with these five basic rules in mind that she created 5Rsonline; a 30-week schedule of daily curated maths content that students can access whenever and wherever they need to.

“Students can access it on their phone, on their laptop or on an iPad,” she explains. “It’s about 24/7 accessibility because we know students can run at a different timetable to everybody else sometimes. They might be up to two in the morning, they might have a late start during the morning. Some of them just like to do it on the bus on the way to college.”

She has created a bespoke resit curriculum for those in further education, so that every day, from Monday to Friday, they can visit the site and get a useful dose of daily maths.

“It’s engaging, it’s motivating, it’s got some funny bits on there, it’s a combination of videos, games and worksheets,” she says. “And 90 per cent of it is marked there and then, so the students get impact; they get instant feedback whether they get the answer right or wrong.

“Also, they can choose to a certain degree, so if a student really likes a particular area, they can just carry on doing that and do more of it. There’s a bit of autonomy; it’s handing the control over to the student, which is a really good thing.”

With the SHINE funding, Smith will give access to the site to 150 teachers from at least 15 colleges in the North East and Yorkshire, which will mean about 3,000 students logging on to receive a daily dose of maths, grounded in research.

And she also plans to explore the possibility of turning the site into an app, to further improve accessibility and ease of use.

“It’ll be really good as a little app,” she says. “You know how you have a Fitbit on your wrist and it reminds you to get up and walk? It could be like that: ‘Why don’t you just do five minutes of maths?’ It’s all about making a habit.

This article originally appeared in the 25 June 2021 issue under the headline “College staff take ‘catch-up’ into their own hands”