The Department for Education’s top civil servant has called for a “more rounded” way of judging the success of university technical colleges.

Under questioning from MPs this afternoon, permanent secretary Jonathan Slater also revealed that there is currently only one application to create a new UTC.

UTCs, which provide a technical and academic education for 14- to 19-years-olds, were introduced by the coalition government, but the programme has been blighted by closures, difficulties recruiting pupils and poor exam results.

According to the latest Ofsted statistics, 11 of the 24 UTCs that have an inspection grade are rated “requires improvement” or “inadequate”, and the sector had an average Progress 8 score of -0.86 last year, well below local authority schools and other types of academies.

Mr Slater told the Commons Public Accounts Committee that UTCs should instead be judged on the destinations their pupils go on to.

His view echoed a recommendation from researchers at the NFER, who last year called for the government to “urgently examine” how well the current accountability measures fit UTCs.

UTCs: Success or failure?

Mr Slater said: “We need to look at it in the round, don’t we? Because it does seem to me that holding a UTC that takes kids at 14 through to 19 to account under a regime of testing them on how well they have done at the age of 16 - there’s a lesson for us.

“A better measure of the added value of a UTC, it would seem to me, would be the extent to which those kids leave at the end into productive employment.

“It’s striking, for example, that the average UTC gets 20 per cent of its kids into apprenticeships - three times the level of your typical state school and four times the level of higher level apprenticeships than a typical state school, so I think we need a more rounded sense of success and failure than was had at the beginning of the programme.”

He also revealed that there is currently only one application to set up a new UTC, which “is being considered at the moment in light, among other things, of the learning of the previous seven years”.

Under questioning, he acknowledged that UTCs faced a challenge because they have to compete with other schools for pupils at the age of 14.

He said this system was created “with the government’s eye open”, and added that sometimes it had succeeded and “at other times hasn’t”.

He added: “I think the particular competition challenge faced by UTCs is taking kids on at 14, because that definitely puts them in competition against the local secondary school that’s got the kid in it at 14 and would quite like to keep hold of them because there’s five grand if they do so.

“I completely acknowledge that that is definitely the risk in the UTC programme.”

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