AoC’s David Hughes: Reshaping FE Through Collaboration and Skills Reform

We catch up with David Hughes, Chief Executive of the Association of Colleges (AoC) at the Federation of Awarding Bodies annual conference 2024.

David discusses the current challenges in FE and Skills, with NEET numbers rising, the Government is looking for a no class ceiling, and David explains that we need to work out how to make the FE and Skills System work more effectively.

David goes on to discuss collaboration to ensure the sector can work together. David is hoping that the Government will soon come out with a Skills Strategy, which will be a vision for the sector for the next five to 10 years. David explained that the Skills Minister Jacqui Smith said that the Skills System of the future will need to be more about collaboration than competition, more coherence, rather than fragmentation. He also explained that without any more money, the system needs to work together to work out how those systems work more efficiently. Particularly the pathways, such as how do we get people progressing from school to college, to university, into apprenticeships and into work, we need to think about collaboration, to get the qualifications right, to equip people with the right skills.

These skills may not just be technical skills, but communication skills, problem solving skills, team building that probably haven’t been high enough on the agenda for the past 10 years.

Check out what David has to say below: