Ofsted lauds FE colleges' support role but exposes flaws in preventing Neets

But the inspectorate’s report also highlighted serious flaws with the way local authorities, schools and further education providers work together to prevent young people ending up as Neets (not in education, employment or training) upon leaving.

The Ofsted report was based on information gathered from 50 students and 80 staff across seven FE colleges in the capital. It found that many colleges had created a "team around the student" approach to support services for disadvantaged young people, based on good knowledge and understanding of individuals’ needs and aspirations.

Tutors were also alert to the negative experiences students had with schools. This knowledge informed their teaching strategies, ensuring they gave regular feedback on progress, developed varied learning activities and enabled students to play an active role in developing practical tasks.

Colleges had also developed good partnerships that supported specific groups of vulnerable young people to participate effectively in further education, in particular care leavers, young offenders and those with learning difficulties and/or disabilities.

Ofsted’s inspectors found that college staff regarded high attendance and low dropout rates as good indicators of success. However, few of the colleges compared data on the performance of their different groups of disadvantaged students with data for their student population as a whole; and there was little evidence that they compared outcomes of like-for-like groups on comparable courses across London colleges.

Since no agreed benchmarks existed, it was difficult for them to compare and evaluate their performance against that of other colleges.

One of only two that did benchmark was Croydon College, where managers tracked the performance of students in receipt of bursaries and compared their success rates with the overall college average.

The success rate on "long courses" in 2012/13 for supported 16–to 18-year-old students who were not looked-after young people was 87.6 per cent; but for looked-after learners in the same age bracket it was 76.7 per cent.

The report highlights funding problems and organisational change as major challenges to colleges, schools and local authorities maintaining support services and preventing young people ending up as Neet.

However, the effective sharing of information between local authorities and colleges was inconsistent in the colleges visited.

The strong strategic links that the colleges had with local authority staff had not helped to ensure that information was shared consistently well, the report found. Five of the seven colleges did not have information-sharing protocols that were effective enough to identify young people who were Neet, or whose status was not known, and engage them in learning.

A key factor in this was the way different local authorities interpreted data protection legislation. This, together with instability in some authorities as a result of budget reductions and reorganisations, weakened arrangements to identify, track and support young people effectively, Ofsted added.