Further written evidence to be reported to the House
Education and Skills Bill
10:30 am
Ioan Morgan: I am happy to take that one. My college has recently benefited from a full Ofsted inspection which finished last Friday. One of the features of the outstanding grade that the college got was its very high attendance rates—well into the 90s. That is done through the fact that we offer very good teaching and an appropriate product. If those two elements are in place, attendance is something that follows. The element of compulsion is interesting, but I think that the success or failure of the volume of attendance at a college is about the issues and characteristics that I have mentioned.
Colleges are now very much measured on attendance performance. When inspectors come into a college one of the first things they look for are measures of attendance as an indicator of health. At Warwickshire college we have many systems in place for monitoring attendance. We have at-risk systems which flag up students who are not attending and so on. Working with the local authority to co-ordinate and correlate that information is something that we could do.
I would go further. One of the issues for us is the compulsion element for students who would be on work experience, working with employers, and the onerous duty that employers would have. In our partnership work with companies, we try to relieve companies of that burden now. Colleges could have a role in helping companies, small and large, to look after the compulsion and monitoring element within the Bill.