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College pay is back in the hard part of the conversation. This week, FE Week reported that the Association of Colleges, UCU and UNISON have jointly warned ministers that college staff could be facing a very low pay award, possibly even zero, unless there is a material change in funding. That is not a normal sector posture. Employers and unions do not often stand shoulder to shoulder on pay. When they do, it usually means the spreadsheet has run out of room. A zero offer woul

Tuesday's King's Speech put SEND reform into legislation for the first time. The Education for All bill, confirmed on 13 May, bundles school standards and special educational needs into a single piece of law, backed by £4 billion in investment. [FE Week] For colleges, the question isn't whether reform is coming. It's whether the timetable and the funding model will work in practice. What the bill actually covers The detail, so far, tracks closely to February's school white

College finance teams are working through a familiar kind of late-April: multiple funding announcements arriving, none of them quite settled, with decisions due in May that will shape the rest of the financial year. This week brought guidance on the post-16 National Insurance contributions grant, updated apprenticeship funding rules, and a pay claim from joint unions now queued for its first formal hearing in June. The combination doesn't make for easy planning. The NI Grant

Skills England published the funding rates for all ten apprenticeship units on 21 April, and the earliest starts are 28 April [FE Week]. That's less than a week away. Colleges and training providers that haven't yet looked at the payment model in detail should do it now. Thirty per cent at the milestone. Seventy on completion. Here's the structure. Providers receive 30% of a unit's funding rate when a learner completes 30% of their planned hours. The remaining 70% only arri