Skills Minister Baroness Jacqui Smith addressed an audience of UTC principals, chairs, and multi academy trust CEOs at our summer conference on Tuesday 15 July.
During her speech, Baroness Smith praised UTCs for supporting government priorities such as T Levels and greater skills education: “What makes UTCs special is your enduring partnership with local employers,” she told the packed audience.
The minister was also quizzed on the government’s plans for new free schools including new UTCs in Doncaster and Southampton. “I’m afraid this comes down to a constraint on capital, particularly for developing the 44 schools that were in the free school pipeline.
“The government is reviewing it, carefully, receiving representations, as I have, from MPs about the UTCs. We hope to be able to announce the result of that review as soon as possible. But I am afraid it does come down to a limit on the amount of capital that we have and some quite difficult decisions that we have to make to prioritise capital for the whole school estate, which is not in as good as a state as we want it to be.”
Baker Dearing would like to thank Baroness Smith for taking the time to speak at our conference.
One objective that the minister raised was to increase the number of female students in technical education and this emerged as a key theme from the day. Later on in the conference, Lily Gregory, who recently graduated with a first class degree in engineering from King’s College London, spoke about her dissertation research into gendered choices in engineering.
“Why did I choose to focus on women in engineering for my dissertation? While there has been improvement in female involvement in undergraduate degrees over the past ten years or so, the year on year improvement still sits at 0.4 per cent. We are still the minority, with 22 per cent of enrolments onto engineering degree courses, so there is a big gap to close,” Gregory told conference.
London Design and Engineering UTC led a workshop on the new Ofsted inspection framework, after the school took part in a pilot inspection. UTC leaders found it enormously helpful to receive a better understanding of what the watchdog will expect under this new framework.
The conference also heard from Lucie Gresham-Hill, a UTC Norfolk alumna who now works for Morgan Sindall Construction, and James Keil, alumnus of The Leigh UTC, who is now progressing to Oxford Brookes University. Both will be joining Baker Dearing’s new alumni board, which is starting in September and they spoke to the conference about their education journeys and what they achieved at their UTCs.
UTCs the “only solution” to workforce shortages
Industry leaders took to the stage for the afternoon session of the conference.
Chairman of Baker Dearing and Make UK CEO Stephen Phipson CBE first addressed the conference on the government’s Industrial Strategy.
“UTCs are the only solution” to workforce shortages in key sectors such as manufacturing, which is “not getting the volume of people coming through apprenticeships that we need,” Stephen said.
Representatives from top employers and trade bodies then joined Stephen on stage for an employer panel. Jo Simovic from Amazon spoke passionately about how successful T Levels had been for the employer, so that now she was pushing to expand their use across the business.
Baker Dearing trustee Purminder Gandhu discussed DEI lessons from her over 30 years at the BBC and why more needed to be done to help young people from world majority backgrounds to access technical opportunities.
Danny Reed from the Manufacturing Technologies Association (MTA) spoke about the manufacturing sector’s reaction to the Industrial Strategy and how he got into education through an inspiring FE teaching job.
Thank you Jo, Purminder, and Danny for taking part in the panel and Stephen for providing the conference with fantastic insights about the strategy then chairing the panel.
The huge progress made by the Baker Award since rollout was outlined by the award’s lead Steve Leahey at the conference as well.
Over 1,000 students from UTCs across the country are taking part in phase one of the Baker Award, with even more set to be part of phase two.
Scarborough University Technical College principal Helen Dowds also spoke about how the Baker Award fitted perfectly with what the UTC was doing, in terms of work experience, technical qualifications and so on.
“If you’re not on it, why aren’t you,” she challenged the audience.
Long-lived UTCs celebrated at dinner
The night before conference, UTC leaders, employers, and other stakeholders gathered for the annual dinner.
As part of the dinner, UTCs which are this year celebrating their tenth anniversary were presented with trophies by Baker Dearing’s Chairman Stephen Phipson.
The UTCs are:
- Thomas Telford UTC
- UTC Oxfordshire
- South Devon UTC
- Shireland Biomedical UTC
- University Collegiate School
- Engineering UTC Northern Lincolnshire
Congratulations to all of them on reaching this milestone.
