WIREDGOV

2020 vision

With Christmas around the corner and 2020 quickly approaching, it’s a good time to take stock of where we are at and where we are going. I do hope you enjoyed our Christmas animation which showed how Jingles the elf changed his life with the help of some technical qualifications! It’s what you do for learners every day and we are incredibly proud to work with you to contribute to the success of all kinds of learners, across the UK and internationally.

We can all recognise that 2019 has been far from dull – change has been the only constant across the sector - an ever-shifting economy and a seemingly endless political climate of unrest which has resulted in the first pre-Christmas general election for 96 years! For NCFE however, it has been nothing but good news!

In our capacity as a not-for-profit organisation, NCFE has worked tirelessly for the past 170 years to help promote opportunity and social mobility through learning, ensuring that people from all walks of life have the means to achieve their goals. We’re incredibly proud of our history and we’re keen to use our years of experience to help support the sector through this period of change, but we’re also keen to keep expanding our reach into new areas of education so we can continue to make a difference to peoples’ lives and to ensure we have a positive impact on life chances.

In the past year alone, we have worked with over 3,000 organisations, issued almost half a million certificates to learners, provided more than 8,000 learners with the opportunity to progress to higher education, launched 50 new qualifications to market, achieved a 99% pass rate for the 1,100 apprentices who completed End Point Assessment with us and much more. That’s not to mention launching our #FullyFunctional campaign to help change educational outcomes for millions of young learners nationwide, or being selected by the government as the delivery partner for the Digital Business Services, Digital Support Services, Health, Healthcare Science and Science T Levels from 2021.

We have also been fortunate enough to welcome a number of other educational support services into the NCFE family. Skills Forward - one of the UK’s leading assessment and diagnostic software solutions for the successful delivery of Functional Skills and GCSEs, as well as the development of employability skills is now part of the NCFE family. We also more recently welcomed peer-to-peer learning specialist, Peer Tutor into the fold. Add to this, our designation as a successful End Point Assessment Organisation (EPAO) and the work that we do to guide training providers and employers, including over 160 NHS trusts across the UK through the full apprenticeship journey and 2020 already looks incredibly busy for NCFE!

Standing on the cusp of a New Year always seems like the right time to do some horizon scanning and make plans for the future. With so much going on both within our four walls and the education sector at large, it’s undoubtedly an exciting time to be leading NCFE. I’m inspired by our newly realigned core purpose to ‘Promote and Advance Learning’ which will see us constantly reinvest into the development of high quality educational solutions, supported by innovative resources to expand our product portfolio and create a wider range of choice for learners in line with the changing requirements of the economy and society.

As we head towards 2020, we look forward to supporting more people onto the next step of the ladder in their own personal learning journeys and continuing to work closely with all of you, our fantastic customers, who work so hard to support our learners and help them achieve their goals.

So finally, let me take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you for working with us this year and I look forward to working together in the coming year.

Best wishes,
David.