If you follow our @tesfenews Twitter account, you’ll be well aware that last weekend was a particularly significant one for the FE sector.

Our reporter Julia Belgutay was at EuroSkills in Gothenburg to cover Team UK’s efforts. And they didn’t disappoint, returning with five medals and eight medallions for excellence. Organisers said this year marked Team UK’s best ever EuroSkills. Not bad for a contest that the team regarded as a warm-up for the main event: WorldSkills 2017 in Abu Dhabi.

But the drop in the government funding that WorldSkills UK receives is stark - its core grant has been reduced by almost half since 2012-13 (not unusual under the coalition government’s austerity programme). It’s to the credit of Team UK that their performance has continued to improve. If the government wants this success to continue, it’s time to stump up the necessary cash.

A long way from the heat of competition, I was in the more reflective environment of ResearchED’s first FE and vocational conference. Practitioners covering everything from history to plumbing exchanged ideas with academics and sector leaders on a range of subjects, making for a thought-provoking day.

The one opinion uniting everyone at the event was that it was time for policy to be just as rooted in evidence as teaching practice. Although, given that the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) results this week provided plenty more ammunition for ideologues at both ends of the political spectrum, I’m not holding my breath that this will be happening any time soon.

@stephenexley