Private training providers were overpaid around £20m last year by the Education Funding Agency (EFA),
FE Week can exclusively reveal.

Around 10 per cent of the EFA’s 2011/12 budget for private sector provision for 16 to 18-year-olds was not returned, even though it wasn’t delivered.

A further 15 per cent — around £25m — was handed back.

An EFA spokesperson said it allowed providers to keep a certain amount of funding for which no provision had been delivered.

But, she said, it was not true that it had paid £20m to independent training providers “for nothing”.

“In 2010/11 and 11/12 we applied a 10 per cent margin for some independent providers where they under-delivered to reflect changes to the funding system in those years. This has been reduced to 5 per cent in 2012/13,” she said.

However, Shadow junior education minister Tristram Hunt called on Education Secretary Michael Gove to account for the £20m overpayment.

It comes just weeks after FE Week reported how the Department for Education (DfE) had cut its projected budget for 16 to 18 apprenticeships by £166m, in part because of “competition” from older applicants — who are funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) rather than DfE.

“This is another worrying sign of incompetence at the DfE. In a tough economic environment we simply cannot afford to be losing money like this,” said Mr Hunt.

“Every wasted pound is a pound that could have been spent on improving educational attainment for our young people. Instead, we have £20m that appears to be sitting in the bank accounts of private providers.

“Meanwhile, the government has a £166m under-spend on the young apprenticeships we need to boost our competitiveness, rebalance the economy and provide a high quality vocational pathway for the forgotten 50 per cent.

“Michael Gove needs to explain where this £20m has gone and get a grip on the chaos overwhelming his department’s finances.”

Paul Warner, Association of Employment and Learning Providers director of employment and skills, said: “The period in question relates to a time when the DfE was making changes to Foundation Learning that had some acknowledged issues at the onset.

“Therefore, we were seeing in effect some transition funding to protect the provider infrastructure from a serious shock which might have left provision short for young people in some geographical areas. The margin has now been reduced.”

The overpayment figures are not in the public domain, but have been seen by FE Week.

They provide a stark contrast to private training provider funding for older learners, paid for by the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) and BIS.

The SFA makes the details of its overpayments public, but it pays private training providers strictly on delivery. Its overpayment of £91m last year therefore ended up largely in the coffers of colleges and local authorities, for example.

Kim Thorneywork, the SFA’s chief executive, said the overpayment — revealed in December — meant some providers’ allocations for 2012/13 would be reduced, and she expected “to deliver a balanced budget for the 2012/13 financial year”.

It is not known the extent to which the EFA overpaid non-private training providers, such as colleges and local authorities, for 16 to 18 provision.

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Editorial: Money for nothing?

The EFA did not need to pay private companies £20m more than the value of their 16 to 18 delivery

They refer to ‘changes to the funding system’ as the rationale.

Presumably this relates to ending the ‘entry to employment’ scheme of short employability courses, and replacing them with the larger and longer ‘foundation learning’ programmes that Ofsted recently criticised.

So private providers delivering part-time courses were given an allocation boost in advance of running longer and more expensive courses.

Should the fact that many of these more expensive courses never materialized justify overpayments?

To put it another way: how much of the £20m has left the sector in dividend payments to grateful company bosses?

As reported in FE Week the National Audit Office is conducting a review of the EFA, so the question should be asked.

Before then, the Public Accounts Committee and Education Select Committee might like to question Michael Gove.

Nick Linford, editor

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2 Comments

  1. You know what Nick Linford, you need counselling.
    You have an irrational hatred for private providers. Suffice to say that if the private providers you so quickly vilify performed as terribly as some of the colleges you support, particularly the ones that you used to be part of in South London, they wouldn’t be amalgamated, they would be shut down. You don’t see many (if any) Grade 4 private providers still in business, you see plenty of Grade 3 and 4 colleges letting their communities down year-in year-out. The only thing a college will be shut down for is if they mess up their finances as well as their delivery. Look at Kent.
    The government are forced because of statute to pour millions upon millions of pounds into poor college provision. Again, just look at the £15m gone to Kent and the millions in South London, but still the main thing you bleet on about is private providers’ dividends.
    What your tacky little article fails to mention is that the providers that were within the 10% financial margin, were paid because they did in fact hit their Learner Start numbers and part of the reason that some of EFA fundiing wasn’t used was because FL learners successfully moved on. This rarely happens in colleges.
    How many colleges used 100% of their 16-18 FL funding? Not many because this year most have been cut.
    And guess what they are doing? Carrying on with their own Grade 3 provisions and passing all of their cuts onto their sub-contractors, who in fact, delivered a lot of their successful programmes.
    If you hate private providers so much, stop being such a hypocrite and trying to sell them your self-indulgent little webinaaaars, and your so called wonderful funding information.
    You clearly fancy yourself as the font of all knowledge for of all things education. If you were really being honest, you’d accept that the owners, directors and staff of private providers do a much better job on a lot less funding than your over-paid, over-pensioned college luvvies.
    Also, if this information isn’t in the public domain, how come your tacky little FE Sport, got sight of it? Explain please.

  2. What a venomous vitriolic attack from N.B who is clearly on someone’s PR payroll. A ridiculous effort to skate over the fact that private providers just waltzed off with £20 million of tax payers’ money while attacking public institutions.