The Skills Funding Agency (SFA) has announced that it has delayed the launch of the new ‘recruit an apprentice/trainee’ service until “early summer”.
The SFA said in its online Update bulletin today that the reason for the delay was to “carry out more development work and user testing”.
The new service, which will replace the old ‘Apprenticeship Vacancies’ site, will be hosted on gov.uk and offer a “self-serve facility for colleges and other training organisations to advertise vacancies more quickly”.
The bulletin added the new service would include built-in validations for wages on the vacancy posting form, simpler vacancy management tools, with enhanced quality assurance features, and clearer and timely feedback from its advisers to providers on their vacancies.
“We will publish details about how to use the new service on gov.uk later this spring,” it added.
It did not however mention the inclusion of a feature to allow employers to post their own vacancies, as promised in the government’s 2020 Vision document released in December.
That report said at the time that “by February 2016, employers will be able to post their own vacancies on the system, working with education and training providers where they want to.”
When asked by FE Week what was happening with this, an SFA spokesperson said: “The first phase of the launch will enable providers to post their own vacancies. The second phase will allow employers to post their own vacancies.”
I have lost count of the number of times that the SFA, and the EFA, have missed deadlines. Why is it acceptable for this level of tardiness and incompetence when individual colleges or training providers are routinely castigated for anything that even resembles failure to deliver in a timely fashion. The SFA is not, and never has been, fit for purpose, and is a byword for useless and inept. Words fail me.