Paul Offord | FE Week

95% of apprenticeships agreed at full cap price, despite negotiation ‘experiment’

The government should drop its “experiment” with negotiated apprenticeship prices, after it emerged that almost every single one is currently being agreed at full cost, the boss of the Association and Learning Providers has said. Mark Dawe wants “fixed pricing” for all apprenticeships, both for the new employer-designed standards and for the older frameworks. Every […]

Government departments falling short on public sector apprenticeships target

Widespread failure has been exposed across Whitehall with hitting the government’s own target for apprentices employed by public bodies. Shadow skills minister Gordon Marsden (pictured above) and other MPs lodged a parliamentary question asking how many and what proportion of staff employed by various departments were apprentices. The intention was to find out how they are progressing […]

NOCN Group taking over One Awards

NOCN Group is taking over awarding organisation One Awards, which specialises in access to higher education, FE Week can reveal. NOCN, based in Sheffield, confirmed the takeover would go through from August 1. It said that One Awards, which is based in County Durham, is a natural fit, as the two organisations have “successfully worked […]

Barnfield College could lose its apprenticeships provision

Barnfield College has been rated grade four by Ofsted for apprenticeships, which means it will lose the right to offer them under updated government rules. An inspection report out this morning rated it ‘requires improvement’ in all other headline fields, except for adult learning programmes and provision for people with high needs, where it was ‘good’. […]

New 20% limit for management fees in best-practice guidance

The management fees charged by prime FE providers should not be more than 20 per cent of the programme funding – and will generally be much less – after big-hitting FE representative bodies struck an agreement. The organisations putting their name to new best-practice guidance on relationships between primes and their subcontractors are the Association of […]

Hull College Group to shed over 200 staff

Hull College Group is preparing to shed up to 231 full-time jobs in an effort to balance its books. In a statement that appeared online yesterday, chief executive Michelle Swithenbank warned that “some difficult decisions have to be made” to regain stability amid longstanding financial troubles. The FE commissioner reported in February last year that […]

DfE ‘plain sloppy’ at policing apprenticeship minimum wage adverts

Providers on the government’s apprenticeship search site are not being effectively policed to ensure they advertise legal wages – and the shadow skills minister has accused it of being “plain sloppy”. The apprenticeship national minimum wage is rising from £3.50 to £3.70 per hour in April, but FE Week has discovered that this detail is […]

Commissioner report shows governors’ surprise at college’s dire finances

A new FE Commissioner report has shown how the dire financial position of a college that needed two government bailouts last December came as a surprise to its governors. The report on Bradford College, following intervention by Richard Atkins and his team, was published today. “The college now finds itself with a serious cash shortfall […]

Strike action escalates on a second day of college walkouts

More than 1,500 staff from colleges are expected to take part in a second day of strike action, and more walkouts are planned up to the end of April. The dispute is over what a spokesperson for the University and Colleges Union described as “a disappointing” pay offer of one per cent, made last September […]