You can’t understand FE from Whitehall alone

I’d like to start this piece by saying that the people within the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions are good people. This is not a hit job but the genuine opinion of someone who has worked on both sides, I’ve been the regulator and the regulated.

But I am concerned about the lack of experience members of staff in both departments have of working within the FE sector. DfE have recognised this and in previous years have worked with colleges and universities to provide two-day immersion visits to its staff. Is two days enough time for civil servants, who have never worked in the sector, to understand the challenges the sector faces?

As everyone reading this will be aware, the government has defunded leadership and management apprenticeships. I know of a provider that had a relatively minimal cap on one of the standards being defunded (less than ten apprentices).

This provider received their cap letter on March 17 and had enrolled a number of apprentices of March 30 that took them over their cap by one. which DfE kindly reminded the provider of. The provider tried to have these learners removed from impacting the cap but were ultimately unsuccessful. And when you look at the provider’s argument, it shows a lack of understanding from the departments of what goes into enrolling an apprenticeship.

The provider argued that the entire process of enrolling these apprentices started in October 2025 when their business engagement team engaged with the employer. After a couple of months with various meetings and correspondence, the employer agreed to use the provider to develop members of their staff.

Then the enrolment was passed from the business engagement team to the onboarding team as well as the team who would be delivering the apprenticeship. Skills scan meetings were booked in (which is not as easy as it seems – if you know, you know) and the onboarding team were working on getting packs ready for the apprentices to start.

Skills scans completed. Start date agreed. Packs complete and sent out in early March. Then comes the provider’s (and I mean every provider) hold-your-breath moment; waiting for the learner and employer to sign the packs as soon as possible to get this show on the road. It took two weeks for all the documents to be signed, which delayed the start date to March 30.

All of this information was laid out to civil servants. But they wouldn’t even let the provider redistribute some of the cap to this standard, which lead to one apprentice having to be taken off the programme.

All this leads me back to my original question. Do they have the experience to understand the work that goes on behind the scenes in the FE sector?

What I’ve discussed is small fish, a few apprentices on a standard. I imagine there are larger providers out there whose business engagement and onboarding teams were in the middle of having conversations with employers and onboarding apprentices when the rug was swept from under their feet.

DfE and DWP need to stop being so rigid and understand the complexities of FE, especially when they are the ones that make this so complex! The only thing that will help with this is experience of working at an FE provider. They could develop an internal apprenticeship for this, but even if it got the go ahead, I doubt I’d see the approval from Skills England within my lifetime.