A London scheme that paid £400 for every adult learner who found work in key sectors used only 2.5 per cent of its £5.4 million budget, FE Week can reveal.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan began offering job outcome payments from the capital’s adult skills fund through his Mayor’s Skills Academies programme in 2021.
Colleges and providers could claim a £400 “bonus” if a learner landed a job related to one of the mayor’s priority sectors within five months of completing an AEB-funded course.
But only £142,269 was paid out for job outcomes – from the £5.4 million available between 2021-22 and 2024-25.
And college and provider leaders complained the volume of paperwork involved meant the payments were a waste of effort.
The GLA stopped offering the payments last April after admitting take-up was “lower than expected”, but plans to re-introduce incentives with updated criteria this year.
Quality and outcomes
Job outcome payments are not usually offered to colleges or training providers through the government-managed adult skills fund, but have grown in popularity among mayors who control their own budgets.
Announcing the approach in 2018, Khan said the skills system was “too heavily focused” on delivering qualifications rather than “quality and outcomes”.
Then in 2020 the government launched skills bootcamp training courses for adults, which offer training providers a final “milestone three” payment of 20 to 30 per cent of funding per learner if learners achieve a “positive” job outcome.
Other combined authorities including West Midlands, Liverpool City Region and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough also offer payments of up to £400 for providers whose learners move into jobs after completing a work-focused training programme, although the level of uptake has not been shared publicly.
Gareth Thomas, a skills policy adviser and former director at the government’s Learning and Skills Council, welcomed the renewed interest in job outcome payments after working on national programmes that offered them in the late 2000s.
But he warned incentives for providers must be “at a level” that makes them worth the additional paperwork needed to prove learners have secured work.
London’s ‘academies’
London’s job outcome payments were available through the Mayor’s Skills Academies, a long-running programme that has co-opted colleges, independent training providers, local authorities and NHS bodies into “hubs” focused on boosting employment in priority sectors such as the green economy, creative, digital and health.
About £16 million has been spent on hub staffing, marketing, a GLA ‘quality mark’ for courses and bespoke support for underrepresented groups.
Until this week, the London authority had not released performance data for its programme and had only published one of the two programme evaluations it commissioned since 2021.
Data shared with FE Week shows colleges and training providers only claimed 336 individual payments for learners on the academies programme, which recorded 53,152 Londoners participating in training and education as a result of “hub activity”.
Only six of the 40-plus organisations that joined the academies programme claimed job outcome bonuses, with most of the funding (£110,000) going to Waltham Forest College.
Providers ‘baulk’ at paperwork
The GLA maintained strict thresholds for job outcome payments for three years until March 2024, despite knowing that training providers were concerned about the paperwork burden.
Criteria for payments included jobs being at least 16 hours per week, that the job lasted at least four consecutive weeks, paid at least the London Living Wage, and did not involve the use of zero-hour contracts.
An unpublished interim evaluation of the academies programme completed in 2023, seen by FE Week, reported that providers “baulk” at the amount of staff resource needed to make a claim.
A follow-up report by the same evaluators released late last year warned £400 was “not a sufficient incentive” for providers, with some worried that claiming the funding carried “risks of clawback”.
When contacted for comment, providers echoed these concerns – but also praised the academies programme for its “collaborative approach” to supporting “many people” into training and work.
Nishan Rajput, head of skills and employment at Big Creative, an independent training provider in north-east London, said his team found it challenging to find entry-level jobs or apprenticeships that met GLA’s London Living Wage requirement, which is equivalent to a £28,860 full-time annual salary.
Big Creative could have claimed a total of £156,000 in job outcome bonuses but only received £16,243.
Rajput told FE Week that the £400 payment was “not a massive amount” and “a bit disincentivising” for the amount of resource needed to support people into employment.
Meanwhile, West London College did not claim a single job outcome payment despite having a potential total allocation of £171,200.
Its CEO Karen Redhead said she was proud of her college’s work leading a green skills hub, which included employer-led partnerships, job coaches and employability leads.
But she added: “Whilst we recognise the need to evidence job outcome payments, this is not always straightforward to collect and payments are sometimes unclaimed.
“Consequently, the hub did not claim any job outcomes payments from the funding that was made available.”
The GLA appears to have taken this criticism on board.
Under its inclusive talent strategy, which will replicate the academies model with closer involvement from employers, it will offer providers a £500 fee for “good work” which pays at least the London Living Wage, and £300 for “other work” which pays at least the national minimum wage.
A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said the skills academies “played an important role” in fast-tracking Londoners into good jobs in key sectors.
They added: “These academies have helped Londoners to access free accessible training and gain the skills they need to succeed, and have supported over 21,000 Londoners into employment in sectors such as the creative industries, health and the green economy.”
Your thoughts