Latest news from FE Week

Birmingham already had a college on the Register of Apprenticeship Training Providers, and it fills an important gap in provision, says Clair Mowbray

Over the past few editions FE Week has been telling us that from May this year the Second City will have no colleges able to deliver apprenticeships, as all four existing Birmingham colleges failed to get on the apprenticeship register.

While we were pleased to learn that South & City College Birmingham has now been added to RoATP, we would like to set the record straight that Birmingham would already have had at least one education institution offering apprenticeships from September, when the National College for High Speed Rail opens its doors.

We are filling a gap in FE provision

The Government has invested £80m to create five new employer-led National Colleges in Britain to make sure that our young people learn world-class skills in key sectors such as digital media, nuclear, creative, oil and gas and high speed rail.

In doing so it is filling a gap in FE provision. The tight links National Colleges have developed with employers mean business can shape these institutions and help them produce workers with the skills they need.

The colleges also provide highly targeted learning opportunities in sectors that are key to the future of the British economy, ensuring that British workers will be at the forefront of these growth industries by creating a pipeline of British talent.

The rail industry is a case in point.

Over the next five years it is estimated that businesses in Britain will need 182,000 new engineers every year. Right now, we’re falling short by 69,000 engineers a year. Moreover, one in five rail engineers is currently aged over 55.  

A lack of skilled workers within our workforce is one of the reasons that the productivity of British workers remains stubbornly low when compared with other nations. As our Chancellor Phillip Hammond lamented, it effectively takes a German worker four days to produce what the UK makes in five.

The new National Colleges will play a central role in producing a generation of young people who are genuinely ready to hit the ground running when they start their working careers.

These issues are symptoms of the brain drain

With campuses in both Doncaster and Birmingham, the National College of High Speed Rail will also help counter the northern brain drain.

Around 30,000 young people move out of the region every year after graduating from northern universities. And in 2013 alone, there were around 25,000 vacancies in the Midlands that were hard to fill due to a lack of suitably skilled applicants (around a fifth of all such skills shortages in England).

Both these issues are symptoms of the brain drain our regions suffer as talented young workers gravitate towards London, putting the future competitiveness and prosperity of our regions at risk.   

While there are excellent FE colleges already established across both the North and the Midlands, there is a dearth of institutions offering more advanced qualifications at Level 4 as the National Colleges will, and we are interested in partnering with colleges across both regions to help improve students’ skills.

At a governing level, we are also backing important initiatives such as the Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy and the Midlands Skills Strategy. 

We have an essential role to play in supporting the ambitions of both Transport for the North and Midlands Connect as these new transport bodies look to fulfil the ambitions of the Northern Powerhouse and Midlands Engine by creating transport-led regeneration to improve connectivity for businesses and workers across those regions.

The future success of Britain depends on us getting this right

If we are to solve the brain drain from our regions then we need to make these areas more attractive as places where people can learn world-class skills, then stay to find quality jobs and enjoy a higher standard of living.

With more than £500bn worth of UK infrastructure projects currently in the pipeline, this is a prime time for young people to begin preparing for a career in British industry.

The National Colleges will provide a new, employer-led blueprint for helping to tackle Britain’s skills shortages and provide businesses with the young talent they need. The future success of Britain depends on us getting this right and we are extraordinarily motivated to do so.

To avoid a conflict of interest, it would seem logical for Ofqual to take over external quality assurance for the Institute for Apprenticeships, but this would put off many organisations wanting to offer end-point assessment, says Simon Martin

Apprenticeship standards are intended to drive forward the workforce skills that UK employers have identified for competitiveness in the world economy. Yet many standards do not include any technical or vocational qualifications to benchmark the skills, knowledge and behaviours to be acquired by the apprentice, and even where they do, successfully passing the standard relies on passing the end-point assessment.

This means the robustness of EPA, and the quality assurance needed to underwrite that robustness, is a fundamental requirement for instilling confidence in the reliability of the new standards. But this remains highly questionable, given the fragmented approach that is emerging towards external quality assurance of EPA.

At the Annual Apprenticeships Conference in March, Peter Lauener, Shadow Chief Executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships, openly reiterated in a plenary session that the Institute’s primary function was to drive apprenticeship quality through its role as the regulator of standards and Assessment Plans. He added that one of the three key features of the new apprenticeship system was external quality assurance of EPAs; indeed, that IfA itself would ‘establish an approach to Institute-led external quality assurance’.

It is far from clear how this is materialising

It is far from clear, however, how this is materialising in a market where the employer groups themselves are choosing one of five different EQA organisation types, and moreover where one of these is the Institute itself, alongside the Quality Assurance Agency, Ofqual, professional bodies, and employer-led approaches.

Furthermore, in a workshop at the conference, Mike Keoghan, Deputy Chief Executive of the IfA, reported that a key area of concern arising from the sector consultation on the IfA was its role in ‘ensuring reliability and consistency of assessments with EQA organisations and the Institute’s role in quality assurance’.

There is, therefore, a core issue that needs to be resolved rapidly if the new apprenticeships are to be accepted as the professional and industrial Gold Standard that is hoped for.

At the conference Mr Keoghan described the Institute as the ‘back stop on quality’. This implies, and it would be reasonable to assume, that the Institute will therefore be the ultimate adjudicator across the mixed approach to EQA (there are already nearly 25 different EQA organisations). Yet the Institute itself is already being chosen by the standards development groups as the most popular EQA route, despite it supposedly being a ‘last resort’ option only. It is even more popular than the official qualifications regulator Ofqual.

There is manifestly a potential conflict of interest here

There is manifestly a potential conflict of interest here. To remedy this, Peter Lauener was clear at conference that the Institute will not employ staff to undertake EQA, but that this will be ‘tendered out’. In plenary and in workshops it was hinted at several times by senior representatives of both organisations that the Institute and Ofqual will be ‘talking closely’. This, however, is a problem.

If Ofqual takes a bigger space in the EQA arena – for example, by tendering for IfA/s EQA provision – any organisation looking to offer EPA where Ofqual is nominated as the standard’s EQA choice, has to become Ofqual-registered first.

This is a lengthy and daunting process for any organisation (such as an Awarding Body, for example) that is not already Ofqual-registered, and in reality has to be completed before even contemplating an application to the Register of Apprentice Assessment Organisations, which is in itself a considerable task.

Therefore, unless Ofqual changes its current rules, any move by the Institute for greater Ofqual involvement in EQA is likely to be off-putting for many organisations wanting to offer EPA.

Moreover, it will further delay the process, thus amplifying the travesty of current apprentices already following standards that do not have an identified EPA organisation in place – worryingly, already over half of all ‘live’ standards.

Colleges and training providers were sent a funding allocation on April 25, for apprenticeship starts from May to 31 December 2017 for non-levy employers. In response, the finance director of Ofsted outstanding apprenticeship provider Crackerjack has written to minister Robert Halfon to question their contract allocation, which he says equates to a funding cut between 80 and 90%.

Attention Robert Halfon

Minister of State for Apprenticeships and Skills

Dear Robert

I wrote to you on 21/04/2017 outlining my concerns with respect of the lack of progress on apprenticeship standards for the childcare sector. I look forward to receiving your reply to the questions I have asked.

Unfortunately I have the urgent need to contact you again regarding a far more serious issue, the announcement from Keith Smith (ESFA) on 25 April regarding contract extensions for ROATP providers due to the government pause in the ITT for non-levy paying organisations (98% of employers in the UK).

We received our allocation statement from Keith Smith, ESFA, via the Hub.

I wish to advise you that the allocation given to our organisation is derisory and in no way reflects our delivery record to date for 2016/17.

All our employers are small- to medium-size childcare nurseries and are all non-levy payers normally less than 20 employees. We therefore have no access whatsoever in our sector to large levy-paying employers and therefore no access to funding for apprenticeship starts from 1 May 2017.

 

Our apprenticeship contract 16/17 allocation (12 months) is:

16-18     £630,937              (for comparison, over 8 months this equates to £420,624)

19-23     £312,501              (for comparison, over 8 months this equates to £208,334)

 

However: Our apprenticeship contract 17/18 allocation issued by Keith Smith (8 months) is only:

16-18     £79,466                 (only 18.89% of our 16/17 eight month pro-rata allocation above)

This is an 81% cut in funding

19-23     £22,770                 (only 10.93% of our 16/17 eight month pro-rata allocation above)

This is an 89% cut in funding

 

We are an outstanding apprenticeship provider with success rates of 93% for 16-18 apprenticeships and 96.6% for 19-23 apprenticeships (30% above the national average), just the kind of provider the IFA need to deliver the high quality apprenticeships that the government is calling for.

Could you please investigate this allocation matter urgently as there is obviously something wrong with the way our allocation has been calculated.

I have also raised this matter with our constituency MP in Birmingham, Shabana Mahmood, Mark Dawe AELP and Nick Linford FE Week.

Our managing director will also be contacting Amanda Spielman, Chief Inspector, Ofsted to raise this issue. I will also be contacting Peter Lauener and Anthony Jenkins of the IFA.

I would appreciate your help and support in resolving this issue as soon as possible

Regards,

Chris Baker

Finance Director, Crackerjack Training