Andrew Cleaves looks ahead to a post-apprenticeship levy environment, where he says colleges will have to tailor their training far more to employers.

In 10 years’ time the FE landscape is going to look very different from today; the apprenticeship levy is going to be a real game-changer.

While traditional sources of funding continue to be under pressure, the apprenticeship levy represents a significant opportunity for colleges to develop and grow.

In the West Midlands alone it is estimated there will be in the region of £150m to £180m brought into skills training and because it is raised from employers, for their own use, the levy will change the way businesses think about skills and the way they relate to skills providers.

We will need to design more and more training that isn’t based around term times

It is already clear that wise companies will invest carefully, to change the way they recruit, retain and develop talent.

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that we will see huge changes on both sides of the supply and demand for skills provision.

On the demand side, employers will become more engaged and have an active involvement in the design and content of their training, with sectors and supply chains also pulling together more effectively.

As employers get the value that they need and want from education, they will clearly identify their requirements and be willing to take an active role in skills training.

On the supply side, FE colleges will likewise have to think and act differently, and become fleet of foot in their response to the employer imperative.

We will need to design more and more training that isn’t based around term times, isn’t run around what we perceive to be the normal working week, and is aimed at what individual employers require.

We will also have to think more carefully about progression in work, with the potential to create new career pathways that by-pass some of the more traditional graduate entry routes and give employers a real opportunity to grow their own talent.

Increasingly, I believe colleges will not be able to offer off the shelf ‘construction training’ — it will have to be training that has been designed for, and in partnership with, particular employers.

And as these partnerships develop, FE colleges will be an importance source of new talent, much more involved in pre-employment activity so that we can increase the range of potential recruits that we’re able to bring to the table.

Just recently, BMet launched two career colleges, an exciting step towards real employer-led education which will see the curriculum of each college being designed by employers, for employment.

Our two career colleges will provide specialist vocational education in the professional services, and the digital and creative sectors, with leading employers in the region feeding directly into the curriculum.

Both the professional services, and digital and creative, have been identified by the Greater Birmingham and Solihull local enterprise partnership as key growth sectors for the region.

So they will address the skills gap that firms are experiencing, at the same time as providing our students with direct access to the world of work.

As with many colleges across the UK, this concept is not new.

The work BMet has done with Wesleyan, one of our leading local financial services firms, is a good example of an existing partnership with business.

We put young people through a really strenuous course so they get the proper qualification, but they also gain that invaluable experience in the workplace with an employer who is committed to their future career development.

For many of our students, this is increasingly a safer option than the traditional university route.

The more employers we engage with on apprenticeships, the more that other students benefit because of the knowledge and experience our tutors and assessors bring back in to the wider vocational curriculum.

At BMet, we’re confident that success lies in helping more young people get the technical and professional skills they need to be effective in the workplace.

David Allison discusses the effects of the apprenticeship levy on business agendas and the challenge employers face in finding the right apprentices.

Whether you like it or not, the apprenticeship levy continues to raise awareness of apprenticeships across a wide range of stakeholders. Some of them have been around the block with the various iterations of skills funding and agencies in the last 20 years, and some are new to the subject of apprenticeships.

Each business that will be paying into the levy is undoubtedly trying to answer one simple question: ‘what does it mean for me?’

There are many answers: financial: ‘how can I get more back than I put in?’; strategic ‘how do I get the right skills for the next 10 years?’; or operational ‘how do I deliver an apprenticeship programme?’

It is up to the FE sector to help more employers take on more young people.

The fact that one version or another of this debate is now happening across the country is a significant opportunity for the FE sector as a whole. There will be a number of employers setting up apprenticeship programmes for the first time, or significantly scaling. Alongside complaints about the apprenticeship ‘tax’, there is also a genuine interest, and in some cases excitement, about the opportunities that the new apprenticeship agenda will open up.

So, the ‘three million apprentices’ target may be wrong and could threaten standards, but to focus on this side of the debate misses the very real opportunity that now exists. It is up to the FE sector to help more employers take on more young people.

The FE, and specifically apprenticeship, sector is about to be exposed to a new and exciting world and within this new world will come new rules. Some of them will be documented (eventually) by the funding agencies, others will be set out by our new customers.

At GetMyFirstJob, we believe that the winners in this marketplace will deliver consistently high levels of service throughout an apprenticeship programme. From the first engagement where programmes are specified and agreed, through the contracting and operational phases, it will no longer be enough simply to be an SFA contract holder. Agreeing and delivering on specific outcomes (and not simply following funding guidelines) will be essential.

All of this is happening at a time when the challenge to engage and recruit high quality candidates is also as hard as it has ever been. Changes to both sixth form and HE funding have led to increased ‘competition’ for learners. So, delivering an outstanding experience to candidates and companies will be needed to deliver the best outcome. It is the recruitment experience that will, after all, be the first real deliverable of the apprenticeship journey.

This experience has to go far beyond a simple communication process. Of course apprenticeship providers should get back to candidates when they apply, of course communication with employers should be accurate and timely. This is surely easy and done by all apprenticeship providers anyway, right? Wrong. Research we conducted recently with members of the Federation of Small Business, amongst others, showed that over 40% of small businesses who had experience of an apprenticeship programme rated the communication process with their provider as unsatisfactory. How many rated it as outstanding? I’m afraid to say 0%.

From working with 150 colleges, employers and training providers, GetMyFirstJob is fully aware of the challenges such establishments face in communicating apprenticeships with this generation of young people and serving up outstanding service to employers. That’s why we’re so pleased to be using our recent £1m investment from City & Guilds and Nesta, to put more focus on helping bridge the gap between young people, training providers and employers. Part of this strategy will include investing heavily in communicating the value of apprenticeships to young people and guiding businesses through the storm of the apprenticeship levy.

The prison education reforms announced by Michael Gove are to be welcomed, says Nina Champion, but more investment is needed to ensure governors have enough staff to make them work.

As a committed advocate for progress in prison education, my feelings over the last fortnight have veered between elation and frustration.

I was delighted to hear, on May 18, that the government had accepted all aspects of the review into prison education led by Dame Sally Coates.

Key recommendations included prison governors being held to account for the educational progress of the people in their custody, professional development for all staff, and a more personalised approach to learning for all prisoners.

I sincerely hope the latest reforms are reality and not just rhetoric

Dame Sally stressed the need to raise aspiration and help learners achieve higher-level qualifications, something that the Prisoners’ Education Trust, as a provider of distance-learning courses up to degree level, is very much in favour of.

Two recommendations in particular have sparked controversy.

Dame Sally called to extend the use of technology, which she presented as crucial to deliver high-quality education.

She also advocated increasing the use of day release to allow prisoners to attend college or work placements.

This resulted in news coverage about giving “lags” “treats”, in the form of iPads or “weekend jail”.

In the not-so-distant past, headlines like this would have had politicians quickly backtracking and promising tougher regimes.

But so far justice secretary Michael Gove, who commissioned the report, has stressed his commitment to even its most controversial aspects.

In principle, the Coates Report represents the sort of radical rethink that we so desperately need. Its suggestions are in line with the sector’s experts’.

But it is easy to get carried away with political promises and forget the reality of a prison system under serious strain.

This truth was brought home to me last week, when a colleague, corresponding with a staff member at a prison, was told that due to officer shortages and an overtime ban, the education department at her prison was to close for two weeks. Disastrously, this will fall over exam period.

This means the men won’t have the opportunity to obtain the qualifications they have worked hard to achieve.

The teachers who have engaged and supported them will also be sad to see their efforts come to nothing.

The cost of supplying the course is wasted. The men in this prison now have no choice now but to sit locked in their cells all day rather than doing something positive to show their families, and themselves, that they can achieve something positive and move forward in their lives.

And that prison isn’t alone. John Attard at the Prison Governor’s Association has said that although he sees the “potential” of Dame Sally’s review, it represented a “missed opportunity” to recognise the enormous strains on the system today.

The report suggests training officers to teach basic skills, but when there aren’t enough officers to even escort prisoners to an exam room, expanding their remit is, in Attard’s words, “highly aspirational”.

It is harder than ever for governors to keep staff and prisoners safe and promote a culture of respect and humane treatment, let alone a culture of learning and rehabilitation.

Michael Gove’s recent commitment of £10m to improve security is welcome, but with so much money having been taken out of the prison system in the last few years, this represents a sticking plaster on a serious wound.

There must be a more fundamental solution to the mismatch between the resources available and the sheer numbers of people occupying our jails.

For prisoners who are unable to sit their exams this summer, and for prisoners and staff across the estate who are being routinely failed by the system, I sincerely hope the latest reforms are reality and not just rhetoric.

Shane Chowen explains why he thinks Lord Sainsbury’s review of technical and professional education should avoid old solutions to new challenges.

If FE Week’s timings are correct, this ought to be my penultimate column before the publication of Lord Sainsbury’s review and the government’s ‘continuing revolution’ of technical and professional education.

I can’t be the only one who is struggling with this metaphor.

Ideally, if you’re going to have a revolution, you want some really clear demands and, most importantly, some kind of utopian goal for the people to get behind.

Leaders have just cause to hold the government’s feet to the fire when it comes to clarity

If your revolution just goes on and on and on, with a confusing message and no end in sight, it’s probably the white flag rather than the red one you need to be reaching for.

If we really are about to see an end to mixed academic and vocational provision post-16, which I think is unlikely, then I would consider that more orthodox thinking than revolutionary.

Saying that, you can see how such a move could be justified.

The prime minister and skills minister have made very clear their shared vision for a future, where every young person goes to a university or does an apprenticeship.

Unrefined, that looks like a competing choice between vocational and academic.

Lord Sainsbury’s review has been tasked with putting forward a technical and professional education system that rivals the best in the world.

Reintroducing some rigid structures which pit academic and vocational as polar opposites would not mirror the best in the world.

Remember John Hayes? In 2010, the then-skills minister said in a speech that “the line between further and higher education should be a permeable membrane, not an iron curtain”. Nobody wants iron curtains.

Instead, I think we will see a new vision set by the Sainsbury Review, with some principles for reform, and a fairly long lead-in time, the year 2025 maybe, for targets and reforms to be met and completed.

On face value, the idea that there will be 15 ‘high-status and clear’ routes in and up some groupings of technical and professional careers could be welcome.

In particular, it would be great to see them focus on sectors/careers which currently don’t benefit from well-known undergraduate routes and where there will be good opportunities accessible to people who don’t live near a Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls Royce or BT plant.

There are some examples of similar set-ups across Europe — where career routes can be mapped out through intermediate up to higher-level training spanning vocational and academic learning against national occupational standards.

However, it is worth noting that Alison Wolf, who is advising the Sainsbury Review, was very clear in her 2011 review of vocational education that all non-academic programmes of study for 16- to 18-year-olds “should be governed by a set of principles relating primarily to content, general structure, assessment arrangements and contact time”.

This could suggest the kind of TPE frameworks Lord Sainsbury will recommend. Professor Wolf also recommended against study programmes which were “entirely occupational”.

The government’s response to the Sainsbury Review, which I’d expect at the same time as the report, will hopefully draw parallels between what is hoped to be achieved through reforms to TPE and parallel agendas dominating learning and skills at present.

Provider leaders definitely have just cause to hold the government’s feet to the fire when it comes to clarity over what they want from the sector in return for, albeit diminishing, taxpayer funding.

Key questions should for example include, will Sainsbury’s review be a continuation of moves to more freedoms and flexibilities, or will it add further complexity to the market?

Also, how can TPE routes help open careers to people without traditional social and financial capital usually expected of people in certain professional careers?

Finally, will TPE training be limited to institutes of technical excellence following area reviews?

You can start to see how, from the government’s perspective, this could all piece together. But for the benefit of leaders across the sector, I really hope I am right about the extended lead-in time before any reforms.

We also learned in the Queen’s speech that there will be a life chances strategy later this year. I’d expect part of that to be about the role of TPE, FE, and higher education in helping people overcome barriers to better opportunities throughout their lives.

Traineeships definitely need to be reviewed – as they’re still not really taking off with learners and aren’t serving the key purpose of helping boost apprentice starts.

I know their wider aim is to help steer young people lacking basic skills away from the oblivion that is long-term unemployment.

But they were sold to the sector around the time of their launch three years ago as an important means of preparing students for apprenticeships — which simply isn’t reflected in the progression figures unearthed in our story this week.

It’s not good enough for the government to publish vague catch-all progression figures and I fear this reflects wider confusion at the top over what it hopes to achieve through them.

The freedom of information response figures suggest boosting apprenticeship starts is low down on the list of traineeship priorities.

But if this is the case, it calls into question whether scarce public funding could be better used elsewhere.

More focus is needed and the government could do a lot worse than looking again at the Association of Colleges’ manifesto call last year for a specific pre-apprenticeship programme.

Paul Offord, deputy editor

paul.offord@feweek.co.uk