The government was today still unable to say how small businesses who don’t pay into the apprenticeship levy would access funding for the programme — despite them delivering more than 90 per cent of all apprenticeships.

From April 2017, employers will have to pay 0.5 of their pay roll costs to the apprenticeship levy, the government announced in November.

But businesses with payrolls of less than £3m — over 98 per cent of all employers — will not pay the levy, the government said.

And, speaking in a government-funded webinar aimed at promoting the levy, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) official David Sampson conceded that a “new model” would need to be developed “that applies to non-levy payers, but that is being worked on at the moment”.

Mr Sampson, head of standards development in the apprenticeships directorate at BIS, made the comments during a webinar, entitled ‘Frameworks to standards: what you need to know’, hosted by the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP), and chaired by Mike Cox, AELP operations manager (pictured above), on January 13.

“Hopefully, by the time you have your levy webinar [being held by AELP on March 17], we will at least have a timescale in place the provision of that information, although I don’t know if any more information will be available at that stage,” said Mr Sampson.

As Mr Sampson’s comments revealed, many details of the levy remain unresolved.

In response to a question from Mr Cox about firms whose workforce includes people overseas, Mr Sampson said he was “aware of some work that is going on right now to work out the detail as to precisely how the payroll calculation will be made”.

Information should be available “in the next couple of months”, he said.

Concerns about the number of awarding organisations involved in the new system of Trailblazers and undetermined end-point exam costs will also not have been eased by Mr Sampson’s comment that there were “still some issues to work through in terms of bringing assessment bodies on board”.

Stewart Segal, AELP chief executive, said: “The levy proposals for large companies should not be at the expense of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) funding, nor drive the shaping of an SME funding system.

“We are still concerned as to whether upfront cash contributions will compromise SME engagement.”

A spokesperson for the Association of Colleges said: “Small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy and the government must ensure that they, and their staff, can also benefit from the funding created by the levy.”

A government spokesperson said that employers who did not have to pay the levy would “continue to have access to government funding to support apprenticeships. Further details of how the levy will operate will be available in due course”.

Association of Teachers and Lecturers general secretary Dr Mary Bousted has told of her hopes that a consultation on reforming Functional Skills exams will boost their “credibility and value”.

The Education and Training Foundation (ETF) unveiled its timetable for a “multi-stage” consultation on Thursday (January 14).

A spokesperson told FE Week that it would be running “many different activities until late June” geared towards collecting views on how the qualifications should be reformed by 2018.

The first consultation set to launch shortly and close on April 7 would, he said, focus on “employers and technical experts”. A second consultation with providers and other sector experts is expected to run from mid-May until late June.

Dr Bousted (pictured above) said: “As a member of the Functional Skills Reform Programme Expert Advisory Group, ATL supports the review of maths and English Functional Skills qualifications.

“The review is timely as it is over five years since the qualifications were launched.”

She added: “Functional Skills are the most popular qualifications after GCSEs, with one million awarded every year. So it is clear their relevance is already acknowledged by industry, practitioners and learners, but their credibility and value needs to be recognised by government ministers.”

Visit www.etfoundation.co.uk/functionalskillsreform or www.pyetait.com/fsreform to find out more about the consultation.

Area reviews, apprenticeships and the large employers’ levy were all topics that were raised at a Westminster Education Forum on reforms to vocational qualifications in England.

The word “bewildering” was used more than once throughout the forum, highlighting a view that routes through vocational education lack clarity.

Warwick Sharp (pictured above), deputy director, vocational education and 16-19 strategy at the Department for Education (DfE), spoke on reforms so far and said that vocational education needed simplification to make it more accessible.

“I don’t think you could describe our system of vocational education as simple or streamlined,” he said.

“The majority are doing vocational education … we need to get it right,” he said.

On apprenticeships, he said they offered an advantage over other types of provision for particular industries because being in the workplace allows learners to focus more on practical skills.

Mr Sharp said the DfE wanted apprenticeships to be “part of the whole system”, with “flexible movement between classroom-based provision and apprenticeships”.

He also said he thought area reviews were a “really good opportunity” for vocational education.

“What is at the heart of area reviews is trying to match the needs of a local area and the provision that’s available … one of the things that could happen is more specialisation and it might be that some institutions are specialising more closely on things that local area needs,” he said.

Kate Shoesmith, head of policy and public affairs at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, raised the topic of the large employers’ apprenticeship levy.

She said: “The apprenticeship levy is coming our way and the one concern that I would have with that, and that employers across the board are saying, is if that’s a pure focus on the numbers of people doing those apprenticeships because we have a target to meet by 2020, that’s not going to do very much for us.

“The thing that we’re really interested in is the quality of the training and how that is helping people to find the right jobs and get into industry.”

During the forum speakers also flagged concerns that the introduction of a compulsory English Baccalaureate (EBacc) could negatively impact on the number of students taking vocational qualifications.

In June 2015, the DfE announced the intention for all pupils starting secondary education in September 2015 to take the EBacc subjects when they reached their GCSEs in 2020.

Jill Stokoe, education policy adviser for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), said: “We’re about to look at a 90 per cent target for the EBacc, this is currently Forum looks at vocational reforms in England being consulted on. What we’re saying in our response to the EBacc consultation is that we’ve got real concerns about all students having to do the five academic subjects, five academic GCSEs — with the tech awards besides them.

“Though it’s a good mixture of academic and vocational, forcing students to do those subjects could mess it up across the piece for them.

“We’re worried that the tech awards will suffer as a result of this compulsory EBacc requirement — we think this is a mistake,” she said.

David Harbourne, acting chief executive of the Edge Foundation, also commented on the issue.

He said: “This will have a big impact, including on technical awards.

“If the 90 per cent target had been in place in 2014 an additional 141,800 key stage four students would have had to take a humanities GCSE instead of something else.

“To hit the languages target an extra 220,000 students would have to take a languages GCSE instead of something else.

“In my view that’s a very difficult target to achieve, for all sorts of reasons, but I’m also very worried that we assume that a modern foreign languages GCSE is more important than a technical award.”

Sheffield academic looks at qualification values

The forum heard from University of Sheffield academic Dr Steven McIntosh about his latest research.

The economics researcher, as part of the Centre for Vocational Education Research (CVER), set up by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills last year, is using data sets to estimate the value of different qualifications in the labour market.

CVER is using individualised learner records (ILRs), which represent the population of learners in FE, and matching them anonymously to tax and benefit records to reveal what people go on to do after receiving their vocational qualification.

The research aims to find out what jobs individuals do, how long they spend at work and how much they’re earning. The researchers will also be able to divide up the finding on factors such as type and level of qualification, the provider and the characteristics of the learner themselves.

“We have got the population of learners over the last ten years,” he said.

“This will allow us to provide a lot more detail than has previously been available from research … We’ll be able to make much more detailed statements to provide information to young people and their parents as they’re making decisions.”

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