A college strategic funding manager has hit out at the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) for refusing to publish a list of which qualifications have lost full funding through a widely-criticised consultation.

The review, which ran from February 10 to 29, requested views on plans to end full-funding ‘core’ entitlement for up to 524 full level two and three qualifications offered by 56 awarding organisations for 19 to 23-year-olds.

FE Week last month reported fierce criticism of the consultation’s timing from NCFE and the Federation of Awarding Bodies, because five of the 14 working days it was open fell over half-term.

The SFA subsequently revealed that only 33 of the 524 qualifications remained eligible for entitlement funding as a result of this, because they “evidenced demand, local need and entry to highly specialised job role/occupation, or the qualification serves as a prerequisite to a specialised job/occupation”.

But it refused to provide a list of the remaining 491 potentially losing entitlement to full funding status despite repeated requests from FE Week, which provoked a bemused response from Morley College’s strategic funding and examinations manager, Stephen Hewitt.

He said: “It is ridiculous that the SFA won’t publish a list of the over 400 qualifications that they have decided should be stripped of full funding status.

“We need this information to plan for 2016/17 and, by not telling providers, Peter Lauener and his agency are making this much more difficult.”

An SFA spokesperson said only 33 qualifications were added to the entitlements list because “428 qualifications did not receive any submissions from a provider or an awarding organisation indicating they wanted them to be added to the list”.

She added: “Of the 63 qualifications where we did receive a submission, but which have not been added to the updated list, there are small number we are further reviewing as they were below the minimum size threshold.”

When asked which of the 524 had lost full funding or were still under review, an SFA spokesperson said: “We don’t hold an updated non-core list, this list was only used for consultation.”

But the agency has never published a user friendly list of the qualifications under review — although FE Week managed to create a list after unlocking the spreadsheet.

The data that we compiled this list from has since been taken down from gov.uk.

FE Week previously published contents of a leaked letter, sent in February by NCFE chief executive David Grailey to SFA boss Peter Lauener, which was highly critical of the consultation process.

Andrew Gladstone-Heighton, NCFE policy leader, also told FE Week in early March: “We don’t think this short timescale was sufficient for a consultation of this nature.”

When asked this week for his views on the consultation result, he said: “I’m still disappointed with the rushed nature, and that we provide so much information for it to just seemingly disappear.

“I think the low number of qualifications added to the non-core list also reflects the fact that Awarding bodies didn’t have sufficient time to make their case.”

Click here to download interim editor Nick Linford’s editorial on this story.

Concerns have been raised over delays with government approval of apprentice assessment organisations (AAOs) for Trailblazer apprenticeship standards after just 13 were cleared.

The Skills Funding Agency (SFA) first began taking on submissions to their new Register of Apprenticeship Assessment Organisations (RoAAO) in March last year. But FE Week has found that despite 88 apprenticeship standards being open to new starts — just 23 (26 per cent) have 13 AAOs assigned to them.

And 16 out of those 23 only have one AAO to choose from, raising issues around lack of choice for employers.

The director of assessment policy, research and compliance at City & Guilds, Patrick Craven, told FE Week the RoAAO tendering process had been “longer than we might have anticipated”.

“There are likely to be many more assessment organisations that are still in the pipeline waiting for their applications to be processed by the SFA,” he added.

“It’s also the case that many of the early standards approved are very specialised with small numbers of apprentices expected.

“This means that only an assessment organisation that specialises in that particular occupation is likely to register.

“We expect there will be a lot more registrations from assessment organisations when more high volume apprenticeship standards are approved.”

And not all the 13 approved AAOs are even open for business. BT was approved in September last year for the digital industries standard, but confirmed this week it had no immediate plans to carry out assessments.

Responding to these issues, an SFA spokesperson said: “Any organisation that considers itself suitable to conduct end-point assessment can choose to apply on the register of apprentice assessment organisations.

“The register is open for applications on a continuous basis. We update the register each month so that it contains all organisations who have been successful in their application.”

FE Week reported in August last year that frustration was growing among Trailblazer designers because many standards were still awaiting government approval for delivery almost a year after they were published.

The managing director of awarding organisation NOCN, Graham Hasting-Evans, told FE Week that progress with apprenticeship standards had been so slow “they might never be finished”.

“We are gravely concerned about how bureaucratic this is all becoming and how slow the rate of progress on apprenticeships is,” he said. “To quote the minister it is ‘ball-achingly’ slow.”

Mr Hasting-Evans also noted that it was “extremely difficult” to become an AAO.

He said: “We understand at present that there are a number of apprentices working on apprenticeship standards where there is no AAO and therefore, at present, no chance of actually completing and passing the standard.”

The outgoing chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, Stewart Segal added that he expected more organisations to offer assessment services in time.

He also warned that providers “should be aware of the cost of assessment before they take on any new starts”.

Pearson, OCR and Ofqual each declined to comment.

Government figures showed a 6 per cent fall in employer numbers posting apprenticeship vacancies in the same week it admitted to delaying the launch of a service it hopes will improve the situation.

Skills Funding Agency (SFA) and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) data published on Tuesday (April 5) showed that 23,800 employers posted vacancies from last August to March this year.

That was just over 6 per cent down on 25,360 posted over the same period in 2014/15.

The SFA then admitted a day later, in its weekly update, it had delayed the launch of the new ‘recruit an apprentice/trainee’ service until “early summer”.

The online bulletin did not however mention the inclusion of a planned feature to allow employers to post their own vacancies, as promised in the government’s ‘English Apprenticeships: Our 2020 Vision’ document released in December.

That report said at the time employers would “be able to post their own vacancies on the system, working with education and training providers where they want to” by February.

When asked by FE Week what was happening with this, an SFA spokesperson said: “The first phase of the launch will enable providers to post their own vacancies. The second phase will allow employers to post their own vacancies.”

The fall in employers posting vacancies comes after the 2020 Vision document wrote: “We know that in other countries, the proportion of employers engaged with apprenticeships is much higher.

“For instance, around 25 per cent of employers in Austria employ apprentices, 24 per cent in Germany, and 30 per cent in Australia. This is compared to only 15 per cent of establishments who have or offer apprenticeships in England.”

The same SFA and BIS data published this week showed a 20 per cent increase in the number of vacancies posted — from 87,340 for August to March last academic year, to 105,170 up to March 2015/16.

The number of applications also went up by three per cent over the same eight months, from 1,024,830 in 2014/15 to 1,060,220 of 2015/16.

Mike Cherry, Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) national chairman, said: “While this report can be read in a number of ways, it’s good to see more people seeking to be apprentices.

“Although the number of employers using the official apprenticeships vacancies website is down, we can’t assume this means fewer are seeking apprentices — they may just be choosing to advertise opportunities in other ways.”

He added: “While aspects of the government’s reform plans, such as the apprenticeship levy, will not be applied to the smallest firms, it is important these businesses can continue to interact with the system.”

An SFA spokesperson did not answer directly when asked by FE Week if it was concerned about the fall in employers posting apprenticeship vacancies. But she said the delayed ‘recruit an apprentice/trainee’ service would “include quick and easy to use tools, including a self-serve facility for colleges and other training organisations which will allow providers and employers to work closely together and advertise their vacancies more quickly”.