This is the man with the daunting task of implementing a new cross-government IT system for large employers to pay into the proposed apprenticeship levy — and he’s got to do it in just 18 months.
In an exclusive interview with FE Week, Cabinet Office Minister and ‘earn or learn’ taskforce chair Matthew Hancock opened up on just how far officials have to go in designing the new system that will determine and track levy cash revenue on one side and pump out digital apprenticeship vouchers on the other.
The architect of Traineeships also discussed how he saw the youth unemployment programme just over two years after it was launched in a wide-ranging interview that goes on to touch upon his taskforce, Trailblazer apprenticeship standards and that ‘half-cock’ comment from his Skills Minister successor, Nick Boles.

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Scale of apprenticeship levy IT task emerges

The government is yet to make a start on designing an IT system to track large employer payments into a proposed levy despite the fact it would need to be in place in just 18 months, FE Week can reveal.
But Cabinet Office Minister Matthew Hancock has been charged with overseeing the development of the system and he told FE Week that it would be done “properly”.
“We’ve got to settle the full details of the policy first,” he said.
“But I’m now responsible for digital implementation across government, so believe you me it will get the attention it deserves.”
But while a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills consultation on the levy proposals closed earlier this month, the government has already said it wants the system in place in 2017 — and has tied it closely to the planned new digital apprenticeship voucher.
Indeed, the levy consultation document said: “Government intends for employers to have an online “voucher account” where they will be able to see their levy contribution and the digital vouchers that they can use to purchase apprenticeship training.
“The amount in an employer’s individual voucher account available for apprenticeship training will be dictated directly by the amount levied from the employer by HMRC.”
It added: “This would be part of a broader digital system that enables employers to advertise vacancies, search for applicants and engage registered providers to provide training for their apprentices.”
But memories of the botched data collections and funding transformation programme, in which among other issues a new funding information system produced inaccurate reports, from largely under his watch while Skills Minister will still be fresh in the minds of many in FE.
Nevertheless, Mr Hancock also told of his determination that the IT system would be worked out “properly”.
“You can only work out the full figure once the policy details are set, but we’re going to do it properly,” he said.

SEE EDITOR’S COMMENT BELOW

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Hancock on…

Traineeships

We set out what we were trying to achieve with Traineeships at the start, which was to make sure people who aren’t yet quite ready to take a job can get into a job, and can get the training that they need, the work experience and the English and maths.

So the key is to learn from where the people who have been on them have ended up, that’s what really matters, and the value for money that we get from the taxpayers’ point of view too.

Similarities between Traineeships and new “activity programmes”

The intensive activity programmes are about making sure that if somebody’s unemployed and signing on, then they get the intensive support within the jobcentre in the first instance, aimed very much at the skills needed to get through an interview and the support you need there. There isn’t the English and maths element. Where needs differ, so too should the support that people get.

Apprenticeship reforms and Skills Minister Nick Boles’s claim that the first round went off “half-cock”

It was a choice phrase. Nick and I work very closely together. We’re old friends from before either of us went into Parliament and I think he’s doing a magnificent job, so there’s no way you’ll get an inch of paper between us on policy issues. I take it with a grin on my face.

On the substance of it, the levy proposals are different from the original PAYE proposals. I think, actually, they’re a better set of proposals and the only regret I have about them is that I didn’t come up with the idea myself.

Number of new apprenticeship standards

I remember those early days of re-writing the frameworks when we gave the pen to employers and said: ‘You write down what you need people to be able to do’. And in some cases they were astonished that we didn’t then take the pen back and we said: ‘No really, we want you to write it’.

There’s a large number of occupations in the economy and apprenticeships need to reflect the economy if they’re going to reflect the economy.

Should the Skills Funding Agency and Education Funding Agency should merge?

There’s all sorts of ways you can organise a government in order to deliver, but I think it’s very important to stay focused on the needs of young people and we can get too tied up with bureaucratic design.

Decisions of the taskforce

The decisions of the task force are announced through the ministers who sit on it. So the purpose of the task force is to bring together the different departments and ministers who are involved in delivering this agenda.

Life without Sir Vince Cable

I always had a very professional relationship with him. He was always very straight-dealing, he was a strong supporter of the skills agenda. But there were things we were unable to do.

We were unable to be as clear as we now can be that all young people under the age of 21 should either be earning or learning, and to deliver that you need both support for training opportunities but you also need very strong incentives in the benefits system.

That’s something we weren’t able to deliver, that’s something we now can and I hope that leads to a further fall in youth unemployment.

Young people and apprentices won’t benefit from the new living wage

People gain experience through time and people are inevitably, on average, less experienced when they are younger.

We’ve put up the apprentice minimum wage very sharply. It was much lower. And we decided to put it up. So it’s gone up to over £3 an-hour. It was £2.65 when I was apprenticeships minister.

Let’s be clear, there is a good reason that there’s an apprentice minimum wage that’s different to the national minimum wage and the new national living wage that’s coming in. When you’re an apprentice you are learning and earning at the same time but you’re learning and that’s why the wage is lower to reflect the fact you’re training on the job.

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Editor’s comment

Action man given mission impossible?

It seems very obvious that Matthew Hancock, the man of action when it comes to ‘digital implementation across government’, has been given an impossible mission.

If the government deadlines are to be believed, they have less than two years to develop, test and roll-out a new online apprenticeship payment and funding system.

The history of problems with the current intermittently available SFA apprenticeship funding system, which took three years to develop, have been well documented on these pages.

Yet the current system is child’s play compared to one that will need to accommodate hundreds of thousands of time limited employer levy payments via the Treasury, millions of online apprentice voucher applications and many more millions of individual payments to employers, colleges and training providers.

So my advice to the minister is simple.

Commission a feasibility study from some relevant technology experts who know they won’t gain financially from developing the new system.

I suspect the study would conclude, regardless of development costs, that the timescales are too tight and the risk of failure too great.

More time is needed, alongside carefully considered action, else this movie genre will quickly switch from fantasy to disaster.

Chris Henwood

FE Week editor

chris.henwood@feweek.co.uk

 

 Main image above: Bloomberg

Large employers should be able to hand out apprenticeship funding earned under the government’s proposed new levy system to smaller firms, ministers have been told.

The call was made by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) in its response to the government’s consultation on the plans, which closed on October 2.

It said large employers set to be made to pay the levy “may not have capacity to take on additional apprenticeships ‘inhouse’, while others may already have a fully qualifi ed workforce that fulfi l their immediate needs”.

“We believe these employers should have some control over where their levy money is spent and, in keeping with the ‘use it or lose it’ model, be permitted to select other companies to receive a proportion of their levy contributions,” the response added.

It stated that large employers may want to hand over surplus funding from the levy, set to be introduced in 2017, to smaller employers in their supply chains that would not be required to pay the charge.

“Others may wish to fund the training of apprenticeships, for instance, for corporate social responsibility or community purposes,” it added.

Senior FSB policy adviser David Nash told FE Week that spending levy cash on smaller companies would “make commercial sense for the large firm too, if skills gaps within the supply chain are filled”.

David Pollard, chair of the FSB education and skills committee, also said in a letter accompanying the consultation response that “it is important the levy is designed in a way that meets the requirements of employers over the long-term, and that we avoid constant policy churn”.

“Whichever model is ultimately agreed must deliver a secure long-term funding source,” he said.

The consultation responses of a number of other sector bodies, including the Association of Colleges (AoC) and Confederation of British Industry (CBI) were reported in edition 149 of FE Week.

The CBI stated that “employers should be allowed to spend their levy on training outside the company — for instance in their supply chain if they choose to.

“Many businesses train apprentices for their partners or the wider supply chain. Toyota, for example, operates a ‘cooperative model’ of apprenticeships with its suppliers and local businesses.”

It also called for the levy to be controlled by a new independent board, using the Low Pay Commission as a “blueprint”.

Meanwhile, the AoC warned the “government must not be seen to be using the levy as a reason to reduce its own £1.5bn annual spending on apprenticeships”.

The response from the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, covered on feweek.co.uk, proposed that cash generated by the levy should be combined with government funding in a central pot available to all employers.

A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills declined to reveal how many consultation responses it had received, but said: “The government response [to all consultation submissions] will be published in due course.”

A panel of five representatives from industry and trade unions was drawn together by City & Guilds to discuss the findings of the Industry Skills Board (ISB) report Making Apprenticeships Work.

The report includes 25 recommendations from the ISB for improving the way that apprenticeships are delivered. It was launched the same day as the panel event — Monday, October 5 — which was held at the Haberdasher’s Hall in London.

Quality and how to measure it
The panel was clear about what a quality apprenticeship should look like.

“Every apprenticeship needs to be of high quality and high value,” said Andy Smyth, vocational learning development manager at TUI Group and chair of the ISB.

“It needs to make an impact on the individual taking that apprenticeship. It needs to be such that they can make a contribution to their organisation positively. And collectively it needs to have an impact on the productivity targets that we’re setting for the UK.”

From a parent’s perspective, a good quality apprenticeship “means their son or daughter is going to get paid a reasonable wage, and relatively quickly if they progress, and they’re not going to incur a massive student debt going to university, and it’s going to lead to a job,” according to Nicky Taylor, head of training and development at Ginsters.

But how do you ensure that level of quality? It’s about more than just duration, the panel agreed — although a minimum was necessary, according to Tom Wilson, director or Unionlearn at the TUC, “because there were so many scandals”. Nonetheless, he said, a “one-year duration is a very crude proxy”.

It was a point echoed by Mr Smyth, pictured right, who said: “We could almost classify the 12-month duration as being a set of stabilisers on the system. It was designed to do something, and we all understand that.”

There was less agreement on what those measures of quality might be — not least because, as a member of the audience commented, “there’s an awful lot more to a quality experience for an individual”.

Mark Maudsley, chief executive of GTA England, proposed looking at the outcomes of an apprenticeship as a quality measure. “Sustainability of employment I think is something we should pull into the suite of things to look at,” he suggested.

Whatever measures of quality were identified, they would need to be reflected in the Ofsted inspection of those involved in delivering the apprenticeship.

However, Mr Smyth said: “It’s about finding the right measures of quality, rather than finding an easy way of doing it that just happens to fit a system.”

Flexibility
An apprenticeship should be flexible enough, according to the panel, to meet the needs of both the learner and the employer.

When someone starts an apprenticeship, said Ms Taylor, “you’re giving them the experience of how that sector works and operates and lives and breathes, and therefore the model needs to be flexible enough to reflect what’s really going on in different employers”.

It should be easier for people to take a break during an apprenticeship, according to Mark Lavington, HR manager at PGL, so that those who aren’t in full-time, permanent employment — for

example, seasonal workers — could still take one. This would help to ensure that apprenticeships “reflect the pathways that people are walking,” he said.

Mr Smyth also stressed the need for greater flexibility in the education system as a whole. “People will go in and out of the education system,” he said. “Our job is to make sure the system can respond appropriately to the needs of the individuals.”

This includes ensuring that people don’t come out of education and find themselves ineligible for further support because of the learning they’ve already done. To address this, Mr Lavington called for colleges and employers to be “incentivised to think further through so that the journey was being created at a start point”.

This, he said, would mean greater involvement of employers at the start of a college course, in order to create a package that included enough learning and work “to get them to a point of mastery as a unit”.

Apprenticeship levy
The apprenticeship levy is a “hot topic at the moment” according to Mr Smyth, and the ISB “recognised there is a lot of good that can be done” but at this stage he said they needed to make sure they didn’t constrain themselves.

“There’s a lot we don’t know about the levy yet, but we are positively engaged in, OK, what could we do with this?” he said.

 

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How to build a quality and sustainable apprenticeship system — the employers’ perspective

Kirstie Donnelly MBE
Managing director, City & Guilds

To celebrate the launch of the Making Apprenticeships Work report, we gathered a group of employers and educators together to hear from our Industry Skills Board (ISB) members about what makes a great apprenticeship for them and what needs to change in the system to maintain quality.

All panellists agreed about the positive impact apprentices have on their businesses and Warren Page, from Xtrac, said that apprenticeships are the best way to maintain skills.

However, the discussion quickly moved on to the difficulties of convincing parents and young people to consider apprenticeships as well as the difficulty of getting onto an apprenticeship when you’ve made that choice.

We didn’t have all the answers but everyone in the room wanted to build better links between education and employers so that young people can get excited about industries that they may never have been exposed to before.

We came back again to the poor careers advice in this country and the need to involve employers a lot more in this. Someone asked whether the employers would be willing to use some of the levy funds to pay for an improved careers service.

Something that I am proud of is the diversity of employers we have on the ISB. It allows us to understand the variety of skills needs across different industries and the flexibility that is required in the system to make it work for everyone.

One of the panellists, Mark Lavington, from PGL Travel, feels constrained by the notion of a fixed-length apprenticeship as this doesn’t give him enough flexibility to train seasonal staff. This led to a discussion around the ideal length of an apprenticeship with everyone agreeing that the length matters less than the quality. The consensus was that learning doesn’t just happen in one block but it’s something people return to throughout their entire careers.

Chair Andy Smyth, from TUI Group, was keen to point out that it’s not all about apprenticeships. The ISB acts as a skills advisory body and while apprenticeships are part of its remit they are not the only answer. I look forward to continuing the discussions around the broader skills agenda with the ISB over the coming year.

Finally, what we tried to put forward with our report and certainly what came across on Monday was that the ISB is not a talking shop.

We will all hold ourselves to account and report on the progress of our action plan. As Mark put it: “We are keen to influence what happens rather than criticise what’s occurring.”

Chartered status for colleges and training providers in the FE sector has moved an important step closer after the body set up to launch the quality mark was given legal approval.

The Queen approved the grant of a Royal Charter to the Institution for Further Education (IfE) in June, as reported in FE Week.

The body announced today that it has now been given the Great Seal of the Realm.

A spokesperson said that this meant it had been granted legal status and would now be known as the Chartered Institution for Further Education (CIfE).

Lord Lingfield, chair of the new CIfE, said the development was “a significant milestone” in the chartered status project for FE.

He added: “I am grateful to everyone in government and in the sector who have helped us to get this far.

“We shall now be moving to fill in the remaining details of the Institution’s internal governance framework and to set up the new chartered organisation to accept qualifying colleges and training providers into membership.”

Plans were originally drawn up, by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, for the Royal seal of approval to be granted to high-achieving FE institutions in July 2012.

It was almost another year before the appointment of Tory peer Lord Lingfield (pictured main, above) as chair of the IfE.

In March 2014, he told FE Week that he expected “negotiations to be completed within months” that would allow for the quality mark to be launched.

But an FE Week survey on the mark, carried out in May last year, unveiled concern that it could simply “sink without trace, before further worries earlier this year that it had “stalled” after no sign of movement.

The University for Industry (Ufi) Trust has officially launched 16 tech-based projects that it hopes will revolutionise digital learning in FE.

The VocLearnTech projects, which involve for example augmented reality simulators, 3D printed robots and interactive chemistry platforms, have been backed by the trust with £750K funding.

The launch event held last night (October 8) at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce building, in London, was attended by more than 40 guests from across the tech and education sectors.

Ufi chief executive Rebecca Garrod-Waters told guests that 200 different organisations had submitted applications for funding to develop tech-based education ideas since April, through the VocLearnTech scheme, which was whittled down to 16.

“We have had such a good response this year that we want to make it an annual project,” she said.

“There is something really exciting about each project and they can have an impact on digital learning.”

Ufi trustee and Toshiba education adviser Bob Harrison, who contributed to the FE Learning Technology Action Group (Feltag) report, said the next stage for the 16 projects would be for them to be “commercialised into a product” that can be sold to the private sector and adopted by colleges.

Ray Barnes, chair of the Ufi trustees board, said: “There is risk with these new projects, but if they work then it will be great.

“We will see all of them through to the next stage,” he added.

Ufi launched its charitable trust in May 2012 to help solve the UK’s skills deficit, as reported by FE Week.

Click here for an expert piece by Ms Garrod-Waters on this year’s funding awards.

Main pic above: Neville Rudd, director of Learn TMP at the event

 

Here are the 16 projects:

[slideshow_deploy id=’40212′]

Interactive instructional videos for the land-based sector — Myerscough College:

The videos will be geared at level two golf greenkeeping learners.

An app will be developed to allow learners to access the videos on smart phones.

A Ufi spokesperson said that the aim of the “easily accessible, interactive instructional videos” will be to “maximise access to training and develop new methods of active learning through the use of technology”.

 

Cuppa – Sarah Dunn Associates

Cuppa will deliver concise, workplace-specific learning resources to social care staff.

A Ufi spokesperson said it will provide “a skills boost in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea”. “Cuppa will use mobile channels, exploiting an accelerating ‘bring your own device’ trend to deliver just-in-time learning to a workforce that is on its feet, pushed for time and not always well-supported,” she added.

 

Digital vocational badges — Sussex Downs College

The project aims to improve the ways skills in education are recognised and assessed.

A Ufi spokesperson said that the college will take on board the skills, attitudes and evidence that employers are seeking across key vocational areas and encode them into the digital badges.

“These [badges] can be awarded to learners that meet the criteria and shared with employers or via social media,” she added.

 

CommSim — Learn TPM

Learn TPM is already experienced in applying technology — particularly serious games and simulations — to deliver learning, training and outreach in diverse contexts.

A Ufi spokesperson said that CommSim will “fuse the known ability of immersive simulations, to provide rehearsal of skills in contexts which would be otherwise difficult, expensive or risky to practice in real life, with unique audio analytics to provide valuable objective insights into performance, facilitating reflection, analysis and improvement”.

 

Badgemaker — We Are Snook

It will provide a simple platform for schools to build, earn and display online standards known as ‘open badges’.

The project will allow young people to “display a range of skills that build upon traditional qualifications”, a Ufi spokesperson said.

“Badges act as a digital form of validation that can be shared with educators and future employers,” she added.

 

Electronics for Everyone — MakerClub

MakerClub will for example use 3D printing and an intuitive online platform to bring programming, design and electronic engineering to life with a range of robotics kits aimed at the 12+ age group.

“The kits use proprietary browser based technology with mobile, and bespoke hardware to create a seamless learning experience that is tailored to the users individual ability levels,” a Ufi spokesperson said.

 

Elli-centric — Vital Partnerships

Elli-centric is a learning assessment and development tool based on the Seven Dimensions of Learning as identified at Bristol University.

A Ufi spokesperson said that the project involved the development of “an interactive, user-responsive platform with a suite of innovative animations”.

 

Frequency Based Learning Platform — Rapid English Limited

The project will aim to improve the flow of information between educators and learners, as well as employers and employees, by changing how all the parties involved relate to the language they use.

A Ufi spokesperson said it will bring “a new level of efficiency to vocational education, course material production and course content management, using a revolutionary combination of linguistic know-how, big-data and machine learning”.

 

GroupMOOC — Tamarisk Capital Ltd

GroupMooc will help organisations train their staff using free online courses from the world’s best universities.

A Ufi spokesperson said the idea is to “aggregate online courses from multiple providers so they’re all in one place, including an organisation’s own proprietary courses”.

 

I am Enterprising — The Women’s Organisation

The I am Enterprising app is designed to help build the entrepreneurial capability of learners.

A Ufi spokesperson said that it “can be integrated into courses and extra-curricular enterprise activities”.

 

Job Packs — PlayLingo

The project aims to teach migrant learners essential vocational vocabulary in a mobile social game designed to keep users motivated while they learn independently.

The target audience is “the almost 1m UK migrants with little or no English as well as migrants who are proficient in general English but seeking to develop their vocational vocabulary to improve employability,” a Ufi spokesperson said.

 

NanoSimBox — Interactive Scientific

The Nano Simbox is a molecular dynamics tech-based platform.

A Ufi spokesperson said had “been shown, in early stage trials, to engage a wider range of learners than traditional science teaching”.

 

Target — European Innovation

The project will involve a full commercial trial of wearable technology (in this case smart glasses) (in a manufacturing environment.

A Ufi spokesperson said: “When switched off, the glasses can form a standard pair of safety glasses.

“When switched on, the two head up display screens built into the glass can deliver interactive content directly to an individual as they look at a specific machine.”

 

The Charity series — GivebackUK

GivebackUK is a not-for-profit organisation creating a free online video learning library for the UK’s third sector.

A Ufi spokesperson said that it is “creating professional, bite-sized video interviews to share work based knowledge and expertise — as well as being popular, research shows that watching this type of video aids learning”.

 

Voc Qual tracking — Bedford College

The aim is to create tailored modular extensions for qualification progress tracking and personal learning planning.

A Ufi spokesperson said that the modules had been specially designed “to meet the needs of FE colleges”.

 

The Virtual Reality Personal Incident Command (VRPIC) — West Midlands Fire Service

The project aims to improve training, development and assessment of emergency response incident commanders who work within the emergency services.

A spokesperson said it will “evaluate and support ongoing development of emergency incident commanders and provide individuals with bespoke targeted tools to support their development”.

 

Photographs by Rebecca Jones and Chris Morley 

Two central London colleges have laid out their ambitions to become an Institute of Technology (IoT), as consultation opens on a possible merger.

In a joint proposal sent out by City and Islington College and Westminster Kingsway College, the two colleges outline a number of collaboration models.

These include developing their “offer of the highest quality” intermediate and higher level technical and professional training, which would put them “in a unique position to become an Institute of Technology at the heart of London”.

Collaboration, the proposal outlines, would enable them “to become recognised as the ‘go-to’ place for technical and professional training in London and the South East”.

Andy Wilson, principal of Westminster Kingsway College, which received a grade two Ofsted rating when it was last inspected in 2011, said: “We’re trying to create a college that employers and students see as the place to go for higher level technical qualifications.

“If there was the opportunity for us to be recognised for that type of work”, he added, “it fits in with our aspirations”.

IoTs are part of the government’s plan to address the UK’s skills shortage and close the productivity gap. First outlined in the government’s Productivity Plan, launched in July, they will have a specific focus on delivering high-standard, high-level professional and technical training.

The government expects there to be one IoT per local enterprise partnership, according to its guidance on the area reviews of post-16 education. The steering group for each area review is expected to consider the case for an IoT in its area, and whether any existing colleges could become one.

The City and Islington College and Westminster Kingsway College consultation follows on from the announcement, covered by FE Week in July, that the two colleges were exploring working more closely together.

Speaking to FE Week at the time of the announcement, Sir Frank McLoughlin, principal of City and Islington College, which received a grade one Ofsted rating when it was last inspected in 2008, said: “This is nothing to do with survival or cost cutting, it’s about ambition.”

According to a spokesperson for City and Islington College, the colleges were consulting with staff, local and regional authorities, suppliers, funders, colleges, banks and other organisations they have relationships with.

Respondents to the consultation, which is available on feweek.co.uk, are asked for their views on the benefits of collaboration between the two colleges, what the strengths of the two colleges are and what form of collaboration they would like to see — from loose collaboration, federation or full merger. The consultation, which was sent out on October 2, closes on November 6.

Three Greater Manchester colleges subject to one of the government’s post-16 education area reviews have been called on to take learners from a local school after it suspended sixth form enrolment.

Parents and carers of prospective Stockport Academy sixth formers have been told by the school that Stockport College, Aquinas College and Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College — three of 21 Greater Manchester colleges whose futures have been put into question by an area review — could take their children.

Small numbers in preceding years at the academy, which opened just eight years ago, forced the temporary move from next September — and it has drawn an angry response from the FE sector with the school exempt from the same area review process that could ultimately see the colleges closed.

James Kewin (pictured above), deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges’ Association, said it highlighted the “absurdity of not including schools and academies in the area review process”.

And while schools did not automatically feature in any of the six area reviews announced so far by the government, Association of Colleges chief executive Martin Doel said they should take into account “the unsustainable nature of all post-16 school provision”.

He also said the government should not open any new post-16 school provision while reviews were taking place.

The government has said the “need” to move towards “fewer, often larger, more resilient and efficient providers,” underlies the area reviews.

However, Mr Kewin said increasing pressure on pre-16 funding meant more schools were questioning whether maintaining an “unviable” sixth form with money intended for younger students was sustainable.

He said: “Although this may have been a difficult decision for Stockport Academy, it was also a sensible one. Many school and academy sixth forms limp on with uneconomic class sizes and a narrow curriculum, which leave students poorly served.

“If all sixth form providers were in scope [of the area reviews] it would be much easier to ensure that all young people had access to sustainable and high quality 16 to 19 provision.”

Mr Doel said: “We are likely to see more school sixth forms suspending enrolment as funding pressures grow.”

He added that in its Spending Review submission, the AoC recommended that school sixth forms with fewer than 250 students merge with others.

“We hope that this could not only ease the funding pressure but create a more stable environment for students,” he said.

“We will be speaking to local councils and regional schools commissioners about the future of sixth form provision in their area as and when the reviews are completed,” he added.

David Robinson, governors’ board chair at Stockport Academy, said: “To run a viable sixth form we need a minimum of 100 students per year group and currently have 49 on roll in Year 12 with lower numbers than this likely in the future from our small current years 9 and 10.

“Taking into account our need to provide more Year 7 spaces and the falling intake at Year 12, our conclusion is that with regret we will suspend enrolling students into our Sixth Form from September 2016.”

Ryan Jones, assistant principal of Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College, said: “We have guaranteed all Stockport Academy students a place at the college subject to satisfactory references.”

It comes after FE Week reported on September 25 that 21 general FE colleges and 13 sixth form colleges (SFCs) were to be be involved in three extra post-16 education and training area reviews announced by the government.

They are for Tees Valley, Sussex Coast and Solent regions — with the government warning that more area reviews will be announced “shortly”.

A previous story by FE Week on September 8 reported that 22 general FE colleges and 16 SFCs were to be involved in the first round of post-16 education and training area reviews announced by the government, in Birmingham and Solihull, Greater Manchester and the Sheffield City region.

The results of an exclusive FE Week survey published on September 11 also showed that almost 90 per cent of principals affected by the first area reviews announced on September 8 were unhappy with the government’s guidance.

It comes after five FE colleges and SFCs facing “significant financial challenges” announced on July 21 that they are “actively considering” collaboration plans, following a review of post-16 provision in North East Norfolk and North Suffolk.

It came a day after BIS announced plans, in its report reviewing post-16 education and training institutions, for a “programme of area-based reviews to review 16+ provision in every area” of the country.

Stockport College declined to comment on the area reviews or the suspension of enrolment at Stockport Academy sixth form. Aquinas College did not respond.

An upcoming Ofsted review of apprenticeships is likely to lay bare “quite a lot of bad practice,” Skills Minister Nick Boles (pictured above) has said.

The results of Sir Michael Wilshaw’s much-awaited inquiry are expected this month and Mr Boles told Conservative Party conference-goers on Tuesday (October 6) that he did not think they would paint a positive picture of the programme.

He also pointed to the shift to Trailblazer apprenticeship standards from frameworks, set to be finished by 2017/18, as a helping to improve standards.

“Ofsted is doing this review and I suspect that they are going to discover what in a sense we all know, which is that there is quite a lot of bad practice,” said Mr Boles.

“We are in the process of transferring from the old apprenticeship frameworks to these new Trailblazer standards and let’s be honest, while development of the standards is going very well it is still the case that almost all the apprenticeships are being done on the old frameworks.

“Some of those frameworks are great, but some are a bit flaky quite frankly, and you add some employers who are a bit flaky and training providers who are a bit flaky and you will get some bad practice.

“I’ve met recently with Ofsted at a senior level and asked them to give me to ask their whole network for examples of bad practice so we can start shining a light on it and driving it out of the system.”

Paul Warner (pictured right), Association of Employment and Learning Providers director of employment and skills, criticised Mr Boles for the comments.

He told FE Week: “We are a little surprised by the minister’s comments on bad practice, because while we agree that all of it should be rooted out, we have not been presented with any evidence to suggest that poor delivery occurs on the scale he suggests.

“If we are trying to engage more employers to hit the [government’s] 3m target [for apprenticeships], it is vital business is hearing positive messages.”