Leeds City College is looking to take on a new apprenticeship subcontractor for up to £400,000-worth of provision, despite a Skills Funding Agency plea to the sector to run more of the training directly.

The college has posted the invitation to tender on the gov.uk ‘Contracts Finder’ site.

It said that the college “is seeking to recruit an organisation to deliver apprenticeships in the health and social care business sector, with a contract value up to £400,000 of Adult Skills Budget funding”.

The closing date for applications is January 4, with the contract scheduled to start on January 25 and run until the end of July 2017.

It comes after SFA funding and programmes director Keith Smith (pictured above) warned at the Association of Colleges (AoC) conference last month, in Birmingham, that colleges should be looking to run more apprenticeships directly.

He told delegates that they would be facing a “huge challenge” when the apprenticeship levy comes into play and allowed subcontractors to received funding directly from the government.

Mr Smith said: “You might be benefiting at the moment from subcontracting bringing money in, but from April 2017 those subcontractors will take that capacity and they will get funded directly through the apprenticeship voucher system.”

Leeds City College used the gov.uk site earlier in the year to advertise “a further opportunity to join a select group of subcontractors to deliver high quality apprenticeships in the Yorkshire and Humber region, with a particular focus on the Leeds City Region and Local Enterprise Partnership priorities”.

The college said it was looking for four organisations to deliver up to £800,000 of apprenticeships in engineering, ICT, retail, business administration and health and social care at the time, but no one was awarded the contract and the opportunity was closed.

When asked by FE Week on Monday (December 14) why it was using the government tendering site to find apprenticeship subcontractors, David Gaughan, director of apprenticeships, said: “We are required to use the website by the Public Contract Regulations, 2015.

“The college engages with subcontractors in order to better meet customer needs.

“We work with providers who effectively reach priority learners in the community and who can demonstrate positive employment outcomes.”

Mr Gaughan added that the college sometimes subcontracted “to access or engage with a new range of customers, to support another provider develop capacity or quality, to provide niche delivery where the cost of developing direct delivery would be unsustainable, or to work with providers that offer sector specific Local Enterprise Partnership priority engagement”.

He added that all sub-contractors “will be subject to the college due diligence process”.

Commenting on Mr Smith’s concerns about subcontracting, Mr Gaughan said: “The college is developing capacity to deliver more apprenticeships across all of its curriculum areas and is already at advanced stages of commencing the delivery of the new Trailblazer apprenticeships as part of the apprenticeship reform programme.

“The college strategy is to reduce reliance on sub-contractors in the future,” he added.

It comes after Skills Minister Nick Boles also raised the issue of subcontracting in his speech at the AoC conference.

Mr Boles asked college leaders: “Why on earth are you letting these guys nick your lunch?” and challenged his audience to aim for FE colleges to be responsible for two thirds, instead of only one third at present, of all apprenticeship training by 2020.

When questioned this week on the issue of colleges tendering for subcontractors, a spokesperson for the SFA said: “We continue to monitor all lead providers’ subcontracting arrangements.”

 

 

City and Islington and Westminster Kingsway Colleges have announced that they plan to “merge” from August next year.

But while the move is likely to lead to services such as human resources, marketing, finance and IT being shared, governors from both colleges confirmed that the separate identities of the two colleges will be maintained — including their individual names and brands.

A spokesperson for both colleges said that that governors from City and Islington and Westminster Kingsway met on December 9 “to consider options with respect to closer collaboration” and agreed that “merger would best serve the interests of students, staff, and employers”.

Andy Wilson, principal of Westminster Kingsway College (pictured above), was asked by FE Week why they were not going down the more traditional merger route of combining brands.

He said: “It could be seen in some ways as a federation, but there is only going to be one corporation, because that’s a lot more efficient way to operate.

“The problem with a federation is that you are trying to service more than one corporation which takes a lot of effort.

“So we’ll have a single corporation but it will be like a group of colleges.

“We’re expecting to get a single allocation. And then at the corporation level we will divide that up between the two colleges. It’s early days.”

Alastair Da Costa, chair of governors at City and Islington College, said: “I am delighted that the two boards have agreed to merge.

“It is a really positive and bold move which will enable us to meet the needs of Londoners and those students who travel from other parts of the South East, to benefit from the specialist training and education that both colleges deliver.”

City and Islington College was rated as ‘outstanding’ across-the-board by Ofsted in 2008 and Westminster Kingsway received a ‘good’ overall rating in 2011.

Mr Wilson said: “Essentially the reason for creating a bigger college is so we can save some money on central services and move those resources into continuing to provide excellent teaching and learning and develop new income streams that we’re going to require in the future.”

He added that he expects services such as human resources, marketing, finance and IT to be shared once the merger has taken place, but staff numbers should remain unaffected.

The spokesperson for both colleges, however, said that “staff will benefit from a collaborative approach to curriculum development, quality and continuing professional development”.

Both colleges also said that there are currently no plans to sell any of the buildings of either college.

A shadow board, consisting of governors from both colleges, will be launched in January.

It will look into appointing a chair of the new corporation and other senior management roles in early 2016.

Mr Wilson said: “There will only be one chief executive of the new college, so the shadow board will select one of us.

“The selection will take place at the end of January or the beginning of February we hope, but we’ll stay in our current positions until the merger takes place at the end of July.”

Sir Frank McLoughlin, principal of City and Islington College (pictured right), said: “This is a governor led process.  The shadow board of the new college will have its first meeting in early January and appoint a selection committee which will then appoint the chair of the new college.

“That chair will then join the selection panel to appoint the chief executive officer (CEO) and senior staff before the new college is formed at the start of August.

“Announcements will be made into the New Year on the appointment of the new chair and chief executive.”

Based on current figures, the two colleges expect to enrol 26,500 students next academic year, and receive a combined total income of £84m.

The move comes ahead of the colleges’ involvement in the London post-16 education and training area review.

The capital was one of six regions that it was announced by the Government on December 3 would be involved in the second wave of area reviews, encompassing 34 general FE colleges and 15 sixth form colleges.

Just like the seven reviews of the first wave, in which 83 colleges are being reviewed, no school sixth forms were listed.

 

 

Sector leaders have welcomed then findings of a new Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report that raised grave concerns over the post-16 education and training area reviews process and FE finances.

The report published this morning, entitled ‘Overseeing the financial stability of the FE sector’, said it was “unclear how area-based reviews of post-16 education, which are limited in scope, will deliver a more robust and sustainable further education sector”.

It warned that the Government viewed “area-based reviews as a fix-all solution to the sector’s problems”, but they had the potential to be “haphazard”.

The comments were welcomed by Martin Doel (pictured above), chief executive of the Association of Colleges (AoC), which submitted written evidence to the enquiry.

He said: “Area reviews are limited in their scope and are too often seen as a fix-all solution to the financial pressures in the sector and it is helpful that the PAC has recognised this.”

He added: “The committee has [also] recognised the damage funding cuts have already done to colleges across England, as well as how these are exacerbated by late funding decisions.

“The AoC has called for three-year funding allocations to be introduced to allow for better planning, so the committee’s recognition of the problem is welcomed.”

The report highlighted a number of “substantial external challenges” facing colleges that were, for example exacerbated by “very late funding decisions” and “overly complex funding arrangements”.

Stewart Segal, Associations of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive, called for more focus on “minimising the amount of financial support required and maximising the money available for frontline delivery”.

He added: “It is important that the area reviews consult all providers and AELP is working with local provider networks to provide input into the discussions.”

“The [PAC] committee has rightly found that reviews must take into account the education and training provision of a local area as a whole, including school sixth forms, rather than singling colleges out.”

James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association said: “The PAC report makes a number of sensible observations about area reviews.

“To be effective, the reviews should of course include all post-16 providers on the same terms.

“Expanding the scope (to include schools) and extending the timeframe will lead to better quality recommendations and a better deal for students.”

David Hughes, chief executive at the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, said: “I’m pleased the PAC conducted this inquiry into the financial health of FE, particularly colleges. In its response, there are two key points I hope the Government will address.

“There does need to be a recognition that funding pressures hinders the ability of colleges to innovate and deliver the policy priorities put forward by Government; big changes are needed by colleges to make a success of the apprenticeships levy, local commissioning, extension of advanced learning loans and delivering high quality English and maths to name just a few.

“Funding pressures are also impacting on quality and on the range of learning opportunities for adults and young people. Both of these directly hit the ambitions of learners.”

Meg Hillier, PAC chair and Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, said that the report’s findings were “deeply worrying for a sector which equips people with skills and qualifications that can transform their life prospects, and by extension those of the communities in which they live and work”.

Neil Carmichael, Education Select Committee chair and Conservative MP for Stroud, said: “Funding for FE has to match the Government’s ambitious goals for the FE sector and ensure colleges have the financial security to plan ahead and achieve these aims.”

Skills Minister Nick Boles said on behalf of BIS and DfE: “With early intervention from the funding agencies, the FE commissioner and locally-led area reviews, colleges will become more efficient and financially resilient.”

Skills Minister Nick Boles has revealed in the Skills Funding Letter that co-funding in the workplace will be removed from 2016/17.

The letter to Skills Funding Agency (SFA) chief executive Peter Lauener, which set out the Agency’s priorities and funding for next financial year, was published yesterday evening.

In a move which FE Week understands will save around £50m from the adult education budget (AEB), Mr Boles said: “Co-funding in the workplace is to be removed. As part of the diversification of funding, we consider that employers should fund learning that takes place in the workplace.

“The funding released by this change can be used by providers to deliver more priority learners.”

The announcement on co-funded provision, for non-apprenticeship workplace courses that the SFA only pays half the fully-funded rate for, indicates that employers could be charged a fee to make up for some or all of the difference.

But director of employment and skills at the Confederation of British Industry Neil Carberry said: “Businesses will be concerned that this move has more to do with underwriting colleges than funding high quality learning.”

He added: “The [planned new apprenticeship] levy will change who funds learning — but what’s important is that learning is relevant and effective, not where it takes place.”

According to the November Statistical First Release, in 2014/15 there were 56,100 workplace (non-apprenticeships non-English and maths) funded starts — although the figures did not say how many of these were co-funded.

Stewart Segal, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said: “We have to accept that some people in the workplace that would have previously been co-funded will no longer be funded, other than through the apprenticeship programme or a loan.”

Mr Boles added, in the letter, that the Department for Business, Industry and Skills (BIS) will no longer provide a “separate community learning budget”.

“The Pound Plus strategy, introduced in community learning in 2013, must be used to deliver value for money focus public support on disadvantage and ensure that all learners pay if they can afford to do so,” he added.

“In 2016/17, I ask that you consult with local commissioners and providers to agree how to get the most from the integration of the community learning budget, in order to best meet local adult education needs.”

Sue Pember, director of policy and external relationships adult and community learning provider membership body Holex, said: “It is what we expected and have been preparing for.

“It will help adult education providers deliver what the community needs to support productivity and personal growth.

“What needs to be worked through is how the devolution areas local commissioners will operate and how to make provision relevant to local needs without creating another layer of bureaucracy, or worse introducing new unwieldy procurement processes.”

Mr Boles also elaborated on the implications of Chancellor George Osborne’s commitment announced last month to protect the “core adult skills participation budgets in cash terms, at £1.5bn”.

The letter stated that this “£1.5bn available to support adult FE outside of the costs of apprenticeship funding”, would form “a new budget we call the AEB”.

“It is a single funding line which replaces what has been three separate funding lines: funding for adult FE outside of apprenticeships (previously within the adult skills budget), community learning, and Discretionary Learner Support (DLS),” Mr Boles said.

It also said BIS “will provide information on capital funding in the new year”, which differed from the typical expectation on the department to announce the spending level by now.

Questions remain over whether moving community learning to the AEB will mean it is no longer protected, and what impact the move will have on DLS funding which the Government is predicting will be £86m this year.

More detail will also be sought be FE Week on how funding to support 19+ apprenticeships and adult education will be cut by £34m, from £373m to £239m, as stated in the letter.

 

Post-16 education and training area reviews have come in for heavy criticism in a new Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report that raises serious concern about the financial health of the sector.

The report, entitled ‘Overseeing the financial stability of the FE sector’, was published first thing this morning (Wednesday, December 16).

It follows the committee’s enquiry into FE finances, which included an evidence session on October 19 where senior figures questioned included Martin Donnelly, permanent secretary for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), and Peter Lauener, chief executive of the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) and Education Funding Agency (EFA).

The report said that it was “unclear how area-based reviews of post-16 education, which are limited in scope, will deliver a more robust and sustainable further education sector”.

“The departments appear to see the national programme of area-based reviews as a fix-all solution to the sector’s problems. But the reviews have the potential to be haphazard,” it added.

The report also raised concern that “with so many parties involved in running the reviews, there may be no clear process for making difficult decisions”.

It followed the government announcement on December 3 that 34 general FE colleges and 15 sixth form colleges (SFCs) would be involved in the second wave of post-16 education and training area reviews.

And just like the seven reviews of the first wave, in which 83 colleges are being reviewed, no school sixth forms were listed.

The report recommended the government should “demonstrate the area-based reviews are taking a sufficiently comprehensive look at local provision taking into account all FE providers and school sixth forms”.

It also raised grave concern about colleges’ finances.

It said the SFA had conceded that the SFA “deemed 29 colleges to be financially ‘inadequate’ in the 2013/14 academic year”, but “the agency’s latest estimates, produced in May 2015, suggest that there could be around 70 colleges in this position by the end of 2015/16”.

It added “substantial external challenges” facing colleges had been exacerbated by “very late funding decisions”, as well as “overly complex funding arrangements, whereby funding comes from many sources for different students attending the same course”.

The SFA was also singled out for being “too reactive to emerging [financial] risks”.

It recommended, for example, that the government should “review and simplify the oversight and intervention arrangements for colleges”, making them as “streamlined” as possible.

Meg Hillier (pictured above), PAC chair, said: “The government has been desperately slow off the mark to tackle a looming crisis in FE.

“This is deeply worrying for a sector which equips people with skills and qualifications that can transform their life prospects.”

Having read the report, Skills Minister Nick Boles said on behalf of BIS and DfE: “We have protected funding for FE and will be increasing real-term spending by more than a third in the next five years. “Furthermore, funding for apprenticeships will have doubled since 2010.

“With early intervention from the funding agencies, the FE commissioner and locally-led area reviews, colleges will become more efficient and financially resilient.”

An SFA spokesperson said: “We have strengthened our own approach to intervention,” she added. “It includes using a variety of data sources to assess where risk might be highest.

“In addition, for the current year we included clauses in our funding agreements with colleges that enable us to require early action to be taken before formal triggers for intervention have been breached”.

Visit http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmpubacc/414/41402.htm to download the report.

The Skills Funding Agency (SFA) has confirmed that publication of the next round of nationwide qualification achievement rates will be delayed by around two months, FE Week can reveal.

The final Qualification Success Rates (QSR) figures for 2013/14 were published in January this year.

But a note sent to providers by the SFA’s central delivery service on December 11 said that the equivalent reports for 2014/15, illustrating what are now called Qualification Achievement Rates (QAR), will be published “towards the end of March 2016”.

Jerry White, deputy principal of City College Norwich, was frustrated by both delay and short notice of the announcement.

He told FE Week today: “What is so frustrating is that the sector has been planning for the normal cycle of publication, with the provisional data expected next week, so a week’s notice of a two month delay seems incredibly late in the day.

“It is especially annoying as the actual changes to the business rules for 2014/15 success (achievement) rates are relatively minor compared to the previous year, so there seems little reason for any technical problems to have occurred.”

The SFA note explained that “while this [publication of the report] is later than in previous years, the changes that have been made to collection and storage of this data will make future reporting quicker and more efficient and cost effective,” it added.

“We do recognise that this could affect some of your planned business processes.

“However it is important that we allow time for thorough testing and quality assurance to be carried out, particularly as this data will be published and used by external stakeholders. The timing of the publication of National Achievement Rate Tables (NART) will be unaffected.”

The full NART will still be in April 2016, the same month that National Success Rate tables were published this year, as reported in FE Week.

It also said that Ofsted had been kept “fully briefed and they have confirmed to us that they will use a combination of provider’s own data and the ILR data they receive from the SFA until the provisional QAR are available”.

An Ofsted spokesperson said: “Our judgements depend on what inspectors see when they go into FE and skills providers, as well as data. We are satisfied the SFA’s arrangements will allow us to have as up-to-date and accurate records as possible.”

Stephen Hewitt(pictured right), strategic funding, enrolments and examinations manager at Morley College, said: “If this means a little bit of short-term pain this year, through the delay, to allow a better system to be implemented for the long-term, then that should be okay.

He added: “In the past, the QSR report was published as a series of PDFs, but we understand that the QAR data is going to be presented on a database accessible through the Hub.

“It will make it easier for providers and, for example, local enterprise partnerships and Oftsed to check out the revised data.”

An SFA spokesperson said: “The new reporting system we are introducing for 2014/15 QAR’s will use interactive dashboards accessed via the Hub.

“It will give providers and stakeholders more information than we were able to publish in the PDF reports that were distributed through the provider gateway.”

Weymouth College has jumped from an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted rating to ‘good’ following intervention from the FE Commissioner.

The latest Ofsted report on the college was published this morning (December 15), with inspectors rating it ‘good’ across-the-board.

It represented a significant improvement on the ‘requires improvement’ rating handed out by the inspectorate in June 2013, and the subsequent ‘inadequate’ rating in February 2015.

It also comes after FE Commissioner Dr David Collins raised concern about the college’s finances and leadership and launched a Structure and Prospects Appraisal (SPA) in March 2014 for the provider, which was deemed inadequate for financial health by the Skills Funding Agency (SFA).

Dr Collins went on to work on improvements at the college with new interim principal Nigel Evans who took over the leadership after Weymouth’s previous principal, Liz Myles, was suspended in November 2014 and then resigned in February 2015.

And the latest Ofsted report stated that “since the previous inspection governors and leaders have taken decisive action to remedy the financial position of the college”, with governors working to “carefully scrutinise the financial and academic performance of the college”.

It said management at Weymouth was now good and managers were developing “strong links with employers and partner organisations”.

The curriculum was deemed “cost-effective” and effectively meeting the needs of learners, employers and the local community.

The report found that learners at the college were well-behaved, received good support form staff and are making good or better progress, with “a high proportion” completing their main vocational or academic courses successfully.

Careers advice and guidance were considered “very effective in enabling learners to make the right choices and move on to further learning, training or employment”, the report added.

Points for improvement raised by the report included insufficient numbers of 16-18 learners achieving qualifications in English and maths.

A need to boost standards in a minority of subject areas was also identified, including beauty therapy, business and administration.

Mr Evans said Dr Collins’ visit had been very significant in making this progress, adding that he felt the commissioner’s team were “rooting for” the college to succeed.

He added that Dr Collins “made his position very clear to us about what we should do next, which was about savings. He was adamant that the government wouldn’t give us any more money — at least we became clear on what we had to do”.

Mr Evans said that a lack of financial expertise, particularly among the previous senior leadership team, had led to significant problems such as running an apprenticeship programme that had not been costed out.

But Dr Collins, he added, brought in Andrew Tyley, who is now part of the FE Commissioner’s team, as an interim vice-principal for finance and business planning to advise the college.

The college also carried out its own series of internal mid-term reviews in each subject-sector area, as part of an ongoing process of self-assessment.

Unviable class sizes were addressed by converting poorly recruiting level one provision into a “communal” offering of taster courses, Mr Evans said.

He told FE Week: “We’ve all moved the college into a different place.

“In October, we came out of the SPA because we had a break-even budget, we’d hit our student number targets, and then we had a week ago we had the letter from the secretary of state taking us out of administered status.”

The college, which currently has around 2,600 learners, was told by an FE Commissioner adviser in October that Dr Collins was “ready to take a step back from his oversight role”.

After a revisit in July, Dr Collins commented that he was “delighted with the progress that the college has made under its new leadership and management”.

 

 

The second wave of invitations to tender for long-awaited European Social Fund (ESF) cash — this time totalling £16.2m — were published today (December 14).

The Skills Funding Agency (SFA) and ESF announced today that the four local enterprise partnership areas involved were Swindon and Wiltshire, Greater Manchester, West of England, and Cornwall and Isles of Scilly, with the total value of contracts totalling £16.2m.

 

Local Enterprise Partnership	Invitation to tender reference	Number of contracts	Total amount of ESF	Link to tender documents
Cornwall and Isles of Scilly	29907	One	£1.1m	Click here
Greater Manchester	29913	One	£12m	Click here
Swindon and Wiltshire	29912	One	£1.4m	Click here
West of England	29909	One	£1.7m	Click here

 

An accompanying SFA and ESF document stated that invitations to tender would close on January 25, leaving just 27 working days excluding weekends and public holidays.

And then, after tenders have been awarded on March 30, winning bidders will have only 11 working days before delivery commences from April 14.

 

Task	Deadline
Publication of ITT	December 14, 2015
ITT closes	January 25, 2016
Notification of tender results	March 30, 2016
Day 1 mandatory standstill period	March 31, 2016
Day 10 mandatory standstill period	April 11, 2016
Contracts issued from	April 12, 2016
Delivery commences from	April 14, 2016

 

It means the same amount of time is being made available as for the first round of invitations to tender for ESF cash issued on December 7 — which were for five Lep areas and almost £15m of ESF cash — although the closing for those was January 18.

Tendering for further ESF contracts is expected to open “at regular intervals between January and May 2016,” said a Skills Funding Agency (SFA) spokesperson.

“We won’t know how many contracts there will be until after the procurement exercise is completed at the end of May 2016,” she said.

The second wave of contracts will be worth £1.4m for the Swindon and Wiltshire area, £12m for Greater Manchester, £1.7m for West of England, and £1.1m for Cornwall and Isles of Scilly.

It comes after FE Week reported on December 11 that Paul Warner, director of employment and skills at the AELP, feared the drawn-out nature of the tendering process could encourage sub-standards bids.

He said that providers who were unaware of future tenders could win a contract only to find delivering it might hamper their ability to deliver ESF provision put to market at a later date.

Such a situation might, he suggested, put ESF contract-winning providers off going for further contracts despite having the necessary expertise because, for example, staff were located in a different region.

“With each specification likely to be launched gradually over a number of weeks, providers may find it difficult to allocate resources sensibly, which may lead to some having to choose which specifications to bid for on the basis of available resources, rather than delivery expertise,” said Mr Warner.

It follows a summer in which ESF-funded providers were forced to lay-off staff amid delays in issuing new ESF contracts, as the government sought to iron out regional devolution issues with Leps.

It was exclusively revealed by FE Week on Friday (December 4) that the Lep areas the invitations to tender would go to included Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, and Solent (covering the Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton).

The other Leps involved were Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership, Northamptonshire Enterprise Partnership, and Leicester and Leicestershire Enterprise Partnership.

It followed another FE Week exclusively on November 10, which revealed how the SFA was planning to run a “sequence of procurement” for handing out £650m of delayed ESF cash, which must be finished by the end of September next year at the very latest to allow a minimum delivery period of 18 months.

The delivery period, up to March 2018, was determined with ministers unable to say that the SFA would oversee anything other than apprenticeships beyond then.

None of the Leps involved in the second wave of applications were available to comment ahead of publication.