The efforts of a Bolton College staff member to raise awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues have been recognised by veteran actor and activist Sir Ian McKellen.
Learning and development mentor Nick Buckley was presented with the Most Inspirational Person of 2015 award by the Hollywood star during an anti-homophobia event held in Bolton last month.
Mr Buckley has championed the importance of tackling homophobia, including a “Love Bolton College. Hate Homophobia.” campaign.
He has also set up an LGBT-awareness group based at his college, which will be touring local schools and targeting year 9, 10 and 11 pupils.
Mr Buckley said: “I was absolutely thrilled to receive the award, and it was an honour to meet Sir Ian — he’s a legend.”
As well as the awards dinner, the town-wide event included activities such as a football tournament, sing-a-longs, cabaret and burlesque shows, and a night-time vigil.
Pic: Bolton College’s Nick Buckley with Hollywood legend Sir Ian McKellen
Employer bodies have attacked Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) guidance that Trailblazer apprenticeship incentive payments are used where expensive assessments push costs over government funding limits.
However, a BIS spokesperson has told FE Week that capped government funding levels, ranging from £2,000 to £18,000, were “only part of the funding available” — employers could “also use the incentive payments that are available under this model towards the costs they incur,” he said.
Neil Carberry, director for employment and skills policy at the CBI, said such use of incentive payments “called into question how deliverable this model is”.
“If employers are being told to use incentive payments to bridge the funding shortfall owing to high-cost end-point assessments, this indicates that the apprenticeship standard falls under the wrong cap,” he said.
Under funding rules for the new Trailblazer apprenticeships, each standard is allocated one of five government funding caps. The government will pay two thirds of the cost of delivering the standard up to the cap, with employers expected to contribute the remaining third.
But FE Week has found that, in some cases, employers would be expected to contribute more than a third — possibly using the incentive payments — with government funding not reaching its two thirds mark.
Ian Cass, managing director of the Forum of Private Business, said members had told him that being made to use incentive payments towards the cost of delivering an apprenticeship risked “employers being punished for training up young people”.
“The incentive payment is really there to cover some of the costs of compliance with regulations, insurance payments and the cost of supervision of the individual on site,” said Mr Cass.
There are three incentive payments on offer – a 16 to 18 apprentice payment, a small employer incentive and a completion incentive.
The Skills Funding Agency (SFA) Trailblazer funding guidance for 2014/15 stated the payments were intended to cover “additional costs that small employers can face when taking on an apprentice” and the “additional demands of recruiting a young apprentice”, and to “encourage employers to train apprentices across the full breadth of the apprenticeship standard”.
However, the SFA’s funding guidance for 2015/16 makes no mention of what the payments are intended to cover.
But, the guidance does state that employers were “free to use the incentives payments as you wish, including meeting the wider costs of employing an apprentice”.
Among those that employers may have to use the incentive payments for was the Gas Network Team Leader standard. It was allocated a maximum funding cap of £6,000, despite its Trailblazer group having estimated delivery costs to be around £14,600 (based on the end-point assessment, priced at £3,808, representing 26 per cent of the total cost as set out in the assessment plan).
A spokesperson for sector skills council Energy and Utility Skills, which worked with employers to develop the Gas Network Team Leader standard, insisted employers were “willing to invest beyond any funding cap allocation”.
The BIS spokesperson said “The funding cap represents the maximum ‘core’ contribution that government is prepared to make towards the off-the-job training and assessment costs associated with a standard.
“This maximum contribution is only part of the funding available, employers can also use the incentive payments that are available under this model towards the costs they incur.”
The National Audit Office (NAO) will investigate quality concerns over the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ (BIS) drive towards 3m new apprenticeships by 2020.
The NAO announced today (November 6) that it will publish a report on apprenticeships in spring next year.
A spokesperson said: “They are a key element of the government’s plans for growth and productivity and 3m new apprenticeships have been promised over the course of this parliament. The study will examine the management of the apprenticeship programme by BIS.”
“In particular, it will assess whether the department is facilitating the delivery of high quality skills training that meets the needs of businesses, employees and the wider economy,” it added.
The NAO published a previous report on apprenticeships in February 2012 — which looked at whether BIS was “obtaining value for money from the programme”, as reported in FE Week.
It found that “adult apprenticeships offer good value for money, but the government needs to focus its resources on industries which offer the best economic returns”.
Stewart Segal
Stewart Segal (pictured right), chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, told FE Week today: “Given the NAO’s previous findings about the programme’s excellent return on the government’s investment, it’s important that the reforms both for funding and standards build on what has worked well.”
He added: “Our post-election submission included a number of recommendations on how significantly more apprenticeships can be delivered in this parliament without risking quality in the programme and we have shared these with the NAO as part of its welcome inquiry.
“We have always said that the apprenticeship programme needs an effective overall management structure that involves employers, providers and other stakeholders working with government.”
At the Association of Colleges, Teresa Frith, senior skills policy manager, said: “Apprenticeships are an essential part of post-16 education and training as they provide a dual learning, both on and off the job.
“We hope the NAO will have a good look at the management of reform and the growth of the programme, as the Government aims for its target of 3m new apprenticeships by 2020.
“We have already spoken to the NAO and we will be watching this investigation as it develops.”
Concern was raised over the apprenticeship reform programme stalling after Skills Minister Nick Boles (pictured below left) told the House of Commons Education Select Committee in January that the government had “gone off half-cock” on planned changes, including proposals to fund them through PAYE, as reported in FE Week.
The government partly addressed this in July when it announced plans for an apprenticeship levy on large employers, to encourage more businesses to invest in the programme, with a BIS consultation on how this would work closing a month ago.
But FE Week also reported growing frustration among new Trailblazer apprenticeship designers in August over delays with the government clearing standards for delivery, almost a year after they were first published in a number of cases.
Just 22 standards had been cleared by BIS as ready for delivery at the time and that figure still only stands at 60 out of more than 350 under development.
An Ofsted report published on October 22 was also highly critical of apprenticeship standards and
chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw criticised widespread use of government cash to subsidise low wages training programmes for older learners in an exclusive interview with FE Week.
He said: “What we’re seeing is that a lot of apprenticeships are simply accrediting what they’re doing already and again employers are using funding from government to subsidise already low wages — that’s got to stop.”
An infinite enthusiasm for physics gave Sir David Melville the incredible opportunity to be part of the Apollo Programme to land the first man on the moon in 1969.
The current chair of Pearson Education Ltd was given the opportunity in the mid-1960s after he completed his physics degree at the University of Sheffield and secured a year’s placement at Columbia University to assist with Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind.
From left: Sir David’s son Richard and his daughters Jane and Ruth outside Buckingham Palace after his knighthood in 2007
One journalist described my career as ‘repeatedly clutching defeat from the jaws of victory’
The grandfather-of-five says: “I was very committed to science and space physics was my real passion at the time.
A photo taken in 1975 when Sir David was a young physics lecturer at Southampton UniversitySir David receiving his BSc first-class honours in physics at Sheffield University in 1965
“The detail of my involvement in the Apollo Programme is rather complex — it’s best to say I was a physicist on the programme.”
He adds: “However, I always had an interest in, as well as students who were very clever and bright and had opportunities, those who missed out on those opportunities.”
It was an interest that would lead to a 50-year (and counting) career in the education sector — with half of that coming via FE roles.
And Sir David has held notable job titles in the sector, including Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) chief executive, Vocational Awards Council chair and FE adviser to successive government ministers.
Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II and Sir David at the opening of the Medway campus at Kent University in 2005
He has also held a range of higher education roles including vice-chancellor of two universities and was awarded a CBE in 2001 and a knighthood in 2007 for his services to FE and higher education.
Sir David, now 71, retired from full time work eight years ago and currently works part-time as Pearson Education Ltd chair, Manchester Metropolitan University governor and is a patron for numerous trusts including the 157 Group and Comprehensive Future.
A career like this was not built overnight, so where did it all begin for the former FE funding boss?
Sir David was born in Gateshead, Durham, in 1944, to dad Fred and mum Mary and grew up with older sister Joan in a small cotton mill town in Lancashire called Clitheroe.
“My father was a local dental mechanic and my mother was a shop assistant, who both left school at the age of 13 to start working — so I was the first in the family to go to university,” explains Sir David.
He went to Clitheroe Grammar School to do his O-levels and A-levels, and then went on to study physics at the University of Sheffield in 1962.
After graduating from the university, Sir David travelled to America for a year in 1965 to work on the Apollo Programme as part of his space physics diploma.
The programme was designed to land humans on the moon and bring them safely back to earth between 1963 and 1972, and Sir David helped set up Neil Armstrong’s successful Apollo 11 mission.
The experience gave Sir David the ambition to teach and on his return to the UK, he completed a PhD at Sheffield and secured his first job as a physics lecturer at the University of Southampton, where he worked at until 1984.
Then as a nationally renowned scientist he chose to move to Lancashire Polytechnic (now University of Central Lancashire).
“It was quite a different institution to move to and the people around me at Southampton thought that it was the end of my career,” explains Sir David.
“In fact, one journalist described my career as ‘repeatedly clutching defeat from the jaws of victory’.”
However, Sir David explains that he was particularly interested in the way polytechnics took students who “didn’t have particularly good A-levels and gave them opportunities”.
He worked at the polytechnic first as professor and head of physics rising to become vice-rector by 1991 and then went to Middlesex University to become vice-chancellor.
“I shifted from physics, to managing larger and larger organisations, but the thing that drove me was opportunity — giving people second chances, and seeing amazing results with all of that,” he says.
His next career move proved to be the biggest yet and in 1997 Sir David became FEFC chief executive until 2001.
“I was the second chief executive and that is what I am known for in FE,” says Sir David, adding: “The FEFC was quite a small body which funded all of the colleges in England, and what it did, from when it was established, was to bring together the colleges into what might be called the FE system.
“Before that, they were in separate local authorities, so it was important to get them together into a national system.”
Sir David joined the FEFC while the government changed from Conservative under John Major to Labour under Tony Blair’s New Labour.
“So all of my years as chief executive were during the labour administration and there was a lot of interest in FE at that time,” says
Sir David.
He explains one of the reasons for the interest in the sector was because then-Education Secretary David Blunkett “understood FE” when “generally politicians didn’t — and still don’t”.
“So this was a time when FE had its place in the sun, and we were able to grow it and develop it in that period,” says Sir David.
Throughout his five-year stint at the FEFC Sir David visited more than 300 colleges, which he said was a highlight of the job.
He remembers one student at a college he met who had gone into catering with no GCSEs to do a BTec.
“He said: ‘One day I will do a higher national diploma’. This really inspired me because this student had a line of sight to achieve that qualification, and he knew he needed to get though each year at a time,” explains Sir David.
“He didn’t have to go through some kind of UCas system with steps and do A-levels, he could just progress — and of course that was transforming for his life.”
Sir David’s time as chief executive of the FEFC came to a close when the change in 2001 brought the FEFC and Training and Enterprise Councils together to become the Learning and Skills Council.
“My own view is that that change, although I was in favour of it at the time, proved to be pretty disastrous for colleges, and it’s led to a situation where it’s now easy for government to cut FE, which is what it’s doing at the moment,” he says.
With there being little impact Sir David can have on the current cuts, his hopes for the future of the sector are for “colleges to move to the kind of independence that polytechnics moved on when they became universities”.
He says: “In a sense colleges could be given more freedom and more responsibility, and so could be more responsive to local need — but it just hasn’t happened.
“At the end of the FEFC the whole system went the other way and there has been more micro-management by central government, even when there’s no funding.
“That’s my biggest disappointment, because I think colleges could do much better if they were freed up — just in the way that new universities have blossomed.”
At the end of our conversation when we discuss what has driven him this far within the sector, Sir David reflects on his half a century career and notices a sequence which has developed over the decades.
He says: “When I was a tutor to students at Southampton University, I had direct influence over tens of students.
“At Lancashire Polytechnic and Middlesex, that became thousands.
“But at the funding council, it was millions — and to have an influence over what happened, how it was funded, what opportunities were available, was really what drove me.
“But the driver was to influence and to help many more — so that’s been the pattern of my career.”
It’s a personal thing
What’s your favourite book?
I guess the Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle, and I’ve even read the recent ones by Anthony Horowitz. Or anything by Thomas Hardy, such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I also read political biographies, so recently I’ve been reading Alan Johnson’s biography. I read a lot of these — mostly people I admire
What do you do to switch off from work?
I sail. I have been a sailor for, I guess, more than 40 years. I have sailed all different kinds of boats, mostly around the south coast, across the channel to France, Belgium, and Holland. I have sailed about 15,000 miles — and I mostly sail with my wife, Hilary
What’s your pet hate?
I guess two. One is prejudice. I have spent my life doing various things associated with combating prejudice, particularly racial prejudice. And the other is ignorance, so my career has been about education
If you could invite anyone to a dinner party, living or dead, who would it be?
Someone whose company I did enjoy a lot who has now died is Lord Brian Flowers, who was the rector of Imperial College, a famous physicist and sort of my mentor. And the other would be someone I admire, such as Nelson Mandela
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
I went through all the usual things growing up such as a footballer, a doctor and a surgeon — I think I even wanted to be a dentist at one point
Comedian-turned-actor Sir Lenny Henry will be one of the guest speakers at this year’s Association of Colleges (AoC) Conference.
He will discuss the role that education has played in his life and particularly in his work with Comic Relief, at the three-day conference which opens on November 17 in Birmingham.
A college student himself in the 1980s, Sir Lenny went to WR Tuson College (now Preston’s College) to take his O-levels — alongside completing a show season in Blackpool.
The experience sparked a lifelong interest in Shakespeare and helped spur Sir Lenny on to continuing education.
The conference, which this year has the theme ‘Powering the Economy’, has a wider line-up of 22 speakers confirmed so far, including Skills Minister Nick Boles and Education Secretary Nicky Morgan.
From the House of Lords, Professor Lady Alison Wolf and Lord Ian Blair, 24th commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, will both be speaking.
As a marketing expert, Ruth Sparkes found the job of helping her offspring find the right FE institution an eye-opening experience.
It’s that time of year when colleges are flinging open their doors and inviting prospective students in, to ‘taste’ their wares.
The summer and ‘mop-up’ campaigns are but a distant and expensive memory, and the new student recruitment cycle has started, all over again.
Schools have distributed their Year 11s predicted GCSE grades.
Recruiting students needs a joined-up approach, now more than ever
Most colleges will already have published their glossy new prospectuses for the 2016/17 in-take.
Some colleges will already have a few open events under their belts, applications will hopefully be rolling or dribbling in, and some colleges will have started interviewing potential students, and have made conditional offers.
This is what happens every year and it ought to be a well-oiled machine — but, in my experience as a parent this year, for the first time on other side of the institution’s doors — I can see why parents choose school sixth forms over standalone sixth forms or FE colleges.
Team Sparkes doesn’t have the ‘luxury’ of a school sixth form to fall back on, so we’ve had to persevere, even though we’ve hit quite a few obstacles.
Team objective — find a good college within an hour’s travelling that can offer A-levels in maths, further maths, economics, French and law.
We live in a county with 18 standalone mainstream colleges (either FE or sixth form) so it shouldn’t be too difficult — you would think.
College A — we enjoyed a fabulous welcome at the open event, staff on hand to answer questions, the principal was lively, engaging and accessible, but can’t offer economics and would love to offer French — but needs more applicants.
Unfortunately, French was not an option on the college’s online application form. So, it didn’t matter how many prospective students were urged to apply — they couldn’t. It took two phone calls and an email to the principal to rectify this.
The application has still not been made because — “It’s a ridiculous form, the worst of the lot I’ve had to fill in — I might go back to it.”
If this was your college, how many of your prospective students would persevere?
College B — an over-subscribed sixth form, which can offer all the subjects, but unfortunately offers its open evenings in the same week, and requires applications before Christmas. (Team Sparkes couldn’t attend open evening week due to the key member being on a GCSE-controlled assessment in Shropshire).
College B has booked us on a ‘tour’, but says: “This is just a tour, without any opportunity to speak to teaching staff or explore course choices.” Hmmm…
College C — This time last month, College C wasn’t even on the radar, but has since been fully investigated and is currently top of the list.
All subjects are offered, travel is doable and the application form was the least onerous of the three — it even had a clever and warm automated response that sent out a thank you, and an interview time and date.
This is just a selection of what we’ve encountered — we’ve discounted a grammar school in a neighbouring county, which had poor and incoherent careers advice, and inaccurate course information.
As college marketing staffing levels and budgets are squeezed to a shadow of their former selves, recruiting students needs a joined-up approach, now more than ever.
This is only one part of marketing your college, but, put yourselves in the shoes of prospective students, and ensure that barriers to interview are removed.
Is your course information up to date? Is your online application form seamless and relevant? Are you offering courses in your prospectus and on your website that haven’t run in years? Are the people answering your telephone under the impression that student recruitment is someone else’s job?
It really doesn’t matter how beautiful your prospectus is, or how good your website looks on a smartphone, if you can’t deliver simple assistance to teenagers to help them to apply to your college — they will find an alternative.
When high street jeweller Gerald Ratner famously rubbished one of his products a few years ago, his ill-judged comments resulted in Britain’s biggest jewellery group plunging £122.3m into the red with 330 shops in Britain and the United States closing.
I’m sure Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw, when rubbishing ‘cleaning’ and ‘coffee-making’ apprenticeships, did not intend the apprenticeship brand to suffer a similar fate.
A glance at the cleaning standards would have shown the complexity of 21st Century cleaning.
Too often a junior minister uses their newly-acquired powers to make changes solely to promote their own ambitions with no regard to the consequences
Cleaning the windows of The Shard or a hospital operating theatre demonstrates the skills modern cleaners require.
Again, it is us, the provider who has to clear up the mess after Ofsted’s five minutes of PR fame.
Learners, parents and employers have to be reassured of the value of the apprenticeship they are undertaking.
While cleaning apprentices may not have the academic abilities needed to become an engineering technician, it is arrogance to suggest their skills are not as important to society as a whole today, especially in respect of public health, safety and hygiene.
There should be parity of esteem across all apprenticeship programmes, regardless of technical complexity and academic requirements. Where would we be without sanitized and clean hospitals, care homes, toilets and public buildings?
Before disparaging ‘coffee-making’ apprenticeships, if the chief inspector had taken the trouble to look at the standards, he might have realised no such apprenticeship exists, but coffee-making is just one unit in the Serving Food and Drink Apprenticeship.
I’m sure Sir Michael’s continental colleagues, whose apprenticeships he so approves of, would not share his views about the skills sets required to become a sommelier, maître d’, barista or cocktail mixologist.
After reading Ofsted’s report I returned to City & Guilds’ Sense and Instability report (yes, the one that reminds us we’ve had 61 ministers of state, 10 different departments and 13 major parliamentary acts in the last three decades to establish a skills policy). Our democratic system has destabilised the vocational skills policies this country needs.
Too often a junior minister uses their newly-acquired powers to make changes solely to promote their own ambitions with no regard to the consequences.
Similarly, civil servants with little knowledge of vocation education and training (Vet) or apprenticeships make decisions based on their own academic journey centred around school, sixth form and university with very rarely any apprenticeship or commercial work experience.
While there is a sprinkling of ex-teachers, lecturers, head teachers and FE principals scattered across Whitehall, I can think of no ex-work-based learning member of staff working in government.
A plethora of research organisations have recently been announced to look into the sector. It would benefit us if they could expand the City & Guilds report to historically detail all the initiatives and ‘reforms’ to Vet and apprenticeships over the last three decades, to analyse, where the data is available, the benefits, results, costs, advantages and disadvantages of each of these initiatives, together with the minister responsible. Then the sector could score the results, which worked, which were disastrous, which benefited the economy, which wasted taxpayers’ money.
The result would be a document detailing the success and failures or mostly those that just dropped away with a change of minister or government (remember Guilds under John Hayes?). This might introduce a level of ministerial accountability into the sector and become a bible for incoming ministers and new civil servants.
There would be no excuse for introducing something that had previously been proved a failure or changing something that had proved to be a success.
Ironically, the direct face-to-face training, assessment, mentoring and guiding my trainer-assessors undertake on a daily basis with their apprentices and employers has changed very little over the years, just different paperwork, different programme titles and different funding regimes.
Former Education Secretary Ken Baker (pictured above) has hit back at criticism that his university technical college (UTC) project had been given a “get out of jail clause” in government plans for the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) performance measure.
Lord Baker, co-founder of Baker Dearing Educational Trust (BDT), which has been working to develop UTCs, also defended the institutions over claims they simply replicated the work of general FE colleges.
The Conservative peer used his speech and appearance at the ninth annual Sir John Cass’s Foundation Lecture to defend UTCs, which offer 14-19 vocational training in science, technology, engineering and maths-based (STEM) subjects, alongside the teaching of core academic subjects.
He said he was “not in favour personally” of the 14-16 Ebacc, for which a government consultation launched this week with UTCs, studio schools and FE colleges potentially exempt from the measure while officials were “consulting on how the policy should apply”.
The exemption from the Ebacc measure — which shows the proportion of pupils in a school entering and achieving a good GCSE in English, maths, science, a foreign language and history or geography —drew criticism on Twitter from the likes of @SchoolDuggery, who described it as a “get out of jail clause for UTCs”.
The government is consulting on making 90 per cent of pupils do Ebaccs from autumn 2017, but Lord Baker called for more “technical, practical, vocational, hands-on training and learning”.
“Ebacc was the exam I took in 1951, called the school certificate. Item for item, it was the same thing,” said Lord Baker. “And it was abolished in 1951 because it was too narrow.”
The government consultation, which closes on January 29, says that “like pupils attending UTCs and studio schools, [14 to 16] pupils [at FE colleges] have chosen to specialise in a technical or professional area from key stage four”, which would be likely to make them study “a smaller academic curriculum” unsuitable for EBacc.
Charles Parker, chief executive of the Baker Dearing Education Trust said: “It seems to us that the compulsory EBacc is not compatible with the UTC program. We are glad to see that the consultation recognises this.”
Catherine Sezen, 14-19 and curriculum policy manager at the Association of Colleges, said the consultation meant FE colleges with learners aged 14 and over would have “a chance to respond to the government’s proposals”.
Nevertheless, in his speech, entitled The Intelligent Hand — how we can solve the problem of people without jobs and jobs without people, Lord Baker went on to say: “The greatest problem facing our educational system is that it is not being geared up to providing what industry, business and commerce require”.
He laid part of the blame for this at the door of FE colleges, and said: “If FE colleges were as successful as people believed, we wouldn’t have a skills gap today.”
He also hit back at comments by Northampton College principal Pat Brennan-Barrett at a House of Lords Social Mobility Committee meeting where, as reported by FE Week, she said UTCs did “the sort of work that FE colleges have done for many years”.
Lord Baker, speaking at the November 4 event at the Cass Business School in London, said: “The trouble is that so many FE colleges have never related their output to what the needs of the economy are, and what the needs of industry are.”
A three-year funding cycle was one of the key proposals in the AoC’s submission on the Spending Review, explains David Corke.
Colleges may just be the most important element of the government’s plan to improve productivity in the UK.
With industry-standard facilities and expert teachers, students receive the very best technical and professional education, which equips them with the skills to go to work. Colleges should, therefore, be respected and valued.
However, there is a risk that, under its Spending Review, the government will cut funding to the FE sector yet again. As funding for colleges is not protected in the ring-fenced budget that covers funding for schools, whenever savings need to be made, FE is in the firing line. It has to stop.
Funding cuts with little or no notice make it extremely difficult for colleges to predict and plan organisational finances and make sure they have enough money to pay for the services they offer
In a submission to the Spending Review, the AoC has called on the Government to make some changes to the way colleges are funded.
Our message is simple — education funding must be fair. When a student moves from school to college, the funding for their education drops by about 22 per cent. This is not acceptable.
If colleges are to provide the kind of quality A-levels and technical and professional education required to produce a skilled workforce, the funding must be there to pay for it.
Colleges are more than capable of creating the education and skills training that employers need, but they need the financial backing of the government.
Colleges also need to know in advance when and how much funding they will receive to allow them to adequately prepare their own budgets.
It is impossible to decide how to spend money when you don’t know when the next payment is coming and how much it will be. Funding cuts with little or no notice make it extremely difficult for colleges to predict and plan organisational finances and make sure they have enough money to pay for the services they offer.
A three-year funding cycle, as in our submission to the Spending Review, would mean that budgets would be set three years in advance, allowing colleges the chance to better manage their finances.
The government’s aim is to ensure that the UK’s workforce is highly and appropriately skilled so as to increase productivity. One of its ideas for achieving that goal is to create 3m apprenticeship starts by 2020, which will be challenging.
Colleges act as an important conduit in the apprenticeship system, playing the role not only of training provider, but also helping to source the employer to provide a job for the apprentice.
At present, the government has said it will introduce a levy to encourage — though some would say force — large employers to invest in apprenticeships.
Of course, creating more opportunities for work-plus-training for young people is laudable, but it is important that while straining for quantity, the quality of the apprenticeships does not decline.
An apprenticeship is only of value while it is preparing the apprentice for a good career within a sector, rather than just training them to work for a specific employer.
If the levy was set at 0.5 per cent of payroll costs, as AoC suggests, paid by all public and private organisations with more than 250 employees, this would support good quality training.
Securing a levy from businesses is one thing, but great consideration must be given to how it is spent.
Colleges work with employers to identify the needs of the local economy but it is important that this is a coordinated effort by the whole community. Local councils and other education providers need to be involved to ensure the right priorities are set to train young people for the jobs that are available.
Funding helps colleges to provide quality education and training to their local community and it must stay that way. Government must support them if it is to get the highly skilled workforce that the UK economy needs.
