The relationship between lead and sub-contractor may be one defined by tension for some, and tranquility for others. Matthew Lord outlines how to help make these relationships fall into the latter camp.

With the final push to sign off contracts and the last-minute dash for recruitment dominating our lives, I’ve been thinking about exactly what we, as a ‘sub-contractor’ are looking for from our college partners (although ‘sub-contractor’ is surely a misnomer if ever there was one – to us it’s a partnership, with all the sense of alliance and co-operation that implies).

We simply haven’t got the time to be passed around the college talking to all and sundry (delightful though your colleagues are)

 

We’re all united by a single aim — to deliver great learning to our students — but too often the sub-contractor-college relationship founders because one ‘side’ or another doesn’t understand what the other needs. So let’s banish misunderstanding, frustration and soaring blood pressure and make the relationship work.

The first thing to consider are time frames and contracts. Timing is everything. Is your college able to commit to our time frames, process the necessary due diligence and get the course under contract in time for us to be able to recruit learners at the right time of year? If you can do this, it tells us you’re a super-efficient college — just what we like.

Secondly, count date meeting. Meet with us one week before the count date and please make sure you withdraw learners that need to be withdrawn.

Third is registers. Decide how these are submitted and monitored. And please make sure someone from the college does actually look at them and that they are monitored regularly.

Bursary application forms comes fourth in this list. Provide us with a checklist of the exact evidence required. And once you receive the forms, please process them quickly. Delays at this late stage cause real problems for us and, more importantly, our students. Many of ours are entirely dependent on financial help to pursue their studies.

Fifth is being ‘Ofsted-ready’. Check that your sub-contractor is Ofsted-ready — you don’t want your next inspection to be adversely affected by any shortcomings beyond your control. It will boost your confidence — and that of your sub-contractor — to know that everything is hunky-dory.

And sixth is English and maths. Does the sub-contractor have the necessary support to ensure success in these crucial areas? Do staff have the necessary training and resource support? This should include initial testing, teaching delivery and exam preparation. Good results are in everyone’s best interests.

It hardly needs saying, but keep in touch. This is number seven. Do meet regularly with your sub-contractor and draw up a set agenda around numbers, quality and support.

Number eight is fewer points of contact. With the best will in the world, we simply haven’t got the time to be passed around the college talking to all and sundry (delightful though your colleagues are). Less is definitely more, so let’s agree a few key points of contact at the start of the relationship. These are sub-contracting/business manager (responsible for internal liaison with safeguarding, HR, finance and contracts); registration (enrolments, withdrawals, bursary forms, exam registration); quality assurance; and heads of department.

And if your staff change, remember to
tell us.

Back to the list of ten and at nine is learner support. Make sure that your contractor has a robust system in place for learners who need support. In the case of Let Me Play, the vast majority of our students have been turned off learning by bad experiences at school and have very low self-confidence, so this is second nature to us. Before they can even begin to learn, our young people need to acquire the habit of regular attendance at our learning centres and find some self belief. Many have difficult home lives, and some are already living alone at the age of 16 or even homeless. These are all potential barriers to learning which have to be overcome before they’re ready to move on to college at the end of our courses.

And ten is free school meals. Young people need feeding — and nutritious meals aid focus and concentration. If your sub-contractor delivers full-time study programmes to 16 to 18-year-olds off-site, do you have a system for paying for free school meals to eligible learners?

 

Judith Doyle inherited a grade three Ofsted-rated college in August 2013 and within eight months of her appointment inspectors dished out the same result again. But, picking up the gauntlet, she instigated a raft of changes that in July saw the college rated as outstanding.

I was proud and delighted to be made principal at Gateshead College in 2013, a college which at that time was graded by Ofsted as requiring improvement.

I relished the opportunity to build on the improvements that were already in evidence but equally recognised that turning things around would need focus, clarity, and ultimately a bit of backbone.

We used to effectively have a college that operated as two — work-based learning on one side and classroom-based learning on the other

Gateshead College had an impressive legacy of being a technical college; close to local business and close to its community.

At some point this got lost in translation, focus and delivery.

My primary goal became the delivery of a strategic transformation programme, starting with a shift in culture. Simplified, it was going back to what we always did best.

The priorities were having a relentless focus on quality improvement and a curriculum that suited market, employer and business needs. We could no longer afford to be distracted from this approach, however interesting or attractive new opportunities appeared to be.

Our first priority was our students [and our strategy] — to make them the most highly-prized in the jobs market, and to give them the best learning experience in a safe, nurturing and aspirational environment.

We aspired to give our students the ‘employment edge’ — a point that Ofsted recognised in its report. Our approach to safeguarding was also recognised as outstanding and we continue to review and improve beyond the current framework — we’d been working on the Prevent agenda for a number of years.

We restructured our college board; traditional structures made way for more dynamic, agile and focussed committees with a greater business representation. The support of my chair and board was very important to developing a clear strategy going forward.

My role was clear: to drive and lead — encourage, motivate and kick (a little). I had to communicate a vision, a clear sense of purpose to which all staff could engage every member of staff had to understand the part they had to play in delivering excellence for students.

We recognised the need to improve communications with all staff. Regular, more focussed team briefings were introduced to encourage and cascade communication in departments and there was an increased focus on informal communication. I used every opportunity to reinforce the message to all staff that if we delivered high quality, teaching, learning and assessment the rest would follow. It is our core business and we had to get that right.

Another huge internal shift was establishing a ‘one college’ approach to our business. We used to effectively have a college that operated as two — work-based learning on one side and classroom-based learning on the other.

There was a lack of a coherent sense of purpose and no real accountability as well as waste, duplication and lost opportunities.

We enhanced our management information systems and became far more rigorous about capturing and routinely analysing data. We now have extremely detailed and accessible information about every student’s achievement, progress and experience along with a range of performance data which is used this to make quick management decisions and early interventions.

Our links with the local and regional business community have always been important, but I set about strengthening these further by listening to employers and working with them to shape our curriculum and enhance students’ experience of work. We had proven our ability to be highly responsive to businesses, delivering many bespoke solutions, and could demonstrate the impact of this to the inspectors.

We have forged outstanding — and very meaningful — partnerships with regional organisations like the Confederation of British Industry, North East Chamber of Commerce, Entrepreneur’s Forum and our local enterprise partnership.

All of this is being achieved within a tough political and financial landscape, but we are working from a robust financial position to deliver on the government’s skills agenda.

 

Chancellor George Osborne’s decision to impose a levy on employers to fund apprenticeships is a positive move if carefully and fairly implemented and if the unintended consequences and opportunities for fraud are thought through in advance.

Training prescribed by industrial training boards was funded by a statutory levy until abandoned by Margaret Thatcher in the 1990s. My first work-based learning job was with the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board, one of 32 training boards funded by a statutory levy.

Compulsion to take an apprenticeship will probably drive the completion rates down from their current highest ever level into the 60 per cent range

In those days, most companies paying the levy ensured they undertook sufficient prescribed training to claim back in full their levy payments. As it was compulsory, some employees and employers benefited from the training delivered and others begrudged it.

But this is no different from today when a head office HR department imposes apprenticeship programmes across the whole company without explaining to the site managers, supervisors and potential apprentices the benefits and responsibilities.

Any taxation, which is what the levy is, has to be perceived as fair by all required to pay it. The danger lies with limiting it to companies with at least 250 employees.

They will see themselves paying and training staff, who, when competent, will be poached by smaller companies.

The levy should encompass all employers, apart from the very small, say those with fewer than 25 employees.

The powerhouse for economic growth is the small and medium-sized enterprises, so they should be encouraged to take on apprentices, albeit through the imposition of a levy.

The increased income raised by including all employers in the levy, apart from the very smallest, would allow those employers with fewer than 25 employees to have free apprenticeship training.

Of course there will be consequences. Being forced to undertake an apprenticeship so their employer can recoup their levy payments will drive up early leavers.

Our statistics show the highest number of early leavers come from employers who demand the age grant and only pay the minimum apprentice wage.

Compulsion to take an apprenticeship
will probably drive the completion rates down from their current highest ever level into the 60 per cent range. However as Prime Minister David Cameron’s target is only for 3m starts, completions and early leavers will not figure and most early leavers will not join the unemployment register.

How the levy is raised is being pondered by government, whether on a company’s turnover or a headcount of employees.

In some sectors, this may induce employers to make their staff self-employed to avoid paying the levy. It is common practice in hairdressing for the saloon owner to rent out ‘chairs.’

This could convert into other sectors, for example self-employed waiters could ‘rent’ tables from the restaurateur. I have no doubt a whole industry of ‘levy advisers’ will evolve to show employers how to avoid or minimise payments. These people will creep out of the woodwork in the same way there are a plethora of ‘consultants’ who trade sub-contracting around FE colleges and providers for a ‘small’ fee.

I think it is important that the smaller companies and enterprises, ie those with 25 or more employees are brought into the levy as well as large employers.

The overwhelming message from government is the 3m target. If this is not met by manufacturing and service industry employers, it will be easy for the government to switch the tap on for national and local government departments and the NHS to ‘fill their boots’ with apprentices.

While this may benefit the efficiency and productivity of the government departments concerned, the emphasis for apprenticeship recruitment should be concentrated on manufacturing and service employers who need the improved efficiency and productivity a skilled workforce can bring and thus contribute through taxes to the Treasury to fund and improve state services.

And if there is not enough money in the pot to pay for all these increased apprenticeship and there is no other source of government funding, simple — just raise
the levy.

 

When news broke last week that nine people had been killed by a gunman at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon, Iain Mackinnon’s thoughts jumped to the time he spent there a decade ago.

By chance I’ve visited Umpqua Community College in Oregon, scene of the latest mass killings.

This is no inner city madhouse where students live in constant fear — it’s Ambleside, not the Bronx.

Nor is it a coven of far-right extremists, or even a bunch of hillbillies fitting in a bit of college round another hunting trip. It’s a lovely, welcoming rural community. And the killings are sadly yet more evidence of a deeper, and baffling, structural problem in America.

It was 1995 and I was on a month-long study trip to the USA funded by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

I spent a day in Douglas County, hosted by Norm Gershon, president of a local job training non-profit, and also a member of the state legislature.

There were certainly no entry barriers, which most urban colleges in Britain sadly have to have. Umpqua was about as far from being an inner city hell hole as it is possible to be

Norm took me to meet a group of staff at Umpqua Community College. They were just the sort of hard-working, kind, deeply committed, college staff who we all know from our own colleges over here.

The college worked and still works primarily with adults, many of them ‘displaced’ as Americans call it — a less personally negative word than ‘redundant’ — helping them to re-train.

And helping them to re-train for better jobs where they could — there was a strong emphasis in Norm’s non-profit and in the college and with other providers, that simply getting someone into another minimum wage job was a poor second best.

They worked hard to give them a leg up to something better (and their placement data recorded how much a successfully-placed student earned in their new job).

It was heart-warming stuff. And the college was a welcoming place. Pleasant buildings, pleasant surroundings. There were certainly no entry barriers, which most urban colleges in Britain sadly have to have. Umpqua was about as far from being an inner city hell hole as it is possible to be.

But they weren’t hillbilly rednecks either, pillars of the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Douglas County was — and seems still to be — a warm, welcoming, liberal-minded, lovely place to be.

I was Norm’s guest the night before our visit to the college at the county’s annual First Citizen’s dinner. More than 700 of us packed a sports hall and at least 50 of us were invited to stand in turn to be applauded by the rest (‘this is a bit of a marathon, I’m afraid, Iain — you’re doing well’). I was one of those to be applauded as the MC, who struggled with my weird first name, announced: ‘Mr Ay-ain Mackinnon from London, England, our furthest travelled guest of the evening’.

I’ve dug out my notes to refresh my memory. They took a lot of trouble to dress all the tables. They paraded the flag. They stood to pledge the Oath of Allegiance. There was a real sense of community and huge local pride on show. ‘Isn’t this a great place to live,’ said one speaker, to huge applause.

It clearly was, and is, a great place to live — and it will be again. But right now they’re hurting, and they’ll need all that warm community spirit to help them cope with this tragedy.

Again and again we in Britain struggle to understand how so many Americans are still so reluctant to tighten their gun laws to stop these near-daily mass murders, so commonly targeted on schools and colleges and universities — and despite overwhelming evidence that gun control works.

I feel as powerless to stop this tragedy in America as I am to stop the tragedy in Syria (and it’s no comfort that even President Barack Obama shares that frustration).

In my note to Norm the day after the tragedy, I said: “There are many people this side of the pond thinking of you all today”, and I hope that being remembered is at least better than being ignored.

We can and should keep repeating our dismay than an otherwise civilised society can’t sort this out.