The FE Commissioner has questioned the future of a cash-strapped Midland college that saw governors resign after a new principal was appointed without a competitive application process.

Dr David Collins was sent in to Stratford-Upon-Avon College by former Skills Minister Matthew Hancock in May after the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) rated its financial health as inadequate, having posted deficits for the last five financial years running.

Plans to turn the college around are in place under new principal Nicola Mannock (pictured), but even her appointment earlier this year proved an issue for the governing board, which Dr Collins said needed a revamp.

It is now shedding 40 full-time posts to save £1.2m a-year, but in a powerful statement about how the 450-worker college was tackling its problems, Dr Collins’s report, out this week, said: “Although there are signs that the financial recovery plan is working, there is still a question mark over the long-term viability of the college as an independent institution.”

The college, which has around 6,000 learners, had been deemed to require improvement with a grade three Ofsted inspection result in November — and the commissioner’s inspection report made for further uncomfortable reading.

It described as “questionable” the governing board’s appointment, without a process of competition, of acting principal Mrs Mannock — who had joined the college as vice principal last year — to the post permanently, and said a number of governors had resigned over the move “on a point of principle”.

He said most of the board at the time of his inspection had been in place when the college was “running up significant deficits and failed to challenge adequately the then-management team on its performance”.

But he also pointed out how the new principal — whose predecessor, Martin Penny (pictured left), quit late last year after eight years and has since become the interim director of finance and corporate services at Bicton College — was viewed by stakeholders as a “breath of fresh air”.

The commissioner’s report said: “Although the new management team is doing the right things, it is not yet clear that they are doing enough to safeguard the future of an organisation with less than £14m of funding, over £2.4m of which comes from the international market.”

Dr Collins said he wanted to see a “majority of new members” on the board, along with a governors’ training programme; improved and cheaper clerking arrangements; mentoring for Mrs Mannock; and, an autumn review.

He warned that a structure and prospects appraisal should be carried if there was “insufficient progress”.

And it wouldn’t be the first time a college has ‘disappeared’ after a commissioner’s visit. Dr Collins put Kent’s debt-ridden K College into administered status and the minister later approved proposals to split it up and sell it off — a process that was completed at the start of this month with successful bidders East Kent College and Hadlow College having stepped in.

Nevertheless, a joint statement from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the SFA read: “Following the FE Commissioner’s visit to Stratford-Upon-Avon College in May 2014 the college has taken steps to address these weaknesses, including new governor appointments and clerking arrangements.

“The FE Commissioner will continue to monitor and review progress. If progress is insufficient, the FE Commissioner will consider and advise Ministers and the chief executive of the funding agencies on any further intervention action that should be taken.”

The college is yet to comment.

UPDATE

Mrs Mannock told FE Week: “My appointment as permanent principal reflected the seriousness of the college’s quality and financial position last year and the urgent need for stability.

“It was the governing body’s decision to take swift action rather than delay an appointment by three months, and avoid incurring substantial recruitment costs.

“Although I was not party to the consultation or meetings in which my appointment was approved, I believe the main driving force for the decision was that the board, staff and internal and external stakeholders were happy with my performance to date and were confident in my ability to deliver a robust college recovery (this was commented on by Dr Collins in his report), and that an expensive recruitment process was not appropriate while the college was undergoing a significant restructure to reduce staffing costs.”

She added: “The governor who left on point of principle at my permanent appointment resigned prior to notification of the FE Commissioner’s assessment of the college.

“The other five governors who tendered their resignation did so on receiving the FE Commissioner’s assessment summary and recommendations — not in relation to my appointment.

“The college now has the strong support of staff and stakeholders alike and we have received a very positive response, from both in and outside of the college, in respect of our achievements.

“As a result of the difficult decisions taken to invest in the long term sustainability of the college, we have been able to secure its financial future and enhance the future development and success of our students. This has been further reinforced by last week’s best ever A-level results, with students gaining a 100 per cent pass rate in English and maths and a 7 per cent increase in those achieving high grades.”

Click here for a expert piece from Mrs Mannock on Dr Collins’ findings.

Apprentices should be no older than 23 at the time of starting their course, a new report from the left-of-centre Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank has recommended.

The 52-page report, called Remember The Young Ones: Improving Career Opportunities For Britain’s Young People (pictured below right), says that only in exceptional circumstances should those aged 24 and over be allowed to start apprenticeships. It comes three years after the IPPR said that the maximum age for starting apprenticeships should be 25.

The report also says that all apprenticeships should be at level three (they currently start at level two) and above and last, like current government policy, for a minimum of one year, even though Labour policy is for two years. And traineeships should be developed into pre-apprenticeships.

Tony Dolphin (pictured below left), IPPR chief economist, said: “In the past we have said no one aged 25 and over should be an apprentice, so not starting one after the age of 23 is broadly consistent with that. That said, we seem to have decided that ‘young people’ equates to 24 and under so we’re saying the vast majority of apprentices should be young people.”

He added: “I’d be happy if we evolved to a system of apprenticeships longer than a year but I think the priority is improving the quality.”

The report says: “Official figures show the number of apprenticeships in England almost doubled between 2008/09 and 2012/13.

“However, much of the increase has been accounted for by people aged 25 and over; the number of apprentices aged 24 and under has increased by only 30 per cent over the same period. As a result, whereas young people accounted for four of every five apprenticeships in 2008/09, they now account for less than three in five.”

Martin Doel, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said: “The introduction of a pre-apprentice level to enable young people to be able to compete well for high quality apprenticeships would be a very helpful addition to the range of tools available to colleges in helping those young people to achieve their ambitions.”

Stewart Segal, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP — click here for an expert piece on the IPPR report from Mr Segal), said: “Apprenticeships continue to provide an important but not the only route into sustainable employment and the IPPR report recognises the success of the programme.

“However removing the level two programmes will reduce the opportunities for many young people,.  We agree that every young person should have a progression route available to a level three job, but not everyone will have that opportunity from day one.”

The report argues that youth unemployment is lower in countries where the vocational route into employment through formal education and training is as clear as the academic route. It highlights the dramatic fall in unemployment over the last year, with 141,000 fewer young people unemployed, 64,000 fewer than the previous quarter. The youth unemployment rate has fallen from 20.9 per cent a year ago to 17.8 per cent.

But the report shows there are still 868,000 young people aged 16 to 24 unemployed and 247,000 of them have been looking for work for over a year. Around 700,000 workless young people have never had a job and almost one million are classified as not in education, employment or training (Neet).

Mr Dolphin said: “While the last six or seven years have been particularly tough for the latest generation of young people, even before the financial crisis many of those entering the labour market for the first time were struggling to compete with older workers for jobs.

“Although there has been a sharp fall in the number of unemployed young people over the last year, it is unlikely that even a full-blown economic recovery will fully solve the UK’s structural youth unemployment problem.”

The report further recommends that every secondary school appoints a full-time careers officer responsible for careers education and guidance and for liaison with local employers; and that careers guidance — and some careers education — be provided by specialist advisers, not teachers.

Mr Doel said: “Providing high quality, impartial advice and guidance is no easy task. While we appreciate schools are receiving no extra funding to support this statutory obligation, while competing in an increasingly competitive market to enrol young people, we need to see clearly defined legal duties and accountability.

“We would expect new providers for 16 to 18-year-olds to explain how they will develop a curriculum that meets the needs of future employment opportunities and how schools are going to guide their pupils career choices.”

The government has today published for the first time employment and other 19+ learner outcomes for FE and skills providers — and Darlington College has the highest job outcome rate of all general FE colleges. Click here to see full report for Darlington College.

The data from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), for learners at all Skills Funding Agency-funded providers that completed in 2010/11, comes as part of a consultation on proposed new success measures from 2016/17.

However, BIS itself, along with the Association of Colleges (AoC) and the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP), has urged caution over the use of the “experimental” data, which also covers progression within learning and earnings.

Skills Minister Nick Boles said: “This country needs high quality post-19 education and training that equips learners with the skills employers need and value. This data and consultation is an important step in recalibrating the way we think of success in FE.

“Simply gaining a qualification is not the reason learners enter education and therefore should not be the sole measure by which we determine success.

“Instead we need to look at where education leads — whether that’s employment or further study. We need to be scrutinising not only how well FE providers deliver learning, but also what that learning achieves. By using a more holistic measure of success, we are working to incentivise providers to stretch and challenge students.”

The proposals for the new success measures for publicly-funded post-19 education and skills, excluding higher education, are laid out by BIS in a 12-question consultation, which opened today and is due to close on October 10.

Joy Mercer, director of education policy at the AoC, said: “It is seldom possible to sum up success in a single measure, particularly when colleges serve so many different students in so many different circumstances, and we support the use of a range of ways to identify success.

“Anything that helps students of all ages to make properly informed decisions as to which course and institution in which to invest their time and effort will be worthwhile.

“The publication of this data is also useful to colleges, who currently have to spend time and money finding out what happens to their students. This will help save money — at a time when they have seen their funding for adult students cut by 25 per cent.

“However, the government must be careful not to confuse helpful data on which courses can lead to better employment prospects, with expecting colleges to have direct responsibility for job success.

“Some colleges are operating in the most deprived areas where jobs are scarce, and the government must accept that there are a whole range of local stakeholders, in particular Local Enterprise Partnerships, who also play a key role in creating new employment opportunities.”

An AELP spokesperson said: “We welcome the use of data if it is offering a broader view of how success is measured, providing that the information is accurate and up to date.

“But it’s important that the data needs to be reviewed in context; in other words, it’s not right to set absolute targets because learner cohorts vary so much. Nor would we want to see tables and rankings based on data only. We should be very cautious about how the data is used.”

Within the documentation released, it said: “These measures are experimental, and have been published for transparency as well as to develop an initial view of how to make full use of them to support the FE sector.

“This publication provides the headline outcomes for destinations and progression, and also showcases some features of the data that are important for their interpretation. The type of provision offered and the clientele that providers work with are just two of the considerations that should be taken into account to understand that a low rate does not necessarily equate to poor performance. Therefore it is not recommended to use the data to compare provider performance at this stage.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) said: “The measures will not impose any additional data collection burdens on training providers, employers or members of the public as they will be based on robust and statistically valid matching of currently collected administration datasets from across BIS, the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.”

At the time of going to press, no individual providers had been contacted.

The appointment of Nick Boles (pictured) as Skills Minister following the promotion of his predecessor, Matthew Hancock, has led to questions about whether he will have enough time in the role to learn about the FE sector, its challenges and its successes included.

Here, Association of Colleges (AoC) chief executive Martin Doel and Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Stewart Segal set out their priorities for Mr Boles.

Martin Doel

Together with the AoC president [Richard Atkins] and our associate director for sixth form colleges [Mark Bramwell], I was fortunate enough to meet the new Skills Minister, Nick Boles, only days into his new job.

The Minister (the fifth I have worked with who has responsibility for FE) was, as I had expected, focused, business-like and keen to hear our ideas. But he has a number of significant challenges and decisions to make.

Only a few weeks ago, both [former Education Secretary] Michael Gove and Matthew Hancock gave AoC and our sister organisations assurances that government had received and understood our consistent message that colleges have taken far more than their fair share of austerity.

The lack of ring-fence around funding for the education of 16 to 18-year-olds has left many colleges taking massive cumulative hits to their budgets and this is beginning to affect the curriculum range they can offer students. Further while quality as evidenced by Ofsted results continues to be strong there is an incipient, but no less real threat to quality of provision over time.

The new Minister will be taking a big decision in the autumn about funding in 2015-16. He should be in no doubt about the significance of this for the future of colleges.

Meanwhile, on the Department for Business, Innovation an Skills (BIS) side of the Minister’s brief, funding for adult FE students has declined by 40 per cent since 2010. This situation is clearly unsustainable over the medium to long-term and this provides some rationale for the current consultation concerning the extension of student loans to 19 to 24-year-olds and for level two provision for 25-year-olds and above.

With colleges operating within such tight and declining margins in both their Department for Education and BIS remits, there is little capacity for them to adapt to new requirements of policy or to respond to opportunities and needs identified by local economic partners, like local enterprise partnerships. For this reason, I suggested to the Minister that he consider a growth and innovation fund for colleges similar to that available to universities under the Catalyst scheme.

The reform of apprenticeships remains a major worry for colleges. Officials will no doubt have informed the Minister that colleges and others remain concerned that the proposed changes will only make it more difficult for small and medium-sized businesses to take on apprentices. These companies are the lifeblood of our economy and to create a system which requires them to take on all the administration of an apprenticeship seems risky at best.

There is also a concern about the sheer pace of change. Politicians, businesses and colleges have all worked hard to transform the reputation of apprenticeships for the better. They are now seen as a valuable option for many, resulting in better jobs and associated salaries. We shouldn’t rush into reform of something which is just (re)establishing itself.

There are also opportunities for the new Minister, particularly in relation to higher technical and vocational education. Our recent publication, Breaking the Mould proposes an increased role for colleges at levels three, four and five and sets out a range of ideas.

Most of these would require specific ministerial action, for example the creation of a new technical accreditation council to approve institutions that want to make their own higher technical and vocational awards and allowing colleges with foundation degrees to award them at other institutions. Our overall message is this: the monopoly of university control of higher technical and vocational qualifications is not serving the needs of a dynamic and recovering economy.

The role colleges play internationally, both in-country and recruiting students from overseas, is under-developed and is an area where they could do with additional support. Some of the constraining factors are outside of BIS’s direct control, such as the Home Office’s immigration rules, the lack of capital investment and the relatively small size of colleges in relation to universities. However, there is scope for a new Minister to build strong links with all parts of BIS and other departments to ensure colleges can play a full role in delivering to this important aspect of the UK’s Industrial Strategy.

Stewart Segal

It is a few weeks since the new Skills Minister, Nick Boles, joined BIS and took responsibility for the apprenticeship changes. Since then there has been an interim Q&A covering some of the issues raised in the recent funding consultation but it did not respond to the main issues involved.

It is not clear when that the full government response to the consultation submissions will be but let’s not forget it may not address the main issues of the impact of mandatory cash contributions, negotiated rates and payments and whether direct funding of employers will positively or adversely affect apprenticeship quality and numbers.

The consultation only covered a very narrow question so we hope that the new Minister will be considering the wider issues where the evidence we have seen suggests that employers are not in favour of the proposals. The construction industry including shop fitters, the hairdressing industry, the electrical contractors industry have all expressed real concerns about these changes. The previous Minister claimed full support from the employer representative bodies but that support has been in principle and all of them have expressed similar concerns about the current proposals and the impact on businesses, small business in particular, and young people.

AELP has also supported these principles which include more employer engagement especially in the development of the new standards, more flexibility in delivery and more focus on the impact of the programme on employers and apprentices. However we do not believe that some of the proposals will move us closer to those objectives we are all driving for. We hope the new Minister will look at some of the proposals we have put forward which we believe are based on clear evidence from employers and based on giving employers more not less choice.

With regard direct funding of employers, all the evidence we have is that employers want more control and influence over the content and delivery of the apprenticeship programme but do not feel they need more control over the funding. However we believe that if they do want direct funding, they should be allowed to follow that route but they must have the option to work with a training provider chosen by them to draw down the government contributions on their behalf.

Employers would be in control of the process in either scenario but it would be based on employer choice. In our view, this would be very much in line with the CBI’s view that arrangements that currently work for employers should be retained.

We also support the drive to increase the employer contribution towards apprenticeship training. However this co-investment comes in many different ways including cash but can also include the provision of staff time, facilities and training equipment. These are very real and important contributions that will be put at risk if we try and enforce cash payments. Employers should have the choice of how to make these contributions but we agree that we can put more focus on this issue and make it a more important part of the Ofsted framework.

We are expecting announcements on how the first trailblazer standards will be managed and funded during 2014-15 when some of the phase 1 trailblazers may become available for delivery. We are not expecting huge numbers of starts but the rules will have to be issued shortly as some employers and providers are expecting to start learners this year.

There are still a lot of issues still to be resolved such as which band of maximum government contribution each of these new standards will slot into. We also need to understand how employer contributions will be collected and evidenced, particularly as all payments will be made through providers or employer providers this year. Clearly providers will play an important part in this process and we need to understand if the ‘incentive’ payments could be off set against the employer contributions which might reduce transactions considerably.

We have been involved with BIS and the Skills Funding Agency in a number of discussions about the future structure of the new standards and have recommended a number of solutions including a more staged approach to the changes such as allowing the new standards to bed in for 12 months before introducing grading and having a clear overall process for managing the trailblazers to ensure an integrated approach.

We hope that Mr Boles will adopt an approach that reflects the views of employers and that encourages input from all parts of the sector to ensure that the changes build on a very successful apprenticeship programme.

Funding for FE was cut last year to pay for the government’s universal free school meals policy, a former aide to ex-Education Secretary Michael Gove has told FE Week.

Dominic Cummings (pictured), who was a special adviser to Mr Gove, claimed cuts announced in 2013/14, including the controversial 17.5 per cent cut to the full-time funding rate for 18-year-old learners, were necessary to find cash to pay for universal free school meals — a policy championed by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

He said the trade-off was rubber-stamped by ‘The Quad’, a decision-making body at the top of government consisting of Prime Minister David Cameron, the Deputy Prime Minister, Chancellor George Osborne and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander.

But the Department for Education (DfE) denied the accusation, insisting the money for free school meals was pumped in from the Treasury.

Mr Cummings, who has come under fire from Coalition leaders after previous attacks on the government, said: “The decision in 2013 to cut 16 to 19 further was necessary because of all the extra money for universal free school meals and other constraints imposed by The Quad.

“Left to his own devices Gove would not have done that but he was given no choice by Downing Street. Number 10 gave Clegg universal free school meals as a trade-off for their own announcement on married couples’ taxes.

“It was a small but telling example of the stupid way decisions are made by Cameron and Clegg without proper thought and it is more telling that they have no idea why it’s stupid.”

Mr Cummings also suggested in posts on Twitter that the DfE had been forced to make cuts to 16 to 19 funding that were never revealed at the time.

He said: “The cuts process uses figures which aren’t made public. £ is shuffled/created/magicked in/out of existence in ways that would get you arrested immediately if you did it in a company. ‘Is this real or funny money?’ is a phrase heard many times/day.”

In the last year, providers have been told a 19 per cent cut to the adult skills budget over the next two years will see their budgets slashed by 15 per cent, on top of a cut in the full-time funding for 18-year-old learners, from £4,000 to £3,300.

But the DfE dismissed Mr Cummings’s claims, and said the money for the free school meals programme — £1bn in revenue funding from the Treasury and £70m in capital cash for new kitchens — was new.

A DfE spokesperson said: “This is completely untrue. All of the funding for providing universal infant free school meals has come from the Treasury and unspent school maintenance budgets — as made clear in the 2013 Autumn statement.

“The announcement also meant that, for the first time, all disadvantaged 16 go 19-year-old students will be eligible for free school meals, whether they choose to study in college or sixth form.”

Mr Clegg’s official spokesperson did not respond to a request for a comment, and Downing Street said it had nothing to add to the DfE response.

Picture: Asadour Guzelian

 

What do you think? Let us know below whether free school meals were a price worth paying for FE and skills cuts elsewhere.