There are surely less gruelling ways of spending quality father-and-son time than a bike ride the length of Great Britain.

But the opportunity to get back on the saddle and raise more than £1,000 for Oxfam proved too much for National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (Niace) chief executive David Hughes.

The 48-year-old is spending the next fortnight, and a bit, cycling 1,250 miles north from Land’s End to John O’Groats with 16-year-old son Oscar (pictured below) — and then 120 miles back south to Inverness.

The duo plan to head off from the Cornwall starting point tomorrow morning, with Mr Hughes’s wife, Emily, 48, and daughters Evy, 18, and Matilda, 13, set to cheer the pair on from a distance.

Mr Hughes, of  Loughborough, Leicestershire, said: “Oscar recently turned 16 and finished his GCSEs and we thought it would be a nice thing to do together.”

The duo decided against following the most direct route through the centre of England and Scotland, and instead will be passing through Wales and the Scottish Isle of Arran.

“We’re taking a longer route and plan to cover around 90-miles-a-day. With regards to training, I do try to keep fairly fit generally, but usually do it through running,” said Mr Hughes.

“I’m away from home a lot through my job and it’s easier to go running wherever I am than to bring along a bike.

“However, Oscar and I cycled 300 miles in four days following the Tour de France around Yorkshire this month and made sure we went up and down all the biggest hills.

“We have probably cycled about 2,000 miles overall together overall since Christmas.”

He added: “I did a lot of cycling when I was a teenager. I used to do time trial races and long bike rides. I rode from London to Land’s End with my dad, but that was over 30 years ago.

“I know I could have done this when I was 15, 16, and 17, but I’m 48 now so it might be a bit different.”

They have already reached their £1,250 fundraising target for the cycle effort, but said they would welcome more donations.

Guests at the Niace Adult Learners’ Week awards ceremony in London on June 16 donated £270 towards the total.

Mr Hughes said: “I have been volunteering and raising money for Oxfam for more than 30 years so it was a natural choice for our charity.

“Their philosophy is to give people the tools to improve their lives, rather than just giving them food, which I have a lot of time for.”

Follow Mr Hughes and Oscar’s trip blog at davidoscarlejog.wordpress.com and  visit www.justgiving.com/Oscar-David to donate.

Pictures: (top) Niace chief executive David Hughes pictured in early July on at the summit of Buttertubs peak, in the Yorkshire Dales, which featured in stage one of the Tour de France. Inset: Mr Hughes’s son, Oscar, with his bike on Buttertubs

The return of the “concept behind” a Labour government policy on funding adult skills abandoned in 2001 amid fraud claims has been put forward by former Shadow Skills Minister Gordon Marsden.

In a contribution to the book One Nation Fizz, published yesterday (Wednesday, July 16), he said the Individual Learning Account (ILA) system of funding, where employers, government and employees paid in small amounts towards training, similar to a pension scheme, was “an idea whose time had come again”.

The ILA scheme was abandoned by the then-Labour government after just a year due to problems with implementation, including fraudulent claims by employers and providers for education and training that was never delivered. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee later estimated that of the £290m spent on the scheme, fraud and abuse could have amounted to £97m.

However, in his article, entitled Transforming Skills and Life Chances For 2020 Britain, Mr Marsden said: “If aspects of that delivery were flawed, the ideas behind it were not, including a tripartite contribution system where businesses and individuals, including the self-employed, could be given incentives (such as matched funding) to pay in modest amounts each month.”

Mr Marsden told FE Week the proposals were part of a “new deal for adult learning and skills” which he wanted to see introduced.

“I’m not saying we should just dust the ILA policy off from 12 years ago and do it as it was then — it’s the concept behind it,” he said.

“It would differ in the sense it wouldn’t simply be a repetition of it — the technology for administering is completely differently, it could be administered locally or regionally, utilising funding that’s already going into the Leps [Local Enterprise Partnerships] for local growth and social inclusion.

“As it’s worth bearing in mind that other part of the UK have tried this and had some success and we should look at how it works in Scotland and Northern Ireland.”

Mr Marsden also said the ILA could be used to promote localism, by allowing employers or groups such as unions to decide what skills their workforce needed.

The ILA proposal bears many similarities to ideas put forward by the National Institute for Continuing Adult Education (Niace) in its manifesto, published during adult learner’s week in June.

It called for increased localism and personal skills accounts — funded by learners, employers and government.

Tom Stannard, Niace deputy chief executive, told FE Week: “We welcome serious consideration of mechanisms enabling new ownership of skills by all adults.

“We need state, employer and individual investment in learning and skills in order to meet the current and future skills needs of the economy.

“Our proposal for new Personal Skills Account would empower and support adults of working age to get the skills they need to gain decent employment, stay in work longer and be more productive while at work.

“They would have one essential feature: if individuals put money in it unlocks investment from the government and employers.

“Personal Skills Accounts would be different to ILAs, which were established in the early 2000s and stopped in part due to fraud but mainly because they were uncapped and the budget was insufficient.

“The new accounts can more easily be managed with the new mechanisms in place via the Skills Funding Agency (unique learner number, Personal Learning Record and register of approved providers).

“The lessons from the ILAs can easily be learned and managed.”

Mr Marsden, who wrote the article before the publication of the Niace manifesto, acknowledged the similarities.

“The point is all of the arguments I make in this article are ideas that have been tossed around in the adult skills landscape for four or five years,” he said.

“So what I’m trying to do is to bring them all together and say ‘look we now need to act on this, we need to build a framework structurally and financially that will enable this to happen”

He wouldn’t say whether the plans he had outlined were likely to influence the Labour manifesto before the 2015 general election, but he said his suggestions were “absolutely in line “with Labour’s skills agenda.

He said: “I’m putting this on the table, it draws on a lot of things people have already said, there’s a very string narrative of why we should be doing things from a Labour point of view.”

One Nation Fizz, published as an e-book yesterday (Wednesday, July 16), contains 14 articles on Labour policy with further contributors including former Education Select Committee member and ex-college principal Nic Dakin, whose chapter was co-written with Paul Blomfield MP and called Energising Further and Higher Eecuatio to Boost Our Nation’s Future.

A former deputy chief executive of the Institute for Learning (IfL) has made a last-ditch public plea to stop it being taken over by the Education and Training Foundation (ETF).

Lee Davies, who was at the IfL for six years from 2005, issued his 11^th-hour plea via Twitter this morning, with the message: “Dear @IFL_Members Advisory Council ….. do the right thing today, please”.

The tweet (pictured below right) included a link to a post on Mr Davies’s blog, where he argued for the continued existence of the IfL. It came with the IfL advisory council expected to vote this afternoon on a proposal to disband and pass membership over to the ETF.

Mr Davies, chief executive at The Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys since 2012, wrote on his blog: “I have spoken with many members and I know that the appetite for an independent professional body remains.  This is not met by ‘gifting’ the membership to the ETF.”

The IfL’s plans to close and transfer to the ETF were announced at the beginning of the month. They were triggered by fears the IfL did not have enough cash to keep going with huge numbers of members having deserted in the face of increasing membership fees in response to government funding being withdrawn.

Sue Crowley, IfL elected chair, said: “We decided to offer the stewardship of the legacy to the ETF because its aims and objectives relating to the professionalism of teachers and trainers align closely with IfL’s; because it already has responsibility for professional standards in the sector: because it offers development opportunities for teachers and trainers; and because its remit extends across the entire FE and skills sector.

“We believe the ETF is the organisation best placed to continue pursuing IfL’s objective ‘to promote education and training for the public benefit by the enhancement and maintenance of the quality, standards and practice of learning and teaching’.

The proposal has enjoyed the support of ETF chief executive David Russell, who also took to Twitter today (pictured right), posting: “Hoping that @IFL_Members Advisory Council will choose to join forces with @E_T_Foundation today — we would evolve and strengthen as a result.”

However, Mr Davies argued that the IfL could adapt to the financial pressures it was facing. He told FE Week: “I think there’s a genuine need for a professional membership organisation and at the heart of this is the decades-old debate about professionalism — I believe FE teaching is a profession and so it needs a professional body.

“I recognise that the IfL needs to change its operations to sustain its impact but there’s no need to give up the gift of thousands of members — we started running the organisation from the back of the Lifelong Learning UK offices with a budget of barely £10,000. It can be done.”

He added: “I’m not saying that the needs of member couldn’t be met by the ETF. What I’m saying is that if you truly recognise that it’s a profession then you need a truly representative membership body, and I don’t think that’s the direction the ETF has been heading in.”

Mr Davies also said the ETF might not be a “solid basis” for a membership body. “The ETF may not even survive the next election,” he said.

“A professional membership body needs to stand outside of the political arena and I don’t think the foundation will be able to do that — whereas I think the IfL can say it’s free of political influence.”

Mr Davies’s tweet and blog post,which appeared on Thursday last week, met with support from Niamh Sweeney, Association of Teachers and Lecturers executive member for Cambridge.

She tweeted: “@LeeMarkDavies @IFL_Members good points very well made Lee. Individual membership of a professional body is vital to the sector.”

The vote on the future of the 33,500-member IfL is expected to take place between 4.30pm and 6.30pm. The decision to vote on the transfer followed a recommendation by the non-executive board of the IfL that it should close and that its legacy and assets be passed to the ETF through a deed of gift.

Members who had renewed their membership until March 31, next year would become part of the ETF’s professional membership. If voted through, the process was due to be completed by the end of next month.

Skills Minister Nick Boles said he was prepared to investigate whether qualifications reform had “gone too far” as he addressed MPs for the first time in his new role today.

At a Westminster Hall debate on youth unemployment and Ofsted this morning, Mr Boles (pictured above in action) said he had heard “concerns” about the extent of reform carried out by the government and was willing to investigate.

His comments came after a series of public funding cuts to adult quals and also a review by BAE Systems group managing director and UK Commission for Employment and Skills commissioner Nigel Whitehead (pictured) which last year called for around 95 per cent of the vocational market’s 19,000-plus qualifications to be cut.

Mr Boles said: “I believe we were right to scrap, as I think honourable members on all sides the House have recognised, some of what my honourable friend referred to as the ‘GNVQ fiddle’ to some of the qualifications that purported to have the equipment to get people a job but did not. We were perpetrating a fraud and it was entirely right that we got rid of that fraud.

“But I have heard absolutely clearly the concern that maybe that reform has gone too far. I am not going to even for a moment suggest that I agree with it or not, but I absolutely promise to talk to members, to talk to the chairman of the select committee who I understand may have some similar concerns and to understand where that concern lies and how we can preserve the massive gains we have made, but nevertheless address the concerns they may have.”

He said he supported the work to rectify a “fundamental dishonesty” in the skills system inherited from the last government, but conceded that concerns existed.

He added: “My understanding is that when we came into office, this government, in 2010, we inherited a system in which there were brave intentions, but a fundamental dishonesty.

“The fundamental dishonesty lay in the fact that we said to many young people that if they studied a whole range of courses and collected a whole confetti of qualifications, that somehow they too would be able to share in the benefits of our growing economy. That was not true.

“It was not true in 2010 when the economy wasn’t growing, it wasn’t even true in 2007 and 2006 and 2005 when our economy had been growing for a very long period of time, and yet still there was a huge number of people who, for all of their GVNQs [sic] and qualifications were not able to fully share in the benefits of that economy.

“That is the key challenge we have tried to face, to face up to that fundamental dishonesty, and with the help of the fantastic Alison Wolf and others, to identify those core skills that it is essential that every young person must acquire if they are going to be able to have a chance to share in that economic prosperity.”

He said his “simple mission” when he was Planning Minister was to get more houses built, and added that he believed his mission in his new role was just as simple.

He said: “In this job, I feel I have an equally simple mission, and that is to ensure that every young person acquires the skills that they will need to share in our economic recovery.

“And we have made substantial progress, even when coming out of one of the deepest recessions for several generations, but we have not made enough progress, and we are not satisfied and we will not rest and the work will continue right up until election day and long after it to ensure that mission is fulfilled.”

Mr Boles praised the government’s work “to revive and restore and re-inspire the concept of an apprenticeship,” adding: “It was something that had become a low currency in our education and training system, and that, I am pleased to say, is no longer the case.

“We are on track to deliver two million apprentices over the course of this Parliament, and not just two million in number, but two million high quality, long term apprenticeships which people running businesses and other organisations value as real ways to get into work and into good long-term employment.”

According to figures from the current Statistical First Release, out last month and including provisional figures for 2013/14, the current total of apprenticeship starts from the beginning of 2010/11, after the current government was elected, stands at nearly 1.8m.

Mr Boles continued by acknowledging his own lack of sector knowledge and paid tribute to his predecessor, Matthew Hancock, adding that he was keen to learn more about FE and skills.

“One of the phrases, and there are many phrases and new jargons that a newly-appointed Minister has to get to grips with, and one we have heard a certain amount of this morning, one I don’t like any more than any other jargon, is work-readiness,” said Mr Boles.

“I have to say I feel peculiarly un-work-ready this morning, having had less than 24 hours to get my head around these issues.

“I nevertheless feel at some advantage because of the superb work of my predecessor, who I know earned the respect of colleagues around the House for his indefatigable energy, enthusiasm and drive.”

He added: “I am tremendously privileged and lucky and happy to be given this job. Like poor Manuel, I know nothing at the moment, but I am keen to learn.”