Colleges claim they have been left short-changed after learning how much money they will receive to pay for the government’s new universal free school meals programme.

The Education Funding Agency (EFA) wrote to colleges on Monday (May 12) to tell them how much they would receive to pay for meals for disadvantaged learners.

It comes after it was revealed last month that colleges would receive funding equivalent to £2.41 per meal per learner, based on 4.5 days a week and 33 weeks of study a year.

But many providers have complained that the figures they received, which are based on data from previous years, are much lower than what they were expecting,

The extra money is good news, but as the guidance was issued in April and the allocations in May, colleges are going to have to move quickly to get arrangements in place by September. Schools have had twice as much time to prepare for infant free school meals.

and the relatively low government contribution towards set-up costs has also been criticised by the Association of Colleges (AoC).

The DfE was not able to provide a full list of allocations, but a survey of 79 college leaders conducted by FE Week showed that money for set-up costs amounts in most cases to 5 per cent of the total allocation, but capped at £6,000, which means bigger colleges with large allocations will lose out.

The survey also revealed many providers felt they had been short-changed because the number of entitled learners calculated by the EFA was different to the number worked out by the providers themselves.

East Durham College learner services director Mark Moore said the £138,876 his college had been allocated was enough to pay for around 200 meals, when the college paid bursaries to more than 1,000 learners with low household incomes.

He said: “This is yet another burden placed on colleges to administer. In times when college budgets are being cut we are increasingly managing devolved funding. Free school meals is just another to add to the list, along with 24+ advanced learner loans and the bursary which is managed at learner level, high needs funding, again, managed at learner level with masses of localised bureaucracy.

“Adults additional learning support is also managed at learner level along with 16 to 18 vulnerable bursaries. The government is trimming back on costs in their departments and passing the load to individual colleges whose budgets are not being increased to reflect the additional work required.”

Julian Gravatt, assistant chief executive of the AoC, said: “The extra money is good news, but as the guidance was issued in April and the allocations in May, colleges are going to have to move quickly to get arrangements in place by September. Schools have had twice as much time to prepare for infant free school meals.

“Colleges educate the majority of low-income 16 to 18-year-olds and so they will get the majority of the money available, but the start-up funding doesn’t really cover the full cost. Once the arrangements have settled in, it would be worth looking at whether the management of this could be combined with other 16 to 18 support funding.”
The Education Funding Agency declined to comment.

An awarding organisation has hit back at claims by Bright Assessing chief executive Krissy Charles-Jones about its qualifications.

She had told FE Week that the troubled Warwickshire-based provider was “never approved or used” by Highfield Awarding Body for Compliance (HABC).

But the awarding body has disputed Ms Charles Jones’s statement.

Terry Bloor, HABC quality assurance manager, told FE Week: “Bright was approved as an HABC-approved centre on September 16, 2013, after completing our centre application process and paying the required approval fee [£336].”

He added the company was sent “a centre certificate confirming that Bright had been allocated centre number 13255”.

Mr Bloor said the provider still claimed it was accredited by ‘Highfield’ on its website — five months after HABC suspended ties with Bright without approving any qualifications for its learners [it had not removed the claim as FE Week went to press].

But Ms Charles-Jones said she was “sticking by” her original statement.

She said: “Bright have not received any confirmation from Highfields that we are an approved centre, we have no centre number. We never received a centre approval certificate.”

NCFE (formerly the Northern Council for Further Education) stopped certificating Bright courses in February following its investigation into alleged malpractice. The findings have not been made public, but Bright disputed “the findings and the sanction” and appealed. NCFE has now confirmed it has de-certificated at least one former learner, who took a level three assessing vocational achievement qualification with Bright.

A Skills Funding Agency (SFA) spokesperson indicated several former learners could face losing their qualifications.

She said: “For learners that the agency has funded, the lead providers have been working with NCFE to resubmit their portfolios and arrange for qualifications to be awarded. Privately funded learners are encouraged to contact NCFE.”

She declined to comment on whether the SFA would fund retraining for former learners who had passed publicly-funded Bright courses yet faced losing qualifications.

OCR and Ascentis confirmed last week they had cut ties with Bright — a move which, it is thought, left the provider without an awarding organisation.

OCR declined to comment on whether it would revoke certification from former Bright learners. Ascentis had “no concerns” about validity of its certificates.

Ms Charles-Jones said she planned to complain to Ofqual about NCFE, claiming the awarding organisation was to blame for former learners’ qualifications being revoked as it had not carried out sufficient “external moderation” of Bright courses.

She said: “Learners should not be concerned if they have contacted NCFE and have been told they are not registered, this is because they are about to become registered as we are data cleansing and collating our final lists.”

Ofqual said it was “being kept up-to-date” on the NCFE appeals process and enquiries should be made to its helpline on 0300 3033346.

Learners should email vocational.qualifications@ocr.org.uk, qualityassurance@ascentis.co.uk, or service@ncfe.org.uk for advice.

Mr Bloors told FE Week:

“Following its approval, Bright put numerous references to being approved by us on its website, including the HABC logo.

“We have asked Ms Charles-Jones to remove the ‘Highfield’ reference [on Bright’s website], but have not been provided with a response.

“Following Bright’s approval and prior to its suspension, HABC held ‘centre visits’ at Bright’s head office in Alcester on two separate occasions.

“On no occasion in our meetings or in the numerous correspondences between HABC and Bright (including Ms Charles-Jones) has Bright questioned whether they were indeed an approved centre, including correspondence confirming approved centre status had been suspended in December 2013.

“Neither have they questioned the whereabouts of an approval certificate or approval number.

“Bright’s centre status has now been permanently removed by HABC. We will under no circumstances work with Bright or Ms Charles-Jones in the future.”

The former head of skills investment at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Bis) has warned that entrepreneurial education in colleges must be underpinned by good governance.

Dr Susan Pember, now education and management adviser to the Association of Colleges, told delegates at the Gazelle Annual Summit on Tuesday (May 13) that moves to make FE institutions more enterprising “need to be built on really sound accountability systems”.

She said: “My message to you is probably what some of you don’t want to hear but I’m going to say it anyway.

“I’ve had the privilege of going into colleges up and down the country and I’ve seen some absolutely brilliant stuff but also seen some stuff where if you tried to be entrepreneurial on top of that your college would come crumbling down.”

The question for colleges wanting to be more entrepreneurial, she said, was “how do you balance risk and compliance?”

“It’s wrong, isn’t it?” she told the audience at assembled at London HQ of BIS.

“When you think of entrepreneurial things, you think of it as being not bureaucratic, not regulatory and not having rules and regulations.

“However, if you’ve got a really sound base… then it’s easy to move up.”

She pointed to her experience of visiting good and outstanding private providers and colleges.

“They were very clear about their governance structures, and by being clear about your governance structures, you give staff the freedom to innovate,” she said.

Dr Pember’s comments came the same week the Inspiring Governors Alliance, a group dedicated to encouraging high-calibre people to become governors, was launched and followed publication of the Leadership of teaching, learning and assessment by governors report by 157 Groups and Ofsted [see feweek.co.uk for coverage of both].

Skills Minister Matthew Hancock also spoke at the conference.

He told FE Week that for him, enterprising colleges were “innovative, self-confident, have strong leadership and good governors that hold the feet to the fire of principals and holds them to account for what they deliver.”
But, he said, he was unwilling to define what exactly an entrepreneurial college was.

“The great thing about entrepreneurial colleges is there’s so many different ways to define it that I wouldn’t want to restrict that,” he said.

“What I’m trying to do is release the constraints that are put… onto colleges so that they can respond to the needs of their learners and crucially, be held to account for what they achieve.”

Click here to read the Gazelle summit expert pieces from Signe Sutherland and Sharron Robbie

More than half of providers are failing to meet targets for collecting data about the employment status of their learners, figures released by the government have revealed.

The figures in the latest Individualised Learner Record (ILR) have revealed that 50.3 per cent of providers (481) missed an Information Authority (IA) target of 0.6 per cent for the number of learners for which they do not hold employment status information upon enrolment.

The sector as a whole, against the 0.6 per cent target, in fact had 8.2 per cent as “unknown” or “not provided”.

The target was for the halfway mark of the current academic year, but the result could mean that the employment status of tens of thousands of learners is not clear.

However, Steve Hewitt, strategic funding, enrolments and examinations manager at Morley College, said there was no consequence for failing to hit the target.

“The reason some [providers] are missing that target is there’s nothing that happens to us if we don’t provide that information,” he said.

“While they would like 0.6 per cent, the fact is, it’s 8.2 per cent which still isn’t bad for 1m learners.

“For the 50 per cent who are above that target there is no actual comeback.”

Despite the lack of information on learners upon course starts, the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) will, from next year, still be expecting providers to keep track of learners after they have completed courses by providing learner outcome and destination data.

Mr Hancock told FE Week: “Of course there’s always measurement issues around data, and I think that they’re important to resolve. But in a sense they are the means to the end.

“The end is holding colleges, schools, sixth from colleges to account for what they achieve for their students.”

In 2012, FE Week revealed that 40 per cent of providers sent data about apprentices to the Information Authority with details of employment status missing.

This led to calls by the then Shadow Skills Minister Gordon Marsden for the SFA and National Apprenticeship Service to do more to encourage providers to give a full picture.The SFA declined to comment.