London Mayor Sadiq Khan is seeking employers in key sectors to join boards to “ultimately lead commissioning” of skills, work and careers programmes in the capital.
The employers would have unprecedented levels of influence over the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) £334 million adult skills fund and £27 million skills bootcamps budgets.
This autumn, three boards will be set up to put employers in construction, life sciences and creative industries “in the driver’s seat” – followed by health, social care and hospitality early next year.
The initiative goes a step further than most other mayoral combined authorities which have launched single boards of business representatives from a mix of sectors to guide devolved adult skills powers.
According to a report before the adult skills fund mayoral board last week, the boards will shape a more “employer-responsive talent offer”, reduce skills gaps, and ensure more Londoners can access work in key growth sectors.
It said: “In addition, the sector employer boards will inform and co-design responsive curriculum, shape and ultimately lead commissioning of skills, employment and the careers offer.”
Each sector will have a business-facing “hub” to deliver training, and the capital’s four “subregions” will each have a “multi-sector hub” to coordinate local talent supply and support for small and medium-size businesses.
The GLA’s move to seek direct input from employers has been cited as a potential driver of growth – but was criticised as unnecessary by a Conservative London Assembly member.
Alessandro Georgiou, the Conservative group’s skills spokesperson, said the GLA should survey the capital’s industries on what training they need and “that’s where you leave it”.
He added: “It’s all well and good inviting the big boys around the table, but they need to look at industry as a whole.”
Essential skills offer
According to the mayor’s report, his new “systemwide approach” reflects “other examples of best practice in London and internationally”.
Alongside the boards and hubs, an “inclusive talent strategy” will focus on helping underrepresented people from racial minorities, who have lower earnings and employment rates, into industries with the biggest skills gaps.
The talent strategy could include an “essential skills offer” passport, improved ESOL training, embed problem-solving and communication skills into all GLA-funded essential skills programmes, and create “stronger pathways” to higher-level training.
Lizzie Crowley, senior skills adviser at the Chartered Institute of Professional Development, said putting employers “at the heart” of the skills system would “build social partnership, identify shared skills needs and set clear industry priorities”.
She added: “If they are to take on commissioning responsibilities, they will require representation across businesses of all sizes, and close alignment with existing structures such as LSIPs and the Skills for Londoners board to prevent duplication.”
Get Britain Working
It comes as England’s mayors and local authorities publish local growth and Get Britain Working plans, designed to boost employment rates through a focus on priority sectors in line with the government’s UK-wide industrial strategy covering the next 10 years, published this summer.
These plans are expected to align with government-funded local skills improvement plans (LSIPs), which have been coordinated by employer representative bodies since 2022.
London’s growth plan, published in February, promises a new “integrated workforce plan”, to “start to change” the way London commissions adult education, and launch a new fund to reduce key skills gaps.
Stephen Evans, chief executive of Learning and Work Institute, said he hoped “the new boards will look at increasing employer investment in training, which has fallen 36 per cent in the last 20 years, as well as how to make the most of public investment.”
Echoes of the past
Some other mayoral combined authorities have begun to take similar steps to the GLA.
In February last year, Liverpool City Region Combined Authority created three “cluster boards” for priority industries to help advise on policy, economic growth and productivity.
West Yorkshire Combined Authority published six “cluster action plans” for its priority sectors earlier this month in collaboration with employers.
A single ‘employer board’ was also set up by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority in 2023 to share “sector insight” on how the local skills system could be improved, with a particular focus on seeking placements for T Level students.
Setting up sector-specific boards to shape the capital’s skills, employment and careers offer echoes of the 23 levy-funded industrial training boards set up in the 1960s.
Of them, only the Construction Industry Training Board and Engineering Construction Industry Training Board survived cuts by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the early 1980s.
More recently, New Labour set up more than 20 sector skills councils in 2002, but many shrank in size or became dormant after funding was fully withdrawn in 2016.
The government has finally committed to publishing the full details of how it will deliver on its pledge for 6,500 more teachers – a year and a half after being elected.
The House of Commons public accounts committee (PAC) said in June that it remained “unclear” how the Department for Education would honour its pledge or measure its progress, or the impact this would have on resolving workforce shortages.
Now, in its response to the report, the government has said that the DfE will publish a full delivery plan by December.
“This will include: the definition of the pledge, how the department will track progress over the duration of this Parliament, progress to date, and the levers it will use to deliver the pledge (including how it will focus on both recruitment and retention).”
The response adds that the DfE has “made strong initial progress” on recruitment. The workforce grew by 2,346 full-time employees between 2023-24 and 2024-25 in secondary and special schools – schools “where they are needed most”.
The government said it is seeing “positive signs” that the 5.5 per cent and 4 per cent pay rises over the past two years are “starting to deliver”.
The DfE has come under repeated criticism for failing to publish details of the pledge, which formed a part of Labour’s 2024 election manifesto. It initially promised 6,500 “expert teachers in key subjects” as one of its six “first steps for change”.
Over the summer, the government revealed that primary teachers would not be included in the targets. Schools Week then revealed that not all of the teachers will be “new”.
Instead, the target will reflect how much the workforce has grown overall – meaning it will include increases in retention rates.
The government said it agrees with all six of the PAC’s recommendations and is providing implementation dates for them. Among the recommendations was for the DfE to work with schools to understand why those in deprived areas have bigger workforce challenges.
The government said it will “continue to invest in evaluation and understanding of the workforce” and set an implementation date of August next year.
The PAC report also recommended that the DfE develops a “whole-system strategy” for recruitment and retention, saying it had “no clear or coherent approach bringing together its various initiatives” for the two.
The government responded that it is now investing in analysing policies to understand their impact, and “continues to review the balance between recruitment and retention”.
Another recommendation was for the DfE to “work to better understand why teachers leave” and better support schools in addressing these factors.
The schools white paper and the 6,500 teacher plan will provide the detail on this.
As pilots of Ofsted’s new inspection framework begin ahead of full reform rollout on November 10, the inspectorate’s national director of education, Lee Owston, spoke to FE Week senior reporter Josh Mellor about inspection anxiety, transparency, and why the ‘inclusion’ grade is nothing new.
Do you think Ofsted’s reforms will reduce inspection anxiety?
Inspection exists as part of a wider accountability system, so regardless of how hard we try, we’re not going to be able to remove anxiety that’s associated with an accountability system where, essentially, people are evaluating and then determining an outcome against a team or provider.
However, what we’ve done with this framework is bring in measures to reduce anxiety and to think carefully, not only about the wellbeing and welfare of those that we are inspecting, but also the inspectors.
It’s multi-faceted. I don’t think we’re going to remove anxiety altogether, but we are doing everything within our power to reduce it as far as possible, so your inspection sees providers as they are.
FE leaders and the independent wellbeing impact assessment have both suggested that inspection-related stress will remain the same, given we’ve got up to 16 graded areas instead of the current 10. Has the framework for FE turned into a bit of a monster?
I don’t think so at all. What we’ve done is made it more transparent and explicit – the different grades that we’re giving to parts of provision, as well as what we think about the provider as a whole. All those decisions were made under the previous education inspection framework, it’s just they didn’t make it to an explicit grade on a report card.
The report card is reporting on the light and shade, with further nuance than we’ve had before, so everybody can see whether it’s learners, their parents or employers themselves where the strengths lie. They can also see where they might need to turn their attention next to continuously improve.
When we introduce something new there will always be an element of anxiety, because it’s different to what has gone before.
Is there a risk that the sheer volume of information, such as the new toolkits, is overwhelming for providers given the short rollout timeframe you’re working to?
There shouldn’t be anything in the toolkit that people don’t recognise as being part of what makes great FE provision. There is more detail in the toolkit than we had in the handbook previously, but that’s in response to what we heard through the Big Listen, which was that people didn’t understand the descriptors that we had because they were too high level, and there wasn’t any detail to explain what they meant in practice.
We’ve had to use slightly more words than we have in a handbook, but if people look at those words, it should be far more transparent and accessible in terms of what inspectors will be seeking in evidence, and how that then relates to the standards we use to grade them.
Are you saying that in the long term, providers and Ofsted will be in a better position because there is more clarity? That we’ll face increased anxiety in this period, followed by a longer-term payoff?
I think once we have inspections underway in November, people will see what we’ve put on the page is the reality of what we’ve put into practice.
Is it a bit late, in terms of the order of events and publication of new framework training for inspectors, if pilots have already started?
This is the traditional way in which we’ve worked. We had test visits, which were testing different methodologies, different versions of the materials, from consultation to launch. And once we’ve published, then we start our piloting process, which is with the finalised methodology.
That gives providers an opportunity to understand how it works in practice, but also gives inspectors an opportunity to get to grips with what it means for them.
Then, of course, we have the inspector training programme in October. We can feed all of that into it, and, in time, that will be published and available to anybody who wants to see it.
Is the timeline rushed, given that we don’t yet know how the Department for Education’s accountability framework will work, particularly for independent training providers facing high stakes as a result of inspection outcomes?
We exist for learners and young people. It’s about ensuring they get the absolute best, so that’s always first and foremost. And of course, there can be no gap in terms of ensuring that those learners do get what they deserve and need.
However, that doesn’t mean we’re not conscious of the landscape in which leaders and staff are having to work.
I want to make clear that you cannot equate the grades or judgments that went before with the grades we have in this toolkit. We were charged with changing the culture of inspection, and one of the ways we do that is by drawing a line in the sand and having something different to move forward with.
There are lots of small, independent training providers that deliver higher-level apprenticeships in advanced professional occupations such as accountancy. How would the inclusion criteria be applied in that context?
We shouldn’t be so focused on just SEND or high needs. Yes, they are vitally important, but there are a whole host of other vulnerabilities or barriers to learning and wellbeing that we need to be conscious of.
It is about speaking to the context in which leaders are working, and saying, what are having to support learners with? It could be a family bereavement – obviously you need to take account of that in terms of why somebody might be reacting the way they are in a classroom, or wherever the training is taking place.
We do not want to increase bureaucracy, to introduce all sorts of systems and processes.
Another question on inclusion – let’s say Ofsted inspects an inner-city general FE college with a lot of disadvantaged learners, and a sixth-form college with a lot of high-attaining level 3 students. Would inclusion apply in the same way to both?
There shouldn’t be any tension between inclusion and achievement. Every institution should have the same opportunity to be graded as ‘expected standard’, ‘strong’ or ‘exceptional’, regardless of the context.
Some institutions will have more challenges than others, but every provider will have challenges of some sort, and that’s why inspection is trying to get underneath their context so we can understand it and factor it into the evidence we collect.
Inclusion was in the last framework. We’ve just shone a brighter spotlight on it.
Interesting fact: Reza’s wife wouldn’t take his surname after she found out it literally translates as ‘sweaty one’ in Yiddish.
David Marlow
Chair, Nottingham College
Start date: August 2025
Concurrent Job: Chief Executive, Age Partnership
Interesting fact: Since retiring from full time work, David has become a sports tourist and loves watching all the key finals in football, rugby, cricket, golf, tennis and F1.
College leaders have expressed shock at being threatened with industrial action if they fail to make “serious” pay offers by next Friday.
The University and College Union (UCU) has written to 76 college principals demanding their members get a 10 per cent or £3,000 pay rise – whichever is greater – plus action on workloads and a commitment to national pay bargaining.
The letter, seen by FE Week, gives colleges until 10am on October 3 to agree, or face a formal declaration of a trade dispute.
It comes after an Association of Colleges’ (AoC) recommendation that colleges offer staff a 4 per cent pay award in 2025/26 – despite the AoC admitting “many” colleges would struggle to afford it.
Several colleges told FE Week they had matched the AoC’s 4 per cent recommendation, so were surprised to be singled out on the UCU’s strike list.
Liam Sloan, principal of Bolton College, said: “I would like them [staff] to be paid best in the sector, but affordability is a challenge.”
He added the college’s UCU branch had recommended members accept the 4 per cent offer, but the outcome of the ballot would be revealed at the end of the month, cutting it fine with the October 3 deadline.
Following publication of this story, Sloan said he has now received confirmation from UCU that the letter he received was sent in error.
A spokesperson for Chichester College Group also said they were “surprised” to be on the list “after we have in fact honoured staff with the 4 per cent pay rise in question”.
And the sentiment was echoed by several other college leaders who declined to comment on the record while negotiations with unions were ongoing.
UCU general secretary Jo Grady said last week: “College leaders now have a clear choice; make a serious offer or the sector will be hit hard with industrial action this autumn.”
UCU south west official Nick Varney added that “most colleges will try to get away with the AoC recommendation”, while the union’s northern official Chris Robinson said some bosses were waiting to complete enrolment to calculate what they could afford.
“Some college bosses’ argument is we’ve got to wait until we see the bums on seats before we can put an offer in,” he added.
A spokesperson for Blackpool and The Flyde College said it was “too early” to decide what they could offer for this year’s pay award.
“We will be discussing this with colleagues and the trade unions first,” they said.
Meanwhile, WCG said it was not surprised to be targeted by the UCU as “we have not been able to confirm that a 10 per cent pay award is affordable”.
A spokesperson added: “We are carefully considering the AoC’s recent pay recommendation and, like many colleges, we face significant financial pressures which make decisions around pay awards extremely challenging.”
Collective bargaining call
Varney told FE Week that negotiations at colleges involved in mergers – such as Petroc and Exeter College – were particularly complex as pay disparity exists between teachers at the different campuses.
“We desperately need to rectify pay scales across colleges,” he said. “The main thing here is we’re campaigning for binding national pay bargaining.”
Exeter College said it would take a pay recommendation that “reflects the difference staff make to the college” to its board of governors in October as normal.
The AoC’s pay recommendation is not binding, meaning colleges can set the pay in their own organisations.
Parliament’s education select committee this week recommended the government set up a statutory pay review body for colleges after finding “fragmented” and “inadequate” FE teacher pay decisions.
AoC chief executive David Hughes said the idea would have “many supporters” but posed risks due to current funding levels.
The UCU has demanded the 76 colleges on notice make a public statement of support for a new binding negotiating agreement for FE or face a formal dispute.
Adult budget erosion
Colleges with large adult provision will struggle to meet the AoC recommendation this year after being left out of the government’s boost to 16-19 funding rates and suffering cuts to the adult skills fund.
Teachers at Derwentside College accepted a 2 per cent pay award this year, according to UCU’s Robinson. “We haven’t pushed them because we know that the money is not there to push them on,” he said.
“That was a measure brought in because a pay award couldn’t be made in line with AoC recommendations and other local colleges,” Robinson added.
Growing numbers of children in custody cannot access education due to violence and prison staff shortages, the chief prisons inspector has said.
In his annual Children in Custodyreport, chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor said outcomes in young offender institutes (YOI) and secure training centres in England and Wales continued to be “worryingly poor”.
A survey of 12 to 18-year-olds in custody found 61 per cent reported spending more than two hours out of their cells on weekdays in 2024-25, a 11-percentage-point drop from the year before.
Meanwhile, at Feltham A YOI, only 33 per cent of children said they spent more than two hours out of their cell, and 39 per cent said they were not doing any education, behaviour programmes, training or paid work.
Taylor said: “When children make it to education or other activities, the quality on offer is rarely good enough and sessions are often restricted or curtailed because of staff shortages.”
Many children were “simply unable” to take part in productive activity during their time in custody due to a combination of “weak relationships, a lack of motivation, and high levels of unpredictable and often reckless violence”, the report found.
Violence in youth custody is also worse than in adult prisons due to severe staff shortages and too much time spent in cells due to “overly restrictive” rules on children mixing, creating a “vicious cycle” of isolation, frustration and poor relations with staff.
‘Painfully upsetting’
Andrea Coomber, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “Prison is no place for a child, and these painfully upsetting survey responses from children trapped in the system explain why. They chime with what the Howard League hears consistently through its legal advice line.”
The report’s findings are based on 375 survey responses from the approximately 400 children held in Feltham A, Wetherby, Werrington and Parc YOIs, and Oakhill Secure Training Centre.
It follows a joint thematic inspection review of the YOI estate over the last decade with Ofsted, published last year, which found unlawful levels of access to education and training, unsuitable curriculums and poor-quality teaching.
Taylor believes the key cause of declining educational standards is “poor leadership and collaboration” between governors and contracted education providers – a mix of FE colleges and training businesses.
Figures obtained by the Howard League earlier this year show that in 2024, average hours of education delivered per month fell to as little as 1.5 hours at Feltham A in August last year, while Parc consistently delivered at least 19 hours.
Minister for youth justice Jake Richards told FE Week the report’s findings were “deeply concerning” and said failures in youth custody are a product of “a broken justice system that has been overlooked for too long”.
“Every young person in custody must feel safe and supported, so they can turn away from crime and become better citizens,” Richards added.
The government has now “implemented” three-year improvement plans for each institution to reduce violence and increase time spent in purposeful activity like education, although the Ministry of Justice’s spokesperson did not respond when asked for details of when the plans were agreed or actions they involve.
The government claimed that time ‘out of room’ is gradually increasing at all sites.
In line with the chief inspector’s recommendation, the government said it had seconded staff from HMP YOI Parc – which was praised by the inspectorate for high rates of education and purposeful activity – to share learnings of their success.
Jon Collins, chief executive of the Prisoners’ Education Trust, said: “While young people in the community are starting a new school year or preparing for college or university, young people in custody are sitting in their cell doing and learning nothing.
“They are being failed by a system that is not teaching them the skills they’ll need to thrive as adults. There should be no more excuses. It’s time for a complete reset of youth custody that puts education first.”
Universities and College Union general secretary Jo Grady added: “Prison educators work incredibly hard in very tough conditions, where gang culture and the threat of violence is all too common a feature.
“A review is long overdue into the cost effectiveness and value for money of various multi-million-pound initiatives focused on young offenders.”
Shift to the community
In the last decade, numbers of children in custody fell to a record low of 430, compared to 2,881 in 2008-9 and 1,037 in 2014-15.
However, reports from the prisons and education inspectorates suggest a declining custody population has failed to improve conditions.
This summer Ofsted issued an urgent notification about “profoundly serious and systemic failures” at Oakhill Secure Training Centre, run by private security company G4S, and Taylor slammed management of YOI Feltham A, in west London, for only planning to give children four hours of planned time outside of their cells per day.
A review of children’s social services by Labour MP Josh MacAlister in 2022 recommended phasing out all YOIs and secure training centres within the next 10 years, as secure children’s homes and schools are “almost always better able” to help care for and support young people.
The review found that the MOJ had saved “significant sums of money” by reducing the number of children in custody, but local authorities were bearing increased costs as a result.
In response to a parliamentary question in January last year, the Conservatives said secure training centres and children’s homes cost an average of about £300,000 per child per year, while YOIs cost about £129,000 per child.
If history often rhymes, as Mark Twain once said, then Tom Bewick’s book, Skills Policy in England and the Future of Work, is a poignant poem of political déjà vu that should be required reading for our skills policymakers and shapers.
As “a product of FE” who went on to help shape the skills system at its highest levels, Bewick has spent the last three years poring over 4,000 artifacts in the National Archives, some only recently declassified, to document not just the history of our skills policies but the real motivations of the politicians and civil servants behind them.
Its 290-pages depict a mournful tale of oft-repeated warnings about the urgent need to prioritise technical skills training. Noble attempts at reform are all too often stifled by the overriding counterforces of civil service resistance, red tape, funding constraints and a snobbery against FE.
In one eye-popping revelation, civil servants in 2010 recommended to business secretary Vince Cable the closure of every FE college, with one official remarking “nobody will really notice”. “That belies a certain attitude that exists within Whitehall,” says Bewick.
He hopes his book, out next month, becomes an essential text for aspiring, as well as current, policy officials. You may need to be an economist to advise the Treasury, or a qualified planner to advise on the environment, but he finds it “extraordinary” that “virtually anyone can become a skills policy adviser”.
Almost every former minister and senior civil servant interviewed for the book “indicated that they’d fallen into it by accident”. This is partly because skills policy is “relatively new” – university departments do not teach graduate programmes in skills policy. So officials tend not to be “specialists”.
Bewick’s aspiration is that his book will, “in a small way, contribute to the idea that skills policy does have an intellectual hinterland, you can’t just come in as a gifted amateur and think you can solve the skills crisis. I hope it helps shift the dial on those amateurish attitudes”.
Bewick with his late foster parents at University of Bath graduation in 1994
FE lifeline
His passion for FE evolved from the fact the sector gave him a second chance.
Bewick’s mum died young, his dad was a gambling addict and he was placed into care aged five. He left school with no qualifications. Opportunities “opened up” to him after he attended evening classes at his local FE college, North Warwickshire College of Technology and Art (now North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College), while working at a supermarket.
At that time in the 1980s, he was one of over a million adults in ‘night schools’ at over 500 colleges. In contrast, Bewick describes colleges now as “on the whole 16-to-19 exam factories”.
In his book he charts how, going as far back as the mechanics institutes of the 1880s, technical colleges were “bottom-up working-class self-improvement vehicles”. Now they are “just delivery arms of the state”.
Looking through “that long lens of history”, Bewick feels fortunate to have accessed an FE college that was able to “mould its offer” around him. He is pessimistic he could access similar opportunities today.
Dream come true
Bewick pursued a career crafting skills policies in government, then influenced skills policy at various think tanks, quangos and skills associations, including the Federation of Awarding Bodies.
As an active member in the Labour Party from 1990, he was “very much part of the internal party discussions about what should be in the 1997 manifesto, albeit more as an observer”.
Becoming the party’s post-16 education and employment policy officer when Labour came to power was “a dream come true” as Bewick felt Labour was “building a new Britain where social class would no longer be a barrier to opportunity”.
He wishes a book like his was available to him then.
Bureaucratic market centralisation
Bewick’s book claims the real reason for policy churn and rise and fall of so many skills-related institutions over the decades is because Britain lacks a consensus about how to finance and organise post-compulsory education and training.
The country instead has a “national obsession” with structural reform, which he also pleads “guilty” of having himself when he was a ministerial adviser in the early 2000s.
To make sense of decades of stop-start reform, Bewick sets out four “training states” that define the post-war skills landscape. It begins with the interventionist state (1939-79), where government steered training directly, to the laissez-faire years of Thatcherism (1980-88), through the localism era (1989-2010) of Training and Enterprise Councils and regional experiments, and ends with today’s technocratic state (from 2010), ruled by quangos, metrics and ministerial pilots.
His central argument is “bureaucratic market centralisation” (top-down state intervention) has been the dominant policy paradigm since 1981.
In the 1990s, this morphed into what he terms “quasi-market centralisation” through its “managed provider market, funded and monitored via a battery of arms-length agencies and regulators,” and Whitehall becoming “more adept at shielding the central bureaucracy from criticism”.
Bewick points to three policies from that era – individual learning accounts, Train to Gain, and employer-owned sector skills councils – which he believes, had they been adequately supported by officials, would have successfully decentralised the skills system. As someone who wrote the proposal for sector skills councils, he is hardly impartial.
Official shot taken when Bewick joined the Labour Party HQ in London (1997) as its post-16 policy officer (educaton and employment)
Top secret
Bewick is a gifted writer when given free rein on a topic he loves, as anyone reading his opinion pieces will know. But as his book also forms the thesis of the PhD he is taking through the University of Staffordshire, it is by nature academic. Bewick the astute commentator is at times bogged down by his need to show academic rigour.
He nearly gave up writing it four times. “It was intellectually very challenging, more so than I expected,” he admits.
But Bewick’s meticulous research reveals fascinating contradictions between the private and publicly stated motivations underlying certain skills policies.
Thatcher’s Youth Training Scheme (YTS), which gave young people compulsory (but poor quality) training in return for allowances as an alternative to putting them on the dole, was, Bewick states, used to “manipulate the official unemployment count”.
His evidence lies in a memo marked ‘secret’ from Thatcher’s adviser Oliver Letwin, recommending it was better to subsidise low pay through in-work benefits for the unemployed than to engage in the more ‘expensive option’ oftrying to reskill those on benefits.
He is also scathing about the “murky” process the Thatcher government used to abolish the industrial training boards which had been established in 1964 to get employers to pay for training for employees through a levy system.
He cites this, and the expansion of tertiary education since the 1990s, as examples of the “massive transfer of responsibility for skills acquisitions from employers onto the financial shoulders of the state and individuals” that has happened since 1981.
Cathartic writing
Bewick has an unavoidably biased view of the skills policies that he helped to shape, and admits to sometimes writing as “Tom the polemicist, not Tom the scholar”.
But the book’s most fascinating elements are when he channels frustrations he must have felt as a government adviser at seeing civil service officials sabotage policies that he championed. Writing it was, he admits, “cathartic”.
For example, he describes how a policy he strongly endorses, the Individual Learning Account (designed to give money to individuals to train, with added contributions from employers and the learners themselves), “went through the departmental mincing machine” before emerging in a diluted state.
Bewick’s old boss, former education and employment secretary David Blunkett, blamed the Treasury for not wanting to work with banks to open accounts. “They wanted and got a cock-eyed voucher system, which was then open to abuse,” he tells Bewick.
Civil servants chose Capita, an outsourcing firm with no experience in devising financial payment systems, to implement the scheme. It was 40 per cent over budget even before accusations of significant fraud emerged.
There are lessons to learn here for those now working on the rollout next year of a policy with similar objectives, the lifelong learning entitlement, intended to enable learners to access loans for some courses at level 4 upwards.
The late Lord Tom Sawyer, who was general secretary of the Labour Party with Bewick
Civil service accountability
The permanent secretary of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) at the time, David Normington, “absolved” himself when hauled before the public accounts committee, saying it was “inexplicable” what his colleagues had done. He was later awarded a knighthood.
Bewick quotes an unnamed former DfES minister as saying the saga “raises legitimate concerns about how far career civil servants, particularly those who assume leadership positions, are themselves held to account for the decisions of the people they are said to be accountable for”.
The problem of civil service culpability still looms large today for Bewick.
Skills minister Jacqui Smith last year declared that “the skills system is failing individuals and our country”, as her government embarked on yet more significant structural reforms. But to blame the Tories for the ‘failing’ system is an “incongruence”, says Bewick. Her predecessor, Robert Halfon, was “one of the more effective skills ministers”.
“To come to office and say, ‘it’s all the fault of the Tories, but then just to carry on working at the highest level with the very same people who advised those former ministers… because, when you look at the policy decisions made since those ‘nasty Tories’ went away, we’ve seen a continuation of that departmental philosophy, for example with the cut in adult education.
“I don’t believe for a minute Labour ministers really want to make those cuts, but they’re put forward to them by senior officials who don’t value adult education.”
Speaking at the Skill Kerala Global Summit
Cinderella’s origin story
Bewick wants to end the binary divide between FE and HE by creating a single tertiary education sector, potentially ending the entrenched perception of FE as the ‘Cinderella’ of the education system.
Readers will be familiar with this often repeated analogy (most recently used this week by education committee chair Helen Hayes).
Bewick unearthed what he believes was the first time it was used in reference to FE, in a 1982 confidential memo from Treasury minister John Wakeham copied to then-chancellor Geoffrey Howe.
Calling for a ‘coherent strategy’ for FE to be directed not by the Department for Education and Science but the Department of Industry, Wakeham attacked the “largely anti-industrial, anti-commercial and anti-entrepreneurial” education culture and described FE as “a Cinderella of the education service”.
This tussle over skills between departments reflects how skills policy has long been “the orphan of Whitehall”, being passed from one department to another. There have been six iterations of skills in various departments since the year 2000.
Since the 1990s, employer investment in training has slumped. The UK investment per employee is around half the EU average, with a knock-on-effect on productivity and the take-home pay of workers. The stakes could not be higher for current skills policymakers to get things right.
This book serves as a crucial lesson in what not to do when drawing up skills policies.
Bewick and I have been sitting in a restaurant high up in London’s Shard building, enjoying sweeping views over the financial heart of London. Bewick-the-education-consultant has another meeting now on a different floor with a Saudi delegation.
The setting is a far cry from where he grew up in Nuneaton, a place he now sees as a “metaphor for what’s gone wrong outside of London and the South East” with its “boarded up shops, charity and gambling shops everywhere”.
“You see how the Palace of Westminster really dominates the landscape,” he says gesturing out the window as he bids me goodbye. That much never changes.
Multiverse has become England’s largest revenue-generating apprenticeship provider for the first time, overtaking Kaplan.
Latest Department for Education figures show Multiverse earned £58.9 million from apprenticeship training between April 2023 and March 2024 – up from £44.1 million and fourth place the previous year.
It beat QA Limited and Lifetime Training, which recorded revenues of £53.3 million and £53.1 million respectively. Kaplan, which topped the charts in both 2021-22 and 2022-23, slipped to fourth place with £52.8 million.
BPP Professional Education remained close behind in fifth with £51.9 million, while Corndel also saw strong growth, reaching sixth place on £42.9 million.
The figures, published on Wednesday, reveal a highly competitive market among the top five providers, with just £7 million separating them.
Multiverse, founded by former prime minister Tony Blair’s son Euan Blair (pictured) in 2016, mainly delivers tech-related apprenticeships with relatively high funding bands from levels 3 to 6. Its total starts numbers grew from 5,770 in 2022-23 to 7,910 in 2023-24.
Blair’s provider continues to attract national media attention following the company’s failed expansion into America and take-up of artificial intelligence, which boosted turnover but increased the company’s losses to £60.5 million.
Multiverse is the only firm in the 10 highest earning apprenticeship provider list to hold an ‘outstanding’ Ofsted rating. The other nine are judged ‘good’.
Another notable change in the top 10 list for 2023-24 was the rise of Paragon Education and Skills Limited, which was acquired by Knovia Group in September 2023.
Paragon’s apprenticeship revenue rose from £16,396,400 to £21,613,629, moving the firm from 16th to 10th.
Lifetime Training continued to lead on volume with 16,330 starts.
Public sector providers also feature in the top 10, with the British Army drawing down £35.1 million and the Royal Air Force £21.7 million.
The Open University was the highest earning university, placing 14th with £18.8 million, while the college that generated the most from apprenticeships in 2023-24 was Bridgwater & Taunton College, placing 29th with £12.8 million.
The figures come amid ongoing scrutiny of the balance between higher-level and traditional apprenticeships, as costly level 6 and 7 programmes continue to account for a large share of the apprenticeship budget.
Level 7 apprenticeships will be removed from levy funding from January for people aged 22 and older, which is likely to have a significant impact on apprenticeship revenue generated for providers including Kaplan, BPP and Corndel.
In July, the government released its 10 Year Health Plan for England in response to Lord Darzi’s diagnosis that the NHS is in a critical condition. The proposed reforms aim to revolutionise healthcare in England, and the focus will now rightly shift to deliverability.
To achieve the stated transitions, such as moving from hospital to community care, from sickness to prevention and from analogue to digital, technical education will play a pivotal role.
Digital skills training
The success of moving from analogue to digital will depend on ensuring the public are equipped with the digital skills required to access the proposed “Doctor in the Pocket” and various services available via the NHS app.
Mobile technology will provide patients with instant access to healthcare services such as virtual consultations, prescription management, appointment booking and health monitoring tools.
NCFE’s recent No One Left Offline report highlighted that one in five people lacked the essential digital skills needed to fully engage with today’s digital world. This represents a significant portion of the population who, without intervention, risk being left behind as the NHS app evolves into a one-stop shop for patient access, and underscores the importance of providing access to essential digital skills training.
Upskilling digital capabilities will also be crucial for the workforce as AI becomes embedded in clinical practice. AI is already being trialled in diagnostic imaging, triage systems and predictive analytics for patient outcomes.
If AI agents are to become trusted assistants to nurses and doctors, training will be essential to ensure their efficient use and to prevent them from adding to administrative burden. Staff will need training in interpretation of AI-generated insights, understanding the limitations of algorithmic decision-making, and maintaining ethical standards in patient care.
Building trust
As patient records become centralised and accessible through digital platforms, cybersecurity will remain critically important for both NHS staff and patients. Risks include phishing attacks, data breaches and ransomware targeting sensitive health information. People will need increased knowledge and awareness around how to effectively safeguard data.
Training should cover secure data handling practices, recognising cyber threats and understanding legal responsibilities under data protection regulations. A digitally literate workforce is essential to maintain public trust in the NHS digital transformation.
Data analysis will also take on a more central role as genomic studies expand. If genome analysis is to become universal at birth, it will require the storage and analysis of vast amounts of data. Although AI will likely perform the bulk of analysis, there will still be a need for professionals to quality-assure the outputs.
Workforce evolution
Education and training will be equally vital in shifting care from hospitals to the community. With the planned introduction of neighbourhood health centres (NHCs), there will be a rise in demand for qualified health professionals. Technical and vocational education will be key to ensuring a sufficient supply of nurses and allied health professionals to support the implementation and operation of NHCs.
This plan must also align with the Care Workforce Pathway recently announced by Skills for Care – the workforce planning body for adult social care. Again, education will play an integral role in ensuring that staff working in adult social care possess the skills required to deliver high-quality personalised care, as emphasised in the 10 Year Health Plan.
Promoting prevention
Transitioning from sickness to prevention will require educating the public on healthy lifestyle choices. We have already seen the need for a plan to support sustained weight loss following the administration of new weight-loss medications.
Additionally, increasing vaccination uptake will require more trained professionals to administer vaccines, alongside efforts to combat misinformation that has contributed to growing scepticism.
The government’s plan sets out a transformative vision for the future of healthcare, with education and training at its core.
Ultimately, delivering it will require a coordinated, inclusive approach, ensuring no one is left behind as the NHS evolves to meet the needs of tomorrow.
