Plans for a new college to train nuclear power plant workers have sparked concerns among colleges who had been hoping to deliver training for the industry themselves.

Skills Minister Matthew Hancock was at the PoliticsHome Skills Summit in London on Tuesday (January 28) when he announced the proposals. He said the new college could “provide the specialist, advanced skills” for the nuclear industry.

A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) later told FE Week the location of the new college had not been “established”.

The announcement caused raised eyebrows at Bridgwater College, in Somerset, where principal Mike Robbins has spent the last three years planning for and developing training facilities and courses for workers set to help build a new nuclear power station at nearby Hinkley Point by 2023.

Mr Robbins told FE Week: “We are awaiting further details, but would hope to play as full a part in any discussions as possible. We have invested much of our own time, effort and resources in preparing for the new nuclear build on our doorstep and in developing plans with contractors and other colleges and training providers in the region to meet the skills and training needs of the project.”

Another provider that could be affected by the plans is South Gloucestershire & Stroud College. It has submitted proposals with local enterprise partnership gfirst (Growing Gloucestershire) to develop a renewable energy, engineering and nuclear skills training centre at the decommissioned Berkeley power station, in Gloucestershire.

A spokesperson for the college declined to comment on whether its plans could be undermined by the proposed nuclear college.

Mr Hancock’s announcement came just weeks after the government unveiled proposals to create a new college, the first since colleges were incorporated in 1993, to support the engineering skills needed for the new HS2 rail project.

He said he wanted it to be an “elite centre” like the nuclear college.

“In the next 20 years, some £930bn will be spent across the world on new nuclear reactors — and £250bn on decommissioning old ones. In Britain alone, 40,000 jobs could be created,” said Mr Hancock.

“So the new college will build on the industry’s work — and provide the specialist, advanced skills to meet that demand — and then sell that expertise to the world.”

Bridgwater College has already invested more than £2m of its own money on its scheme and attracted millions more from outside organisations. Among the investors was French firm EDF Energy, which will build the new facility. Its managing director, Humphrey Cadoux-Hudson, was quoted in a BIS press release on the new nuclear college plans announced by Mr Hancock.

Mr Robbins said: “Although many of our programmes, qualifications and facilities have been designed to meet local demand, some are designed to meet industry needs on a national scale, and it wouldn’t make sense to replicate them. The extent to which a new national nuclear college would impact on this work would therefore largely depend on its intended purpose, how it will operate and where it is located.”

See Mr Robbins’ expert piece on page 10

As many as 1,500 qualifications face the public funding axe as the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) looks to introduce a 15-credit threshold.

The SFA has published a list of 1,477 Qualification and Credit Framework (QCF) level two to four qualifications which it says will not be approved for funding in 2014/15.

It aims to make funding only available to qualifications of at least 15 credits (one credit equates to 10 hours’ learning), despite draft proposals late last year in which qualifications had to be of at least 12 credits. The change means that certificates — not just lower-credited awards — will be hit.

Jill Lanning, Federation of Awarding Bodies (FAB) chief executive, said: “We are naturally concerned that the new rules and the resultant significant reduction in the number of qualifications eligible for public funding will have serious implications for awarding bodies but also for the breath of the offer available to providers and learners.

“FAB will continue to represent its members’ views in our on-going discussions with the Skills Funding Agency as the implications of these changes become clearer.”

The move comes after a review by BAE Systems group managing director Nigel Whitehead late last year, in which he suggested 95 per cent of the adult vocational market’s 19,000-plus qualifications could be axed in a bid to “de-clutter the system”.

Nevertheless, 15-credit announcement came via a statement on the SFA website while the sector awaits the Skills Funding Statement.

It said on the SFA website: “This is a list of QCF qualifications from level two to four approved for funding for 2013/14 but which do not meet the new size business rule of 15 credits for level two to four qualifications, and are therefore not approved for 2014/15.

“Awarding organisations may notify that they wish the agency to consider funding a qualification below 15 credits.”

Among the awarding organisations with qualifications named in the list is apt awards, which has seven qualifications on the list.

Chief executive Christine Bullock said she had a team analysing the impact the cull would have.

She said: “It is something we were aware of and we are analysing the document as we speak.”

City & Guilds has 289 qualifications at risk. A spokesperson said: “We will look into the information further and work with the SFA accordingly.”

It comes after a cull of more than 1,800 adult qualifications that had little or no uptake was reported by FE Week last September. The SFA axed the funding for a host of awards, from entry level to level four, as part of its New Streamlined Funding System for Adult Skills in August.

Among the qualifications hit were City & Guilds’ level one award in creative techniques in jewellery — personalised key fob and the Royal Society for Public Health’s level two award in health promotion.

Ms Lanning, from FAB, said: “The SFA outlined its thinking [on latest cull] to our members at a couple of forums last Autumn which did indicate restrictions on funding based on the size of qualifications so our members have waiting to see what this would mean in practice.

“It is no secret that public funding and therefore the SFA’s budget is being squeezed and they have been developing their new approach over the past few months.”

She added: “Our members will now be working through this very detailed document to understand what it means for them.

“It is important to remember that a significant number of qualifications are already taken by learners who finance themselves or are supported by their employers.”

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Editorial: Skills Funding Statement leakage?

The Skills Funding Agency said in its weekly update that it could not announce funding rules for next year until BIS published the now well overdue annual Skills Funding Statement (SFS).

It might therefore come as a surprise to learn that on the same day the agency said this, it announced a significant funding rule anyway.

The new rule states level two, three or four qualifications below 15 QCF credits will no longer be funded.

Could it be the SFA could not wait any longer, and the SFS information blockage is starting to leak?

Providers, who try to plan and advertise their courses well in advance, should be the first to be informed.

Instead, this significant funding change was to be found in new ‘business rules’ for awarding organisations, like it was perfectly normal and to be expected.

Without FE Week bringing the change to the attention of providers, how long before they would have realised?

The SFS (still not out at the time of going to press) serves to communicate such changes. It cannot come soon enough.

Chris Henwood

Key information designed to “hold the government to account over delivery of policy” has been corrupted by ongoing problems with new funding software.

The latest Statistical First Release (SFR), out on Thursday, January 30, included a host of important information based on providers’ data.

However, they’ve struggled to submit learner numbers, course details and other key information because of ongoing troubles with new Skills Funding Agency (SFA) software.

And now the problems are affecting the SFR, which acknowledged issues with a note: “There is evidence of increased data lag for the first three months of 2013/14 compared to the same period of the previous year.”

Among the statistics most affected by the software problem appears to have been provisional data on the number of apprenticeship starts for the first quarter (August to October) of the current academic year.

They showed an unexpected 19 per cent drop for intermediate level apprenticeships (which are not subject to FE loans). There were 90,800 starts during the first quarter of 2012/13 (according to provisional figures published in January last year), compared to just 73,500 during the same period in 2013/14.

Stephen Hewitt, Morley College’s strategic funding, enrolments and examinations manager, said: “The problems with the new funding software are clearly starting to distort the FE figures, as shown in the SFR.

“Providers will obviously do our best to get the figures right for the next round of figures, but this is likely to continue for the next few months.”

Lindsay McCurdy, from Apprenticeships4England, said: “The software is not fit for purpose at the present time and is obviously contorting the figures, which you can clearly see with intermediate level apprenticeship starts. Urgent action is need to rectify these problems.”

A spokesperson for the SFA and BIS admitted there had been “data collection issues” affecting the “validity” of the SFR. However, he declined to comment further on the cause of the SFR problem. Nor did he comment on what actions BIS or the SFA was taking to rectify the software situation.

A statement explaining the importance of the SFR on the Data Service website states: “Its aim is to present the performance of the FE system, and to hold the government to account over delivery of policy.”

Shadow skills minister Liam Byrne said: “The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills [BIS] is bringing the same shambolic approach we saw in student finance to collecting figures for apprentices — this can’t go on.

“Ministers must come clean and tell us the full extent of these ‘data collection issues’, what they estimate the genuine figures are and what they’re doing to ensure this never happens again.”

The SFA and Data Service’s new Funding Information System (Fis) software is behind providers’ data submission headache.

It should have been available in August last year, but was not released until November — and providers say it is still giving unreliable funding data reports.

The government’s Learning Aim Reference System (Lars) online search engine should also have been available by last August.

It is supposed to help providers’ management information system (MIS) officers check whether qualifications are eligible for funding, and how much per learner providers should receive.

However, it is still not available and providers are having to use Lars Lite instead — a temporary downloadable database from the SFA that providers claim is also producing unreliable data.

The Association of Colleges and 157 Group declined to comment.

More than a dozen former employees of welfare to work provider A4e are due to appear in court charged with fraud.

The eight women and five men are due at Reading Crown Court on Monday, February 3, for a plea and case management hearing.

They face allegations including conspiracy to defraud, making a false instrument and supplying articles for use in fraud, dating from February 2009.

It is alleged they forged documentation to support fraudulent claims for reward payments from the Department for Work and Pensions under the Aspire to Inspire programme, which ended in 2011.

A Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson said: “Under the terms of the contract, payments were made when the scheme successfully placed individuals in employment.

“It is alleged that many of the reward payments related either to people who never attended A4e or to clients whom A4e had not successfully placed in employment. The contract was to deliver motivation and training and to assist people to find employment.”

The case comes amid revelations that A4e, one of the UK’s largest welfare to work providers, suffered an £11.5m pre-tax loss last year.

Company accounts also show revenues fell by 14 per cent to £167.1m in the 12 months to last March.

And the company owes £17m to the Co-operative Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland, and has extended the loan until the end of 2015.

Company owner Emma Harrison resigned as chairwoman and also gave up her role as Prime Minister David Cameron’s back-to-work tsar following the fraud allegations.

Ms Harrison, who still owns 85 per cent of the company, has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Account manager Ines Cano-Uribe, aged 37, of Madrid, Spain, and administrator Zahar Khalil, 34, of Dolphin Road, Slough, are charged with 55 counts of making false instruments, one count of conspiracy to cheat and defraud, two counts of making and supplying articles for use in fraud and two counts of possessing and controlling articles for use in fraud.

They are joined by recruiters Charles McDonald, 43, of Derwent Road, Egham, Nikki Foster, of High Tree Drive, Reading and Aditi Sigh, of Elmshott Lane, Slough, both 30, and Julie Grimes, 51, of Monks Way, Staines.

Bindiya Dholiwar, 27, of Reddington Drive, Slough, Dean Lloyd, 37, of Rochfords, Coffee Hall, Milton Keynes, and Yasmin Ahmed, 39, of Colchester Road, of Southend on Sea, are also charged.

They were charged in September, and a further charge against Cano-Uribe and four more defendants was announced in December.

Cano-Uribe was also charged with one count conspiracy to make false instruments. The same charge was put to quality co-ordinator Sarah Hawkins, 31, of Bagshot, Surrey, operations manager Serge Wyett, 39, of Richmond, team leader Matthew Hannigan-Train, 29, of Bristol and recruiter Hayley Wilson, 26, of Springfield in Milton Keynes.

They were also due to appear in court this week.

An A4e spokesperson said: “The alleged incidents all relate to old paper-based contracts which used systems that have since been replaced.

“We are fully co-operating with the police to ensure the investigation can be concluded quickly and are therefore unable to comment further on an ongoing enquiry.”

[Proceeding]

Two former education and skills secretaries joined the charge against a controversial funding cut for 18-year-old learners as Skills Minister Matthew Hancock was grilled by MPs in a special debate on the issue.

Former Education Secretary David Blunkett and former Skills Secretary John Denham joined the Westminster Hall debate over plans to cut the full-time education funding rate for 18-year-olds by 17.5 per cent on Tuesday.

The Department for Education has faced criticism over the proposed cut and an impact assessment behind it.

Mr Denham, who held the now-defunct Skills Secretary for two years post under Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said: “It is not entirely clear, now that these students are going to be funded by about £700 a-year less than other students, whether the minister thinks that colleges should continue to support these students in their third year to the same quality of education despite not having the money — or whether the minister wants these colleges only to offer these students two years of education?

“The consequence of this decision is to concentrate the cuts on a sub-set of colleges, and in particular that is those colleges which are in areas with historically weaker school performance because those areas will throw out more able students who require a third year to get to level three or A-level. It has
the effect of concentrating the cut on areas with a higher than average level of deprivation.”

During the debate, several MPs questioned why the impact assessment had taken so long to be released. It showed that FE colleges will be among the worst-hit of all institutions — with an average reduction in funding of 3 per cent.

For land-based colleges it’s 2.5 per cent, for commercial and charitable providers it’s 1.5 per cent, and for sixth form colleges it’s 1.2 per cent.

But for school sixth forms it’s just 0.4 per cent. However, the report does not say how much cash the funding rate cut, due next academic year, is expected to save. The Association of Colleges is among those to have objected to the cut, estimating that it could save the government £150m.

And Mr Blunkett, who was Education and Employment Secretary for four years under Prime Minister Tony Blair, said the impact assessment had concerned colleges in his Sheffield constituency.

He said: “Sheffield College and Sheffield Longley Park Sixth Form College are somewhat bewildered as to who could possibly have undertaken an impact assessment that so grievously missed the point of what it is going to do to young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.”

Labour MP Kate Green, who organised the debate, raised further concerns about the impact the funding rate cut would have before Mr Hancock defended the cut in response to Shadow Junior Education Minister Rushanara Ali.

She had described the way the decision had been made as “reckless and irresponsible”.

Mr Hancock said: “We are faced with a cut across the government to make savings to reach the goals we have to reduce budget deficit.

“It is difficult being a minister when there’s no money left, but we all know whose fault that is.”

He told MPs that the reduction would take funding for 18-year-olds back to 2012/13 levels, but he admitted the decision to target older learners “wasn’t easy”.

The Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) has raised concerns over the government’s proposals to direct funding for apprenticeships straight to employers.

Chancellor George Osborne, in the Autumn statement, said a new funding model would use Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) systems to route funding directly to employers.

And AELP’s position paper for an upcoming government technical review on the proposals was seen by FE Week.

Stewart Segal, AELP chief executive, said: “The government’s proposal on funding could potentially create a barrier for small and medium-sized enterprises.

“The majority of apprentices are in a workplace with only one or two other apprentices so to put in all that infrastructure is a lot for just two learners.”

The document also expresses concerns about whether the government would contribute to funding for 17 and 18-year-olds.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) consulted on apprenticeships funding last year following the Doug Richard Review which recommended greater employer ownership of the apprenticeship system.

A BIS spokesperson could not say when the technical consultation would be launched.