Proposals to make jobseekers take part in English, maths and IT training to qualify for benefits have been welcomed by FE sector leaders — but there were questions about how the training would be funded.
The idea was announced by Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Rachel Reeves (pictured) during a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank in London on Monday (January 20).
She said she was unveiling plans for, “a new requirement for jobseekers to take training if they do not meet basic standards of maths, English and IT — training they will be required to take up alongside their job search, or lose their benefits.”
Ms Reeves said basic skills were “essential in today’s job market”, but that “shocking levels of English and maths among too many jobseekers” were “holding them back from getting work and trapping them in a vicious cycle between low paid work and benefits”.
“Research shows that nearly one in five of those who have made multiple claims for unemployment benefits have problems with reading or numeracy,” she said, adding that schools had a “critical role to play”, but that FE was also important for those lacking basic skills.
Her emphasis on FE was welcomed by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) and the Association of Colleges (AoC), but concerns have been raised about an apparent lack of detail on funding.
Dr Mary Bousted, ATL general secretary, said: “It is good to hear that the Labour Party is making a commitment to provide jobseekers with training in English, maths and IT.
“However, where will the funding come from to deliver the training and to develop and run the tests to ascertain who needs training? And where will the training take place following the recent cuts in funding for FE colleges which may mean that, by the time this policy is implemented, there aren’t enough college places or FE colleges to provide the training?”
She added: “We would like to see a greater commitment from companies to training their staff at the beginning and throughout their career.”
Michele Sutton, AoC president, said: “Colleges already have an excellent track record of working well with Jobcentre Plus and they are experts at getting people into employment. Our members currently work with 230,000 unemployed people a year and 97 per cent of colleges work with Jobcentre Plus.”
She added: “The work colleges already do with the unemployed is succeeding, but they are working with more people than they are funded for. If Labour wants colleges to work with more benefit claimants, they will need to ensure sufficient funding is available to make it a reality.”
Ms Reeves’ comments came two months after IPPR report No More Neets, the last of its three reports late last year, called for a ‘youth allowance’ to replace existing out of work benefits for 18 to 24-year-olds.
The report also called for a ‘youth guarantee’ to be established, offering access to FE or vocational training plus intensive support to find work. For those not learning or earning after six months, mandatory paid work experience and traineeships should be provided, it said.
Business Secretary Vince Cable is this week expected to be grilled by MPs about the failed apprenticeship FE loans system.
Adrian Bailey, chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee, said he planned to question Dr Cable on 24+ advanced learning loans during a session starting around 10.15am on Wednesday. The session is to focus more widely on the BIS annual report.
Mr Bailey told FE Week that he also planned to ask Dr Cable about government figures, published in December, that showed in the 2012/13 academic year there were 10,400 fewer apprenticeship starts than in 2011/12 — a fall of 2 per cent.
Mr Bailey said: “I can’t go into detail about the exact nature of my questions ahead of the session, but Dr Cable will be questioned about his department’s annual report and one of the things we will be asking him is about the problems with FE loans. We will certainly be looking at the decision to cancel 24+ apprenticeship loans.
“I am also concerned about the fall in apprenticeship starts and the effect that could have on social mobility and will question him about that.”
It comes after Dr Cable exclusively confirmed to FE Week before Christmas that the government was “dropping” the troubled 24+ advanced learning loans system for apprenticeships.
With just 404 applications in around seven months up to December, he “accepted” the system had failed, but said non-apprentice FE loans would remain.
Martin Doel, Association of Colleges chief executive, and David Igoe, Sixth Form Colleges Association chief executive, were two of the four to put their name to the hard-hitting correspondence.
Along with 157 Group chief executive Lynne Sedgmore and Principals’ Professional Council chair Mike Hopkins they told the minister the assessment confirmed fears about the policy “far from allaying” them.
They said the assessment showed how the policy, that will see 18-year-olds’ full-time education funded at a rate 17.5 per cent lower than learners aged 16 and 17 from next year, was “based on inadequate analysis and insufficient evidence”.
It shows 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.
Mrs Sedgmore told FE Week: “The long-awaited impact assessment does not allay the many fears that this policy will disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged students, many of whom are served by large, urban further education colleges.
“The impact on colleges is more than seven times greater than the impact on school sixth forms. At a time when we should be promoting vocational routes to give our young people the skills they will need to contribute to economic growth, this disparity seems ill-advised.
“The data presented in the impact assessment is open to differing interpretations, and we believe this policy has been ill thought-through. It risks undermining the real progress that has been recently made in evening out the playing field between different providers of post-16 education.”
They also called for talks on “mitigation measures” with Education Secretary Michael Gove having said he would consider limiting the initial effect of the cut, although the impact assessment said such a move could not be decided upon until the end of next month at the earliest.
The new rate for 16 and 17-year-olds is expected to be announced in March, but at the current rate 18-year-olds would be funded at £3,300.
The cut has been the subject of widespread criticism and prompted the creation of an online petition against the move that could force a debate on the issue in the House of Commons if it is signed by at least 100,000 people. It has already been singed by nearly 2,500 people.
Nevertheless, the sector leaders’ letter further raised concerns about the fact the cut would be retrospectively applied to learners halfway through a course, meaning providers would be left with a funding shortfall.
“We remain especially concerned that the cut might apply to students who are part-way through a course they have begun legitimately believing they would be fully-funded until the end. Colleges will have to work hard to mitigate this unfair, and possibly unintended, consequence,” said Mrs Sedgmore.
The Education Funding Agency announced the funding rate cut on December 10 and said the Spending Review for 2015-16 meant that savings were required from the 16 to 19 participation budget that year.
It said those who were 18 at the start of the academic year “will already have benefited from two years of post-16 education and will not therefore need as much non-qualification provision within their study programmes as 16 and 17-year-olds”.
Mr Gove told the Education Select Committee last month: “It is a painful cut forced on us by, A, difficult economic circumstances and, B, the fact that there are some parts of the education budget that are protected and some parts that are not.
“We conducted an impact assessment which we can share with the committee. In short, of all the ways we looked at to reduce expenditure in the 16 to 18 area, this is the one we felt was the least worst. But I won’t say that it’s a good thing to reduce spending in this area. It’s a difficult decision.”
The Department for Education is yet to respond to the letter to Mr Hancock.
It took the National Apprenticeship Service, and the overarching Skills Funding Agency, three months to act over a 3p rise to £2.68 on the apprentice minimum wage. The rise happened in October, but it took until mid-December before the official online advertising system for apprenticeships was amended so as to only accept adverts at the higher wage. Stephen Gardner discusses the importance of keeping all things apprentice as clear as possible.
Given that apprenticeships should be about learning in the workplace rather than simply earning it is appropriate that there is a rate set for an apprenticeship minimum wage that is below the National Minimum Wage (NMW).
However, it also seems to me that this should be rigorously enforced by the government or those mandated to distribute funding, thereby ensuring that young apprentices are treated fairly by all employers.
Simply saying that the minimum wage should be paid is not enough — it seems the probability of an individual employer receiving a visit from a NMW officer is too low to prove a deterrent.
Apprentices in employment are not in a strong position to complain to their employers, even with the help of their training provider and it would seem appropriate that there should be a means whereby apprentices, or those who know that wages lower than NMW are being paid, can notify the National Apprenticeship Service in confidence.
Once notified, there should be a duty on NAS to investigate and take appropriate action. This should involve liaison with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and, where substantiated, prosecution and remedial action in the form of back payment.
Training providers should also be required to do more to ensure that the employers they contract with do pay the correct amount for all the hours worked.
Technically, only an apprentice paid the NMW is legitimately an apprentice, so the Skills Funding Agency could, in theory, recover any funding paid to a provider for an “apprentice” not in receipt of the NMW.
The first requirement is for the NMW to be widely publicised so that all school leavers and their parents or guardians know what apprentices should be paid.
Simply saying that the minimum wage should be paid is not enough
Careers advisers should be the first source of information — but this assumes that the current arrangement for providing careers advice tells the young people and their parents or guardians about apprenticeships at all.
The recent ruckus about the apprenticeships vacancy area of the NAS website is embarrassing for NAS and damaging to apprenticeships.
It should be a simple matter to ensure that the current NMW is automatically displayed on every appropriate page of the apprenticeship vacancy website, removing the opportunity for anyone to advertise a lower wage and I hope that this is something that NAS is now implementing in light of the recent adverse publicity.
Apprenticeships need to be clearly seen as a three-way investment in skills.
Government invests funding, employers (with the help of training providers) should invest in high class training, and young people invest their time and dedication to learning.
A fair financial contribution to help the apprentice with their living and travel costs during the apprenticeship is essential.
It has been a long journey for Ameen Hussain from the Indian Pearl City of Hyderabad to collecting an MBE for services to adult education and his local community in South London.
Hussain, aged 71, may have been “amazed, flabbergasted and humbled” to be recognised in the New Year honours list, but it was just reward for his dedication over more than two decades to broadening people’s horizons through the open-to-all Asian Resource Centre, in Abbey Wood.
His education of others started in 1970 for Hussain, with a maths teaching job at Sedgehill School, in Lewisham, South London.
“I wrote to my father saying ‘I think I will be out by Christmas, teaching probably isn’t for me’. It turned out I was wrong, as I stayed at Sedgehill for 32 years,” he said.
Hussain had moved to London three years earlier. His first job in England was working as a quality control inspector at Teddington Auto Controls, which made thermostats, and Landis and Gyr, in Acton, which made household electricity meters.
But he was destined to return to maths and the classroom having studied at two secondary schools in India before completing a degree in maths, physics and chemistry, along with a masters degree in maths at Osmania University, Hyderabad.
He was born in 1942 in Hyderabad, a city within a state bearing the same name.
I wrote to my father saying ‘I think I will be out by Christmas, teaching probably isn’t for me’. It turned out I was wrong, as I stayed at Sedgehill for 32 years
“I originally came over here because I wanted to continue my studies in the UK, but that turned out to be too expensive,” explained Hussain.
Hussain’s father Muhammed Khasim, who died in 1985 aged 77, was an excise inspector for Hyderabad’s civil service.
He moved around a lot because of the job and would take wife Kulsum, who died aged 76 in 1995, daughter Jameela, who died in December aged 73, and the young Ameen with him.
“My dad’s job took us all over Hyderabad, which meant I attended a lot of different primary schools in regions where people spoke different languages,” said Hussain.
Ameen Hussain when he was nine years old
“I started-off in the Kannadi-speaking region, then moved to a school in the Telegu-speaking area, before going to another school where they spoke the Marahati language.
“Luckily, they all had Urdu as the main language of education, which was my mother tongue.”
Hussain, of Welling, in Kent, is a devoted husband of Nafees, 61, and father of daughters Yasmin, 35, and Sameena, 31, and son Abid, 30.
He also dotes on his grandchildren Amanah, four, Yusuf, one, and Musab, who is four months old.
He said: “I am most proud of my family but of course have taken huge pride in the MBE, which I dedicate to my tutors, students and all the other people who have helped me along the way.”
It was while working at the Sedgehill that Hussain started teaching part-time at what was then called the Greenwich Asian Resource Centre from 1990.
He said: “The biggest influence on my community work was my dear friend and mentor Sadhu Sing Biring, who introduced me to the centre and was a great campaigner for the local Asian community.
“He sadly passed away [aged 69] in May 2012 and I wish he had been here see me get the MBE.
“I taught at the centre in the evenings after school and on Saturdays until the council decided it wanted to withdraw funding in 1996 and the main centre closed temporarily.
“However, our languages school was still running and the tutors weren’t paid for six months, because there was no-one left to do the paperwork.
“The management committee asked if I could sort this problem out. I did the paperwork and sorted out the payments, then the main centre re-opened and I became more and more involved with things like helping people with passports and housing problems.”
Hussain took over as the centre’s manager after taking early retirement from his school in 2002, a year after its name was shortened to the Asian Resource Centre.
He said: “We dropped Greenwich from the name because we used to get phone calls asking if it was just for people from Greenwich, which it wasn’t.
“It became the Asian Resource Centre, but then we were getting non-Asian people asking if it was just for Asians and we welcome everyone, so these days we just call it ARC.”
Hussain is most proud of access to teaching courses for Asian women run by the centre from 2003 to 2005.
“I knew there was a lot of untapped talent among educated Asian women,” he said.
“Many of them had degrees, but they were not getting out of the house after marrying and having a family, because of the pressures of raising children and the stigma against them returning to work or education.
“We started running access to teaching courses, in partnership with the University of Greenwich, and ended up helping dozens of women on their way to better things.”
The centre has run a huge variety of classes during Hussain’s time in charge, including English for speakers of foreign languages, maths, science, dance and clothing repair classes for adults, and family learning sessions on computers, history and food from around the world.
The centre is still thriving today and Hussain has no intention of winding things down.
“We cater for everyone really. There’s one group called the Thamesmead Surfers for older people interested in learning about computers,” explained Hussain.
“The average age of people involved is 76 and they range from 69 to 84. We teach them about the internet, e-mail, digital cameras, and they used our computers at the centre to set up their own website.
“One of my favourite members, David Kelly, arrived at our door with a laptop in 2008 when he was 89 and asked if we could show him how to use it. He was one of our best students right up until he passed away two years ago.
“My great passion is for adult training and he was living proof of my firm belief that you can learn at any age.”
Why have traineeships had such a poor take-up, asks Ruth Sparkes.
Traineeships were supposed to be ‘the next big thing’ for FE.
You may be forgiven for thinking that traineeships were a government knee-jerk reaction to our shocking youth unemployment figures.
While it may well be the case that 59 per cent of young people get five good GCSEs with English and maths, and these teens can go on to comfortably complete A-levels, BTecs and apprenticeships, what’s left for the 41 per cent of young people who don’t make the grades?
Pendennis, a luxury yacht builder in Falmouth, takes on a dozen apprentices every year.
This year, around 180 young people applied for an apprenticeship with the firm. This means, broadly, that the 168 applicants who were rejected didn’t have the personal skills or the qualifications the company was looking for.
We often hear similar stories surrounding the big national companies such as Rolls Royce and BT, but believe me, this sorry tale is replicated at a company near you.
Employers have been complaining that young people don’t have the necessary skills to start an apprenticeship. Traineeships are supposed to bridge that gap, and I’m sure they do. However, take-up is so poor and it’s tricky to find a learner to ask them about it.
So, if traineeships are a good thing, and there’s a real need for them, why is take-up so embarrassingly poor? We need to ask whether we’ve got the seven Ps right.
First, the product. There is no point in developing a product or service that no one wants.
We have already established the great need for traineeships, so by and large this part of the mix is okay.
Second, place. The product must be available in the right place, at the right time.
FE, like other education sectors, has its own cycle, and traineeships were not presented to the sector at the right time. As colleges and higher education providers know, any new course that misses the advice and guidance cycle misses out.
Third, promotion. Promotion is the way an organisation communicates what a product does and what it can offer its ‘customers’.
Who knows about traineeships? Government, the FE sector and West Ham’s Karren Brady know all about traineeships.
FE, like other education sectors, has its own cycle, and traineeships were not presented to the sector at the right time
What about headteachers, careers teachers, advice and guidance people, parents and most importantly, the prospective trainee? These very important stakeholders know nothing of traineeships. And they aren’t alone. By and large, employers don’t know about them either. Promotion of traineeships has been low key to say the least.
Fourth and fifth, process and people. The process of giving a service, and the behaviour of those who deliver are crucial to customer satisfaction.
And now in an effort to increase take-up, grade three providers who ‘require improvement’, according to Ofsted) will now be able to deliver traineeships as prime contractors (where they have been downgraded in-year).
On one hand, this is a good thing. Grade one and two colleges are not equally spread out geographically, so before this edict, a potential ‘trainee’ in somewhere like Bristol might have been unable to secure a traineeship simply because of a lack of a quality provider.
But on the other hand, the government was, initially, at pains to make sure that traineeships weren’t seen as sub-standard and so restricted their delivery to only good and outstanding providers, along with grade three subcontractors.
Traineeships are already below apprenticeships in the hierarchy of qualifications, and I believe the government was trying to ensure that employers and learners viewed these as desirable qualifications. If you restrict the availability of a product, you serve to make it exclusive.
Sixth, physical evidence. Training is a service, and a service can’t be experienced before it’s delivered. New courses are always a bit of an unknown quantity, there’s no track record. What is important here, especially for traineeships are institutions’ reputation with employers.
And finally, price. It is the only element of the marketing mix that generates revenue — everything else represents a cost.
Funding for traineeships has been sketchy and confusing, and a few providers have been put off by this. Never forget other products are available.
Traineeships need more time and proper, planned attention to really take hold, until then, they’ll sadly continue to be FE’s best-kept secret.
Ruth Sparkes, managing director of marketing and education, media and PR agency EMPRA
The Department for Education would have been hoping its impact assessment of the controversial 17.5 per cent funding rate cut for full-time 18-year-olds put an end to further questioning. But, as Mick Fletcher, explains, it’s done quite the opposite.
Imagine a man embarrassed about his short stature. Instead of saying he is four inches shorter than his friend, he could accurately say that he is only two inches shorter than the average of their heights.
Indeed, if he were six inches shorter than everyone else in the whole land except for his friend, he could still truthfully say that he is only two inches shorter than the average, as long as he reveals in a footnote that he means the average of himself and his friend.
If this sounds convoluted, it is, but that in essence is how the Department for Education has approached the impact assessment for the cut to 18-year-old funding.
Government is clearly embarrassed to have made a cut that discriminates against disadvantaged students.
Those who are still studying in FE at the age of 18 are more likely to be from a disadvantaged background than 16 or 17-year-olds.
They are even more likely to be from such a background than 16 and 17-year-old students in school sixth forms who, in general, come from more affluent households.
To focus cuts on these students in particular risks undermining any gains achieved through policies like the pupil premium and further damaging social mobility.
The impact assessment presents the data in a way calculated to disguise these facts.
The assessment appears to have been written to justify a policy that is clearly flawed
Instead of comparing 18-year-olds with 16 and 17-year-olds it compares them with the average – 16 to 18-year-olds as a whole.
Instead of comparing those affected with the rest of the cohort it only looks at those on the ILR ie it excludes school sixth forms which actually recruit more full time 16 and 17-year-old pupils than FE colleges.
Furthermore, it makes no mention of the potential distortion caused by omitting such a large part of the population in question nor attempts to estimate its direction and scale.
The inescapable fact is that this is a cut that targets poorer students and those who work with them in FE colleges.
The assessment does identify that the impact on FE colleges is more than seven times greater than it is on school sixth forms (the authors show this as a 2.6 percentage point difference whereas it is equally true to say that colleges are hit 750 per cent harder).
In a commentary that is truly breathtaking, however, they argue that it is acceptable to hit colleges harder because schools “have so far seen a significantly larger reduction in funding per student since 2011/12, as part of equalising funding rates across institution types”.
What that means in translation is that after years of foot dragging government has finally abolished the indefensible funding gap between schools and colleges — and since that has meant a cut to school budgets it is now right to target any further cuts on FE. The authors have clearly been clutching at straws.
The Government seems equally embarrassed by the impact on black and minority ethnic (BME) students and uses similar strategies to downplay the impact.
Once more, the large numbers in school sixth forms are left out of the calculation and despite the fact that FE recruits from a more diverse background there is no commentary or attempt to show the potential distortion.
Even the trick of comparing 18-year-olds with 16 to 18-year-olds still shows that the proportion of BME students in the group affected is some 30 per cent higher than 16 to 18-year-olds as a whole (26 per cent as opposed to 20 per cent).
The impact assessment therefore chooses instead to highlight that within FE colleges being both from a BME background and from a disadvantaged postcode is not more prevalent among 18-year-olds than 16 to 18-year-olds.
Reading the impact assessment one is forced to conclude that this is not evidence-based policy-making but policy-based evidence.
The assessment appears to have been written to justify a policy that is clearly flawed. At a superficial level it manages to do that, but it does not hold up to serious scrutiny
A company that provided training to organisations across England through the Excellence in Learning brand is being liquidated after a downturn in bookings.
National Training Resources Ltd (NTRL) has appointed Birmingham-based Baker Tilly Business Services Ltd after officially going into liquidation on January 8.
Excellence in Learning was a brand created by NTRL to provide workshops, consultancy and in-house training services to a range of sectors, including learning providers.
It is understood that 16 people have lost their jobs after directors struggled to keep the company, based in Tamworth, afloat.
Meanwhile, it has been claimed the company has still not informed clients that it has gone bust, but bookings through the Excellence in Learning website have been suspended and phone lines seem to have been cut.
A Baker Tilly spokesperson told FE Week: “Following statutory meetings of members and creditors on January 8, Nicholas Lee and Dilip Dattani of Baker Tilly Business Services Ltd were appointed Joint Liquidators of National Training Resources Limited, based in Tamworth. The company, which was founded in 1993, had been profitable in recent years, however due to a downturn in bookings in the second half of 2013, the directors were no longer able to fund the company’s losses.
“Prior to appointment, sixteen employees were made redundant, and the joint liquidators are currently in the process of trying to realise assets for creditors.”
There was shock at the loss of the 21-year-old company, and providers that had booked training now face the task of trying to get their money back.
Former director Jon Collis, who resigned from the board in September and said he had not been active in the company for most of 2013, said: “It is a huge pity, because not so long ago it was a very successful organisation. I was involved for 20 years and built up some of the areas of business like the Excellence in Learning brand and division. I built it up from nothing and it’s a shame to see this happen.”
Sally Connolly, the human resources manager at Oxfordshire-based training provider Qube Learning, said she had three operations managers due to take part in inspection nominee training last month
but after the company failed to get in
touch with venue details she started to investigate.
She said: “I started chasing them, but all my emails were coming back and the phone number on the website wasn’t working.”
Ms Connolly said the only way she found out what had happened was by calling one of the tutors who had previously worked for the organisation.
She said: “There was no indication that anything was wrong. We were very lucky in that the cheque had only been sent off a few days before so we were able to cancel it, so they don’t owe us anything.
“Obviously, there are other resources we can use. They were not a lifeline for us, but it is a shame this has happened because they did run an awful lot of courses. It’s also a shame we had to find out the way we did.”
