Employers are set to figure at the heart of a much-awaited review of apprenticeships, FE Week can exclusively reveal.

Former Dragons’ Den star Doug Richard, whose independent review is expected to be published by the end of the month, said he wanted to see “much more employer involvement” on apprenticeships.

“I’ve been doing everything I can, using as many different devices and activities to encourage, incentivise, drive and hope for, much more employer involvement because apprenticeships more than anything else are partly a job, which by definition means you need an employer in the mix,” he told FE Week at the launch of the Entrepreneurs and Education Programme at Lewisham College incorporating Southwark College on Monday, November 12.

“This is what’s unique about apprenticeships, therefore employer involvement on many levels is simply more important than in other things we do.

“I’ve put a lot of effort into increasing the type, the calibre and the depth of employer involvement and that’s a clear message of the review.”

Mr Richard was joined at Lewisham College’s Waterloo Campus for the programme launch by Michael Fallon MP, Minister for Business and Enterprise.

The Entrepreneurs and Education Programme is being funded by £1.1m of cash from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills over three years to provide support and advice to students, teachers and researchers across 100 colleges and universities.

Mr Fallon said: “Entrepreneurship is coming back into colleges. We’ve had enterprise societies across universities colleges and the further education sector.

“It can be taught by example. By getting entrepreneurs to come in to colleges, getting businesses into colleges and businesspeople to talk about how rewarding it can be to set up a business and start employing other people.”

The programme, supported by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, aims to create a new generation of educational entrepreneurs by equipping colleges and universities across the country with the tools to survive a competitive marketplace.

There were seminars throughout the day, from 9am, with students and staff listening to Mr Richard’s views and advice on business.

“Entrepreneurship can be taught,” he said. “And it’s not so much that’s it’s lacking in FE, it’s just that we don’t have the structures and the systems to promote it to flourish to the degree we want.

“This is broadly in the context of FE colleges, specifically in the context of vocational education and very much in the case of apprenticeships, which I intend to change.”

Online exclusive

 Q&A with Doug Richard on his upcoming apprenticeships review

The Richard Review was launched by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills just before the summer.

It was tasked with taking a medium to long-term look at the future of apprenticeships in England, identifying best practice and ensuring future apprenticeships meet the needs of the changing economy, and ensuring apprenticeships deliver the qualifications and skills employers need to world class benchmarks.

It is expected to be published by the end of the month, but author Doug Richard gave FE Week an exclusive interview ahead of the big launch.

How did the review go?

It was a far more complex world than I perhaps appreciated. There was a complexity that doesn’t necessarily have to endure. It’s delivering many benefits, so you have to be very careful not to flush out the baby with the bathwater and there turned out to be many more benefits than I had accounted for.

Any surprises when you carried out review?

The thing that hit me first was how complex the apprenticeship system is in this country. It’s got a lot of stakeholders and players. The second thing was because it’s so large in terms of sheer numbers of people involved, there’s a great deal of good stuff going on within it, but that doesn’t prevent there from being a lot of stuff that’s not good as well.

It was not at all intuitive, that is to say how do you set up a system that is more prepared for the future, which bear in mind was my remit — it’s not to tinker around the edges of the old system, but to say the future’s coming at us and conditions are changing enormously so what’ll we do to make sure we have a clean system that works in such way so that it’s future-proofed. It’s ready for what’s coming, which means we had to spend a lot of time thinking about what’s coming.

What conclusions have you come to?

The big conclusions we’ve drawn are about the engagement of employers on a more profound level and on lots of different levels, making sure the system engages students on an equal level at the right points of time with better information about what it means to be an apprentice versus alternative forms of education and a real focus on higher quality — but what does that mean? If you get on the ground, what does quality really mean? It is a very vague word and so we really had to dig around on it — who’s doing it right and what are the hallmarks of quality activity and how can we make sure those things happen elsewhere?

The BIS Select Committee on apprenticeships called for greater definition on the term apprenticeship. Do you agree there is a need to define what an apprenticeship is?

I think it’s reassuring that two different groups of people with profoundly different situations can look at the same thing and see many things in common — there’s more in common than not, which is a good thing. Their comment about the definition of what constitutes an apprenticeship is very relevant. In the review I’ve gone to a great deal of effort to be extremely precise about what I believe should be included within that word and what shouldn’t, and if it’s not included what should we be doing in those instances. There’s lots worth preserving, they just don’t have to be called apprenticeships. So yes, the issue of definition is going to be a part of the report.

Lord Heseltine’s report, No Stone Unturned, made much of the role of local enterprise partnerships (LEPs). Do these figure in your thinking?

Lord Heseltine has a very strong view of localism that is almost theological. It spans almost anything he looks at. He asks himself ‘how can we be local?’ He and I aren’t completely aligned, but in fairness to him there is a local element to apprenticeships and it’s wonderful when you get it right. But ignore LEPS for a moment because they’re just an entity – it’s a type of thing. The fact is if local colleges and local businesses work together for local demand that is a good thing and if we lose sight of that and the quality of community in this discussion then we short-change the apprenticeship programme. Having said that, there is an equal amount of stuff that is not divided by where are or what sector you are in. There is a marriage to be made of things that are properly sectoral and things that are properly local, and that’s where he and I differ.

The two reports mentioned brought into question the future of the Skills Funding Agency. Was your thinking along those lines, too?

We’ll have to wait for the report before I make as direct a comment as that.

Are you radical in the report?

In some ways absolutely, yes. But the problem is it’s still too early and we’re waiting for sign-offs.

Is the report going to make waves?

Anytime one seeks to build a template for a future of a system with that many participants and that many stakeholders you’d have thought a ripple or two might come up.

Has this country got it right on apprenticeships in any way?

Absolutely. There’s lots of things. We underestimate how good we are at having agile, flexible systems. When you look at the problems of apprenticeships systems, they tend to come from rigidity — it tends to come from them being so state-driven. That can be very valuable in capacity-building, but it makes them really difficult to change and the world’s changing really quickly.

How confident are you your report will be listened to and acted upon?

I’m very confident and obviously hopeful. I’ve had an open-door discussion with every relevant minister. Everyone loves apprenticeships and everyone wants to see them succeed and you don’t always have that. It’s important to remember this has been an independent review therefore I have felt very comfortable talking to all the senior people in the three major parties. You’ve got an uncommonly open door with cross-party support and I don’t think there’s grounds for a political fight over this — not a politicised fight. If there is discussion and debate over this, it’ll be over the substance rather than political background.

A cash-strapped college that recently got a government warning about its finances went ahead with a “costly” merger despite a report critical of the move, it has emerged.

Under-fire K College, in Kent, has a £6.4m deficit and in August became the first provider to get a government warning that could lead to the withdrawal of Skills Funding Agency (SFA) cash.

It was formed of a merger in April 2010 between South Kent College and West Kent College – but just five months earlier a report, seen by FE Week, warned about the move.

It appears to have been written by a senior figure at the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) – the predecessor body to the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) – and refers to criticisms in an earlier due diligence report on the merger by South Kent College.

“This [earlier] report highlighted that West Kent College faces significant financial challenges and lacked spare cash reserves to support the merger,” said the LSC report.

“The merger appeared to be in trouble if the Learning and Skills Council could not offer merger support or the governors of West Kent College decided to reject the merger due to a lack of willingness to borrow funds.”

The LSC report further mentioned a report by accountants KPMG to support their criticism of the merger.

“I could not quickly identify the business case for this merger when reading this document although I appreciate that there are always generic valid reasons for merger, including economies of scale,” said the LSC report.

An SFA spokesperson declined to comment on the report, but said: “The consultation for the South Kent College and West Kent College merger was handled in line with the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the former LSC’s merger process that was in place at that time.”

Nobody from K College was immediately available for comment.

However, the college’s website stated South Kent College governors chose West Kent College as their preferred merger partner following a KPMG report commissioned in 2008 by the LSC, which recommended merger as the best course of action for South Kent College students.

The college’s financial problems saw principal Bill Fearon resign on the same day staff went on strike over plans to cut around 150 jobs.

FE Minister Matthew Hancock has also been in talks with local MPs on the future of the college, while a spokesperson from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) said de-merging the two colleges remained an option.

The college has blamed its deficit on falling student numbers, funding cuts from central government, the cost of running six sites and a delay in money owed from the sale of land.

The college was asked by the SFA to work with Learning and Skills Improvement Service to balance its budget in the next two years having been issued a notice of concern.

A revised guide on government measures to help colleges run courses in response to local employment and skills needs has won the approval of Lady Sharp.

It comes just over a month after she accused the Skills Funding Agency of misinterpreting her suggestions for the Innovation Code, “wrapping it up in precisely the sort of restrictions that we were trying to get away from”.

But Lady Sharp, the Liberal Democrats’ education spokesperson in the House of Lords, said the agency’s latest advice on using the code was a “major improvement…and really begins to give the flexibility we were asking for”.

She said: “I am particularly pleased to see the range of examples given of the likely scope for use of the code — supporting employment and progression in employment, developing specific skills for specific sectors, reskilling and upskilling, preparation for and progress within an apprenticeship, and to support entrepreneurship.

“The main condition is that there should not be a qualification that exactly meets these needs. It doesn’t have to be, at least initially, an accredited qualification, priority being to help get people into work and develop the qualification later.”

The code was a key element of recommendations that emerged last year from the Colleges in their Communities Inquiry, chaired by Lady Sharp.

However, following her criticism the code had not been flexible enough, the agency this month revised its guidance.

 I’m delighted the Skills Funding Agency has responded to earlier criticisms”

“We’ve listened to feedback from the sector and in response we’ve published revised guidance, in partnership with the Association of Colleges and the Association of Employers and Learning Providers,” said agency chief executive Kim Thorneywork.

“Our goal is really to make sure that providers have as much scope as possible to deliver the mix of learning and skills training that is the right fit for their local area.”
She added: “We know that if we are to put the FE system in the hands of the sector, and let them use their professional judgement to give learners and employers what they want, there won’t always be a package of learning or skills training that an individual might need.

“So we need to do all we can to support the offer, so that FE is accountable to local people. And we must do more to support those out of work to gain the skills to compete in long-term sustainable employment.

“And this is where the Innovation Code comes into its own.

“It allows a college or training organisation to deliver the provision that is needed in their area, without having to wait for a new qualification to be developed — a true ‘rapid response vehicle’.”

Lady Sharp said: “This is a major improvement on the agency’s earlier version and really begins to give the flexibility we were asking for.

“The new code does seem to give the two things we were looking for — flexibility and meeting local needs. I’m delighted the agency has responded to earlier criticisms and come up with something so much more positive.”

More taxpayers’ cash should be spent on attracting women to college governors’ boards in a bid to combat under-representation, according to the Women’s Leadership Network (WLN).

The campaign group’s chair, Sally Dicketts (pictured right) said the “magnitude of the role and the need to have the right people” meant more needed to be done to get women in roles of governance at colleges.

“There is a strong business case for using colleges’ existing expertise and HR resource to ensure the process of recruiting governors is similar to that of appointing senior staff, rather than the largely informal processes currently used, which offer insufficient rigour,” she said.

Ms Dicketts, who is also principal of Oxford and Cherwell Valley College, spoke out after research by WLN showed just how badly women were under-represented on FE college governor boards.

The majority of governors are men and most have been in the role for more than three years”

It found they had almost twice as many men and that less than 18 per cent of FE chairs were women.

It further found committees were almost three times as likely to be chaired by a man and in just 2.5 per cent of cases were governors appointed through competitive interviews.

“Colleges may worry about spending public funds on expensive recruitment processes for a volunteer board, but the magnitude of the role and the need to have the right people, and the right mix of people, must also be considered,” said Ms Dicketts.

“The majority of governors are men and most have been in the role for more than three years and some for more than ten, thus perpetuating the dominant culture.”

The purpose of the WLN research was to examine the performance of the FE sector in the context of Lord Davies’ February 2011 report Women on Boards, which highlighted the under-representation on corporate boards.

It looked at the positive contributions of women on boards and made a series of recommendations to improve the gender mix.

“As Lord Davies said, this is not a ‘gender numbers game’ — it is about the richness of a board that can combine different perspectives, backgrounds, life experiences and skills to offer a fully rounded view of a college’s achievements, ambitions, strategic decisions and forward plans, and to offer staff and students a clear demonstration of women’s achievement and success,” added Ms Dicketts.

Rob Wye, chief executive of the Learning and Skills Improvement Service, which funded the research, said: “This is an important and useful piece of research into the gender diversity on FE boards, and provides an excellent resource for corporations to better understand the national picture of women’s involvement in FE governance.”

Dan Taubman MBE, senior national education official at the University and College Union, said: “We believe there should be monitoring of who exactly is on FE corporation, urgently. This kind of monitoring hasn’t been done on a national scale for some time.”

He added: “The number of black and minority ethnic FE governors is probably also fairly low.”

Visit www.wlnfe.org.uk/downloads/FINALGovsSurveyReportvFinal.pdf to read the findings of the WLN research, carried out over six weeks this summer, in full.