No way, says Graham Hoyle. In its 10 years, the AELP has worked hard for smaller providers . . .after all, 40 per cent of its members have agency contract values of less than £1m.

Peter Cobrin was certainly right to say that smaller independent training providers should be represented at the top table when it comes to policymaking for FE and skills (Training providers exploited and undervalued, FE Week, October 22). But, the reality is that they are already.

Subcontracting, the focus of last week’s Ofsted report on apprenticeships, was high up on the agenda of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers’ (AELP) autumn conference. Delegates heard the forthright views of Roger Lynch of Robust Training on unjustifiable management fees in London — opinions that he, as an AELP board member, expressed to the funding agency heads only the day before.

There is no review on subcontracting, so AELP and the Association of Colleges (AoC) instead are working together to draw up a set of standards that reflect best practice under a common accord.

Greater transparency on management fees will form a key part of the new arrangements.

The Skills Funding Agency (SFA) has agreed in principle to back the accord to tackle prime contractors who choose to ignore the standards.

I recognise that despite our modest membership fees, a significant proportion of SFA contractors are not AELP members.”

Half the AELP board is made up of founders and heads of smaller providers. They’re entrepreneurs – and they’re vocal.

Forty per cent of AELP’s 600 members have agency contract values of less than £1m and a third of our membership comes from the voluntary sector.

Through our board members and the chairs of our special interest groups, they have regular contact with ministers, senior civil servants, agency heads and other officials.

In its 10 years, AELP has been determined to represent the interests of independent providers of all sizes, and indeed has spoken for the work-based learning interests of our college members.

Since 2002, it has continuously lobbied for growth in the programme and for funding rates that make provision viable for providers, large and small.

One of the reasons the funding rates for 2013/14 are not yet ready for publication is because AELP funding expert Stewart Segal and our member representatives have been negotiating firmly, but constructively, with their SFA/National Apprenticeship Service counterparts on a fair deal for both providers and the taxpayer.

AELP also has batted well for smaller providers in the opening up of the Education Funding Agency’s (EFA) market for NEET provision.

More providers are securing direct contracts with the EFA and, even more importantly for the young people who they support, providers are now able to offer more flexible provision that can lead to a full apprenticeship. Regular meetings with senior Department for Education and EFA officials are shifting the department away from its traditional mindset of seeing higher education as the only destination of worth.

I recognise that despite our modest membership fees, a significant proportion of SFA contractors are not AELP members.

This means that many providers will not be aware of what AELP is doing on their behalf because they are not receiving Countdown, our weekly newsletter.

But as well as offering comment to the sector press, we are increasingly using other channels of communication including Twitter and Linkedin to promote key policy messages.

Our conferences and events are also open to members and non-members, providing an excellent opportunity to hear policy updates and to feed directly any concerns from the frontline deliverers.

Providers of all sizes are well represented by AELP. . . and here’s one piece of advice that I can offer to non-members too. No matter how strong your representation is at the top table, if the quality of your provision is not good enough, then the days of it being protected by government funding are numbered.

And that’s the way it should be.

Graham Hoyle OBE is chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers.

The chances of the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) agreeing to 50 per cent flexibility in adult skills budgets were very low — but if you don’t ask you don’t get, says Lady Sharp.

The idea of the Innovation Code put forward in our report The Dynamic Nucleus – Colleges at the Heart of Local Communities, was that it would give colleges a degree of flexibility in allocating  resources to meet local needs that did not fit neatly into budget headings.

Perhaps, above all, we had in mind the ability to use funds to seed initiatives that would not necessarily yield returns in the short period but would lay the groundwork for longer-term returns.

An example here might be the development of a partnership with the local police and/or youth offending team to set up a series of workshops — in bicycle and motorcycle maintenance, perhaps — that could develop into a set of apprenticeships but, in the short term, would provide activities to help to keep young men aged 16 to 21 off the streets.

In the report we suggested that colleges graded good or outstanding by Ofsted should be able to allocate up to 25 per cent of their adult skills budget to address local priorities.

This was carried forward into a recommendation to the government that they should “establish an Innovation Code to fund responsive provision that meets locally assessed priority needs. This should total up to 25 per cent of the college’s annual adult skills budget (by September 2012) rising to 50 per cent (by September 2013)”.

We were deliberately flying a kite. We knew that the chances of the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) agreeing to 50 per cent flexibility were very low — but if you don’t ask you don’t get. We were delighted that the White Paper, New Challenges, New Chances, published soon after our report, picked up the idea.

What is particularly disappointing about the SFA’s take is that it quotes the idea for the code as coming from our report and then misinterprets it”

However, had we read the paper more carefully, we would have seen that the idea was translated into something narrower than we intended; it was to be “for funders to draw down funding for programmes that meet a particular employer skills need while they are simultaneously developed for QCF”.

The SFA has refined this further in the guidance issued in August this year (The Innovation Code: A Guide), which suggests that the code may be used where “a provider, liaising with local employers…identifies a particular skills gap for which there is not an appropriate accredited qualification available in the QCF” and “may identify either existing provision or propose entirely new provision” that “will need to be developed to move into the QCF”.

It then goes on to make it clear that any proposal must respond to employer/business needs and must be broadly suitable for developing within the QCF.

What is particularly disappointing about the SFA’s take is that it quotes the idea for the code as coming from our report and then misinterprets it, wrapping it up in precisely the sort of restrictions that we were trying to get away from.

We were looking for a funding methodology which, together with the new Foundation Code of Governance emphasising accountability to local stakeholders, encouraged colleges to be creative and entrepreneurial in identifying and meeting local needs. As it is, there seems still to remain a substantial disconnect between the new freedoms being introduced to determine priorities locally and flexibilities necessary to deliver those priorities.

Lady Sharp is the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson in the House of Lords