Employers are to be given £250 million of colleges’ funding. Shocking. But hang on: what funding is it that colleges are entitled to?

Of course all good employers want to develop the skills of their workforce and apprentices, and most want to use the best colleges and training providers to help them. Where employers act as ‘intelligent customers’ they drive up the quality and impact of the training because, if nobody buys it, poor quality providers go bust.
But at the moment, the state defines and regulates the product, fixes the price and then routes the funding through those providers, good or bad. You would have to be a saint, as a provider, not to exploit the dominant position that gives you.

I should declare my interest. As Director of the LSC/SFA/NAS National Employer Service until recently, I and my team made sure that the senior HR directors of large employers could explain what they wanted from their skills and apprenticeship programmes, and were prepared to invest in enough inhouse expertise to own the funds and make sure the money worked hard for them.

Some large employers found this approach too onerous, and continued to find it easier to outsource the detailed thinking to their provider. But many others started to understand how to achieve their ambitions in spite of the complexity, and developed active long-term commercial partnerships with good, high quality, flexible providers.

I’m not suggesting all were perfect, but I was glad to see Ofsted’s comment last month on the ‘very strong performance’ of ‘employers who deliver their own training’.

Ok, so why do we still have a problem? Here are the first four of my reasons.
First, in spite of the evidence of quality, the furore about this proposal to ‘give funds to employers’ shows how deep-rooted is the belief that employer-led is second best, that employers are not to be trusted, and that the right thing to do is to leave this stuff to the professionals.

I was glad to see Ofsted’s comment last month on the ‘very strong performance’ of ‘employers who deliver their own training’.”

Second, we’re not differentiating between what is good workplace training and programmes that the state is willing to buy. Of course we shouldn’t pay the same good money for a qualification that takes an experienced person eight weeks, if what we actually want to encourage is a year-long development programme which includes mentoring, English and Maths and progression (though that doesn’t mean that the experienced learner and their employer didn’t benefit from a short programme).

Third, the market is dominated by providers (and no doubt some employers as well) who take short-cuts because their ambitions have shrunk to the accumulation of units of qualifications, as Alison Wolf noted, rather than the development of programmes of learning which have currency in the workplace.

Fourth, the support available to employers who would like to recruit young and unemployed people into work and into learning is chopped up into different funding rules and systems between DfE/schools, BIS/apprenticeships and DWP/JobcentrePlus, and unless you’re motivated by the money, who has time for all that?

So a new challenge fund which employers can bid into but which still requires them to deliver the existing regulated SASE-compliant apprenticeship frameworks, and to do it in ways that are convenient to government, is doomed to disappoint. I fear its failure will be claimed as evidence that employers don’t really care about skills. Instead, what this Employer Ownership project needs to achieve is something much more ambitious.

It needs to give employers the opportunity to develop and try out programmes of learning which address government priorities but are not fully regulated. It needs to find new ways of demonstrating accountability for public funds without admin systems so elaborate and complex that they absorb the funds needed for learning and drive employers mad.

And it needs to restore a commercial relationship between employers and their providers which is driven not by qualifications but by the needs of learners and employers.

Hilary Chadwick is a consultant and PhD student researching the skills and apprenticeship programmes of multi-nationals.

With the Chancellor’s Autumn Financial Statement now out of the way, budgets are being set for different parts of the education system.

First out of the blocks has been the FE and adult skills sector where BIS has announced an overall budget of £3.8bn for 2012/13, dropping as per previous announcements to £3.4bn for 2013/14 and £3.3bn for 2014/15.

Nor might it stop there for the Chancellor also confirmed in his Autumn Statement that spending limits will remain for at least a further two years beyond the current cycle, up in other words potentially to 2015/16.

We’re therefore in for a long haul and as the Institute for Fiscal Studies put it, “one begins to run out of superlatives for describing quite how unprecedented (the situation) is.”

Yet the sector may be able to draw some comfort from three other factors. First that some additional money will be available for at least the next two years from the European Social Fund and, from 2013, from the new FE loans system.

Second, that while the overall envelope may be getting smaller, some elements, notably currently apprenticeships and Learner Support, continue to receive some strong funding.

And third, as the Chancellor also indicated, the Government is launching a number of initiatives under its growth strategy such as the Youth Contract and the Regional Growth Fund in which the FE sector will play a key role and may attract additional resources.

some additional money will be available for at least the next two years”

But these days, funding comes as part of a wider package and the other part of the package is further system reform.

Much of what’s in the reform document released alongside the Investment Statement is fairly familiar having been under consultation and discussion for much of the last few months but there are perhaps a few less familiar if not less expected aspects. They include the following.

First, in the area of opening up higher level vocational education, where in an effort to strengthen the ladder between F and HE, the Dept appears to be re-opening the CATs bag. “We therefore intend to invite collaborative proposals to increase credit accumulation and transfer (CAT) opportunities across further and higher education.” This it seems will form part of what is being called a new ‘Higher Vocational Education’ portfolio which may in turn lead to re-adoption of the nomenclature of College of F and HE.

Second, and in a similar vein, the Dept is mirroring for the FE world the model being adopted in higher education to help prospective students get better advance intelligence about courses, by advocating the use of ‘common information sets’ and quality comparison information.

Third, adult literacy and numeracy, or English and maths as it’s now to be known where following further research evidence, concerns remain that progress continues to be slow and where as a result the Dept appears keen to inject some new thinking and energy.

This means piloting a different funding model, one that reflects progress made, as well as considering the use of more flexible, unit-based stepping stones towards GCSE.

Fourth, the announcement that an independent Commission on Adult Education and Vocational Pedagogy will be established from next April.

This is something that Alison Wolf had proposed for 14-19 learning and will bring together a wide range of key stakeholders, professional bodies and practitioners to ‘set out the standard expected of a good learning opportunity’ and ‘define a range of effective pedagogical approaches.’

The latter may be more easy to determine than the former and the question will remain as to how far you can bottle this sort of expertise up and release it when necessary but clearly the Government is keen to respond to reports such as the latest Annual Ofsted report which suggest that the quality of teaching in post-16 education can be patchy. The Commission and practitioner groups could play a big part in raising the game here.

Fifth, the intention to pilot community learning trusts next year with a view to possible roll-out the year after. Adult and community learning remains the poor relation of the adult learning world but this Government, like previous ones, recognises how important this local heartbeat of activity is.

The trust model sits within the Big Society concept and we shan’t know exactly what form the trusts will take until the prospectus is released next year but it remains an interesting model.

Steve Besley is Head of Policy at Pearson. He tweets @SteveBesley

This conference season has felt particularly ‘anti-school’. Don’t get me wrong, there’s always been an element of schools bashing, but this year it feels more desperate, and I think that’s because it’s not just from the usual suspects.

Working in education and across sectors (primary, secondary and further education) you see the ‘bashings’ come in cycles. First in the cycle comes GCSEs.

What regularly happens here, is a ‘Falling Standards Shocker’ story, where some interested party digs out an old O’ Level paper and compares it unfavourably to a recent GCSE paper.

Then it’s the turn of A-Levels. The record-breaking pass rates will be blamed on ‘dumbing down’ (it’s obviously not going to be attributed to the effects of harder working students or better skilled teachers and lecturers).

Universities aren’t immune; they’ll be tackled over “Mickey Mouse” degrees and of churning out graduates who aren’t ‘work ready’.

So, on one hand, FE colleges share the loud complaints about the standards of literacy and numeracy and the ‘dumbing down’ of exams with schools, but on the other they are spared the howling cries for schools to stuff more and more into the curriculum.

Colleges and training providers say they can’t get into the schools to talk to students, to tell them about the wonderful opportunities at their institution, to save them from their small school sixth forms.

Careers advice is also causing a rift. Connexions, the careers advice service has all but disappeared, and once again schools are tasked with picking up that mantle, but without any additional funding to enable them to do so effectively.

FE colleges aren’t keen; they are suspicious of schools’ intentions and their ability to deliver advice and guidance, impartially.
Funding means that schools are clinging on tighter to their post 16 students and colleges are working harder than ever to loosen the schools’ grip. It’s a flawed numbers game and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.

Schools are bemoaning that, in an attempt to lure these students away from them, colleges are becoming quite predatory, putting on free transport and tempting students with free food, laptops and other goodies.

But, as I have explained to schools countless times, they have five years to work on their students, to encourage them into their sixth forms, whereas colleges have a much smaller window to engage with them – often despite school barriers.

I understand colleges’ desperation; some have suffered significant drops in enrolments, the cuts surrounding education maintenance allowance (EMA) and falling demographics have been cited as probable causes. Some colleges’ futures may be in the balance.

FE colleges aren’t keen; they are suspicious of schools’ intentions and their ability to deliver advice and guidance, impartially”

However, academies have also had an effect on college enrolments. The academies have now been established long enough for the interested to see improvements.

Because of their extra funding, and their renewed focus, they are winning influential friends and building enviable reputations; communication with parents has improved, uniforms have gotten smarter, discipline has been tackled, school days have been restructured, and results in the main, have improved. These academies are keeping their post-16 students in numbers before unseen.

But even they are not safe from the ‘new kids on the block’. Free schools with sixth forms, supported by high profile academic sponsors, and UTCs (university technical colleges) sponsored by big business are causing secondaries and colleges to quiver.

Funding dictates that post-16 is a numbers game; institutions’ survival and jobs depend on getting students through the door.

Of course students would do better if education weren’t chopped up into sectors, and not require each sector to eat the next sector in order to survive, but we are where we are, and schools are an easy target.

Schools get it in the neck for all that is wrong with society, and like it or not, they’re more visible than colleges, schools get the ‘column inches’ and those with agendas use that for their own ends.

Our education arena is already cluttered and confusing, and bashing the very schools that feed our colleges is not going to help. At this time of year, why not be the bigger sector, find some goodwill and play nice?

Ruth Sparkes is Director of EMPRA. She tweets @EMPRA