Further education colleges will be able to bid to become specialist ‘technical excellence colleges’ under a Labour government, Keir Starmer will announce at his party’s annual conference on Tuesday.
Under Starmer’s plans, universities will get a seat around the table in the development of local skills improvement plans (LSIPs) and new statutory guidance would make the plans “democratically accountable” to local communities.
Local government as well as local businesses will be involved in developing the plans.
Labour said existing LSIP funding, like the local skills improvement fund, would be “repurposed” to help colleges specialise and become ‘technical excellence colleges.’
It’s unclear what advantages gaining specialist status would bring to colleges, or how others not awarded the status would be disadvantaged.
Bids for the new status would be assessed by Skills England, a new body that would oversee skills interventions as well as Labour’s planned skills and growth levy, a successor to the apprenticeship levy.
Labour said college bids for specialist status would be informed by reformed local skills improvement plans. Colleges that prove they can meet skills needs, lever investment from employers and utilise other local colleges and universities, would be awarded the status by Skills England.
It’s also not clear how many colleges could be awarded the new status in each of the 38 LSIP areas.
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said Labour were right to recognise the role of colleges rather than commit to introducing a new set of institutions.
“The UK underperforms on skills, productivity and employer investment in training and colleges have suffered from years of underinvestment so it’s good to see an ambition to address this, through an expanded role for colleges across the country.
“In the last twenty years, ministers have enjoyed inventing new organisations which is an approach that often results in duplication and wasted spending. It’s significant and reassuring that these latest plans are explicitly focused on strengthening the existing college network, rather than creating new institutions,” he said.
The last Labour government introduced a similar scheme to encourage colleges to deliver courses meeting local and national skills needs. The then Learning and Skills Council oversaw the Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) programme in the early 2000s.
By 2006, over 400 colleges and training providers had been awarded a CoVE status. In 2007 though, the then Labour government announced it was replacing the scheme with a “new standard” that would cost £8,000 to apply for.
Starmer plans to set out how he will deliver his five missions when he gives his mainstage speech at Labour party conference on Tuesday.
T Levels success at York College has not come easily. There has been a carefully considered approach to promoting our technical education mission within York and North Yorkshire and this has resulted in a momentum being built that has established ourselves as one of the leading providers of T Level education.
As one of the early T Level adopters, our approach started with an attempt to educate people about the qualification. Initially, this was an internal exercise, but it very quickly extended to parents, potential students, and (potentially most significantly) key members of staff in secondary schools.
As the T Level brand became more established, we started to focus on the quality of delivery. Successful applications for capital grants allowed us to carefully invest in our facilities so they could be sector-leading in the areas offering T Levels, such as the current extension work that is being carried out on our construction centre.
It centred too on supporting staff to upskill where necessary by accessing the support available from the Education and Training Foundation’s professional development programmes. In some areas, we have also made investments in specialist staff to teach the highly technical content of T Levels, for example employing registered nurses as dual professionals so that our health T Level students benefit from current practice and knowledge.
Meanwhile, we leverage good news stories locally, whether that has been excellent results achieved by students, the case studies provided to us by employers, or interviews with T Level students who have successfully completed the qualification.
We have also promoted what our students have gone on to do after completing their studies, such as higher-level apprenticeships, securing employment and progressing to university, including extensive work between the delivery team at the college and university admissions co-ordinators to ensure the value of T Levels is recognised in their entry criteria.
The factor that has had the biggest impact on our T Level offer, though, is the work we have done with fantastic employers. Our partnership work with them has allowed us to ensure that they are fully aware of the support that they can offer to us as a college and the benefits that a T Level placement student can have on their business.
Of course, the employer support fund has helped to facilitate industry placements, but what we have found is this has not been the determining factor in terms of whether someone takes a student on industry placement from York College or not.
Instead, it is the focus on providing meaningful and supportive industry placements for highly enthusiastic, skilled students – and getting employers to recognise the value that such a student can bring to their organisation – that has been a game-changer in the way that we have been able to engage with employers.
Our work to promote T Levels and ensure healthy recruitment has not stopped. Just last week, we held an afternoon T Level party with careers and guidance advisors from our feeder secondary schools to ensure that they were aware of the developments in our T Level offer and for us to share the good news stories that we have about our T Level successes.
Our recent focus on the purpose and development of our level 2 programmes has involved changing the curriculum offered so that potential T Level students develop the knowledge and skills they need to progress. For example, we have introduced a mathematics for engineeringoption on our level 2 programmes to ensure students have the higher-level mathematics skills they need to be successful.
There is a belief among staff at York College that T Levels are the ideal technical learning platform for students to develop their knowledge, skills and understanding of subjects that directly link to their future employment opportunities.
It is rare for a prime minister to spend time talking about post-16 education from the stage at a Conservative party conference and there was a lot for FE to welcome in Rishi Sunak’s speech on Wednesday.
His plan for a new Advanced British Standard involves increased funding for up to 195 more post-16 teaching hours per student, tax-free bonuses to a maximum of £30,000 for lecturers in key subjects, and education becoming “the priority of every spending review from now on”.
On the face of it, the new qualification, reminiscent in ambition (if not detail) of recommendations made by the Tomlinson report in 2004, is a positive shift towards the ever-elusive parity of esteem between academic and technical education.
However, given the dire state of polling for the Conservative party and the fact that the new qualification has an anticipated gestation period of a decade, many commentators suggest that, like Tomlinson’s diploma, it will never see the light of day.
Which leaves me thinking of all those people across the country responsible for teaching, marketing and timetabling T Levels, the new qualification celebrating its own promotional “week” on the day that the prime minister announced plans for its demise.
Our research into public awareness of T Levels, in common with that of the Department for Education, shows that the majority of parents, school teachers and employers have limited awareness of the qualification. In our most recent study, undertaken on behalf of an Institute of Technology among IT firms and departments, half of respondents had never heard of them.
So, for many the first thing that they will read or hear about T Levels will be this week’s coverage of their proposed expiration.
If you are a parent attending a college open day with your child, and a lecturer suggests they should consider this new T Level qualification, what are you now going to think?
If you are an employer who is approached to provide work experience for T Levels, are you more or less likely to say yes based on what the PM has just said about T Levels?
If you are a university that does not accept T Levels as an entry qualification for degrees, are you more or less likely to change your mind?
As someone involved in the launch of the 14-19 diploma, discontinued in 2013, I have first-hand experience of the challenges in rolling out new qualifications. They require sustained positive promotion in the public and political sphere in order to generate sufficient credibility among young people and their families; if you are going to dedicate two years of your life to studying a course, you need to be sure that it will get you where you want to go. Collective confidence is crucial.
The struggle to recruit to T Levels is well documented. As of this week, it just got harder.
Several colleges have abandoned T Level courses this year after falling GCSE English and maths pass rates for school leavers hit their recruitment targets.
West Herts College Group dropped four T Level programmes in recent weeks while Aylesbury College cancelled one course because “unfeasible” enrolment numbers would have left classes empty.
They join a host of colleges warning that lower English and maths GCSE pass rates from this year’s school-leavers have made it harder to hit T Level recruitment goals.
At an event run by Westminster Forum Projects last month, James Scott, chief executive at Trafford College Group, which missed its T Level recruitment target by almost a third this year, said: “There’s a clear trend coming out, which is the impact of GCSE results on the number of students being recruited onto T Levels.
“We certainly haven’t achieved our targets. You’ve got many colleges reporting greater numbers of students on level 1 and 2 programmes, less on level 3 including T Levels and A-levels, and much larger increases in young people having to re-sit GCSE maths and English.”
Chichester College Group T Level development manager James Watters added: “We have seen a drop in our T Level starts for September 2023 due to GCSE results. Our level 2 and foundation year study programmes are either full or oversubscribed as a result.”
Ofqual data shows the proportion of 16-year-olds who passed maths with a grade four or above dropped from 75.1 per cent in 2022 to 72.3 per cent in 2023. The proportion of 16-year-olds who passed English language fell from 77.2 per cent to 71.6 per cent.
FE Week analysis suggests that 38,000 more students will have to continue studying English at post-16 compared with last year, while nearly 22,000 more students will have to continue maths compared with 2022.
Colleges are free to set their own entry requirements for T Levels, but research has found that many require students to already hold a grade 4 in English and maths.
West Herts College Group cancelled four T Levels – in education and childcare; onside construction, carpentry and joinery; electrotechnical engineering for construction; and plumbing and heating engineering.
It blamed the decision on “low application numbers”, caused by lower English and maths GCSE passes and young people “deciding to study other qualifications in the same subject area”.
Aylesbury College, part of the Buckinghamshire College Group, dropped a T Level in lab science after it missed its 12-student target. Only six students signed up, which made the course “unfeasible”.
A spokesperson for the college told FE Week that lower GCSE English and maths pass grades “have meant that many students have not met the T Level entry criteria this year”.
They added: “That contributed to an increase in numbers on our level 1 and 2 provision as well as an increase of over 50 per cent in GCSE re-sit numbers.” Many of those students went onto a T Level foundation course instead.
The group confirmed that it was running the rest of its T Level courses as planned in areas such as digital and education and childcare.
Colleges have cancelled or deferred T Level courses before. Department for Education research released this year revealed that a fifth – 14 of 62 – of colleges did so for their cohorts starting in 2021 due to low recruitment.
But the continuing trend will add to concerns that colleges are not ready to move away from offering alternative level 3 qualifications like BTECs, which are in line for the chop from 2025, while T Levels find their feet.
Students at both Aylesbury College and West Herts College who were hoping to do a T Level have been moved onto a BTEC instead, with some others switching to A-levels.
But concerns around low T Level enrolments are not universal. Neil Thomas, chief executive at Dudley College of Technology, said the number of students studying its 11 T Levels had risen by 126 per cent in total, which he put down to the qualification “gaining traction in the market”.
He did point to a “deflation in the grade profile of many learners” which meant a “large number of learners” joined the college for level two courses. But that “has not been at the detriment of T Level programmes”.
York College has also bucked the trend. Deputy principal Ken Merry said: “York College & University Centre has not closed down any of the T Level courses that we had planned to run.
“In fact, we have witnessed 400 per cent growth in terms of the numbers that have enrolled on our health science and business T Levels. We have a smaller than expected group for digital, but the course is still viable and running.”
A cash-strapped land-based college in Dorset is considering a merger to secure its long-term survival.
Kingston Maurward College is in discussions to join Weymouth College off the back of a recent FE commissioner-led review.
A joint statement from the principals involved said the plan is for each college to “retain its own identity”, but under a larger corporate structure which will “make both colleges and the group more financially resilient”. The pair are aiming for a merger date of August 2024.
Kingston Maurward College has been put in and out of formal government intervention multiple times since 2015 for deteriorating financial performance. The land-based college, which is set in 750 acres of farmland, parkland, gardens and a conservation area near Dorchester, suffered a big hit to its commercial income during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns.
The college is still yet to publish accounts for 2021/22 but previous financial statements showed an anticipated deficit of £1.3 million by the end of July 2022, and an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) deficit of £234,000. The college’s cash resources were also “at the lowest level”.
Kingston Maurward is also currently locked in a dispute over off-the-job training evidence with the Education and Skills Funding Agency which could force it to repay £850,000 in apprenticeship funding.
The college has not received any emergency bailout funding to help it stay afloat from the government so far, but principal Luke Rake admitted this was “likely to be necessary” this financial year because of inflationary pressures.
Merger will make both colleges ‘more financially resilient’
Asked whether Kingston Maurward’s survival is in doubt if the merger with Weymouth does not go ahead, Rake said: “The provision? No – the need for land-based provision in one of England’s most rural counties is a given, and the strategic value of this and the site as well is recognised by everyone. The corporation? Maybe – it would need to be considered as part of a wider costs review by the Department for Education.”
He added: “At this stage though, closure is nowhere near the table and we are all, including the DfE and FE commissioner, committed to finding the best solution for the county.”
Weymouth College has experienced its own financial difficulties in recent years. It was handed a financial notice to improve in 2020, but had it lifted in August 2022.
Julia Howe, principal of Weymouth College, said: “We believe that this place-based solution [merger], providing education, skills and training across rural and coastal Dorset will deliver a cohesive and high-performing offer across many sectors for our local and regional communities.”
Weymouth College teaches over 2,800 students while Kingston Maurward has around 1,000. The colleges, both rated ‘good’ by Ofsted, are located around 10 miles apart.
Rake said the idea of a Dorset college group has been floated several times over the past decade. A public consultation on the plan is expected to launch in the spring.
London’s Croydon College has been told to “harmonise cultures” by the FE Commissioner after Ofsted judged it as ‘inadequate’ due to “inappropriate” behaviour.
The FE Commissioner’s team visited the south London college in June after a “significant minority” of students reported instances of homophobic language and “taunting” behaviour which left female learners feeling uncomfortable.
Ofsted dealt the college a grade four report in May to the “surprise” of its leaders. Most criticism was targeted at “behaviour and attitudes” at the college’s Coulsdon campus.
The FE Commissioner’s follow-up intervention report, published today, said work to ensure all learners at Coulsdon feel safe whilst attending college has been strengthened through increased visibility of staff (including senior managers), teachers more consistently challenging and confronting poor learner behaviour, and effective consultation with staff and students.
Students at both Coulsdon and the college’s Croydon campus now report that behaviour is “respectful, positive, and tolerant between peers and staff”.
Croydon College merged with Coulsdon Sixth Form College in March 2019. Ofsted previously criticised leaders for a “considerable variation” in the quality of teaching across the two colleges.
Today’s FE Commissioner report echoed this concern and warned that “organisational progress” since the merger has been “too slow”, particularly the formation of a “single organisational identity through harmonisation of cultures and purpose”.
“Many” staff and students interviewed “were not able to identify a consistent set of college values. This will need to be addressed if senior leaders are to successfully establish a corporate culture across both colleges,” the report added.
The college’s chief executive, Caireen Mitchell, has now been tasked with developing a strategy to “provide purpose, harmonise cultures, and reinforce values, which needs to be applied to all college processes”.
‘We are encouraged by the positive observations’
A new management structure has been introduced since the Ofsted inspection, but it was “too early to judge” how effective it is at the time of the FE Commissioner’s visit.
While the FE Commissioner’s team highlighted many areas of “progress”, they said the pace of “corrective action” needs to be increased to ensure “timely improvements to the 16- to 18-year-old learner experience and their outcomes”.
As part of this, the college’s chair, governance professional, and chief executive have been told to develop and implement a strategy for ensuring governors “understand what it is like to be a student at Croydon College”.
The “significant volume” of data and information produced by the college also needs to be managed more effectively to be accessible, inform decisions, report performance, and drive actions for improvement.
The FE Commissioner’s report said student attendance and punctuality are still too low, but recognised progress has been made to “marginally improve” this area.
Leaders at Croydon College were praised for gaining ‘outstanding’ financial health through careful management of cash, operating surpluses, and capital expenditure. Even if the Ofsted result causes a dip in student recruitment over the short term, the college is well positioned to absorb any associated reduction in income, the FE Commissioner’s report said.
Overall, governors are “confident that recent changes to the college leadership structure have strengthened the leadership team’s capacity to steer the college through its journey of improvement”.
One of the FE Commissioner’s national leaders in further education will continue to assist the principal of the Coulsdon campus for the 2023/24 academic year.
The college teaches over 2,500 young learners – around two-thirds of whom studied at Croydon with a third at Coulsdon – as well as over 2,600 adult learners, around 200 apprentices and 200 students with high needs.
In a joint statement, principal Caireen Mitchell and chair Tony Stevenson, said: “The merging of the two colleges in 2019 presented significant challenges, not least because of the lasting impact of the Covid pandemic. We are therefore encouraged to see the FE Commissioner recognise the senior leadership’s approach to creating a harmonised, single-college culture.
“Achievement for the group is now in line with the national average, and we were pleased to celebrate many individual success stories this summer of students securing high grades and coveted places at prestigious universities or corporate training schemes. This has been followed by a very healthy enrolment for 2023/24 at both colleges, which reflects the positive perception of our colleges in the community.
“We are encouraged by the positive observations of the FE Commissioner, as we forge ahead with our quality improvement plan, and our shared ambition to achieve a ‘good’ Ofsted rating.”
Darren Hankey is keen for his students to grasp the tantalising opportunities to acquire net zero skills that are emerging in his region as a way of pulling themselves out of poverty.
In the college’s 175-year history, Hartlepool has gone from being an industrial powerhouse to one of England’s most deprived towns. Students’ behavioural problems are presenting an ever-greater challenge.
They are bearing the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis, Hankey tells me, with bursary applications going “through the roof”. But the country’s efforts to wean itself off fossil fuels are creating apprenticeship opportunities which offer a way out of entrenched cycles of social deprivation.
Hankey, who has just marked ten years as principal at the college, spent the morning before my visit hobnobbing with business executives from SeAH Wind, who were also visiting the college. The Korean company has invested £450 million in a monopile manufacturing facility in nearby Middlesbrough – the first of its kind in the UK.
The monopiles are needed to build one the world’s biggest offshore wind plants, on former industrial land at Teesworks, part of regional mayor Ben Houchen’s grand vision for the Tees Valley region to lead on the net zero agenda. The Tees Valley local skills improvement plan (LSIP) includes hydrogen and carbon capture and storage projects as well as offshore wind, creating around 10,000 jobs over the next five years.
Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen
Over 2,000 of those jobs are expected to be created through the monopile factory and its supply chain, with SeAH taking on 14 Hartlepool College apprentices in its first cohort.
Hankey shows me new facilities where students are learning to maintain electric vehicles and explains how many of the college’s 1,000 apprentices (who make up a fifth of its total student population) are in an engineering discipline, with many joining companies in the supply chains of Nissan and Hitachi.
This year the college’s apprenticeships division was rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted. Hankey attributes this to the significant work they put into finding out what employers want.
‘I’m not one to be sat in my office looking at spreadsheets’
For Hankey, developing the character of apprentices is “just as, if not more important, than the qualifications themselves”.
We walk past a new student who isn’t wearing his college badge, and Hankey tells him to make sure he brings it tomorrow. “You’ve got high standards, I recognise that about you – they just dipped a little bit today,” he gently warns him.
Interacting with students – whether that’s as a teacher or wandering in and out of classrooms (something that he encourages his senior leadership team to do regularly) is the part of his job that Hankey enjoys most.
“I’m not one to be sat in my office, looking at spreadsheets.”
He is, though, one of the country’s most visible college principals on social media, airing his views on policy and posting reminders of pro-FE statements made by former cabinet ministers like Gavin Williamson and Boris Johnson to expose how funding has not followed sentiment.
Hartlepool College of Further Education
Working poor
In the century or so after the college opened in 1849, many of its students went on to jobs in the local iron, steel, shipbuilding and marine engineering industries. But much of that is now gone.
Under Thatcher, thousands of steel workers lost their jobs, just a couple of decades after the last ship to be built there set sail.
Industrial decline left its residents feeling neglected. During Brexit, Hartlepool recorded the biggest margin of victory in the region for the Leave campaign – 69.6 per cent of the vote.
Ironically, Hartlepool College’s website still features the EU flag branding for the European Social Fund next to the college’s own logo, despite the fact that this funding has now ceased – a reminder of how EU money was central to boosting skills in the region.
These days, the college hallways are adorned with posters featuring inspiring quotes and pictures of icons such as Bukayo Saka and Marcus Rashford, because Hankey sees positive role models as a way of countering the growing influence of popular figures like Andrew Tate. Last year, six of his students were targeted for criminal and sexual exploitation.
The principal himself is also a source of inspiration for the many college students having to retake their English and maths GCSEs. Enrolment for those courses has almost doubled this year, from 642 to 1,204.
Hankey knows first-hand just how “disheartening” that sense of failure can be. He passed his maths GCSE at the age of 22, after attending night school at Leicester College.
“I tell them, get that GCSE before I got it,” he said.
Education was not seen as a priority for Hankey growing up in Leicester. After his parents separated when he was a young boy, his mum worked hard to put food on the table, which often meant going from a day job cleaning offices to working evenings in a pub.
He sees his own background in many of Hartlepool’s current students; they have parents who work hard but still cannot make ends meet. Last year, around half of the college’s bursary applications came from working families, something they had “never really seen before … it was eye-opening.”
West Hartlepool Technical College, as Hartlepool College was known then, back in 1912
Second chance education
Hankey left school at 16 with the equivalent of three GCSEs and got a warehousing job at WH Smith, sweeping the floor and picking up litter. The initial excitement of earning a wage quickly wore off, and the work became “quite monotonous”.
Fortunately, WH Smith sent him to night school at Leicester College when he was 18, where he took a management course and then went on to Sociology and French A-levels.
“If you’d told me when I first walked through those college doors that I’d still be there four years later, I wouldn’t have believed you. But I really thrived in that environment.”
WH Smith paid for all Hankey’s courses, apart from French, which only cost him £50.
It was a Leicester College lecturer who approached him after an evening class to suggest he went next to university. Hankey drove home with “fireworks going off in [his] head”.
“He thought I’d have an aptitude for it. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. I knew about Oxford and Cambridge, I knew Leicester had a university and a polytechnic, but I didn’t know the difference between them. I just had no clue.”
Leicester College, as it is now
Beverly Hills 90210
Hankey had some “wanderlust” and applied for a business and economics degree at Sunderland University which included a year in Austin, Texas. There, he was placed in “the equivalent of Beverly Hills 90210”, sharing a dorm with a student who had been handed a $30,000 Ford Mustang as a high school graduation gift.
“When I left school, I went down the working men’s club with my grandad and got a pint of bitter!”
Hankey found part-time work as a learning support assistant in maths and statistics classes, which gave him the “bug for teaching”. He spent the next six years teaching at FE colleges in inner-city London, starting with entry-level courses and moving on to teaching marketing and HR.
When the opportunity arose to move back up North as Hartlepool’s assistant principal in 2001, he grabbed it. By 2013, he had climbed the career ladder to principal and chief executive.
Bursary blues
The percentage of Hartlepool’s 16-19 cohort applying for bursaries usually “fluctuates between 40 and 50 per cent”, but last year it was 95 per cent and this year it is gearing up to be even higher. This time last year, the college had received 750 bursary applications. They have already had 850.
Hankey believes poverty is forcing increasing numbers of young people to leave college to take on paid work.
Last year the college’s achievement rate was around 80-85 per cent, whereas normally it is in the nineties.
A big bugbear for Hankey is the legwork that goes into students having to apply for free school meals. For schools, the process is automatic.
“We’ve got a great team who do that, but I’d rather they’re doing something different than processing all that paperwork.”
The bureaucracy means around 100 of those entitled to free school meals go unclaimed because those young people live in “a chaotic family with parents or carers dependent on alcohol or drugs. They can’t get the evidence to us, through no fault of their own.”
The college uses bursary funding for those students, because “we know there’s a need”.
“We just try to spread the jam and make it work.”
Ronnie Bage welfare officer at Hartlepool College with donations for refugees
‘It’s absolutely tough’
The college tops up the standard free school meal allowance from £2.53 per student – which “you’d struggle to feed a growing teenager on” – to £3.50. Some students receive double, “because otherwise they’re probably not going to be eating. It’s absolutely tough.”
Ronnie Bage, the college’s welfare manager and resident knight in shining armour, welcomes me into his office. It is crammed full of donations he has been collecting – bikes, car seats, clothes and toys – to give out to needy students.
When his mother-in-law died six months ago, he brought the “full house” in and “gave it to all the refugees”.
“I know cooking is important in their culture, so I brought slow ovens.”
He always carries spare change in his pocket to hand out to needy students, although Henkey emphasises that “we’ve told him not to”.
“I know, I’m sorry, boss,” Bage responds.
He points to a new student walking past who lives with her nana, along with five siblings.
“None of them have been to school and they don’t have any standards. I fed them all last week – they were lovely then. But now they’re kicking off. It’s trauma that’s causing it.”
The college works with local civil engineering firm Seymour on training up out-of-work adults (including many former prisoners) in groundworks skills, and Bage receives a phone call about a young man who had found himself homeless following a domestic incident. He is hungry and crying, and Bage announces that he will “go over there and give him all the information he needs” to find accommodation.
Another engineering course the college offers helps unemployed students to get jobs in the rail sector within just six weeks.
The students are naturally required to be clean of drugs and alcohol, which Hankey says means the first day on that course is “always quite entertaining” as “people turn up with Ribena bottles. We know what they’re trying to do”.
Bage believes that student behaviour has got worse as council support has fallen away.
“We’re not social workers, but the skills our team has are second to none. We’ve had to upskill ourselves, just to deal with the young people that come through those doors.”
But he is incredibly proud to work for the college, which is “amazing in its facilities and staff”. “We don’t want pity. However, how do we keep pulling people out the river? How do we cope?”
Darren Hankey with a 1940s MG car restored by former students
Councils have attacked the inflexible funding rules of the prime minister’s “short-termist” flagship maths programme after new figures revealed that a third of the money allocated in its first year went unspent.
Multiply, Rishi Sunak’s adult maths education programme, committed to provide £559 million across three financial years to the end of 2024-25 from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
The scheme offers free courses for adults who did not achieve a grade C or above in GCSE maths or an equivalent level 2 qualification.
But, in its first year of delivery, £30.3 million of the £81 million awarded was clawed back by the Department for Education and returned to the Treasury, according to data obtained by local government expert Jack Shaw through a Freedom of Information request.
Councils that returned the largest proportion of their funding told FE Week that this was down to the terms and conditions of the funding: money was handed out over halfway through the 2022-23 financial year and councils were not allowed to roll over any that was unused.
“It’s clearly problematic,” Shaw told FE Week. “Multiply is described as part of the Shared Prosperity Fund, but the non-Multiply element of the SPF was allowed to be rolled over, and this wasn’t.
“The government was meant to allocate this for the financial year of 2022-23, but authorities received it well into the financial year – leaving them somewhere in the region of six months to plan, stand up, deliver and wind down programmes.”
He said the scheme was not unique in having a large amount of underspending in the first year, adding that this reflects a “systemic challenge that Whitehall is too short-termist and doesn’t have an adequate appreciation of what implementation involves”.
Sunak, who launched the Multiply scheme when he was chancellor, used his speech at this week’s Conservative party conference to criticise the political system being heavily focused on “short-term advantage, not long-term success”.
Sue Pember, director for policy and external relations at adult education provider network Holex, said it was “disheartening” to hear about local and combined authorities returning funds but insisted the scheme had been “embraced as a valuable source of funding for numeracy, igniting innovation and reaching thousands of learners”.
She added that over 45,000 people participated in the scheme in its introductory year, which is a “remarkable achievement, especially considering the programme’s rapid launch without development funding or established infrastructures”.
DfE approval delayed Multiply roll-out
Councils complained that the roll-out of the scheme was delayed as their investment plans could not be implemented without approval from the DfE.
A Greater Manchester Combined Authority spokesperson said the department only approved their investment plan in the second half of 2022, “meaning that recruitment, procurement and delivery of the programme was not finalised and implemented until the fourth quarter of the financial year”.
In Greater Manchester, 331 residents were recruited onto the scheme. The combined authority received £4.3 million for the first year and returned £3 million (69 per cent) of it to the Treasury.
Hampshire Country Council said waiting for the DfE to approve its plan, plus procurement time, meant it did not start delivery until January 2023.
A spokesperson said the county council supported 1,607 individuals on Multiply from January to March 2023, of which 998 were parents of children in Hampshire schools.
“We have a number of target groups on Multiply, including local businesses, parents, refugees and those with a lived experience of the criminal justice system,” the spokesperson said, adding that it has supported 1,225 people so far in year two, for which it has received £2 million in funding.
Oxfordshire County Council handed back the largest proportion of its year-one funding, returning £717,555 (92 per cent) of the £778,200 allocated. Its first year consisted of “research and planning” so the money was not required, a spokesperson told FE Week.
Warwickshire Country Council gave back £503,650 (66 per cent) of its £768,922 allocation. A council spokesperson said the funding was used to enrol 400 learners.
Pember said: “Challenges arose from not funding through established adult education budget routes, necessitating some councils and combined authorities having to instigate tender processes. This slowed down the process of student recruitment.”
