A training provider in the north of England has been forced to close some of its centres as a result of an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted report published today.
Aspire-Igen Group Ltd, which to date has run six training centres across Bradford, Leeds, York, Hull and Scarborough, told FE Week that it had closed “some” of its centres and transferred provision to others where “the achievement of learners’ aims can be better supported”.
It is not clear at this stage which centres have shut their doors and whether any staff jobs have been lost.
Ofsted downgraded the provider to the bottom rating following a visit in December and a report published today, reporting issues such as poor attendance, behaviour and teaching. It had previously been rated ‘requires improvement’ in February last year.
The provider said nearly half of its learners had no prior qualifications and multiple barriers to learning, explaining that “it should come as a surprise to no one that some have struggled to re-engage with formal, face-to-face education”.
Aspire-Igen Group confirmed that it had “also struggled to recruit suitably qualified teaching staff of the past year, and have, at times, been forced to rely on temporary staff from employment agencies to maintain face-to-face lessons”.
A spokesperson said leaders had requested an internal review of the report.
“All that said, although we do not agree with some of Ofsted’s comments, we have taken them on board and reshaped our provision, closing some of our centres and transferring provision to one of our other centres where the achievement of learners’ aims can be better supported,” the spokesperson said.
“In future, we aim to focus our delivery in West Yorkshire around our well-equipped Bradford centres, alongside smaller centres in North and East Yorkshire.”
According to inspectors, Aspire-Igen provides education for young people – many of whom have no prior qualifications or who have high needs, with 575 learners on its books at the time of the visit.
Just under half of those were on health and social care and child development programmes, largely at levels 2 and 3.
Others are on entry level, level 1 and level 2 programmes in areas such as construction, motor vehicle, public services, business administration, hair and beauty, learning support, IT, and hospitality and catering.
Inspectors found that “too many learners do not attend their classes frequently enough,” which resulted in gaps in learning or were “not well-enough prepared” for employment or further training or education.
Inspectors reported poor behaviours and attitudes with disruption in lessons.
The report said that learners on health and social care and child development courses benefitted from work placements and useful careers guidance but too many learners in other programmes did not get the same.
Leaders were “too slow to act” on poor teaching, the report said, adding that efforts to improvement quality are “not effective enough”.
Elsewhere, assessments were not used by teachers to identify gaps in students’ knowledge, which resulted in learners not having a good enough understanding of how to improve or falling behind.
The report continued that “teachers do not adequately support learners to improve their English skills,” and added that “while most learners with high needs make progress towards their individual learning goals, too often this is not rapid enough”.
Ofsted said that workshop space at the firm’s Leeds site was not suitable for the construction programmes, as bays were too cramped, and some online teaching resources on the childcare courses were not appropriate for the age of the learners.
It added that while directors had supported leaders’ work to improve attendance, they “do not do enough to tackle the poor quality of education”.
T Level students will be able to sit their core exams and employer-set project in two different assessment windows from September 2023, under new government plans.
Currently students must undertake their core exams, an employer-set project and an occupational specialism assessment to complete a two-year T Level. The first time students sit their core exams, they must do so in the same assessment period as their employer set project, for instance in the summer of their first year, but for retakes for those elements can be done separately.
Ofqual has today launched a consultation on T Level assessments in which it proposes awarding organisations allow students flexibility to sit their core exams and employer set projects separately. For example, students could sit one element in the summer and the other in the autumn.
It said that decision was taken by ministers following feedback from providers, and plans to introduce the new proposals for new starters from September 2023.
Cath Sezen, interim director of education policy at the Association of Colleges, said the move was “sensible” as it “allows greater flexibility for colleges to manage teaching and learning to suit the needs of students and the varied demands of the T Level”.
She added: “In practice, most colleges deliver core in the first year and occupational specialism in the second. Greater flexibility in when students can sit the core assessments makes it possible to deliver some of the occupational specialism material alongside the core in the first year if that works better for the students and the college.
“It also allows students more time to prepare for the core assessment.”
Ofqual’s consultation document said the move “will offer more flexibility for education and training providers and for students, as providers will be able to tailor the sequencing of assessments to their course, and reduce the assessment burden on students”.
The consultation confirmed that students would need to complete all the individual elements of that component at once, for example core exams where there are more than one paper to sit would need to be completed in the same assessment period.
According to Ofqual, if the plans are introduced it will effectively require each of the awarding bodies to offer core assessments twice in each academic year, although this already happens in practice because of re-sits.
Changes will not affect the way core assessments are graded, Ofqual said, which will remain a grade from A* to E.
The document said the current rules requiring the core exams and employer set project to be sat in the same assessment window “reflected the DfE policy that awarding organisations should not break the core into smaller separately assessed and graded units or sub-components,” which was “intended to help support the maintenance of standards”.
But the consultation continued that Ofqual believes the proposed changes “do not materially increase any current risks in relation to the maintenance of standards”.
The proposed change is the latest tweak to the flagship qualifications, which are designed to be the technical equivalents of A-levels.
Earlier this month education secretary Gillian Keegan pushed back the start of four T Levels due to launch this September amid fears they were not yet ready to roll out.
And earlier this year the government changed the work placement rules for T Levels by allowing up to a fifth of hours to be delivered remotely in certain subjects.
Ofqual’s latest consultation is open until 11.45pm on May 15.
Chair, National Association for Managers of Student Services
Start date: March 2023
Concurrent job: Assistant Principal: Students/Customers, Chichester College Group
Interesting fact: Lisa returned to work at Chichester College 20 years after her time there as a student and student president. For the last 10 years, she has spent two weeks every summer volunteering in Kenya with staff and students on education projects
Ciaran Roche
Public Affairs Manager, AELP
Start date: March 2023
Previous job: Public Affairs and Prospect Research Officer, University of Salford
Interesting fact: Ciaran is fascinated by all things history, the older the better. If you want to get him talking ask him about Herodotus or Roman coins; if you want him to keep quiet, give him a book.
Chris Rose
Marketing Director, HIT Training
Start date: March 2023
Previous job: Head of Marketing, HIT Training
Interesting fact: Before working in marketing Chris had a career working and managing in pubs and hotels where he also trained as a barista.
Josh was a talented bricklaying student with dreams of running his own building firm. Then his mother lost one of her part-time jobs, forcing them to request financial support from his school, Hartlepool College of Further Education. Josh – not his real name – got a part-time cash-in-hand job and, after his attendance started waning and he struggled to focus at college, he dropped out altogether.
Hartlepool’s principal, Darren Hankey, says colleges across the country are dealing with students like Josh daily, a claim backed up by our investigation showing how more students have quit college since the cost of living crisis began, with support staff feeling “overwhelmed” amid spiralling demand for their services.
Soaring demand for support
Every one of the 18 colleges responding to a survey for FE Week by the National Association for Managers of Students Services saw demand for their support services rise in the last year, with half seeing demand increase by more than 20 per cent.
Growing demand is piling more pressure on overstretched staff and student welfare budgets. Only 2 of the 63 colleges (3 per cent) that responded to an FE Week freedom of information request saidthey were planning to increase their student services budgets this financial year, with the same percentage cutting the resource and the rest maintaining it for now.
Eddie Playfair, senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges, says colleges are reporting a “massive growth in demand” for support which they are “struggling to keep up with”.
“Whether it’s mental health or financial support, they haven’t been able to grow their support in proportion to rising need,” Playfair said.
Lisa Humphries, the new chair of the National Association for Managers of Student Services (NAMSS), says support services are overwhelmed and believes demand has “tripled, if not more” over the past four years at her members’ colleges.
She points out that the cost of living crisis is just one of several calamities to hit this generation of young people.
“It is the year-on-year build-up of the impacts of the pandemic and mental health issues. We literally have to ask ourselves each day, what support can we put in place that is going to have the most impact?”
How colleges are helping students cope
Rise in drop-outs
More students have dropped out of college since the cost of living crisis began, with five times more students blaming the decision to quit on money worries, our FOI responses show. So far in this academic year, 7 per cent of students have withdrawn. The overall figure was 9 percent last year, and 7 per cent in both 2020-21 and 2019-20.
But 5 per cent of students quitting this year said that they left for financial reasons, compared with 1 per cent in 2021-22 and 2 per cent in 2020-21.
A higher share of those quitting their courses cite getting a job as their main reason: 12 per cent since September and 14 per cent last academic year, compared with 10 per cent in 2020-21 and the preceding year.
Weston College noted some learners withdrawing from its trade provisions because of the “lure of high hourly wages and the increased demand for low-skilled labour”, while Blackpool and The Fylde College told FE Week that many of its students were missing classes due to second jobs.
Hankey is concerned that the rise in students dropping out to work “bakes in inequality”. He says: “It is nearly always in precarious work – zero-hour contracts with no guaranteed income from one week to the next. Ultimately, this is a waste of talent and, I’d imagine, a practice solely taken up by those from poorer backgrounds.”
Universal Credit and Child Benefit rates rise by just over 10 per cent from April, providing some reprieve for cash-strapped families. But it will be too late for Josh.
“The current circumstances have deprived the economy of someone who has had the opportunity to make a greater impact snatched away,” Hankey says.
Darren Hankey, principal of Hartlepool College of Further Education
More bursaries for struggling families
The impact of the cost of living is also evident when it comes to demand for bursaries, with all of NAMSS’s survey respondents seeing a rise in uptake in the past year, and 61 per cent calling the increase “significant”.
Amid soaring inflation, some commented that they were having to increase the household income eligibility threshold to support struggling students and families.
Whereas usually about 60 per cent of Hartlepool’s students apply for funding in any academic year, this year 95 per cent applied, with extra demand coming from students in households where parents are working, Hankey says.
This places “extra burdens” on the college in supporting students and processing bursary applications.
Humphries, who is also associate principal for students at the Chichester College Group of seven colleges, says that normally their students would apply for financial support at the start of their course. This year they have seen around a 10 per cent increase in students “suddenly in financial hardship” applying for bursaries mid-year.
Hartlepool usually uses the government bursary funding for the essentials such as students’ travel to and from college, food, and key curriculum kit, while trying to keep some back for “enrichment activities” for poorer students such as visits to businesses which “can be invaluable”.
But the escalating demand means Hartlepool might have to limit these activities, or not offer them at all.
Playfair says the £90 million government funding that colleges receive for bursaries is insufficient. “Colleges are spending their bursary fund and having to make difficult decisions. Some colleges talk about using other funds to shore up hardship – they’re spending more on transport or food than the allocation they get from government,” he says.
Filling the food gap
Although some students’ families receive Universal Credit, they are often below the threshold for free meals. But colleges are stepping in to fill the gap.
Thirty-nine per cent of NAMSS respondents now provide a foodbank within their college, all of which have seen increased demand, and half of which have seen a significant increase.
Others have established strong links with local foodbanks.
Playfair says that “many, many more cases of students are relying on colleges for all their main meals, and coming into college even if they haven’t got classes because of that”.
Colleges providing foodbanks on campus include City College Plymouth, Abingdon & Witney College and Newark College, which has seen a 60 per cent rise in usage in the past year. Newark also provides free breakfasts every day for students and staff, and food bags of ingredients to take home and cook.
One student there described how she usually only eats when she is at college three days a week, and the food bags, which each contain a recipe card for students to learn how to cook healthy meals, is “something to look forward to and [a chance] to eat properly”.
Newark College student Jake Crane and head Penny Taylor participating in the food waste project
How councils are helping – or not
In some cases, local authorities have stepped in to provide extra support.
Tower Hamlets has been the most generous, earmarking £500,000 this year to re-introduce a version of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), scrapped in England in 2011, to support poorer 16-19-year-old students from its borough.
The council received 1,921 eligible applications for the £400 payment this year.
Playfair believes now would be a good moment for the government to revisit the idea of reintroducing the EMA in England, which is the only part of the UK not to have it.
“As an anti-poverty strategy, it would pump some money into very hard-pressed local economies,” he says.
Some councils have used the household support funding from government, designed to support vulnerable households, to provide meals for college students during the holidays.
But Playfair describes provision as a “postcode lottery”, with some learners receiving food vouchers while others attending the same college but from a different council area go without.
With fuel costs rising, Playfair says some councils are struggling to subsidise students’ public transport fares, so some colleges have stepped in to run them instead.
Weston College offers all learners “50 per cent plus” subsidised bus travel via First Bus, as well as providing its own “bespoke transport services”. But it has still seen some learners quitting “due to the removal of a small number of local bus services by the local authority”.
South Essex College has made Friday a self-directed study day, so that learners can save on transport costs.
Lisa Humphries, chair of the National Association for Managers of Students Services
How the crisis is affecting attendance
For those students who do make it to class, some colleges are finding they are staying on campus for longer because of the free food and warmth on offer.
The NAMSS survey shows that 44 per cent of colleges provide a warm space or open existing heated facilities for longer hours to help students. Even among those colleges who do not, several said that they had accommodated students on non-timetabled days, and that they had generally seen students generally staying at college longer than in the past.
Penny Taylor, head of Newark College, says that since introducing a daily free breakfast club for students and staff, the college has seen a rise in “attendance, retention and punctuality”.
But it’s a mixed picture. Humphries says Chichester’s seven colleges are all seeing drops in attendance as students are forced to work to support their families or take on more caring responsibilities for younger siblings to allow parents to work more.
Like many colleges, Chichester has extended its opening hours for its warm spaces, after seeing more students “hanging around in canteens and common rooms for longer”, says Humphries. “Part of that is because maybe they’re not getting heating at home, or parents are working longer hours and they don’t want to be on their own at home.”
But she warns of the difficulty in paying for staffing costs to cover extended hours, and of colleges’ own rising energy bills.
Of all the colleges that responded to our FOI, the City of Liverpool College reported the highest proportion of drop-outs this year at 17.5 per cent. But it is also taking concerted action to support learners.
Its head of student services. Amanda Parker, says that as “more and more students are working part or even full-time jobs alongside their studies”, the college has adapted timetables as well as keeping its nursery provision and libraries open later. It provides free breakfasts and has expanded free meals to its adult cohort across the week.
Basingstoke College of Technology is responding to rising demand by organising more food parcels, helping students apply to charitable organisations and accompanying them to citizens’ advice meetings.
Playfair believes that going to college is seen as “part of the solution” to the crisis for many learners. “The college becomes more important in their lives because of the support it offers.”
A former president of the National Union of Students (NUS) who was sacked over allegations of antisemitism and breaching union policies has launched formal employment tribunal proceedings, claiming she was subject to “discriminatory conduct”.
Shaima Dallali was elected NUS president in March 2022 and started the role in July, but was dismissed in November last year after the union said there had been “significant breaches” of the union’s policies.
In a statement at the time, the union said there had been an “independent KC-led investigation into allegations of antisemitism,” under the NUS code of conduct.
It is understood to be in relation to social media posts from 2012 which referenced a massacre of Jews in 628.
Dallali later apologised for the post, and called it “unacceptable”, and following her dismissal hired the services of law firm Carter Ruck to fight her case.
That has now escalated into employment tribunal proceedings against the NUS, as well as lodging an appeal to the union directly under its internal appeals procedure.
The NUS says that its process had been “robust”.
A press release from Carter Ruck said that Dallali contends the dismissal amounted to “discriminatory conduct” against her.
It said: “Ms Dallali has deeply held, publicly-articulated beliefs on the right of Palestinians to live free of occupation. As the NUS has belatedly had to accept, Ms Dallali’s pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist beliefs amount to protected beliefs for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. She has publicly articulated those beliefs throughout her adult life, just as she has consistently and repeatedly condemned antisemitism.”
The release said that Dallali “considers that she was disadvantaged at every single stage of that process” in regard to dismissal proceedings.
It said added the lead complainant was consulted on who the investigators would be and the terms of reference for the probe when Dallali was not, and said that she was “repeatedly required to defend or renounce the views expressed by other Muslims, despite never having expressed those views herself”.
Carter Ruck alleged that NUS “refused even to take into account Ms Dallali’s written submissions,” and added that she was not allowed legal representation at her disciplinary hearing despite “the leading counsel who had undertaken the investigation” being allowed to “play a dual role as investigator and presenting officer”.
It continued that the NUS “repeatedly failed to take any steps to facilitate the calling of a number of witnesses whom Ms Dillali had identified as being able to give evidence which was important to her defence” during the disciplinary and appeal.
Carter Ruck’s statement added that Dillali first learned of her dismissal from a news website article shared on Twitter, which included comments from the lead complainant. The statement said “the NUS either leaked, or allowed to be leaked, highly sensitive and clearly confidential information concerning Ms Dillali into the public domain”.
Dallali is seeking declarations and compensation for loss of earnings, stigma damages, personal injury, injury to feelings and aggravated damages on the grounds that she was discriminated against on her protected beliefs, racially discriminated linked to her association with Palestinian and Muslim people, and harassment related to religion or belief.
A spokesperson from the NUS said: “We are confident that the independent KC-led investigations that led to the dismissal of the previous president were conducted in a thorough and fair way – and in the strictest parameters of the law. There is no room for doubt that this process has been as robust as it gets.
“We understand the former president has now submitted employment tribunal proceedings. Our focus is to represent all students and to rebuild NUS to be an inclusive and progressive force for good. We are taking steps to enact our antisemitism action plan and to mobilise students to campaign for a better future.”
Age should not be a barrier to upskilling or retraining and getting the job you want. The Budget highlighted our efforts to build a skills and apprenticeships nation and get more people into rewarding work, including removing barriers for older workers.
As a 53-year-old myself, I know the value of experience in the workplace. In the modern economy, we need skills and real-world experience more than ever before.
That is why we we’ve launched our new ‘returnerships’ initiative to encourage workers over 50 to get back into work and embark on exciting new career ventures.
As well as apprenticeships, many of which are a great fit for more experienced workers, this will be backed by a £34 million boost to our successful skills bootcamps scheme. These provide fully-funded, intensive courses in skills for in-demand sectors like digital and green technology, and we’ve already invested £550 million between 2022 and 2025.
This is fantastic news for adult learners, with 8,000 set to benefit from these transformational courses. We’re bringing together existing skills offers to encourage them to get back into work via a training course. This is about supporting older people with a recognisable path back into work, making sure our existing skills programmes are accessible and provide the skills and support needed to thrive in a job and continue to climb the ladder of opportunity.
This is also great news for the sector. Skills bootcamps, and other adult learning programmes like our free courses for jobs, enable FE providers to broaden their learner base to people who might not otherwise engage with FE.
The Budget also announced an expansion of the Department for Work and Pensions’ sector-based work academy programme (known as SWAP). This is about identifying skills needs in a local area and allocating resources to get people receiving unemployment benefits trained up to fill them.
Work placements arranged through the scheme help businesses to recruit talented workers and get people into rewarding work.
In the Budget, we have also launched a refocussed investment zones programme, aimed at boosting productivity and growth in key areas. Coupled with the huge expansion of free childcare to support parents and enable more of them to return to work, we really are delivering for hard working people across the country.
Our wider skills agenda also continues at pace alongside existing commitments. Earlier in March, I was proud to publish our response on the lifelong loan entitlement (LLE) which will be introduced from 2025. The LLE will transform the student finance system, empowering more people to study throughout their life, even if they have other commitments like childcare, caring or work.
I also recognise that the FE sector is facing financial challenges, and we have made changes to increase the sector’s funding. In the 2021 Spending Review we announced a £1.6 billion uplift in funding for 16-19 provision in 2024-25, compared to 2021-22. Likewise, in the adult education budget we are increasing earnings for providers in non-devolved areas.
We’ve given an additional £53 million of capital funding to FE colleges in 2022/23 to support them to improve their energy efficiency, and a further £150 million to support colleges making adjustments following the ONS reclassification of the sector.
This is on top of the £2.8 billion investment in skills capital that was announced at the last Spending Review to improve the FE estate and support the rollout of Institutes of Technology and new qualifications such as T Levels, with a 10 per cent uplift to T Level funding for the next academic year, as well as £12 million to help deliver crucial industry placements for learners.
I want to reassure the sector that these funding commitments remain in place. This financial support helps the sector to deliver its vital services and I will continue to work with you to understand how we can support you in building a skills and apprenticeships nation.
A Labour government will review functional skills requirements in apprenticeships, the shadow skills minister has said.
However, the party won’t commit to reversing the government’s removal of funding from level 3 qualifications, like BTECs, that overlap with T Levels.
Department for Education rules state that apprentices without a GCSE grade 4 or above in English and/or maths must reach that level 2 standard to achieve their apprenticeship.
Training providers have long complained that the generic curriculum, exam-based assessment and poor funding of the English and maths functional skills courses contribute to the low achievement rate of apprenticeships.
FE Week reported last March that apprentices on standards hit a 51.8 per cent achievement rate in 2020/21, prompting the then skills minister Alex Burghart to announce a new target achievement rate of 67 per cent by 2025.
In an interview with FE Week following his keynote speech at the Annual Apprenticeship Conference earlier this week, Labour’s shadow skills minister, Toby Perkins, said that he shared training providers’ concerns and committed to a review of functional skills if his party wins the next general election.
He said: “Functional skills should be precisely what it says on the tin. It is my view that maths and English skills are very important, but I don’t believe the current functional skills arrangements work. I think they are a reason why there are low completion rates. We will be reviewing the way that works.”
Perkins said reversing or maintaining the Conservative’s policy of defunding BTECs and other level 3 qualifications that overlap with T Levels “just depends on what is going to happen between now and the next election”.
He added that Labour is “not hostile” to T Levels and is “100 per cent in favour” of choice at level 3 for young people. If Labour was in power, Perkins said, it would not be defunding overlapping qualifications.
If Labour does win the next election, which must take place by January 24, 2025, Perkins said his position will be informed by how providers have responded to the level 3 reforms, rather than expecting providers to anticipate Labour’s policy.
If Perkins does become the skills minister in January 2025 (although the election is widely expected to happen sooner) he will not have long before at-risk qualifications lose their funding that September.
“We’re absolutely clear that the path the government is pursuing right now is a mistake. Now, if in 18 months’ time, or in a couple of years, things have gone through and lots of providers have got rid of their BTEC qualifications and people are doing T Levels then obviously we’ll be in a different place to where we are today.
“If we’re proved correct, and that the move purely to T Levels means that lots of students who could be excluded, then, you know, we wouldn’t tolerate that situation carrying on. But it is just difficult to know, given the direction governments are taking, what will the landscape look like by the end of 2024, potentially 2025. You have to look at what you’re inheriting. And I just don’t think that’s knowable at this moment,” he said.
Labour’s skills and growth levy
Last summer, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer announced that he would replace the current apprenticeship levy with a “skills and growth levy”. It would ringfence half of funds raised through the levy for employers to choose to spend on other forms of skills training.
The policy was criticised for being unclear about apprenticeships for smaller businesses, which are currently funded by larger employers not spending their full levy.
Calls to allow for courses other than apprenticeships to be funded through the levy have grown. Even prominent Conservatives like former education ministers Jo Johnson, Anne Milton and Justine Greening have made the case for change.
Johnson has gone on to suggest that the amount employers pay into the levy should be doubled to address chronic underinvestment in training by employers.
Perkins is lukewarm to Johnson’s suggestion to increase employers’ levy bills.
“I’m always enthusiastic about more money for investment in the next generation of skills. Having said that, I’m also very conscious that there are many businesses who are feeling the pinch right now.
“The changes we are proposing at this stage are about flexibility. But in terms of increasing the tax level tax burdens on business, this moment in time, that is not that is not on the on the agenda.”
While the door is closed on generating more revenue from employers, for now, Perkins does want to address falling numbers of apprenticeships at lower levels and to see more opportunities go to younger workers.
“We want to see more levy being spent on entry level apprenticeships. We’re committed to degree apprenticeships, but we want to make sure that there’s an increase in the number of young people doing levels two and three.
“I think there will be further announcements from us in this space.”
Outcomes from apprenticeship end-point assessments (EPA) will feature in official government statistics for the first time from this summer, Ofqual has said, but there will be limits to what is published.
Speaking at the Annual Apprenticeships Conference this week, the regulator’s executive director for vocational and technical qualifications, Catherine Large, told delegates that new data on EPA outcomes will finally be made public.
“Later this year, you’ll see the EPA outcomes data included in our quarterly VTQ statistical release for the first time,” Large said from the main stage.
She used her speech to describe a “healthy market” of over 140 regulated end-point assessment organisations and said the body has completed the transition of external quality assurance (EQA) for 428 apprenticeship standards from other EQA providers, bringing their total to 588. EQA for remaining standards sit with the Office for Students and IfATE, Large said.
“Together we are achieving full market coverage and a new quality bar has been set,” she said.
The marketplace for end-point assessment organisations has grown but it has not yet been possible for apprentices and employers to compare the outcomes of the apprenticeship standards they assess. Ofqual has been collecting this data for four years.
Steve Walker, Ofqual’s associate director for apprenticeships and external quality assurance, gave more detail at the conference on what to expect from the first publication of EPA outcomes data.
The stats release, which is scheduled for “between June and July” will report “end-point assessment delivery figures and outcomes distributions”.
It is anticipated that the data will show how grade profiles for apprenticeship standards vary across different assessment organisations. Users should also be able to use the data to compare outcomes by assessment methods, for example computer-based assessments, paper-based, remote or face to face.
FE Week has since learned that there will be limits on what Ofqual will publish this summer.
Ofqual has said that it will only publish outcome distributions where an apprenticeship standard has five or more end point assessment organisations, and 500 or more total EPAs in one year. This is because “statistics could be misleading if computed for small groups of outcomes”.
This leaves open the possibility that smaller EPA organisations and those where there are only a few delivering against a standard, will have their outcomes data missing from public view.
Ofqual told FE Week that they will “provide different breakdowns of the figures” but was unable to elaborate further at the time FE Week went to press.
High-earners with fat pension pots will benefit from a multi-billion-pound tax giveaway from this week’s budget, as calls for cash to tackle FE teacher shortages were ignored.
Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor of the exchequer, delivered the blow on Wednesday in his first Spring budget. It is also the first since FE and sixth form colleges were reclassified as part of the public sector.
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said: “Once again college leaders will be rightly dismayed that the sector has been overlooked by the chancellor and are wondering why Jeremy Hunt continues to ignore the central role colleges play in delivering the enterprising, highly skilled, high-growth country he wants to see.”
Hunt told the House of Commons that his economic growth plan would tackle labour shortages. However apart from small boosts to promote bootcamps and work academies to lure the over-50s back to employment, he provided no extra funding for skills budgets.
Other enticements for older people included scrapping the lifetime allowance which, from April 2024, will mean people with pension pots worth over £1 million will no longer be heavily taxed on what they draw down on retirement. Labour pledged to reverse the move if it wins the next election and said the “massive tax break” will only benefit the top 1 per cent of pension savers. Among them will be highly paid and long-serving principals, heads and chief executives.
Hunt wants 80,000 more sector-based work academies (SWAPs) across 2023/24 and 2024/25 and an extra 64,000 skills bootcamp places from 2024/25. About £40 million has been allocated to SWAPs over those two years and an extra £40 million will be spent on bootcamps per year.
Extra places on skills programmes are expected to be badged under the government’s “returnerships” scheme (see page 6).
Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute, said that the latest inflation forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) show that even though inflation is coming down, government spending on skills in England will still be £1 billion lower by 2025 than in 2010.
“Higher inflation than expected at the 2021 spending review wipes out £200 million of planned [spending] rises in real terms,” he said.
L&W analysis of skills spending
Jane Hickie, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said: “Additional funding for SWAPs and expanding supported internships are welcome, although relatively modest. While we’re pleased to see investment in extra skills bootcamps, it’s disappointing that this does not start for another 18 months.
“Ultimately, we’re disappointed at the lack of detailed plan to meet the chancellor’s aim to get more people back into work and achieve the stated aim of skills being the catalyst for economic growth.”
Investment zones cash can be spent on skills
Rather than invest in skills through increasing funding rates directly, Hunt’s plan is to allocate funding for local areas to spend in un-ringfenced pots, such as through the new single budgets for West Midlands and Greater Manchester (see page 7) and 12 new “investment zones”.
Dubbed “potential Canary Wharfs”, these zones will have access to “flexible grant funding” worth £80 million over five years to “support skills and incentivise apprenticeships, provide specialist business support and improve local infrastructure, dependent on local requirements”.
The 12 zones are: the proposed East Midlands Mayoral Combined County Authority, Greater Manchester Mayoral Combined Authority, Liverpool City Region Mayoral Combined Authority, the proposed North East Mayoral Combined Authority, South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, Tees Valley Mayoral Combined Authority, West Midlands Mayoral Combined Authority, and West Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority.
Intensive English language courses for Ukrainians
In an extension of the support for Ukrainians fleeing the war who have arrived in the UK under the Ukraine visa schemes, the government is providing £11.5 million for “intensive English language courses and employment support” for up to 10,000 people.
Further details, including additional groups who may be eligible for this support, will be published “in due course”.
Universal credit training flexibility extended again
The government’s “train and progress” policy, originally announced as a six-month pilot in March 2021, increases the amount of time universal credit claimants can study full-time, work-focused courses while still receiving benefits from eight to 12 weeks.
This is extended to 16 weeks in certain subject areas which have skills bootcamps.
The flexibility has been extended again to April 2025.
Additional £3m for supported internships
Hunt also announced that the Department for Education will invest an additional £3 million over the next two years to pilot an expansion of the supported internships programme to young people entitled to SEND support who do not have an EHCP.
