The double-whammy of GCSEs and A levels is hitting our house at the moment and, like many parents around the country, we’re navigating our way beyond UCAS and into student finances. With only months to go before our daughter sets off for university, we were taken aback to hear about the changes to the student loan system.
For students starting a new undergraduate programme in September, the new ‘Plan 5’ loans signify three major changes: loan repayments will now stretch from 30 to 40 years; the starting salary for repayments will drop to £25,000 (down almost £2,500), meaning that repayments start earlier for more graduates; and, on a more positive note, the interest rate has dropped from as much as three per cent above the Retail Prices Index (RPI) to RPI only.
For those on middle to low incomes, this will amount to a lifelong ‘graduate tax’ that may stretch all the way to retirement. For many, it may never be worth paying off the loan early.
It’s unlikely these changes will have an impact on students making post-18 choices this year. UCAS applications from students living in England are down, but not noticeably (2.71 per cent), and what little drop there is can be accounted for more by the fall in mature students than any drop in college-leavers progressing straight to undergraduate course. In any case, these changes have been announced quite late in students’ application journey, and if my own experience is anything to go by, awareness of them and their long-term implications are little-known and even less understood.
In the longer term, some may argue that Plan 5 loans, with a prospect of a lifetime of debt and reduced earnings after tax, present apprenticeship providers with an opportunity to offer an alternative to college-leavers. The obvious option is degree apprenticeships. As these are fully ‘paid for’ via the levy or funding, there’s no cost to the apprentice, who earns a salary just like any other employee.
Presenting options as ‘apprenticeships vs university’ is no longer productive
Likewise, it could be argued that any apprenticeship at a level appropriate to the job role can be offered as an ‘alternative’ route to a degree, and the recent move to promote vacancies and opportunities alongside degrees on the UCAS portal is an interesting step toward this. Although they often lack the equivalent opportunities of personal growth (moving to a new city, making new friends, living independently, and so on), apprenticeships offer a range of other benefits, not least the opportunity to gain a ‘hands-on’ education and to pursue a career as part of a structured learning plan.
But in reality, relying on student finance as a lever to nudge more students towards apprenticeships is unlikely to bear results. Instead, we should recognise that presenting options as “apprenticeships versus university” is simply no longer productive. There are plans to build UCAS points into some apprenticeship standards, and the IfATE’s Beta version of the Occupational Maps is intended to simplify “the relationships between education, qualifications, apprenticeships and occupations”.
Providers should take this as a strong hint that developing career-supporting learner journeys is the way forward. Clearly mapped progression routes from Level 2 to Level 7 that may or may not include degree apprenticeships will draw young people keen to avoid debt and who have a career in mind. Presenting employers with long-term CPD solutions will also encourage stronger buy-in from managers and decision makers.
It has always been the case that providers should aim to attend career fairs at local schools and colleges to promote apprenticeships and meet potential candidates face-to-face. However, this is a resource-heavy activity. In my experience, few providers utilise their best advocates – local employers and apprentices – to support these activities. Providers who can coordinate visits and workshops from ‘near-peer’ apprentices and their employers will quickly build partnerships with schools and colleges to promote apprenticeships directly to students. Some of this activity could even be mapped to outcomes for apprentices currently on-programme.
The revised student loans are closer to a ‘learner contribution’ system and should probably be labelled as such; ‘learn now, pay later’ versus ‘earn as you learn’. They won’t put students off going to university, but they may cause more to re-think the route they take to get there.
Plugging the participation gap in the labour market is one of the highest priorities for government and the number one issue on the list for many employers struggling to fill vacancies. Whether it’s ‘the great resignation’, the effects of a post-pandemic health backlog, the impact of Brexit restrictions or a combination of all three, it’s in all of our interests to ensure those who want to work are able to and that the work on offer is fulfilling and financially viable.
Most commentary on the issue, as reflected in the major announcements in the Chancellor’s spring budget, has focused on how people who have left the labour market can be supported or enticed to return, for example by better integrating work and health support in Workwell Partnerships or through ‘returnerships’ for the over 50s.
What this overlooks is that, for years before the current crisis, we were failing adequately to support tens of thousands of people who were already struggling to find work, and that those people are now likely to be further back in the queue for support. This will have a particular impact on young people who have the added disadvantage of a lack of work experience on their CV.
The fact that 1.7 million people who are currently not working say they would like to while government programmes designed to address that gap (including traineeships, apprenticeships and the Restart scheme) are underspending suggests that we may be looking in the wrong place for the answer.
Unpalatable though it may be for some policymakers and politicians, one place we could look is Europe – or at least to the programmes that until recently were supported by the European Social Fund. One of these is Building Better Opportunities (BBO), a national programme of LEP-level interventions co-financed by the National Lottery Community Fund.
There are important lessons for commissioning employability programmes
The programme was specifically designed to target those with most barriers to employment and placed as much emphasis on building resilience as it did on acquiring qualifications and finding work. The programme began in 2016 and will wind up this year having engaged more than 150,000 people of all ages and abilities, often through partnerships led by voluntary-sector organisations.
Groundwork has been involved in BBO as a programme lead and a delivery organisation. We have with more than 12,000 people across in 11 areas of England – from young people leaving care to refugees and those with long-term health conditions. A recent analysis drawing the lessons from these programmes points to a number of common ingredients that have contributed to successful outcomes.
What connects them all is the centrality of coaching to the delivery model – a trusted keyworker able to provide support and to listen when that’s what’s needed, but also prepared to push and challenge when the time is right. This is nothing unusual, but what made BBO so effective was the ability to deploy this resource in the context of a (relatively) long-term, (relatively) well-resourced programme, meaning coaches could afford to be patient and properly tailor their approach.
Moreover, in each area coaches were connected into a partnership of locally-based organisations. This means they were able to draw on a wider infrastructure to help with barriers such as homelessness but also identify opportunities. For example, one programme helped young people find their voice by securing time in a local music studio.
Few will lament the bureaucracy and stifling audit regimes that accompanied this and other ESF-funded programmes. However, there are important lessons to be learned about what works that should be applied to the way our sector prepares young people for adult life and the way in which skills and employability programmes are designed and commissioned.
The government recently announced a relaxation of the rules around the UK Shared Prosperity Fund in an attempt to bring forward more proposals to support skills and employability. This was too late in the day to make an appreciable difference to plans in development, but it does mean that these bids should be prioritised next time around.
Local authorities should engage meaningfully with colleges and training providers in preparing their proposals, which can only be strengthened by the lessons learned from programmes such as BBO.
Previous job: Deputy Principal, Cambridge Regional College
Interesting fact: Michelle is a former national sailing champion whose love of the water and exploring new places is well-documented in her travel blog. When she’s not off exploring, Michelle enjoys spending time relaxing with her family.
Simon Jordan
Principal & Chief Executive, Oldham College
Start date: Summer 2023
Previous job: Deputy Principal, Burnley College
Interesting fact: Simon is a keen runner who has completed several marathons and ultra marathons. The furthest of these was a 100-mile run which he achieved in under 24 hours.
Chris Claydon has a biography better suited to James Bond than to the chief executive of a training provider for building service engineers.
He has flown Apache military helicopters, briefed cabinet ministers on evacuations from the Arab Spring uprisings, and helped save lives by designing countermeasures to the roadside bombs used in Afghanistan. Oh, and he used to live in a castle.
That all happened in his previous life in the British Army, which he left in 2015 at the age of 50. Claydon spent the next seven years as chief executive of The Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB), the employer-led skills body for the engineering and construction workforce, where he honed his corporate skills and gleaned intelligence on what employers say they want.
That came in useful for his next and current role leading JTL, a charity providing advanced apprenticeships in electrical installation, engineering maintenance and mechanical engineering services.
An education, not skills system
On his first day at JTL in February, Claydon was keen to meet apprentices at the heart of the organisation. He visited the site of the refit of Deutsche Bank’s new London headquarters to meet some adult apprentices – one of whom, he recalls, was “on track to earn £75,000 this year”.
I express some astonishment at this figure.
“Go to the car park of any apprentice training centre where you’ve got electricians or welders, especially towards the end of their apprenticeship, and look at the cars knocking around,” he says. “These apprentices are in well-paid jobs.”
Claydon believes “many people” in the UK “do not understand” just how much such skilled labour jobs can pay. He blames this partly on schools.
When Claydon asks apprentices what careers advice they got at school, a “woefully low” number say their teachers encouraged them to do an apprenticeship.
He believes “the DfE is still very much focused on education, not skills. Now, [education secretary] Gillian Keegan and [skills minister] Robert Halfon do have a good skills focus, so maybe things will change. But, at the moment, the focus is still around schools.”
Another department name change might help matters. Claydon has suggested to DfE officials that they should “get into their cellars” where a sign might be lurking for the former Department for Education and Skill’ (which became defunct in 2007).
“I told them they could dust it off and reuse it… But they didn’t like even a joking assessment.”
Claydon also questions whether T Levels are the right solution for the country. While “we’ve not seen sufficient numbers to really understand whether it is the answer to what we need”, his concern is that they are “pitched at quite a high level”.
Chris Claydon
Explosive success
I ask Claydon whether he would have considered studying T Levels, had they been around when he was at school? The chief executive tells me not to ask him about his education. “People develop at different ages, let’s put it that way.”
Claydon joined the army at 18, starting in infantry roles including patrolling the streets of Northern Ireland. He later applied to become a helicopter pilot in the Army Air Corps, starting on the Gazelle and the Lynx before learning to fly the Apache attack – described by some as a “flying tank”.
But Claydon was keen to fly high in other ways in his career and grasped the opportunity to spend five years working for the Ministry of Defence on strategy. During the Arab Spring, he worked with the Cabinet Office, briefing ministers on plans to extract UK nationals from countries in conflict.
He also worked on projects around how to establish a presence in the Middle East and was very closely involved in a scheme to base the UK military east of Suez for the first time since the 1960s. It involved establishing a seaborne mine countermeasure force to provide guarantees of access to the Gulf.
Another job in which Claydon was very heavily involved was designing countermeasures to the improvised explosive devices that were killing and injuring so many soldiers in Afghanistan at the time. The devices, also known as roadside bombs, were being used “extensively and effectively” and it was “quite a challenge designing systems to overcome that threat”.
Of all his jobs in the military, this was the one that Claydon gained “most satisfaction” from because it resulted in casualty figures dropping.
King of the castle
But his final stint before leaving the military was perhaps even more impressive. During the day, he commanded a brigade of 4,500 across sites in the UK and South East Asia, delivering security, crisis response, training, logistics and infrastructure support to military forces and civilian emergency services. In his “evening and weekend job, quite bizarrely”, he was deputy constable of Dover Castle.
His role involved supporting the constable – at the time, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Boyce. Notable former constables include Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Sir Winston Churchill during the Second World War.
Claydon’s children enjoyed making the most of castle life when they came to visit him there, and he admits that “once the gates had closed, the whole castle was yours. For games, go-karting and teaching children to drive, it was wonderful.
Claydon has the “dubious distinction” of being the last full-time resident of Dover Castle in its 850-year history after cost-cutting measures saw the position disposed of. He insists, with a smile, that this has nothing to do with any parties he threw, and was “definitely not because I destroyed a piece of English Heritage property”.
Civilian life
Claydon now lives in a house (“not a castle”) in Hammersmith. The job leading ECITB piqued his interest because it involved “pulling together a workforce to deliver critical national infrastructure”, something he considers vital for the country.
“It’s not making the plastic toy that goes into a happy meal. People who do that [infrastructure] work should feel absolutely motivated and proud they are doing important things.”
But the shrinking domestic skilled labour market since Brexit, combined with a tight global market – “we’re all on the same timetable to net zero, everyone’s starting to build this infrastructure” – has created a “perfect storm” for the engineering and construction industry.
One of the biggest challenges is finding people to work on the country’s first nuclear power station to be built for a generation, Hinkley Point C in Somerset. The site’s owner EDF Energy is stumping up £24 million for 30,000 new training places for electricians, welders and pipe installers.
There is also HS2, which also requires thousands of electricians to lay cables.
At the moment, a contractor will only take on apprentices when the order book is filled. But it takes four years to train an apprentice electrician, for example.
“Unless you’ve got a lot of spare capacity in the system, you have this constant tension between, ‘I need it now’ and ‘But I can only get it when I’m paying for it’.”
Claydon believes the solution for large infrastructure projects is to develop a model of “forward funding”, to “pump prime” the system of skills provision. He provides the example of a £500 million project for carbon capture in Teesside.
If those funding the project could provide £5 million to train local people up in advance in the core skills required of welding, pipe fitting and electrics, while some may go on to work for other companies by the time the project comes to fruition, at least those skills would be “more readily accessible to meet the requirements”.
On a project of that size, Claydon sees £5 million as “nothing”, and the investors will have “helped de-risk the project”.
“It’s hitting their ESG [environmental, social, governance] goals, so there’s a win-win. But how you persuade people is the challenge.”
But that is “unfinished business”, which he has left to his successor at ECITB.
Military skills
Claydon believes the soft skills he learnt in the military around “conflict resolution” and “tact and diplomacy” have been invaluable in his roles since. He recalls a position he undertook at the United Nations headquarters in Sierra Leone, which was a “tricky juggling act between the military and civilian mission, and bringing people together to reach agreements on issues which could really scale out of control if you weren’t careful”.
The importance of training – now central to his role – was also intrinsic to his role as a helicopter pilot, where he was “constantly training and being evaluated”.
While in the military “you are all of one company – you define a mission and work towards it” – but being chief executive of a training provider involves “negotiating and navigating between people with different strategies and agendas. It’s harder to get a more coherent line going forward around issues.”
Electric dreams to be realised
JTL, graded ‘good’ by Ofsted at its last inspection in 2017, is currently training around 8,500 apprentices and taking on around 2,300 new starters this year. That “inevitably places strain on the system” by requiring more qualified engineers to teach and assess.
“It’s that age-old conundrum, that the trainer gets paid less than the site operative. But we need the site operative to become the trainer. You can see the fragilities in that system.”
But, while there are “good numbers” of apprentices signing up, it is “not going to be enough” to meet the economy’s needs. He also believes there is a “north-south divide” in the apprenticeships market, with “people understanding the value of skilled jobs in the north” but a “wider, more competent and competitive jobs market” down south.
“You generally get more applicants further north. So you are competing harder in the south, where there are very high-demand areas.”
JTL’s electrical apprentices are the ones at the forefront of the country’s net zero ambitions. But Claydon believes the industry needs to do more to promote its role in saving the planet to the next generation in order to attract new recruits.
“Joining photovoltaic cells and bringing solar farms on stream, smart housing and all those smart technologies saving energy in the commercial environment, installing offshore wind turbines – all of these things are contributing to reducing our carbon emissions. We’re playing a vital role on that journey.”
The boss of one of England’s largest training providers has stepped down with immediate effect.
Babington Business College confirmed today that chief executive David Marsh has left the company after almost five years at the helm.
A message to stakeholders, seen by FE Week, said Marsh’s decision to leave was due to “personal reasons”. Companies House shows he set up his own consultancy firm last week.
Marsh’s departure comes months after Babington was sold by RJD Partners in December 2022 to Unigestion, a Switzerland-based private equity firm.
A spokesperson for Babington said its board of directors is “actively working to appoint a new chief executive”.
The company’s “executive committee” members – chief operating officer Jen Bramley, chief learning officer Rachel Kay, and chief financial officer Steve McMullan – will take over the day-to-day leadership of the organisation.
Marsh is a recent former board member of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers and a co-founder of the St Martin’s Group – another membership body for training providers.
He started his career in education as a teacher before spending almost six years at Babcock International Group where he was a director in the company’s training business.
He then spent two years as head of academies at British Gas before becoming managing director of Capita’s apprenticeship and training business, and then moving to Babington in October 2018.
Babington, which was founded almost 50 years ago, is currently rated ‘good’ by Ofsted and trains thousands of apprentices and adult learners each year in areas like accountancy, administration, management and employability skills.
The provider acquired the apprenticeships division of PeoplePlus, which had described that part of its business as “loss-making”, in 2020. Babington then shot up to the fifth biggest provider in terms of apprenticeship starts in England in 2021/22, recording 4,420 according to government data.
Babington is yet to file accounts for 2022, but its financial statements for 2021 show turnover reached £26.1 million in 2021 with a profit after tax of £3.4 million. However, Babington’s holding company, Project Sinatra Topco Ltd – now called Babington Managed Services Topco Ltd – showed a loss of £2.5 million in the same year.
Leaders at a sixth form college who announced “abrupt” plans to shut this summer and leave dozens of students in limbo have bowed to pressure and committed to delaying closure by a year, admitting they “got it wrong”.
Queen Alexandra Sixth Form College in Wallsend said this week that it would close at the end of the academic year because plummeting student numbers over the last three years had left it “no longer financially viable”.
It left 49 AS students in the first year of their A-levels scrambling to sort provision for next year. But following outcry from students, parents, Tynemouth MP Alan Campbell and the University and College Union, the decision has been postponed by a year.
The sixth form, which is part of the Tyne Coast College group, has now committed to seeing through the first-year students and instead close in July 2024.
Following a crisis meeting between chief executive Lindsey Whiterod and the chair of governors this morning, Whiterod admitted it had been the wrong call to close so hastily.
“The response to our announcement to cease A-level provision has been overwhelming. It is clear that the students absolutely love studying at the QA and the response from parents, students and previous students has been incredible. The chair and I have reflected on our decision and, simply put, we got it wrong,” Whiterod explained.
“Myself and the chair can only apologise for the stress that this has created to parents, students, teaching and support staff who I must personally commend and thank for how well they have carried on supporting our learners after the initial announcement.”
The college said that it wanted to make the announcement as soon as possible to minimise disruption to students preparing for exams.
The initial announcement this week had put 11 members of staff at risk of losing their jobs, and an application process of voluntary redundancy had already begun, as well as endeavours to finds alternative roles for staff under threat.
Whiterod confirmed the result of the fresh announcement will “not create efficiencies elsewhere”.
Staff at the college had been hastily attempting to find alternative sites for the first-year students to complete their studies for next year, which had included forming individualised spreadsheets for students based on what they were studying and where they could be matched, and plans to sort one-to-one meetings to discuss options.
Today’s update means that will no longer be necessary.
On Thursday, the college said it made the announcement of the impending closure at the earliest opportunity, but it attracted widespread ire, including from Tynemouth MP Alan Campbell who questioned how “abruptly” the decision had been made.
“I fully share the concerns that have been raised with me and have today been in contact with the principal of Tyne Coast College, the local authority and the minister of state for higher education to see what can be done to address this issue,” he said before the latest announcement.
UCU regional support official Jon Bryan added: “Staff, students and the local community are rightly furious that their local sixth form college will no longer cater to A-level students. Ending A-level provision would see young people in Wallsend lose key educational opportunities and the decision must be reversed.”
In its original announcement, a spokesperson for Tyne Coast College said it was a “challenging” time for the sector, with the decision coming after a review of its curriculum.
“Despite trying to grow the provision with new A-level options in the 2022/23 academic year, sadly we did not see growth,” the spokesperson added.
It is understood the sixth form currently has 49 AS-level students and 66 second-year students. FE Week has asked the college to clarify how much its student numbers have declined by in the last few years.
Tyne Coast College accounts for 2021/22 indicated a £3.4 million deficit for the year before other gains and losses, however £2.5 million of that was because of changes to the Tyne and Wear local government pension scheme.
Its adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) was reported at £1.3 million.
Tyne Coast College principal Lindsey Whiterod had previously been a national leader in FE up to March last year – a programme that sits alongside the FE commissioner’s office who work with senior leaders to provide strategic mentoring and advice on improvement plans for the sector.
A rail engineering training provider is set to close after a combined authority suddenly terminated its adult education contract amid a dispute over “unsatisfactory” funding claims.
GNR Training has been left effectively bankrupt after Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA) stopped paying the provider in February after accusations of “serious non-compliance” with its rules were made.
But GNR, a family-run business that delivers short adult-education courses, has strongly refuted the authority’s allegations and even claims the provider has itself been underpaid by officials over the past three years.
GNR is now attempting to rally its local MP to intervene in what it claims to be a “stitch-up” situation in which it was “set up to fail”.
More than 30 rail engineering learners have been left in limbo as a result of the stand-off.
‘Unsatisfactory’ use of funds
CPCA began contracting with GNR in the 2020/21 academic year and entered into a direct contract worth £82,000, having spent a few years providing freelance teaching for other providers.
The Sheffield-based firm opened a new training centre in Peterborough and delivered a fresh contract the following year worth £477,000 in 2021/22, before securing a five-year contract, which began in August 2022, worth millions.
It delivered a 21-week level 3 diploma in engineering technology, as well as previously teaching a 12-week level 2 diploma in rail engineering, but the rug was pulled when CPCA terminated the agreement in April.
The termination followed an audit of GNR, commissioned by CPCA and carried out by Mazars, between September 2022 and the end of January 2023, which concluded there had been an “unsatisfactory use of funds”.
The audit report, seen by FE Week, said that there was £95,862.17 overpaid by CPCA for National Skills Fund (NSF) money, with just over £53,000 in adult education budget cash claimed over the agreed contract value by GNR.
The breach of contract notice said that achievement payments had been claimed in relation to free courses for jobs (part of the NSF), “without any evidence to support such claims”.
CPCA has now invoiced GNR for £84,539 to recover free courses for jobs funding.
In addition, CPCA said that GNR had failed to notify the authority of a change in circumstances, namely a suspension of direct claim status (DCS). DCS allows centres to claim certification of learners without waiting for external quality assurance.
The agreed contract for 2021/22 totalled £477,640, but GNR claimed £529,120 on its individualised learner record.
In a response to a Freedom of Information request by GNR, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough said: “The combined authority will only pay up to the contract value, irrespective of claims made via the ILR, unless an agreement has been reached to vary and increase the contract value.”
‘Set up to fail’
But GNR has hit back at the authority, claiming that it has been underpaid to the tune of about £110,000.
The provider asserted that the contract value did not account for CPCA uplift payments for learners.
GNR claims those uplifts included a flat £600 per learner because they were considered required skills for the area, as well as area and disadvantage uplifts that were based on learners’ circumstances and calculated as a multiplier.
GNR claimed it was “set up to fail” because CPCA had set a target number of learners that, if achieved, would exceed the contract value in 2021/22.
Rachael Bull from GNR told FE Week: “The need for rail people is phenomenal, it is off the chart. Now there is a training company that is wiped off the face of the planet – that was training good engineers that had jobs to go to – the industry as a whole suffers.”
GNR disputed CPCA’s claims that there was no evidence for free courses for jobs learners, saying that it did provide evidence and was unclear why it was not accepted.
Furthermore, internal quality assurance documents between the awarding body EAL and GNR, seen by FE Week, suggested GNR did have DCS for its level 3 offering.
The provider has also contested the audit findings. It said the NSF overpayment was because CPCA believed that, without DCS, the certificates were void and therefore claiming for learners who had not completed. On the AEB claim, GNR insisted that a variation in the contract agreed by the authority wasn’t taken into consideration.
A GNR FOI request also showed that only about £37,000 of the £94,368.91 in completion payments had actually been paid by CPCA.
Bull said the firm has not received payment since February and, had it known of an intent to cease its contract, could have completed learners and found additional contracts elsewhere.
Multiple attempts to see reconciled accounts to determine which completions had been paid for had allegedly fallen on deaf ears.
She added: “If they [CPCA] had concerns about our performance, why did they waste more taxpayer money on giving us a prime contract only to end it in four months and strand the learners?”
Rallying support
GNR contacted the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) in a bid to investigate, but said the ESFA confirmed the matter was for CPCA to deal with.
Peterborough MP Paul Bristow did not respond to FE Week’s requests for comment.
CPCA said it was unable to comment as the GNR case was an “ongoing matter”.
GNR and CPCA are due to meet today (Friday) to further discuss the dispute.
Twenty “elite” apprentices and students from the UK will head to Poland this autumn to compete against the best young trades people Europe has to offer at the EuroSkills finals.
Talented UK students in disciplines such as hairdressing, joinery, cooking, restaurant service, plumbing and web development will go up against their European peers in Gdańsk from September 5 to 9, with the competition encompassing 600 young learners from 32 member countries.
Following top ten positions from UK entrants in last year’s WorldSkills finals, Team UK organisers confirmed the UK will be entering the digital construction and robot systems integration categories for the European competition for the first time.
Lucy Yelland, a Siemens apprentice who will represent Team UK in mechatronics, said: “The training so far has been tough but really enjoyable.”
Ben Love, who is also an apprentice with Siemens and competing in the mechatronics category, added: “As an apprentice, I never thought I would be saying that I would be representing the UK in Europe.”
Tyler Lewis – a student at Harrow, Richmond and Uxbridge Colleges – won gold in the national finals, and said: “Now to be able to say I’m representing the UK in Europe is just the best feeling. For now, I’m focused on preparing for the competition as I know the standard will be really high.”
Competitors, who come from all four nations of the UK, have been through a thorough selection process that included taking part in the national competitions. They will be eyeing a place on the WorldSkills finals stage, set to take place in France next year.
Event organisers said they expect more than 100,000 spectators from Poland and across Europe to watch the EuroSkills events, after disrupted years caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ben Blackledge, interim chief executive at WorldSkills UK, said it would provide a “valuable mechanism” in which to benchmark students’ skills against European standards.
“This will be a life-enhancing opportunity for these remarkable young people who will be competing as Team UK. They are the embodiment not only of the characteristics that we should aspire for in a young workforce, but for the UK Government’s ambitions for global Britain too,” Blackledge said.
“They are leaders of their generation – and will inspire many more to walk in their footsteps. I wish them the best of luck.”
Teija Ripattila, chair of the board for WorldSkills Europe, said the event will showcase “the highest standards of excellence which motivates more young people to develop technical and vocational skills”.
Robert Halfon, the minister for skills, apprenticeships and higher education, said EuroSkills helped learners achieve their career goals.
He added: “Celebrating Britain’s excellence in skills isn’t just good for business and the economy, it makes a real difference to how vocational education and apprenticeships are perceived, raise their status and support our brilliant further education sector.”
People are spending billions of pounds on their own learning – more than the government or employers – according to new research.
Analysis published today by Learning and Work Institute claims that learners invest £7.3 billion of their own money and £55 billion worth of their own time in education each year – well in excess of the £42 billion annual investment by employers, and the £6.8 billion in tax reliefs and learning provision by the government.
It equates to £323 per learner studying an average 223 hours annually, the report said.
The research also exposed the postcode lottery of participation in learning, due to the age and pre-existing qualifications of the population. Participation in London was highest at 56 per cent compared to 36 per cent in the south east.
The report noted that learning on apps such as Duolingo and online provision such as FutureLearn had risen in recent years, driven by technology and people’s preferences, with the training sector needing to adapt to the convenience those offer.
Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute, said the current landscape was “too patchy” but both a mix of traditional classroom learning and flexible online options would be needed.
“One of the biggest barriers to learning that we see regularly is fitting learning around the work and home life, and these sorts of things can really help to do that,” he said.
“I think what we are arguing for really is to have different ways into learning to better suit people. Sometimes that is classroom-based, traditionally scheduled, sometimes it is an app, sometimes it is a mix of the two.”
Data on individual investment in education was an estimate taken from the institute’s adult participation in learning survey, in which respondents were asked how much they had paid for the training and the number of hours per week.
However, it was noted that some participants might have included things such as university tuition fees while others did not.
The report has called for new learning accounts for all adults, with a £5,000 contribution to course fees, and enhanced maintenance support so that out-of-work adults can study full-time for up to 12 months rather than 12 weeks as is currently allowed on the Department for Work and Pensions’ Train and Progress scheme.
The report said that the current landscape of government support, such as advanced learner loans and the planned lifetime loan entitlement due to launch in 2025, is too complicated, and called for a “lifelong learning entitlement” to effectively bring different support streams under one umbrella.
In addition, the Learning and Work Institute wants the right to request time to train for those in work to be extended. Currently, only employees in organisations with 250 or more staff members have a right to request time to train, and only for learning directly linked to their job.
The institute wants that to be extended to all learners, cover all accredited learning and to become a right to train, not just a right to request, for larger employers.
On its proposals for a one-year unpaid career break, the institute said people would remain employed but be entitled to a maintenance loan from the government, but would not be paid by their employer during that time to reduce the burden on employers.
Evans said not providing flexibility for learning “holds back” the economy as well as the life chances and wellbeing of adults, explaining that the investment in learning from individuals is “underplayed”.
He added: “Our analysis shows huge inequalities between demographic groups and geographic areas that are holding us all back. Part of the reason is that policy doesn’t sufficiently support people to learn. We need much better support with the costs of learning, good-quality careers advice, and joined-up national and local action to promote learning.”
A spokesperson from the Department for Education said: “We are boosting investment in skills by £3.8 billion over this parliament – working with employers to create more apprenticeships, offering more skills bootcamps and creating a new lifelong loan entitlement from 2025 to make it easier for people to learn throughout their lifetime.
