Second chance for firms that failed to join flexi-job apprenticeship register

Education chiefs will reconsider failed bids to join the register of flexi-job apprenticeship agencies in an attempt to bolster its numbers.

The register was updated last month with 16 new names – but this was just over half the number of organisations that had applied to join.

In an update this week, the Department for Education said that any organisation which applied in September 2022 but was rejected solely on financial health grounds would be reconsidered against “an additional test of sustainability”.

The department will contact organisations directly and there will be no need for the submission of additional information.

The DfE’s offer is open only to applicants in the last window and not those who failed with original bids at its launch in February 2022.

The department explained that its existing financial health assessment will remain in place, but a new sustainability assessment will also be carried out.

Organisations that failed to meet the financial health assessment criteria in their application but passed all other aspects – and can demonstrate they pass the new sustainability criteria – will be able to join the register.

The current financial health assessments require the submission of statements such as full accounts, end of period profit and loss accounts and balance sheet and a breakdown of sums with creditors.

A financial health grade is then issued based on profitability, solvency and debt ratio, with one of four grades given – outstanding, good, satisfactory or inadequate.

The guidance does not yet make clear what the new sustainability criteria will contain.

However, the DfE confirmed that providers accepted based on the sustainability measure will be subject to “a higher degree of oversight by the DfE”.

Flexi-job apprenticeship agencies aim to support apprenticeship delivery in sectors with shorter-term working models, such as construction or the creative arts, where employment for a year is not possible and project-based employment is the norm.

The agencies act as an anchor for those apprentices and the administration work needed for them, but apprentices move among employers through the course of their apprenticeship.

The register was launched in February last year with 15 organisations – 11 of which had also received grant funding – although two dropped out and another joined by the autumn.

The DfE said it had received around 30 applications for its latest window, confirming in January that 16 new names have joined the register. All joined without grant funding.

The DfE committed £5 million in grant funding to those 10 agencies at the original launch in 2021/22 and 2022/23, with a target of 1,500 apprentices recruited in the initial roll-out.

The department said it was continuing to see demand from employers that wished to join the register in sectors which face barriers to traditional apprenticeship models. Target numbers for the register are not set.

In the last application window, the DfE said it was keen to try the flexi-job apprenticeship model in sectors not previously included. Among the additions were organisations in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries.

The DfE added that the new sustainability assessment will be incorporated into the evaluation checks for future application windows to join the register.

Concern has previously been raised over whether organisations which received grant funding would be able to remain on the register once their grant deals expire at the end of this month.

One of those to raise questions, ScreenSkills, explained that film and TV firms already paid the apprenticeship levy, apprentice wages and associated on-costs. It would therefore not be realistic to expect them to provide funding for a support service for flexi-job apprenticeships once government grants cease, it said.

One of the two organisations to drop out early told FE Week that a lack of take-up was behind its decision to come off the register.

Taxpayers’ £10m hit over ‘careers queen’s’ bust empire

A renowned entrepreneur has left the taxpayer at least £10 million out of pocket after she closed her chain of training providers amid a government investigation.

Angela Middleton, a media commentator and self-proclaimed “careers queen” who was awarded an MBE in 2018 for her services to apprenticeships and business, blamed the “devastating impact of Covid-19” when she shut her four skills training companies in December 2020.

But FE Week understands the decision came after the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s counter-fraud and investigation team probed how multiple contracts were used across the firms.

After two years of investigating, the ESFA has now submitted a £10.1 million clawback claim to the liquidators of Middleton’s biggest provider, Astute Minds Ltd, according to a new statement of affairs document.

The agency is also seeking £63,000 from another one of her firms, FNTC Training and Consultancy Limited.

Investigations continue into her best-known provider, MiddletonMurray, where the total claim from the agency remains “uncertain”, according to liquidators at FRP Advisory Trading Ltd. No claim has been made to date to Middleton’s other provider, The Teaching and Learning Group.

However, the liquidators’ report states there “will not be sufficient funds available” to pay unsecured creditors, which the ESFA is classed as. It means the government will never receive the funding back from Middleton’s providers.

The agency’s investigation is only mentioned briefly in the statement of affairs. The report said the liquidators were in discussions with company directors about the OneFile apprenticeship database that held learner records, which the ESFA “required access to so that they could continue their investigations”.

The ESFA declined to comment on its investigation findings.

Middleton has not responded to requests for comment but, at the point of closure in 2020, a spokesperson for her told FE Week that the ESFA’s investigation was a “standard audit looking at qualification achievement rates”.

The Insolvency Service, which investigates the behaviour of directors if their company becomes insolvent, has concluded its investigation into Middleton and decided there will be no disqualification proceedings.

Middleton’s four companies delivered a mix of FE loan-funded provision, non-levy apprenticeships, adult education budget courses, traineeships and 16 to 18 study programmes.

Astute Minds was judged as ‘good’ by Ofsted in 2017. It was one of the government’s biggest traineeship providers, delivering 2,660 starts on the pre-employability programme between 2014/15 and 2019/20.

MiddletonMurray was last inspected by Ofsted in 2016 and was graded as ‘good’ for its provision to around 287 learners, while FNTC Training and Consultancy received the same grade in the same year.

In a new provider monitoring report published in May 2019, the Teaching and Learning Group, was found to be making ‘insufficient progress’ in its provision to 24 apprentices.

Middleton states on her website that she appears on big-name media outlets like Sky News and in the Daily Telegraph, and has links to several high-profile politicians.

Skills minister Robert Halfon wrote the foreword to her book, Bridge That Gap!: How Schools Can Help Students Get Their First Job and Build The Career They Want, while former Home Office minister James Brokenshire’s favourable review of her earlier book, How To Get Your First Job And Get The Career You Want, is featured on its Amazon page.

Middleton is also a fitness guru who founded a company called YourBodyMeansBusiness and The Limitless Group, the latter of which provides corporate solutions for a “healthier, age-agnostic, more resilient workforce as a business asset”.

‘Stunned’ businessman vows to walk away from FE after ‘inadequate’ verdict

A businessman has vowed never to re-enter the FE training market if his apprenticeship provider’s contract is terminated following an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted assessment that left him “stunned”.

Wildes Education has operated as a subcontractor for over a decade and began direct delivery in 2018, training apprentices in adult care, hospitality and catering, hairdressing and administration.

The private provider now faces being kicked out of the apprenticeships market, under Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) rules, after Ofsted gave it a grade four report this week following the firm’s first full inspection visit in December.

The watchdog’s report included some positives but delivered the lowest possible judgment overall mainly due to “limited” training. “Too many apprentices do not receive enough time at work to complete their studies,” Ofsted reported. “As a result, they study in their own time, balancing their personal commitments with the completion of their apprenticeship.”

Owner Paul Wildes, who also runs hotels, restaurants, spas and is a racehorse owner and breeder, said he was shocked at the inspectorate’s approach considering the challenges the sector has faced with Covid-19 lockdowns.

“In adult care and hospitality to a similar degree, providing training during the pandemic was difficult because obviously we weren’t allowed in to visit the students,” he told FE Week.

“It just seemed like inspectors believe the pandemic never happened. And, if it did happen, it certainly shouldn’t have impacted training, which was just a very difficult position for us to come back from because it did happen.”

Wildes admitted that some of his 200 apprentices were behind on their training but were due to have caught up in three months’ time.

He claimed inspectors told him that, if they had visited three months later, his provider’s grade would have been higher. He also claimed that Ofsted’s team told him they feel his provider should not lose its apprenticeships contract over this judgment.

Wildes Education is the latest in a string of providers to complain that Ofsted has failed to take into consideration the impact of the pandemic when delivering ‘inadequate’ reports. Some have tried and failed to challenge the grades and subsequent contract termination legally.

Wildes told FE Week he did seek legal advice but decided against formal action considering the cost involvement and unlikelihood of success. He hit out at the “autocratic” system in which private training providers have to work.

“The ESFA have the ability to take your contract away no matter what happens, which is an unusual state for any business to operate in when you actually understand somebody has the ultimate power to take all your business away without even giving you a reason to do that.”

Wildes said he had not received any communication from the ESFA following Ofsted’s judgment, but he was expecting contract termination.

If this does happen, it would “certainly stop me from coming into this sector again, because you can’t run a business when somebody has the ultimate authority to take something away from you”.

He added: “This business, unusually I suppose, was never about making money for me. It was about trying to make a difference. I feel like I’m not going to be able to deliver that anymore, which is sad.”

Wildes Education has around 15 staff whose jobs would be at risk if the company is wound down. The ESFA does not comment on individual cases.

Sign language learners affected as ‘ground-breaking’ awarding body to close

An awarding organisation for British Sign Language (BSL) courses is to cease trading after more than a decade because of a shortage of money due to falling student numbers post-Covid. Up to 150 students could be affected by the closure.

The Institute for British Sign Language (IBSL) will lose its Ofqual recognition on Friday, March 3 and told FE Week that it is due to close its business at the end of the month.

Ofqual said it was informed by IBSL in January that the charity planned to surrender its status as a recognised awarding organisation. A letter sent from the institute to centres on Tuesday said the decision was made on financial grounds.

It was “with great sadness” that the charity had decided to wind up, the letter said, adding: “As trustees, we have had to make some very hard decisions about our future and ability to continue. Our conclusion has been that IBSL is not financially viable, and we will be closing the organisation in the next couple of months.”

The awarding organisation (AO), which is led and managed by deaf people, currently has nine qualifications on Ofqual’s register, ranging from level 1 BSL and deaf awareness courses through to level 6 diplomas in sign language interpretation.

It stressed there was “no issue with the quality or validity of IBSL qualifications or assessments”.

The organisation told FE Week that it currently has around 150 learners taking its qualifications who could be affected.

Results and certificates issued to students beyond Friday will remain Ofqual-regulated, it has been confirmed.

Heather Venis, acting responsible officer for IBSL since mid-January, said: “We hope and intend until the end of March to continue with our marking and awarding, which means we can continue to issue certificates. Any learners that are continuing and have got assessments and marking booked for March will be able to complete their qualification.”

Learners that do not complete their qualification with IBSL after the end of March should contact awarding bodies Signature or SEG [Skills and Education Group Awards]. These offer similar qualifications and will “be able to make an assessment of progress so far through the qualification and what they have achieved as individual learners”.

The bodies can then put learners “on the right track in terms of the appropriate qualification and any additional assessment or anything that they might need to complete that qualification”.

The charity would not disclose its 2021/22 financial position, accounts for which have not yet been published, but figures for 2020/21 showed a £51,832 deficit following a £93,253 deficit in 2020.

Its 2020/21 income was £150,183, which included around £26,000 from two government grants, compared with more than £250,000 of income recorded pre-Covid.

IBSL confirmed it was financially stable before the Covid-19 crisis, but student numbers declined during the pandemic as learners were unable to attend and centres delivering courses closed. It also cited rising costs, but would not be drawn on the extent to which  student numbers had fallen.

Venis said the organisation “did make some noises with various MPs and tried to lobby”, but “didn’t get very far unfortunately”.

Its letter to centres this week said IBSL had been “ground-breaking, as the only deaf-led AO” and expressed its pride at its learners who remain the charity’s legacy.

A statement issued before Christmas explained it was under new management in a bid to steady the ship, but was issued with special conditions from Ofqual in late November instructing the charity not to enrol new learners until further notice.

The organisation was originally established by the British Deaf Association in 2004 but needed to become an independent organisation to achieve awarding body status, according to IBSL’s website. It was incorporated as a community interest company in April 2007, before registering as a charity in September 2015. It gained Ofqual recognition in June 2009, with its first results issued in April the following year.

SEND plan: less big bang and more damp squib for FE

After an extended period of review and consultation – and many missed deadlines – at last we have a SEND and alternative provision (AP) improvement plan. But has it been worth the wait? For the FE sector, the answer has to be no. 

It’s no surprise that the improvement plan is largely focused on addressing the two key issues that were foremost in the SEND and AP green paper: the spiralling costs of the system, in particular the call on the high needs budget, and the rising numbers of children with SEND being educated outside of mainstream schools. 

National standards setting out ordinarily available provision may well help in this mission. 

It remains to be seen, however, whether the tension between retaining young people’s rights and reducing costs can be satisfactorily resolved. 

The increased focus on accountability, with more oversight and clearer sanctions for local authorities failing to fulfil statutory duties, is welcome. Lack of accountability has certainly been a factor in the failure of the current SEND system.

Of course, Natspec was hoping that the improvement plan would include some bold reforms to address the intransigent issues affecting 16-25 year olds, especially those with more complex needs. 

Sadly, they are not to be found. There is more post-16 content than in the green paper but that is a pretty low bar. 

Missed opportunity

We may have played a small part in ensuring some of the more controversial proposals in the green paper, such as tailored lists and mandatory mediation, are trialled before final decisions about implementation are made. But we haven’t seen these off by any means. 

Our disappointment is rooted in the missed opportunity to set out a vision for 16-25 SEND provision that addresses the key challenges in meeting the needs of young people effectively. 

What the improvement plan offers is an assortment of initiatives already announced: investment in supported internships, the access to work passport and qualification reform.

There is an acknowledgement of the need for reform but without any new commitments, for example, on re-working the dysfunctional FE funding system or providing dedicated funding for students with lower-level needs. All we get here is a promise to keep working with the sector to find solutions. 

The main offer to FE is new transition standards. These may be helpful, but they will need to drive change well beyond interactions between schools and colleges if young people are to be spared the anxiety caused by late decision-making and missed statutory deadlines.

We were hoping for clear recognition that that the circumstances of FE are very different from the school sector. 

Capital omission

While only 50 per cent of children with EHCPs are in mainstream schools, 90 per cent of FE EHCP-holders are in general FE colleges. 

The issue in FE is how to keep it that way. There are already early signs of a slow but steady increase in demand for specialist college places. We need an equivalent commitment of funding to support SEND learners in mainstream FE colleges as that going to mainstream schools. 

We also need similar levels of support for specialist colleges as that shown for maintained special schools. While £2.6 billion has been poured into funding new special school places and a new tranche of special free schools will be opening, specialist colleges are in desperate need of capital funding just to maintain the fabric of their buildings in many cases. 

Surely the children who benefit from these brand new special schools also deserve high quality facilities when they move on to college? 

Government could have required local authorities to commit a proportionate amount of funding to those aged 16-25 or at least been explicit in stating that the funding should be used to secure quality provision in local specialist colleges as well as special schools. 

Omissions like this leave us uncertain as to the government’s understanding of and commitment to specialist further education. 

They tell us that they have heard from Natspec and its members that specialist colleges are often regarded by local authorities as external rather than integral to the FE system. They propose to work with us to review the way the Department defines and manages specialist further education.

It’s just a pity they didn’t set that in motion within the improvement plan itself. 

SEND improvement plan ‘offers no solutions’ to post-16 problems

Ministers finally published their special education needs and disabilities improvement plan today, three years after the SEND review was first launched. 

The government has pledged to go ahead with most major reforms it set out in its green paper last March but had very little new to say on post-16 SEND education and training.

Further education leaders were left disappointed by proposals in the green paper, which they didn’t go far enough in addressing complex bureaucracy, under-funding and inconsistencies in the system. 

Today’s implementation plan provides some clarity that was missing in the green paper about the role of specialist colleges and post-16 settings within the government’s proposals for a coherent national system. 

Plans for national standards to hold local authorities and education settings to account won’t be introduced in full until 2025 at the earliest. 

Proposals to standardise and digitise education health and care plans (EHCPs) will go ahead, but again won’t be rolled out fully until 2025.

The Department for Education has kept its pledge to double the number of supported internships by 2025 and commits to continuing to pilot English and maths “flexibilities” within apprenticeships which allows some apprentices with an EHCP to achieve with a reduced level of English and maths. 

Natspec, the representative body for specialist colleges, said it welcomed greater commitments to work with post-16 SEND providers but the plan fails to deal with the sector’s urgent staffing and capital needs. 

Clare Howard, Natspec chief executive said: “We support the government’s aim to create a more inclusive system where children and young people’s needs are more swiftly met. However, we cannot fully endorse a plan which fails to make much-needed commitments to support the FE sector.

“Whilst the improvement plan acknowledges some of the issues for FE, it still fails to include concrete solutions or new proposals, and does not provide the urgent funding for specialist staffing and facilities required by both general FE and specialist colleges.”

One of the headline announcements from today’s implementation plan is for 33 new specialist free schools in 30 local authority areas, mainly those with large high needs deficits. 

But there are no plans for capital investment for post 16 specialist colleges. SEND leaders highlight that specialist colleges are often not eligible for funding under the government’s existing capital programmes for colleges, such as the further education capital transformation fund. 

“We are pleased to see more capital funding for special schools, but the children who benefit from new buildings at school also deserve quality facilities when they reach college. Many specialist colleges are now in desperate need of capital funding but there are no new resources for refurbished or extended facilities at specialist colleges,” Howard said.

David Holloway, senior policy manager for SEND at the Association of Colleges, said: “The plan acknowledges critical issues faced by college students with SEND – like the muddle around the status of specialist colleges and the lack of distinct funding for those who do not qualify for high-needs support. But the plan offers no solutions to these problems, nor even a timescale for review.

“Some issues, such as investment in college buildings for students with SEND, are not addressed at all.”

Here’s what you need to know about the “new” policies announced in the government’s improvement plan.

National standards (not until 2025)

By the end of 2025, new national standards will be introduced which outline what provision young people and their families should expect to be made available for them from early years through to further education. The standards also aim to clarify who is responsible for making provision available and which budgets should be used to pay for support.

The standards will be underpinned by legislation to “facilitate intervention in education settings if standards are not met”. But the department confirmed that there won’t be legislation this parliament. 

From this spring, parents and “frontline professionals” will be among those ministers talk to on how the standards could look.

By the end of this year, government will “start testing some elements” of the standards with the regional expert partnerships. 

Then by the end of 2025, “a significant proportion” of the standards will be published, “with a focus on those that are most deliverable in the current system”.

Accountability to ‘ensure expectations met’

Ministers will also look at designing accountability mechanisms “to ensure the government’s expectations are met, including considering the role of Ofsted and Care Quality Commission”.

The new national standards could set out how colleges must adapt physical and sensory environments to enable students with SEND to learn alongside peers, as well as the council’s role in supporting this. 

Clear standards for universal and SEN support provision (so those without an EHCP) will enable “better accountability at this stage”. 

National SEND tariffs to come alongside standards

The SEND review also proposed a national system of funding bands and tariffs for students with special needs to ensure more “consistent” funding.

This will go ahead, with bandings clustering “specific types of education provision” and tariffs setting the rules and prices that commissioners use to pay providers.

No specific dates for implementation were provided, just a pledge it will be “alongside our broader changes to the national funding system and the development of national standards”.

The new system will give providers “clarity on how much funding they should expect to receive in delivering support or a service and enable commissioners to determine the funding required”.

EHCPs go digital – but trialled first

DfE is going ahead with plans to create a standardised EHCP template, but guidance won’t be in place from 2025. It will “consider the case for mandating its use through legislation”, but will “encourage” councils to adopt the template.

On plans for a digital EHCP, this year DfE will work with councils, suppliers and families to test how “digital solutions might best improve their experiences of the EHC process”. 

In 2024 they will design digital solutions and testing drafts, before beginning “rollout of requirements” across councils in 2025.

Inclusion plans in, but no council admission powers

Government is going ahead with “local inclusion plans” (LIPs), created by local SEND and AP partnerships. Non-statutory guidance will be published this autumn on expectations for the partnerships, alongside a “self-assessment tool”. 

In 2024, the change programme’s regional taskforce teams will target support to areas most in need. The DfE’s regions groups will work with the local partnerships to develop and agree LIPs by the end of 2024.

From 2025 onwards, government will introduce primary legislation at the “next available opportunity” to put make partnerships statutory.

Transition to post-16 and employment 

For students with an EHCP, local authorities are supposed to specify post-16 provision by March 31, though “this deadline is regularly missed” according to the plan. Information about students’ needs isn’t shared early enough, which means transition to post-16 settings is often hampered late decisions and poor planning. 

The government’s answer is to develop new good practice guidance for each transition stage from early years through to employment and adult services. Key partners, including students and the Association of Colleges and Natspec, will be involved. 

There’s also a commitment to research the experiences of young people applying and enrolling in post-16 settings “to improve the sharing of information”.

The plan restates the government’s commitment to spend £18 million over the next three years to double supported internships by 2025. Internships Work have been appointed as “delivery partner” and are tasked with “levelling up the quality of internships across the country”.

There were 2,500 supported internship starts in 2020/21, but an investigation by FE Week that only one in foursupported interns achieved sustained employment. 

Mandatory mediation to be scoped out first

Ministers had controversially proposed to make mediation between councils and families during the EHCP process mandatory. Currently thousands of appeals go to the first-tier tribunal with some parents waiting up to a year for help.

The move will be tested through the change programme to ensure there are no “unintended consequences for families”. It will look at options to “strengthen mediation” before deciding whether to bring forward legislation. 

This year it will work with organisations such as the Civil Mediation Council, the College of Mediators as well as families to review and build on professional standards for mediators. 

It will improve mediation advice for families and evaluate the outcomes and impacts of the process. 

Next year, it will “clearly set out” what processes should be followed locally and say how the mediation process “will be monitored to give families confidence in it”. 

Workforce support for schools, but not for FE

Ministers will go ahead with plans to introduce a new leadership level SENCo National Professional Qualification. The Department confirmed to FE Week that the implementation plan did not contain any new workforce development measures for post-16 settings. 

Instead, the Department pointed to three new practice guides, to be introduced by the end of 2025, which “will equip frontline professionals with the skills and expertise to make best use of provision and to identify needs early, accurately, and consistently.”

Inclusion dashboard demo next month

The SEND review pledged new “inclusion dashboards” for 0 to 25 provision to offer a “timely, transparent picture” of how the system is performing at local and national level for “strengthened accountability and transparency to parents”.

A prototype will be tested from this April “with a view to making a fully public version available in autumn 2023”.

However, where new mandatory data collections are proposed, they will be assessed to check if they are “genuinely necessary, non-duplicative, comparable and coherent with all other data collections”.

Double tax on employers to boost training, says former education minister

The next government should at least double what businesses pay in to the apprenticeship levy to repair the country’s poor record on training, according to a former Department for Education minister.

Jo Johnson, who was universities minister at the DfE when the apprenticeship levy was being developed, told an event in parliament today that increasing employer contributions would enable the levy to fund “a wider range of courses”, without reducing the resources available for apprenticeships.

The now Lord Johnson of Marylebone was speaking on a panel organised by the Future Skills Coalition – a new campaigning group set up by the AoC, AELP and City and Guilds. The panel event was part of a day of action with colleges and training providers lobbying MPs for greater investment in FE and skills ahead of next month’s budget. 

Johnson said taking more money from employers to fund adult training, as well as apprenticeships, was the most realistic way of solving the country’s skills gaps. 

“There is a need to ramp up training spending. As a country we spend less than half the Europeans on training employees and virtually all economists are in agreement that the UK needs to invest substantially more into training and development of its workforce.”

Johnson, who is chair of independent training provider Access Creative College, would increase the amount employers pay in to a rebranded “apprenticeships and skills levy” from 0.5 per cent of their annual pay bill to 1 per cent. 

He suggested half of the increased funding raised should be ringfenced for apprenticeships, and the rest could be spent by employers on “non-apprenticeship training, including modular courses to tackle key skills gaps.”

The Labour Party announced last year that it would also reform the levy to a “growth and skills levy” so businesses could use half of their contributions on non-apprenticeship training. Unlike Lord Johnson’s suggestion however, Labour didn’t announce any plans to raise extra funding from employers, leading to concerns that its plans could shut out smaller businesses. 

At today’s “mind the skills gap” event, which also saw speeches by Kirstie Donnelly, chief executive of City and Guilds, Jane Hickie, CEO of AELP, David Hughes, CEO of AoC and Lord David Blunkett who led Labour’s Council of Skills Advisers, Johnson took aim at the government’s record on investment in skills and training. 

“I think there is a really shocking mismatch between government rhetoric on skills and the actual resources that have been made available to colleges and independent training providers” he said.

“Government funding itself is not going to be the whole answer. So I don’t think anybody should be under the illusion that the Treasury is just going to write a cheque. 

“That’s why reform of the apprenticeship levy is so important, because it will potentially bring more employer funding to the table in a way that absolves the taxpayer and the treasury of the sole responsibility of addressing this mismatch. 

Smaller businesses should also pay the levy, Johnson suggested, so “more SMEs have skin in the training game”.

Currently businesses with an annual pay bill of over £3 million are liable to pay the apprenticeship levy. Johnson said that £3 million threshold could “potentially” be brought down, though he didn’t specify by how much. 

“As a country, we really need to double, or more, mandatory spending on training. An apprenticeship and skills levy in the next parliament, I think, is the only game in town in that respect,” he concluded.

Elsewhere in his speech, Johnson took aim at the government’s plans to defund applied general qualifications that overlap with T Levels. 

According to Johnson, the government is “proceeding at a really alarming pace” and has “created a burning platform with the defunding of BTECs and other applied general qualifications in order to accelerate the rollout of T Levels”.

“There is a clear evidence base that T Levels are not yet ready to take the weight and shoulder the burden that’s being placed on them, and I am extremely concerned, looking at the situation on the ground and talking to providers, that there is a real risk of a large number of learners being left with no option that really suits them,” he added.

His comments come on the day 360 headteachers and principals wrote to education secretary Gillian Keegan to ask the government to postpone plans to defund most BTECs and applied general qualifications.

‘Innovative’ colleges honoured in 2022/23 AoC Beacon Awards

The “best and most innovative practices” in UK colleges have been celebrated this week in the Association of College’s Beacon Awards.

Ten colleges were recognised for their “inspirational work” across the awards event, with another being “highly commended”. Gongs recognised achievements in areas such as engagement with employers, widening participation, excellence in governance and use of digital.

Mark White, chair of the AoC’s charitable trust which runs the event, said: “The AoC Beacon Awards showcase exactly why colleges are so important to every community and why people value them.”

Colleges in Nottingham, Preston, Oldham and Brighton were among those to scoop awards, with Weston College celebrating more success this year following its two award wins last year.

Skills minister Robert Halfon Tweeted his congratulations to all of the evening’s winners: “These winners represent the best and most innovative practices in FE colleges,” he said.

The evening also celebrated the Student of the Year award winners, who were announced at the end of last year.

The full list of winners is as follows:

The AoC Award for Widening Participation: Hopwood Hall College (pictured)

The British Council Award for Internationalism: Gower College Swansea

The City & Guilds Award for College Engagement with Employers: Preston College

The Edge Award for Excellence in Real World Learning: EKC Group

The JISC Award for Effective Use of Digital Technology in FE: Activate Learning

The National Centre for Diversity’s Award for Inclusive Learning Leadership: The Bedford College Group

The NOCN Group Award for Mental Health and Wellbeing: Nottingham College

The Nous Group Award for Education for Sustainable Development: Brighton Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College in partnership with FE Sussex

The AoC Award for Excellence in Governance: Weston College

The RCU Award for Support for Students: Oldham College

Highly Commended College: Bishop Auckland College

DfE’s college loans scheme won’t be ready until summer

A new Department for Education loans scheme for college capital projects has been confirmed today – but cash for the “time-limited” scheme won’t be available until the summer.

The Education and Skills Funding Agency in its weekly update said the DfE capital loans scheme will provide vital funding for FE capital schemes that are either under way or in the pipeline that have been held up as a result of reclassification of colleges into the public sector.

Full details are set to be published next month – which crucially will include eligibility criteria – with loan funding set to be available from “early summer”.

In November’s re-classification by the Office for National Statistics, the DfE said that colleges must gain special and rare permission from the DfE for finance deals with the private sector.

It said that was “very unlikely” given the costs of private sector borrowing were higher than in the public sector.

It left colleges putting key projects on hold and at risk of not being completed.

In January, the DfE said it was “possibly” considering its own loan scheme, but had put in place an additional £150 million of grant funding to be shared among colleges in April.

Today’s announcement confirmed the new DfE loan scheme will be time-limited, with the repayable loan funding to be drawn down by March 2025 at the latest.

The ESFA said it has written to accounting officers at colleges to clarify any undeclared commercial borrowing they had in place at the point of reclassification with regard to capital projects up to March 2025.

The Association of Colleges deputy chief executive Julian Gravatt said: “The fact that DfE will be announcing a two-year loan scheme in April 2023 is progress because this will unlock college capital projects that are currently stalled because of uncertainty about cash.

“However, it’s now three months since DfE introduced a bank borrowing ban so it is disappointing that there’s another month to wait for the terms, conditions and interest rates for the new loans.”

Last week the AoC said colleges have made 55 loan applications to the DfE since the ban on borrowing came into effect on November 29, of which 22 were refused and 10 are pending. The 23 applications that had been approved were all for short-term loans.