MOVERS AND SHAKERS: EDITION 402

Ellie Churchward

Head of Lifelong Learning and Skills, Sheffield City Council

Start date: September 2022

Previous job: Service Manager – Adult Community Education, Sheffield City Council

Interesting fact: Ellie started out as a soldier in the Royal Signals and still loves outdoor life. You’ll often find her on a campsite, but these days in more luxury as a motorhomer.

James Pallister

Head of Sales (Education), Metaverse Learning

Start date: October 2022

Previous job: Senior Manager, University Relations, Leverage Edu

Interesting fact: James collects Star Wars graphic novels and has a whole bookcase of them in his home office.

Mark Trewin

Principal – Adult education and skills, Plymouth City Council

Start date: October 2022

Previous job: Chief Transformation Officer, City College Plymouth

Interesting fact: For the last 32 years Mark has played in bands and once made a living from music and technical roles in the live events industry. He still performs today, with a highlight being an annual David Bowie tribute show which raises funds for St Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth.

OfS touts tough registration rules on sexual harassment

Universities and colleges are set to face stricter registration requirements by the higher education regulator, in a bid to tackle sexual harassment and misconduct.

The Office for Students (OfS) plans to consult on a new condition of registration early next year, which means it could be in place before the start of the next academic year. 

Colleges and universities risk losing their registration with the OfS if they fail to meet the new requirement.

The requirement is set to be introduced after an evaluation of the OfS ‘statement of expectations’ found that there were serious shortfalls in how colleges and universities were tackling sexual violence.

Susan Lapworth, chief executive of the OfS, told MPs on the women and equalities committee this week: “We’re working on a condition of registration that we would consult on early in the new year and that would put, subject to the consultation, this area of work [sexual harassment and misconduct] onto a sharper regulatory footing. It would put in place mandatory requirements, and it would allow us to intervene when we saw concerns.”

In April last year, the OfS published seven “expectations” which set out how universities and colleges should prevent and respond to incidents of harassment and sexual misconduct, after 50,000 accounts of sexual violence were published on the website Everyone’s Invited.

The statement of expectations provided recommendations for the systems, policies, and practices that institutions need to have in place to prevent and effectively respond to harassment and sexual misconduct.

Earlier this year, OfS commissioned an independent evaluation to look at the actions universities and colleges had taken to comply with their statement of expectations. The evaluation, set to be released next month, is expected to show that universities and colleges have taken some steps, such as making it easier for incidents to be reported.

“Patchy and too slow”

But the evidence from students – given as part of the evaluation – suggests that progress has been inconsistent and too slow. Many students don’t know what to do if this happens to them or have a poor experience when they report an incident of harassment.

Lapworth said: “[Students] said there has been progress, but it’s been patchy, and it is too slow. So we’re not seeing the impact that we would have expected. We signalled to universities and colleges that if that didn’t do the trick and drive the process then we would impose a condition of registration.”

Julian Gravatt, deputy chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said this is the “right thing for OfS to do”. He told FE Week, however, that there are “complications, because college safeguarding procedures are already regulated by DfE, and Ofsted”. 

Gravatt added: “We look forward to discussing the details with all three organisations to ensure the rules work for students and staff in our part of the HE sectors.”

Intervention

A new pilot prevalence survey was also announced by the OfS this week, which will collect data on sexual violence in higher education settings, and is set to run within the same timeframe as the registration condition consultation.

Lapworth could not say how much the new prevalence survey would cost but confirmed the importance of “conducting a carefully constructed sampling approach across the sector” to determine which sort of students are experiencing sexual violence so they can intervene when they need to.

Drawing on evidence from surveys from the National Union of Students’, Revolt Sexual Assault and Everyone’s Invited, Lapworth corroborated that students with particular characteristics, particularly disabled women and minority ethnic groups, are impacted more by sexual violence.

When asked whether bystander training will make up part of the new requirement, Lapworth confirmed that the OfS’ focus will be on credible, evaluated training.

Third college to go through FE insolvency regime owes £8m

The country’s smallest sixth form college has become the third college to ever go through the further education insolvency regime, closing with £8 million of debt.

St Mary’s College in Blackburn shut its doors to students and staff this summer after it failed to find a viable merger partner.

The Catholic-run college, which had been open for almost 100 years, became financially unsustainable due to repeated years of falling student numbers, and has been propped up by emergency government funding since 2020.

Accounting firm RSM UK has been appointed to handle the insolvency and published its first report on the process last month.

A “statement of affairs” revealed that the college owes £8.2 million to six creditors. The Local Government Pension Scheme is owed most of the debt – £5 million – while Barclays Bank is owed £2.8 million. The Department for Education is also one of the creditors, owed £62,000.

The college’s property is currently on the market for an undisclosed fee to generate funds to repay the creditors. But the insolvency practitioners’ report suggests a book value of just £402,795.

Asked how likely it was that the creditors will be repaid in full, joint liquidator Diana Frangou told FE Week: “Any distribution to creditors in the liquidation will be made from asset realisations which are currently in progress and hence uncertain.”

The first colleges to go insolvent

The further education insolvency regime came in force in January 2019, from which point it was made possible for colleges to fail and be placed into an insolvency process for the first time.

Scandal-hit Hadlow College was the first to go through the process later that year after an investigation from the FE Commissioner uncovered how the college ran out of money through leadership and governance failures. There were also claims of financial irregularities which led to investigations into the former management.

Hadlow’s sister college – West Kent and Ashford College – was the second to go through the FE insolvency regime later in 2019. Between them, the two colleges went under with debts of almost £150 million.

Department for Education officials previously revealed that the cost of putting the two colleges through the insolvency regime cost the taxpayer around £60 million. Most of this related to capital costs that needed to be spent to bring Hadlow’s and West Kent’s estates (which had been left in “very poor condition”) up to “reasonable standards” to be sold or taken over by other colleges.

St Mary’s College’s cause of insolvency is different to Hadlow’s and West Kent’s. It was first warned in 2016 of its deteriorating financial position and urged at the time to find a merger partner or academise.

It continued to survive on its own largely thanks to its higher education income and its commercial pre-school nurseries, but its ability to continue doing so came to a head in 2020 after student numbers failed to improve. Against a capacity of 1,250, there was only 653 students on roll at the time of an FE commissioner visit in 2020.

Growth predictions wrong

The FE Commissioner’s intervention report said “inaccurate growth predictions” at the college, which led to “over-optimistic expectations for student recruitment”, were the primary cause of financial failure.

A structure and prospects appraisal process was subsequently launched and invited potential partners to express an interest in partnering with St Mary’s, but no viable partner was found.

Kate Hollern, the MP for Blackburn, said: “The loss of St Mary’s College, an institution that has been part of our community for so long, was cause for great sadness. The financial pressures and dwindling student numbers the college suffered under were, of course, unfortunate.

“[The college] was a place where students felt empowered to fulfil potential and it boasted a good academic experience.”

The Department for Education told FE Week that it provided St Mary’s College with the “minimum level of emergency funding” to “protect learners and enable them to complete their courses”, but refused to reveal the total figure.

Frangou said an orderly wind down of the college completed in August, with all remaining 225 students completing their studies.

She said all staff employed by the college were made redundant on July 31, 2022, and they all received their “contractual and statutory entitlements upon redundancy in full, and therefore do not have claims in the liquidation”.

College management also “ensured all suppliers were paid in full prior to the liquidation”.

Frangou added that protecting the students and minimising disruption to their studies has been the “paramount objective of the college and the Department for Education” and to ensure this, a number of college staff were retained by the liquidators on a subcontract basis and funded by the DfE to guarantee that exam results could be received “in the normal way”.

The Department for Education said its current expectation is that “only costs directly related to learner activities, outside of the statutory duties of a liquidator required post-liquidation will be funded by the DfE”, although it will not release these figures.

One of the most controversial aspects of the Hadlow and West Kent insolvencies was the costs charged by the insolvency practitioners BDO, which reached £6 million and was described by the DfE’s permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood as “gut-wrenching”.

RSM would not reveal its time costs and charge out rates, stating that these will be included in its first annual report a year after the liquidation began. Frangou said RSM’s fees and costs are “subject to approval by creditors and payable from net realisations from college assets”.

There is no suggestion of impropriety from St Mary’s Colleges former leaders or governors, but RSM said that as with all insolvencies, there is a “duty to investigate and submit a report on the conduct of the directors to the Insolvency Service within three months of the appointment”.

RSM said the report, which is “confidential”, will be considered by the Insolvency Service who will “take any action it sees fit”.

DfE forced to finally reveal true amount of apprenticeship funding returned to Treasury

Over £2 billion of apprenticeship funding has been returned to the Treasury since the launch of the levy, FE Week can reveal after obtaining figures that finally show the true extent of apprenticeship underspend.

The clawback equates to 23 per cent of the Department for Education’s total ring-fenced apprenticeship budget between 2017 and 2021.

Ministers have repeatedly refused to reveal exactly how much of the annual apprenticeship budget has gone unspent after the whole system, including non-levy paying employers, has been funded. MPs, including former DfE adviser Richard Holden just yesterday, have even had requests for this information turned down.

FE Week, in partnership with the new Apprenticeships Data Insights service also operated by our publisher LSECT Ltd, has now forced the DfE to reveal the figures for the first time through a Freedom of Information request.

Tom Richmond, a former adviser to two skills ministers and now director of think tank EDSK, said: “We need full transparency over where the levy funding has gone and how effectively it has been used. On that basis, it should not have taken so long for such a simple but crucial piece of information about underspends to come to light.”

He added: “Now that we can see the scale of the underspend, it raises important questions about why the levy funding has not been fully utilised, particularly when there is still a cap on the number of apprenticeship starts in small and medium-sized businesses.”

Since 2017, businesses with a payroll of £3 million or more pay each month into a levy pot and have a rolling 24-month deadline to spend the funds.

The levy policy was designed so that large employers wouldn’t use all of their funds. The unspent money is recycled and made available to small businesses who do not pay the levy to use to train their apprentices. Unspent funds are also used to top up levy funds by ten per cent as well as pay for English and maths teaching for relevant apprentices, among other things.

But because the government refuses to share annual spending data, there are many misconceptions in the sector and national media that all apprenticeship funding that expires from levy accounts goes back to the Treasury.

The Financial Times, for example, reported in July that more than £3.3 billion of apprenticeship funding had been returned to the Treasury since 2019. But this figure was in fact the amount of funding that had expired in levy-payers’ levy accounts and did not take into consideration that part of this funding would pay for other parts of the system.

In each year since the levy was introduced FE Week has requested the true apprenticeships budget underspend from the DfE press office, and after receiving provisional figures to this effect from the department’s press office, published articles that showed £880 million had been returned to Treasury between 2017 and 2021.

The DfE has now revealed through an FOI that £424 million in 2017-18, £493 million in 2018-19, £550 million in 2019-20, and £604 million in 2020-21 was surrendered to Treasury.

The DfE said it could not share the figures for 2021-22 because its accounts for that financial year “have not been audited and published” yet.

John Cope, a board member of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, said the figures “highlight a real issue: the need for greater transparency on how the apprenticeship levy works”.

He added that the underspend figures “need to be taken with a massive pinch of salt as they are for pandemic years when many firms were unable to trade, and the government spent huge amounts on the Kickstart scheme as well as employer incentives to take on apprentices”.

Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Jane Hickie said the reasons for an underspend on the apprenticeship levy “are complex – from the ongoing impact of the pandemic on learner numbers to wider trends in the labour market”.

She also called for “much more transparency and up-to-date information from government on the level of underspend”.

Mental health: 8 key priorities to take the sector forward

This Monday marked the tenth World Mental Health Day, an opportunity to reflect on the progress made, and the work still to do. And my first reflection is that, while WMHD is an important date in the calendar, supporting mental health is a 365-days-a-year job.

The Mental Health Foundation, a key partner of Good for me, Good for FE, wants “mental health and wellbeing for all to be global priority”. We know that the further education sector is at its best when it thinks globally and acts locally, and I’m proud of the progress we’ve made towards that end.

A few short years ago, mental health support felt marginal, at times even radical. Some saw it as overstepping our territory from the educational to the clinical. But a vanguard of colleges, my own included, pursued this area of support, recognising that our students needed good or at least well-supported mental health to study and achieve.

Hitting the mainstream

Fast forward, and now over 200 colleges have signed the Association of Colleges’ (AoC) mental health charter. Stigma is reduced across the sector. Our literacy around discussing mental health is thoughtful, our understanding deepening and being refined.

There are commitments on college-wide strategies, discussions among senior teams and governors, mental health first aid-trained staff are present in most colleges, with access to counselling, nurses, and tutorials common. Human resources teams have maturing policies, practices, and cultures.

Supporting student and staff mental health has now become mainstream.

One of the people the sector should thank for that is Richard Caulfield at AoC. We worked together with other ‘pioneers’ to connect with the Department for Work and Pensions and the NHS to bring resources into colleges while the education department was playing policy catch-up.

There are now teams at the DfE that have both mental health and further education in their job titles, which is an encouraging development and demonstrates a recognition in policy. Hopefully that will one day transform into funding. Meanwhile, Ofsted now has lines in the handbook about developing learner “resilience and knowledge so that they can keep themselves mentally healthy”. 

Pushing forward

But the development of mental health in colleges is far from the end. The time is now to move this work from a deficit model to one that is more proactive, and also supports wider sector ambitions. Right now, there are still areas of work in colleges which would benefit from a mental health lens.   

The cost of living crisis

External conditions are putting overwhelming pressure on individuals and families, leading to poorer mental health.

Staff wellbeing

That means enhancing support but also creating and maintaining better boundaries between work and life.

Inclusion

Broader sector ambitions around equality, diversity and inclusion mean recognising the lasting mental health effects of discrimination.

Off-site provision

We must ensure all employers are supporting students on placement and apprenticeships to the same standard we hold ourselves to. 

Leadership

The sector needs better support, research and training (already positively begun by ETF) to create inclusive and sustainable conditions for its leaders. 

Neurodiversity

There’s scope for big improvements in our recruitment practices for neurodiverse staff and learners.

Action

Increased demand for college services remains largely unfunded, putting pressure on the sector and affecting mental health across the board. We need to lobby!

A united front

Some curriculum areas have been slower to engage with the agenda due to sector culture. (We see you, construction and engineering!) That needs to change.

At East Coast College, we have declared this the ‘year of belonging’. We’re focused on how students might have felt socially, culturally and emotionally excluded following the pandemic. Mental health is the foundation for inclusion, and in turn for academic performance. It should be seen as such.

The sector has so much to be proud of, but challenges remain that are a key priority for us all. So, see you again next World Mental Health Day to celebrate more of our successes!

The DfE’s consultation puts family learning at stake

Recently, stakeholders across FE and community learning have highlighted the potential impact of the department for education’s FE Funding and Accountability Consultation, which closed on 12 October.

The DfE proposes that a new set of outcome measures should apply to non-qualification provision, including entering employment or moving closer to the labour market. HOLEX policy director, Susan Pember warns that “these proposals, if implemented, would lead to a loss of a vast number of critical adult education courses” affecting some 300,000 adult learners or more.

Meanwhile, in our new discussion paper, ‘Bringing it All Back Home’, Sam Freedman recommends that the DfE should ensure its proposals don’t reduce family learning provision by forcing providers to focus on labour market outcomes.

Family learning provision is funded through the Adult Education Budget (AEB). It supports parents to engage in their children’s education and development from early years through to FE. And crucially, it often provides a vital first step back into learning for adults, especially for those who are economically inactive and who may be far from the labour market.

For many parents, helping their children is a powerful motivator to get involved in learning.

Family learning is therefore not only a driver of positive outcomes for children, but also for adults. And like adult education, there are multiple and wide-ranging outcomes too. From building parents’ own confidence in learning and widening aspirations for them and their children, to supporting better health and wellbeing and better finances, to developing new skills and progressing into FE.

Family learning acts as a bridge into mainstream FE

For example, our family finance programme for parents with English as an Additional Language resulted in 98 per cent of parents changing how they dealt with money, and 91 per cent of their children said it helped them too.

For adults who lack confidence and motivation to sign up directly for college courses, family learning programmes act as a positive bridge into mainstream FE. The experience of running family learning outreach programmes for a college demonstrates this: 24 parents in one school alone completed teaching assistant qualifications in FE, a direct result of taking family learning courses.

Parents who take family learning courses have varied needs and skills levels. The strength of family learning provision is that it can be shaped to the needs of the community. For people who lack confidence and aspiration, learning journeys are often not linear. Moving into further learning and employment for them is not an immediate step, though it may be a longer-term result of first engaging in family learning – which is why we need to protect the provision that offers a step back into learning.

Campaign for Learning shares the concerns of stakeholders across FE and community learning. Family learning provision is usually non-qualification based. The proposed measures are inappropriate for family learning where the emphasis is on children and parents improving learning outcomes together; they put its funding and participation at stake.

We must ask why the DfE proposes to prescribe outcome measures for non-qualification bearing provision, given the extent of the application nationwide. More and more areas of England are being granted devolution deals which cover the Adult Education Budget that funds family learning.

The assumption is that devolved authorities will determine how much to spend on family learning and the outcome measures which should apply. Given that most of the country will be covered by devolution deals, there seems little point in the DfE prescribing outcome measures that will include family learning in a limited number of areas.

We need to retain the flexibility and decision-making capacity of local areas and providers so that they can respond to the needs of families in their communities – especially at a time of flux.

This must mean flexibility of outcomes too.

The Staffroom: Becoming a ‘trauma-informed’ setting

As a society, we have a better understanding of the effects of early childhood trauma. More recently, many education settings are training staff to be ’trauma-informed’ and adopting strategies to support children and young people to overcome some of their early trauma and have the best possible life chances.

At North Hertfordshire College like so many other settings, we’ve seen an increase in more vulnerable students. Then there’s the impact of Covid and working with the virtual school, we’ve seen an increase in the numbers of care-experienced students on our roll too.

Hence, we’ve taken positive steps on a journey to become a trauma-informed setting.

The term ‘trauma-informed’ means to understand how trauma in a child’s early life impacts their overall development. Examples of early trauma are abuse, neglect, bereavement, incarceration of a parent and being placed in care. These traumatic events in a child’s early start in life are collectively known as ‘adverse childhood experiences’ or ACEs.

We have three ‘systems’ in our brains: the threat system (how we deal with danger/protection), the soothing system (how we manage distress/promote bonding) and the drive system (motivation/achievement). ACEs affect how these systems develop.

For example, a child who has suffered abuse and has spent much of their life in a constant state of fear will have an overdeveloped threat system. This can often present in different types of behaviour, such as anger, defiance, tearfulness, becoming withdrawn and/or being confrontational. Typically, children with this experience will also have an under-developed soothing system and find it difficult to self-regulate.

At North Herts, we know the key to good support is to develop a good understanding of our young people: their behaviours, their triggers, what de-escalation strategies they respond to and how to help them recover.

The impact of this evidence-informed work is transformational

Our Health and Social Care teacher, Taylor Smith, has a group of 18 students of which five have experienced ACEs. Two have been out of mainstream education, two are care-experienced and one suffers with severe mental health issues.

The typical behaviours Taylor was seeing in class at the start of the year included the inability to engage in formal learning, aggression, ignoring instruction, attendance issues, outbursts, anger and lashing out at peers. Taylor was spending a lot of time dealing with challenging behaviour which was disrupting learning, and this hugely affected the rest of the class in other ways too.

Becoming trauma-informed gave Taylor the strategies to support her students. Her approaches include a ‘roots and fruits’ activity to look at the behaviours and explore the feelings behind them and the reasons for those feelings.

Taylor also works with the students to understand the behaviours themselves, which involves a risk reduction plan, breaking down triggers, understanding needs, and post-incident recovery. As trauma-informed practitioners, we understand how a student processes their trauma and how they best recover. This will include how a student likes to calm down, how they move on and how to move back into learning mode.

The impact for our students is significant. Taylor reports fewer dangerous and difficult behaviour incidents. Students are completing higher quality work. They are all achieving minimum grades and four achieved stretch grades. And general behaviour has improved in class too; all students can sit and engage in their lessons and all have engaged in a full year of formal education.

We are still on our journey, but the impact this evidence-informed work is having is already transformational. We work with an external partner, Beyond Psychology, which is supporting a core team of staff to lead this work across all parts of our organisation. So more of us are learning the theory behind this approach and developing the tools to make a difference.

We know from this that working with students with ACEs during the teenage years can significantly reverse some of the effects of early trauma. Our students deserve the best chance in life, and we are excited to continue this work and to see what more they can achieve.

Why successful online assessments are all in the blend

With the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating the digital transformation journey of all educational institutions, it is no surprise that online learning and assessments have increased in popularity as part of a blended approach.

This creates opportunities to match the assessment to the skills being assessed and to choose an appropriate combination of technology and human provision. For example, memory and recall can be assessed through short on-line multiple-choice tests; analysis and some practical skills through simulations.

Artificial intelligence may help human assessors work more quickly and consistently, giving teachers time back to concentrate on curriculum and skills.

Ensuring students are familiar with using technology outside of tech subjects is also vital to the future of the workforce, as almost every job within society contains an element of digital capability.

The use of collaboration tools such as SharePoint in group assessments and ongoing class work will stand students in good stead when joining the world of work.

Online assessments can be extremely helpful to individuals with accessibility issues who may need additional support too. The use of software to ensure students universally receive the same opportunity to do well in an examination can make all the difference to those struggling to achieve their goals through disability or access issues.

A computer will never understand a student as well as a teacher

That said, there are risks associated with online assessments, including opportunities for fraudulent behaviour and cheating. In an exam hall assessment, you can clearly identify each student and ensure the required resources are available; this may be harder to do when examinations are taking place remotely.

Limiting opportunities for cheating and ensuring those who are sitting examinations are who they say they are, are two distinct problems. The key issue for assessors is to ensure the steps they take do not impact the students’ outcomes.

For example, students may feel under intense scrutiny if they are being closely monitored by an invigilator for the entirety of an exam, which may prevent them performing to the best of their ability.

When verifying the identity of those undertaking online assessments, facial recognition and biometric identification tools have been used to reduce instances of fraud.

However, research from Harvard University has shown that these tools can be more than 30 per cent less accurate when used on individuals from different racial backgrounds, compared to when used to identify white males.

This is due to inequality in the database of ‘faces’ used when developing the tools. I am pleased to say that big players in the game such as Microsoft are making strides to improve the accuracy of their software, but more needs to be done before these tools can be a proven source of truth.

The key to a secure assessment is understanding students and working with them to monitor their progress. There are other ways to ascertain if the person being assessed is who they say they are, including making comparisons against previous work and evaluating factors such as sentence structure and knowledge.

This is also a good indication of whether additional resources have been used, or cheating has occurred. For example, if a student suddenly appears extremely knowledgeable of a certain subject they have previously struggled with, then that should raise some red flags (though it is entirely possible they have just put the work in).

AI and algorithms may be able to help make these comparisons, but a computer will never understand a student as well as a teacher who has taken the time to get to know them.

Technology in assessments is not a silver bullet: many students struggle with digital poverty and need help gaining access to equipment, connectivity, and a safe place to study and sit exams to ensure parity with their classmates.

Through a mix of blended learning and assessment – where students are continuously assessed online and in person – along with a close student-teacher relationship, issues students are struggling with can be identified and adjustments quickly be made.

When it comes down to successful assessments, it really is all in the blend.

We can’t level up by blocking young people’s progress

I think most people understand that different jobs require different skillsets. A brain surgeon might be the best doctor in a hospital but could be totally unable to change a car tyre. A journalist could be an award-winning wordsmith, but not have the skills to cook in a busy restaurant.

People look for work in the areas in which they perform best. This is not a revelation.

The problem with our qualifications system is that at the start of the career ladder, we expect everyone to be good at everything. That is to say, to begin training in any specialist area, we demand proficiency in a standard set of sometimes unrelated skills.

Take Andrew, a level 2 health and social care apprentice. To become qualified, we require Andrew to pass a level 1 English and maths functional skills test.  

Or Sarah, a level 3 childcare apprentice. Or Eleanor, a level 3 accountancy apprentice. Without a level 2 English and maths functional skills test, neither can become a qualified apprentice in their chosen field.  

Why is a childcare worker required to have the same level of maths competency as a qualified accountant? And how is this levelling up?

We can all see the value in functional mathematical skills. But does Sarah need to achieve the same level as an accountancy apprentice to provide high-quality care effectively, professionally, and enthusiastically? I don’t think so.

Could she end up abandoning what should be an achievable dream for a long-lasting career in childcare because of an arbitrary exam certificate? Yes. And unfortunately, this is happening all over the country across a range of apprenticeship courses.

Very soon we’ll have a skills gap so wide we won’t function at all

Fixated on getting all candidates to a certain level of literacy and numeracy, the people in charge of the education system have totally forgotten – or perhaps have never realised – that sometimes real people must follow a process or a step change to achieve. And as a result, very soon we’ll have a skills gap so wide we won’t function at all.

We are driving a new generation of potential skilled workers out of qualifications and further away from the labour market. They are losing out on opportunities due to restrictions in apprenticeship training requirements, and I would like to hear from policy makers who can explain it.

Why is the implementation of obscure maths exam targets so important? And how exactly will the certificate unlock a level of competence in childcare, social care or even construction that wouldn’t be possible without it?

As someone who left school at 16 and followed a non-traditional career path, one step at a time, to being CEO of one of the UK’s leading learning providers, I know the value in meeting a candidate where they are.

If we really want to achieve ‘levelling up’ we have to work with new apprentices collaboratively towards personalised goals that bring them up a level or two from where they were when they started and build from there. People are not machines, and no two candidates are the same.

In fact, it is possible that we do more harm to the numeracy and literacy potential of many candidates by insisting on grade requirements when they are not yet ready to achieve them. Using maths and English as a barrier to the professions they aspire to is not likely to encourage future engagement.

The UK is teetering on the edge of a huge skills gap and workforce crisis. In order to keep the country running and fill key worker roles, government needs to focus less on attainment statistics and more on progress targets.  

There is little value to be gained from blocking the path of new starters with illogical course requirements. Individualised learning at an achievable pace and intensity is the key to levelling up.

And it’s not a secret either; it’s time we hold ministers to account on this one.