How ITPs can ensure more SMEs benefit from levy transfer

It’s fast approaching six years since the Government’s apprenticeship levy was introduced and it’s safe to say it remains contentious. In the past two weeks we’ve seen a number of organisations lobbying the government for change. Recent research from City & Guilds found that an overwhelming 96 per cent of UK businesses would like to see a change to the levy. Others are calling for wholesale reform. 

Ministers have so far resisted such calls and even in the unlikely event a reform is proposed, it is likely to take a significant amount of time. So, what happens now?

Returned levy funds are often presented as opportunities missed, but within the current system levy payers can in fact generate opportunities with their unused funds. They can do this via transferring up to 25 per cent of unused levy to non-qualifying businesses in need. This was among the key recommendations of City & Guilds and it is a way of reducing skills shortages in the sectors most affected.

Supporting SMEs by widening access to apprentices is a key aspect of this. Not only will it address the issue of access to apprenticeships for non-levy paying smaller businesses, it will also help to address the differences in outcomes for levy-paying and non-levy-paying businesses, which the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) set out in its ‘Fit For The Future’ report.

Leveraging support

I strongly believe this is where the ITP industry can effectively step in.  Working in partnership with employers and colleges, they can use existing infrastructure, connections and knowledge to ensure that as many people as possible can benefit from quality apprenticeships in the sectors that need it most.

ITPs should use their voices to champion ways of supporting SMEs within the current system. A lack of resource, knowledge and time are some of the key barriers that are currently preventing smaller businesses taking up apprenticeships.  Many smaller employers simply don’t know about the support that is available to them to invest in and expand their workforce. 

ITPs can remove some of these barriers by facilitating levy transfers. They are well placed to understand the transfer mechanisms and can ease the process by managing the relationships between partnerships, which will help to encourage more take-up.

Levy transfer has numerous benefits for SMEs and the large levy-paying organisations. It’s an opportunity for large employers to meet their wider objectives such as social mobility and support the regions and communities that they operate in.

For sectors with the most acute staffing shortages – such as the care sector – this collaboration between levy and non-levy paying businesses is vital.

Tackling shortages

Lifetime provides apprenticeships in sectors such as retail, hospitality, care, early years and active leisure. We identified a need and opportunity for additional levy funds from our partners, who are among the UK’s largest employers, to be channelled within the care and early years sectors.

The number of people starting apprenticeships in the early years sector fell from just over 27,000 six years ago to just over 16,000 last year. While in the care sector, there were over 165,000 vacant posts when the results were published last Autumn. 

We believe everyone deserves to learn the life-changing skills they need to realise their full potential, and we work with our employer partners to achieve this. That’s why we set up a levy transfer service. Channelling funds to trusted and vetted SMEs in the care and early years sectors enables employer partners from any sector to support those with the most acute shortages.

On balance, reforming the levy risks leaving millions of businesses and learners temporarily in the lurch. Meanwhile, expanding it to include other forms of training risks impacting quality.

But by working together to improve the current system, it’s possible to provide tangible impact and outcomes for more employers and learners from otherwise unspent levy.

Six years is a very long time in politics but a short time to embed a new system and build the capacity to deliver it. That capacity is growing, and more leadership from ITPs could negate the need for levy reform.  

How mandatory work experience could be a win for colleges

Mention universal work experience to somebody working in a college, and they’ll probably go a little pale. While it is near universally agreed that exposure to the workplace brings great benefits to students, the practicalities of arranging meaningful placements for every student are challenging. And schools and colleges understandably fear that formidable task will fall to them.

All the same, continued concerns over skills shortages have led several organisations (among them, Speakers for Schools, the Federation of Small Businesses and the Labour party) to call for work experience to be made accessible. So we at the Social Market Foundation have spent the last few months exploring how such a policy could be feasible, in a way that would not be too painful for educational institutions. 

Concerns with supply

We need to start by recognising where we are. Employer engagement with education is low and has weakened further over the pandemic. Generating enough placements for T level students is already proving tricky. Speaking to career leads and college representatives, there is concern that creating further competition for work experience could make this worse.

We should therefore avoid over-burdening the limited number of employers that currently do provide placements. Without careful planning, universal work experience risks becoming a tick-box exercise, where students are put on any available placement simply to meet the requirement.

Local coordination

This is far from inevitable, though. Handled well, a push for universal work experience could expand the number of employers and placements. To make this a reality, we need investment in brokerage services to support them to sign up more employers to participate in work experience.

Colleges tend to have quite good relationships with local employers, but developing these takes significant time and effort, which all too often is duplicated. Schools, Education Business Partnerships, Career Hubs and dedicated careers services are all trying to build relationships with the same employers. That means the process of engaging employers is less efficient than it should be, and that it is often unclear for employers where to start if they want to contribute.

We should establish a single, local point of accountability

What would work better is embracing economies of scale and establishing a single point of accountability for local coordination. Employers, educators and careers services would benefit from a single point of contact.  As they already have broad geographical coverage, and a majority of schools and colleges are already part of one, we believe that Careers Hubs would be best placed for this role at a local level.

Clearly assigning responsibility for coordinating work experience within an area to a single organisation, such as a Careers Hub, would allow them to get on with the sustained, proactive outreach needed to engage more employers with the education system more broadly. Armed with a full menu of ways to support students, employers would be gradually moved up the ‘ladder of opportunities’ – perhaps starting with presentations and workplace visits, and then working up to short placements, and eventually T levels.

Learner benefits

The reduced administrative burden of sourcing placements means that those responsible in schools or colleges can pour their time and resources into supporting students on work experience to make sure they make the most of them. Placements can be appropriately matched and shaped to the students’ needs and interests, and students themselves can be better prepared for them. Not only will colleges avoid competing with each other or with local schools for employer contacts, but they can also coordinate to ensure that placements don’t clash, improving access to opportunities.

Effective, universal work experience also presents a more indirect benefit for colleges: better support to younger students at key stage 4, a group that faces key decisions over their educational futures and careers with often too little understanding of the workplace to make those calls.

In turn, that could be good for colleges, creating a better informed and motivated student body, ready to take on the qualifications that are right for them.

‘Learning from experience: How to make high quality work experience for all a reality’ can be accessed here

Time in student services transformed my approach to learners

There is one area of my college I always feared to tread. Not the management suite or the smoking area, but student support services. To me, it has always felt like a place of pain. I’ve heard others describe it as the place where poor behaviour finds its excuses.

A college has a single reason to exist, which is education rather than social care, but in recent years my college has been overhauled this area to become an award-winning provision, and the enormous and highly effective student support team is the foundation of that success.

While every staffroom in the land still plays host to debates about whether our youth are ‘snowflakes’ or whether they are truly suffering, the fact is that they need and rightly expect support. What we see in our young people is a social and societal problem but it is also a profoundly educational one. High stress levels are an obvious hindrance to learning, and while the Covid years knocked many off balance, the truth is that the causes of their stresses pre-date the pandemic.

There’s the age-old exam stress, of course, which an obsession with league tables has heightened to a pitch almost from day one of their schooling. And today, even the winners have the weight of student debt and impossibly priced rents to look forward to – not much of a prize. Behind this hovers a deep corrosive fear that comes from a poorly addressed climate emergency, putting everything they are working for at risk. Many no longer feel the future is a place of hope, but despair. Social media compounds this, since there is no sanctuary from these pressures. 

But there’s a more positive aspect to all this, which I’ve learned from listening to students. Many talk of the normalisation of seeking help. And they’re right. Where once people would have been ashamed to pose personal questions in public, now there are networks dedicated to the nichest of issues. Where not so long ago we looked on puzzled at America’s apparent obsession with therapy, now we employ counsellors on our college staff.

There is something serious and worrying going on

Does that make them snowflakes? I can see why Gen X teachers might find the whole thing confusing, but if shame has simply evaporated when it comes to struggles with mental health that is surely no bad thing.  

No matter how hard you search the historical record, you will find no mention of prostate cancer before 1853 when the disease was first recognised, but it existed. PTSD was only identified in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, but its effects were quite evidently described millennia ago in the Aeneid. As educators, are we willing to mirror WWI generals who thought shell-shocked soldiers should simply snap out of it and return to the front line? 

In this light, the snowflakes vs suffering debate is only really asking whether there has been an increase in need or an increase in our ability to identify need. Either way, suicide rates are falling worldwide and in the UK, so all the talk about mental health clearly helps.  

However, in an awful twist, the teen suicide rate bucks this trend. Intentional self-harm is now the third most common cause of death for UK teenagers after accidents and cancer. Like far too many teachers, I have more than once been on the edge of such awful tragedy and have seen enough self-harm to last a lifetime. There is something serious and worrying going on, which can’t be put down to the scandalous underfunding of CAMHS alone.

Whatever the reason, we teachers have a role to play. When anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked about the earliest sign of human civilisation, she spoke of a 15,000-year-old human femur which showed signs of having been broken and healed. The person had been cared for while convalescing. This, Mead said, is civilisation.  

I now see our student support services area as a place of healing, a place where poor behaviour and poor learning find their reasons. That is the kind of place where I want to be. So that is where you’ll find me, listening to the youth of today – not in the staffroom debating their problems.  

Alumni agree: Losing BTECs will exclude many from success

The government’s review of level 3 qualifications has concluded that BTEC is neither a technical qualification, nor a good preparation for university. As a result, BTECs are being defunded. At UP2UNI, we have personal experience of BTEC dating back to 1988, as teachers, managers, franchisers, assessors, selectors and evaluators in schools, FE and HE.

We see lots of positives in T levels, but we strongly object to the removal of applied generals so that T levels can ‘flourish’. We’re not alone: our position is shared by many educators, employers, universities and senior politicians of all parties, making this ironically one of the most unifying political actions ever taken in the education sector.

The government’s response to the level 3 review coincided with the launch of UP2UNI’s 3-year evaluation of Professional Pathways, a programme in which a wrap-around curriculum runs alongside the level 3 BTEC in Ark sixth forms. Surveys, interviews and focus groups with some 600 students and alumni refuted the stereotypical view of BTEC as ‘second-best’; these students made ambitious and sustainable post-18 choices in the same way as their A level peers.

As objections to the defunding of BTEC spread from educators to the general public, we felt there was a gap in the debate: the voice of adults who could reflect on the impact of BTEC on their education, employment and career trajectories over their lifespan. Our response was a life histories project with adults who took a BTEC diploma between the 1980s and 2010s, in ten different industry sectors.

The research produced rich data supportive of the concerns being expressed in the media, but one of our findings seems to be a topic receiving less attention: those students who progress from “failure” at school to demonstrate their full potential through a BTEC route that offers a smooth transition from entry level to level 3, suggesting a failure of the school system, not the students.

Alumni refute the view of BTEC as ‘second-best’

As our participants described their BTEC experience, it emerged that two of them had followed this pathway. One had a story familiar to many FE practitioners: a school curriculum that simply failed to deliver for a young person who was ‘dyslexic, not academic, often sitting in a classroom without really understanding, and found that everything went out of their head in the exam hall’. Four years on, the student had a level 3 diploma, level 2 English and maths, and work experience that prepared them for employment in their chosen sector. The other participant, having arrived in this country at 18 with no prior schooling or qualifications, progressed from entry level to top grades at level 3, followed by a first-class university degree and graduate employment.

Anyone who has worked in FE will have similar examples; it’s a feature of BTEC that really does support levelling up and enhances social mobility. If this is lost, what will we offer 16-year-olds who feel they have failed? T levels, even with a transition year, won’t fill this gap – and anyway, many of these young people will not want a technical route.

In the ‘Imagined Futures’ section of our report, there are some strong views on the loss of BTEC. However, our participants were not simply protective of the distinctive BTEC brand; they were calling for the retention of an approach to learning and assessment that was very different to their experience of school, that had allowed them to shine, prepared them for employment and represented an educational concept they felt should not be denied to young people in the future.

A growing movement in England is arguing for assessment to be fairer, broader and more equitable than the exam-assessed GCSE curriculum that leaves many 16-year-olds with nothing to show by way of achievement. There are many reasons why BTECs should not be summarily withdrawn, but defunding a pathway that enables such young people to gain recognised qualifications, with progression routes to employment in sectors crucial to our national economy, may be the most important reason of all.

Ministers must heed colleges on their move to defund BTECs

The FE sector has united this week to send a clear message to DfE ministers about their planned reform of level 3 qualifications.

The ambition to have robust, universally recognised and valued qualifications cannot be argued against. But what policy makers need to be completely clear on – and what colleges are shouting about – is the impact that defunding 75 level 3 qualifications will have on the lives of people studying them, now and in the future.

Level 3 students at our college have chosen not to take an academic A level route at school. This may be because they didn’t achieve the GCSE grades required to stay on at sixth form or because they prefer a more practical learning route with an identified career at its end.

We currently have around 40 Level 3 courses for 16-18-year-olds in a range of areas from art and design to uniformed protective services. By 2025, based on the new reforms, we will be delivering a fraction of these courses and instead be offering seven T Levels.

While I am supportive of T levels and believe them to be an excellent alternative route for some students, they are in no way a direct replacement for the vocational qualifications that will be lost. 

T levels are rigorous. They are ultimately an A level alternative for people who get at least five GCSEs as opposed to being an alternate vocational 1-3 level for those who don’t.

There’s an obvious gap here, and until we improve the school system enough to ensure everyone is leaving with five GCSEs we need a range of fully accessible level 3 qualifications. T levels aren’t the answer as the bar is just too high.

In addition, they are ‘large qualifications’ and remove scope for a broader set of subjects to be studied. This means that learners will be very much tied to the industry they have chosen at age 16. This simply isn’t right for everyone.

The skills system isn’t failing T levels; The school system is

It’s not the skills system that’s failing T levels, it’s the school system. We need qualifications and accessible pathways for people who don’t achieve as well academically but have got talent in many other areas. 

Such young people and adults need and deserve high-quality alternative routes to achieve social and economic mobility. This equality of opportunity can only be achieved with accessible, sustainable and industry-relevant skills-based qualifications.

The definition of social mobility is ‘a change in someone’s socio-economic situation, either in relation to their parents or throughout their own lifetime’. In short, this is about ensuring people have access to the same opportunities as others to do well in life and are able to successfully improve their own prospects.

We know that inequality starts at birth. For many young people, this disadvantage gap widens throughout their education. While this clearly needs to be addressed much earlier on, further education offers pathways to support young people and adults to gain qualifications, skills and knowledge, often after years of being unable to access the traditional learning on offer at school.

The suggested reforms risk blocking these progression pathways by narrowing options at this crucial level.

My hope is that government ministers (including the opposition) and policy officials hear the concerns the FE sector is voicing and act on it.

I urge them to listen to the experts on the ground and to look at lessons from the past – for example, the failure of GNVQs, which were never given the kudos of being an A level alternative – and realise that change takes time to embed. 

The mistake they are making now is positioning T levels against BTECs, when in fact they should be positioned against A levels.

2025 is just around the corner. We need more time to develop a complete, long-term solution to create a system that truly recognises and rewards the diverse abilities of all learners.

Getting these reforms right is important to so many people’s lives, as well as to the wider economy. It’s imperative we get it right.

Principals call for 12-month delay to ‘reckless’ plan to defund most BTECs

Hundreds of school and college leaders are pleading with ministers to delay their “reckless” plan to scrap most BTECs and other applied general qualifications by 12 months.

In a letter to education secretary Gillian Keegan, 360 headteachers and principals warn that without the postponement they will not have sufficient time to ensure that “students are on the right courses, or the right staff are in place with the right level of training”.

The Department for Education is working to introduce a streamlined system for students finishing their GCSEs that pushes them to study either A-levels, their new technical equivalent T Levels, or an apprenticeship from 2025.

Alternative applied general qualifications (AGQs), like Pearson’s popular BTECs, will only continue to be funded if they do not overlap with T Levels or A-levels and pass a strict new approvals process.

But FE Week revealed last month that of the 134 AGQs included in the DfE’s performance league tables, which were reformed in 2016, more than half have been excluded from this process by government edict. The qualifications account for almost two-thirds of current sixth-form college students and almost a third of courses available in general FE colleges.

Today’s letter to Keegan, co-ordinated by the Protect Student Choice campaign, states that removing such a significant proportion of AGQs will have a “hugely negative impact on many of our students”, adding that this “would be disastrous for social mobility and economic growth”.

The DfE plans to publish a list of new courses that will replace the current suite of AGQs in July 2024, for schools and colleges to start delivering in September 2025.

Leaders have told Keegan that this plan is “simply not credible” and urged the education secretary to introduce the new qualifications in September 2026 instead.

Schools and colleges that signed the letter point out that prospectuses and marketing materials for courses starting in September 2025 will already have been finalised by July 2024, and engagement work with students will be well underway. They go on to write that “it will be very difficult to provide effective information, advice and guidance to young people if we do not know what qualifications we can deliver until the end of July 2024”.

Leaders have reiterated the call of several Lords for the DfE to remove the 134 reformed AGQs from the scope of the department’s defunding review.

But if ministers decide to continue with the proposals, leaders have pressed that a change of timing would at least “minimise the disruption to young people’s education caused by implementing this policy”.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said he was “dismayed by the government’s plan to scrap lots of hugely popular BTECs and similar qualifications” with a timescale that “lacks any understanding of how the education system actually works”.

Lucy Heller, chief executive of Ark Schools, said that compressing the time frame for the implementation of this policy “does not serve schools and colleges well but, most importantly, it short-changes our young people who have already suffered so much disruption to their education”.

Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, added: “The fact that BTEC students are more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds makes the government’s strategy, and the timeline for implementing it, detrimental to both society and the economy.”

A DfE spokesperson said: “Our reforms will simplify the system for young people. Students will continue to be able to study BTECs and other AGQs where they meet new quality criteria and support young people to progress.

“The BTECs that will no longer be available are only those with low take up, poor outcomes, or which overlap with T Levels. We have also introduced a transition year to support students who may have taken BTECs, into T Level qualifications.”

College leaders to fight ‘destabilising’ free school bids

College leaders in west Yorkshire have vowed to fight proposed new free schools in the region, warning that the “unnecessary” competition will provide a “significant risk” to their viability.

Five colleges from the West Yorkshire Consortium of Colleges have written to the Department for Education’s free school assessment team opposing a series of planned new free schools in the region that the colleges claim are “destabilising”.

The latest wave of free school applications include two in Bradford – a BRIT School North and iExel Elite STEM Sixth Form College for Females; a Northern Technology Sixth Form in Kirklees, Edith Cavell College in Wakefield; and for Keighley a New College Keighley.

In Leeds, two applications have been lodged – Dixons East Leeds Sixth Form and Thorpe Park College.

The bids follow a government commitment to opening “a number” of “high-quality, academic focused” and “elite” 16 to 19 free schools in education investment areas – regions with the lowest student outcomes that have been promised extra support.

According to the DfE, just a quarter of the wave 15 applications will be approved – around 15 of the 60 bids. Leaders at the five colleges opposing the plans say the proposed schools are not needed on their patch because the existing colleges can already accommodate additional students.

Principal and CEO of Kirklees College Palvinder Singh

The five colleges protesting the plans are Leeds City College and Keighley College (pictured) – both part of Luminate Education Group – as well as Bradford College, Kirklees College and Wakefield College.

Principal of Kirklees College, Palvinder Singh, said: “Should the proposals go ahead, there is a significant risk that existing providers will have to make savings, requiring cuts to the curriculum and staffing, and some will no longer remain viable.”

Singh added that the increase in school leavers predicted in north Kirklees in 2026 will fall after a few years, with that growth happening before the new schools are even ready.

According to Leeds City College, an 8 per cent rise in the city’s school leaver numbers is predicted between now and 2026, which the existing colleges can accommodate.

Colin Booth, Luminate chief executive, said the DfE should be focusing on growth in T Levels, explaining that the new bids could cause “real damage” to existing provision.

He added: “This policy and planning vacuum leads to catastrophic failures as can clearly be seen, for example, in how university technical colleges and national colleges have fared.”

The college heads are set to lobby their MPs at tomorrow’s Mind the Skills Gap event in Westminster organised by the Future Skills Coalition – the collective of the Association of Colleges, Association of Employment and Learning Providers and City and Guilds.

FE Week has approached all of the college’s MPs to determine whether they are in support of the free school bids or back the concerns of the five colleges, but has yet to receive responses.

However, in November Bradford East Labour MP Imran Hussain said he backed plans for a new elite all-girls STEM sixth form in the city which will “open new doors” for girls’ participation in STEM  (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects.

Heart of Yorkshire Principal and Chief Executive Sam Wright

“With girls woefully underrepresented in science., technology , engineering and maths field and careers, particularly computer science and engineering, the whole country is missing out on the potential that they can bring, and we need to be doing much more to break down the barriers that many women and girls face in taking up these subjects and seeing it as a viable future career,” he told FE Week.

Chris Webb, Bradford College chief executive and principal said the city is already served by “three colleges, two specialist sixth forms and 15 secondary schools offering post-16 education” with new bids risking investment “going to waste”.

Sam Wright, principal and chief executive of the Heart of Yorkshire Education Group which includes Wakefield College, added: “If they come to fruition, these free school proposals have the potential to severely jeopardise the ability of our colleges to not only thrive, but indeed survive. The government should reconsider investing this level of funding and support into existing providers, which would enable us to grow, align our curriculum offering, increase our resources through recruitment, and expand our facilities to meet any rises in demand.”

Registration opens for UK’s biggest national skills competition

Apprentices and students can now register to take part in this year’s national WorldSkills UK competitions, with new green skills areas making their debut this year. 

Training providers, employers, students and apprentices have until March 24 to apply to take part in the seven-month long process which will include regional heats and intensive training in 50 different skills areas before the national finals in November. 

Finalists will also have the chance to be selected to compete against their international peers at WorldSkills Lyon 2024.

Designed by industry experts, the competitions develop participants’ technical and employability skills and taking part could even lead to increased earnings.

Research by Frontier Economics found that young people who have been involved with WorldSkills UK competitions earn around 60 per cent more than their peers who have not taken part.

Minister for skills, Robert Halfon, said: “Demonstrating high-quality skills to employers is the key to unlocking your career potential, and what better way to showcase your talent than by competing against the best of the best?

“With competitions across different skills disciplines in everything from manufacturing to health and social care, WorldSkills UK offers a unique opportunity to hone your skills and climb the ladder of opportunity.”

REVEALED: WorldSkills UK’s 2022 national finals results

Last year’s national competitions saw over 200 bronze, silver and gold medals awarded, with Southern Regional College topping the medal table.

The range of skills competitions now open for registrations is enormous. They include heavy vehicle engineering, commercial make-up, cyber security and the newly added skills competitions for Industry 4.0, additive manufacturing and renewable energy. 

Following registration, competitors will go through a remote or online entry competition in April which is then followed by national qualifier competitions between April and June. From there, the national finalists are chosen and will be announced in July. 

WorldSkills UK deputy CEO, Ben Blackledge, said:

“Taking part in WorldSkills UK competitions can be a life-changing experience that develops crucial skills and boosts future earnings. Our competition-based development programmes offer students and apprentices the opportunity to pit their skills against the best of the best across the UK.

“I would encourage everyone to have a look at the many options available and sign up to compete. We are particularly excited to launch the renewable energy and additive manufacturing competitions this year as we strive to deliver the skills the UK will need in the future.”

AELP board election results revealed

The Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) has announced changes to its board following the trade body’s annual general meeting this afternoon. 

Three well-known figures from the training sector were re-elected by AELP’s membership. They are Brenda McLeish, chief executive of Learning Curve Group, Ian Bamford, chief operating officer at Paragon Skills and the former AELP chief executive, who now leads The Skills Network, Mark Dawe. 

However David Marsh, chief executive of Babington and co-chair of St Martin’s Group – another membership body for training providers – was not re-elected and stands down from the AELP board today after three years.

Joining the board as new non-exec directors of AELP are Jill Whittaker, managing director of HIT Training, and Iain Salisbury, chief executive of Aspiration Training. 

All five elected and re-elected members will each serve a four-year term. 

Hyde

Veteran training leader John Hyde, the founder and executive chairman of HIT Training will end his 13-year stint on the AELP board today. 

Hyde retires following 20 years of involvement with the trade body having first joined the board when the then Association of Learning Providers (ALP) was established in 2002. He left the ALP board a year later, but re-joined in November 2010. 

Also leaving the AELP board is Alan Ovenden from Babcock International Group, who served for four years.

AELP’s annual general meeting took place in London today. 

The association also confirmed that board member Rob Foulston is its vice chair, succeeding Alex Khan who stepped down last year.

Jane Hickie, AELP chief executive, welcomed new members of the board and paid tribute to those stepping down:

“I would like to congratulate Iain and Jill on their election. The new board members take up their positions at a time when the strongest voices of the sector are crucial for progress. I am looking forward to working closely with them. 

“I’d like to say a huge thank you to the outgoing board members for their hard work in recent years. They have been a great source of knowledge and have helped us to lobby for employers and training providers effectively and consistently. 

“I’d like to pay a special tribute to John Hyde whose retirement from the board comes after 20 years of involvement with AELP. As a founding member, he shared a vision with a small group who built AELP from a group of ten providers in 2002 to today with just under 800.”

Prior to leading Aspiration Training, Salisbury held a number of roles in the employment and skills space. He spent two years on the board of the Employment Related Services Association (ERSA) and held senior roles at Intraining and Learndirect. 

Whittaker has been at the helm of HIT Training for over 10 years, and was the companies finance director for six year before becoming managing director. She was made an OBE for services to training in hospitality, care and management in the 2022 Queen’s birthday honours. 

Feature image: Left – Jill Whittaker, Right – Iain Salisbury