Independent training providers can rest assured they will be eligible for the government’s latest catch-up funding, it has been confirmed.

The Department for Education last week announced £1.4 billion for extra tuition, teacher training and additional years in education to help students whose learning has suffered due to Covid-19.

This included £222 million to expand the 16-to-19 Tuition Fund, which will deliver extra tuition for students, specifically focusing on English and maths as well as vocational courses.

Additionally, providers will also be funded to offer students in year 13 the option to repeat the year “if they have been particularly badly affected by the pandemic”.

When the support measures were announced last week, there was initially concern as to whether independent providers would be in-scope to benefit alongside schools and colleges.

The press release sent out by the DfE said the funding would only apply to “schools, colleges and early-years providers in England”.

FE Week has now had it confirmed by the DfE that independent training providers will also be eligible.

Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Jane Hickie said her organisation was “very pleased” with the clarification.

The AELP had recommended to the education recovery commissioner Sir Kevan Collins that “no young person should be excluded from any form of government catch-up support based on where they chose to access their educational entitlement,” she said.

Over 100 independent providers have direct 16-to-19 contracts and were already utilising the £96 million the government committed to the 16-to-19 Tuition Fund last July.

Allowing them to access this second tranche, Hickie said, “will enable continuity and support young people who most need it”.

The extra tuition can be delivered one-to-one or in small groups for disadvantaged students on 16-to-19 study programmes if their learning has been disrupted because of coronavirus.

Providers in the first wave of the 16-to-19 Tuition Fund spent their allocations on hiring extra tutoring and pastoral staff, as well as mental health support for students.

While ITPs have welcomed the funding, the Covid catch-up announcement caused Sir Kevan Collins to resign. He told prime minister Boris Johnson in his resignation letter the amount of money “falls far short of what is needed”.

Collins was reported to have called for spending of around £15 billion.

Colleges and universities are being invited to bid for a slice of a new £18 million fund to expand their higher technical qualifications (HTQs) offering.

The Growth Fund has been set up to help providers invest in equipment and develop the business links they need to offer training at levels 4 and 5 in sectors with growing employer demand, such as digital, construction, health and science.

Applications can be made from today and will need to be submitted within four weeks, by July 9.

It is being funded from the National Skills Fund, of which £50 million was earmarked for “capital investment to drive up higher technical provision” in the November spending review.

Colleges must have a rating of ‘outstanding’ or ‘good’ to be eligible for the cash, and have a financial health rating of at least ‘satisfactory’.

The Growth Fund follows a review of higher technical education concluded by the government in July 2020.

Ministers have since pledged to introduce newly approved HTQs from September 2022, supported by a government-backed brand and quality mark.

The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education will shortly announce the first successful digital HTQs. Awarding bodies will be invited to submit HTQs for approval against employer-led occupational standards in construction, and health and science on July 5.

This will be followed in 2022 by business and administration; education and childcare; engineering and manufacturing; and legal, finance and accounting. The year after will involve agriculture, environmental and animal care; catering and hospitality; creative and design; and hair and beauty.

‘We want to counter the myth that a degree is the only way to a good job’

As well as the Growth Fund, the DfE has today announced £10 million for Institutes of Technology to develop and deliver higher technical short and modular courses in STEM disciplines like engineering, manufacturing, construction and digital.

Aimed at working adults, these courses, which will be available from autumn 2021, will be “free to access and will support people to rapidly reskill or upskill to meet local economic needs”.

Another £2 million has been set aside for a project led by The High Value Manufacturing Catapult, an organisation that “supports businesses to harness innovation”.

Working with IoTs, the company will “support the development and delivery of modular training focused on upskilling employees to help address future skills gaps in high-value manufacturing”.

The new suite of HTQs is planned to be a natural progression route for young people taking new T Levels or A-levels.

Education secretary Gavin Williamson said: “Investment in higher technical skills will support more people to secure exciting and rewarding careers, fill skills gaps in our economy and help us build back better from the pandemic.

“We also want to counter the myth that a degree is the only way to a good job. This funding will help open up more high-quality training alternatives for people, empowering them to get the skills they need to build the life they want, wherever they live.”

Tens of thousands of students faced more stress this morning as a glitch in UCAS’s system automatically rejected their university offers.

Around 100,000 learners have until midnight today (June 10) to make their decisions through the admissions service’s portal.

But as many as one in five received emails from UCAS in the early hours of this morning telling them that their offers were lost.

UCAS tweeted at 8.36am to assure students the issue was an “error” and that their IT team was working “urgently” to fix the issue.

We’re sorry some offers have been automatically declined in error before the deadline. We’re working to fix this urgently and your offers will be available for you to make your replies shortly. Please be assured you will not be disadvantaged by this error.

— UCAS (@ucas_online) June 10, 2021

But it was met by a barrage of complaints from anxious learners and parents. A-level grades are being awarded through teacher-assessed grades this year, rather than normal exams, owing to multiple lockdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Richard Hiding tweeted: “One very stressed daughter, email received at 1am telling her that all her offers were lost. The icing on a very difficult 18 months.”

Another user called Laila said: “This has caused so much stress. It is very unprofessional to post on Twitter without sending an email at least. What if other undergraduate/postgraduate students do not have a Twitter account. My daughter has been unbelievably stressed and is not doing okay since the morning!!!”

While another, Atif, added: “This gave us a near heart attack this morning as we were shocked to seeing all our offers getting auto declined whereas the deadline is midnight of 10th June.”

Chief operations officer for UCAS, Sander Kristel, initially told FE Week that only a “small percentage” of the 100,000 university-hopefuls had been affected, before clarifying this amounted to around 20,000.

He said the issue was fixed by 9.30am and apologised to those affected, insisting that no student will be disadvantaged by the error.

“Unfortunately, a small percentage of those due to make their decisions today were automatically declined earlier this morning due to a systems error,” he said.

“We have apologised to all affected students and reiterated that our teams are available on the telephone lines and social media to provide support and advice as students make their decisions today.”

Provider-level qualification achievement rates (QARs) will include only some courses in 2020/21, the Education and Skills Funding Agency has announced.

Only those that are subject to normal assessment will be included, but qualifications that receive teacher-assessed grades will be left out.

The QARs will then be shared with individual providers as well as Ofsted for inspection purposes and deciding which colleges and training providers to visit.

QAR data, which is used to measure providers’ performance and hold them to account, was not produced for the 2019/20 academic year following the Covid-19 outbreak. Providers were not sent the data nor was it shared with the inspectorate.

The ESFA had said earlier this academic year that the data would again not be published in 2020/21, but that it would be shared with providers and Ofsted.

Announcing the decision to exclude teacher-assessed qualifications again, the agency said: “Recognising the ongoing impact of the pandemic and published guidance on the awarding of qualifications for summer 2021, those qualifications confirmed as subject to normal assessment (category A) will be included in institution level QARs and shared with Ofsted and providers.

“Those qualifications confirmed as teacher-assessed (category B1) and those which may be subject to a teacher-assessed grade if they cannot safely access an assessment (category B2 and Access to HE courses regulated by QAA) will not be included in institution level QARs or shared with Ofsted or providers for 2020 to 2021.”

Ofqual has split the awarding of vocational and technical qualifications (VTQs) for this year into three broad groups.

Those that are most like GCSEs and A-levels, such as most BTECs, will receive teacher-assessed grades. VTQs that are used for direct entry into employment and demonstrate occupational or professional competence will see their assessments go ahead as planned.

And assessments for VTQs that are unlike GCSEs and A-levels but are still used for progression, such as functional skills and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), should still go ahead. But if this is not possible, they can receive teacher-assessed grades.

The QARs are the percentage of enrolments that are successfully completed and passed in each academic year by providers.

They are produced for apprenticeships, adult education and 16 to 18 programmes.

The government should pay apprentice wages and fund their full cost of training “for at least a year” if they work for a small or medium-sized employer (SME), an influential MP has said.

Robert Halfon, chair of the education select committee and a former skills minister, believes the chancellor’s extra investment for apprentice incentives and kickstart programmes should not have “been given so much to the bigger companies”.

Speaking at today’s Association of Employment and Learning Providers conference, Halfon said it would have been better targeted at smaller firms and went as far as to call for their apprentices’ wages to be funded.

It echoes a policy proposed by Labour, which wants unspent apprenticeship levy funding to subsidise apprentice wages.

Halfon said: “The number of apprenticeship starts has fallen steadily among all age groups since 2015/16, from 509,000 to 323,000 in 2019/20. That’s an overall decline of 37 per cent. This fall was particularly acute for the most disadvantaged young people aged under 25 who fell by 52 per cent.

“So to support SMEs, we should fund 100 per cent of training costs and salary, at least for the first year of an apprenticeship.”

He added that government should “try and ensure” that every person is given an “apprenticeship guarantee” and “strategically weigh the levy in favour of young people, especially those disadvantaged backgrounds to address the rising unemployment figures in this age group”.

Under chancellor Rishi Sunak’s plan for jobs, the government has offered apprentice incentive payments to all employers since August. The cash bonuses for starting new apprentices currently amount to £3,000 for any age at any employer.

And Sunak is also investing £2 billion in kickstart – a wage-subsidy scheme that allows people aged 16 to 24 who are claiming Universal Credit to take newly created six-month work placements with employers, who will also have their overheads covered.

Kickstart grants for employers can total £6,500.

‘Proposals from Halfon and others can make a difference’

Expanding on his call for apprentice wage subsidy for SMEs in a Q&A after his speech, Halfon said: “The money that government has given towards apprenticeships and kickstarter is going to every company whether they’re big or small.

“And I think, they perhaps should not have given so much to the bigger companies and given that money to smaller companies. You’ll be able to give those companies more money than the existing schemes and I think that would have been a bigger incentive for those smaller companies to employ young people and employ apprentices.

“I talked about an apprenticeship guarantee and I think if you gave that incentive to small businesses to do this I think it would make a huge difference. Huge difference. And I suspect that it would be very successful, and they would be able to employ a lot more apprentices than they otherwise might do.”

AELP chief executive Jane Hickie said: “AELP called for wage subsidies early in the pandemic and so we are pleased that the opposition and the education committee chair share similar views.

“We are concerned that young people on kickstart, for example, are not necessarily going to progress on to an apprenticeship and so proposals from Robert Halfon and others can make a difference in giving young people a proper career path instead of a welcome but short-term respite off benefits.”

The head of the government’s careers quango has bemoaned how independent providers have not been given enough access to schools to talk up technical education.

Speaking at the Association of Employment and Learning Providers national conference today, Oli de Botton (pictured, right) committed the Careers and Enterprise Company to this year making sure more students know all the options available to them beyond A-levels.

“It is true historically that there hasn’t been enough access for ITPs or enough information about apprenticeships and technical routes for young people,” the CEC’s chief executive, appointed last October, told delegates.

He promised the company, set up in 2014, would be working “very, very hard this year” to ensure students know all their options as this is important to the government’s levelling up agenda.

“What is very clear is when you do give access to different providers and all the options, young people are more likely to take them,” he added.

His remarks came in response to a question on research by UCAS, released late last month, which revealed one-third of students are not told about apprenticeships.

This is despite secondary schools and colleges in England being legally required to allow other training providers access to their learners to inform them of technical qualifications or apprenticeships.

This is what is known as the Baker Clause – named after its author, former education secretary Lord Kenneth Baker – which became law in 2018, and meant schools and colleges also had to publish statements online outlining how they will comply.

In a report on its research, UCAS stated an ambition to “act as a ‘digital Baker Clause’, providing comprehensive information, advice, and content tools to help students make informed and aspirational choices about the full range of post-secondary options in a single location”.

The Department for Education and its agencies have made several small-scale attempts to enforce compliance with the clause: then-academies minister Lord Agnew fired off letters to headteachers last year, warning them to comply with the legislation.

It followed letters to five academy trusts about non-compliance that were sent out by the DfE in 2019.

In May 2020, Ofsted judged a secondary school to be ‘inadequate’ for “not currently meeting its statutory responsibility to ensure that providers of technical qualifications and apprenticeships visit the school to inform pupils about these options”. FE Week understood this was the first case of a school being pulled up by the inspectorate for failing the Baker Clause.

But the CEC’s own data, published in November, showed just 47 per cent of the more than 2,000 schools in the quango’s careers hubs fully met a target for a “meaningful encounter with providers of the full range of learning opportunities” for staff and students. For those schools not in the hub network, 13 per cent met the target.

In its landmark Skills for Jobs white paper, which formed the basis for the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill currently going through Parliament, the DfE pledged “tougher formal action against non-compliance” with the Baker Clause.

This, the paper published in January said, will be based on a new minimum requirement “about who is to be given access to which pupils and when”. Government-funded careers support for schools will also be made conditional on Baker Clause compliance.

de Botton, himself a former headteacher, did also say today the Careers and Enterprise Company had heard from the schools and colleges that “they are providing more and more access to ITPs, more and more compliance with the Baker Clause”.

In response to de Botton’s comments, a DfE spokesperson said: “It is vital young people are informed about the wide range of options for them to reach their future careers goals.”

A consultation on proposals to “strengthen” the Baker Clause will be conducted in the summer they added, and more details “will be released in due course”.