Education giant City and Guilds is facing a £50,000 penalty from Ofqual after it was found an assignment for multiple level 3 qualifications from 2018 was “unfit for purpose”.
A notice of regulatory action against the awarding body was published by the regulator this morning. It states that City & Guilds must also pay all legal costs.
It reported that one of the tasks for the awarding organisation’s level 3 animal management qualifications was “written in a way that potentially made the requirements unclear and ambiguous to candidates.
“This caused some candidates to struggle to access higher mark bands.”
300 learners did not receive marks reflecting their attainment
The compulsory task was the same across three other qualifications and contributed to the overall grade – but the weighting differed.
The qualifications were held at 27 centres in England and three in Wales and summer 2018 was the first year these qualifications had been awarded by City & Guilds.
In total, 300 of the 2,316 learners who received results for the qualifications in August 2018 did not get marks which reflected their level of attainment, Ofqual found.
Results for 174 candidates changed from a fail to a pass, one changed from a fail to a merit, 104 from pass to merit, 20 from merit to distinction.
There were no other errors on the synoptic assignment, so the regulator deemed that overall, the qualifications remain robust.
While it was found City & Guilds did not notify Ofqual at the time the issues were discovered, it did so within six days.
The notice highlights the “significant steps” the organisation took “to rectify the issue and issued upward grade changes to all affected learners within a month to ensure that no learners were disadvantaged”.
The mistake was acknowledged and “no attempt was made to conceal the incident”.
Qualifications body offers to pay legal costs
Ofqual’s enforcement committee intends to accept a settlement from City & Guilds, which includes the awarding body admitting to breaching eight of the General Conditions of Recognition – the rules for all the qualifications and organisations the watchdog regulates.
City & Guilds’ settlement also includes an offer to pay a £50,000 monetary penalty and to pay Ofqual’s “reasonable” legal costs for this matter.
It comes after the organisation received a £38,000 fine in August 2016 for failing to issue results in a “timely” manner for qualifications, including paper-based Functional Skills assessments, to for 22,229 learners.
The committee will meet again on or after June 25 to consider any representations which have been made, and if to accept the settlement from City & Guilds or whether another order should be made.
Managing director ‘takes Ofqual’s findings very seriously’
City and Guilds’ managing director David Phillips apologised again “to all of our learners and customers who were impacted by the issues flagged by Ofqual regarding four of our Animal Management Technical Qualifications in 2018.
“We dealt with the matter swiftly at the time to ensure that no learner was disadvantaged. However, we accept the findings of Ofqual and have since reached an agreement regarding a resolution to their investigation.
David Phillips
“We have taken the findings from the Ofqual investigation very seriously and, as a result, have implemented further quality assurance measures and controls that ensure the qualifications remain high quality and fit for purpose.
“Since the launch of our suite of Technical qualifications in 2017/18, City & Guilds has continuously reviewed and refined their development, delivery and awarding to ensure they provide learners with the relevant technical skills needed to succeed in their chosen career path – be that a job, university or an apprenticeship.
“We remain committed to maintaining the highest standards in all of our products and services and will ensure this is a top priority moving forwards.”
The government has temporarily upped the cash incentives for employers running T Level industry placements to £1,000.
It comes as the Department for Education has become increasingly concerned with convincing businesses to host students for the 315-hour or 45-day placements.
The new incentives, today’s announcement reads, are “designed to offer support to employers impacted by the pandemic, to ensure they can continue to host placements”.
Firms will be able to claim for a new maximum of 20 students on T Level programmes from 27 May 2021 until July 2022.
Three T Levels were rolled out last September, and a further seven are due to start this autumn.
Gillian Keegan
Apprenticeships and skills minister Gillian Keegan said employers “are already recognising the value of hosting a T Level industry placement,” as it helps “build the skilled workforce they need for the future”.
This “temporary cash boost,” she continued, “will help even more employers to experience the benefits, while also providing young people with invaluable first-hand experience in the workplace”.
Cash incentives are not the only measure the DfE has pulled out to try and persuade employers to host placements.
A new employer guide is also being published today to help businesses understand what is expected of them from an industry placement.
Today’s announcement comes on top of an existing Employer Support Package to help firms deliver placements.
The package includes online guidance, case studies and workshops and is set to continue into 2021/22.
The DfE has said an invitation to tender will be published this summer to extend the package.
An early engagement notice was already published last week, which revealed the package is meant for employers who are “less certain” about industry placements than they are about apprenticeships or work experience.
The notice says employers are particularly unsure about what the placements entail and “how to work with students and providers to structure an appropriate placement”.
The pandemic has heightened the difficulty in finding sufficient placements for students, with the results of a National Foundation for Educational Research survey published in July 2020 reporting employers were “cancelling or not committing to placements”.
The report went on to say providers were “most worried” about placements, as existing partnerships with employers had been “seriously damaged by Covid”.
Some placements have since been delayed. Providers of the early years educator T Level told FE Week last January they had postponed placements to keep students and the workplaces safe.
The DfE also cut the minimum hours for placements for level 3 early educator qualifications, including the T Level, from 750 hours to 415 because of the pandemic.
Last weeks’ notice states that the DfE’s latest programme of support will include measures to raise awareness among employers, including “targeting specific routes that are proving particularly problematic”.
Suppliers of the support will also be expected to provide the DfE with intelligence on employer behaviour and employer patterns.
A dedicated response team, and online webinars which can be accessed at any time, will also be expected.
The highest paid college principals and chief executives in 2019/20 have been revealed by the Education and Skills Funding Agency today.
Sitting at the top of the list, published within the agency’s annual college accounts spreadsheet, is New City College boss Gerry McDonald who earned a basic salary of £235,000 in 2019/20.
Following in second was Weston College principal Paul Phillips who took home £222,000, and in third was LTE Group chief executive John Thornhill who wasd paid £214,000.
There were six college leaders in total who were paid a basic salary of £200,000 or more last year.
FE Week has excluded colleges that were led by multiple principals or chief executives in either year.
England’s top 10 highest paid college leaders in 2019/20 were as follows:
[CORRECTION: Since this article was published a number of colleges have contacted FE Week to say that the ESFA’s data for basic salary has included pension contributions in some cases. FE Week has amended the table to reflect this.]
UCAS has pledged to act as a “digital Baker Clause” and reform its service to be “as strong for would-be apprentices as it is for prospective undergraduates”.
In a report published today, the universities admissions service warns that one-third of students are not told about apprenticeships despite this being a legal requirement for schools.
And it claimed that only around half of those currently studying in FE colleges receive their entitlement to information from apprenticeship providers.
A survey by the admissions service also found that three-quarters of students said it was easy to find information about higher education, compared to a quarter who said the same about apprenticeships.
Its report states that while “most people appreciate that apprenticeships are there as an option, they are not sure either how to get information on them or indeed where they can lead”.
UCAS says it is “working hard to improve our apprenticeships offer” and will undertake further work, starting with a deep dive on apprenticeships this autumn.
Its ambition is 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”.
Named after former education secretary Lord Baker, the Baker clause was introduced in January 2018 and requires secondary schools and colleges in England, by law, to allow other training providers access to their learners to inform them of technical qualifications or apprenticeships.
But non-compliance with the rule has been rife and a lack of government action has led to sector leaders labelling it as the “clause law without teeth”.
UCAS’ report comes after the service’s director of strategy, policy, and public affairs, John Cope, told FE Week in November that the organisation was working on plan of action that could level the playing field for HE, FE and apprenticeships.
He said this could in part be achieved through a new post-qualifications admissions system that has been put forward by government and is currently under consultation.
Currently, applicants to college or university are given predicted grades by their education provider, from universities can decide whether to offer them “conditional” or “unconditional” offers, and the applicants can then rank their offers in order of preference.
Cope said this creates an “unhelpful split” between academic and technical results and offers, and so “life-changing decisions” on whether to pursue a place at college, university or elsewhere can be made on “imperfect information”.
He argued a post-qualification model could “significantly” level up the playing field for further education and skills providers and create an “offer window” where they and universities could attract applicants at the same time.
‘We are working hard to improve our apprenticeships offer’
Today’s report says UCAS is “not starting from scratch” when it comes to making its service easier to find apprenticeships as the programmes are listed on the “career finder” section of its website which have been viewed more than a million times in the past year.
Jane Hickie
UCAS said over half of school-leavers interested in applying for entry in 2022 have registered an interest in apprenticeships, with engineering, computer sciences, and architecture, building, and planning the most popular.
Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Jane Hickie said the government appeared to recognise the flaws with the Baker Clause when it published a three-point plan in its FE white paper to address the matter.
However, the “absence of specific measures in the recently published Skills Bill would suggest we have a plan that’s a bark but no bite”.
“AELP will be urging Parliamentarians to use the Bill to fix this once and for all,” Hickie added.
The Commons’ education select committee heard from expert witnesses and two sector leaders today as part of its ongoing inquiry into prison education.
The inquiry is intended to review current arrangements for learners in custody, including what barriers exist to delivering apprenticeships.
In the first of two sessions, MPs heard from NACRO’s director of education and skills Lisa Capper, St Giles Trust’s peer advisor network coordination manager Shereen Lawrence, and the chief executive of the Bounce Back project Julian Stanley.
The second session heard from Association of Colleges chief executive David Hughes and Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief policy officer Simon Ashworth.
Here are five key things we learned…
Prison education ‘hasn’t gotten better in 15 years’
Hughes, who formerly worked as a provider services director for what became the Education and Skills Funding Agency, said when he was managing offender learning contracts almost two decades ago and “the funding looked about the same” as it does now.
David Hughes
On top of the low funding, he said prison education relies on “pitiful” learning facilities and a digital estate which is “completely underinvested in”.
“Ironically, because of lockdown, prisoners who’ve been able to get digital access in in their cells have been able to access learning more effectively than when they were expected to go to classrooms or workshop,” he highlighted.
Hughes’ solution was: “Let’s put the funding in properly, let’s give individual learning plans, let’s get the settlement plans to include the educational outcome, let’s fund them in the community as well as give them access to the learning loans when they come on stream, let’s give them access to the level three entitlement when that kicks in.”
Legislative needed to allow prisoner apprenticeships
This morning’s witnesses confirmed legislation would need to be changed to allow prisoners to take apprenticeships.
Currently, prisoners cannot start apprenticeships as they are forbidden from contracts of employment.
So the legislative changes, Lisa Capper said, would be needed so “apprenticeships could be fully started within the prison environment”.
Yet there was not a swell of support for such a change among the witnesses.
Capper said there were issues with funding, as “if a lot of the upfront learning is done in prison, it leaves very little funding for the community education providers to complete with that prisoner on release, in terms of placing them in the workplace.
“Apprenticeship pay is not necessarily as much as they need on release, as well. It’s not always the most attractive option.”
She said apprenticeships were not “necessarily the panacea” and there are “other pathways that prisoners can take” to be work-ready when they are released.
Hughes said “a lot of stability” was needed for prisoner apprenticeships, including allowing those with up to six months on their term to be in a prison near to the community they live in, with a learning plan, work experience, and preparations in place for an apprenticeship so employers will commit to them.
Should levy funding be used to upskill prisoners?
Hughes and Ashworth appeared to diverge during the session on whether unspent apprenticeship levy funds ought to be used to fund prisoners through training.
Hughes argued inmates’ apprenticeships “should just be funded,” as “I don’t think we should get tangled up with the levy – it’s too complex”.
Yet Ashworth said employers are handing back millions in levy funds to the Treasury every year and have an “appetite” to transfer funds, possibly to “use it as a feeder to help potentially train up prisoners”.
‘No idea of the scale’ of SEND needs in prison
Committee member Tom Hunt quizzed the first session’s witnesses after Dame Sally Coates, author of a landmark review of prison education in 2016, told the committee in an earlier session that prisoners do not have an assessment for special educational needs when they arrive.
This, he worried, meant “we’ve got no idea of the scale of a problem”.
Lawrence said in her experience, “there isn’t an assessment,” just a classroom which is not “geared” to support those with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND).
“However, if that was done very early on with everybody, we will have accurate numbers and we’ll know what resources we need to buy.”
Stanley said a SEND strategy implemented once an inmate arrives in prison, perhaps backed up with technology to speed up assessment, would be “fantastic”.
Warnings of ‘barriers’ to career opportunities in women’s prisons
Lawrence told the committee female prisons “tend to focus around a lot of what would, many years ago, have been women’s jobs”. Including sewing and hair and beauty tuition.
This was instead of “more practical” workshops, such as in construction.
Stanley objected to this exclusion, as: “Women in construction is a key thing.”
His organisation, Bounce Back, finds training and employment for ex-offenders and specialises in the construction industry, so Stanley said there is a “massive range of opportunities for women in construction are all different levels”.
Capper said women do face “barriers,” not just in terms of the curriculum, but also “cultural issues on the outside” of prison.
Almost one year in to her two-year role, Larissa Kennedy, one of the youngest ever presidents of the National Union of Students, explains why she wants louder FE campuses
Larissa Kennedy, president of the National Union of Students, is on a specific mission to increase the voice of FE students, she tells me.
The public may be used to university students going on marches and protests – prompting the ire of a government who now claim free speech is at risk on higher education campuses – but what about further education learners? Can they, too, speak loudly enough that the government notices them?
“We need to empower FE students to have a say in a way that’s authentic to them,” explains Kennedy. “There’s this paternalisation of FE students – this energy that doesn’t centre their agency. We want to turn that on its head.”
Before speaking with me, Kennedy was on a call with FE students at Leicester College helping them to coordinate protest action. The students are worried about the effect of the government’s adult education budget clawback on the college, a measure also currently being opposed by a cross-party group of MPs.
“They are infuriated that the Education and Skills Funding Agency are doing this! They’ve set up a petition and have got more than 5,000 signatures,” Kennedy tells me. “So I’m talking with them about how do we amplify that? How do we get it over the 10,000 mark, how do we get it the attention it deserves?”
She adds: “The question I often ask is, what’s pissing you off? Then we turn that into action.”
The question I often ask is, what’s pissing you off?
The fighting talk could sound blunt and formidable, but Kennedy grins for most of the time she’s speaking and has a way of putting things that makes her sound both passionate and pretty reasonable at the same time.
It may be a result of not being brought up in a stridently political household, but one in which injustices were explored through personal stories: a skill Kennedy herself has inherited. She’s also been on both sides of society in her home stomping ground of Croydon in south London – rubbing shoulders with both the well-off, and everybody else.
“I think perhaps our household was more political than my mum knew at the time, mainly because of the things she was reflecting on to me,” she says. Kennedy’s mother is a teacher and was working in one of the most deprived schools in the neighbourhood, she says.
Kennedy at a Youth for Change protest campaigning for FGM training for teachers in 2017
“She told me about having to give apples to kids who were hungry, or having to clean their shirts. She’d explain it was impossible for them concentrate, because they were hungry and exhausted.”
Her father would tell her how, when he’d moved over from St Vincent in the Caribbean, people had thrown bricks at his head as he and others tried to go to school. Such tales set Kennedy ticking on to the power of education, she says.
“It wasn’t an intentional politicisation. But it made me question why people are so afraid of certain groups of people getting access to education. What is in there that people are trying to hide?”
Kennedy is all praise for her primary school years, and particularly about the personal encouragement she got from Mrs Berkeley-Agyepong, her year 6 teacher. “I always loved school, I just loved learning,” she beams. As a small child she’d be found trying to read the newspaper, sometimes retrieved by her mother if the content was considered too stark for a four-year-old.
There’s a West Indies phrase for someone like her, Kennedy continues – a person who is “inner” (although she’s not sure how it’s spelled). “It’s like a positive version of nosy. I want to be able to read everything, want to get into everything.”
Kennedy at a summit organised by Women Political Leaders in Iceland in 2019
The personality trait paid off, and Kennedy won an academic scholarship, and a bursary place, to Croydon High School, a fee-paying private girls school in a different part of the neighbourhood.
The experience was both formative and uncomfortable at the same time, and clearly leaves her feeling uncomfortable now.
“It was a massively different environment. I saw very starkly the difference between the friends in my area, and the people who were at my school, and it almost radicalised me.
“I could just see the avenues of opportunities were really different for us. At my school we went swimming every week because there was a pool and my friends from home weren’t doing that. We had a library – it wasn’t even just a library, it was called the resource centre.”
When she met her old friends afterwards for chicken and chips, their different days soon became obvious. “I was in four choirs,” laughs Kennedy. She continues more seriously, with a certain frankness.
“It’s something I struggle with. I don’t know if I would be doing what I’m doing now, or if I would have gone to my university, and that makes me wholly uncomfortable. Here I am, campaigning against fees.” She says she adopted a kind of “character” act to fit in during those years.
With French, Spanish and English Literature A-levels under her belt, Kennedy then won a place at Warwick University to study politics, international studies and Hispanic studies. In fact, she’s not finished it. She’s still on a break from her degree, and should strictly be in Colombia for her year abroad. “I miss my degree so much,” she joke-moans. Instead, she moved into student politics.
It wasn’t entirely surprising. Kennedy had already been a spokesperson for Girl Guides in sixth form, heading off to TV interviews during her late teens. She recalls being picked up by Sky News to give interviews before school and would have a “full face of makeup” on ready for 9am. Standing up for a good cause is a muscle she developed very early: her mum put her on the Girl Guides waiting list when she was four.
At Warwick, she became the freshers’ representative for the anti-sexism society, and in her second year, she also became co-president of the anti-racism society.
Then a huge news story broke concerning the university two years ago, shocking much of the higher education sector. The BBC ran a special investigative programme on it: “Inside the Warwick University rape chat scandal”. Young male students were writing horrific things to one another as “jokes” in a Facebook group chat.
Kennedy speaking on sexual violence at Warwick University in 2018
Comments included “rape the whole flat to teach them a lesson”, as well as fantasies about named female students being abducted, chained up and urinated on. The young men had all given themselves names of notorious serial killers and serial rapists.
Five were banned from the university, two of them for ten years. But when these two appealed, the university reduced the term to just 12 months.
“We were just completely flabbergasted,” says Kennedy. “I spent the entire of second year fighting this, going out, galvanising people.” Eventually, Warwick University launched a review into its disciplinary processes.
By the end of it, Kennedy was well known about the campus and students asked her to take a paid sabbatical role working for the student union. She became education officer and deputy president and during that tenure campaigned to get the university to pay an hourly wage to minority ethnic students contributing heavily to its decolonisation work.
“It was expected that we would continue this work, year after year. The university was using this to make itself more marketable, so why wasn’t it being recognised as work?”
A black female member of staff at the university had said something to Kennedy that really stuck with her. “She said, ‘Don’t make yourself part of the black attainment gap while you’re trying to fix it.’” With this in mind, Kennedy and her team secured pay for those students as official employees of the union.
Kennedy presenting research on students of colour’s experiences to the MP in the House of Commons (in 2019)
Kennedy then tried to leave student politics, taking a placement with an organisation tackling gender injustice for a year. “I was like, I’ve done my work! I tried to escape,” she chuckles.
But her fellow campaigners rang her up to suggest she run for the president of the NUS against vice president Erica Ramos. Despite having no similar ranking within the NUS, she won the top role and began in July last year.
She also considers herself lucky: she swiped the role at an unusual time for the organisation. The NUS had completed an internal reform process after narrowly avoiding bankruptcy with a £3 million deficit in 2018, and had set itself a new course. One change was that the presidency would now be for two years, instead of one. Aged just 21, Kennedy had won the reins of power for longer than any of her predecessors.
“It’s absolutely a good move for it to be two years. Now I feel like I’ve got my feet under the table. When I started, week six was the A-levels fiasco, and having to deal with that was incredibly difficult. Now I feel ready to take it bolder and bigger.
“FE is one of the areas I really want to go big on now.”
Kennedy and her team have set a target for engaging more FE students as part of their “new vision for education” campaign. Across both FE and HE, they want to mobilise 300,000 students this year. If she is going to galvanise more FE students into political action, then she draws on a formidable experience base of how to do it.
A college being forced into a merger after an audit revealed a £5.35 million over-claim has now suspended its long-serving principal.
FE Week has seen an email to Ruskin College staff saying its principal of nine years, Paul Di Felice, has been removed.
And a college spokesperson today confirmed he had been “suspended from his post pending investigation”.
The college added it was “unable to provide further comment on this matter at this time”.
Former interim principal for Hadlow College, Graham Morley, has been recruited to lead the college during the investigation, ahead of its merger with major college group Activate Learning at the end of July.
They reveal the college is not operating as a going concern and there are “inadequate resources to continue in operational existence for the foreseeable future.”
The Education and Skills Funding Agency is clawing back £5.35 million, the accounts state, including £1.5 million for that year, £1.85 million for 2017-18, and £1.98 million for 2016-17.
The clawback follows an audit which found overclaims for adult education budget and residential bursary funding. England’s three other adult residential colleges have been stung by a similar audit which alleges they have misapplied an uplift that has been in place since the 1990s.
The Ruskin accounts stated they had “consistently applied the same methodology over many years, so was unaware of the need to align to a different scenario”.
Ruskin College has also sold off one of its bases of operations, the listed Stoke House, in March 2021 – using the proceeds to settle a debt with the Co-operative Bank after it committed a breach of its covenants. This breach had meant the college owed a £2.3 million loan within a year, but this has been paid off in full.
The accounts say “critical issues” including the clawback and a “significant” fall in HE learners from 214 in 2017/18 to 161 in 2018/19 “have significantly and adversely impacted on the overall financial and solvency position of the college and the outlook is challenging”.
However, the ESFA and the college are in “continuing discussions” about its financial position, and the provider believes “a solution to the cash shortfall prior to the merger will be found” – leaving the door open to a government bailout.
The college hopes Morley can shepherd them through the merger, with the all-staff email, from Paul Di Felice’s personal assistant, reading: “Graham is a very experienced individual who has extensive experience in college oversight and management, and I’ve assured him that you will give him your support whilst he is with us.”
Previously, he was interim principal at Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College, and principal of Cannock Chase Technical College and South Staffordshire College.
FE Week understands the investigation into Di Felice is being led by Evan Williams, the Association of College’s former director of employment and professional services, who now works as a governance and industrial relations consultant.
Ruskin College
This management shake-up is another blow to the Ofsted grade two Ruskin, which has been subject to a financial notice to improve since 2014.
The notice was reissued in November 2020 and the Department for Education placed the college in supervised status following a report by then-FE Commissioner Richard Atkins, published in October, which said the provider faced an “uncertain future”.
The Oxford-based college, originally founded in 1899, currently focuses on adult learners and its offer includes Access to HE diplomas, English for speakers of other languages courses, and trade union courses accredited by the TUC.
It has historic links to its city’s famous university and is itself renowned for educating working class people, especially those in the trade union movement.
As of July 2020, the FE Commissioner reported, enrolments were just over 50 per cent less than in 2018/19.
A structure and prospects appraisal was ordered in the wake of the report, which is what led to the merger with Activate Learning being announced in February.
Ofsted has chastised an online training provider after finding cases where, “in contrast to the records held”, apprentices did not have jobs.
Applied Business Academy Limited (ABA) claimed it was an “isolated incident” but was also called out for poor safeguarding, after the watchdog discovered the provider did not know at least one of their apprentices was under the age of 18.
The London-based provider, which began training apprentices in April 2020, received ‘insufficient progress’ judgements across the board following a new provider monitoring visit and is now suspended from new starts under government rules.
It had 37 apprentices at the time of the inspection on two standards-based apprenticeships: the digital marketer standard at level 3 and the junior content producer standard at level 3.
Despite Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman previously insisting that the watchdog only focuses on the quality of education and does not police compliance against funding rules, ABA’s report outlines a series of non-compliance issues with apprenticeship regulations.
The report, published today, said: “In contrast to the records held, inspectors found cases of apprentices who did not have jobs, whose job roles were inappropriate for their course of study, and who did not work in England for the minimum time required under funding regulations.
“Leaders do not keep accurate records of their apprentices and did not know that at least one of their apprentices is under the age of 18. As a result, leaders have not appropriately assessed the risks these apprentices may face or put in place measures to support them.”
Inspectors added: “Not all apprentices have jobs which allow them to apply their learning at work. For instance, a few apprentices working towards the digital marketer standard mainly take orders from customers or make deliveries while at work.”
A spokesperson for ABA claimed the issue of apprentices without jobs was “one isolated incident”.
Ofsted criticised the provider’s leaders for not “accurately” assessing the quality of their apprenticeship training and “do not effectively monitor the quality of their staff’s work”.
Governors also “do not have an accurate understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the apprenticeship provision”.
Among other issues, the watchdog pulled the provider up for being too slow to put suitable arrangements in places for English and maths tuition, as well as a failure to assess apprentices’ prior knowledge before starting their training.
ABA’s spokesperson said: “We are taking all the necessary actions to upgrade ourselves to do more efficient work.
“We are not challenging Ofsted’s report. Our investigations into the full report are not yet complete. We are taking help and support to relook at everything.”
[UPDATE: On 02/09/2021 Ofsted published a follow-up monitoring report for the provider which focussed on its safeguarding provision. The provider was found making ‘significant progress’.]
The Skills Bill drops hints as to the direction of policy in the sector, writes Mark Taylor
The skills and post-16 education Bill gives us clues as to where the government is headed on policy in the further education sector.
Let me talk you through a few points of interest (or, at least, which are of interest to a lawyer…)
Local skills improvement plans
If the legislation had stated that colleges must have a mission to focus on local skills, this could arguably have changed the mission of colleges and even their charitable objects.
But by saying there is a requirement on colleges to think of local skills plans, it’s not giving them a new mission, but an obligation with which they must comply.
Otherwise, college boards might have had to act differently, and there could have been complicated changes under charity law. So the way this new requirement has been phrased is useful.
Colleges already have many statutory obligations, so adding a few more shouldn’t change their charitable status. However, it will add to the regulatory burden on colleges.
The obligations are not to absolutely comply with a local skills improvement plan. The obligations are to “have regard” to it and to work with employers to develop it. This should allow some leeway for colleges to not follow every aspect of a local skills improvement plan, provided that any such decision is properly reasoned.
The risk for colleges is the intervention powers that the FE Commissioner now has into colleges that are not meeting local needs. Modern colleges are not used to being told what provision to deliver. Intervention by the secretary of state purely because of the type of college delivery would be a shock to the system.
It would also potentially raise questions as to whether that college could continue to be classified as a private body, rather than a public body, for Office for National Statistics purposes.
In setting and enforcing a local skills improvement plan, we have to hope that employers and the secretary of state recognise the diversity of mission of colleges.
The strength of the further education sector is not built on an army of clone-like colleges. The sector is stronger because no two colleges are alike. Not every college (particularly specialist designated institutions) will be able to cater for every part of a local skills improvement plan.
Regulation of independent training providers
The bill gives the secretary of state the power to make regulations around keeping a list of (mainly) independent training providers.
Funding authorities (including devolved ones) will not be able to fund or allow sub-contracting with a provider not on the list.
We can take from this that the secretary of state is clearly willing to increasingly regulate devolved adult educational delivery.
The new list will focus on learner protection and concerns about provider failure.
This is a market that clearly concerns government. We will wait to see what the entry requirements are and how they differ from existing checks.
Mergers and insolvency law
The bill clarifies the government’s power to require a college to merge. These are powers which government arguably already had, but did not use.
That the Bill clarifies this shows that, firstly, past failure to use these powers may have been due to an uncertainty within Whitehall over its ability to do so. Secondly, if government feels the need to make clear that it has these powers, then it thinks that it may need to use them in the future.
An intervention regime in which colleges are forced to merge would be another significant shift for the sector.
The Bill also clarifies insolvency law surrounding colleges. While this may not have changed the law, the fact the government is looking to make sure it works shows they’re still planning to use it in the future.
Not in the bill
Many elements of the white paper are not reflected in the Bill, such as changes to college governance and funding.
This is likely to be positive for the sector, as legislation for legislation’s sake would only add to a college’s burden.
However, it does mean that we must wait for funding and policy changes to see what the future holds.
