It’s true – entry requirements for apprenticeships risks closing doors

Some learners barred from apprenticeships are ending up on college courses for three years, write Stephanie Thomson and Lorna Unwin

As another academic year draws to a close, families, teachers and careers advisers will rally round to help 16 -year-olds find a place for September.

But while guarantees and entitlements are popular hurrah words for policymakers, the reality on the ground shows an uneven playing field when it comes to post-16 options.

A big issue, as FE Week recently reported, is that entry requirements for some apprenticeships at level 2 are surprisingly high. Some employers demand GCSE grades equal to or beyond those necessary for A-level or level 3 vocational courses.

We found similar evidence in our research for the Nuffield Foundation published in February. We looked at the 40 per cent of young people who annually miss the benchmark grades in maths and/or English.

Across our case study areas in Greater Manchester and North Tyne, we identified great variation in entry requirements for similar types of apprenticeship ̶ and requirements that did not always coincide with the level of the apprenticeship.

For example, 33 per cent of apprenticeships at level 2 specified English and maths GCSE at grade 4 or above as the only condition of entry. Yet the corresponding apprenticeship standard usually stated an apprentice would be expected to work towards these GCSE grades or functional skills during their training.

Like FE Week, we also found that apprenticeship adverts often use vague terminology stating that particular grades “would be an advantage” or were “desirable”, or that a “good standard” or “reasonable level” of English and maths was required.

Given the acute shortage of apprenticeships for young people, using maths and English GCSEs as the main sorting device risks closing down opportunities for many who are keen to show their potential through work-based learning.

In addition, adverts for apprenticeships are not always clear whether achievements in other GCSE subjects, vocational qualifications, work experience and volunteering will be considered.

Course entry requirements are more likely to do this, but there is considerable local variation even for courses at the same level.

Across England, we found that around 25 per cent of young people without English and/or maths GCSE at grade 4 had started their post-16 phase at level 1 or below, including learners with substantial level 2 achievements.

Starting levels can affect progress and outcomes. For example, of the learners who started at level 1, 53 per cent had achieved at least level 2 by age 18. Yet this figure rose to 85 per cent for those who started at level 2.

Some young people are spending three years in the post-16 phase when they don’t necessarily need to

Understanding more about why some learners with similar GCSE attainment are starting on different levels is important because this could be creating inequities.

It could also help explain why some young people are spending three years in the post-16 phase when they don’t necessarily need to. This an aspect of the system that needs to be better understood and more widely acknowledged.

Some of the young people we spoke to were frustrated by starting on a lower-level course. But it is easy to see why colleges and training providers do this.

Reasons include funding constraints, inadequate information about a learner’s pre-16 achievements, timetable pressures due to maths and English upgrading, and a perceived need to start some vocational courses at a basic level.

But is there room to be less risk averse? Could colleges pool experiences and examine data on prior attainment and achievements in different subjects to see if starting levels need adjusting?

Could IfATE fund some sector-based pilot initiatives so employers and providers could work together to overcome prohibitive apprenticeship entry requirements?

Our research and FE Week’s findings disrupt the notion that, just armed with the “right” information, young people can progress smoothly into post-16 pathways.

This summer’s Covid-affected GCSE results will create headlines about grade inflation and teacher-led assessment.

Whatever the results, how can we ensure entry to post-16 provision focuses on young people’s potential – rather than their “failure” in certain subjects?

Academy trust comes to UTC’s rescue

Another university technical college in financial difficulty is seeking to shelter inside a multi-academy trust after recruiting fewer than half its target number of students.

Bristol and South Gloucestershire UTC, also known as Bristol Technology and Engineering Academy (BTEA) and based in Stoke Gifford, is awaiting sign-off from ministers to join The Olympus Academy Trust this September.

The decision comes after the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) criticised the college for its “weak financial position” and “continued concerns on governance and oversight of financial management by the board” in a financial notice to improve, published last Friday.

The notice followed a warning letter from the ESFA in 2017 and told the college that it must either join a “strong” MAT or expand its board of trustees.

 

College pauses admissions

In a letter about its move to Olympus, the UTC says it has paused recruitment from September for “logistical” reasons.

Admissions are expected to restart next year.

Dave Baker, the MAT’s chief executive, said joining the nine-academy trust would provide “a financially and educationally viable future for the specialist UTC provision and for current students”.

Ministerial sign-off is expected this month. The decision will then need the approval of Olympus’ trustees.

Baker further explained that the pause in admissions was due to “leadership turbulence”. Several governors and leaders had left the college within the past year, which had made recruitment “challenging”.

The UTC opened in September 2013 but has struggled to recruit its anticipated student numbers. Government figures show that, despite a capacity of 440 at its north Bristol base, it currently has just 205 students.

 

University technical college hands back almost £400k in one year

Under-recruitment has led to the ESFA clawing back more than £1 million in funding from the UTC since 2014.

Its 2019-2020 financial statements show that it had accumulated a deficit of £833,391 by August 31, 2020, partly due to having to hand back £108,000 that year.

Previous years’ statements show it had to hand back as much as £362,000 in 2015-16.

University technical college
Lord Baker

Baker said the clawback was for “pupils number adjustment – BTEA was funded on estimated numbers which didn’t materialise, so the overfunding has to be paid back”.

He said that “low student numbers have made it impossible to fund the actual costs of running the establishment”. The college’s budgetary situation remains “challenging”.

 

ESFA demands college act towards balanced budget

Joining an MAT has become a common option for struggling UTCs in recent years. It is a move favoured by ministers and, despite initially resisting it, the UTC licensing body the Baker Dearing Trust began to encourage the process in 2019 to enable the colleges to survive.

Currently, there are 48 UTCs of which just over half (25) are now run by MATs.

Aside from encouraging the college to join an MAT, the financial notice also mandates BTEA to “submit all audited financial statements to the ESFA on time and without qualification”.

It must also “demonstrate that every possible economy is being made to achieve a balanced budget”.

The ESFA’s permission is also needed before the UTC takes on costs like the writing off of debts or making special staff severance and compensation payments.

Low student numbers and ensuing financial difficulties have dogged the UTC programme since it was launched in 2010. The brainchild of former education secretary Lord Baker, 11 UTCs have now closed.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: EDITION 353

Your weekly guide to who’s new and who’s leaving.

Esther Chesterman, Chief executive, National Extension College

Start date: April 2021

Previous job: General manager, NCC Education Ltd

Interesting fact: During March, she and her daughter walked 500 miles to support Global Girl Project, a charity she is trustee of.

Dr Jenifer Moody, Non-executive director, Energy and Utility Skills

Start date: May 2021

Concurrent job: Qualifications and assessment consultant

Interesting fact: She is one of the original trustees of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors, where she is currently a fellow.

Daniel Stanbra, Director of adult education and contracts, RNN Group

Start date: May 2021

Previous job: Director of operations, The Source Skills Academy

Interesting fact: He enjoys “unsuccessfully” maintaining classic cars, most of which have invariably broken down in a variety of European countries.

School catering firm furloughed tutors despite going on apprentice hiring spree

A major school catering supplier has been slated by Ofsted for hiring apprentices during the pandemic only to place their tutors on furlough.

Inspectors found that, as a result, almost all apprentices at Aspens Services Limited in Worcester are asked to complete assessments before any learning takes place.

Some apprentices had to wait for four months before receiving contact from a tutor. Inspectors also warned there are no plans in place for how apprentices will be supported to catch up.

The judgment came after a new provider monitoring visit in March. The report was published this week.

Two of the three themes that were judged returned ‘insufficient progress’ scores. As a result, the provider faces a suspension on starts until a follow-up Ofsted visit returns improved judgments, in line with government policy.

Aspens Services Limited provides catering services in 700 schools across the country and began delivering its apprenticeships in early 2020, just before Covid-19 hit.

Fifty-two apprentices were hired last year and began standards-based apprenticeships such as chef, team leader and customer service.

Ofsted praised senior leaders for having a “clear rationale” for the apprenticeships they deliver. They have “designed the programme of apprenticeships to ‘upskill’ their workforce with these skills as the focus”.

But leaders have not ensured that there is a clear delivery plan and resources in place to support apprentices, inspectors found.

The report said: “Almost all of the current apprentices on programme have been recruited during the pandemic. However, many of those responsible for teaching apprentices have been furloughed.

“There is no clear plan in place for how apprentices are taught, assessed and supported to develop the knowledge, skills and behaviours they need. As a result, apprentices are making slow progress.

“There are no plans in place for how apprentices will be supported to catch up.”

Ofsted also pulled the provider up for a lack of “focus” on English and maths, as well as there being “no clear plan for how on- and off-the-job training link together”.

In addition, the watchdog reported that the line managers of apprentices are not clear on what apprentices are moving on to next, which has led to almost all apprentices making slow progress.

During their visit, inspectors found that almost all apprentices have “been set assessment tasks to show what they have learned from the course before any teaching has taken place”.

Tutors’ reviews with apprentices “lack focus” and “do not set clear targets for what apprentices need to do next”.

Aspens Services Limited did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Skills taxonomy’: new algorithm planned to seek out skills cold spots

A government tender has revealed plans to develop a “skills taxonomy” that could sit at the heart of Department for Education proposals to dictate college courses.

Ministers want a new algorithm developed to map England’s skills shortages, with experts predicting it will play a key role in putting local skills improvement plans (LSIPs) together.

Beginning with a £25,000 research review by Frontier Economics, the taxonomy is intended for the education secretary’s new Skills and Productivity Board to identify and analyse national skills needs and those that “add the most value” to the economy.

The board, composed of seven labour market and skills economists who have been tasked with influencing policy, has met four times since it was formed in November but minutes of the meetings have so far been kept under wraps by the DfE.

The skills taxonomy tender appears to be the first insight into the board’s direction of work.

It states that the board requires a “functional and operational skills ‘taxonomy’ – to be able to name, define and classify skills (for example, knowledge skills, workplace skills, transferable skills)” as well as a way of linking these skills to occupations and, possibly, qualifications.

The board is then expected to use this taxonomy “to identify areas of significant skills shortage”.

Labour market economist and chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, Tom Bewick, said taxonomies can be useful in terms of “helping to shine a light on trends relating to occupational skills gaps and shortages”, but warned they are “hopeless at predicting employer or student demand in a fast-changing economy”.

Similarly, Stephen Evans, who heads up the Learning and Work Institute, said a skills taxonomy can help commissioners and providers plan provision, but added there has “been so much work on this already and ultimately a taxonomy is no substitute for increased funding for adult skills”.

 

What is a skills taxonomy?

A skills taxonomy tries to set out what skills are needed in particular roles. It is essentially a skills map for different jobs and occupations. That then is intended to help skills providers design provision and to help people understand what other jobs their skills might be suitable for.

Globally, work has already taken place on skills taxonomies which have typically linked occupations to skills. The O*NET database in the US is the most famous.

The DfE’s tender also points out that innovation agency Nesta and the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence recently undertook an exercise using “web scraping techniques for online vacancy data to produce their own data-driven taxonomy of skills demand in the UK”.

Part of Frontier Economics’ brief is to bring together the work currently taking place on skills taxonomies in the UK, including techniques such as information from web scraping vacancies and other real-time information.

Labour market analyst firm EMSI does a lot of economic modelling for the FE sector, including scraping job posts to inform colleges what employer demand looks like in their area for them to then translate that back into curriculum planning.

EMSI’s managing director, Andy Durman, said this is one piece of the jigsaw that gets beyond the headline figures that government data can show, building a “more specific insight” into which particular skills occupations require.

He warned, however, that web scraping job postings is “not an exact science” and it is “fraught with a lot of danger” as they “crop up in multiple places”.

Durman urged the DfE to be “very careful to assume that job postings tell us everything about what’s needed”.

 

How could the skills taxonomy be used?

Bewick told FE Week he believes the algorithm will help form the education secretary’s evidence base to intervene in geographical areas where “they believe FE providers are not sufficiently shaping course provision to meet the aims of LSIPs”.

He said it looks like government wants a new national framework for deciding whether or not local course provision meets real labour market needs, and such a taxonomy “could be what all local areas are mandated to use when putting together LSIPs in future”.

LSIPs are central to the DfE’s FE white paper reforms. They will be piloted this year, and legislation is being drawn up to put employer leadership of the plans on a statutory footing.

Colleges and training providers must then pay “due regard” to the plans by ensuring their courses align to local employers’ needs. Failure to do so will result in intervention from the education secretary.

Bewick warned that if the intention of the DfE’s skills taxonomy is to try and predict how many hairdressers or mechanics a local area needs to train, “it will fail”.

“Moreover, post pandemic, there will be new jobs and skills created which labour market economists will not be able to anticipate or fully capture in their econometric models. In simple terms, this means that any taxonomy tool will already be out of date before it is even used.”

Durman agreed. He said the world moves at pace and things decay. “You can’t afford to pay massive panels to keep tweaking it every few months so they tend to be fairly static.”

Linking skills shortages to which quals are made available has proved controversial in recent months. The Education and Skills Funding Agency sparked outrage when it excluded major sectors including hospitality, tourism and media from its new level 3 adult offer as they were deemed to be a low priority with low wages.

Evans pointed out that any new skills taxonomy would not be ready until LSIPs are already in play, but they could be used to inform them in future.

He also pressed that the government needs to be “much clearer” on how LSIPs fit with Skills Advisory Panels, Local Enterprise Partnerships and local government, otherwise “we risk an alphabet soup of acronyms”.

Frontier Economics’ contract started in April and is due to end in July. The initial findings are expected to form the basis for a larger piece of research in the next financial year.

WorldSkills centres expand to ITPs

A new teacher development programme run by WorldSkills UK is being expanded to independent and employer providers.

From Monday until June 4, the organisation – which puts up teams of skilled young people against other nations at international ‘Skills Olympics’ events – will be accepting applications for the second wave of its Centre of Excellence programme.

Ten spots will be available for the continuous professional development arm of the programme, where high-performance coaches, who also train the UK’s competitors for international competitions, work to train up teaching staff in international best practices.

Successful applicants will start on the programme from September. The centre’s second element, a series of digital masterclasses and learning resources, will open for applications for 40 places later this year.

The professional development “is designed to equip educators in technical and vocational education and training with insights from global skills systems,” says WorldSkills UK’s head of skills development and international competitions Parisa Shirazi.

Twenty colleges won spots in the first wave last year and have gone on to develop pressure testing and skills competitions for their students.

As in-person skills competitions have been delayed because of the Covid-19 pandemic, WorldSkills UK has championed the use of international pressure tests, where nations test their skills against each other in isolated, single-discipline competitions.

The tests have now been adopted on a smaller scale by one of the colleges from the first wave of the Centre of Excellence: RNN Group, based in the Midlands and Yorkshire.

worldskills
Rebecca Blackburn

Assistant principal for apprenticeships, high-level skills and innovation Rebecca Blackburn told FE Week five of RNN’s educators had been working with performance coach Frazer Minskip.

The five had reported being “upskilled in their teaching and learning”, particularly around pressure testing, which “they specifically learned through WorldSkills UK”.

While RNN had already been running competitions against Grimsby Institute, their work with the Centre of Excellence had led them to introduce tournaments between its three campuses: in Rotherham, north Nottinghamshire, and Dearne Valley near Doncaster.

“The learners really benefit from those competitions,” Blackburn said. “But what we’ve learned is, how are we better preparing them for those competitions? We weren’t, because it was a one-off thing in the middle of the year. So the inter-campus competitions are a great way to start off the environment of pressure learning.”

Minskip says implementing competitions into the curriculum is part, but not all, of the programme.

“We’re here to share the raft of experience and skills that we have with FE sectors around the globe, to explain what works for
us and how it could work for you.”

Since launching last year with £1.5 million from awarding body NCFE, the Centre of Excellence programme has been lauded in the government’s Skills for Jobs white paper.

It uses the centre as an example of how the government pledges to “encourage more organisations with relevant expertise to  provide high-quality and evidence-based training and development for teaching staff in the sector”.

WorldSkills UK is bringing in independent and employer providers now, Shirazi says, as they had picked up on their interest.

And because “one of the benefits of this programme is looking at how we can mainstream excellence through that provision of global skill systems and world-class practices across the whole of the sector.

“And not exclusively to colleges, because we know that as a sector, we all have a role to play.”

She says the existing team of eight performance coaches will work with the providers joining from September, while continuing to work with the colleges which joined last year.

WorldSkills UK is hoping to build its network of independent and employer providers in the third wave of the Centre of Excellence programme, which will open for applications around this time next year.

Applications will open for this year through www.worldskillsuk.org at noon on Monday, May 17.

Apprenticeship levy funding: the truth is out there

A major problem for apprenticeship levy watchers and commentators is that the government not only refuses to share spending data – it is failing to properly explain how the policy works.

As a result, this week a national newspaper was persuaded by an organisation with vested interests to report that the policy was  “wasteful”, claiming billions were going unspent.

This concern is not new, nor a result of the pandemic stifling apprenticeship starts. Ever since the levy was introduced in 2017 there have been regular press releases from large employers calling on the government to find alternative uses for unspent levy funding.

Yet in March 2019, nearly two years after the levy was introduced, the National Audit Office found the new style apprenticeship standards were costing “around double what was expected” and reported a potential “overspend in future”.

In the same month, the then permanent secretary of the Department for Education, Jonathan Slater, agreed. He told the education select committee the levy budget “could be significantly overspent if we carried on, on the basis of current trends”.

And in January 2020, the incoming chief executive at the Institute for Apprenticeship and Technical Education, Jennifer Coupland, said there was “not sufficient money available for these small and medium-sized businesses” and called for government to find a further £750 million.

Underspending, or on course to overspend?

It is clear that some underspending claims are wildly inflated and misrepresent the policy.

The apprenticeships minister, Gillian Keegan, replied in answer to a parliamentary question this week, that £1 billion “had expired between May 2020 to February 2021”. But when a levy-paying employer loses access to the funding after 24 months, this does not mean there has been any budget underspend, nor that the levy policy has failed.

Without expired funds there would be no money to pay for the apprentices at 98 per cent of employers, those that do not pay the levy.

Without expired funds there would be no money to pay for the employer and provider cash incentives.

Without expired funds there would be no money to pay for the ten per cent levy account top-up.

Without expired funds there would be no money to pay for apprentices’ English and math qualifications.

Without expired funds there would be no money to pay for the apprentices still on a pre-levy programme.

Without expired funds there would be no money to pay for apprentices at employers that exhausted their levy pot.

And these are far from minor extra costs.

For example, the NAO report revealed that in 2017/18, funding from levy accounts only amounted to £191 million. But when including all the extras, in total more than £1.5bn had been spent on apprenticeships.

Keegan did go on to say in her answer: “We do not anticipate that all employers who pay the levy will need or want to use all the funds available to them, but they are able to do so if they wish. Funds raised by the levy are used to support the whole apprenticeship system.

Employers’ unused funds are available to support apprenticeships in smaller employers who do not pay the levy and to cover the ongoing costs of apprentices who began training prior to the introduction of the levy.”

But the government has completely failed to explain this complex feature of the policy – so expired funds are, incorrectly, reported as “wasteful” and unused.

And, if we are being honest, vested interests are exploiting the confusion. Just this week the Times reported: “Ten vice chancellors have written to Rishi Sunak asking for changes to the ‘inflexible’ apprenticeship programme they say is wasting billions of pounds.”

So the government needs to explain better and defend its policy, but it also needs to come clean on the actual spending figures.

The apprenticeship levy spend suffers from a unique lack transparency, which is also hampering informed debate.

All other sources of FE funding, including apprenticeships before the levy, include regularly published provider allocation spreadsheets as well as final funding values.

And a simple Freedom of Information request to the DfE would solicit spreadsheets listing the names of employers alongside the funding values paid to the relevant provider.

No such data is available for the apprenticeship levy, with the government hiding behind the fact that it is a tax.

Keegan’s answer this week to an MP asking simple questions was: “Due to taxpayer confidentiality, we are unable to publish the  amount that individual employers have contributed through the apprenticeship levy or the amount of funds that have been spent or have expired.”

And yet the government now publishes more data about apprenticeship starts than ever before. The DfE’s quarterly “underlying data” spreadsheet published on gov.uk has hundreds of thousands of rows and tells me, for example, that in the month of January 2020 Staffordshire University started one 19-to-24-year-old apprentice on the level 6 police constable standard, that they live in Birmingham, Erdington, they had already been in the job for seven to 12 months and the delivery is taking place in Birmingham, Ladywood.

An incredibly rich source of data about the provider and apprentice – but nothing about the public money earned so far, nor future monthly payments committed to for the duration of this apprenticeship.

And at a national level – although the DfE has been forced to reveal some funding that has been returned to the Treasury in past years – very little is shared willingly.

So returning to the question: underspending, or on course to overspend?

The answer is, it remains top secret. So genuinely informed policy debate needs two things:

1. Putting a stop to the myth that expired funds are wasteful or the same as unspent funds.

2. Access to funding data which, to date, the DfE has classed as a tax and refused to share.

FE Week will be working hard over the coming months to encourage the government to start sharing levy funding data.

Once made public, a genuinely informed debate may finally take place about how it is best spent.

The truth is out there – so stay tuned!

Banned: 9 firms join the ‘suspended’ list on the apprenticeships register

Peterborough Skills Limited has become the latest apprenticeships provider to be banned from taking on new starts after being reprimanded by Ofsted.

FE Week analysis shows the east of England-based firm is one of nine providers to have been slapped with suspensions on the register of apprenticeship training providers (RoATP) in the past 12 months, after they were found making ‘insufficient
progress’ in a new provider monitoring visit.

Education and Skills Funding Agency rules mean any provider which receives at least one such rating from an early monitoring visit will be banned from taking on new apprentices until their rating improves, unless there is an “exceptional extenuating circumstance”.

Peterborough Skills Limited made ‘insufficient progress’ for its safeguarding arrangements, with inspectors finding staff did not have “sufficient knowledge” to deal with disclosures or see them through to a “reasonable resolution”.

Leaders and the provider’s board, the report read, have “insufficient oversight” of safeguarding and have not established “a culture of safeguarding apprentices”.

A spokesperson for Peterborough Skills Limited said it “respects the decision” of Ofsted and through the “support of an independent safeguarding consultant we have addressed all the findings and significantly improved our processes”.

“We would like to express that there has been no negative impact to the well-being of our apprentices on record,” they added.

Other providers that have been added to the suspended list were found to be making ‘insufficient progress’ because they are “not ambitious enough” for apprentices.

Failure to take into account prior learning is another common theme that trips up new apprenticeship providers who find themselves on the banned list, as is poor English and maths and off-the-job training.

Many are also criticised for slow progress, with one provider being caught out for having apprentices on programme for 12 months who only submitted one piece of written work.

FE Week analysis of the RoATP reveals a total of 21 providers are currently suspended (see full list below). Nine have been added to the list over the past 12 months, while the remaining 12 were on there prior to the first lockdown.

That is a decrease from the 46 providers banned at the time of this publication’s last stocktake in April 2020, at the very start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since then, 25 of the 46 providers have been removed from RoATP altogether.

Ofsted paused its inspection activity at the outbreak of coronavirus in March 2020 and only resumed new provider monitoring visits in March 2021, which may have impacted the pace of suspensions over the course of this year.

RoATP has been closed to new applicants since April 2020, but will open on Monday for its second refresh in two years.

The full list of banned providers is as follows (bold indicates they are new to the list):

 

[UPDATE: After this article was published evidence was provided to show that Aldridge Education has had its suspension lifted by the ESFA despite still being on the banned list on RoATP. Aldridge Education can therefore start new apprentices again.]

Loans provider slammed for accepting ‘identical’ learner work

A new FE loans provider where tutors accept suspected copy-and-paste assignments from learners has been slammed by Ofsted.

Inspectors warned that a significant amount of written work submitted by different students at London Cactus Limited is “identical”.

Tutors “accept the work at face value, without verifying that learners have completed the work themselves”.

Ofsted also said managers recruit too many learners on to programmes who do not have the necessary level of English to “maximise their chances of succeeding on the programme”.

London Cactus Limited has been delivering FE loans provision since 2017, receiving almost £1 million in Education and Skills Funding Agency allocations to date.

It has also recently started to deliver health and social care apprenticeships, the provision of which was also in scope for Ofsted’s visit. But the provider only has 12 apprentices on its books, with its main provision being adult FE loans to a current cohort of 72 learners on business and care courses.

The watchdog’s new provider monitoring visit report shows three out of four ‘insufficient progress’ judgments. The provider now faces a suspension on apprenticeship starts, but ESFA policy mandates it can continue recruiting adult learners despite the poor judgments.

Inspectors found that the loans learners only attend the course for between three and four hours each week for a total of six months, which is “substantially lower than the recommended total course hours stipulated by the awarding body”.

Tutors were criticised for not identifying how the programme might fit with learners’ longer-term career or personal goals. And in lessons, a high proportion of learners “struggle to grasp more complex concepts and do not demonstrate spoken or written responses at the appropriate level” as they do not hold the required level of English for the course.

As well as accepting identical work, tutors do not make learners aware of the potential for them to achieve above a pass grade, inspectors said.

“Most tutors’ feedback does not guide learners to improve their work and achieve higher marks. Learners are unable to explain how the feedback they receive from tutors helps them improve their work and develop further. All learners so far have only achieved pass grades.”

The provider did however score ‘reasonable progress’ for its safeguarding arrangements.

Ofsted said: “Apprentices and adult learners feel safe in learning and when working. They know whom to contact if they have any safeguarding concerns. Care apprentices are knowledgeable about safeguarding policies they need to adhere to, for example when lone working.”

And while most of its apprenticeship provision was criticised, leaders were praised for recruiting “skilled apprenticeship tutors who are knowledgeable and well qualified”.

London Cactus Limited did not respond to requests for comment.