England’s first college to be put through the government’s insolvency regime is selling off a huge parcel of land, as the local community fights to reopen its popular farm shop.

A total of 45.42 acres – equivalent to 25 football pitches – has been put on the market for £580,000. The college entered education administration in May 2019.

A brochure for the sale by estate agent Knight Frank (pictured, left) said the five lots up for grabs are separated into various field enclosures and would be “suitable for agricultural, equestrian or other leisure uses”.

The college and its sister institution West Kent and Ashford College (WKAC), which entered administration in August 2019, have seen their campuses and sites split up between local providers.

Capel Manor College, EKC (East Kent College) Group, and North Kent College (NKC) took over the two colleges’ educational provision over the course of last year.

Administrators BDO declined to comment on what the proceeds of this sale will go towards. Their latest administration report shows they have received 177 claims from unsecured creditors, totalling £20.8 million, to date.

Meanwhile, a petition is running to ask North Kent College, which took over the main Hadlow College site in Tonbridge, to keep its on-site farm shop open.

At the time of writing, there are 644 signatures on a Change.org petition entitled Save Hadlow College Farm Shop.

The shop was closed last year by Hadlow College before North Kent College took over in August 2020. It was not part of the transfer of facilities
to NKC and is not part of the land sale.

BDO’s latest progress report on Hadlow College’s administration, published in December 2020, says a marketing exercise was undertaken to sell the farm shop, but there was “insufficient interest to support a commercial transaction”, which directly led to its closure.

The petition, started last year, calls on NKC to reopen the shop as it has “played a vital role in our neighbourhood for many years. During lockdown, its staff have gone above and beyond to serve the community. Please help us not to lose it,” it asks readers.

Petition organiser Anne Waddingham told FE Week they had held out hope for the facility to reopen after local MP Tom Tugendhat met with NKC’s principal David Gleed.

Tugendhat wrote on his website last September, following the meeting, that the closure of the shop “has hit the community hard”.

But: “I was encouraged following my conversation with David that there could be a future which can serve local residents.

“In the case of the farm shop, North Kent College are considering how a shop in this location, with alternatives not far away, could be run sustainably.”

The shop was not transferred to NKC as it was not directly linked to the college’s education provision, Tugendhat wrote.

But NKC was “looking at how a farm shop can better work with the courses students are studying at the college, so that there is benefit for those learning too”.

Waddingham said she had “heard nothing since then, which is disappointing”.

An NKC spokesperson said it has “never operated the farm shop and at present have no plans to reopen it”.

One of the government’s once-vaunted national colleges is being wound up – without ever opening, FE Week can reveal.

A notice to dissolve was posted on the National College for Onshore Oil and Gas (NCOOG) Companies House profile last week, seven years after it was originally announced.

Its former interim managing director Martin York said there was “no requirement” to proceed with the college following a government review into the industry.

“Its provision was dependent upon the UK government granting permission for the onshore oil and gas industry to extract shale gas via rock fracturing in order to proceed,” York told FE Week in a joint comment with Blackpool and the Fylde College, which is where NCOOG was set to be based.

The government subsequently imposed a moratorium on fracking which “contributed to the industry decision that it no longer had a UK skills shortage and as such there was no requirement to proceed with the National College Onshore Oil and Gas”.

More than £5 million of government capital funding had been earmarked for the college, but York claimed this was never drawn down.

The Department for Education said the college had received £429,000 in research funding since its inception.

A spokesperson for the department added that the energy industry and government focus had “changed since the initial proposals to establish the National College for Onshore Oil and Gas”.

“Given the change of landscape, the DfE and Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy felt it was unlikely that the industry would be seeking to train apprentices at the rate which was originally anticipated in the short term and we therefore were content with the college’s proposals to dissolve its operations.”

 

National colleges ‘inefficient means’ to meet industry need

News of NCOOG’s abrupt collapse comes in the same week it was announced a second of the five national colleges had dissolved.

After facing insolvency, the flagship national college for HS2, now called the National College for Advanced Transport and Infrastructure (NCATI), has been closed by ministers and relaunched as a subsidiary of a university.

Similarly, the National College for Creative Industries (NCCI) dissolved and handed over its courses to a college and private training provider in February 2020 after years of surviving only on government bailouts.

Tens of millions of pounds have been pumped into the national colleges programme since government announced plans to open five of them in the 2015 spending review, which said they would “train an estimated 21,000 students by 2020 in industries central to the productivity agenda, such as digital and high-speed rail”.

Tom Richmond, a former Department for Education special adviser turned director of think-tank EDSK, said: “The demise of yet another national college emphasises why top-down solutions to improving the skills system are always likely to struggle.

“New initiatives, new buildings and new equipment are often an expensive and inefficient way to meet the needs of different industry sectors, but the lack of policy memory among government departments and civil servants means that such mistakes are repeated with alarming regularity.”

Richmond said the onus was now on the Institutes of Technology (IoT), providers of higher technical skills developed in collaboration between higher and further education providers, “to ensure they do not suffer the same fate”.

Twelve IoTs based around England were given the go-ahead by the Department for Education in 2019, and a process is currently ongoing to approve another eight.

 

NCOOG already suffered delays

NCOOG was originally announced by sector representative body UK Onshore Oil and Gas, which York chairs, in 2014.

In April 2017, it was revealed the plans to launch the NCOOG had stalled, and its launch date of September that year had been pushed back.
In 2019, UK Onshore Oil and Gas told FE Week the college’s further development was “on hold” while “greater clarity and progress by way of timing and the scale of production activities is ascertained”.

The college was to be based at Blackpool and the Fylde College, with principal Bev Robinson serving as one of the national college’s directors.

Blackpool and the Fylde College has since put forward a bid to open an Institute of Technology.

Funding troubles have bedevilled the national colleges programme: NCATI had to take a £4.55 million bailout from the Department for Education to sign off its 2017/18 accounts and was placed in formal intervention in December 2019. It has now been reformed as a new institution, part of the University of Birmingham.

NCCI made it through 2017/18 as a “going concern” only thanks to a £600,000 bailout from the DfE, as FE Week reported in June.

It now licences its provision to South Essex College and Access Creative College.

The two remaining national colleges are Ada National College for Digital Skills, based in London and Manchester, and the National College for Nuclear, which is split between two hubs: one at Lakes College in Cumbria and another at Bridgwater & Taunton College.

The much-heralded Skills Bill contains a Department for Education “power-grab” and will “fail to meet the scale of the challenge that years of neglect” of FE have caused, Labour has said.

Writing for FE Week, shadow skills minister Toby Perkins warned that many “smaller” colleges will be looking nervously at the government’s expressed right to force mergers “without recourse to local circumstances or consultation”.

He said there is also “little expectation” of a role for metro mayors and nor does there appear to be “any enthusiasm for Local Enterprise Partnerships”.

Perkins added that in the “many hundreds of meetings” he has held during his first year in this post, “I confess I have never heard anybody suggest that a more hands-on role for Gavin Williamson was central to ensuring Britain is equipped with a well-skilled workforce”.

Yet here, the education secretary “awards himself new powers to intervene in ‘failing’ colleges, to merge or replace colleges, to select or to sack ‘employer representative’ bodies, and to dictate whether colleges are fulfilling the requirements these bodies lay down”.

“Poorly defined local skills plans risk shutting out metro mayors and combined authorities, many of which have democratic accountability for local skills and economic regeneration,” Perkins added.

Local skills improvement plans led by employers and new powers for the education secretary to intervene when colleges “fail to meet local need” are central new pieces of legislation in the Skills Bill.

Batting for the government in this week’s edition of FE Week, skills minister Gillian Keegan insisted that the Bill is “not about taking back control of colleges”.

“This is about ensuring we can continue to sustainably offer high-quality education and training to as many people as possible, and that the training on offer meets the needs of employers and local communities,” she added.

Other sector leaders have cautiously welcomed the reforms.

Tom Bewick, chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, said the Bill gives “sweeping new powers to end FE college autonomy as we know it”.

“Power without proper resources is futile,” he continued. “And too much centralisation of power without devolving resources to individuals, employers and local communities will not work either.”

Bewick said the federation “broadly supports” the direction of travel of the reforms but will “examine carefully” the clauses that appear to change the focus of independently regulated qualifications, particularly those that give the Institute for Apprenticeship and Technical Education new powers to accredit technical courses.

“In no circumstances must we return to a situation where public agencies are marking their own homework when it comes to ensuring public confidence in apprenticeships and qualifications. That’s why Ofqual was set up in the first place.”

David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said the Bill puts post-16 education, skills and colleges in the “forefront of the government’s priorities as look to a post-pandemic and post-Brexit world”.

He added that his association is looking forward to hearing the proposals on what will trigger interventions and how DfE proposes to measure and assess the degree to which colleges are meeting local needs.

“Getting the balance between accountability and intervention powers is a bit like walking a tightrope, and requires careful consideration and fine tuning, but colleges are confident that they meet local learner and employer needs, so we’re confident that there is a way to ensure the measures are fair and proportionate.”

Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Jane Hickie welcomed the “employer-informed approach” and is “generally comfortable with the direction of travel that the Bill is pursuing”.

She said the House of Lords can play a “very useful role” in probing the government on how the legislation’s clauses on local skills improvement plans will apply in practice to independent providers, especially as the impact assessment document states that the duty to “have regard” to the plans “does not mean that a provider is required to implement or deliver the skills needs outlined in the plan”.

Another key reform in the Bill is the introduction of a new register that private providers will need to be on to be eligible for funding and subcontracting.

Hickie said AELP has “no argument” with new legislative measures to protect the interests of learners.

However, “where we have serious concerns is that being on the list will, according to the government, have ‘significant impact’ on the costs of smaller providers because, for example, of the imposition of professional indemnity insurance.

“If this is a backdoor method of trying to reduce the number of ITPs in the market, it could backfire because many are either specialist providers or serve areas out of easy reach of a local college.”