Northern College has been a beacon in the world of adult education and a forerunner in what we know is a fantastic way to kickstart career change – one of the most important parts has been the residential element. Residential courses should not just be for HE students or those who go to private schools but should be for all students and adults. That is why we need adult residential centres in every region.
Residential activity is recognised as an integral funded element in the national citizen service programme which has been developed for young people; and therefore, we should have similar a residential experience for all adults.
So it’s unfortunate when we are talking about skills bootcamps and intense provision that Northern College, which provides residential education for adults, seems to be at risk. It’s not at risk because of anything it could have foreseen but because of the unintended consequences of administrative action that the DfE may or may not choose to do.
Three issues have come together to create a perfect administrative storm: when the DfE undertook a review of residential funding, the scope was wide, and it was always felt that adult residential was only added as an afterthought. The focus of the consultation was about finding solutions that worked for the 16-to-19 sector, such as elite sport and land-based activity.
In hindsight, the funding review should have been split and adult residential activity viewed through a different lens, where the pros and cons could have been properly aired. As it stands, we don’t know whether the DfE is going to take the action it proposed or not.
The second issue is about funding rules that have been in existence since before 2007. It doesn’t seem right to start changing those rules retrospectively without looking at the impact and modelling of those changes and offering tapered support.
And lastly we have the issue of the pandemic and the DfE announcement about retrospective clawback, and the department’s inability to recognise that they created the issues by insisting that providers stayed open, then closed, then went online and so on, and not meeting the consequent increased costs of delivery.
Each one of these issues stacked on top of the other puts the institution at risk, a triple whammy that could be diverted with joined-up administration and impact assessment.
What is needed is a debate on what type of adult skills offer we want, then a discussion about funding. Let’s not allow the unintended consequences of proposed policy changes to undermine a much-needed and loved learning institution, and let’s not jump to the FE Commissioner’s sole solution to any problem – merger.
If funding can be adjusted to allow for other small unique establishments, such as Institutes of Technology and University Technical Colleges to operate, then the DfE should be able to do the same for adult residential colleges.
The Education and Skills Funding Agency has moved a step closer to limiting apprenticeship providers’ delivery to the sectors they have experience in.
Under new conditions published last week for the refreshed register of apprenticeship training providers, providers must prove their “experience of managing and delivering training to learners and are established within the sectors in which you intend to deliver”.
And if in the future the provider wants to move into sectors they did not mention in their initial application, they must for the first time inform the agency “within one calendar month”, a spokesperson told FE Week.
Failure to do so will now determine the provider as “high risk” under the intervention regime.
However, the process for informing the ESFA of any delivery changes is still being worked on.
The agency’s director for apprenticeships Peter Mucklow told FE Week’s Annual Apprenticeship Conference this week that those details will be set out in “due course”.
He said it is “clearly a warning sign” if a provider changes the sectors they deliver in at “very short notice” and “as regulator, we ought to know about that and be at least able to raise questions”.
But he insisted it is not the ESFA’s intention to “prevent good providers from moving into new areas”.
Plans to limit providers by apprenticeship standards and sectors were first revealed by Mucklow’s predecessor Keith Smith at last year’s AAC.
FE Week understands that since then, the proposal, as well as another to introduce earning limits on providers, has been drawn up but the agency is holding out for extra funding from the Treasury to increase its oversight capacity, which is not yet forthcoming.
Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Jane Hickie said it “seems reasonable” for providers to prove their sector-subject expertise, but her organisation is “watching carefully the ESFA’s approach, which may further evolve moving forward”.
“Informing the ESFA is very different to seeking approval, but we are clearly moving towards a more regulated marketplace for apprenticeship training through another RoATP refresh and the ESFA making moves to gather more granular information on sectors and standards,” she added.
“Apprenticeships are driven by employer-led demand, so a balance of risk and oversight needs to be struck.”
The move to potentially limiting providers by sectors would align the provider register to the one for end-point assessment organisations, which can only assess apprenticeship standards they are experts in and approved for via application.
Tom Bewick, chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, said that if the ESFA had “managed the provider register, setting the bar high enough in the first place”, the agency “would not now find itself in this remedial position”.
“Too often over the last few years we’ve seen officials encourage new market entrants to the detriment of system-wide quality.”
But, he added, one “problem with the ESFA now micro-managing the provider base is that, over time, it may end up stifling innovation and discouraging business investment”.
This will be the third version of the register of apprenticeship training providers since its launch in March 2017. The most recent “refresh” was in January 2019.
The national finalists for this year’s FE Week and AELP AAC Apprenticeship Awards have been revealed.
From 350 entries the shortlists for the 21 awards, being run in partnership with Open Awards, were announced at a virtual ceremony on Thursday evening, hosted by comedian and impressionist Rory Bremner.
They will now go forward for the awards, which will be announced at a gala dinner in Birmingham on Thursday, July 8.
Shane Mann, managing director of FE Week’s publisher Lsect, said: “These finalists are some of the very best of the apprenticeship sector and show just what can be achieved.
“The past year has placed an enormous strain on all our lives, both in our private lives and our places of work.
“The judges were astounded by the innovation, tenacity and thoughtfulness of apprenticeship providers and employers across the UK. These awards are just one of many ways we can show our appreciation and celebrate their exceptional work.
“In past years we’ve announced the national finalists during a parliamentary reception. This wasn’t possible this year.
“But it was great to have Rory Bremner host this evening’s special online presentation.”
The big award, apprentice provider of the year, will go to either Cardiff and Vale College, Exeter College, Acacia Training and Salford City College.
Meanwhile, Lee Marley Brickwork, Merseyside Police, Pendennis Shipyard Ltd and the Royal Air Force will duke it out for apprentice employer of the year.
AELP chief executive Jane Hickie said it was “very difficult to choose the shortlist for each category.
“As this year’s array of finalists demonstrates, the fantastic training being delivered to young people and to existing employees who need to enhance their skills in the face of the pandemic and current economic uncertainty never ceases to amaze me.
“AELP partnered with FE Week on these awards as a way to demonstrate the amazing work done by providers in supporting their learners and employers – we certainly have many examples of outstanding work demonstrated across the sector.”
A number of sector leaders are also in the running for the individual award for outstanding contribution to the development of apprenticeships.
These include Anthony Impey, chief executive of Be The Business; Andy Berry, principal of Bridgwater & Taunton College; Rob Colbourne, chief executive of Performance Through People; and Robert Watts, European apprenticeship and early talent programme manager for Covance Laboratories.
Labour is “interested in exploring” greater devolution of skills budgets to mayoral combined authorities, its shadow education secretary has said.
Speaking to the FE Week Annual Apprenticeship Conference this morning, Kate Green would not say definitively whether Labour would hand over a greater amount of funding to metro mayors, many of whom already control their local adult education budgets.
But she said she “finds it very difficult to see how you can dictate these decisions from Whitehall.
“The needs of employers for apprenticeships in Cornwall and Devon are going to be very different from what we need in Greater Manchester,” the Stretford and Urmston MP said. “We’re very different sorts of economies.”
Her view is local and regional leaders “must be empowered, giving them a genuine voice to shape the system so that it delivers for their local economy and community; rather than settling for a system handed down but that doesn’t work for local communities.
“Our metro mayors and combined authorities must have a major role in supporting apprentices and apprenticeships, so that the training system works hand in hand with regional and local regeneration and industrial strategies to revitalise regional and local economies.”
As a Greater Manchester MP, she has become “immensely frustrated” the mayor for the area’s combined authority Andy Burnham “has not got his hands on the 16-to-19 skills or the apprenticeships budgets and all the spending that goes into skills and training in Greater Manchester”.
There are currently eight areas, including the Greater London Authority, which have a devolved adult education budget. And subject to legislation, Sheffield City Region and West Yorkshire combined authorities will join them from 1 August.
A number of the mayors leading those authorities co-signed a letter in 2018 calling for unspent levy funds in their areas to be handed to them.
London mayor Sadiq Khan went even further at the time, saying he wanted “London’s whole contribution to the apprenticeship levy to be ringfenced and devolved to spend on meeting the capital’s complex skills needs”.
In a speech on devolution last December, Labour leader Keir Starmer announced Labour would launch a UK-wide Constitutional Commission to look at devolving power to local areas.
He said: “The case for the next phase of devolution was urgent before Covid, but the pandemic has put rocket boosters under it.
“Our Labour council leaders, mayors and metro mayors have stood up for their communities against a centralised Westminster-knows best response.”
But when asked directly by FE Week editor Nick Linford if she would lobby Labour leader Keir Starmer to devolve the apprenticeship budget, Green would not give a yes or no answer.
Instead, she said: “I think it’s an important conversation to have with colleagues internally.”
Pressed again, she said: “I think we can interpret the answer being I’m very interested to explore that.”
Green stressed it was “really important you don’t make policy on the hoof, you are properly examining the implications of policies, and you’re thinking about talking to all the stakeholders in that policy territory.
“But as I say, I just think that if you’ve got a mismatch in governance between economic regeneration and social justice strategies on the one hand, and employment, training and skills strategies on the other, that does not sit easy with me.”
It was “concerning,” she said, that a third of them resulted in at least one ‘insufficient progress’ judgement.
“The quality of apprenticeship training does need to improve,” Spielman told delegates, after she and Ofsted more widely have expressed repeated concerns about quality in the apprenticeship sector.
Ofsted’s 2020 annual report said apprenticeships were the “weakest” area of provision in FE providers, with one in ten judged ‘inadequate’ last year.
Speaking this morning, Spielman said: “Let’s be frank, this can’t be blamed on Covid. This is the same pattern we were seeing before the pandemic.
“To have such a high proportion of insufficient progress judgments is troubling.”
Ofsted’s stated concerns contrast with the Department for Education, which has continually boasted of the quality improvement apprenticeships have experienced because of the government’s reforms to the sector since 2017.
When asked by FE Week editor Nick Linford today, neither Spielman nor Joyce would be drawn on whether quality had improved since the apprenticeship reforms.
Joyce explained they were at an “early stage” of their evaluation of the programme, partly as there were still providers delivering apprenticeship frameworks while being inspected by Ofsted, as opposed to the reforms’ flagship apprenticeship standards.
Apprenticeship achievement rates ‘not yet high enough’
Speaking at AAC on Monday, Keegan said she had ordered an investigation into the “astonishingly” high apprenticeship drop-out rates.
That is after official government data published in March showed just 60.2 per cent of apprentices training on new-style standards stayed on their programme until the end in 2019/20. This figure was 48.3 per cent the year before.
Peter Mucklow
The retention rate on the old-style frameworks has stuck at 69 per cent.
And addressing the conference today, the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s director of apprenticeships Peter Mucklow said achievement rates “are not yet high enough,” though they had increased by 12 percentage points between 2018/19 and 2019/20.
However, that still only brings it up to 58.7 per cent – much below the 61 or 62 per cent which Linford told him “used to be minimum standards threshold”.
The apprenticeship regulator is reviewing a proposal for a level 2 business administration replacement, which employers hope to have ready for delivery from September.
Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) chief executive Jennifer Coupland told FE Week’s Annual Apprenticeship Conference today they are mulling over a “public sector organisation administrative assistant” standard.
This has been put forward by a group of employers, including the NHS, after repeated bids for a level 2 business administration apprenticeship standard to replace the old-style framework were rejected.
She said the institute “will always respond to employers who come forward with proposals for new apprenticeships and we take every proposal on its merits”.
A “number” of employers had come forward with the proposed new standard at level 2, which would be considered “in isolation from things that may or may or may not have gone before,” as “that’s a fair and proper thing to do”.
Coupland said the proposed standard would have to meet IfATE’s “usual” tests to be approved for delivery.
It is not clear at this stage how this new proposal differs from the level 2 business administration, aside from having a different name.
It was Coupland who drove the final nail into the level 2 business administration standard’s coffin, ahead of the framework being switched off last July.
At a last-chance meeting with employers in February 2020, after she took the chief executive post the previous November, Coupland said the employers’ proposal did not meet the requirements for an apprenticeship, namely the minimum 12-month duration rule.
She also told the employers they would not be able to submit any further proposals for the standard.
Employers have been able to utilise the level 3 business administrator standard, and the Education and Skills Funding Agency has highlighted the level 2 customer service practitioner standard as a replacement for the level 2 framework.
FE Week reported last October plans were afoot for a new, level 2 “Organisational Support Assistant” standard, which was being developed by the NHS and local councils for use in the public sector.
And plans for this new replacement appear to be quite far forward.
Lucy Hunte
Addressing an Annual Apprenticeship Conference workshop yesterday, NHS Health Education England’s national programme director Lucy Hunte said her organisation was “busy” with getting the new standard ready for delivery hopefully from this September.
The programme would be “widened” to outside the public sector, she said, adding that surveys will be “coming out shortly just to get private sector input.
“But the aim is we would hope to have this ready for delivery from September, but don’t hold me to that, and obviously this is all IfATE-dependent.”
Hunte said the institute “is really interested in the social mobility aspect this time round”.
The finalists for the FE Week and AELP AAC Apprenticeship Awards 2021 will be revealed at a virtual celebration event tonight – and you’ve been invited to watch the announcement live.
Presentation host, Rory Bremner.
Hosted by comedian and impressionist Rory Bremner, the ceremony, being held in partnership with Innovate Awarding, will be shown on the FE Week News YouTube channel from 18:15 – 19:15.
On your smart TV, go the YouTube app and search for the FE Week News Channel, you’ll then be able to find the broadcast listing.
Or alternatively, watch below.
Following tonight’s announcement, the winners of the 2021 AAC Apprenticeship Awards will be named at a glamorous gala dinner in Birmingham on Thursday 8 July.
FE Week’s Annual Apprenticeship Conference has been running this week, starting on Monday and set to finish on Friday, providing key policy updates and important views from top government officials and sector leaders.
The Further Education Trust for Leadership think tank will close this year. Should the model be replicated? Jess Staufenberg finds out
“Do we need an independent think tank for further education?” That’s the question that will be posed in a webinar next week by perhaps the only organisation that could claim to be exactly that.
It’s been seven-and-a-half years since the think tank set up with £5.6 million in the bank, handing out the public funds for some quite extraordinary projects.
Unlike the Education and Training Foundation (ETF), it has not been closely associated with the government and has enjoyed a huge degree of freedom over its chosen projects.
And unlike think tanks such as The Edge Foundation or EDSK, it focused on leaders – not the broader skills or education landscape.
So does FE need a replacement for FETL? If so, what exactly is being replaced?
‘None of the minister’s business’
FETL’s beginnings are as gutsy – and slightly surreal – as its founding force, Dame Ruth Silver, a former child psychologist and principal of Lewisham College in south London for 17 years.
Silver, who retired from the college in 2011, had been chair of the government-funded Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) since it was set up in 2008.
But in 2013 the coalition government cut ties with LSIS, moving monies to the ETF.
Silver was “furious”, she says, and, quite unbelievably, succeeded in hanging on to about £2 million (£2,099,743, to be precise) still in the LSIS kitty, along with £2.7 million from the Inspire Leadership group, a staff development organisation, and £811,000 from Lifelong Learning UK, another professional development body.
Ruth Silver
“Normally, you’d turn to the government and say, ‘take the money back’, but we were semi-independent, and as long as we respected the charitable objects [of LSIS], we decided we could set something else up,” she says, adding that “a lot of people came after” the money.
But she held firm and asked the sector what it wanted. When she proposed a think tank to civil servants, they said “the minister won’t like it”, to which she says she responded, “well that’s sad, but it’s none of his business”.
With the intention to run until the money ran out, FETL was born.
The founding trustees included some big names, including Sean Larkins, a deputy director of communications in the Prime Minister’s Office, Toni Pearce, the first FE student to lead the National Union of Students, and Ayub Khan, a former local authorities strategist in London.
Other sector specialists such as Jill Westerman, the former chief executive at the Northern College, and Denise Brown, now principal at Stoke on Trent College, remain on the board, alongside FETL chair and a former trustee at LSIS, Ricky McMenemy, who runs the famous Rules restaurant in Covent Garden, London.
The organisation held a board meeting this week, and FE Week understands an unconfirmed “dowry” left in the kitty will be bequeathed to a deserving organisation.
A surplus of £560,000 was carried into 2020-21, according to the latest accounts. The question now is whether FETL’s inheritor should seek to replicate its model – or do something different.
‘Give the sector time to reflect’
FETL’s strapline is “to foster and support the leadership of thinking”. Silver unpacks this with the equally rich explanation: “It’s about the leader in the system, and the system in the leader.”
The remit seems to draw on Silver’s own experiences. As a principal, she was given a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge.
McMenemy says: “Ruth had that wonderful opportunity and she said it had completely invigorated her. So that’s what we were trying to do at the start.”
The idea was to fund FE practitioners to take time out to do research. “We felt the sector didn’t have enough time to breathe, to see what was necessary to carry itself forward and improve its status,” he adds.
Ricky McMenemy
But he and Silver are honest the initial model didn’t quite work.
“That just wasn’t fit for purpose,” Silver says. “FE doesn’t have the practice of a sabbatical. People couldn’t get the time off.”
She’s equally frank about problems with another idea: to fund the first “professor of leadership in FE and skills” at UCL Institute of Education.
Martin Doel was appointed, a former chief executive of the Association of Colleges who had come up through the Royal Air Force.
“It put someone with an intimate knowledge of FE inside the world’s leading research institute,” Doel says.
In his four-day week he ran multiple seminars and produced essays, including “Rethinking Place and Purpose: Provocations on the Future of FE”, which pulled together roundtable responses from colleges.
But would a professorship have been better spent on a hard-hitting research project?
“I’m quite pleased I didn’t get wound up in quantitative research, because that could have been quite narrow. I’m proud of keeping my focus on broader, conceptual issues in further education, and drawing people’s attention to these.”
The essays were “closer to a polemic, than highly referenced and deeply researched”.
This approach meant “there was a bit of tension early on about whether we should be getting published in academic journals”, he says.
Martin Doel
“FETL quite properly concluded the target wasn’t to get published in journals, but to affect the thinking of people working now”.
UCL did keep Doel on as a visiting professor after his three-year post came to an end.
However Silver is clear the professorship didn’t quite work, in part because FETL was at risk of “mimicry” by prioritising access to higher education rather than “practitioners in the field”.
Silver moved onto contract
The decision to move away from formal research towards “provocations” – polemic thought-pieces – would become the cornerstone of FETL’s approach, turbo-charged by Silver as leader.
Its first chief executive, Mark Ravenhall, formerly from the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, had stepped down in 2015 as had its second, Khan, in 2017.
The board now moved to pay Silver as a consultant from late 2018, on £800 a day for up to three days a week.
McMenemy explains what could be regarded as the controversial decision not to appoint another chief executive, and instead pay the president on contract.
“We thought, we will do without a chief executive. The person who had FETL in her DNA was Ruth, she understood more about it than any of us. We spoke to her about an ‘honorarium’ payment where she would start to manage all the projects.”
‘Allowed for intellectual curiosity’
The organisation has funded an extraordinary amount of work: 42 project grants, 82 publications, 84 videos, nine webinars and 12 larger-scale symposiums.
It supported the Independent College of the Future report, the Centenary Commission on Adult Education and a four nations report by the Institute for Public Policy Research.
It asked questions no one had asked before – papers such as “What’s Oedipus got to do with it?” looked at the “problem of triangular relationships” in senior leadership teams.
Another considered “how psychoanalysis and systems theory” can contribute to FE, reminding leaders to examine their own “internal drivers”.
Like Doel’s work, many publications are polemics, freed from the constraints of formal academic research.
Instead, the trustee board’s entry requirements were more intuitive.
“We said no to people wanting to do research projects with a qualification at the end – this was not about passing exams. And we said no to things we’d looked at before,” Silver says.
“We said to the sector, come to us with your ideas,” McMenemy explains. FETL funded eight fellowships, which allowed FE staff to pursue a line of inquiry.
For instance Stuart Rimmer, the principal of East Coast College in Suffolk, delved into distress in leadership, speaking to nearly 100 practitioners for his “Voices from the tightrope” paper.
Here FETL’s unique selling point can really be seen.
“It’s allowed individuals to pursue intellectual curiosity,” says Rimmer. “We ended up finding really interesting things, sometimes in marginal topics, that wouldn’t otherwise attract big research funding.”
Other projects were thought up by the board itself, McMenemy says. This year the “Honorable Histories” report surveyed 30 years of FE policy and its impact.
Meanwhile the New Local, an organisation for councils, was funded to examine the “piecemeal nature of English devolution” while a report called “The Way We Work” looked at the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
The very toughest topics have been tackled: the public “shaming” of college leaders, and the way national media overlooks further education.
Hard-hitting enough?
In a way, the risk of being overlooked has been perhaps FETL’s main weakness.
The nature of its work hasn’t always generated the national media headlines, or impacted Whitehall policy, in the way it might have.
Doel describes FETL as “more of a reflection and intellectual engine than a think tank – by the sector about the sector”.
But did FETL impact outside FE? Should it have focused more on funding and findings?
Rimmer says FE didn’t need a “proliferation of data” but instead a “proliferation of thinking” – an intellectual backdrop for future research.
Now the British Library and UCL want to add FETL’s materials to their archives. Doel says: “There’s already such a rich literature on schools, which gives them a framework in which to work. We needed FETL to come first.”
When it’s wound up in December, FETL says it will know how much cash it has left and will decide where to bequeath it.
A think tank that can combine FETL’s rich, anthropological groundwork, with hard-hitting, outward-facing recommendations, could be a powerhouse replacement.
Rimmer says: “It’s been a worthy vehicle. I would like to see a continuation.”
