The government’s skills “boot camps” have moved into their second pilot phase ahead of plans for a countrywide rollout backed by £43 million from the new National Skills Fund.

Colleges and training providers began recruiting earlier this month for the next set of the 12- to 16-week courses, which have been expanded to tackle not only digital skills but also industries including welding, engineering and construction.

Following a £4 million tender by the Department for Education, the Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire (D2N2) local enterprise partnership (LEP) was chosen to commission boot camp providers in their area, with a budget of £996,419; while Devon County Council will oversee courses in the heart of the south-west LEP area, with £1.7 million; and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) will do so for Leeds, with £1.3 million.

They have a strict deadline to recruit learners, who must be aged 19 or over, put them through the boot camps, and provide them with job interviews where appropriate, by the end of March, before the National Skills Fund is rolled out.

The first phase of boot camps started recruiting learners in September with a budget of £4 million and built off existing digital skills-only schemes in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, before expanding to Liverpool and Lancashire.

Both phases must be completed by the end of this financial year in March 2021, and are being funded through the DfE’s unallocated resources.

Education secretary Gavin Williamson announced the second wave last week and called the pilots “only the start for this innovative approach to adult training”.

In a tender ahead of the national rollout of skills boot camps published last Friday, the DfE said it would welcome bids by consortiums of organisations with employers and providers lined up and ready to deliver training.

Plans for the national rollout reflect much of what was put in place for the second phase of pilots, where the bidders also bid with supporting organisations, employers and providers ready to deliver already made courses.

Organisations involved in the second pilot phase told FE Week there was no formal procurement process. Instead, providers and employers attended engagement webinars and then the training organisations submitted an interest in taking part in the boot camps with D2N2, Devon County Council or WYCA.

The providers had to include in their submission what programmes they could deliver and how much it would cost, and the three authorities assessed them against criteria, then put their bids to the DfE, with the providers’ programmes.

The three had from July this year until August to put in their bids.

Exeter College’s director of adult and higher education Lucinda Sanders said they attended a webinar for south-west
employers and providers in July and then worked on their proposal over the next few weeks before submitting it to Devon County Council in August. They put in a bid for £150,000 and received that amount for a course in digital insights – covering a range of skills, including how to do a social media advert and develop simple software.

Rachel Quinn, head of people and skills for D2N2 (pictured, left), said: “We didn’t ask providers to tender as much as to be part of our consortium. But they did submit proposals, which we assessed. If there had been strong competition, then we would have run a formal process, but in the end, the partnership built quite naturally.”

Devon County Council said the Heart of the South West LEP ran a similar process and “received expressions of interest to join, which were then assessed against strategic fit, value for money, quality of provision and deliverability”.

West Yorkshire Combined Authority said: “Due to the timescales involved in delivering the project and the requirements of DfE’s tender process”, its four providers were directly commissioned – but they refused to elaborate.

Employers also became involved with the boot camps through the webinars, or through existing links with boot camp providers, and have to contribute to the programme by guaranteeing job interviews, providing in-work mentoring, or allowing the use of facilities for learners.

Quinn said D2N2 will also charge their employers a ten per cent cash match. For example, if a course was allocated £30,000, the employer involved would have to pay £3,000.

Employers also impact upon which learners are put through the course, with Allan Allison, director of client engagement for D2N2 provider Babington, saying their role would be “more focused on the employed than some of the other providers”. Their boot camp offering covers courses such as digital leadership – combining digital skills with leadership training – and data analysis.

Sanders, meanwhile, said Exeter’s course was looking to help people find new careers.

For Quinn, “It’s all about testing how we deliver skills faster and more responsive to employer need, with a quicker turnaround.”

She continued, “If it’s shown to work, then it could pave quite a different model of rollout of the National Skills Fund.”

Unlike courses funded from the adult education budget and apprenticeships, the boot camp courses will not be recorded through individualised learner records (ILR), and the commissioning organisations said they will instead be monitoring providers’ performance against metrics such as completions and destinations.

One outcome the DfE is keen on is to have a diverse range of learners come through the boot camps. Quinn said each of their providers has targets for characteristics such as gender mix and unemployed vs employed participants.

Crispin Read (pictured), director of one of the providers for Leeds, Coders Guild, said there is “a big appetite for using this pilot to further our work in diversity”. His provider is delivering several boot camps, including in software testing and web development.

On learner targets, Sanders said her college, for example, had a target of 100 learners for its course in digital skills, while regionally, D2N2 is aiming to have 520 learners on its boot camps overall.

Promised investment in skills training has been questioned after FE Week discovered £125 million of FE funding has been delayed by at least a year.

The Conservative Party manifesto pledged a new National Skills Fund (NSF) with £500 million being made available in each of the next five years in England from 2021/22, but last month’s spending review only committed three-quarters of that amount for next year.

The Department for Education has now confirmed that just £375 million of the promised £500 million will be used in 2021/22, following a reprioritisation of funds to “support the government’s response to Covid-19”.

The DfE did, however, make clear that the £125 million underspend will be used as part of the National Skills Fund in future years, and it remains committed to spending the full £2.5 billion.

But it seems there are even questions over the £2.5 billion figure, as £50 million of the dedicated £375 million for next year has been allocated to a capital budget.

Shadow skills minister Toby Perkins was shocked to hear the spending delay decision, saying it was a “remarkable thing at a time when the need for this money is greater than ever before” in the face of Covid-19.

He told FE Week: “There is a particular need for this funding at this moment because there are huge numbers of people who are being laid off in one sector who need to be retrained in new sectors. We have got fast-rising youth unemployment and there is a real need for investment in skills.

“The government rhetoric acknowledges that but their actual spending commitments are even less than what they committed to in their manifesto a year ago, long before anybody had ever heard of coronavirus.”

Policies that the NSF will be used to fund in future years are not yet known, as the DfE is yet to launch its promised consultation.

Of the NSF funding being used in 2021/22, £95 million will fund the prime minister’s level 3 entitlement in his ‘lifetime skills guarantee’, and £43 million has been set aside to expand the employer-led boot camp training model.

Meanwhile, £127 million will be used to continue the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s summer Plan for Jobs, including funding for traineeships, sector-based work academy placements and the National Careers Service.

And £110 million, including £50 million of capital investment, will be used to “drive up higher technical provision in support of the future rollout of a Flexible Loan Entitlement to test and develop innovative models for local collaboration between skills providers and employers”.

When FE Week asked why the NSF was being used to fund capital investment rather than its capital spending budget, the DfE would only say the decision was “taken as part of the spending review”.

University and College Union head of further education Andrew Harden echoed Perkins’ concern about the delay to NSF spending in 2021/22.

“Questions must be asked as to why we yet again see an underspend on a key government policy designed to address a chronic skills shortage when there is a looming need to re-equip the nation’s workforce for a post-Covid-19 economy,” he said.

Harden added that the funding could, for example, be used to fund a college staff pay rise in an effort to rebuild further education’s capacity to deliver the courses needed.

Last week, the Association of Colleges recommended its members give staff a one per cent pay rise owing to a lack of government investment – a decision that outraged trade unions.

Commenting on the NSF, AoC deputy chief executive Julian Gravatt said: “The extra money in the spending review for 16-to-18 education, for skills and for capital is a good start. With a lack of details or allocations yet, colleges won’t be able to make firm spending decisions, including on pay, until this happens.

“It would be useful to know where the £125 million top-sliced from the skills fund has gone. The £375 million allocated for 2021/22 will be a useful addition to the £2 billion spent on adult education and apprenticeships but it’s worth noting the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ estimate that spending halved in the last decade, so there is still some way to go to reach the levels needed to catch up.”

He added: “The need for capital investment is still very real – but there is a risk that Treasury and DfE have divided it up among a lot of budgets.”

The DfE would not be drawn on where the £125 million has been reprioritised to.

 

As most in the sector will know, calling a training programme an “apprenticeship” if it is not government-backed became illegal under the Enterprise Act 2016.

Then skills minister Nick Boles said at the time it would give officials power to take action in such cases as “we don’t want their status to be undermined by those unscrupulously passing off short courses as apprenticeships”.

So when FE Week was tipped off that a commercial training provider in the brewing industry was calling a two-week course an apprenticeship – just the 50 weeks off what is needed to meet the government’s minimum duration for a statutory apprenticeship – we began investigating and asked the Department for Education what action it would take.

But, as ever with the DfE, things were not simple or very transparent.

We were informed on Wednesday December 2 that the Brew-School, a firm that runs commercial beer-brewing courses, had been advertising plans to launch the “Brew-School’s Brewing Apprenticeship” which would last for 14 days at a cost of £2,500 per learner, from 2021.

The course would “combine the best of internationally recognised brewing qualifications with intensive experience of working in a real microbrewery”.

And “during the two-week brewing apprenticeship you will be taught by three master brewers to the latest syllabus of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling general certificate in brewing,” it added.

The advert pitches the course against the government-backed level 4 brewing apprenticeship, saying that “unfortunately” it takes 18 months to complete “and you still will not have an internationally recognised brewing qualification”.

“The beauty with the new Brew-School Brewing Apprenticeship is that this intensive two-week apprenticeship will lead you to obtain several formal brewing- and beer-related qualifications as well as practical brewing training,” it said.

The advert even came with a syllabus for the “apprenticeship”.

FE Week initially tried calling the company, which is also not on the government’s register of apprenticeship training providers, but the number provided on its website goes straight to voicemail. We emailed asking for comment about how this two-week course qualifies as an apprenticeship, and informed them that it is an offence under the Enterprise Act 2016, which includes the following clause: “Only statutory apprenticeships to be described as apprenticeships”.

In 2017, the same clause was added to the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 – the relevant legislation under which powers to intervene now fall.

At the same time we enquired with the DfE and received a response just hours later saying the department will “consider the information provided to us in relation to this enquiry and take action as appropriate”. However, it added that enforcement duties actually rest with the relevant “local weights and measures authority” (trading standards) and it would be for them to decide whether or not legal proceedings are appropriate.

Next stop, then, was to contact the local trading standards – a service typically found in each local authority to whom illegal trading can be reported and acted upon. In this case it was Sheffield City Council.

Days went by before the council called to say it could find no evidence of the Brew-School’s 14-day apprenticeship.

Upon checking back on the firm’s website, it transpired that the “apprenticeship” had since been changed and is now called a “Trainee Brewer Course”.

The DfE called that same day to say it too could see no evidence of a bogus apprenticeship.

Of course, FE Week had screen-shots and the previous syllabus saved to show the council and government what the advert had previously stated.

But it turns out the DfE’s Education and Skills Funding Agency had actually contacted the Brew-School last Thursday, the day after FE Week’s initial enquiry, and told the firm to “ensure that all references to apprenticeships are removed immediately” and to confirm that this action has been taken within ten working days.

FE Week was not – and still has not – been informed of this action by the DfE, but the Brew-School finally responded one week after our initial enquiry to tell us about the department’s communication.

A director of the Brew-School responded to the DfE to say: “Thank you for bringing this to our attention which we were totally unaware of. We have now changed the description of our course and renamed it as a Trainee Brewer Course.”

The council has since not responded to FE Week’s request for comment – so the extent of any legal action that could be taken in such cases remains unclear.

The government has said the names of colleges receiving emergency cash support must be kept a secret so as to avoid “disadvantaged learners” missing out on being educated.

The Department for Education included this claim in a host of reasons why it will not name five colleges that received emergency funding earlier this year, in response to an FE Week freedom of information request.

The response to the request said identifying the colleges could lead to a “loss of confidence in their ability to provide sustained education, and this would be likely to result in fewer students applying to the college for their courses.

“Given the additional travel required to study elsewhere, some disadvantaged learners would be likely to choose not to undertake any education at all.”

Essentially, the DfE is conceding that disadvantaged learners would have no alternative education provider were the college to stop delivering courses.

Despite their reticence in publishing the names of colleges that receive bailouts, the DfE regularly publishes the FE commissioner’s intervention reports and Education and Skills Funding Agency financial notices to improve for individual colleges, which include details of their financial situations alongside recommendations.

The DfE also claimed, in the response to the FOI request, that revealing the colleges’ names “might jeopardise any negotiations of upcoming contracts with their suppliers” and “would likely result in significant additional burdens being placed upon their resources, with the need to manage media attention, parental concerns and the potential loss of/difficulties in recruiting staff.

“This would limit their ability to effectively provide further education, harming the outcomes of learners, which would not be in the public interest.”

FE Week submitted the FOI after skills minister Gillian Keegan told parliament in September that five colleges had needed “financial assistance”. In its response, the DfE did reveal that the colleges had been handed a total of £9.6 million between April and August, with one college receiving £5.3 million over June and July (see table below).

The ESFA’s director of provider market oversight, Matthew Atkinson, told the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee last month that 64 colleges were currently at risk of running out of cash, and the government was likely to spend £70 million on emergency funding for colleges in total this year – which he said was “more than we thought”.

College leaders were themselves “staggered” when another FE Week FOI request revealed in January how four colleges had spent £111 million they had received as part of secretive “Fresh Start’ deals with the government, with money going towards IT equipment and writing off government loans.

An increasing number of college bailouts have been handed out in recent years and have ultimately led to the introduction of the college insolvency regime, which was used for the first time when the Hadlow Group of colleges collapsed last year.

But Atkinson admitted to the education committee these insolvencies will still cost the taxpayer over £60 million, with £6 million going to accountants alone – a figure DfE permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood called “gut wrenching”.

Yet the government has actively worked to stop the names of colleges that receive bailouts coming to light, changing its oversight policy in October so colleges that apply for emergency funding will not automatically fall into formal intervention.

The DfE withheld the information under section 43 (commercial interest) and section 36(2) (c) (would be likely otherwise to prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

FE Week will be referring the decision to withhold the college names to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

A former exams company chief executive is set to replace Dame Glenys Stacey as the chief regulator at Ofqual, FE Week understands.

Simon Lebus is being lined up to take over the top position at the exams regulator as Stacey’s interim period comes to end on December 31.

Lebus served as the group chief executive at Cambridge Assessment, which runs exam board OCR, for 15 years before leaving in 2018.

FE Week understands the appointment is set to be another interim role, though, and has yet to be fully ratified.

Stacey, who previously served as chief regulator from 2011 to 2016, took up the role in August after Sally Collier left following the exams fiasco.

It was announced this week that she is the preferred candidate for chair of the Office for Environmental Protection.

Asked by the education select committee on Tuesday what advice she would give her successor, Stacey said they should make sure they’ve “got the stamina for it” and should “really get into the technical detail”.

She urged the successor to “learn from 2020”, adding: “For example, I don’t think Ofqual was particularly visible in 2020. It had a rather established way of sort of communicating.

“We need to be much more visible and much more interested in listening to others’ ideas and working them through with them… they may be valuable, they may not… but really listening and engaging.”

Lebus was said to have driven Cambridge Assessment through “major organisational and industry change”, including technology advances such as the introduction of on-screen marking and computer-based testing.

His roles since include becoming a non-executive chairman at Sparx, an AI online platform for secondary school maths teaching, and a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, according to his LinkedIn page.

The decision to make another interim appointment is likely to be controversial, particularly given the huge task ahead of ensuring next year’s exam series doesn’t become another fiasco.

The Department for Education said a replacement for Stacey will be announced in due course.

The awarding body that runs BTECs has launched a campaign to encourage students to respond to the government’s level 3 and below technical qualifications consultation.

Backed by former skills minister Anne Milton, “Your Future, Your Choice” has gone live today on Pearson’s website, aiming to give young and adult learners the “opportunity to voice their opinions on what they want for their future education”.

It comes amid a Department for Education review that plans to limit funding for applied general qualifications, such as BTECs, that compete with T Levels and A-levels by 2023.

The DfE claims there is currently a “confusing landscape” of over 12,000 courses on offer to young people at level 3 and below, with multiple qualifications in the same subject areas available – many of which are “poor quality and offer little value to students or employers”.

As well as Milton, who was in post when the DfE first announced the review in March 2019, “Your Future, Your Choice” is backed by five-time Olympic medallist gymnast Max Whitlock.

A Pearson spokesperson explained that the campaign will be giving students, educators and employers the “chance to read more about the government’s proposals for post-16 qualifications, encouraging them to respond directly to the DfE consultation running until January 15 in the case of educators and employers, and encouraging students to share their BTEC success stories with us on social media with #YourFutureYourChoice or submit longer ones on our website”.

They added that while Pearson supports the introduction of T Levels and shares the government’s vision for “outstanding outcomes for every learner”, the awarding body also thinks “offering learners a choice in what qualification suits their career aspirations best is the right way to support them and the UK economy – both now and in the future.

“BTECs have been at the heart of national need for many years and continue to transform lives and careers. We’re encouraging young or adult learners to have their say on their future education options.”

To mark the launch of their campaign, Pearson has also published research that found nine in ten young students believe it’s important for there to be a wide choice of options available to help prepare them for their futures.