A college has announced plans to close its campus for a two week “circuit breaker” to combat rising coronavirus cases in its area.

With the backing of the University and College Union, Preston College has made the decision ahead of Lancashire’s move into tier three – the top level of England Covid restrictions – from tomorrow.

It comes as the National Education Union calls on all schools and colleges to close for two weeks at half term. 

Preston College emailed staff earlier this week to say only essential work will continue on campus for two weeks from 19 October to 1 November. One of those week’s is during half term.

All learning will be moved online for the week before half term (commencing 19 October), and any staff not on leave over half term (commencing 26 October) will work remotely.

A statement on the college’s website says: “As the global pandemic continues to cause uncertainty, at Preston’s College we are doing all that we can to keep learners and staff as safe as possible in these challenging times.

“To support the maintenance of the current situation, we have taken the decision to move to remote learning for one week, from week commencing 19th October 2020. This means that for the majority of learners, regardless of their chosen course or level, they will be required to undertake lessons remotely for the duration of this week.

“This will allow Preston’s College to continue managing the global pandemic effectively and positively. It will reduce the need for travel to college, minimising both pressure on transport networks and social interactions, at what is clearly a critical point in attempts to suppress the spread of coronavirus nationally.”

From week commencing 2 November, all learners “will follow their normal college timetable, experiencing a combination of college and home-based learning”, the statement adds.

Infection rates have risen sharply across the North West of England with Lancashire – which Preston is part of – going into tier three lockdown on Saturday.

UCU head of further education Andrew Harden praised the college, saying that it has shown “real leadership”.

“It is scandalous that Covid cases continue to rise across the country, but the government still hasn’t told colleges to shut down for two weeks over half term as part of a national ‘circuit breaker’,” he said.

“Preston College has shown real leadership in halting in-person teaching for two weeks to protect staff and students, while it considers how best to teach safely under Covid. We call on all colleges to follow its example.”

Earlier this week, advice made on 21 September by scientists from the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) was released and recommended that teaching at all colleges and universities should be online unless “face-to-face teaching is absolutely essential”.

The government has since maintained that all colleges should stay open for face-to-face delivery in all areas of England.

SAGE also urged for the introduction of circuit breaker restrictions three weeks ago – a recommendation that Labour leader Keir Starmer has now backed.

Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “A circuit breaker could allow the government to get in control of the test, track and trace system, and get cases lower to allow the system to work better. 

“Heads, teachers and staff understand the educational impact of this, but we also understand that in exponential epidemics early action is essential. Taking action now can avoid more disruption later.”

The traineeship tender is set to be deluged with “in excess of 3,000 bidders”, with the vast majority likely to miss out on a funding allocation, claims one consultant.

The Education and Skills Funding Agency finally launched the bidding process for 19 to 24 traineeship funding on 7 October, but it is being run on an “accelerated” timetable with a deadline for bids now just eight working days away.

Up for grabs initially is a slice of £65 million to be spent between February and 31 July 2021, which is split across nine regions in England – ranging from £20.8 million for London providers to just £2.6 million for the south west.

Jim Carley, a tender specialist in the FE sector, anticipates there to be “significant” demand with an extremely low success rate.

He expects “in excess of 3,000 bidders” based on eligibility and the level of interest and oversubscription seen on previous ESFA procurements, such as the controversial non-levy tender.

“However”, he added, “the number of contracts to be awarded will likely be well below half this number, based on the upper and lower contract value caps…Consequently, between 50 per cent and potentially as many as 95 per cent of bids submitted are likely to be unsuccessful”.

Carley explained that this is not to say that all but 5 per cent of applicants would put in a poor bid, it is “more a case of how many slices of cake can be given out in the form that they [the ESFA] have got”.

Just like with the non-levy apprenticeship tender, the funding agency is planning to apply a pro-rata methodology where there are winning bids of equal quality.

A minimum tender value of £250,000 has been set, so a provider would lose out completely if, after a new ranking method, they were successful but the pro-rata process took them under this value.

Writing in FE Week’s recently published traineeships supplement, Jane Hickie, the managing director of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, also predicted that competition “will be very fierce” as the tender does not have any provider eligibility criteria, only caps.

Caps, subject to sufficient turnover, have been set at £1 million for brand new providers, £2 million for current subcontractors, and £3 million for existing providers.

The pro-rate methodology deployed by the ESFA in its non-levy apprenticeship tender caused huge controversy, as many universities and Ofsted grade one training providers and colleges did not receive and allocation as their successful bids were dragged down below the £200,000 minimum threshold.

In a message to the sector this afternoon, the skills minister Gillian Keegan said: “We will be looking for providers and employer providers.”

FE Week understands that many large employers are considering bids, including NHS hospital trusts.

The traineeships tender is one way the government plans to triple the number of traineeships starts this year – as pledged by chancellor Rishi Sunak over the summer as part of his plan to combat youth unemployment following the coronavirus pandemic.

Bids are being accepted until 5pm on 28 October.

The digital skills bootcamps announced with the prime minister’s Lifetime Skills Guarantee could lead to adult education budget provision being elbowed aside by training paid for through the National Skills Fund.

A total of £8 million is being spent on the short courses in IT subjects such as cloud services, digital for advanced manufacturing and cyber security with links to job interviews to help people aged 19 and over gain employment in the digital sector.

Boris Johnson, announcing the bootcamps at a speech on the Lifetime Skills Guarantee last month, hammered existing programmes for adults: “We have seen a haemorrhage, in the past 20 years, in adult education – a million fewer [learners] than there were. 

“We are going to change that right now,” he promised, saying that at the bootcamps, “you can learn IT whatever your age”.

At first, bootcamps will be funded through the Department for Education’s (DfE) unallocated resources; with a further expansion, which will include sectors such as construction and engineering, being paid for using the National Skills Fund from April.

The bootcamps build on pilot programmes run by the West Midlands and Greater Manchester combined authorities with established providers such as Dudley College and QA.

The first wave will be run by those two authorities as well as Lancashire Digital Skills Partnership and Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, and will shortly be joined by a second wave of providers in west Yorkshire, the south-west, and Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.

Speaking this week at an FE Week roundtable on the Lifetime Skills Guarantee, skills minister Gillian Keegan emphasised the employability, rather than educational, purpose of the bootcamps: “It’s 12 to 16 weeks, so it’s quite intensive training, and is really trying to get people to get some quite valuable skills, which will lead them to employment in the digital sector and digital-based roles in particular.” 

Bootcamps are just one of the already announced programmes being paid for over five years by the £2.5 billion National Skills Fund, which will also cover an entitlement to a first, full level 3 qualification for every adult, and now the National Retraining Scheme.

That is on top of a series of initiatives to triple traineeship starts in 2021. A tender went out last week from the DfE inviting bids for providers to start delivering traineeships for 19-to-24-year-olds.

Unlike adult education budget provision, the DfE has set much stricter stipulations on how these bootcamps ought to be run, mandating the length, linked job interview and subject focus.

Bootcamps could also be subject to quality checks as stringent as those for AEB courses, as Ofsted has said it will be reviewing, with the DfE, “whether such programmes would fall into our inspection scope in future”.

The DfE will be using information the bootcamps gather to inform the design and delivery of the National Skills Fund, and FE Week understands the bootcamps have been divided into a first wave for local authorities, and a second wave, where the DfE tendered for providers directly, to test which model works better, ahead of the expansion next year.

Recruitment for the bootcamps started on September 29 and the courses must be completed by the end of March.

The pilot project West Midlands Combined Authority’s (WMCA) bootcamps are building on was called the Beat The Bot fund, run with £5 million from the National Retraining Fund.

This programme involves 20 providers training local people to move into tech jobs, or to retrain if they are at threat from redundancy due to automation. 

One of the participating providers was Dudley College, which delivered tutelage in areas such as coding and digital media to over 140 people.

Running from March to July, it was delivered in a number of ways: across four weeks for full-time learners, and 16 weeks for part-time learners. 

“Early evaluation indicates the programme was highly valued by learners,” a college spokesperson said, but “a full review is now taking place so lessons learned can inform future activity”.

The WMCA has been given £1.5 million by the DfE to run these new bootcamps, which the authority says will reach “hundreds” of people. 

How intensive the bootcamp will be will vary between each of its 20 component courses, which include full-time, part-time and remote training, with a mix of faceto-face and online sessions – adapted for Covid-19.

The GMCA, meanwhile, has said it will announce the funded projects for the next bootcamps by mid- to late October, and they will be paid for with £1.5 million from the DfE.

Their key requirements, a spokesperson said, will be to deliver the skills and wider competencies that employers require to recruit to specialist digital roles and that a learner gets a job at the end.

Training does not need to be qualification-based or accredited, though it can be if that is important to enter employment.

The bootcamps will have a mix of online and face-to-face learning and will be taught in smaller groups than those for AEB-funded provision as the new courses will be much more focused on work-readiness.

GMCA’s original programme, the Fast Track Digital Workforce Fund, was run in partnership with the Lancashire Digital Skills Partnership, and was funded with £3 million from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. 

Although Covid-19 has created “significant and widespread challenges in the employment market”, the spokesperson said around one-fifth of learners have progressed into employment from the course.

Technical skills training provider QA was one of those involved in delivering GMCA’s pilot. Sales director Adam Jones told FE Week said it was a 12-week programme which taught participants, for example, how to work on operating systems such as Linux and the software development tool Jenkins.

“These are all really specific technologies with established skill shortages within the Lancashire and Greater Manchester region.”

He stressed the importance of attracting and recruiting candidates as “just as important a part of meeting the digital skills gap need as the training intervention itself”.

The Lancashire Skills Partnership, which is delivering the bootcamp for their county, worked with GMCA on its pilot, but said they are “excited to work with the DfE digital bootcamp programme to extend this work and support even more residents”.

The development and running of their bootcamps will run along the same lines as GMCA, and the DfE has said Lancashire will share the funds allocated to Manchester, but would not say how much they would be given.

Liverpool City Region Combined Authority will be running bootcamps with £1 million in funding, and providers can register their interest in taking part via the Digital Skills for the Workplace website.

“We are very keen to hear from creative and proactive providers who can work with us to provide training content that will meet the needs of our regional employers and the individuals seeking to re enter the workplace,” a spokesperson said. 

Once they believe they have the supply to meet employer demand, the registration process will be closed.

What is required by employers will dictate many aspects of their course, including the intensity and the delivery method of the course, even down to the number of people who take part: if employer demands are quite expensive, fewer people can take part. 

The DfE has said it will announce which providers will deliver the second wave of digital skills bootcamps early next month.

Employers, local authorities and providers had to bid as a group for the £4 million contract by October 2.

Successful bidders have to design and deliver training courses of around 12 weeks to “provide a pipeline of individuals” to guaranteed interviews with employers. 

The DfE “expects” at least 75 per cent of learners will move into a new job or role, the document states.

One organisation which took part in a bid, for the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire leg, was the D2N2 local enterprise partnership. 

Head of people and skills Rachel Quinn said the bid they are part of has 20 providers lined up to deliver a 12-week course, which they hope will reach up to 800 people. 

She added: “There is a clear steer that this should absolutely focus on identified skills shortages, thereby maximising the impact the funding can make in securing progressions. In D2N2 we are specifically including aims to increase female participation.”

The Department for Education looks to have relaxed the requirement for public bodies to publish their progress towards the 2.3 per cent apprenticeship target, claiming it is merely “good practice”.

It comes after FE Week found scores of multi-academy trusts, councils and hospital trusts had failed to publicise what percentage of their staff had started an apprenticeship in 2019-20 on their websites by the deadline set by government.

Since the apprenticeship levy was introduced in 2017, public sector bodies with 250 or more staff in England have had a target to employ an average of at least 2.3 per cent of their staff as new apprentice starts over the period of April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2021.

Under statutory guidance, the bodies must report their annual progress to government and make the information “easily accessible to the public”, for example, on their website.

The data for how many apprentices start at each body is due on September 30 each year.

Chair of the education select committee Robert Halfon, who implemented the target when he was skills minister, called on public bodies to be “wholly transparent” and to comply with the regulations.

Where they do not, the Department for Education should hold them “fully accountable”, he demanded.

However, representative bodies have called on the government to ease off enforcing the rule owing to the pressures the public sector is facing from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Despite its own rules, the Department for Education told FE Week that while public bodies “must” report the data to central government so that overall performance against the target can be published, it was simply “good practice” for the bodies to publish their own data on their website.

Recognising the challenges organisations are facing this year, the department also said that where data is submitted after September 30, “we will endeavour to take account of it when we publish annual performance data in November”.

Every government department published their data on the Civil Service website towards the end of last month, revealing that one of them had recruited zero apprentices in 2019-20.

Out of the 20 largest academy trusts in England, FE Week could only find the data for one trust in the first week of October.

United Learning, the largest multi-academy trust, which has 72 academies and even has a former Department for Education director general – Jon Coles – as its chief executive, was one of the trusts not complying with the DfE’s rules. A spokesperson said the trust makes the information available “on request” and reports the data annually to the Education and Skills Funding Agency.

The general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders union, Geoff Barton (pictured), said he imagines MATs have not hit the deadline as “they are having to spin so many plates at the moment to manage Covid safety measures, keep their schools open, and reintegrate children back into the classroom”.

He would expect the government to be conscious of these “huge pressures”, and called on the DfE, which enforces the data publication rules, “not to insist upon fairly arcane accountability measures being met to the letter”.

The one trust that did publish its data, Delta Academies Trust, had a workforce of 3,208 as of March 31, 2020 and 0.56 per cent of those were apprentices. A spokesperson said that while they were able to publish the data on time, this “clearly continues to be an exceptionally busy period for everyone working in schools” so it was “inevitable” that some work would be delayed.

Aside from MATs, FE Week also looked at a random sample of local councils in the first week of October and could only find up-to-date apprenticeship target data for one of them, Cornwall Council.

A spokesperson for the Local Government Association, which represents councils nationally, said it encourages councils to publish their progress, and while the LGA does not have a position on whether the rules should be relaxed during the crisis, “we do recognise councils have competing priorities at the moment”.

A random sample of five hospital trusts again only turned up figures on apprenticeships for one organisation, University College London Hospitals.

Health Education England, which commissions apprenticeship training in the health service, said it “does encourage trusts to publish their figures, but clearly there could be delays given current circumstances”.