Former training provider boss and renowned entrepreneur Angela Middleton has been stripped of her MBE by King Charles for “bringing the honours system into disrepute”.
Middleton, a media commentator and self-proclaimed “careers queen”, was awarded the honour in 2019 for her services to apprenticeships and business.
She ran a group of training companies until late 2020, initially blaming the “devastating impact of Covid-19” for their collapse.
FE Week later discovered their closure followed the launch of an Education and Skills Funding Agency counter-fraud probe.
The DfE wrote off over £12.5 million in 2024 as funding that wasn’t recovered from Middleton’s businesses: Astute Minds Ltd (£9.9 million), MiddletonMurray Ltd (£1.4 million), FNTC Training and Consultancy (£900,000) and The Teaching and Learning Group Limited (£456,000).
The department has never published the investigation outcome report into Middleton’s companies.
A notice published on The Gazette, the UK’s public record of honours, said: “The King has directed that the appointment of Angela Jane Middleton to be a Member of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, dated 29 December 2018 shall be cancelled and annulled and that her name shall be erased from the register of the said order.”
A separate Cabinet Office notice added that the reason for forfeiture was for “bringing the honours system into disrepute”.
Middleton said she was “disappointed” by decision to revoke her honour, adding that the claims made by the DfE were “unfounded”.
She told FE Week: “In May 2025 I provided the Cabinet Office with a detailed and evidence-based response regarding claims brought to their attention by the ESFA following the closure of my company in 2020. That response set out why those claims were unfounded.
“The figures referenced in your article were submitted by the ESFA to the liquidator in 2022, approximately two years after the company’s closure. They represented an extrapolated claim for the full value of historic contract activity. No sums were owed to the ESFA at the point of closure.
“Those claims were not admitted by the liquidator or determined by any court. The Insolvency Service subsequently reviewed the same concerns and concluded there was no evidence to pursue disqualification proceedings, closing its investigation with no action and an apology for the delay.
“While I am obviously disappointed by the decision regarding the honour, I do not intend to comment further.”
Middleton states on her website that she appears on well-known media outlets and has links to high-profile politicians.
She is also a fitness guru who founded companies called YourBodyMeansBusiness and The Limitless Group.
University of Birmingham vice chancellor Adam Tickell has weighed in on the growing pressure around student loans to argue that students without A Levels or equivalent qualifications are “not really capable of graduating”.
Public and political pressure on the student loan system has been rising, with interest rates and the inequity of debt across student demographics rightly coming under scrutiny.
Yet Tickell’s intervention does nothing to address inequity and should instead be called out across the sector for the thinly veiled class snobbery which it represents.
Headlines have focused on A Levels, but this VC fails to explain what “equivalents” to A Levels he deems appropriate for university entry. Without such details, one can only assume this means multiple routes into HE from vocational education.
This debate comes at a critical moment for higher education, when the purpose of universities is being contested both inside and outside the sector. Universities should be places of transformation, working to reduce, not reinforce, social inequality.
Where research does indicate that students with vocational qualifications are less likely to succeed, this is within the context of social disadvantage. It will come as no surprise to educators that socially disadvantaged students face more barriers to success, not because of their capability but because of the harsh impact of social inequality.
Students and voices in FE have long fought the privileging of A Levels within society, with vocational education routinely positioned as inadequate within the policy sphere. A Levels are still sadly perceived as a “gold standard”, leading to higher university acceptance rates.
The inequality with which BTECs, T Levels and other qualifications are treated is based on an outdated conception of what constitutes rigour in education. In this sphere, end-of-subject examinations are held as the standard, a narrow view of educational practice which has long been critiqued.
Research from the Nuffield Trust instead has shown that students with BTEC qualifications are less likely to drop out of university than their A Level counterparts.
Leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch has positioned herself as wanting to save students money from excessive interest rates, but her comments expose a broader agenda to defund courses which “aren’t delivering for young people”.
Badenoch is directly targeting courses without an immediate quantifiable economic impact. Aside from completely missing the social benefits of a broad-ranging, public higher education model, Badenoch reveals a narrow view of education and a broader agenda against non-elite universities.
Like Badenoch’s intervention, Tickell exposes a political agenda gaining traction via a simplistic political narrative: that of rolling back post-war progress on widening access to post-compulsory and higher education.
As a former FE teacher now researching educational policy, my research explores the limitations of T Levels. Yet, Tickell and I are not positioned in the same wheelhouse.
My research does not identify a lack of capability within non-traditional routes. Instead, I explore the reduction of the T Level curriculum and learning opportunities to knowledge and skills which are to have immediate economic impact by policy makers.
At a decisive moment in which the unequal and unfair student loans system is coming under pressure, the comments from Tickell are incredibly disappointing.
Yet they are not surprising.
As FE practitioners, students and communities are well-aware, we sadly live in a society which routinely fails to acknowledge the transformative work and power of FE’s contribution.
As my practice shows in both FE and in a university where many of our students take BTECs, T Levels or Access courses to get there, students without A Levels arrive at university with important academic skills such as invaluable professional experience, producing detailed coursework, examining research and often the ability to juggle multiple demands of study and work.
Time and again they prove themselves more than capable of graduating.
Yet too often, for students from working-class backgrounds, plus those juggling additional multiple experiences of discrimination, the structural barriers to attaining a university degree, such as the cost-of-living crisis or caring commitments, are what impact university study.
Stating that access to student funding should be reviewed for non-A Levels students rolls back social progress. It furthers the damaging narrative that students with vocational qualifications, who are more likely to be from working-class backgrounds, are not welcome or needed in university settings.
MPs have accused the Department for Education of appearing “unconcerned” about the impact on young people when they lose subsidised post-16 transport.
In a report on home-to-school transport, the public accounts committee (PAC) said DfE officials did not understand how access to transport affected student attendance or participation in education, particularly for young people aged 16 to 19.
Parents and college staff told the committee that students had missed learning or failed to start courses because transport was no longer provided or was unsuitable.
And despite the “weight of evidence” about difficulties navigating the system, the committee said officials appeared “unconcerned about the clarity of the offering” for post-16 learners.
However, the committee stopped short of recommending an extension of the legal obligations placed on local authorities to provide transport for pre-16 pupils to post-16 students.
Council discretion
Local authorities are only legally responsible for providing free transport to school for eligible school-age pupils. Once a young person turns 16, councils have discretion over what travel funding, if any, they provide.
The PAC described this change in entitlement as a “cliff-edge” for families. Parents told the committee losing transport support had “huge impacts” on family life, with some reporting having to give up work to manage travel arrangements.
Colleges also reported direct impacts on participation. Evidence submitted to the PAC from Natspec cited one college where 30 students were unable to start their course on time because transport had not been agreed.
Stronger duties
Ruth Perry, senior policy manager at Natspec, said the committee had highlighted a problem specialist colleges had been raising for years.
“We are pleased to see the PAC recognising that 16 to 19-year-olds with SEND have been among the worst affected by local authority attempts to manage rising home to school/college transport costs,” she said.
Perry welcomed the committee’s recommendation that the DfE should investigate links between transport support and rising numbers of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), but said the report should have gone further.
“We would like to have seen the committee recommend that the statutory duty on local authorities to provide transport be extended to include 16 to 19-year-olds and 19 to 25-year-olds with an education health and care plan (EHCP),” she added.
Department in the dark
The PAC also criticised the DfE for lacking basic data on who received transport support, how they travel or how provision differs between areas, despite annual home-to-school transport costs reaching £2.6 billion in 2024-25.
The committee said this means the government cannot judge whether the system represents value for money or whether support reaches those most in need.
It recommended the department improve data collection from local authorities and set out how it could better understand the relationship between access to transport, attendance and the number of young people who are NEET.
Spending on education transport has increased by around 70 per cent in real terms since 2015-16, driven largely by rising demand from growing numbers of children and young people with SEND.
The DfE had suggested its proposed SEND reforms could help reduce demand for transport in the long term by identifying needs earlier and supporting more students closer to home.
But the PAC said even if the proposed reforms succeed, it was likely to take time before they translated into savings or eased pressure on local authority budgets.
Repeated warnings
The report adds to growing scrutiny of post-16 SEND transport.
Last year, the education committee warned that learners with SEND can lose guaranteed transport when they transition from school to further education and called for clearer funding and transport guarantees for FE students.
And the government’s spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, criticised local authorities’ inconsistent and “insufficient” data collection on SEND transport and said scaling back services could increase NEET numbers.
An FE Week investigation in 2024 found cases where SEND learners missed the start of their courses by up to three months because of local rows over transport services. It also found examples of local authorities charging families hundreds of pounds for services that were previously free.
One in 10 FE and skills Ofsted inspections were delayed at the provider’s request in the last financial year, figures reveal.
Of the 818 further education and skills inspections and visits carried out in the year to March 31, 2025, 114 providers requested deferral. Of those, 88, or 77 per cent, were accepted.
That means 23 per cent of requests were rejected, the highest proportion out of all of Ofsted’s inspection remits covering schools, early years and social care.
There were also four cases where an FE and skills provider requested a pause to their inspection. Each of those were agreed.
This is the first time the watchdog has released data covering inspection deferrals, pauses and post-quality assurance changes to grades. It follows a new policy aimed at lessening the impact of inspections on leaders’ wellbeing.
The mechanisms allowing providers to request an inspection be delayed or put on hold were introduced in January 2024 as part of a raft of reforms in response to the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry.
A coroner ruled in late 2023 that the Ofsted inspection of Caversham Primary School in Reading had contributed to her death.
Ofsted guidance says inspections should only be deferred in “exceptional circumstances”. It lays out examples, which include where a senior leader’s wellbeing “would be severely impacted” and there is no other senior leader to step in.
Other examples include major incidents, such as the death of a learner, closure due to staff training or severe weather.
The data also revealed that during the 24/25 financial year, nine inspections were deemed “incomplete” while additional evidence was gathered.
This policy was introduced in September 2024 and allows inspectors to pause an inspection to allow a provider to resolve safeguarding “where that is the only issue”.
The anonymised data also showed there were four cases that year where a provider’s overall effectiveness grade was changed following Ofsted’s quality assurance processes. This data excluded cases where the headline grade was changed as a result of an upheld complaint by the provider.
Colleges are “mopping up systemic failures” that include poor information sharing from schools and regional disparities in transport costs, the children’s commissioner has warned.
In a report based on survey data from 238 colleges, children’s commissioner Rachel de Souza said young people in post-16 education were often “neglected” due to a narrow focus on schools in education policy.
College leaders told the commissioner that information sharing from school to college was “not good enough”, with many students arriving with outdated education health and care plans (EHCPs).
Almost a third of colleges reported affordability and availability of transport for college students was a top concern, with regional variation in transport subsidies creating an “uneven playing field”.
Other top concerns included access to mental health support, student attendance, funding constraints, and diverse problems faced by college students such as complex home-life pressures, disadvantage and work responsibilities.
De Souza said the data, collected between September 2024 and February 2025, gives a unique national picture of how colleges typically go “beyond their core role” to help students.
She added: “The ambition to reduce NEET rates across the country will require us to tackle the structural and wellbeing barriers our young people face – and colleges are rightly recognised as part of the solution.
“Yet too often, rather than the wider system learning from them, colleges are asked to mop up after systemic failures elsewhere.
“When thinking about supporting young people’s needs, there is now rightful pushback to the simplistic idea of ‘put it on the school curriculum’ as a policy lever, but too little attention is paid to the burdens placed upon the FE sector and skills policy.”
College leaders reported that “delayed or incomplete” information sharing was a barrier to effective planning.
The report says: “Colleges have a shorter amount of time than schools to understand and meet their young people’s needs due to the length of time young people study at the college, and therefore timely information sharing is crucial.”
Key recommendations from the commissioner include providing free travel for as many children as possible, “timely and high quality” data sharing by local authorities and schools, and an extension of the pupil premium to young people in post-16 education.
De Souza said colleges and sixth forms play a “vital role” in young people’s educational journeys, and taught about a third of 16 to 18-year-olds in England in 2024-25.
However, 70 per cent of college leaders listed funding as one of their top concerns, compared to about half of secondary school leaders – revealing one of the biggest disparities between the two sectors.
And 35 per cent said funding constraints prevented them from fully meeting the requirements of EHCPs.
Most colleges step in to provide mental health support due to difficulties accessing local services, the report found.
Access to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) was a top concern for 79 per cent of leaders, with a similar number reporting that they fund their own mental health counsellor.
Chief executive of the Association of Colleges David Hughes said: “The barriers facing the college sector are well known to all across further education, but often fail to register in wider policy circles, so it’s heartening to see this report set them out so explicitly.
“Colleges are consistently asked to do more with less, and despite immense funding and resource pressures, they offer strong support to young people from all backgrounds, no matter what their circumstances.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We are determined to break down barriers to opportunity to reach the prime minister’s target for two-thirds of young people to take a gold-standard apprenticeship, higher training or heading to university by age 25.
“Our post-16 education and skills white paper set out ambitious reforms, coupled with investment, to identify young people who need support and help them to move smoothly from school into further education, including piloting automatic enrolment and investing in better data sharing and attendance monitoring.
“We are also tackling the issues before young people reach college by expanding access to a mental health professional in every school and college, rolling out free breakfast clubs and free school meals, and lifting the two-child benefit cap.”
A rule that blocks apprentices from accessing their legal entitlement to English and maths training will be changed, it has been confirmed.
Officials are also considering amendments to apprenticeship funding rules covering visas, workers employed across UK borders, subcontracting, co-investment collection for completion payments and additional learning support reimbursements.
Department for Work and Pensions’ head of funding delivery Tracey Cox outlined multiple rule change proposals that could come in from 2026-27 during a workshop on day two of this week’s Apprenticeship and Training Conference.
Here’s what you need to know.
English and maths double funding
Ministers announced on February 11, 2025, that an exit rule forcing apprentices without a GCSE pass to achieve a functional skills qualification in English and maths to complete their training was scrapped with immediate effect for those aged 19 or older.
Employers must now agree for older apprentices to opt in to study English and maths. When employers do not agree, apprentices should still be able to exercise their statutory entitlement to level 2 English and maths.
However, current apprenticeship funding rules do not allow apprentices to study the subjects using alternative funding streams while on an apprenticeship.
Cox said the issue had generated a high volume of queries and complaints over the past year.
The government is now looking to change the rules on “double funding” in the English and maths section to “allow for apprentices to seek adult skills fund (ASF) funding outside of their apprenticeship in circumstances where their employer does not allow them to study English and maths as part of the apprenticeship”.
This will hinge on funds being available locally, and apprentices may have to use a different provider if their apprenticeship trainer does not hold an ASF contract.
Learning support cash should double
All education and training providers have a duty under the 2010 Equality Act to make reasonable adjustments for those with learning difficulties so they are not placed at a “substantial disadvantage”.
The main source of funding, the additional learning support (ALS) fund, is a fixed £150 per month intended to pay providers for adjustments such as additional assessor visits and specialist equipment.
Cox said the government receives “continuous feedback” that providers are not claiming this funding due to fears of clawback following several high-profile cases, and because the process can be “burdensome”.
Her department has recommended reviewing the policy, including the funding level, but Cox said this would be a longer-term project and any changes would come in from 2027-28 at the earliest.
She asked ATC delegates how much they spend on learning support per eligible learner each month, and discovered it was at least double the current £150 amount.
Tracey Cox
Break the co-investment and completion payment link
Under current rules, apprenticeship providers must collect and record each employer’s co-investment payment in the individualised learner record for their 20 per cent completion payment to be released, even if the amount is minimal. This must be done by the final return – known as R14 – in the academic year the apprentice completes.
Providers say the rule is burdensome and increases operational costs because staff must track and chase often small co-investment payments, while providers take a financial hit if the money is not collected on time.
The DWP has recommended “removing the link between collecting co-investment and releasing the completion payment”. However, as there is a financial impact to the government, this “needs further exploration” with the Treasury.
Cox said if approved, it “could make a big difference” for providers.
50% working time in England
To be eligible for English apprenticeship funding, an individual must spend at least 50 per cent of their working hours in England over the duration of the apprenticeship.
Cox said she believed the government “should allow greater flexibility in this area” after receiving “a lot” of queries about learners working for employers close to UK borders.
Her team is working with the four nations to “come up with some kind of agreement on what is acceptable across the board”.
Visa clarification
The rulebook states that a foreign learner must be able to fully complete an apprenticeship within the time available before their visa expires.
Cox told ATC the rule had frustrated providers who have apprentices due to complete after their visa expiry date but who plan to extend their visa when they are able to apply for renewal.
Visa extension can be a slow process and they are typically only extended in the six months before expiry.
Analysis suggests that in most cases applications for extensions are granted, Cox added.
The DWP plans to add the following clarification to the funding rules: “Providers must not fund learners who would not have enough time on their visa to complete their course, and who do not intend to or would not be eligible to renew their visa where the course continues past the learner’s visa expiry date. Providers may at their discretion fund that learner only where they have a high degree of confidence that the learner intends to renew their visa.”
A clear subcontracting definition
Apprenticeship subcontracting rules underwent a significant review in 2022. Officials are now looking to update their definitions after finding some providers are failing to declare subcontracting because they are unsure what counts.
Cox said there were around six cases where auditors proposed to claw back all funding handed to providers because rules were misinterpreted.
She said that “everything is subcontracting when you don’t deliver it yourself to a learner”.
But there are areas, such as first aid training or a talk from a tax expert, where Cox believes this should be declared but not classed as subcontracting.
Officials are working on a new, clearer definition.
The DWP is also aware of requests from providers to use subcontractors not on the official apprenticeship provider and assessment register (APAR). Providers can already do this if the total amount subcontracted is less than £100,000.
Cox said her department wanted to provide “further clarity and consider how we can improve the current de-minimis arrangements to allow expert input to training delivery by non-APAR providers”.
Sir Ian Bauckham was jolted into “stepping up” Ofqual’s work on AI misuse after students admitted to him they were using AI but were too afraid to tell their teachers.
Speaking at a keynote and Q&A session at this week’s Apprenticeships and Training Conference (ATC), the chief regulator also said V Levels could be regulated as a “marketplace” without becoming an “easy” option, and insisted Skills England’s apprenticeship assessment overhaul will not mean standards slipping “on my watch”.
AI ‘confessions’
Bauckham told delegates his job regularly takes him into schools and colleges, where he probes what’s really happening on the ground with qualifications.
Over the past year, he said, teachers had told him AI misuse was becoming increasingly difficult to spot, particularly in coursework and non-examined assessments.
At the start of the “AI era”, he said, plagiarism and detection tools could more easily identify where a student’s work had been copied “directly” from elsewhere. But that advantage is fading as AI tools improve and students become more fluent in prompting them.
“When I talk to students and ask them to tell me the truth, not necessarily what they would tell their teacher, they say, well actually, yeah, please don’t tell my teacher, yes I do,” Bauckham said.
This has sharpened worries about “the long-term viability” of non-examined assessments and made it clear to the chief regulator that Ofqual needed to “step up our efforts in this area”.
The remarks came as Bauckham referenced a letter to awarding organisation chief executives, published on Tuesday, in which he warned that while detected AI cases reported to Ofqual remained “relatively low”, there was “significant concern” among teachers and leaders about the true extent of misuse.
In the letter, Bauckham asked awarding organisations to reply to him spelling out the specific steps they were taking to root out AI misuse in their qualifications by the end of March.
In the ATC Q&A, he rejected the suggestion Ofqual had been slow to respond to AI misuse in qualifications, arguing awarding organisations sit closest to centres and were responsible for setting expectations and enforcing them.
Pressed on what happens after the March deadline, Bauckham said Ofqual would review the boards’ proposals and assess “the quality of their responses” before deciding whether further regulatory action was needed.
He acknowledged the “ultimate sanction” would be removing non-examined assessments from qualifications entirely, but stressed many teachers had urged him not to “default to the easy option” because coursework “can be a powerful learning experience”.
Instead, the regulator has its own ideas on “cheat-proofing” but wants to see what boards propose first.
Asked whether he would use AI to help him determine if the AO’s responses were enough, he said: “Of course not, we’ll use our old-fashioned human brains.”
V Levels: ‘No easy options’
Bauckham also set out how Ofqual would regulate V Levels if ministers stick with the government’s proposal to have a market of multiple awarding organisations offering them, as is the case with A Levels, rather than the single-AO licence approach with T Levels.
“Ofqual was set up to regulate a market of awarding organisations, so we’re very comfortable” with multiple AOs, he said.
He added there would be “nationally set content” for V Levels, but with “legitimate variation” in how AOs design, sequence and assess. Ofqual’s job, he added, would be to ensure that a V Level in the same subject holds a comparable standard across AOs “so there won’t be an easy V Level available”.
This followed the latest round of wave 2 T Level licences, showing Pearson will hold 16 of the available 20 T Levels in September 2027.
Asked directly whether it was “high risk” to have a dominant force in a single-provider T Level system, Bauckham said he would “slightly dodge the question”, but said an advantage of a regulated market was that it creates “a layer of resilience” because “there is always a plan B if something goes wrong with an awarding organisation”.
Concentrating all qualifications of a certain type into one AO “potentially reduces that system resilience”, he suggested.
‘Not on my watch’
On apprenticeships, Bauckham said the purpose of Skills England’s assessment reforms was to respond to concerns about “complexity, duplication and unnecessary delays”, while recognising fears the changes could “dilute quality” or weaken how reliably assessment signals occupational competence.
“My priority is, and will remain, the protection of that quality and the purpose of apprenticeship assessment,” he said. “Simplification and streamlining does not mean dumbing down. Not on my watch anyway.”
Bauckham said Skills England’s assessment plans would continue to set baseline requirements per apprenticeship standard, and Ofqual would “regulate to make sure the intention of those plans is delivered”, including by challenging awarding organisations on assessment design choices and requiring them to demonstrate they reflect occupational competence needs.
Plans to merge two industry-led training quangos have been revived – a year after an independent review recommended the tie-up.
A 12-week consultation on merging the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) and Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB) into a “single unified body” will be launched next month.
Both boards are non-departmental public bodies that hand out training grants for the construction and engineering workforces funded by levies on employers.
Work and pensions minister Andrew Western announced the consultation this week as he laid routine legislation to approve levy rates on employers that fund most of the CITB’s training activities.
Western said a single training board would “support the combined skills needs” of the sectors, delivering on a recommendation of an independent review by Mark Farmer which the government partially accepted in January 2025 “subject to further scoping”.
The minister added the views of industry “will inform a decision on how to proceed”, with the earliest likely change to be April next year.
The move comes after the CITB’s boss Tim Balcon was forced to apologise in December for cutting several training grants at short notice due to “the pace of demand growth”.
Government targets
Supply of skilled workers is seen as critical to the government’s manifesto pledge of building 1.5 million new homes by the end of this parliament, as well as major national infrastructure projects such as the ongoing Hinkley Point C nuclear power station.
Measures rolled out since the 2024 general election include a £600 million training package for up to 60,000 construction workers and a construction skills mission board that includes ministers and sector leaders.
However, while the government called on the two boards to collaborate following Farmer’s review, it held back from passing legislation needed to merge them.
The review called for a “fundamental reset” amid concerns about workforce shortages and future skills misalignment, arguing the two quangos had “insufficient” impact to justify their existence.
Farmer told FE Week he was pleased to hear about the consultation, as a merger would result in operational efficiencies and create a more “focused and strategic” workforce planning and development agency.
He added: “It is clear that in the current economic climate, industry will be even more sensitive to the need to deliver operational efficiencies from the ITBs and minimise levy ‘leakage’ for reinvestment in industry that delivers the biggest impact.”
A DWP spokesperson said: “This government inherited a dire shortage of construction workers and we are determined to deliver more opportunities for young people as we work to boost construction skills.
“We will be consulting industry on whether bringing these two training bodies together would better support workers and employers to get the skills they need.”
The two boards
Both the CITB and ECITB work in England, Scotland and Wales, distributing training grants that are largely funded through separate levies on employers.
CITB focuses on construction and building skills for sectors such as housebuilding, while the ECITB works on training for more specialised major infrastructure projects such as nuclear power stations, oil and gas production, and water treatment.
According to its most recent accounts for 2024-25, the construction board raised £228 million in levy funding for training grants to support more than 4,000 new entrants to the sector and 30,000 apprentices. It also runs employer networks and directly delivers apprenticeship and health and safety training.
The board’s most recent minutes from September said it forecast a budget deficit of £14 million for the year due to high demand for its grants.
In the same year, the ECITB raised £34 million from its levy, £28 million of which was spent on training grants and new-entrant programmes.
Andrew Hockey, CEO of the ECITB, said: “Whatever the outcome of this consultation, it is important the distinct skills and workforce needs of the engineering construction industry continue to be supported.
“Our research forecasts that the engineering construction industry will need 40,000 additional workers by 2030. Any changes to how the ITBs are structured should not detract from the urgent need to attract, develop, qualify and retain skilled workers now.”
CITB chief executive Tim Balcon said: “We must continue to work to tackle the joint needs of industry – we need to be providing standardised levels of competence, alternative routes into industry and making it easier to access high-quality training.”
More than 20 levy-funded boards were founded in the 1960s, but the CITB and ECITB are the sole two to remain after most were dismantled in reforms under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
The new chair of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, Tim Bennett-Hart, comes across as the perfect English gentleman, with his self-professed “posh accent”, refined demeanour and royal connection (last month he played guitar in Saudi Arabia for the country’s Crown Prince).
But he has a cheeky side too. As a teenager he was in a band with such a naughty name – referring to a body part – that he dare not say it aloud, and later was part of a team that wrote songs for noughties TV pop talent show stars, including The Cheeky Girls.
Bennett-Hart’s eclectic musical background paved the way for him to become chief executive of RSL Awards, a specialist awarding organisation (AO) for the creative arts.
He is very deliberate in his choice of location for our interview. We meet in the grand interiors of London’s Royal Society of Arts, a precursor to modern awarding bodies. RSA Awards offers graded exams in performing arts such as dance, drama and music, the first of which he says were created in this building more than 150 years ago. Much of what AOs still do stems from that era; NCFE was created in 1848 and City & Guilds in 1878.
But unlike any other time in its history, the awarding sector is facing a crisis of purpose over what assessment should look like, given the impact of AI, acute skills shortages and a mental health crisis some blame on exam pressures facing young people.
On top of this, AOs have lately felt like a “political football being kicked from one place to another”, caught in a fast-moving tide of reform announcements: new V Level qualifications, the lifelong learning entitlement, the growth and skills levy, apprenticeship units, the Office for Students regulating higher technical qualifications, functional skills adjustments and the end of EPAs.
Bennett-Hart shakes his head at the upheaval. “You’re thinking, ‘how much of this do I actually pay attention to, or do I just keep on my trajectory and see where we go?’”
He is particularly concerned that the government should apply the brakes on V Levels, currently set for rollout in 2027. Revisions of GCSE and A Level content, which are “just an evolution of standards”, are not expected to be completed until 2031.
“If we’re doing a revolution of qualifications, giving it more than 18 months would be wise,” he says.
It has also been a period of change for FAB’s leadership. In 2024 the body took on its third chief executive in under a year with the appointment of Rob Nitsch, who Bennett-Hart believes has been a “really constructive agent of influence” for awarding bodies.
FAB’s chair since 2024, Lifetime Training CEO Charlotte Bosworth, had been set to hand the baton to NCFE chief executive David Gallagher until he stepped down last month for health reasons.
Bennett-Hart praises Bosworth for doing a “really good job at keeping things calmer”, because when it comes to qualifications there is a “real tendency to get a bit uncalm about things sometimes”.
He hopes to use his voice through FAB to change perceptions of AO qualifications as being “just about BTECs”, which he says is a hindrance for niche AOs like his. Around 1.5 million people take graded music or performing arts exams each year, all Ofqual-regulated, but they “get lumped in with lots of other things”.
In contrast to RSL Awards, his new vice chair Kelle McQuade is COO of the AQA-owned Training Qualifications UK, which boasts more than 240 qualifications.
“Between us, we feel like we really cover the breadth of awarding,” he says.
Musical roots
Bennett-Hart spent his formative years in the Surrey village of Chobham, which explains his accent, although he assures me: “I’m not as posh as my voice makes out”. His dad was a land surveyor – a maker of “very detailed maps” – and his mum a teacher.
At school he “struggled quite a lot” with English language and was placed in a remedial group. Rather than putting him off, it made him determined to express himself well through language. He began writing poetry and later discovered songwriting, having played the violin since he was four.
As a self-conscious 14-year-old he sold the violin “in a fit of panic” over friends’ perceptions and bought an electric guitar. His first band’s name cannot be uttered because it refers to a “really rude, anatomically interesting part of the body”.
“We were trying to be rebels at the time but failing miserably,” he explains.
At 15 he submitted a mixtape of his songs to a competition for young musicians on Radio 1’s Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq show. He was picked to attend a residential course run by Norton York, founder of RSL Awards, who had set up the AO after feeling irked that funded university pathways were available to classical musicians but not electric guitarists or drummers.
Bennett-Hart had forgotten about the course until, after joining RSL Awards as a director in 2018, he spotted a familiar photograph in the office and realised the scruffy teenager pictured with York was him.
He had long been convinced his destiny lay in becoming a rock star and spent four years as a “jobbing musician”, involving “staying up late” and “sleeping in the back of a van”.
It was hardly glamorous, but touring Europe with a swing band specialising in Glenn Miller songs was “brilliant – my gran came to see me”.
Crazy Frog
At 22, Bennett-Hart experienced the first of two “epiphany” moments. While spending six months in India learning the sitar and living at a spiritual retreat, he realised he wanted to become a teacher – partly, he admits, because “you can’t just sleep in the back of a van forever”.
He went on to study music at the University of Surrey, where he began writing songs seriously, partly as a way “to tell girls that I fancied them”.
This led to work with Jiant Productions, composing songs for contestants on talent shows including Pop Idol, Popstars, The X Factor and the BBC’s Fame Academy.
He specialised in the kind of pop music that sticks in your head all day – like it or not. Jiant’s credits include the Cheeky Girls’ album Party Time.
He also wrote music for the computer game Crazy Frog Racer.
“That was a low point in my life if I’m honest with you!” he says with a smile. “We made some music that we loved, and some resigned to the ‘what was that about?’ category.”
He later wrote music for TV adverts, including reworking Food, Glorious Food into “Chips, glorious chips” for McCain oven chips.
But the industry was changing: instead of being paid to write, songwriters increasingly had to pitch songs and were only paid if they were used.
Lecturing life
Bennett-Hart returned to his ambition to teach, first at Brooklands College in Weybridge and later at the University of Sussex. Academic life was a “shock” after freelancing, far slower paced, and he observed a “clash” between academics focused on research output and students concerned about their futures.
Then life took a dramatic turn when he was diagnosed with stage-four kidney cancer, which was initially thought could be terminal. Coming close to death shifted his outlook and made him, he says, “an eternal optimist”.
He later worked at the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford, helping expand its provision from music into media industries and computer games, eventually supporting the launch of campuses in London and Brighton.
Bennett-Hart argues specialist arts colleges often use degrees primarily as a mechanism to access funding rather than as “their paragon of what they believe somebody needs for that industry”.
He is also an advocate of accelerated two-year degrees delivered through trimester models, although institutions currently receive only two years of funding for them.
“If the outcome is the same as a three-year degree, you could give a really great experience. But at the moment the institution has to bear the financial brunt,” he says.
Global footprint
Since joining RSL Awards in 2018, Bennett-Hart has travelled widely. The London-based organisation operates in more than 50 countries and certificates over 100,000 candidates a year in music, performing arts and creative subjects.
But these days he is reluctant to spend too long away from home – he has a nine-year-old son.
He was recently in Shanghai launching a partnership with China’s state-controlled People’s Music Publishing House, and shortly before we met was in Saudi Arabia, where he played an original blues composition for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
AO market movements
Back in England, the AO market appears buoyant at first glance. The number of Ofqual-regulated awarding organisations has risen steadily from 164 in 2019-20 to 255 in 2023-24.
But a growing minority are loss-making, and offshore investors are gaining a foothold in both training providers and the AO sector, highlighted by the purchase of City & Guilds.
Bennett-Hart says RSL Awards is approached “all the time to sell up”. “That’s lovely,” he adds, “but we don’t need to.”
He worries consolidation could erode specialist expertise.
“If only large generalist AOs deliver most UK-funded qualifications, we’ll end up with privately funded people going down one route and publicly funded people forced down another. That won’t lead to the fairest system.”
He notes that Ofqual is increasingly scrutinising governance and financial sustainability. In recent years, the regulator’s annual compliance checks have involved “more questions about financial sustainability than about the validity and reliability of assessments”.
Given market turbulence, Bennett-Hart believes government policy must provide greater stability.
“Assurance and stability are exactly what our customers expect from AOs.”
AI optimism
When it comes to music qualifications, the declining numbers taking GCSE and A Level music contrast sharply with the growth of vocational music courses.
“It’s not that music or the creative arts are dying in schools,” he says. “Teachers are moving away from GCSEs and A Levels because they’re not relating to the students they’re working with.”
While headlines about AI and the creative industries often sound bleak, Bennett-Hart remains upbeat.
He believes AI is “more helpful than harmful” in creative work because it speeds up processes such as music mastering, enabling more people to produce their own work. AI-powered engines are also speeding up visual effects and other creative processes.
If AI eventually replaces some jobs, he suggests it might even trigger a wave of creativity as people search for new meaning.
“In the pandemic when everybody had loads of free time, people painted and learned instruments. Music sales tripled.”
Bennett-Hart believes awarding bodies are right to be cautious about using AI to mark work, but warns that if AOs fail to adapt, colleges could replace them with their own AI assessment systems.
Although the rapid growth of AI short-course platforms feels like “a bit of a Wild West”, he believes most people in the awarding sector are technology optimists.
After all, he says, “it’s inevitable” that qualifications will have to assess the use of AI.
The challenge now is embedding AI skills into qualifications and moving away from assessment questions that can easily be answered by chatbots.
“Those AOs thinking successfully about AI are thinking about the methodology of assessment in the first place,” he says.
