Introducing a volunteering strategy can seem daunting, especially when staff workloads are already high. However, with thoughtful planning, it’s possible to create meaningful opportunities without overburdening staff.
Being part of Good for ME Good for FE and witnessing the incredible work happening across the sector has been a major source of inspiration for us. Winning three of the campaign’s awards last year was the icing on the cake, and has only motivated us all to push even further this year.
However, I understood from the moment I was appointed to lead student social action in 2022 that the key to success would be to find the right balance between fostering strong student engagement and minimising the impact on teaching staff.
Here’s how we’ve done that.
No new to-do’s
We have embedded volunteering into existing curriculum frameworks. This ensures the strategy supports personal and academic development while keeping staff involvement manageable.
Doing this involved dedicating six stand-alone Personal Social Development (PSD) tutorial sessions to planning and executing social action projects, guided by the #IWill Movement‘s six principles.
This is now aligned with project-based learning and embedded in the main body of the PSD curriculum, spanning a substantial number of weeks. In fact, feedback from staff and students after the six-week pilot encouraged us to provide extra time (eight to ten weeks) in 2024/25.
Dedicating part of the structured curriculum to volunteering projects allowed students to engage in meaningful community activities without creating additional assignments.
Student-led projects
Empowering students to take ownership of their volunteering projects is crucial. Our students lead the entire process, from selecting themes and developing initiatives to executing the projects themselves.
Tutors act as facilitators, offering guidance and ensuring each project aligns with personal and academic goals. This approach not only builds students’ autonomy but also equips them with essential ‘future-ready’ skills, including soft skills, digital literacy, numeracy and oracy.
The student-led model significantly lightens the administrative burden on staff while enhancing student growth and engagement.
Clear messaging
To streamline the process further, we established clear frameworks for social action projects. We developed structured guidelines that outline the steps, expectations and deadlines for each project.
Templates for project proposals, evaluation forms and other documents also help reduce confusion and keep students on track, limiting the need for constant staff oversight.
Vocational alignment
Volunteering initiatives should complement the academic or vocational focus of the students involved. For example, our projects are linked to real-world issues like sustainability and social entrepreneurship, allowing students to develop skills that enhance their employability.
Using peer and expert assessment to feedforward on project progress and outcomes can also negate the need to spend time assessing and grading.
By aligning social action projects and products with vocational pathways, students gain relevant, practical and hands-on experience while tutors can guide and signpost without adding significant workload.
Strong external partnerships
Partnering with local organisations and charities can create mutually beneficial relationships that support the volunteering strategy.
Last academic year, we worked with over 45 charities and organisations, enabling students to work on meaningful community projects. These external partnerships can offer resources and support that alleviate pressure on staff while strengthening the college’s connection to the local community.
Structured staff involvement
Our next step was to introduce a staff volunteering scheme as part of their professional development. This initiative, aligned with the college’s strategic priority of giving back to the community, will provide opportunities for staff to engage in community service without adding to their regular workload.
Integrating staff volunteering into existing professional development plans is allowing us to create a culture of service that benefits employees and the community alike.
And it’s working. Staff and students are engaging in a multitude of activities including refurbishing a local library, creating garden spaces and murals, singing in local care homes and raising awareness of homelessness with a ‘Big Student Sleepout’.
In the end, workload isn’t just about how much work we do. It’s about the value we place in it. If everyone in the organisation values it properly, from inception to design to delivery to impact, then workload isn’t an issue that arises.
And how can anyone fail to value this work?
Nominations for this year’s Good for Me Good for FE awards close on October 7. You can nominate here
Offering prisoners earlier release dates if they participate in education courses will not work unless the government improves “underfunded” education services, ministers have been warned.
According to a report in The Times this week, ministers are drawing up early plans to copy the success of a scheme in Texas which allows prisoners to shorten the time they serve if they take part in education.
The policy proposal, understood to have been briefed to the newspaper by special advisors, comes almost 10 years after former justice secretary Michael Gove claimed to be looking at the policy.
But the Prisoner’s Education Trust’s chief executive has warned that prisons currently lack the capacity for classrooms, teachers or prison officers to meet demand.
Prison education shortage
Jon Collins, whose organisation provides 130 distance learning courses to prisoners, welcomed prioritising education as “fresh thinking” that could help to solve the prisons crisis.
However, he told FE Week: “The biggest problem with prison education in England and Wales isn’t with demand – by and large, people in prison are keen to access education – it’s with supply.
“Prison education is underfunded, what is on offer is narrow and limited, and there aren’t enough classrooms or teachers to accommodate more people or enough officers to escort them to education departments.
“The first priority must be to make high quality education more widely available in prisons, with the capacity to support more learners. Once that is in place, the focus can shift to how to encourage more people to participate.”
According to the Ministry of Justice’s prison performance ratings, more than half of prisons failed to meet their targets for progress in English and maths (57 per cent in category B prisons and 64 per cent in eligible reception prisons) in 2023-24.
An FE Week investigation earlier this year highlighted concerns about declining prisoner participation in education, contracts that prioritise value for money over quality, and a focus on English and maths over more interesting or advanced courses.
Not a new idea
The idea to incentivise prisoners to study through earlier release dates was floated by Gove during his 14-month tenure as justice minister in 2015.
He reportedly asked MoJ civil servants to draw up detailed proposals before then prime minister Theresa May sacked him in 2016.
None of the eight Conservative justice ministers who followed Gove in the last eight years appear to have revived the plans.
In 2022, the MoJ accepted “in principle” a House of Commons education committee recommendation that it consider education as an incentive for early release.
‘Counterproductive’ warnings
However, officials said directly linking early release to education “could be counterproductive”.
They added: “The essential criteria are whether the temporary release applied for will further the prisoner’s rehabilitation, and whether they can be safely released.
“As is demonstrated by our strengthened performance management metrics on prisoner attendance at education, we are keen to ensure that governors can take decisions as to how best to incentivise their prison population to engage with education and training.”
Peter Cox, managing director of prison education provider Novus, which operates at more than 40 prisons and young offender institutions across England and Wales, said: “Reoffending costs taxpayers £18 billion each year, and Ministry of Justice research has demonstrated that individuals who take part in prison education are 7.5 percentage points less likely to reoffend.
“We welcome moves to look at what more can be done to support rehabilitation in prisons, including exploring approaches which have proved successful in other countries.” The MoJ declined to comment.
A judge has dismissed an unfair dismissal claim against a London college group because it was filed 21 years after the event.
United Colleges Group has successfully had an employment tribunal claim thrown out after a former employee lodged a complaint over an accident that happened in 2003.
Judge Tim Adkin agreed with the college’s representative that a fair hearing was “no longer possible” given the time since the accident and the fact that individuals involved are likely to have moved on.
The claimant, named in tribunal documents as Mr A Watfa, was contracted as a centre services assistant for the City of Westminster College in March 2003 and shortly after had an accident that resulted in the amputation of his right middle finger.
Watfa was dismissed in September 2003 and lodged claims of unfair dismissal and disability discrimination 20 years later. He explained the reason for the delay was that it was a “traumatic” accident, and he had had “periods of mental health difficulties” since.
The judge told Watfa that, if his tribunal claim were taken forward, it would probably be heard next year, making it “unfair” for key witnesses to explain their actions 22 years after the incident.
“Even if the respondent was able to track down key witnesses, which must be in doubt, in my view the prejudice to the respondent would be very great and it would be unfair of them to explain their actions 22 years after the event,” Judge Adkin said.
He added that it was “simply just too late” to bring a claim so long after the event.
“I understand that in part the claimant says that he has had a lasting problem as a result of the injury. I do understand that, and I am very sympathetic to that,” the judge said.
“My finding is it that it will not be possible to have a fair hearing.”
Nick Smith of TTE Training sees himself as the “living embodiment” of the difference education can make.
His “amazing” career has so far included briefing journalists on military operations as a commando-trained Royal Navy officer, overseeing a students’ union, and taking the helm at the engineering apprenticeships provider TTE Training.
His office at Ellesmere Port on the Wirral gives him regular cause to reflect on the power of education. It’s on the same waterway his maternal grandmother passed through regularly when she and her family transported coal on a barge from London.
She never went to school and her illiteracy left her vulnerable to exploitation. She was “ripped off” with “inappropriate” credit deals, Smith says. That is why now “the biggest kick” he gets comes from seeing young people “meeting their potential”.
“I feel like a vampire sometimes because I feed off that energy,” he says.
Nick Smith as a child
Taxing tedium
But it took the chief executive a while to realise his own potential.
When he was 11 his dad left the army after 18 years as a squaddie in the light infantry. The family moved from the Black Country to a “sink estate” in Telford.
The struggling school that Smith and his brother attended, which was later closed down, failed to notice the potential in Smith’s younger brother. He was “a lot more intelligent” than Smith but had his “chances hampered from a critical age”.
Smith was less impacted, and made it to Liverpool University to study physics. But his poor schooling left him feeling inferior to the “very upper-middle class kids” he met there. There were “big gaps” in his mathematical knowledge and he felt “very aware” that he “hadn’t been as prepared for that university experience” as his contemporaries. He had to fight “tooth and nail” to graduate.
He recalls a lecturer saying he was “not taking his studies seriously” because he left term a week early to start a Christmas job at Boots. “But otherwise I had no money,” Smith explains.
These days, although his company trains up the next generation of engineers, in his spare time Smith is drawn to the arts; he takes commissions for his watercolour paintings and enjoys playing the saxophone.
His biggest regret is that he didn’t go to art college instead of studying physics. But it never occurred to him back then that a creative career could be possible.
Upon graduating Smith trained to be an accountant – and “absolutely hated it”. Three years into the course, a particularly tedious lecture on tax rules was the final straw. He turned to the person next to him and whispered, “are you enjoying this?” Smith certainly wasn’t.
Nick Smith at his university graduation
Living the dream
A chance meeting on a train shortly after caused his life to take a new turn. A man he met had just been interviewed for a Royal Navy education officer role and inspired Smith to apply. Unlike his train acquaintance, Smith was successful.
During his training at Dartmouth, aged 26 (and already married with two children), he was painfully aware he was older than the other recruits.
Nevertheless, three years later he was serving alongside the Royal Marines. Wearing the coveted green beret had been a “boyhood dream” for Smith, who had been in the territorial army as a teenager.
To become a commando he had to “significantly raise” his fitness levels over the course of a “very intense” 12 months.
How many training provider CEOs can say they’ve completed the gruelling All Arms Commando Course, which includes a ‘Tarzan assault course’ with its rope climb up a 30-foot, near-vertical wall and its full-loaded, eight-hour, 30-mile march across Dartmoor?
Nick Smith passing out of Britannia Royal Naval College in the rain
Media ops
Smith loved his peacetime role as an education officer, raising the aspirations and confidence of young people who, like he once was, were “very unsure of themselves”.
He believes that most people “don’t necessarily appreciate” that the military are “experts in training” when they’re not fighting.
But when they were on a wartime footing Smith was tasked with manning the radio at his commando unit’s headquarters and delivering media briefings.
Fending off tricky questions from journalists (then and now) is “absolutely fantastic” compared to the tax lectures he endured years earlier.
Smith also spent six months in Northern Ireland, during which time his job involved giving young marines an “understanding of the cultural significance” of the tensions there.
He would explain to them how England was “historically a much more homogeneous society, because we’ve been invaded and taken over by different groups throughout history, whereas the Irish generally have been able to repel invaders and retained their cultural identity in a keener way. So flags and sectarian belonging mean much more to aspects of that society.”
But it was “challenging” to tell a young marine that, had they “grown up in that environment”, they would “potentially be exactly the sort of person to be recruited by a paramilitary”.
He says: “The initial reaction was, ‘how dare you?’ because we were all serving Queen and country. But if you can make someone understand that, then they’re less likely to offend when they’re out patrolling the streets.”
Nick Smith wearing his coveted green beret
Moral courage
Smith’s eight years in the military made a “massive difference” to his self-confidence.
He also gained a sense of “moral courage” which means that nowadays he won’t “just walk by” if he sees someone being threatened.
His son and two grown-up daughters are “proud” of him for that, and he can see that attitude in them too.
“The military aren’t all closet Sergeant Majors. But we do all have a very honed sense of loyalty and service.”
But he was “really lucky” his commission ended before the second Gulf war started. Several people he served with were later injured and killed.
A few years later, Smith joined the reserves. He attended an inquest as a media operations officer for a marine killed by an improvised explosive device. Seeing the room full of the man’s friends, “all in tears over the circumstances of his death, really brought home” to Smith how lucky he was not to have endured similar horrors. “They stay with you forever.”
Nick Smith at his LJMU MBA graduation with his kids.
Liverpool life
His first job after the military involved securing new business opportunities for Vasishta Technologies Limited, a company set up by the brother of a royal artificer he had taught.
It was owned by an Indian company and its remit was supplying offshore IT expertise. Smith spent an “interesting” 12 months there before leaving to take on a very different role as chief executive of the students’ union at Liverpool John Moores University.
The “amazing people” he met at the union included the TV presenter Alex Brooker, then one of his elected officers. But he also witnessed during student election time some shenanigans he compares to “what goes on in the House of Commons”, with candidates “trying to entrap” their opponents to prove they were breaking the rules.
It was a “really colourful” place to work. Smith jokes how “the students flogging Socialist Worker on the steps of the Students Union became the stockbrokers of tomorrow”.
Nick Smith speaking at the TTE Training awards 2015
Tomorrow’s engineers
But the role, which mainly involved advising new sabbatical officers each year, became repetitive after a while. In 2007, he decided to jump headfirst into the training provider sector by joining TTE Training.
By that point, the company had already been established for 17 years and had grown to become one of the North West’s leading providers of advanced apprenticeships Level 3 in engineering and laboratory operations, and engineering apprenticeship Level 2 programmes.
It was set up by Ineos ChlorVinyls (formerly ICI, whose chairman is Jim Ratcliffe), Innospec (formerly Associated Octel) and Shell UK to provide training mainly in the chemical and petrochemical industries. The name TTE stands for both its registered name – Technical Training Enterprise – and the strapline the company uses, ‘training tomorrow’s engineers’.
Smith says they pride themselves on delivering personal development, leadership and teambuilding skills “over and above” the requirements that have been built into the apprenticeship standards.
The company’s 45 staff train around 350 learners at any one time.
They mainly take “rabbit in the headlights” 16-year-old school leavers, who by the end of their three-and-a-half-year programmes (two years at TTE’s training centre and 18 months with their employers) are “enormously” transformed.
Their cohort also increasingly includes those with degrees in unrelated fields such as the fine arts, as they can now be funded if their course was in a non-related subject.
It’s never a struggle to find academically able apprentices, with the provider rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted in successive inspections in 2017 and 2023.
Nick Smith speaking at an event
Money isn’t everything
But Smith does face challenges trying “to convince staff to stay”, given “how easy in theory it would be for our technical trainers to get a job in a college on more money”.
As a small company that “can’t afford to pay massive salaries”, TTE focuses on maintaining staff by providing a “good work-life balance”.
Its teaching staff are often former schoolteachers approaching or at retirement age, who still want to “do something socially worthwhile”.
“Money isn’t everything. People want to go home at night feeling like they’ve made a difference,” Smith says.
Nick Smith with colleagues from CMI, as he is a Chartered Companion of the Chartered Management Institute
Ongoing learning
Smith is ever the learner as well as the trainer. He completed an MBA while at Liverpool John Moores, and for his doctorate at Chester University he is specialising in ambidextrous decision-making in independent training providers.
The fact some of us might struggle to understand what the term ‘ambidextrous decision-making’ means only “highlights the problem” with modern training systems, says Smith.
It means “a company is self-aware enough that they’re putting in simultaneous resources into exploiting an existing opportunity and identifying new opportunities with the idea of becoming a sustainable business.
“If you just concentrate on what you’re doing in the here and now, you’ll run out of work. But if you just concentrate on research and development, you won’t make enough money to survive… You’ve got to do both.”
As for AELP, he believes many of its members, like him, “get a bit cynical about the rules and regulations” in the sector.
“But we’re all still here fighting because we care about young people in society. We want to help them meet their potential,” Smith says.
A Birmingham college principal has been chosen as the next president of the Association of Colleges.
Pat Carvalho has been the CEO and principal of Birmingham Metropolitan College since 2021 and has been working in the FE sector for over three decades.
She will succeed Corrienne Peasgood, who has served as AoC president since September 2022, on October 16.
“I am delighted to be the next AoC president and I hope I can do as good a job representing our great sector as my predecessors,” she said.
Before entering FE, Carvalho’s first career was in the NHS as a medical secretary after training at a local Birmingham college, before going on to university as a mature student.
She led Harrow College as principal for over eight years before the college merged to become Harrow and Uxbridge Colleges (HCUC) in 2017. She was then principal and deputy CEO of HCUC for another three years before moving to Birmingham.
AoC presidents are elected by the membership body’s college members. Their term of office runs for a maximum two-year tenure.
The president acts as an ambassador for the membership organisation and the further education sector.
Peasgood said: “It has been an honour to serve as the AoC President for two years, and it’s given me the privilege of seeing our sector from another perspective
She added: “AoC colleagues, staff, leaders and the board have been incredibly supportive, and I’d like to thank them for that. It’s time to hand over the reins now though and I’m thrilled that Pat Carvalho is our new president. It’s a fantastic role, and I wish Pat all the best.”
David Hughes, chief executive of AoC, said Carvalho is “inspiring and passionate about FE and brings a wealth of experience with her from the sector”.
He added: “I also want to say a huge thanks to Corrienne for her hard work over the past two years. She has worked tirelessly in her role as AoC president and has had an immense impact on our influencing and engaging work in particular.”
The Treasury has drawn up plans to extend generous public pensions to college staff who are compulsorily transferred to private sector companies.
The director of public spending at the Treasury wrote to FE sector bodies earlier this month to float a proposal to open up its New Fair Deal (NFD) to colleges.
The Association of Colleges, the Sixth Form Colleges Association and Trades Union Congress have until October 8 to consult members and respond as officials plan to make a final decision “as soon as possible”.
The application of the New Fair Deal, a non-statutory policy, would mean private companies that take on college contracts for services such as cleaning, catering, facilities management or IT would have to honour some of the country’s most generous pension contributions to college staff transferred to them.
Gary Delderfield, partner and head of public sector pensions at Eversheds Sutherland, told FE Week this would mean that the contractor “pays the contributions into the pension fund and the employees have continuous membership of the scheme, so their pension benefits stay exactly the same as if they were still employed by the college”.
Nick Donlevy, the Treasury’s director of public spending, asked college representative bodies to provide their views on the impact of the extension on the workforce, recruitment implications and future outsourcing decisions.
The Association of Colleges (AoC) deputy chief executive Julian Gravatt told members in a briefing last week that he plans to tell the government the change will make it “harder” for colleges because contract prices could be negotiated upward or disincentivise suppliers from bidding altogether.
In its recent budget submission to the Treasury, the AoC said a New Fair Deal extension could create “new complexities” for college leaders, who spend 10 per cent of income on employer contributions to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS) or Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) – an estimated annual £450 million and £250 million on each.
“A new requirement to maintain precisely similar terms and conditions in outsourcing cases would create new complexities for college leaders, new costs and a risk of reduced numbers of bids to run services in what is already a complex sector,” the membership body said.
Most of the affected staff, such as cleaners, are likely to be part of the LGPS. Experts say the Treasury’s plans could be a challenge for contractors as the scheme has 80-odd funds of which the contribution rate differs across the country.
The LGPS employer contribution rate averaged around 21 per cent at its last triennial valuation in 2022, while the TPS employer contribution rate stands at 28.68 per cent.
“The cost of outsourcing the service will become more expensive because the contractor will now have to price in whatever the contribution rate is,” Delderfield added.
Gravatt said the proposal “reinforces” the case for the Department for Education to guarantee LGPS liabilities as it did with academy trusts in 2013, which assures that outstanding pension liabilities will be paid to the pension fund in the event of insolvency by an institution.
The guarantee would have covered St Mary’s College in Blackburn, the country’s smallest sixth form college, which went insolvent in 2022 and owed most of its £8.2 million debt – £5 million – to the LGPS.
Reform ‘now appropriate’ for FE
The Fair Deal was introduced in 1999 to protect government employees’ pension provision when they were outsourced out of the sector.
Their new employer was originally obliged to offer public sector staff a pension scheme that was “broadly comparable” to the public pension until 2013, when the policy was reformed.
The New Fair Deal allowed members of a public service pension – such as the TPS or LGPS – to remain eligible for the generous pension schemes when they are transferred to independent providers delivering public services.
But, in 2014, the government under David Cameron refused to extend the New Fair Deal to FE institutions “because they were private sector bodies and because it would not be consistent with the government’s policy at that time of increasing the level of autonomy they enjoy”.
Since the Office of National Statistics reclassification of colleges in 2022 as public sector bodies, the Treasury now believes it is “appropriate” to extend the non-statutory policy to FE colleges.
Donlevy said: “HM Treasury believes that the current justification for the exclusions of these bodies from NFD no longer applies and that it would therefore be appropriate to extend NFD to FE colleges.”
Paul Bridge, head of further education at the University and College Union, said the policy U-turn will be one of Labour’s “first big tests” after it was elected to deliver a fair deal for working people.
He added: “FE staff working for an FE corporation (college) have been government employees since the ONS reclassification in 2022. However, their public sector pensions have not been given the same level of protection as staff that work in other parts of the public sector. Where is the fairness in that?”
“The non-application of New Fair Deal is a political choice aided and abetted by employers who want to save on their pay bill rather than treat their staff with fairness and respect.
“Pensions are deferred pay and our members work in very challenging environments and deserve the same levels of pay and reward when in work, and dignity when they retire.”
A spokesperson for the Sixth Form Colleges Association said: “It is important to ensure that staff in colleges are not disadvantaged if they are compulsorily transferred to a private sector employer.
“We will be consulting our members on the proposal to extend the New Fair Deal to colleges and will share our view with Treasury officials in the coming weeks.”
Tributes have been paid to a “respected and selfless” former principal of East Durham College who has died after a short illness aged 53.
Mother-of-two Suzanne Duncan led the college for 12 years until her retirement in August this year.
East Durham College said it “owes a lot” to Duncan for growing its curriculum offer, working with the local community and overseeing significant investment across college campuses.
A spokesperson said: “Suzanne was a respected and selfless leader who fundamentally cared about learners and the transformational difference FE can make to their lives.
“She always challenged herself and her team to ensure that learners were always at the heart of all decision-making.
“The college cannot emphasise enough how much we owe to her as a great champion for this college, the FE sector and the North East.”
Suzanne leaves behind husband Steve and two children, Benjamin and Lucas.
Brenda McLeish, a friend for 20 years and chief executive of Learning Curve Group, said the two met at East Durham College two decades ago, when Duncan taught travel and tourism.
“She taught me everything I know about quality and curriculum and was a driving force around creating the best quality experiences for learners,” McLeish said.
“She was a formidable leader who knew the sector inside out.
“We quickly became friends. She was funny, intelligent, caring, supportive and the biggest cheerleader always in my corner.”
A friend, Gail Crossman, said Duncan was a “vivacious character” who left a positive impact on everyone she met.
She added: “Her passion for quality and education was so influential and it certainly shone a light on a path I was destined to take.
“After meeting over 20 years ago and thinking, ‘who is this person with a big smile, fabulous shoes and a handbag collection like no other?’ we became the very best of friends.
“I will miss you my darling and I promise you, Suzanne, I will never put my designer handbag on the floor.”
Chris Nicholls, area director for the North East and Yorkshire and Humber at the Association of Colleges, said Duncan was a “committed” leader.
He added: “Her drive and enthusiasm for the region was clear for all to see.
“Suzanne’s passing is a huge loss and she will be greatly missed. Her legacy will live on through the colleges that she served.”
Training for public sector workforces such as the NHS and local councils will be “devastated” if the government imposes a blanket ban on funding level 7 apprenticeships through the levy, ministers have been warned.
University finances also face being plunged deeper into the red by the move, experts fear, with almost 100 of the higher education providers currently generating revenue from the programmes.
The government has been urged not to “throw the baby out with the bath water” by former skills minister Robert Halfon, who expressed fears the policy could “set a precedent” and lead to the removal of degree apprenticeships at level 6 in the future.
But other sector leaders have praised the decision as it removes so-called “deadweight” costs – paying for training that would have happened anyway in the absence of the levy.
Keir the contradictor
Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer was accused of a “contradiction in terms” this week after he told the Labour party conference that “we’ve got to give businesses more flexibility to adapt to real training needs” before using the Department for Education to announce restrictions on level 7 apprenticeships.
The move is part of the government’s attempts to “rebalance funding in our training system back to young people” amid soaring levels of people over the age of 25 being put onto apprenticeships.
So far, the DfE has only said: “This will involve businesses funding more of their level 7 apprenticeships – equivalent to a master’s degree and often accessed by older or already well qualified employees – outside of the levy.”
New quango Skills England, which hopes to be fully up and running from April 1, 2025, will be tasked with deciding which level 7 apprenticeships get the axe, FE Week understands.
Level 7 apprenticeship starts are dominated by the accountancy or taxation professional and senior leader standards. But other popular programmes include advanced clinical practitioner, solicitor, academic professional, chartered town planner, district nurse and community nurse specialist practitioner.
Employers in both the private and public sector, as well as training providers and universities that deliver their apprenticeship training, are concerned about the possible implications.
Crystal Oldman, chief executive of the Queen’s Nursing Institute, said: “If level 7 apprenticeships are to be removed from district nursing – and other post qualifying advanced practice roles – this will be devastating for the nursing workforce and would seem to go against the government policy to have more care delivered in peoples’ homes and communities.”
Dan Lally, group director of business, enterprise, skills and employability at Sheffield Hallam University, said level 7 restrictions will “disproportionately impact on public services”.
He added: “We are meeting vital skill gaps in disciplines such as advanced clinical practitioner and town planning. I just don’t recognise the narrative of ‘already well paid, well qualified employees’.
“These are NHS workers, civil servants and local authority employees. A high number of our level 7 apprentices have prior attainment below level 4 and come from the areas of highest deprivation.”
Ministers celebrated the development of a level 7 apprenticeship for doctors just two years ago, with the first apprentices starting on this programme this month.
Professor John Alcolado, a medical school adviser who sat on the national implementation group for the apprenticeship, said the medical schools that have “worked hard” with NHS trusts have been “a bit blind-sided” by this week’s announcement.
FE Week understands that civil servants will urge Skills England to keep some level 7 apprenticeships in scope of levy funding, namely those for healthcare professionals, but the decision ultimately lies with the new arm’s-length body.
The government told FE Week that the Department for Health and Social Care and NHS England will “work closely with Skills England to ensure that the NHS has access to the skilled workforce patients need”.
So why remove level 7?
The apprenticeship levy was launched in 2017 and forces employers with wage bills over £3 million to pay into the levy at a rate of 0.5 per cent per year.
England’s current apprenticeship budget is at breaking point and is forecast soon to be overspent, largely due to the rise in higher level apprenticeships which are the most expensive to deliver.
FE Week previously revealed that combined spending on level 6 and 7 apprenticeships soared from £44 million in 2017/18 to £506 million in 2021/22 – hitting £1.325 billion in total over that period.
Figures for more recent years are not available, but the programmes now account for over a fifth of England’s annual apprenticeship budget.
Spending on level 7 apprenticeships alone rose from £11 million in 2017/18 to £216 million in 2021/22 – totalling £588 million over that period.
Meanwhile, spending on level 2 apprenticeships dropped by a third over that period, from £622 million to £421 million.
Labour is currently turning the apprenticeship levy into a “growth and skills levy”, which will allow employers to spend some of their contributions on some yet-to-be-decided non-apprenticeship training. The government therefore needs to find room in the current budget, assuming chancellor Rachel Reeves does not add significant investment to it anytime soon.
Government officials have been weighing up restrictions by apprenticeship level and age for at least a year, as revealed by FE Week in November 2023.
Level 7 axe is ‘avoidable’
Tom Richmond, a former government adviser, said removing level 7 from the levy was “always one of the easiest ways to release more funding for younger learners and lower-level apprenticeships”, but added there was likely to be a “furious reaction from many employers who have been told for the last nine years it was their money to spend”.
Richmond said he has “no time for fake apprenticeships such as the level 7 senior leader programme and the accountancy/taxation professional, which should never have been approved” but recognised the policy could have “unintended consequences for schools, charities, the NHS etc who use the apprenticeships to develop staff”.
Association of Colleges chief executive David Hughes said that, where employers “truly value” those level 7 apprenticeships, then they should “invest their own money in them, showing that they provide a good return on investment”.
The Association of Employers and Learning Providers insisted the level 7 axe could have been avoided if the £800 million gap between the amount taken in by the apprenticeship levy and the actual programme budget was plugged.
The Office for Budget Responsibilities forecasts that £4 billion will be raised in apprenticeship levy receipts by UK companies in 2024-25.
Yet the DfE’s ring-fenced budget to fund apprenticeships in England is £2.729 billion, while the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland receive around £500 million between them.
‘The decision is retrograde’
Most concern over level 7 apprenticeships stems from the senior leader programme that initially included an MBA until ministers stepped in and removed this component in 2020.
Mandy Crawford-Lee, chief executive of the University Vocational Awards Council (UVAC), suspects this week’s announcement “is reflective of the long-standing rhetoric that has been critical of management apprenticeships”.
She told FE Week: “The caricature of the investment banker, or well-paid FTSE executive using levy funds to pay for an MBA has, even very recently, featured in the debate on apprenticeships despite the removal of the master’s degree from funding in 2020. The reality has, however, always been different.”
Crawford-Lee said that around 60 per cent of senior leader apprenticeships are undertaken in the public sector, with the NHS being the biggest investor. Schools also widely make use of the course.
She added: “The decision is retrograde, made even more frustrating by some commentators who support and perpetuate a variety of myths and opinions on the grounds that level 7 apprenticeships are not ‘proper’ apprenticeships.
“Consider what that might mean to those apprentices who have completed their training in advanced clinical practice, clinical pharmacology, town planning, clinical psychology or professional economists.”
More than 100 training providers and colleges, as well as almost 100 universities, currently deliver level 7 apprenticeships.
Kaplan Financial is the highest-earning training provider in the apprenticeship levy thanks to its delivery of the accountancy or taxation professional course to employers including Microsoft, Cisco and HSBC. It raked in over £45 million from big levy-paying businesses in 2021/22, according to latest available data.
Kathy Walton, CEO of Kaplan Financial, said restricting funding for higher level apprenticeships is “extremely disappointing and counter-intuitive”, adding that this is a “blunt instrument that will have unintended consequences for the economy and for young people”.
She claimed that most level 7 apprentices are “under 25 years old and come from many different backgrounds, some progressing through lower-level apprenticeships to reach the point of qualification”.
Several other large level 7 apprenticeship providers, including Cranfield University, First Intuition, and the Devon and Cornwall Training Providers Network that represents employers both large and small in this space, echoed Kaplan’s concern.
The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) is another organisation that has seen turnover soar thanks to management apprenticeships including the level 7 senior leader, for which the company does end-point assessment.
Ann Francke, CEO of the CMI, said: “We are concerned that this decision may negatively impact three of the five government missions – grow the economy, reform the public sector and provide opportunity for all.”
Halfon, who was skills minister until the general election in July, told FE Week he fears that the new government is using a “sledgehammer to crack a nut”.
He said he was concerned about universities considering recent reports about their existing financial struggles including restrictions on international students.
“Are they throwing the baby out with the bathwater?” Halfon asked. “You’ve got some incredibly prestigious level 7 apprenticeships that people put everything into, from architecture down to nursing. Are they going to destroy the degree apprenticeship model by going for level 6 next? That’s my worry.”
Rather than “mess with the levy”, he said the government should introduce a skills tax credit, similar to research and development credits.
