“If this was the college’s intention then students should have been informed two months ago,” the parent said.

Paula Williams, another parent, has written to the college about her daughter, a year 12 studying A-level science, chemistry and maths, to ask: “How do yourself teach chemistry? As a college in an area of deprivation you should be getting them back in.” 

Beale’s letter, according to The News, reads: “Following our recent enrolment it has become evident that we will not be able to accommodate our entire cohort of 1,300 16-18-year-old students at the same time. 

“We are required to ensure that students’ desks are at least one metre apart along with other measures such as enhanced cleaning, hand sanitising, ventilation, students facing the front and the teacher remaining in their two-metre zone. 

“Therefore, the capacity in most classrooms will be around 12 to 14.” 

A college spokesperson told the paper the decision was not take “lightly”, but was based on keeping students safe on campus during a period when the UK has seen a significant increase in COVID-19 cases, particularly amongst young people”.

College leaders will reportedly review the decision next month and the spokesperson said: “Our expectation is to resume face to face teaching for all students as soon as possible.”

Prime minister Boris Johnson previously told the House of Commons it was the government’s “intention” to have colleges reopen in September and “get our young people back where they need to be in education and preparing for their future”.

Education secretary Gavin Williamson said last month the government was “committed to doing everything necessary to deliver on our national priority of all students returning to schools and colleges in September”.

Further education providers were told by the Department for Education last month they would have to switch to a rota system if a local lockdown hit tier 2 – the second-lowest tier – and have just vulnerable children and those of key workers physically attending. 

The college campuses are based in an area which appears to have a low infection rate. According to official data, there were seven cases per 100,000 people in the Havant area between 4 and 10 September compared to an average of 18 across England. 

The college has been approached for comment. 

Staff have been told that they must fill junior executive vacancies with apprentices, as part of a three-month trial in the Department for Education and Education and Skills Funding Agency.

Skills minister Gillian Keegan said the change in recruitment policy was to show that “we practise what we preach” when it comes to boosting the number of apprentices across the country.

The department is also “actively exploring” the development of a “DfE traineeship” focused on supporting more young people onto their apprenticeship programmes.

Both traineeships and apprenticeships are part of chancellor Rishi Sunak’s plan to boost jobs, particularly among young people, following the Covid-19 pandemic.

In his summer statement, Sunak announced that, from August to January, any firm that hires an apprentice aged 16 to 24 would receive a cash bonus of £2,000, while those that hire apprentices aged 25 and over would be paid £1,500.

Speaking at the Association of Employment and Learning Providers’ Covid-19 business recovery conference this week, Keegan said the incentive payments meant it was “a great time for employers to offer apprenticeship opportunities”.

She was then “delighted” to report that the DfE was “changing our recruitment approach to support the take-up of new apprenticeships”, adding that “we will practise what we preach”.

From September 1 to December 31, all junior roles at executive assistant and executive officer level within the DfE and its funding arm, the ESFA, will be filled using apprenticeships for a “trial period”.

A DfE spokesperson said: “As the lead department responsible for apprenticeships, we are taking action to support more people to do an apprenticeship and gain the skills they need to start a rewarding career.

“We are starting with a three-month trial covering all junior vacancies in the DfE and ESFA. After the trial period is up we will review its effectiveness before deciding on our next steps.”

The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education – the government’s apprenticeship quango – told FE Week that, while it was in “close communication” with the DfE about the new apprentice recruitment initiative it had no current plans to take part in the trial.

A spokesperson added that the institute would “continue to look at our own approach and what can be done to employ more apprentices”.

Ofsted, a non-ministerial arm of the DfE, told FE Week that it had no plans to take part in the trial. A spokesperson said: “Recruitment at Ofsted has been significantly reduced due to the pandemic, and it is likely to remain limited as we focus on our restart programme. However, we will continue to review whether any new vacancies are appropriate to offer as apprenticeships.”

According to the DfE’s latest data, apprenticeship starts have dropped by 47 per cent, from 101,300 to 53,530, between March 23 and July 31 this year compared with the same period in 2019, largely because of lockdown.

Colleges and schools have missed two-thirds of their T Level enrolment targets, with digital proving to be the toughest subject to sell to students, according to early findings from an FE Week survey.

But leaders are still celebrating the initial figures, which could increase slightly as recruitment continues in the coming weeks, considering the impact of Covid-19 and the chaos of this summer’s GCSE exams.

Skills minister Gillian Keegan said the early indications were that recruitment had progressed “well in the circumstances” and produced a “viable cohort” across the country.

The first ever T Levels – which have been five years in the making and described as the “gold standard” in technical education to sit alongside their academic equivalent A-levels – launched this month in three subjects: construction, digital and education and childcare.

In what is believed to be the first analysis of T Level recruitment, FE Week asked each of the 44 colleges and schools set to teach the new qualifications how many learners they had managed to enrol against the target they set in each subject at the beginning of the year.

Twelve colleges and four school sixth forms were able to provide breakdowns and, between them, they had set 28 different enrolment targets. Of those, 19 (or 68 per cent) were under target.

Colleges and schools found construction the easiest subject to attract students, followed by education and childcare (see table).

Digital proved to be the biggest challenge. Eleven of the 16 colleges and schools that spoke to FE Week are teaching the digital T Level, and nine of those failed to meet their “modest” targets.

Colleges said that there was an issue with young people’s understanding of the careers available through a digital qualification.

When combining all of the data provided by the 16 schools and colleges, the figures show that 143 students have enrolled on construction courses against a target of 118 (21 per cent above target), 267 students have enrolled on the education and childcare T Level against a target of 289 (8 per cent below target), and 127 have started a digital T Level against a target of 168 (24 per cent below target).

Some colleges were able to buck the trend, however, with Chichester College Group – which is based in Keegan’s constituency – standing out in particular.

The group set a target of 12 students for digital but ended up enrolling 21. It aimed for 24 in construction but has taken on 43 students and, for education and childcare, it sought 18 students but actually enrolled 39.

The recruitment success at the group, which encompasses five colleges in the south of England, has led to it forming additional T Level classes to cater for the larger than expected cohorts.

A Chichester College Group spokesperson said they were “surprised” at just how well the recruitment had gone in each subject, and put its success down to an “integrated but consistent” marketing approach over the past year.

This included a “dedicated digital marketing campaign” that mostly involved paid-for social media adverts, targeted at 16 and 17-year-olds mainly on Facebook, as well as Google adverts.

The group’s “robust” school liaison team had also made pupils in neighbouring schools fully aware of T Levels over the past year, including virtually when the pandemic hit.

Chichester’s spokesperson added that the extra time that students and parents had to research T Levels over the summer, as well as the achievement of centre assessed grades – which were reportedly inflated in many cases – will “all have contributed to our recruitment”.

While FE Week’s survey offers an indication of early T Level recruitment, a full comprehensive view of demand is unlikely to be available for some months to come.

Bridgwater and Taunton College, for example, said it was staggering its enrolment process this year because of Covid-19 and was therefore not yet able to provide any figures for T Levels.

Many other colleges told this publication that their enrolment processes will continue into late September.

David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, told MPs on the education select committee this week that the early response from his members was that there is “good demand from young people and they’ve got employers wanting to do work placements”.

He added: “It is a good start – but it is very low numbers.”

Hughes continued: “The really important bit is sticking at it and making it work and adapting it over time. It’s very easy just to kick them and say they are wrong.

“Everyone needs to get behind T Levels because we need really good high-status technical education for young people with a sense of a broad programme which helps young people to develop a broad range of skills for their whole career.”

When the timeline for rolling out the first three T Levels was announced, the Department for Education set a target of recruiting around 2,000 students in the first year.

In order to increase interest, ministers launched a £3 million “NexT Level” campaign in October 2019. This was controversially put on hold in the first few months of lockdown following orders from the Cabinet Office to focus adverts on updates about the coronavirus pandemic.

Answering a parliamentary question from Damian Hinds, a former education secretary, on early T Level recruitment numbers this week, Keegan said: “All indications are that recruitment has progressed well in the circumstances and a viable cohort of young people will benefit from taking these new, high quality qualifications, leaving them in a great position to move into skilled employment or further training.”

The skills minister added that having 44 colleges and schools teaching the first T Levels this September was “testament to the hard work and dedication of staff in these organisations”.

While T Level numbers appear to be getting off the ground slowly, it would appear recruitment of 16 to 18-year-olds across other level 3 courses in colleges more generally are booming, as FE Week found after speaking with seven leaders this week (see page 18 of this week’s FE Week edition).

The first new university technical college to open its doors for two years has been deluged with students, while its licensing body says that admissions across the network have shot up after years of underrecruitment.

Doncaster UTC has vastly exceeded its recruitment target of 160 students, with nearly double that number starting lessons this week.

The Baker-Dearing Trust (BDT), which licenses the UTC brand, told FE Week that this tallies with a significant increase in its colleges’ total student population across England. It shared statistics which showed a 12 per cent increase as of this September compared with the same time last year, from 14,202 in 2019 to just under 16,000.

Technical colleges have struggled with recruitment ever since their inception in 2010, as highlighted in a report by the National Audit Office last year. It found that the 48 open UTCs were operating at 45 per cent of capacity at the end of January 2019.

BDT chief executive Simon Connell (pictured) said this year’s increase was an “excellent achievement” made through awareness campaigns such as online open days and greater publicity of UTC student outcomes.

He added: “It is also clear that, as the impact of lockdown is felt across the wider economy and students digest the summer examinations debacle, more young people are looking for an education which prioritises the skills and aptitudes they will need in their future careers rather than simply ‘teaching to the test’.”

Several UTCs have begun recruiting from the age of 13, rather than their traditional starting age of 14, to try and boost numbers. Doncaster has started with a cohort of 13-year-olds.

Helen Redford-Hernandez, chief executive of the Brighter Futures Learning Partnership Trust, which now includes Doncaster UTC, said its opening “will provide a landmark event which signals the ever increasing importance of a need for high quality, technical education”. The college “will also be one of the first UTCs to open which is heavily oversubscribed”.

Doncaster UTC, the first to open since North East Futures in 2018, will eventually move into a new, £13.5 million building, but at the moment it is teaching students at the nearby National College for Advanced Transport and Infrastructure.

There are three more UTCs in the pipeline. Last November, Energy Coast UTC applied to open two colleges in Salford and Carlisle, while WMG Academy Trust, which already has two UTCs, has applied for another in Birmingham.

It takes a long time for a new education institution to be widely recognised by parents, students, employers

Energy Coast launched in 2014 and is one of a number of UTCs enjoying an uptick in student numbers. The college said this was because it had now become an established provider.

Cherry Tingle, principal of the Energy Coast, which was rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted in July last year, said its overall numbers had risen by almost a fifth, from 301 in 2019 to 352 this year.

She put the rise down to “our now excellent teaching and exam results, the fact the vast majority, 90 per cent in 2019, of our students go on to apprenticeships, and the excellent links we have with employers”.

UTC South Durham, an Ofsted grade 2 provider, has seen an even more impressive increase, with a 56 per cent boost on its 2019 numbers – up from 199 to 314.

After a couple of years of student numbers bobbing around the 200 mark, principal Tom Dower said the increase was because the college had become “established, with a really good reputation for technical learning”.

He added: “It takes a long time for a new education institution to be widely recognised by parents, students, employers.

“This is particularly a factor when UTC catchments are so wide and parents, understandably, don’t think that a UTC is available for their child if they live 40 miles away.”

Students are joining the UTC from 45 schools across nine counties this year.

A cash-strapped college is among more than a quarter of training providers to have had a bid for help rejected as part of the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s second Covid-19 supplier relief scheme.

The news came as the country’s public spending watchdog revealed that the total estimated cost of the ESFA’s financial support scheme for apprenticeships and adult education had dropped by £117 million.

Bradford College, which almost went bust last year, had to make more than 100 staff redundant over the summer after its first application for apprenticeship relief was rejected – a decision the college’s principal branded “short-sighted” in June.

The college submitted another bid in round two but this week received the “disappointing” news that it had again been refused.

A spokesperson for Bradford College told FE Week they thought their bid was “unlikely” to be successful. They said: “We submitted our application based on our requirements for support over the coming months, as we work to recover and strengthen our apprenticeships provision and support our staff and students after a very difficult period.

“However, to be successful, the college needed to meet a set of criteria particularly around cash in the bank on the precise date of the application.

“This is again a disappointing result for us. During the year ahead Bradford College, along with other colleges across the country, is going to need that vital support from the government more than ever as colleges bear the costs of taking measures to protect staff and students during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

The ESFA’s second round of supplier relief launched in June and allowed FE providers suffering from reduced learner numbers caused by the pandemic to bid for non-levy apprenticeship and adult education budget funding in advance of delivery for the period July to October 2020.

Data shared by the ESFA with FE Week shows that there were 112 applicants, but only 83 (74 per cent) were successful.

Seventy seven of the total bids came from independent training providers and 20 of those were rejected, while 35 applications came from colleges, of which nine were unsuccessful.

The agency said providers and colleges who failed in their bids did not “meet the ESFA’s ‘atrisk’ financial assessment”.

The ESFA’s first supplier relief round covered the period from April to June. It resulted in 165 applications, a third (58) of which were rejected.

FE Week analysis shows there are 734 providers with a procured adult education budget allocation and/or non-levy apprenticeship contract with the government – nearly all of which would have been entitled to bid for the scheme.

The results of the second round of ESFA supplier relief come in the week when the National Audit Office revealed that the total estimated cost of the scheme had dropped substantially.

The NAO’s “cost-tracker”, which has been published to provide an independent summary of the estimated costs of the government’s response to the pandemic so far, shows that the Department for Education first projected a cost of £144 million – but this dropped to £27 million by August 13.

The DfE told FE Week the original estimates reflected the total funds that “could have been requested from eligible training providers if they all applied for the full amount permitted by Cabinet Office guidance”. 

The revised estimated costs of the schemes “reflect the number of applications for relief received from eligible training providers”.

The government is changing the law to allow more redundant apprentices to complete their course.

A Statutory Instrument (SI) has today been laid in parliament that will allow the Education and Skills Funding Agency to continue to fund apprentices to complete their training if they are at least 75 per cent of their way through their programme at the point of redundancy.

Currently the ESFA continues to fund apprentices to complete if they are made redundant within six months of their final day of training.

The SI will need to be debated in both the House of Commons and House of Lords before it can become law.

Once the law has come in to force it will apply to apprentices made redundant from that day onwards – it will not apply retrospectively. FE Week has asked the ESFA when it expects the debates to be held.

Apprenticeships and skills minister Gillian Keegan said: “Covid-19 has had a big impact on the economy, and we know that some apprentices have lost their jobs or are facing redundancy as a result.

“Our redundancy support service is making sure apprentices can get the help they need.

“We are going even further by changing the law so more apprentices who have been made redundant can complete their programmes. We want to make sure that every apprentice has the training and skills they have gained recognised so that they can continue on their track and build their career.”

The “redundancy support service” is new online and telephone support for apprentices who have lost their jobs during Covid-19 outbreak.

It was launched in July alongside another new service that allows employers to share their vacancies with redundant apprentices.