England’s largest apprenticeship provider is planning to slash around 300 jobs as it battles with “significantly reduced” learner numbers caused by Covid-19, FE Week can reveal.

The move by Lifetime Training Group will see its workforce drop by up to a quarter.

Chief executive Alex Khan said that historically his provider has averaged around 1,800 apprenticeship starts a month but since the pandemic hit they have averaged around 350. 

He told FE Week: “Lifetime’s workforce is built based on the number of learners that we have on programme and undertaking assessment.

“Following a period of significantly reduced apprenticeship enrolments combined with learners continuing to achieve their apprenticeships, we expect to see a downturn in learner numbers across the group while the economy rebuilds over the coming months.”

As a result, Lifetime Training has now entered a period of consultation with its staff and propose to make reductions of circa 20 to 25 per cent – around 300 job losses across a “range” of roles.

Khan added that his provider is just one of a “large” numbers of training firms needing to make headcount reductions to stay afloat as the impact of the pandemic bites.

Last month, FE Week revealed that another one of the country’s largest apprenticeship providers – QA Ltd – was also planning to make hundreds of redundancies.

Colleges, such as Bradford, are also having to make large scale redundancies following a drop in apprenticeship business caused by Covid-19.

Lifetime Training Group has grown considerably in recent years after private equity firm Silverfleet Capital acquired a majority stake for a rumoured £115 to 120 million, according to Edu Investor.

Aside from their apprenticeship provider, the group includes awarding body Innovate Awarding and Edtech provider Skilltech Solutions and currently employs just over 1,200 staff.

Lifetime Training stands out as by far the largest apprenticeship provider in the country, with a cohort planned to finish in 2018/19 of 16,060 apprentices, more than double the British Army, the next largest provider.

Lifetime also topped the list of providers receiving funding from levy-paying employers last year after it was paid £51.5 million – almost double the next closest provider QA Limited on £26 million.

In 2014/15, Lifetime Training recorded 15,530 apprenticeship starts, which increased to 23,020 in 2018/19.

Khan said his provider’s starts figures have dropped to around 16,000 this year, with the lockdown months of April and May experiencing the largest fall.

While Lifetime Training is forecasting higher numbers next month when the government’s employer incentives kick in, the learner volumes on programme in the short to medium term “do not justify” the current headcount.

Khan added that it will take “some time to return to our historical averages” but it is “likely that in the future we will rebuild capacity”.

Lifetime Training currently offers apprenticeships in sectors including retail, business and management, hospitality, fitness, childcare and teaching, health and social care and clinical health.

The provider is rated ‘good’ by Ofsted and recorded a turnover of £62 million and profit of almost £11 million in its most recently published accounts for the financial year ending July 2018.

The government has offered providers extra financial support if they are struggling with low starts numbers through their Covid-19 supplier relief scheme, which allows bids for apprenticeship and adult education budget funding in advance of delivery.

However, any apprenticeships funded through the government’s digital system – mostly with levy-paying employers – are not eligible for the support.

Khan said Lifetime Training has not has not applied to the relief fund because around 90 per cent of their apprenticeships are with levy-paying employers and are therefore ineligible.

Just 112 providers applied for the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s second Covid-19 supplier relief scheme – and 35 of those were colleges.

The majority of bids – 70 – were to claim apprenticeship support only, while 14 applications went in just for adult education budget (AEB) relief.

A total of 28 submissions were for both types of funding.

The ESFA’s second round of supplier relief opened last month and allowed FE providers to bid for apprenticeship and adult education budget funding in advance of delivery for the period July to October 2020.

The first of the schemes, which are being run to support providers suffering from reduced learner and apprenticeship numbers caused by the pandemic, 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.

Karen Woodward, the ESFA’s deputy director for employer relations, told a previous FE Week webinar that many providers failed in their first round bids because they struggled to “prove need” for the financial support and not many eligible providers applied because they did not feel “comfortable” in sharing the financial information that was being requested by the agency.

Of the 112 bids in the second round, 77 came from independent training providers while 35 came from colleges.

In June, Association of Colleges boss David Hughes told MPs on the education select committee that college sector income, which currently totals around £7 billion annually, could fall by £2 billion next year as the “enormous impact” of Covid-19 bites.

He said the AoC had recently surveyed the 17 colleges that provide apprenticeships and they predicted a 50 per cent drop in starts next year, which would equate to a £30 million loss just to those 17.

A day after Hughes’ appearance FE Week revealed that Bradford College was to make over 100 staff redundant after their apprenticeship Covid provider relief application was rejected. The college’s principal, Chris Webb, branded the government as “short-sighted” following the rejection.

While non-levy apprenticeships have been eligible for the ESFA’s relief scheme, any apprenticeships funded through the government’s digital system – mostly with levy-paying employers – are not.

The agency claimed this was because the contract is directly with the employer and provider rather than government. The Association of Employment and Learning Providers challenged this legally but dropped the action in June after weighing up the costs.

The ESFA announced last week that it was due to begin notifying bidders of their outcome for the second supplier relief round from July 22. The agency expects to release all outcomes by August 6.

The Education and Skills Funding Agency is to launch a tender to “quickly” widen the provider base for adult traineeships despite a recent history of botched procurements.

It follows chancellor Rishi Sunak’s announcement that the government is to invest £111 million to triple the number of people taking part in the pre-employment programme as part of the country’s economic recovery from Covid-19.

Details about how the ESFA will manage new traineeship opportunities for 16 to 18-year-olds have not been finalised yet but the agency promised the plans will be published “shortly”.

The procurement to deliver 19 to 24 traineeships, which are funded through the adult education budget, will grant successful providers additional funding but there is no launch date yet.

The ESFA said it will be looking for providers with the capacity to start providing “high-quality” traineeships “quickly” through a ring-fenced contract for service.

The tender will be handled through the Department for Education’s e-sourcing portal.

As well as an investment of £111 million for 2020/21, the ESFA confirmed that there are new flexibilities to widen access of traineeships. They include:

    young people qualified up to level 3 (rather than level 2 previously) are now eligible for a traineeship

    minimum work experience of 70 hours (previously 100 hours), with multiple employers if needed

    ESFA said it wants to see flexible content and qualifications that prepares trainees for progression to apprenticeships and jobs through a direct line of sight to the occupational standards

    an increased AEB traineeship learning aim cost of £1,500

    employers who offer new traineeship work placements will receive £1,000 per learner (up to ten learners) to support engagement and assist with costs such as the purchase of additional PPE for trainees

    traineeships can now last up to 12 months, allowing twice as much time on a programme for those young people with particular needs who need it

The ESFA said it will publish an updated traineeships framework for delivery and funding rules over the next month.

Introduced as a flagship pre-employability programme in 2013, traineeships are eligible for 16 to 24-year-olds and training providers are funded by the ESFA to deliver pre-employment training and arrange work placements.

But traineeship starts have been on a rapid decline, from a high of 24,100 in 2015/16 down to just 14,900 last year.

Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief policy officer Simon Ashworth said it’s good to see that the government is “not wasting any time” on its plans to boost traineeship numbers as “we will see youth unemployment shoot up as the furlough scheme unwinds”.

“The procurement should reward existing expertise and capacity among those providers who have stayed loyal to traineeships and turned them into a highly effective programme,” he added.

“But at the same time, it should allow quality controlled market entry to others to meet the new ambitious growth target.  AELP also hopes that the design of the revamped programme will be much more responsive to in-year demand.”

The decision to run another tender may concern some in the sector, especially those who were part of the previous AEB procurement run in 2017.

The tender was plagued with delays and had do be completely redone after the ESFA realised it was botched. And when the final outcomes were released most providers had their funding slashed – including one case of a 97 per cent cut.

Providers teamed up to threaten the ESFA with legal action before the agency found additional funding to top up contracts.

Later in 2017 the ESFA had more issues with its tender for non-levy apprenticeship funding. For example, the agency awarded a contract to an defunct provider but an ‘outstanding’ college was rejected.

And just last year, the ESFA delayed its European Social Fund tender three times following technical errors as well as claims the agency broke procurement rules which led to more threats of legal action.

Colleges and other 16 to 19 providers will be paid at least an additional £150 per disadvantaged learner next year to help them catch-up with the studies they missed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But providers will need to prove that the funding has been spent to support tuition activity “above and beyond the programmes of education already planned for 2020/21” and funds will be recovered if this cannot be demonstrated.

Providers’ use of the funding may also be taken into account by Ofsted in future inspections.

The Education Skills Funding Agency today revealed the spending and audit rules for the £96 million 16 to 19 tutoring fund that is being granted next year as part of their £1 billion Covid catch-up scheme.

Colleges and 16 to 19 providers were originally excluded from the fund but the government U-turned on this decision earlier this week.

The ESFA said today that providers using the fund need to consider what will be “most effective for their students, considering students’ needs and local circumstances”.

Providers have “flexibility” to decide the most appropriate approach to resourcing the delivery of small group tuition.

This “may include a mix of both teaching and learning support staff as appropriate” and resourcing “could be through paying for more hours from existing staff, hiring new staff, or buying in a service from a third party provider”.

The agency made clear that the tuition fund is ring-fenced for 16 to 19 small group tuition only.

They will allocate the funding using the agency’s “existing proxy measure” for disadvantage: learners with low prior attainment, meaning those who did not have a GCSE grade 4 or above in English and / or maths at age 16.

The ESFA will allocate each provider “£150 per instance for full time students without GCSE grade 4 or above in English and/or maths based on the numbers in their current 2020 to 2021 academic year allocation”. There will be pro-rata funding for part time students.

The extra funding will be paid through 16 to 19 funding allocations for 2020 to 2021 academic year and providers will start to receive payments from November 2020.

Providers “must accept or decline the extra funding once we have confirmed funding amounts in August” and the agency will only distribute the funding to those providers that “confirm they will be able to spend this effectively and in line with this guidance”.

All providers, as a condition of the receipt of this funding must:

    produce a concise statement explaining how they will use this funding in line with our guidance to prioritise support for disadvantaged students

    publish the statement on their website in the autumn term

    record the use of the funding, including reference to the individual students that receive the support, the needs of those students, the number of hours of tuition delivered, and retain the necessary evidence of the tuition provided,

    deliver the extra tuition and spend the associated funding in the 2020 to 2021 academic year

    notify ESFA of any unspent funding from this fund for it to be reclaimed

The ESFA said it will run “spot-checks” of a sample of providers as part of the compliance process for this funding.

“We will look for evidence that institutions have used their tuition fund correctly, that is, the funding has supported additional small group tuition for 16 to 19 students in English, maths, or other courses where learning has been disrupted, and that delivery has been in the 2020 to 2021 academic year,” the agency continued.

“Institutions must be able to identify the students supported, and evidence the delivery of provision to the students. In line with usual practice, institutions must retain original documents including, for example, attendance records, enrolment records and learning agreements.”

The ESFA will look to recover funds where there is no delivery or where “we identify the institution is not able to demonstrate at spot checks, or audit how the delivery meets the purposes set out in this guidance”.

Providers’ use of these funds to deliver small group tuition “may also be taken into account by Ofsted, including through the interim visits planned for the autumn term and through full inspection, which is intended to resume from January 2021”.

Employers are cancelling T-level industry placements and providers are finding it increasingly challenging to find alternatives, new research has found.

A survey of 32 of the 44 providers due to teach the first T-levels in just six weeks’ time was conducted by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) earlier this month.

The results, supplemented by a follow-up webinar that included government and sector body representatives, have been published today and show that around a third of the providers are ready for the substantial industrial placement component ‘to a small extent’ or ‘not at all’.

Securing enough industry placements of at least 315 hours was arguably already the most significant challenge threatening a successful T-levels rollout, but this has been exacerbated by Covid-19.

Due to the pandemic, employers are “cancelling or not committing to placements and providers need to seek out new opportunities”, the report states.

One unnamed provider said: “Providers are most worried about industry placements. They feel that in many cases they are going to need to create new partnerships with employers because the pipelines they have been creating for the past two years are now seriously damaged by Covid.”

Just after the research took place in early July, the government announced a “package of support” which included employer cash incentives of up to £750 per T-level placement, with a maximum of ten learners per business.

The NFER said it will be “interesting to see whether this will make a difference to employers when deciding whether or not they are able to take T-level students on placements”.

The first T-level routes to be rolled out from September 2020 will be in construction, digital and education and childcare.

Providers reported that digital continues to be the most challenging route for finding student placements. 

This is due to the “large number of micro and small businesses” in the sector, and to employees “sometimes being required to work from home which is not usually a suitable arrangement for placement students”.

Providers also noted issues in terms of delivering education and childcare placements which have arisen as a result of Covid-19.

Placements in this route will total 730 to 750 hours – in line with sector norms – which does not allow for placements to be shifted to later in year one or into year two of the T-level, when the economy may have started to recover.

While most providers said they were “optimistic” about student recruitment from September, digital was again “a cause for concern”.

Just less than three-quarters of the providers responding to the survey reported that applications at this stage are ‘less than expected’ for digital, whereas for education and childcare and construction the majority of providers reported that they are ‘more than expected’ or ‘about the same as expected’.

There are a number of reasons for the recruitment challenges in digital, which existed prior to Covid-19, according to the report.

These include the “degree of specialisation and ‘niche content’ of the qualification, it containing new and untested content which makes it difficult to market”.

There is also “felt to be an issue” in young people’s “understanding of the careers available in digital as they are not visible, front-line jobs, they [students] might not know people who do them and they are not well-established jobs”.

The struggle of recruiting T-level students and finding enough industry placements has been heightened a by the lack of face-to-face contact providers could have with schools and employers during to the pandemic, as well as the pause in the government’s £3 million NexT Level marketing campaign, as revealed by FE Week earlier this month.

The campaign, which was blocked by the Cabinet Office to ensure government-wide communications focused on an immediate Covid-19 response, is now back underway and providers are hoping the effort will be “ramped up”.

What may also come as a concern to the sector is that the NFER’s research found that some providers are turning off “competing” qualifications, such as BTECs and other applied generals, to increase T-level recruitment.

“Some providers have, for example, decided to replace their level 3 childcare provision with the T-level,” the report said.

“As one provider commented: ‘We are confident about recruitment because we are not offering a non-T-level alternative’.”

Concerns have previously been raised that the government’s plans to withdraw funding for thousands of applied general qualifications including BTECs is manipulation of the market to ensure T-levels are a success.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Industry placements are at the heart of our pioneering new T-levels and will give young people first-hand experience of the world of work and the opportunity to develop the skills that employers need.

“We are really pleased that the vast majority of 2020 providers remain on track to deliver T-levels from September. We are working very closely with T-level providers to identify challenges, and will continue to monitor the impact of Covid-19 throughout the autumn term and whether further support is needed.”

Twenty college partnerships will receive grants through a fund designed to develop greater collaboration across the sector, the government announced today.

Skills minister Gillian Keegan has named the winners of the £5.4 million College Collaboration Fund (CCF). It builds on the Strategic College Improvement Fund.

The 20 partnerships are:

CCF lead college	Partner colleges
Dudley College of Technology	Birmingham Metropolitan College, City of Wolverhampton College
Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College	Harrow and Uxbridge College, West Thames College,The Windsor Forest Colleges Group, Brooklands College
DN Colleges Group	The Sheffield College
London South East Colleges	East Sussex College Group
Darlington College	Middlesbrough College, Education Training Collective, Hartlepool College, Northern School of Art
Wiltshire College & University Centre	Bridgwater and Taunton College
Cirencester College	Strode College, Brockenhurst College, The Henley College, Petroc
Wilberforce Sixth Form College	Franklin Sixth Form College, John Leggott College, Scarborough Sixth Form College, Wyke Sixth Form College
Truro & Penwith College	South Devon College, Petroc
Newcastle & Stafford College Group	Shrewsbury Colleges Group
The Windsor Forest Colleges Group	Berkshire College of Agriculture
Heart of Worcestershire College	Grimsby Institute
Lincoln College	Grimsby Institute, DN Colleges Group, Grantham College, Boston College, New College Stamford
Weston College	Gateshead College
The LTE Group (The Manchester College)	Bury College, Bolton College, Hopwood Hall College, The Oldham College, Tameside College, Trafford College Group, Wigan and Leigh College
Kendal College	NCG (Carlisle College), Lakes College, Furness College, Askham Bryan (Newton Rigg College)
Walsall College	Birmingham Metropolitan College, National College for Advanced Transport and Infrastructure, South Staffordshire College
Plumpton College	Basingstoke College of Technology and EKC Group
Fareham College	Highbury College, Havant and South Downs College
Heart of Worcestershire College	East Durham College

 

The CCF launched earlier this year but was paused in March due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

It reopened for applications on June 10 but with a twist: the original pot on offer totalled £9 million but was then cut to £5.4 million after the Department for Education had to “reprioritise” its spending decisions in light of the pandemic.

The fund is designed to “support FE colleges to respond to the current challenges around quality improvement and capitalise on good practice, including that developed through new ways of working” throughout 2020/21.

The DfE said activities through the programme can include developing “high quality digital content to provide improved remote and blended learning, make sure students affected by coronavirus can catch-up on lost learning hours and also to prevent young people from becoming NEET (not in education employment or training)”. 

Keegan said: “This fund will help colleges work together, to develop cutting edge digital approaches to online learning , to overcome new challenges and continue to deliver high-quality education and training for the communities they serve.

“The past few months have been a challenging time for the sector, but they have gone above and beyond to support their students. This additional funding will help to support further collaborative work as we move forward.”

David Corke, the Association of Colleges director of education and skills policy, added: “The grants will help support collaboration and the sharing of innovative good practice in the college sector.

“Importantly, developing digital content, providing catch up support, engaging vulnerable learners and addressing mental health and wellbeing will all be vital ways colleges will use this money to support students to transition into college or their next academic year.”

Groups of colleges could bid for grants of between £100,000 to £500,000 but are expected to match at least 25 per cent of the total cost of the programme of work.

However, the DfE may waive a proportionate amount of match funding contribution where a college is in formal intervention with Education and Skills Funding Agency, as asking for a contribution would “undermine a college’s financial viability”.

Each submission needed a lead applicant college with an ‘outstanding’ or ‘good’ Ofsted grade and at least one other “improvement partner” college.

Merged colleges without an Ofsted rating could still apply, as long as one of the two previous colleges met the criteria.

Each proposed programme of work must address at least one of the fund’s three “quality improvement themes” identified by DfE: quality of education, financial and resource management, and leadership and governance.

The 12-month CCF follows the Strategic College Improvement Fund – which ended last year after £12.3 million of the £15 million up for grabs was used to help 80 colleges rated ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’ team up with better performing colleges.

Education secretary Gavin Williamson previously said the new fund is needed because there “have been examples where colleges haven’t been getting it right and things that we are not comfortable with have been going on”.

All colleges that receive the funding must complete their activities from the CCF by the 31 March 2021. Successful colleges will receive payment of their grant by 18 September 2020.

The DfE confirmed earlier this month that they will launch another round for CCF funding, but the timeline for this is not yet known.