Several industries where project-based employment is the norm have struggled more than most to comply with the 12-month minimum apprenticeships rule, but their fortunes could be about to change.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced in the Budget on Wednesday a £7 million fund to run so-called “portable” or “flexi-job” apprenticeships in sectors such as creative and construction.

This “new approach” will involve organisations applying for money to start new agencies which employ apprentices and place them with multiple employers.

It is targeted at those industries that cannot offer a long-enough placement with a single employer for apprentices to meet the government’s minimum 12-month duration requirement. In the TV and film sector, for example, most roles are freelance and usually only run for two to three months.

The flexi-job model was lauded by prime minister Boris Johnson during a speech on adult skills last year, after a meeting between ministers and his influential skills advisor Professor Alison Wolf decided the government should press ahead with its
introduction. It also featured briefly in this year’s FE white paper.

The scheme will become the third agency-type model for apprenticeships, following Apprenticeship Training Agencies (ATAs) and Group Training Associations (GTAs), which have been established for many years but have arguably become neglected by policymakers.

The Department for Education, which is responsible for the scheme, has promised a consultation on the proposals.

Levy problems ‘particularly stark’ for creative industries

Flexi-job apprenticeships are being specifically targeted at industries where work is often patchy. Workers in the creative sector, for example, who are finishing off one high-end television show will often wait weeks before starting on a big-budget blockbuster, for instance.

As Mark Heholt, head of policy for representative body ScreenSkills, told FE Week, the problems the creative sector faces are “not unique, but it is particularly stark”.

About 50 per cent of screen sector workers – in film, TV, visual special effects, animation, games – are freelancers, and it is only “if you’re lucky that your jobs will join up, whereas when you’re an apprentice, you have to have a minimum 12-month contract with one employer. So, you can’t move around.

“If you were training to be a set builder, after you’ve built it you’d then have nothing to do until it’s time to take it back down again.”

This issue has led to the creative sector seriously underspending its apprenticeship levy. The Creative Industries Council (CIC), a representative body chaired by the culture and business secretaries and BBC director-general Tim Davie, estimates that out of a £70 million levy pot for the creative industries every year, about 20 per cent is used.

Both ScreenSkills and CIC are working closely with the government on the development of flexi-job apprenticeships.

Ian Woodcroft, policy and government relations manager for the construction training organisation CITB, told FE Week
his organisation had not been “directly involved” with discussions around the flexi-job scheme, but is “keen to understand more of the detail” around it, as they look to tackle similar problems. CITB runs its own shared apprenticeship scheme which has supported 300 apprentices so far.

To their credit, the government has recognised the problem and is acting to help these sectors utilise apprenticeships more easily.

The Skills for Jobs white paper, published in January, acknowledged that creative and construction face “barriers in making full use of apprenticeships,” due to their “varied and flexible employment patterns”.

It added that “sectoral apprenticeship agencies may offer one solution, giving constant employment to an individual during the life of their apprenticeship which allows them to move between work placements and continue their training”.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is also running a £100,000 pilot programme with ScreenSkills, Netflix and Warner Bros, which was launched in 2019.

The programme was halted by Covid-19 and is waiting for productions to start up again before resuming, but will involve training apprentices as broadcast production assistants and production accountants with placements at those two companies, which are match funding with their levy money.

Prime minister Boris Johnson, in his landmark speech on adult skills at Exeter College last September, said the government wanted to make more apprenticeships portable “so you can take them from company to company”.

FE Week understands, shortly before Johnson’s speech, Alison Wolf met with skills minister Gillian Keegan and DCMS’ digital skills minister Caroline Dinenage and decided that flexi-jobs – rather than other options, such as bulk transferring levy funds, or modular apprenticeships – would be the course of action.

Shortly afterwards, the spending review in November confirmed that during 2021-22, the government would “test approaches to supporting apprenticeships in industries with more flexible working patterns”.

How flexi-job apprenticeships will help

Although the Treasury has said employers will be expected to come forward and bid to set up the flexi-job agencies, Heholt expects it will be organisations like sector bodies and training providers instead.

ScreenSkills is itself planning to apply, and Heholt says it will be “critical the agency which employs the apprentices has a background and ability and the skill to look after them, to provide them with all the pastoral care, and all the rest of it.

“It also needs to have very good relationships and contacts with industry, so that it can arrange these multiple placements.”

The number of employers involved in each agency will “depend,” he says, on the role for which the apprentice is training.

If it is a set builder role, they may need five or six; if it’s a production accountant, with larger chunks of work, it may be only two.

The new agencies, he said, “will need to make sure they understand the kinds of roles, the typical duration of those roles. And therefore, how many placements the apprentice needs over the duration of the apprenticeship.”

Neil Hatton, chair of the CIC’s apprenticeship working group, believes there will be a rotating cast of employers: “You could easily get 20 or 30 employers and that may be a rotating 20 or 30.”

As well as scrapping the single employer precedent, the flexi-job apprentices will not be offered a job at the end of the programme, according to ScreenSkills and CIC – again due to the freelance nature of creative workers.

Hatton said, though: “If people come out at the end of the course and they’ve done well, they are going to be in demand.”

Ditching so many tenets of the reformed apprenticeship programme are likely to have implications for how providers report their delivery to the DfE.

When asked what the new scheme will mean for training providers, the department would only say it would consult on how “agency models can better support apprentices to complete their apprenticeships through a series of placements with employers”.

Reporting could be easier for providers under this model, reckons Heholt, as they will be dealing with one agency rather than any number of employers.

What about apprenticeship training agencies?

So far, much of what has been announced about these new flexi-job apprenticeships and their agencies sounds markedly similar to the pre-existing ATA and GTA models.

ATAs, which launched in 2009, employ apprentices and place them with a host employer, so the firms do not have to recruit an apprentice themselves.

GTAs, which started in the 1960s, are set up and governed by local employers who may not have enough resources on their own to train apprentices; so they club together to set up what Jon Graham, chief executive of group training association JTL, calls an “in-house training business”.

Why not use the structure that exists?

“The apprentice will be employed by the employer, but they send them to the GTA, and the employer will have some strategic direction as to what the training organisation does, and how they operate.”

The new flexi-jobs apprenticeship agencies model has provoked some bemusement from the GTA and ATA sectors. The DfE has even described the DCMS-ScreenSkills pilot as an “apprenticeship training agency model”.

Speaking to FE Week, Iain Elliott, who operates both an ATA and a GTA in Humber, asked: “Why not use the structure that exists?” He warned the government to not “reinvent the wheel”.

The Department for Education has said it “values the role good-quality ATAs and GTAs play in helping apprentices and employers access apprenticeships” and “wants to build on the success of existing models”.

But the creative sector has its own reasons why ATAs and GTAs have not been directly adopted.

Mark Heholt said ScreenSkills looked into the ATA model for the pilot, but found “there are none, which I’m aware of, which arrange multiple placements, over the course of the apprenticeship, which is where the all the cost and the complexity comes from”.

This is backed up by Elliott and Graham, with the latter saying they have occasionally used multiple employers informally where an apprentice’s “range of work might change” so they are suddenly working on one task such as cabling “and also need to do a bit of x, y, and z”.

Hatton has also said the creative sector does not have many ATAs, so there is not that existing infrastructure to work from, and he was unsure how ATAs could cope with the periods of little to no work in his sector.

The first flexi-job apprenticeships are expected to start in January 2022, with bids to the £7 million fund opening in July 2021.

Pilot schemes, such as skills bootcamps, are “counter-intuitive” to the Department for Education’s long-term goal of simplifying the FE system, Keith Smith has admitted.

The director for post-16 strategy at the DfE and mastermind behind the FE white paper conceded that introducing programmes with brand-new funding rules and methodologies do add further complexity to an already complicated system.

But he explained that schemes like this needed to be ramped up quickly to help the country’s recovery from Covid-19 and asked the sector: “Please don’t take anything that happens in the short-term as any sort of indication of where the future intent will be.”

Skills bootcamps are currently being piloted and are set for a £43 million national launch later this year. They are part of the prime minister’s “lifetime skills guarantee” and plan to get people quickly back into jobs following the pandemic.

They offer learners aged 19 and over the chance to take a 12-to-16-week level 3 or higher course with a guaranteed job interview at the end.

But as previously reported by FE Week, the new courses involve a totally new funding formula, with providers receiving 30 per cent to start the learner, 60 per cent for achievement and then ten per cent for eligible progression.

Providers also do not record learners through the individualised learner record and there are currently no plans for Ofsted to inspect the provision.

This is despite the DfE pledging in its FE white paper to “reform our funding and accountability system” of which “simplification and streamlining of funding” would be central.

Following this week’s Budget, Association of Colleges chief executive David Hughes said the job schemes that have been created or scaled-up to aid the country’s Covid-19 recovery, such as Kickstart, bootcamps and traineeships, need to be “aligned and funding simplified”.

“The programmes currently do not work well together, are confusing to employers and will not work effectively for many unemployed people,” he added.

“The key thing now is to join up jobs and skills initiatives to allow as many people as possible to benefit from them quickly.”

Quizzed during an FE Week webcast on the white paper this week about why the government appeared to start from scratch when designing bootcamps, Smith agreed they could cause more confusion for the sector.

He said: “Yeah, I can see that. There is always a balance in the short term about getting money into the system in a way that is being provided for. In this case, government is really keen to test it [bootcamps].

“I completely accept the challenge that some of this is going to feel a bit counter-intuitive in the short term, that we’re perhaps doing things that potentially aren’t necessarily always in keeping with the longer term.

“All I would say is that I completely recognise that. Those listening today will understand there is a lot of complexity here we need to sort out. So please don’t take anything that happens in the short term as any sort of indication of where the future intent will be.”

He added that the white paper’s promised funding and accountability consultation “really will be the place that we start to mock all this up”.

The consultation is expected to launch later this year.

The education secretary has pledged to back teachers “all the way” in their efforts to award GCSE and A-level grades this summer, and accepted he will share the responsibility if there is a backlash on results days.

In an exclusive interview with FE Week’s sister title FE Week, Gavin Williamson said the government was putting its “confidence and faith in teacher judgment” and said a “robust appeals structure” would help deal with potential “challenges” with the system.

Exams have been cancelled this year following the decision to partially close schools and colleges in January. The government last week confirmed its plans to base grades on teacher assessments, prompting fears teachers could be left to shoulder the blame if there is another upset this year.

The government was forced into a last-minute U-turn last year on its decision to award grades based on centre assessments adjusted by computer algorithm.

Ministers have ruled out using an algorithm this summer, but there are concerns that relying on teacher assessment will lead to disparities between schools, colleges and grade inflation.

Williamson said the government was “absolutely supporting teachers” and pointed to plans to publish guidance to help with grading and for exam boards to provide additional support.

“It’s why we’ll be putting both the internal quality assurance and external quality assurance [in place] and absolutely backing teachers all the way on this,” he said.

“We want to make sure this works and, of course, everyone has a responsibility for the structures that have been put in place and, of course, myself included in that.”

However, the education secretary said the government would take a “very serious view” of malpractice. Exam boards are to look for this when they conduct the external quality assurance process, including via checks that will be triggered where schools and colleges have previously received sanctions for malpractice.

“People do have to have responsibility for what they’re putting forward and that’s why we’ve put those checks and balances in place,” he said.

“We’d expect everyone to adhere to the high professional standards that we always see within the teaching profession. But where there are things that aren’t quite right we will absolutely take action in order to be able to deal with that.”

Schools and colleges are due to reopen more widely from next week, with providers allowed to phase the return to facilitate requirements for mass testing.

However, the decision to bring all students back in the same week has prompted fears of a return to the situation seen last autumn, when schools and colleges were regularly forced to send large groups of students home because of a confirmed Covid case.

Williamson said he accepted that there “will be children and there will be teachers who will have to isolate, but that’s exactly as you would expect as we are still dealing with a pandemic”.

But he said the number of children having to isolate “fell dramatically over the first four weeks of full return in September, and we’d hope to keep a similar sort of level of practice there”.

Williamson said the country had made a “difficult sacrifice to not bring other parts of the country back before schools and colleges” in order to “safeguard education”.

“Anyone who understands what’s best for a child recognises that actually they learn best and they are in the best possible position to succeed by getting them back into the classroom.

“That’s where our focus has been and we’ve taken a decision not to bring anything else back other than children into the classroom because we’ve always said it’s our national priority to get children back into class.”

Around a third of the funding pot set aside for the Turing Scheme will go to further education providers, FE Week can reveal.

£105 million in total has been promised to pay for 35,000 placements for the UK’s new international student exchange programme, which is set to get underway in September.

In an interview with FE Week, Ecorys, the co-delivery partner with the British Council for the Turing Scheme, revealed that £35 million will go to further education, £60 million will go to universities and £10 million to schools.

This roughly equates to about 10,000 further education placements, 20,000 higher education placements and 5,000 school placements.

The scheme, named after scientist Alan Turing, was unveiled in December as the replacement to the UK’s participation in Erasmus+ following Brexit.

It will allow students to study and work abroad on placements ranging from between two weeks and 12 months.

Bids for a slice of the funding are set to launch this month and the Department for Education plans to issue funding decisions in July.

A new Turing Scheme programme guide was published on Wednesday and provides detail of how the funding will work.

For FE providers, they will get £315 per participant in “organisational support” for the first 100 participants, and £180 for groups bigger than that.

In terms of travel costs, they will receive a fixed amount depending how far away the destination is. For sending learners anywhere between 100 to 499 km away it’s £165 – while visiting Tanzania, for instance, at 11,000 km, would qualify for £905.

Learners will also get £135 each to access language resources if they are going away to a non-English speaking country for more than 19 days.  

Thereafter, daily funds will depend on whether the learner and accompanying staff member is in a group 1, 2 or 3 destination country, which is ranked according to local living costs.

Learners in group 1 countries get £109 a day for two weeks, and £76 a day after that. Those in group 2 countries get £94 a day then £66 a day, and those in group 3 countries get £80 a day and £56 a day after that. 

Meanwhile, FE providers need to identify the “anticipated points of expenditure” when they will require the funds. They will be paid 80 per cent of costs at these points, with the final 20 per cent once a special report is completed showing all went to plan.

FE providers will also need to undergo “financial capacity checks” before their application is accepted.

Read more about the upcoming Turing Scheme and how it may differ from Erasmus+ in tomorrow’s edition of FE Week.

The volume of subcontracted training will be capped at 25 per cent for providers from next year – but plans for a further phased reduction beyond this amount have been binned.

However, providers will be allowed to submit a request to be exempt from the cap.

Further details about reforms to FE subcontracting were published today by the Education and Skills Funding Agency following its consultation outcome published in June.

Many of the measures have stayed the same, but there are some important clarifications.

The most significant for providers will be the ESFA’s decision to introduce a straight 25 per cent cap on subcontracted provision from 2022/23.

The agency’s consultation had proposed that the cap should be further reduced to 17.5 per cent in the following year and then to 10 per cent the year after.

But most respondents disagreed with the proposal and the agency then set off to further evaluate the “right threshold”.

Today’s updated guidance said: “By 2022 to 2023, we do not expect any provider (excluding local authorities and European Social Fund provision) to be subcontracting 25 per cent or more of their provision unless they have written permission from us to do so.”

There is no further detail about which providers would qualify to be exempt from the cap.

The ESFA previously asked all providers to produce a plan during the 2020 autumn term setting out how they will achieve a reduction in their volume of subcontracted activity over the next three academic years

For providers who are currently subcontracting 25 per cent or more of their provision, the ESFA said it will conduct a “targeted exercise, writing to providers to request a copy of their reduction plan (if we do not receive an exemption case) to inform the progress that providers have made in their plans for a reduction across the three years”.

Another key change announced today is that the adult education budget has been removed from the agency’s proposal for prior approval for whole programme subcontracting.

The ESFA’s consultation had proposed to introduce “stricter controls on the circumstances in which the whole of a learner’s programme could be subcontracted, and providers will be required to obtain agreement from the ESFA before doing so”.

This rule will now only be introduced for students whose whole programme of 16 to 19 provision is subcontracted from 2021/22.

The agency said it concluded that introducing “such a requirement for AEB programmes above a specified length is not practical and we will not be proceeding with this”.

 

We are not prohibiting or banning all subcontracting

ESFA chief executive Eileen Milner embarked on a major review of subcontracting in 2019, expressing concerns about the “continued rise” in cases of fraud linked to subcontracting arrangements managed by agency.

The ESFA has since announced a series of measures it will take to “significantly” reduce subcontracting in FE over the next three years.

In publishing the additional detail about the measures today, the agency made clear they are not “prohibiting or banning” all subcontracting.

“Where it is done well, for the right reasons, and properly overseen, it can enhance the learner experience and add value,” they added.

Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief policy officer Simon Ashworth welcomed today’s changes.

“The adult education budget not being included in the whole programme subcontracting proposal is a common sense approach,” he said.

“Jointly delivering qualifications and joint delivery of training programmes are two very different beasts, and the exclusion should be welcomed.

“On the cap, we’ve moved away from the blunt and arbitrary phased reduction over three years as first muted, which is a positive change. The ESFA is now proposing a threshold of 25 per cent, but it will helpfully allow providers to submit for an exemption.”