The chancellor’s spending review document said that £83 million will be provided in 2021-22 to “ensure that post-16 providers can accommodate the expected demographic increase in 16 to 19-year-olds”.
Earlier this month, the Association of Colleges warned that around 20,000 “unfunded” 16 to 18-year-old students are studying in colleges this year following a surge in enrolments due to Covid-19.
Apprenticeship levy flexibilities
Following longstanding sector-wide concerns that the levy is too restrictive on employers, Sunak announced how the government plans to “improve the way the system works”.
From August 2021, employers who pay the levy will be able to transfer unspent levy funds “in bulk to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a new pledge function”.
Unspent levy funds will still expire after 24 months but the government will also introduce, from the same month, a “new online service to match levy payers with SMEs that share their business priorities”.
From April 2021, employers in construction, followed by health and social care, will be allowed to “front-load training for certain apprenticeship standards”.
And during 2021-22, the government will “test approaches to supporting apprenticeships in industries with more flexible working patterns, including consideration of how best to support apprenticeship training agencies”.
Apprentice incentives extended and minimum wage increased
In the chancellor’s summer statement, he revealed that from August to January, any firm that hires a new young apprentice aged 16 to 24 will receive £2,000 – on top of the existing £1,000 incentive for 16 to 18s – while those that hire new apprentices aged 25 and over will be paid £1,500.
Sunak has now extended this incentive scheme to 31 March 2021.
He also announced that the national minimum wage for apprentices will increase in April 2021 from £4.15 to £4.30 per hour.
Chunk of the National Skills Fund to be released
The government’s national skills fund totals £2.5 billion over five years and £375 million of it will be used in 2021-22.
Of that, £138 million will be used to fund “in-demand technical courses for adults”, equivalent to A-level, as part of the prime minister’s level 3 entitlement in his ‘lifetime skills guarantee’, and to expand the employer-led boot camp training model.
Elsewhere, £127 million will be used to continue the chancellor’s summer Plan for Jobs, including funding for traineeships, sector-based work academy placements and the National Careers Service.
Then, £110 million, including £50 million of capital investment, will be used to “drive up higher technical provision in support of the future rollout of a Flexible Loan Entitlement to test and develop innovative models for local collaboration between skills providers and employers”.
FE base rate to be maintained
A total of £291 million is included in today’s spending review to “ensure that core funding for 16 to 19-year-olds is maintained in real terms per learner” in 2021-22.
The FE base rate increased in August 2020 for first time since 2013 to £4,188.
Capital promises followed through
The chancellor confirmed that the government will provide £1.5 billion over six years to deliver their commitment to bring all FE college estates in England up to a “good” condition.
T Level and Institutes of Technology cash confirmed
As previously announced, £162 million will be provided in 2021-22 to support the rollout of T Levels wave 2 and 3, while £72 million will be released next year to support the commitment to build 20 Institutes of Technology.
It comes shortly after prime minister Boris Johnson announced in January that the apprentice minimum wage would rise to £4.15 in 2020. Before then, the rate last rose, from £3.70 to £3.90, at the 2018 Budget.
Aside from the apprentice rate increase, the minimum wage for 18 to 20-year-olds will go from £6.45 per hour to £6.56; and the rate for 16 to 17-year-olds will rise from £4.55 to £4.62.
The rate for 21 to 22-year-olds will increase from £8.20 to £8.36.
The national living wage for individuals aged 23 and over has been increased by 2.2 per cent, the government has announced, from £8.72 to £8.91.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak also confirmed today in his spending review statement that the government will “improve the way the apprenticeship system works for business,” partly by applying a two-month extension to its scheme of cash bonuses for hiring apprentices until 31 March 2021.
This year marks ten years of the BTEC Awards. That’s ten years of celebrating individuals exceeding in vocational pursuits. Ten years of glamorous award ceremonies, even though 2020’s took place virtually. And ten years of the BTEC Awards promoting the sector with a highly competitive contest, not just between excellent learners, but excellent educators and providers too.
The awards come after over 30 years of Pearson running the BTEC qualifications, which are vocational qualifications aimed at making learners “career-ready” by emphasising a hands-on approach and developing the knowledge and practical skills which employers want. Students get to work on a series of assignments in real-life scenarios throughout the course.
As Pearson’s UK president Rod Bristow said at last year’s awards:
“What employers value isn’t just what you know; it’s also what you can do.
“That is why BTEC courses are tough and it’s why employers and universities love BTEC. It’s also why BTEC is the world’s career-focused learning pathway”. It’s also why they received 460 nominations from 21 countries last year.
On page four, we go further into what makes BTECs so important by speaking to senior vice president for BTEC and apprenticeships Cindy Rampersaud.
Then, between pages six and ten, we meet some of the past winners of the awards, to get
a first-hand account of what it’s like to win, and also find out where their BTEC and their award has taken them, including university and employment. We even speak to one of the original winners from 2011!
Then on page 12 comes the part you are all waiting for: the list of award categories and how you can enter. Nominations close on April 2 next year, so there’s plenty of time to get your nominations in. The awards themselves will take place on June 24, and it’s sure to be a day to remember.
A two-month extension is set to be applied to the government’s cash bonus scheme for hiring apprentices in tomorrow’s spending review.
The Treasury has tonight trailed a series of announcements that chancellor Rishi Sunak will pledge for the 2021-22 financial year to create and support “hundreds of thousands” of jobs post-Covid-19, but no other new policies for the FE and skills sector are included.
In the chancellor’s summer statement, he revealed that from August to January, any firm that hires a new young apprentice aged 16 to 24 will receive £2,000 – on top of the existing £1,000 incentive for 16 to 18s – while those that hire new apprentices aged 25 and over will be paid £1,500.
Sunak will extend this apprenticeship incentive scheme to 31 March 2021.
He will also confirm that £1.6 billion is being set aside to continue the “landmark” Kickstart scheme next year, which is predicted to see the creation of “up to 250,000 government-subsidised jobs for young people”.
Sunak will reiterate the government’s commitment to deliver the prime minister’s lifetime skills guarantee, which includes £138 million to pay for extending full funding for a first level 3 qualification to adults over the age of 23, as well as developing the employer-led boot camp training model.
And £127 million has been confirmed to continue the chancellor’s Plan for Jobs skills measures, including traineeships and sector-based work academies.
Sunak said: “My number one priority is to protect jobs and livelihoods across the UK.
“This spending review will ensure hundreds of thousands of jobs are supported and protected in the acute phase of this crisis and beyond with a multi-billion package of investment to ensure that no one is left without hope or opportunity”.
Association of Employment and Learning Providers managing director Jane Hickie said the extension of the apprenticeship hiring incentive “could be an important boost to the recovery efforts, especially among smaller businesses where the first set of incentives has proved particularly attractive”.
Association of Colleges chief executive David Hughes said: “The steps set out are the right things to do given the effects of the pandemic look set to be with us for longer than most people expected. Extending the apprenticeship incentive scheme, Kickstart and traineeships are certainly helpful in the short term and will help to support the increasing numbers of young people that need opportunities.
“The lifetime skills guarantee will open up qualifications to people who need to access training and reskilling opportunities. While colleges stand ready to support more young people and adults, they are eager to see the details so they can plan their offer.”
A crisis-hit college has agreed to merge with a neighbouring sixth form college as it continues its road to recovery.
Highbury College, which has been led by interim leadership since its principal quit last year following an expenses scandal and government intervention, is set to amalgamate with Portsmouth College following an FE Commissioner-led structure and prospects appraisal.
In a joint statement, the colleges said that subject to ministerial approval, plans will move to the next stage of consultation with stakeholders including current staff, students, parents, local employers, universities and secondary schools.
A date for completion of the merger has not been set and while the new-look leadership of the group is not yet known, it would likely involve Highbury’s interim principal Penny Wycherley stepping down.
Wycherley, who took over from former principal Stella Mbubaegbu in December 2019, is currently contracted to continue leading Highbury until August 2021.
Commenting on the potential merger, Wycherley said: “We are delighted to be developing our partnership with Portsmouth College and moving to combining further our strengths.
“The next stage includes all the detailed checks and discussions that are necessary in bringing together two organisations who are so important to the City.”
New chair of Highbury, Paul Quigley, added that the move is an “opportunity to build a stronger, more sustainable college”.
Highbury’s former chair Tim Mason and principal Mbubaegbu stepped down after FE Week revealed how £150,000 was spent on Mbubaegbu’s corporate college card in four years, including extravagant items such as numerous first-class flights, stays in five-star hotels, a boozy lobster dinner and a £434 pair of designer headphones.
Around the same time the college had to make redundancies, scrap its A-level provision and dropped from Ofsted ‘outstanding’ to ‘requires improvement’. Highbury has also been stuck in a legal battle with a Nigerian state following a failed technical education project.
Just a month after Doel and Wycherley took over a Highbury, the pair discovered the college was running out of cash and had to secure a £1.5 million emergency bailout to keep it running.
Nick Wynne, chair of Portsmouth College, said the merger with Highbury is a “wonderful opportunity to bring together two great complementary colleges that will enhance the quality and choice of courses for the learners in and around our city”.
Simon Barrable, principal at Portsmouth College, added: “These are inspiring times for post-16 education and training in Portsmouth and we now have the chance to realise a ‘one city, one college’ vision.”
As revealed by FE Week earlier this month, Highbury is paying back its government bailout and has made its first staff pay award in years after receiving a £3.5 million exit dividend from an international venture in Saudi Arabia.
Portsmouth College is currently rated ‘good’ by Ofsted and posted a surplus of £69,000 in its latest accounts for the year-ended 31 July 2019.
The funding base rate for 16 to 19-year-olds is set to remain at £4,188 in 2021-22 following a £291 million boost announced at today’s spending review.
There will also be an additional £83 million next year to “ensure that post-16 providers can accommodate the expected demographic increase in 16 to 19-year-olds”.
Addressing the House of Commons, chancellor Rishi Sunak said: “We are committed to boosting skills with £291 million to pay for more young people to go into further education.”
In his spending review document, published by the Treasury, he added that the pledge will “support the government’s commitment to improve skills in the economy and level up productivity across England by providing £291 million for further education in 2021-22, to ensure that core funding for 16 to 19-year-olds is maintained in real terms per learner.
“This is in addition to the £400 million that the government provided at spending review 2019.”
The FE base rate increased in August 2020 for first time since 2013 to £4,188.
The rate for 16 and 17-year-olds was introduced at £4,000 per year, per student in 2013, and £3,300 for 18-year-olds since 2014.
The funding announced for last year’s rate boost totalled £190 million and was part of a £400 million package for use in the 2020-21 financial year.
The £83 million to accommodate greater 16 to 19 learner numbers in colleges will be welcomed by the sector, after the Association of Colleges warned that around 20,000 “unfunded” 16 to 18-year-old students are studying in colleges this year following a surge in enrolments due to Covid-19.
Responding to the base rate and expansion announcements, Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said: “We are delighted that the chancellor has earmarked £83 million for expansion funding, this will benefit providers of 16 to 19 education that are currently oversubscribed and is an important first step to accommodating the 260,000 additional 16 to 19 year olds that will participate in education in the coming years.
“Given the enormous pressure on the public finances, doing anything more than maintaining the higher rate of revenue funding announced last year was always going to be a challenge. Maintaining the rate in real terms at least gives sixth form colleges a clear basis on which to plan for the 2021 academic year.”
Sunak also used today’s spending review speech to confirm the government’s commitment to “rebuild colleges” with £1.1 billion, while £375 million will be used to deliver the prime minister’s lifetime skills guarantee and extend traineeships, sector-work based academies, and the National Careers Service.
Government is also “improving the way the apprenticeship system works for business”, in part by applying a two-month extension, until 31 March 2021, to its cash bonus scheme for hiring apprentices.
Ministers must listen to the sector carefully if they want to avoid a post-16 quals fiasco, says Tom Bewick
After months of phoney war, the Department for Education has launched its second round of consultation on which regulated qualifications below level 3 will be assigned public funding in future.
The battle lines are clear: the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, argues that there are a “ridiculously large number of qualifications”. To the tidy mind in Whitehall, it is time to simplify the landscape and make the offer for learners “clearer” and much “easier” for employers to understand.
At one level, it all sounds rather benign.
Except, the experience of early August should be fresh enough in ministers’ minds to make them pause for thought. They should wonder whether the post-16 review could end up being the nemesis of their own career prospects if they get it wrong.
After all, the Conservative Party manifesto on which the election was won last December said that policy needed to move away from “Whitehall knows best”. The fall of the “red wall” seats has meant the “levelling up” agenda now has a vocal political faction, sitting on the government benches in parliament, in ways not seen before.
These MPs will be looking for visible signs of the commitment to create real ladders of opportunity. In every community, particularly for those outside social mobility metropolitan hot-spots, policy will be judged on whether it actually narrows the gap for people who have been economically marginalised and left behind.
It is curious, then, why political alarm bells are not already ringing in Sanctuary Buildings.
The impact assessment of their plans for post-16 qualifications, drawn up by DfE senior officials, lays it all out in quite stark terms.
For example, the ESFA estimates that nearly two-thirds of current quals below level 3 for 16-19-year-olds would not be eligible for public support in future. The estimated impact on reduced enrolments, therefore, for those on the traditional academic track (where A-levels are the predominate qualification), is 16 per cent.
The impact assessment even admits something ministers have so far denied in public about the rationale for these reforms: artificial market manipulation.
Because qualifications that compete with 24 T Levels will not be publicly funded in future, the document says blithely: “Low competition on the technical route should help to support the delivery and take up of T Levels.”
For those who have traditionally pursued a vocational technical qualification at level 3, the impact on reduced enrolments for this group could be as high as 62 per cent.
In other words, the current ministerial fiat that says 16-19-year-olds will have to take either an academic (A-level) or a technical (T Level) route in future will largely be achieved only by wiping out nearly two-thirds of current provision for this age group.
Beyond the cold statistics, this could result in a real human cost, of significantly less choice in the L3 market in future, with the potential to significantly drive up the number of NEETs.
You can already see the constituency case work increasing. MPs’ surgeries deluged by aggrieved learners and parents who will feel they are being treated like square pegs being bashed into policy round holes. “Why should my daughter have only the choice of A-levels or T Levels?,” could become a common refrain.
The situation gets worse for adults and SEND learners. Nearly one-third of technical qualifications currently available at level 3 (31 per cent) for this group “may not fit into the future landscape”, officials admit.
For students from SEN background, the impact assessment concludes that these students could end up being “more strongly negatively impacted by being unable to achieve level 3 in the reformed landscape”.
When Dame Glenys Stacey, the interim chief regulator at Ofqual, was asked about what went wrong with the exams fiasco this summer, she said the whole system had made “a fundamental philosophical mistake”.
When you look at the potential adverse impact on life chances and equalities in the post-16 qualifications review, ministers will not be able to claim this time round that they were unaware of the consequences. They have been warned.
Crucially, it is the job of everyone working in the skills sector to point out where these reforms may not live up to all the hype.
Funding rates for adult learners must be raised to the same level as 16 to 19-year-olds to ensure courses are viable to deliver, the Association of Colleges has said.
Ahead of tomorrow’s spending review, the membership organisation has published research that claims the government’s flagship national skills fund will “fail” unless more money is pumped into the sector.
Budgets for adult skills programmes were cut by 40 per cent in the first half of the last decade and have been fixed in cash terms since then despite inflation, while funding for 16 to 19 programmes “have been funded at a higher rate”.
The AoC looked at the development of “15 course contribution models for 15 different subjects” and compared the cost of delivering them against the funding rates offered via the adult education budget.
The association found that the current funding level in all the adult courses sampled were “not viable, even at the maximum class size”. It said none of the courses generated a benchmark 50 per cent contribution to income after teaching costs that is needed to avoid a loss.
The AoC says the simplest way to ensure adult courses are viable is to “pay a rate equitable to that of 16 to 19 funding and implement a high value premium”.
The base rate for 16 to 19 funding was increased from £4,000 to £4,188 per learner this year and the government also offers those a £400 ‘High Value Courses Premium’ (HVCP) uplift for that age group in subjects such as engineering, manufacturing technologies, transport operations and maintenance, building and construction, and ICT.
Prime minister Boris Johnson recently announced a Lifetime Skills Guarantee that will include extending full funding for a first level 3 qualification to adults over the age of 23. The AoC said this means that more activity will be fully funded, “heightening the importance that funding rates are sufficient to cover necessary costs”.
AoC chief executive David Hughes said: “Today’s findings show that thousands of adults who find themselves out of work and require retraining are at risk of being left behind. Adult education has been neglected in education policy for too long.
“The government’s Lifetime Skills Guarantee extending full funding for a first Level 3 qualification to adults over the age of 23 was a welcome step but our analysis shows that without a funding rate increase, those ambitions will not be achieved.”
He added that the courses needed to train key workers and productive sectors that will “get the country moving again simply cost too much to deliver compared with current rates” and a “failure to act” will leave businesses “without skilled workers and people in long-term unemployment and poverty”.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We are making sure our FE sector has the funding and support it needs to give all learners the skills they need to succeed.
“Through our ambitious new £2.5 billion national skills fund, we will make sure more adults can retrain and upskill so we can unlock even more potential and level up opportunities across the country.
“We are engaging closely with the FE sector and wider industry as we continue to develop our plans for the national skills fund and will launch a public consultation in due course.”
The government is flirting with the language of learner power reminiscent of an old New Labour policy. Jess Staufenberg looks at its chances of making a comeback
For old hands in FE, Boris Johnson’s announcement in September of a “Lifetime Skills Guarantee”, resourced through a “National Skills Fund”, has echoes of an older, more ambitious New Labour policy too traumatising in its failure to seriously consider reintroducing – perhaps until recently.
The language of Johnson’s announcement pricked ears: the government wants to help people “train and retrain, at any stage in their lives”; “end the bogus distinction between HE and FE”; and, perhaps most importantly, “move to a system where every student will have a flexible lifelong loan entitlement”.
There will be “change, radical change”, thundered Johnson.
Ring any bells? For years, ministers have tinkered with the idea of handing choice and power to the student by giving them access to a “bank” of the loans and grants they can spend on tertiary education.
The idea has had various names – Individual Learning Accounts, as they were under New Labour in the early 2000s, as well as personal learner accounts, individual education budgets, skills accounts, skills wallets – you name it, it’s been floated within all three political parties. But a software system open to fraudulent abuse under the ILA system, launched in 2000, caused a horrified Estelle Morris to end them just a year later. Since then, mention of them has largely led to head-shaking.
But alongside the promising language, other moves in the highest echelons of government have not escaped notice. The biggest is, of course, the appointment of Alison Wolf, seconded from her public sector management professorship at King’s College London to be skills and workforce policy advisor to Number 10 at the start of the year. In 2008, during a financial crisis not as bad as the one hitting us now, Wolf wrote plainly about New Labour’s ILAs, asking: “As we free-fall into recession, could we please have them back?”
More recently, she told MPs this year: “You have to put far more of the power and decision-making in the hands of the individual.” She said the simplest thing would be to “take a flame-thrower” to the many and confusing funding pots for adult education.
Other appointments have also been telling. Keith Smith, the architect of the apprenticeship levy system, which operates digital accounts for employers, was moved from the ESFA to the Department for Education in April, bringing with him expertise in setting up a big new IT system.
Alison Wolf
Meanwhile, the Augar review in 2019, which the government shows every sign of largely following, examined the failed ILA scheme and recommended the “gradual” implementation of a similar system that might be “overseen by the established Office for Students and the Student Loans Company”.
Could a single, unified place for the post-18 learner to access education be on the cards?
There have been tentative, but piecemeal, moves in that direction. The current “entitlement” to free English and maths courses has been extended to basic computing skills with new “essential digital skills qualifications”.
Many now wait with baited breath, not for the one-year spending review next week (which can’t promise much, a multi-year, comprehensive spending review having been postponed), but for the FE white paper this year – will it provide proper detail on the Lifetime Skills Guarantee?
And the question they barely dare whisper – might it even include a pilot of personal, cashable accounts?
Jonathan Simons, head of education at think tank Public First, says one recent shift has been a willingness among policymakers to discuss learner accounts as a real possibility again. “Even just five years ago, people were too scarred by ILAs. My guess is that’s not the dealbreaker now.”
Jonathan Simons
Accounts policies now widely exist, he explains, whether via the Student Loans Company for higher education or for apprenticeships. “The technological advancements have happened, and we’ve gone over the ILA stuff so much now that the institutional knowledge is there too. And of course, Alison has been writing about this for years.”
The scars of the failed ILAs, which provided a modest £150 per learner and could be topped up, ran deep, says Julian Gravatt, deputy chief executive of the Association of Colleges.
“They almost became a poster child for bad government. There was no control on what courses could be done or on what organisations could claim the money.”
High-street banks, such as the Post Office, refused to run the accounts and so digital services company Capita was allowed to set up a “separate system” for the accounts, says Gravatt. “That’s why it was so open to abuse. It didn’t use an existing system. But we have those systems now.”
A series of reports followed. A 2002 inquiry by the then-Commons education and skills committee, chaired by Labour MP Barry Sheerman, blasted the fact that of the 2.6 million accounts opened, the government couldn’t say how many had been genuine – and therefore how much of the scheme’s £268 million had been wasted. But Sheerman reminds FE Week that the committee also recommended that the scheme “be rebooted without the fraud […] it was a brilliant concept”.
A National Audit Office report the same year criticised the lack of proper monitoring, but again praised the scheme’s ambition and said, “The government is committed to introducing a successor scheme as soon as possible.” A public accounts committee report in 2003 said the government had reassured MPs lessons had been learned.
But it was never to be. Tom Bewick, chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, who helped draft the ILA policy as a Labour advisor, says Treasury civil servants weren’t quite comfortable with the idea of handing money directly to people instead of institutions, and so were “happy to hit it on the head”. Either way, the ILAs, beloved of Wolf, died.
Yet more recently, the calls for their return have become insistent. In 2016, the Learning and Work Institute (LWI) published a report called Power to the People: The Case for Personal Learning Accounts which called for every citizen to have such an account by 2022, allowing five years for implementation and piggybacking on the existing “lifelong learning accounts” run by the National Careers Service.
Stephen Evans, chief executive of the LWI, points out similar initiatives are already running in Scotland (where they are called Individual Training Accounts), being piloted in Wales, and exist in high-performing systems such as Singapore.
“Our skills-funding system is so complicated, people don’t understand it and quickly lose the will to live. This is a much simpler way to communicate those things. There’s an important communication point here.”
Our skills-funding system is so complicated, people don’t understand it and quickly lose the will to live
Evans sat on both Labour’s 2019 commission on lifelong learning – which, rather against the grain of everyone else on this issue, says it won’t “risk” a return to accounts – and the Liberal Democrats’ commission too. The latter party currently has the most comprehensively thought-out policy around: Daisy Cooper, education spokesperson, confirmed to FE Week the Lib Dem proposal for “skills wallets” worth £10,000 over a lifetime. Evans adds the account could be topped up by the Job Centre, employers or the government, according to someone’s circumstances.
Director Tom Richmond makes the interesting point that the Augar review’s proposal for a £30,000 loan entitlement for each citizen – a figure touted as the equivalent to four years’ undergraduate degree funding under the report’s recommended fee cap – only takes into account the tuition fee loan, not the maintenance loan also available to an HE student. Learner accounts that are truly equitable should be around the £75,000 mark, he says.
“If you can only get maintenance support for HE courses then it will leave universities on a pedestal relative to colleges,” says Richmond. By contrast, his suggested pot “would send a powerful message to learners of all ages, which simply does not exist right now”. Like other policy wonks (and, indeed, Augar’s review), Richmond points towards the Student Loans Company as the obvious administrator for the scheme.
But is it ever going to happen? Those working closest to Westminster aren’t yet convinced. “The DfE are sold on it from a theoretical point of view. The difficulty has always been, will they make it cashable?” says Simons. “There are also questions about whether you can commit to this without a multi-year comprehensive spending review.”
John Cope, formerly of the CBI and recently appointed director of strategy and policy at UCAS and board member at the Institute of Apprenticeships and Technical Education, says skills education reform is clearly a government priority, “with long-debated ideas around learner entitlements and ‘learner accounts’ in the mix”.
In an apparent offer of help, Cope adds UCAS “needs to become a one-stop shop for all options across HE, FE and apprenticeships”. But both stop short of saying the government is set to expand the Lifetime Skills Guarantee into a personal learner account revolution.
In its favour, meanwhile, is the fact the government is obviously worried. The number of adults taking out advanced learner loans has fallen for the third consecutive year. A skilled worker shortage is looming because of Brexit. And Wolf, aside from her support of ILAs, is bothered about devolution (telling MPs it adds “another layer of bureaucracy and arguing about who gets what”).
As Bewick puts it, “if the Treasury is now interested in skills accounts, it’s because they want money to increasingly go to individuals rather than the combined authorities”.
If the combined authorities are out of favour, perhaps the real question then is, will the Lifetime Skills Guarantee hand money to citizens or colleges?
The policy is not altogether straightforward for college leaders: grant funding will be out of their hands. Yet Gravatt is cautiously welcoming, suggesting a “mixed model” of guaranteed core funding for colleges alongside a trial of personal accounts for learners. Echoing Augar, he proposes “a staged implementation with local pilots, to test this out.”
Policy experts seem to be concerned that, despite flirting with the language of learner accounts, and having got firmly into bed with those who would know exactly how best to implement them, current ministers, like those before them, will fall just short of the mark of delivering a policy that most regard as not only excellent, but much-needed.
The Augar review agrees: “We emphasise that, without these changes, neither more flexible provision, nor a major increase in level 4 to 5 uptake, is at all likely.”
It may be that it needs colleges, more than anyone else, to make the case this time.
