Latest news from FE Week

Ofsted finds apprentices without jobs at provider

Ofsted has chastised an online training provider after finding cases where, “in contrast to the records held”, apprentices did not have jobs.

Applied Business Academy Limited (ABA) claimed it was an “isolated incident” but was also called out for poor safeguarding, after the watchdog discovered the provider did not know at least one of their apprentices was under the age of 18.

The London-based provider, which began training apprentices in April 2020, received ‘insufficient progress’ judgements across the board following a new provider monitoring visit and is now suspended from new starts under government rules.

It had 37 apprentices at the time of the inspection on two standards-based apprenticeships: the digital marketer standard at level 3 and the junior content producer standard at level 3.

Despite Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman previously insisting that the watchdog only focuses on the quality of education and does not police compliance against funding rules, ABA’s report outlines a series of non-compliance issues with apprenticeship regulations.

The report, published today, said: “In contrast to the records held, inspectors found cases of apprentices who did not have jobs, whose job roles were inappropriate for their course of study, and who did not work in England for the minimum time required under funding regulations.

“Leaders do not keep accurate records of their apprentices and did not know that at least one of their apprentices is under the age of 18. As a result, leaders have not appropriately assessed the risks these apprentices may face or put in place measures to support them.”

Inspectors added: “Not all apprentices have jobs which allow them to apply their learning at work. For instance, a few apprentices working towards the digital marketer standard mainly take orders from customers or make deliveries while at work.”

A spokesperson for ABA claimed the issue of apprentices without jobs was “one isolated incident”.

Ofsted criticised the provider’s leaders for not “accurately” assessing the quality of their apprenticeship training and “do not effectively monitor the quality of their staff’s work”.

Governors also “do not have an accurate understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the apprenticeship provision”.

Among other issues, the watchdog pulled the provider up for being too slow to put suitable arrangements in places for English and maths tuition, as well as a failure to assess apprentices’ prior knowledge before starting their training.

ABA’s spokesperson said: “We are taking all the necessary actions to upgrade ourselves to do more efficient work.

“We are not challenging Ofsted’s report. Our investigations into the full report are not yet complete. We are taking help and support to relook at everything.”

[UPDATE: On 02/09/2021 Ofsted published a follow-up monitoring report for the provider which focussed on its safeguarding provision. The provider was found making ‘significant progress’.]

How the skills bill would increase and clarify the government’s legal powers

The Skills Bill drops hints as to the direction of policy in the sector, writes Mark Taylor

The skills and post-16 education Bill gives us clues as to where the government is headed on policy in the further education sector.

Let me talk you through a few points of interest (or, at least, which are of interest to a lawyer…)

Local skills improvement plans

If the legislation had stated that colleges must have a mission to focus on local skills, this could arguably have changed the mission of colleges and even their charitable objects.

But by saying there is a requirement on colleges to think of local skills plans, it’s not giving them a new mission, but an obligation with which they must comply.

Otherwise, college boards might have had to act differently, and there could have been complicated changes under charity law. So the way this new requirement has been phrased is useful.

Colleges already have many statutory obligations, so adding a few more shouldn’t change their charitable status. However, it will add to the regulatory burden on colleges.

The obligations are not to absolutely comply with a local skills improvement plan. The obligations are to “have regard” to it and to work with employers to develop it. This should allow some leeway for colleges to not follow every aspect of a local skills improvement plan, provided that any such decision is properly reasoned.

The risk for colleges is the intervention powers that the FE Commissioner now has into colleges that are not meeting local needs. Modern colleges are not used to being told what provision to deliver. Intervention by the secretary of state purely because of the type of college delivery would be a shock to the system.

It would also potentially raise questions as to whether that college could continue to be classified as a private body, rather than a public body, for Office for National Statistics purposes.

In setting and enforcing a local skills improvement plan, we have to hope that employers and the secretary of state recognise the diversity of mission of colleges.

The strength of the further education sector is not built on an army of clone-like colleges. The sector is stronger because no two colleges are alike. Not every college (particularly specialist designated institutions) will be able to cater for every part of a local skills improvement plan.

Regulation of independent training providers

The bill gives the secretary of state the power to make regulations around keeping a list of (mainly) independent training providers.

Funding authorities (including devolved ones) will not be able to fund or allow sub-contracting with a provider not on the list.

We can take from this that the secretary of state is clearly willing to increasingly regulate devolved adult educational delivery.

The new list will focus on learner protection and concerns about provider failure.

This is a market that clearly concerns government. We will wait to see what the entry requirements are and how they differ from existing checks.

Mergers and insolvency law

The bill clarifies the government’s power to require a college to merge. These are powers which government arguably already had, but did not use.

That the Bill clarifies this shows that, firstly, past failure to use these powers may have been due to an uncertainty within Whitehall over its ability to do so. Secondly, if government feels the need to make clear that it has these powers, then it thinks that it may need to use them in the future.

An intervention regime in which colleges are forced to merge would be another significant shift for the sector.

The Bill also clarifies insolvency law surrounding colleges. While this may not have changed the law, the fact the government is looking to make sure it works shows they’re still planning to use it in the future.

Not in the bill

Many elements of the white paper are not reflected in the Bill, such as changes to college governance and funding.

This is likely to be positive for the sector, as legislation for legislation’s sake would only add to a college’s burden.

However, it does mean that we must wait for funding and policy changes to see what the future holds.

This is how we can boost the number of girls and women on construction courses

There’s a huge market for female tradespeople to come round and fix the electrics, so we need to get more on construction courses, writes Nikki Davis

Being a college with one specific industry focus – in our case, construction – has lots of advantages. But even with our advantages, it still takes a lot of effort to increase the number of female students on our courses.

Over three years, we have made progress. We’ve gone from just 33 female apprentices to 190, almost six times as many.

But the percentage in the college itself sounds less impressive – that’s a move from five per cent of students who are female to seven per cent.

Meanwhile, women in the UK construction industry account for around ten per cent of the workforce.

Lack of women on trade courses

Some of our courses do better than others. Our higher and technical courses, such as civil engineering and transport planning, have more female students on them.

On some of these courses, the split is more like 70-30 male to female. The same is true of the staff, giving a much better representation of females who have come directly from the industry and are doing a phenomenal job.

But there are far fewer female students on the trade courses, such as brickwork, joinery, plastering, painting and decorating, tiling, electrical and plumbing.

We do have a fantastic female lecturer in joinery, and that’s what we need more of. However, it’s difficult to recruit female staff in some of these trade courses.

This needs to change because there’s such a market for tradeswomen. How much more comfortable would women feel if it was a woman who arrived to fix their electrics?

Change careers advice in schools

One of the answers is to tackle the problem much earlier in schools. There’s a lot of outreach work needed at both primary and secondary levels. You occasionally hear horror stories of girls being directed away from careers talks on construction, towards a “more appropriate” presentations.

Students should have their perceptions of the construction industry challenged, too. They see it as brickwork, which can be dirty, dusty and cold in winter. There is a bit of that, it’s true, but there is so much more to it.

The sector has a lot of secure jobs that are well paid in many cases. With the government’s “Build back better” slogan, this will be a booming industry. Careers advice in schools needs to be much better informed about a career in construction – it should not be assumed that it’s a job for low-achieving students.

Another way to tackle the issue is to run women-focused short courses here in college. We do taster sessions, where people can ask questions, and also six-week courses to get the basics in a trade area. It’s especially helpful if that’s a female-led course.

Close relationships with employers

One of the big advantages of being a purely construction college is our very close links with employers. The college opened in 1960 because there was a local need for construction workers at the time, with just a handful of staff.

Now, we have 400 staff and about 1,200 16- to 18-year-old students, about 2,500 apprentices and adult students too.

I’ve worked in a mainstream college before this one and the relationship with employers is just different here. They pick up the phone and call us. They work directly with us.

Because we focus solely on construction, we can also offer employers more flexibility – they can send apprentices to us on day release or block release, for example. They can pick a model that suits them.

Employers also help us decipher local skills plans. They can be difficult to understand sometimes, so we work with employers to unpick them in detail.

Being focused on one industry area also lets us attract talent nationally. Because we specialise, we’re seen as one of the best.

But that doesn’t mean our work in improving representation of students is anywhere near done.

The government is expecting employers to do a lot to support the skills system, but the issue of more girls and women choosing construction courses needs to be pioneered within the education sector, supported by employers.

We need to be doing much more, much earlier, to encourage them in.

Colleges are teaching Generation Z: the ‘crisis generation’

The recession, Brexit and austerity have shaped Generation Z’s view of the world, writes Karl Pupé

Educators, we are living in crazy times.

In our society, the old rules and protocols of how we live together are crumbling before our eyes. We are living through one of the most turbulent times in human history.

We are witnessing the death-throes of the industrial age as our world deals with consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and how it has radically changed our society overnight.

But the turbulence of 2020 allowed us to witness the sign of things to come: the information age.

We stare in wonder and fear as the internet 2.0 and artificial intelligence transform and shape our societies in ways that our ancestors could not imagine.

Our students are in this brave new world. If you are an educator teaching students born between 1997 and 2012, who are between eight and 23 years old, you are teaching Generation Z.

That places a large proportion of these learners in colleges and further education institutions. At this point, they are close to entering the outside world.

Let me examine three characteristics of this group as you prepare them for the next step.

They believe in speaking their minds

In a survey of 13- to 29-year-olds by youth marketing website YPulse, 72 per cent believe that “hashtag activism” has the power to change the world, especially in light of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Generation Z are the first-ever human generation who do not know what life was like without the internet. They are known as “digital natives”.

Covid-19 will be remembered as consolidation of the information age, and Generation Z are its first real citizens.

Technology, especially social media, has given our students unprecedented opportunities to speak their minds, and have the world listen to them.

We must use “trust-based empathy”

The lines between the rulers and the ruled are increasingly blurred and the internet has democratised power and attention.

In our classrooms, students are less afraid to question, debate and, in some cases, confront us about why things are the way that they are.

Educators can no longer rely on simply demanding obedience from our students. We must use “trust-based empathy”.

This involves dealing with our students based on mutual respect, shared values and curiosity and creativity in the classroom.

They are pessimistic about authority

According to a survey undertaken by consultants Deloitte in 2019, a mere 12 per cent of older Generation Z’ers (aged 18 to 25) believe that the political and economic situation would change over the coming 12 months.

For many of our older students, a great deal of their defining moments were in the wake of the recession, government austerity and Brexit. This has made our young people more cynical and uncertain of the future.

Educators must move from merely giving lectures to becoming their coaches, showing them that education is still a gateway for a better future for themselves and for the world.

We must learn to bridge our subjects to their interests. We must no longer bribe them with the promise of a degree and a steady job, but inspire them about how they can contribute to a better future for their communities and the causes they care about.

They expect organisations to care

According to Ipsos Mori, less than 30 per cent of students felt the things they owned said much about their socio-economic status, compared to 42 per cent in 2011.

The report revealed that: “Despite pressure of a harder economic context, there has been a cohort shift away from materialistic values.”

Our students have witnessed damning discrimination based on gender, race and sexuality.

After the death of George Floyd, our students are also more conscientious than ever about how companies and institutions affect the world around them. Students support organisations not only for their services or products, but their stances on equality.

The main thing is that Generation Z believes they are a crisis generation. They are actively looking at ways to make their world a tiny bit better.

My advice is to give them a safe space to work their ideas.

For sale! Land of insolvent college goes on the market for £580K

England’s first college to be put through the government’s insolvency regime is selling off a huge parcel of land, as the local community fights to reopen its popular farm shop.

A total of 45.42 acres – equivalent to 25 football pitches – has been put on the market for £580,000. The college entered education administration in May 2019.

A brochure for the sale by estate agent Knight Frank (pictured, left) said the five lots up for grabs are separated into various field enclosures and would be “suitable for agricultural, equestrian or other leisure uses”.

The college and its sister institution West Kent and Ashford College (WKAC), which entered administration in August 2019, have seen their campuses and sites split up between local providers.

Capel Manor College, EKC (East Kent College) Group, and North Kent College (NKC) took over the two colleges’ educational provision over the course of last year.

Administrators BDO declined to comment on what the proceeds of this sale will go towards. Their latest administration report shows they have received 177 claims from unsecured creditors, totalling £20.8 million, to date.

Meanwhile, a petition is running to ask North Kent College, which took over the main Hadlow College site in Tonbridge, to keep its on-site farm shop open.

At the time of writing, there are 644 signatures on a Change.org petition entitled Save Hadlow College Farm Shop.

The shop was closed last year by Hadlow College before North Kent College took over in August 2020. It was not part of the transfer of facilities
to NKC and is not part of the land sale.

BDO’s latest progress report on Hadlow College’s administration, published in December 2020, says a marketing exercise was undertaken to sell the farm shop, but there was “insufficient interest to support a commercial transaction”, which directly led to its closure.

The petition, started last year, calls on NKC to reopen the shop as it has “played a vital role in our neighbourhood for many years. During lockdown, its staff have gone above and beyond to serve the community. Please help us not to lose it,” it asks readers.

Petition organiser Anne Waddingham told FE Week they had held out hope for the facility to reopen after local MP Tom Tugendhat met with NKC’s principal David Gleed.

Tugendhat wrote on his website last September, following the meeting, that the closure of the shop “has hit the community hard”.

But: “I was encouraged following my conversation with David that there could be a future which can serve local residents.

“In the case of the farm shop, North Kent College are considering how a shop in this location, with alternatives not far away, could be run sustainably.”

The shop was not transferred to NKC as it was not directly linked to the college’s education provision, Tugendhat wrote.

But NKC was “looking at how a farm shop can better work with the courses students are studying at the college, so that there is benefit for those learning too”.

Waddingham said she had “heard nothing since then, which is disappointing”.

An NKC spokesperson said it has “never operated the farm shop and at present have no plans to reopen it”.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: EDITION 354

Your weekly guide to who’s new and who’s leaving.

Melanie Guymer, Curriculum consultant, FE Associates

Start date: April 2021

Previous job: Vice principal of curriculum planning, United Colleges Group

Interesting fact: She used to run an English Language Consultancy in Hong Kong.

John Cridland, Chair, WorldSkills UK Skills Taskforce for Global Britain

Start date: May 2021

Concurrent job: Chair, Transport for the North and the Home Group

Interesting fact: He is an avid fan of Star Trek.

Ian Fitzpatrick, Principal, National College for Advanced Transport and Infrastructure

Start date: May 2021

Previous job: Chief executive, Elite Centre for Manufacturing Skills

Interesting fact: He is a qualified diver.

National college closes without ever having opened

One of the government’s once-vaunted national colleges is being wound up – without ever opening, FE Week can reveal.

A notice to dissolve was posted on the National College for Onshore Oil and Gas (NCOOG) Companies House profile last week, seven years after it was originally announced.

Its former interim managing director Martin York said there was “no requirement” to proceed with the college following a government review into the industry.

“Its provision was dependent upon the UK government granting permission for the onshore oil and gas industry to extract shale gas via rock fracturing in order to proceed,” York told FE Week in a joint comment with Blackpool and the Fylde College, which is where NCOOG was set to be based.

The government subsequently imposed a moratorium on fracking which “contributed to the industry decision that it no longer had a UK skills shortage and as such there was no requirement to proceed with the National College Onshore Oil and Gas”.

More than £5 million of government capital funding had been earmarked for the college, but York claimed this was never drawn down.

The Department for Education said the college had received £429,000 in research funding since its inception.

A spokesperson for the department added that the energy industry and government focus had “changed since the initial proposals to establish the National College for Onshore Oil and Gas”.

“Given the change of landscape, the DfE and Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy felt it was unlikely that the industry would be seeking to train apprentices at the rate which was originally anticipated in the short term and we therefore were content with the college’s proposals to dissolve its operations.”

National colleges ‘inefficient means’ to meet industry need

News of NCOOG’s abrupt collapse comes in the same week it was announced a second of the five national colleges had dissolved.

After facing insolvency, the flagship national college for HS2, now called the National College for Advanced Transport and Infrastructure (NCATI), has been closed by ministers and relaunched as a subsidiary of a university.

Similarly, the National College for Creative Industries (NCCI) dissolved and handed over its courses to a college and private training provider in February 2020 after years of surviving only on government bailouts.

Tens of millions of pounds have been pumped into the national colleges programme since government announced plans to open five of them in the 2015 spending review, which said they would “train an estimated 21,000 students by 2020 in industries central to the productivity agenda, such as digital and high-speed rail”.

Tom Richmond, a former Department for Education special adviser turned director of think-tank EDSK, said: “The demise of yet another national college emphasises why top-down solutions to improving the skills system are always likely to struggle.

“New initiatives, new buildings and new equipment are often an expensive and inefficient way to meet the needs of different industry sectors, but the lack of policy memory among government departments and civil servants means that such mistakes are repeated with alarming regularity.”

Richmond said the onus was now on the Institutes of Technology (IoT), providers of higher technical skills developed in collaboration between higher and further education providers, “to ensure they do not suffer the same fate”.

Twelve IoTs based around England were given the go-ahead by the Department for Education in 2019, and a process is currently ongoing to approve another eight.

NCOOG already suffered delays

NCOOG was originally announced by sector representative body UK Onshore Oil and Gas, which York chairs, in 2014.

In April 2017, it was revealed the plans to launch the NCOOG had stalled, and its launch date of September that year had been pushed back.
In 2019, UK Onshore Oil and Gas told FE Week the college’s further development was “on hold” while “greater clarity and progress by way of timing and the scale of production activities is ascertained”.

The college was to be based at Blackpool and the Fylde College, with principal Bev Robinson serving as one of the national college’s directors.

Blackpool and the Fylde College has since put forward a bid to open an Institute of Technology.

Funding troubles have bedevilled the national colleges programme: NCATI had to take a £4.55 million bailout from the Department for Education to sign off its 2017/18 accounts and was placed in formal intervention in December 2019. It has now been reformed as a new institution, part of the University of Birmingham.

NCCI made it through 2017/18 as a “going concern” only thanks to a £600,000 bailout from the DfE, as FE Week reported in June.

It now licences its provision to South Essex College and Access Creative College.

The two remaining national colleges are Ada National College for Digital Skills, based in London and Manchester, and the National College for Nuclear, which is split between two hubs: one at Lakes College in Cumbria and another at Bridgwater & Taunton College.

‘Middle-class grab’ on apprenticeships confirmed by new analysis

The apprenticeship reforms are increasingly disadvantaging people from low-income areas, new FE Week analysis has revealed.

Since the new-style employer-led standards were first introduced in 2015, latest government figures show there has not only been a decline in starts, but also a far smaller percentage of them are from those living in the most deprived areas.

In 2015, 26 per cent of all apprenticeship starts lived in the “most deprived” areas, a figure that has fallen each year to just 18 per cent by the end of 2020.

For higher level apprenticeships this has fallen each year from 22 per cent to 14 per cent by the end of 2020.

Conversely, 14 per cent of all apprenticeship starts lived in the “least deprived” areas, a figure that had risen to 19 per cent by the end of 2020. This figure hits 23 per cent when only higher level apprenticeships are taken into account.

These latest findings come in the same week that apprenticeships minister Gillian Keegan expressed concern at an education select committee hearing that university-goers could “squeeze out” those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The worry within the current government is echoed by that of a former apprenticeships minister, Anne Milton, who told the same committee in 2017 that fears of a “middle-class grab” on apprenticeships are “valid”.

FE Week tried to update more detailed analysis from 2018/19, undertaken by the Sutton Trust for their Making Degree Apprenticeships Work for Social Mobility report.

At that time, just 13 per cent of apprentices on degree apprenticeships lived in the most deprived areas. But, without explanation, the government has stopped publishing deprivation data separately for levels 6 and 7.

When FE Week asked for the deprivation figures, which until 2018/19 had been routinely published, the DfE said they would treat the enquiry as a Freedom of Information request.

Sir Peter Lampl, founder and chair of the Sutton Trust, said: “Higher and degree level apprenticeships hold such promise for social mobility, by offering young people a career-focused – and debt-free – alternative to university degrees. Yet as this latest analysis shows, low-income young people are being squeezed out of the best apprenticeships by the middle classes.

“While it is good that the Department for Education has recognised these concerns, we need action now. As a starter, we need better data on who is starting these apprenticeships, so that we know where efforts to widen access should be focused. We should also prioritise levy funding on younger, newer starters and a proportion of the levy should be spent on widening participation.”

The Department for Education was asked how concerned it was about the findings and what was being done to help more people from deprived communities to access apprenticeship opportunities.

A spokesperson said: “As we recover from the pandemic, we are focused on supporting as many people as possible to gain the skills they need to start a rewarding career or retrain.

“Apprenticeships will continue to play a vital role in this and we are continuing to support employers large and small to offer more opportunities, including through our incentive offer.

“We recognise more needs to be done to ensure everyone, no matter their background or where they live, can access the training they need to progress.

“Our reforms to post-16 education will do just that by making it a legal requirement for employers and providers to collaborate so that the training on offer meets the need of business and local communities.”

ESFA to select providers for reapplication to apprenticeships register in random order

Providers on the apprenticeships register will be “randomly selected” to reapply in different phases over the next year, the Education and Skills Funding Agency has said.

The agency also confirmed that the register remains closed to new providers unless they offer training for critical workers, with no timeline for opening it up to all.

Officials in the ESFA controversially announced in April that they would require all active apprenticeship providers to reapply to the register of apprenticeship training providers (RoATP) as they unveiled plans for a third refresh since 2017 to introduce “more stringent entry criteria”.

Providers must, for example, for the first time prove their “experience of managing and delivering training to learners and are established within the sectors in which you intend to deliver”.

The agency began a “phased reapplication” process this week but has so far failed to publicly explain the format of this approach.

After FE Week enquired about this, a spokesperson said: “ESFA will randomly select active providers on the register to invite them to reapply in phases, over the next 12 months from May 2021 to March 2022.”

Providers will only be able to access the service if they have received an email notification inviting them to reapply. They will receive an invite six weeks before each one-month application window opens.

The cost of refreshing RoATP was revealed in an impact assessment report for the Skills Bill this week.

It totalled £1.2 million as it involved 19 staff in just under two years, and the assessment of over 3,500 providers.

The agency also confirmed to FE Week that the register is currently closed and only open “by exception to those providers that offer training for critical workers and have an employer endorsement to support their application”.

A spokesperson added that they will keep this approach to targeted entry to the register “under review”.