The Department for Education has published details of how it will fund the £101 million school and college leavers scheme, as well as a list of 355 eligible courses.

The programme, announced by chancellor Rishi Sunak during his summer statement last week, will give 18 and 19 year olds who are struggling to find work due to Covid-19 the opportunity to study “targeted” level 2 and 3 courses for a third year free of charge.

Here is what you need to know.

Funding

The one-year offer will include a £400 “uplift” per learner to cover the costs of putting on additional courses at short notice, recruiting extra students, and preparing staffing and facilities

The DfE said the offer will also include “adjustments to retention payments and job outcome payments to compensate where learners leave early and take up employment or an apprenticeship”.

The funding for 18 year olds will be through 16 to 19 study programme rates but 19 year olds will be funded through the adult education budget.

The department said it will fund 18-year-olds on “larger programmes” at the rate for 16 and 17-year-olds.

The normal funding rate for 16 and 17 year olds, for 2020/21, is £4,188 per student but this drops to £3,455 for 18 year olds.

The DfE said the Education and Skills Funding Agency will administer the additional funding via 16 to 19 funding and the adult education budget to support delivery from September 1, 2020.

Further information about funding for both age groups is expected to be published before the end of this month.

Payments for 18-year-olds

The DfE said they will determine the number of additional students from a provider’s “R04 data return” and the autumn census compared to delivery in the previous year and make a “programme payment in-year (subject to affordability)”.

“We will amend 2020 to 2021 allocations accordingly and reprofile across the rest of the year.”

As these students will be recorded as “lagged” student numbers, the programme funding element paid in-year will be “offset against future funding”.

The £400 uplift will not be offset. The 16 to 19 year-old bursary fund allocations will be “adjusted where appropriate to reflect the extra 18-year-olds”.

The DfE added that they will retain some funding for enrolments “later in the year”.

“Providers will receive the uplift for students enrolled after November 2020 in the 2021 to 2022 academic year, and the programme funding in the 2022 to 2023 academic year. The intention is to maximise in-year payments based on the available budget.”

Payments for 19-year-olds

The DfE said they will allocate the “additional ESFA AEB before the end of August 2020” to providers.

“We will distribute funding using a consistent calculation taking into account delivery in 2018 to 2019, historic delivery of the qualifications in scope, affordability and track record requirements in the published performance management rules.

“The additional funding will be ringfenced within your ESFA AEB and be performance managed separately.”

The department added that learners will be fully funded to undertake a qualification from the agreed list (see below) including those who already hold a level 2 and level 3 qualification.

For those wishing to undertake a subsequent level 3 this means they will not be required to take out an advanced learner loan.

List of eligible qualifications

The DfE confirmed the one-year offer will enable 18 and 19-year-olds leaving education and training who are unable to find employment or work-based training, opportunities to be fully funded to undertake specific level 2 and level 3 qualifications that have been identified as “relevant to higher wage returns and economic growth opportunities”.

There are 355 courses in total, 155 of which are at level 2 and 200 at level 3. They are a range of A-levels and vocational and technical qualifications including applied generals such as BTECs.

Subject areas include building and construction, engineering, health and social care, ICT practitioners, manufacturing technologies, maths and statistics, medicine and dentistry, nursing, science and transportation.

The DfE said providers will need to “demonstrate how courses through this offer support employment outcomes, and evidence of need for skills in their local area”.

Download the full list here.

The national retraining scheme has taken another step forward after the government began searching for “partnerships” to design and test 12 week courses for adults that lead to “guaranteed” job interviews.

A Department for Education tender has gone out for groups of employers, providers and local authorities to deliver “a new training model” initially in the digital sector where there is a skills shortage.

Three contracts are up for grabs, one in each local enterprise partnership area of Leeds City Region, Heart of the South West and D2N2 (Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire).

The “model” is expected to deliver training that “meets employer’s immediate needs in a pre-employment phase, de-risking the recruitment process for them”.

Participants must be adults aged 19 or older who are in work or recently unemployed. The DfE “anticipates” that at least 75 per cent of all trainees will move into a new job or role.

The department confirmed to FE Week that this programme of work is part of their national retraining scheme, which was first promised in June 2017 as a manifesto commitment and has been backed with an initial £100 million by the Treasury.

The first phase of the scheme was rolled out in select areas in July last year with the launch of a new digital service – Get Help to Retrain – that acts as a course and job directory.

Asked about this new tender, the DfE said: “These initiatives build on the extensive user-research and engagement with local areas through the national retraining scheme.

“Building on what we have learnt, we are exploring the effectiveness of employer-led, flexible training initiatives.”

They added that this could also help to inform how the upcoming £2.5 billion national skills fund might work.

The DfE continued: “We are currently talking to a number of local areas, employers and providers to better understand how these initiatives can successfully support local regions and employers to fill skills shortages, by bringing participating individuals closer to better jobs through guaranteed interviews.

“This notice is one way of engaging with potential partners so that it can feed in to the wider development of these initiatives.”

The tender states that the department will “aim to award up to three contracts (one per area) to partner organisations consisting of local employers, digital/ICT training providers, local authorities and the FE sector to evidence digital skills shortage vacancies and design and deliver approximately 12 week training courses to provide a pipeline of individuals to fill those roles (when possible we will expand to include other technical skills)”.

Bids “must” detail the “cash and/or in-kind contribution that employers will make, examples could include work experience or support with CVs, interview skills and other interpersonal skills – we are interested in ideas around this”.

A “successful” bid will show, for example, how employers are represented and leading on what training is delivered; how guaranteed interviews are secured as an outcome; how underrepresented groups and those with “protected characteristics” will be engaged and recruited to the training programmes.

Applications must also show how proposed costs of training are determined, including how costs could be reduced through scaling up, whilst “maintaining quality”; and how training will be delivered “flexibly” around other commitments including work, job seeking and caring.

The funding available to each area will “depend on proposals from bidders”, and it will be calculated on “how many people they would train to meet the demand they have identified”.

Bids are open until August 31. The DfE expects delivery to get underway by January 2021. The tender can be viewed here.

Staff cuts to the Education and Skills Funding Agency have been a key factor in their failure to spot early signs of college weaknesses, the long-awaited independent report into oversight of college finances has found.

Dame Mary Ney was commissioned by former skills minister Anne Milton in August 2019 to conduct a review after the shock collapse of the Hadlow College Group revealed failings by the funding body to spot warning signs.

The overarching recommendation from her review, published this morning but dated October 2019, is that there needs to be a “new strategic relationship with the sector”.

It states that the nature of the current intervention regime, the “lack of a sector-wide strategy” and the capacity and resources of the ESFA have resulted in a relationship between government and the sector which is “largely focused on financial failure and which inhibits colleges being transparent with government”.

The relationship is “largely contractual”, focused on the funding agreements and therefore government “does not have sufficient line of sight on the wider issues colleges face and early warning signs of difficulty”.

As a consequence, the sector “lacks confidence in seeking support and advice at an early stage”, Ney warns.

She appears to be recommending the return of funding body relationship managers that would frequently meet with all college leaders, which were a feature of the previous Learning and Skills Council.

The report states that whilst each college currently has a named liaison worker from the ESFA Territorial Teams, “in practice capacity only allows this to be a desk-based oversight of college data which in the main relates to financial returns” and this only becomes a more active role for colleges which are on the intervention pathway.

“This means that in the main the ESFA Territorial Teams do not have a relationship with colleges which gives them any regular granularity of understanding of such matters as vision and ambition, leadership strengths and weaknesses, resource planning, governance compliance etc,” Ney said.

“Importantly it does not give them a line of sight to early signs of potential weaknesses nor allow the government to hold colleges to account for compliance with its guidance and expectations.”

Ney said that for colleges not in intervention, the extent of compliance with the governance and financial planning guides is “largely unknown”.

“Generally, there is no line of sight of the functioning of boards and audit committees; there is not an in depth assessment of the quality of management accounts and financial planning; there is no scrutiny of governance or counter fraud policies; and there is no discussion around curriculum planning, trading/commercial activity, estate management, risk management, partnership working and whether the college is supporting the needs of local employers or the economy,” she added.

But Ney acknowledges that there has been a 60 per cent reduction in ESFA capacity for this work which has led to “prioritisation of resources to focus on the most problematic cases”.

As revealed by FE Week in January, the then Skills Funding Agency shed over 1,000 staff when responsible for college financial oversight, before being brought into the Department for Education (DfE) in 2017.

Ney said the development of a “more proactive relationship with all colleges individually would give oversight of all of these issues and allow a stronger culture of prevention to be developed”.

“It would give colleges the confidence to seek timely advice and help, leading to fewer colleges in intervention and fewer demands for financial support.”

This “new relationship” could incorporate “annual conversations, looking holistically at the college as a critical friend but also allowing the college to showcase their achievements and raise their concerns”.

It would require ESFA staff to become “active participants in nurturing college development”.

Ney also appears to be in favour of giving government greater control. Her report states that the power to be “more decisive could lead to shorter periods in intervention for colleges in difficulty who need a structural solution”.

“A new regulatory regime would require an appetite for radical legislative change and therefore is a matter for more long term consideration,” she added.

The review also recommends that those involved in financial oversight contribute to the Ofsted judgement on leadership to “provide an holistic view and avoid disconnect between the judgements of the two bodies”.

Special measures that have led to more than 100 apprenticeship standards gaining permission to carry out end-point assessments remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic will be retained into the new year.

The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education’s chief executive Jennifer Coupland announced today that the flexibilities will continue until at least the start of 2021.

Apprenticeship assessments usually involve an element of face-to-face assessment, which was not possible due to movement and social distancing restrictions during lockdown.

The flexibilities introduced vary for each standard but can include using technology to conduct observations or professional discussions remotely and reordering assessment methods so that written tests or professional discussions can be taken now and the observation delivered later.

Coupland said: “It is fantastic that the assessment flexibilities, which we carefully tailored for different sectors with employer groups, have helped thousands of apprentices to complete in spite of Covid-19.

“We want this to continue as people gradually return to work-places and face-to-face learning and assessment becomes more viable. The institute will start looking from September at where to go next with the flexibilities, but I can confirm we are not planning to make any changes before the new year to give everyone a degree of stability.”

Prime minister Boris Johnson has now advised that people should start returning to work where possible, which sparked enquiries as to whether the institute will continue to support remote assessment and other flexibilities around the delivery of EPA, according to an IfATE spokesperson.

Coupland said: “The EPA flexibilities have played a vital role in supporting the completion of many apprenticeships through these challenging and unprecedented times. We want to clarify now that there are no imminent plans to reverse these.”

The IfATE spokesperson added that they will give 12 weeks notice from when any changes are announced to existing flexibilities before EPA organisations will have to deliver them.

Dame Mary Ney’s report into college financial oversight exposes a “decade of austerity” and a lack of ministerial awareness of the financial crisis “engulfing” the FE sector, Labour’s shadow apprenticeships minister has said.

Toby Perkins added that the failure in oversight has been “exacerbated by the Tory cuts to the civil service”.

He was responding to the long-awaited independent Ney report, which was completed in October 2019 but only published by the Department for Education today.

The review was commissioned after Hadlow and West Kent and Ashford Colleges became the first colleges to be placed in education administration last year – a shock collapse that revealed failings by the funding body to spot warning signs.

Ney’s overarching recommendation was that there needs to be a shift to a new nurturing and “strategic” relationship with the sector. She warned that significant staff cuts to the Education and Skills Funding Agency have been a key factor in their inability to find early signs of weakness (full story here).

Perkins said: “Dame Ney should be thanked for an excellent report which demands government action to address a widespread failure that is allowing our FE sector to drift towards bankruptcy.

“The report exposes in detail the appalling consequences of a decade of austerity, the failure of the government’s FE reforms and the lack of ministerial awareness of the financial crisis engulfing our crucial FE sector.

“The failure in oversight has been exacerbated by the Tory cuts to the civil service and reforms that have weakened the oversight that government provides.”

The shadow minister added that Ney is “correct” that the current mechanisms and reforms are “inadequate to address this failing and for all the government’s rhetoric about the importance of the sector the truth is that colleges are collapsing and young people are being let down by these failings.

“Labour hopes that the Secretary of state will be making a statement to parliament to confirm that he will address the failings identified and confirm if he will adopt the recommendations in full very soon.”

James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said that Ney’s report makes some welcome recommendations, such as three year funding settlements, a “more joined up approach” to intervention, and strengthened governance.

However, the “scope of the review did not allow Dame Mary to focus on what actually causes financial instability in the first place – not least the decade of underinvestment in post-16 education,” he added.

“Reconfiguring the departments and agencies involved in intervention or refining the financial information provided by colleges will, in isolation, have a limited impact.

“There is certainly a need to reform financial oversight, but there is a more pressing need to ask if colleges are receiving the funding required to provide students with a high quality education”.

Deputy chief executive of the Association of Colleges, Julian Gravatt, said: “It’s helpful that DfE have finally published Dame Mary Ney’s review on the financial oversight of colleges. She concluded her work in autumn 2019 at a time when many colleges were on an improving trajectory but she describes a system which is complex, backward-looking and not really focused on the key tasks.

“The Covid-19 crisis has stopped the financial improvement in its tracks, caused deficits in 2019-20 and opened up large financial problems for colleges in 2020-21.

“Government and colleges should take her recommendations seriously and work out which of them still make sense nine months on. We do not agree with the suggestion that Ofsted should join the long line of regulators assessing college financial health but we do think that the existing arrangements require improvement.”

You can read the government’s response to the Ney report here.

The apprenticeship funding rules for the 2020/21 academic year have finally been published by the Education and Skills Funding Agency.

They outline eligibility rules for the new employer incentives, which were revealed by the agency yesterday, and include the latest details on temporary flexibilities that are available in response to the Covid-19 outbreak.

You can view all of the changes made since the 2019/20 rules here.

As ever, there are three sets of funding rules – one for employers, another for employer-providers, and another for main providers. Links to the relevant rules are below:

Employers

Employer-providers

Main providers