Our bread and butter, as thriving knowledge-based organisations, are about serving the qualifications and assessment needs of thousands of learners and apprentices in both the UK and overseas.
Without general qualifications, such as GCSEs and A-Levels, young people and adults would struggle to progress in their lives. And without applied generals, apprenticeships, vocational awards and other types of work-based end-point assessments, whole sectors of the economy would grind to halt. In short, our work is all about providing the supply of occupationally competent people for a complex workforce.
We have been working in lockstep with the key statutory agencies
A shut-down of the active labour market is what is now unfolding.
Which is why this is such an unprecedented crisis. It has huge ramifications for the entire education and skills sector. Even during the Blitz the government managed to keep the schools open. People went to work. In the long history of national summer examinations, the government has never felt the compulsion to cancel them.
Since the crisis of Covid-19 first broke, the Federation of Awarding Bodies has been forced into non-stop contingency planning mode. Every single aspect of the AO and EPAO ecosystem is being ripped up as we think about mitigating ways in which we can keep the show on the road.
This is proving very difficult. Our industry is renowned for being both high-tech and high-touch. People –learners and employers – are at the heart of everything we do.
I’m proud of the way our industry has stepped up to the challenge.
The CEOs of awarding bodies and EPAOs have dropped everything to help guide government officials with understanding the front-line impact of coronavirus. FAB and many of my colleagues have been working in lockstep with the key statutory agencies to produce comprehensive guidance on everything from special dispensations for learners who are forced to take a break in their apprenticeships, to how to conduct a valid end-point assessment remotely.
We have set up a Covid-19 web page with a dedicated webinar
People working in the sector are looking to their peak-level representative bodies like never before
to represent and support them. At FAB we have set up a dedicated COVID-19 web page for AOs and EPAOs to access all the up-to-date information they will need. This will include dedicated webinar and linking all responsible officers with FAB, via WhatsApp.
We are bringing forward our pre-existing plans of becoming a best-in-class digital trade association by moving all of our training programmes and events online over the coming weeks. As a virtual organisation our staff already work mainly from home. We’ve invested in smart teleworking technology like HiHi2, which gives us a streamlined and integrated way of communicating across our business.
It also means we can do some morale boosting things like coffee catch-ups on video and sharing stories about a menagerie of pets (mainly cats).
As the total lock-down of our society looms, now, more than ever, is the time to promote a real sense of community and to be there for one another.
We owe our staff, students and other stakeholders good leadership – but remember to show a human face as well
If there’s one word that sums up the challenge facing educational institutions in the current environment it’s uncertainty. There’s a lot of it around and a lack of clarity makes it hard to know what is the best action to take.
At this time, the most important thing that will reduce uncertainty is good communication. Students, parents, staff and other stakeholders are looking for leadership from your institution on how the emerging situation affects them.
More importantly, they want a human response. Think about those with concerns or who will be anxious, or disappointed. How does the 15-year-old teenager feel when they realise they have unwittingly left school for the last time?
In my work across different education sectors (primary, secondary, FE and HE), I’ve been offering support and developing plans for this situation over a few weeks now. The following are my five key steps to help your communications reduce uncertainty.
1. Be clear and truthful
Choose your words carefully People need to hear a clear message, using a few carefully chosen words. For example, state that your site, campus or office is closed to everyone for the foreseeable future. Detail any exceptions, provide contact details and explain alternative ways that support or services can be accessed.
The purpose is to avoid students or staff turning up in person. Consider how humiliating it would be for already anxious students to arrive at a locked building because they didn’t understand the clever phrase you’d come up with.
Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger was genius at this. You’ll remember he was the pilot who landed his Airbus A320 in New York’s Hudson River. His message to 155 passengers was clear and simple: “This is the Captain. Brace for impact.”
Explaining this choice of words in a Tweet, he said: “I wanted to sound confident because I knew courage can be contagious. In our aviation vocabulary there are certain single words that are rich with meaning. ‘Brace’ is such a word. And I chose the word ‘impact’ to give passengers and crew alike a vivid image of what to expect.”
2. Be accessible, be visible
The worst thing that an institution can do is to appear to be hiding from those who need support. You may not be able to resolve all of their concerns, but by being accessible and visible, you provide a human contact, which in itself is reassuring. That may be through email or other digital channels, answering the phone or in person. Take the time to listen to concerns, show empathy and ensure those you talk with feel informed and involved.
3. Keep communicating
Planned, regular communication is really important. Let your stakeholders know what information they can expect and when. Include a date and time when publishing or circulating information. Things are changing rapidly so share up-to-date information, and ensure anyone reading it knows when it was updated.
Your choice of communication channels (email, text, Messenger, social media, website, telephone or post) should depend on your audience. Don’t make assumptions. According to the UK Office of National Statistics one in eight 11-18 year olds can only access the internet at home using a mobile phone – and a large number of others have no way of getting online at home.
4. Keep yourself and others updated
Curate relevant information for your audiences. Bournemouth & Poole College does this with a dedicated COVID-19 page on its website. It provides links to official government and health websites plus FAQs for complex information. Chunking information into easily digestible segments makes relevant information quick and easy to find.
5. Keep the media close
Understandably, COVID-19 is currently the only story in town and journalists are looking for every angle to cover it.
Check that emails or texts couldn’t be misconstrued if leaked to the media.
Watch out for potential disgruntled parents or students, as the press like such stories.
Remind staff of who to contact should there be any media enquiries and of relevant policies on media relations.
Engage positively (when possible) if contacted by the media – they can be valuable when you’re trying to engage your community
FE Week meets a principal whose career has been defined by quiet consistency, and who has a few parting words for the sector’s leaders
It was a college principal who suggested I go and interview John Clarke, the retiring boss at Southport College in Merseyside and FE career veteran of 35 years. I’d asked for suggestions for interviewees, prompting the tongue-in-cheek response that Clarke was “worth celebrating” since he’d managed to “leave FE without a scandal – how many can say that?”, winky emoji face, etc. I was intrigued.
Speaking to Clarke, who confesses to keeping his “head below the parapet” during his career, it becomes clear why his record is both well-respected and super-clean – the man strikes you as especially modest. Despite years on leadership teams, there’s not a whiff of authoritarianism about him and, as it turns out, a dislike of overly hierarchical and rule-bound environments is a defining part of his personal character and professional motivation. In fact, an aversion to the same almost kept him out of FE altogether.
1st year at Watford Grammar School, 1966
It was 1981 and Clarke was doing well. He’d just completed a PGCE specialising in adult literacy at the University of Leicester after three years as a community arts worker in Liverpool. But Clarke’s trainee experience in colleges, following the creative, grassroots engagement he was used to, left him cold. “I decided I’d never work in an FE college in my life. They were too stuffy, too bureaucratic. The staff room was dominated by filing cabinets and people didn’t seem to speak to each other. The culture put me off. I swore I wouldn’t.” He quickly follows this up by saying that perception was probably his own fault, being young and unused to paperwork. But on one point he remains firm. “It was massively overregulated.”
Clarke himself had had a fairly free existence, born in Ripon in Yorkshire to a father in the RAF, before settling with his parents and younger sister in north London. His father re-trained as a civil servant and his mother was a housewife. “I grew up in a settled, middle-class existence.” A clear memory sticks out from primary school. “One day we were escorted to the gym but I don’t think we were told what we were doing. We took a test and I think we might have been the last year that did the 11-plus.”
At first the young Clarke didn’t find friends at Watford Grammar School For Boys, which he describes as “setting itself up like a public school” with the teachers all in gowns. But by sixth form he was enjoying himself and won a place to read history at Churchill College, Cambridge – a college set up to take in state-educated children. “I was overawed that I was mixing with a lot of people from public school. What struck me was their confidence in themselves.”
It was there that he heard about a scheme in Liverpool working with disadvantaged young people and adults. On his final day at Cambridge, Clarke didn’t look back.
“Community development was recognised as a profession. That has gone by the board now”
“It was almost literally the day after I graduated. I didn’t go home. I got on the coach up to Liverpool.” He had a job in arts engagement on the local authority’s “community council”, a long-gone late-70s Labour Party initiative. “It was when community development was still recognised as a profession. All that has gone by the board now.”
Clarke’s speech picks up speed as he describes with quiet passion the three years he says had a “massive influence on me, in terms of my thinking in further education”. Nearby Toxteth had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and riots broke out shortly after Clarke left. “I’d studied history and sociology, and I arrived on this estate where virtually no one had gone to university. But I very quickly realised I was mixing with people as intelligent and able as the students I’d mixed with at university and from public schools. That sounds like a strange thing to realise, as obviously I understood the concept of disadvantage, but it was such a stark thing.”
Trying to provide better opportunities has driven Clarke ever since, using the style he learnt on the community council – “engage and involve people, allow them to shape some of what they’re doing”.
Pictured with Swedish partner(s) in an educational transnational European project led by Bolton Community Educational Service, 1996
Still he stayed away from colleges, doing his PGCE but becoming an area youth worker in Oxford for four years, instead of becoming a lecturer. Eventually, he inched a bit closer to them. He took a job running a community education centre at Bolton College in Greater Manchester – almost, but not fully, inside the machinery of the FE sector. “It was a halfway house,” he laughs. “One of the big motivating factors for people, if you leave aside monetary rewards, is having control over what you do and freedom to take responsibility. Because I was working at the community end of things at Bolton, I did have some freedom, so that was good.”
Then incorporation of further education colleges arrived in 1993. Bolton College was removed from the local authority but councillors weren’t keen to lose the community education centre. “The council was very proud of it, and they decided they didn’t want it to go with the college. We thrived in the 90s.” Clarke led on European projects looking at adult education abroad and also helped set up a higher education access course at his centre. Bolton College, meanwhile, “hit the financial buffers”. By the end of the decade David Collins, who later became the FE commissioner and was then head of South Cheshire College, was brought in to save the situation. The first of two significant mergers in Clarke’s life was about to begin.
“He had a plan to bring the local sixth-form college and community education into the FE college.” The sixth-form college never joined, but Clarke soon found himself on the top team at the college as quality manager and then director of adult and community services. “I suppose it was the two or three hardest years of my life, because you were trying to turn around a college with big problems. But it worked.” It also brought to an end a division Clarke had always had concerns about – the separation of adult education from 16-19 further education. They belong together, he says.
It is perhaps ironic that the college in which Clarke found the greatest inspiration was run by a hierarchical and brilliant leader, John Smith at Burnley College in Lancashire. Here, as assistant principal under Smith, rules took on their proper meaning for Clarke. “I had huge respect for John. Personality-wise he was very resolute, he took no prisoners, and he was hugely driven. It was very hierarchical in lots of ways, it was very structured. But ultimately his view was, you have to give people the freedom to move on from the structures so they have the space to implement their own ideas. He had a saying: ‘You can manage people to be good, but they have to want to become excellent’.”
Graduation from Cambridge University with BA Honours in History, 1977
It was Smith who encouraged Clarke to apply for principal at Southport College. He has led it for almost nine years, and is currently handing the reins over to new college principal, Michelle Brabner. The college’s most recent Ofsted came out this Wednesday, with glowing references in particular to the merger Clarke spearheaded with the local sixth-form provision, the King George V College. The report reveals Clarke’s steady hand: “managers have introduced a more rigorous approach”, “senior leaders have made significant progress”, and more. But Clarke clearly sees the overall ‘good’ grade, which both establishments had already, as a modest achievement. Twice he mentions that he regrets not taking the college to ‘outstanding’ for the community, like his most admired mentor. He notes without a sense of martyrdom the huge effort required by a merger: “It might be the right thing to do morally, educationally and business-wise, but it probably distracted us for a year.”
“More than schools and universities, we are subject to a plethora of regulation”
For someone who has achieved so much, and worked so hard for others, Clarke is seriously unboastful about those facts. He says he has changed his view from that held in his youth, when he was “naïve to think I could make a difference to whole communities – I’ve scaled that down to making a difference to individuals.”
But he holds one conviction which has only deepened throughout his years in FE. “We’re still a massively overregulated sector.” The other day Clarke’s finance manager worked out that there are about 24 funding streams for colleges to struggle with. He presses his point home to me. “More than schools and universities, we are subject to a plethora of regulation. Someone, somewhere, has to simplify the regulation in FE.”
The sector has been lucky to have this even-tempered (and scandal-free) person. Let’s hope ministers listen to his parting words.
The principal of a London college has been replaced by a retired further education leader ahead of an FE Commissioner visit.
Waltham Forest College has told FE Week Joy Kettyle stepped down with immediate effect in February after two years at the helm “due to personal circumstances”, and former Newham College principal Di Gowland (pictured) had replaced her on an interim basis.
This comes ahead of a diagnostic assessment by FE Commissioner Richard Atkins and after the college was placed in early intervention by the Education & Skills Funding Agency (ESFA).
In minutes from a board meeting held in November, Kettyle told governors intervention was triggered by its financial health being rated as ‘requires improvement’, but also by Waltham Forest’s cash position.
College accounts, which showed Waltham Forest generated a £482,000 deficit before tax in 2018-19, say it “remains at risk from adverse short-term cash movements” and its cash flow dropped by £274,000 from 2017-18, to £663,000.
Governors had been told at a meeting in October the health grade was under “significant pressure” and pay costs had been 5.2 per cent higher than budgeted due to increased partnership delivery and agency staff costs.
On top of that, the college had additional pay costs of around £228,000 to deliver growth in its ESFA 16-to-19 income. It also had to achieve unfunded income growth of £322,000, and so incurred additional pay costs there.
The college said it has not applied to the ESFA for emergency financial assistance and is not in administered college status. The accounts say Waltham Forest expects to return a financial health score of ‘good’ in 2019-20.
But Barclays Bank has agreed to provide the college with a temporary overdraft of £500,000 in March and April of this year, which is when the operating cash flow is expected to become “challenging” for many colleges, minutes show.
Last July, the grade two college was refused access to the Office for Students’ register of higher education on grounds of “quality”. The OfS said the number of higher education students progressing from their first to their second year of study showed the college had “failed to demonstrate that it delivers successful outcomes for all of its higher education students”.
She brings with her a strong commitment to continuous improvement in quality
According to the college’s latest accounts, none of their higher education students continued into 2019-20.
Under-recruitment of such students led to a shortfall in income from student loans for Waltham Forest, and this had to be met by increased income from high-needs learners and tuition fees.
Gowland said she is “delighted” to be supporting the college and is looking forward to working with the college and the staff while they seek a permanent principal.
She previously served as Newham College of Further Education’s principal from July 2014 to August 2017, after serving as vice principal of Westminster Kingsway, before retiring and setting up as an educational consultant. She is also a governor of the University of Arts London.
College chair Paul Butler said they had “selected Di because of her experience” and because “she brings with her a strong commitment to continuous improvement in quality”.
The college is “extremely pleased” she has chosen to join the college, he added.
Waltham Forest said it has started the recruitment process for a permanent principal.
Education secretary Gavin Williamson announced on Wednesday that schools and colleges will only stay open from Friday afternoon until further notice for vulnerable children and those of “key workers”.
The government has now released a list of who falls into these two categories (in full below).
Children of key workers who are aged up to and including 17 can still attend education providers, while vulnerable children goes up to the age of 25.
The guidance says that “many parents working in these sectors may be able to ensure their child is kept at home”, and that “every child who can be safely cared for at home should be”.
It has also been confirmed that children will be eligible to attend school and college even if just one parent or carer is identified as a “critical worker”.
Association of Colleges chief executive David Hughes said that for “many students of colleges, the right solution for them is to be at home, supported remotely, because that will reduce risks of contracting the virus”.
Vulnerable children:
Children who are “supported by social care, those with safeguarding and welfare needs, including child in need plans, on child protection plans, ‘looked after’ children, young carers, disabled children and those with education, health and care (EHC) plans”.
Key workers:
Health and social care
This includes but is not limited to doctors, nurses, midwives, paramedics, social workers, care workers, and other frontline health and social care staff including volunteers; the support and specialist staff required to maintain the UK’s health and social care sector; those working as part of the health and social care supply chain, including producers and distributers of medicines and medical and personal protective equipment.
Education and childcare
This includes nursery and teaching staff, social workers and those specialist education professionals who must remain active during the COVID-19 response to deliver this approach.
Key public services
This includes those essential to the running of the justice system, religious staff, charities and workers delivering key frontline services, those responsible for the management of the deceased, and journalists and broadcasters who are providing public service broadcasting.
Local and national government
This only includes those administrative occupations essential to the effective delivery of the COVID-19 response or delivering essential public services such as the payment of benefits, including in government agencies and arms length bodies.
Food and other necessary goods
This includes those involved in food production, processing, distribution, sale and delivery as well as those essential to the provision of other key goods (for example hygienic and veterinary medicines).
Public safety and national security
This includes police and support staff, Ministry of Defence civilians, contractor and armed forces personnel (those critical to the delivery of key defence and national security outputs and essential to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic), fire and rescue service employees (including support staff), National Crime Agency staff, those maintaining border security, prison and probation staff and other national security roles, including those overseas.
Transport
This includes those who will keep the air, water, road and rail passenger and freight transport modes operating during the COVID-19 response, including those working on transport systems through which supply chains pass.
Utilities, communication and financial services
This includes staff needed for essential financial services provision (including but not limited to workers in banks, building societies and financial market infrastructure), the oil, gas, electricity and water sectors (including sewerage), information technology and data infrastructure sector and primary industry supplies to continue during the COVID-19 response, as well as key staff working in the civil nuclear, chemicals, telecommunications (including but not limited to network operations, field engineering, call centre staff, IT and data infrastructure, 999 and 111 critical services), postal services and delivery, payments providers and waste disposal sectors.
The government said if workers think they fall within these “critical categories” they should “confirm with their employer that, based on their business continuity arrangements, their specific role is necessary for the continuation of this essential public service”.
A large college group in London is launching “Food Bank Friday” in an effort to combat food shortages for the most vulnerable people across the capital.
Panic shoppers in England have emptied supermarket shelves and hoarded goods amid the Covid-19 outbreak and food banks that rely on donations have been left struggling to stay open, according to reports.
In response, staff across London and South East Education Group’s 16 sites, which includes colleges and schools, will today (March 20) bring an item of food to be donated to local food banks.
It will be the last day that many of the group’s staff are in the classroom before it switches to mainly remote and digital teaching.
Chief executive Sam Parrett told FE Week that at this “very uncertain and difficult time, we want to support all our communities”.
“Coronavirus is already having a hugely negative economic and social impact across the region and it’s vital that we all pull together and help one another as much as possible,” she said.
“For this reason we are launching Food Bank Friday tomorrow. It will be the last day in the office or classroom for the majority of our staff and we are asking them to all bring an item or two to donate to local food banks, which are struggling with very limited donations at the moment.”
Parrett added that her group would “love to see” this initiative being replicated by other FE colleges and schools around the country.
“We all need a bit of positivity at the moment and one thing that has been wonderful to see across our organisation is the community spirit and willingness of people to help those less fortunate.”
UPDATE 20/03/20: The government has now publish key worker guidance here, a Q & A here and information for parents and carers here.
In an effort to win the war against Covid-19, colleges and schools will need to remain open on Monday for vulnerable children and the children of key workers.
But simultaneously open for some and closed for others for how long? Today the prime minister, Boris Johnson, talked of 12 weeks but admitted he “cannot stand here and tell you that by the end of June that we will be on a downward slope. It is possible but I simply cannot say that is for certain. Of course not. We don’t know where we are. We don’t know how long this thing will go on for.”
Summer exams have already been called off, so it seems highly likely the majority of learners will not return to college until September at the earliest.
College and school leaders are already wrestling with the unprecedented challenge of keeping the doors open for a minority of learners, but which ones?
Tomorrow, the government has promised to publish the types of young learners that must be catered for on campus as “vulnerable”. Looking at current ESFA definitions it seems highly likely this will include as a minimum all those aged 16 to 24 with an Education Health and Care (EHC) plan.
Less clear, is who will be defined by the government as key workers and whether their children would need to attend school or college if under the age of 18.
Again, the government promises answers tomorrow.
And keeping campuses open through the Easter and summer holiday will also come at a substantial cost.
As one ESFA official put it: “We recognise that colleges and other providers may incur additional costs as a result of responding to covid-19, for example where colleges open over the Easter holidays. We are looking to put in place a process for providing re-imbursement for those costs.”
Also being worked on is an “urgent package of financial mitigations for providers”.
In an email to a training provider today, one the ESFA official also said: “We recognise that there will be a substantial overall financial impact to colleges and other providers from covid-19 and that for some this will be rapid and severe.
“We are seeking to put in place a range of measures looking at both flexibilities around funding and processes for emergency funding and intend to set out further details shortly.”
And tonight the skills minister, Gillian Keegan, told FE Week: “We are continuing to work closely with the sector to work through a range of areas that have been raised in order to provide clarity and certainty.
“I would like to thank everyone for their continued support and cooperation during these challenging times and we will provide an update as soon as we possibly can.”
So, financial support is coming and those in the FE and skills sector will need to all work together to ensure that when it does, it makes the most positive difference.
England’s largest apprenticeship providers have told FE Week that starts are “falling off a cliff” and redundancies are likely to follow.
According to many of the providers we spoke to, they are becoming increasingly desperate for the government to provide information on what, if any, financial support they will receive in response to the coronavirus crisis.
Liz Bromley, the chief executive of one of England’s largest college groups, NCG, said announcements by education ministers that they expected providers to close their doors and move to online learning for most students after this week will “inevitably impact on our colleges’ apprenticeship delivery for an uncertain period into the future”.
“Across our colleges we are seeing recruitment of new starters stall, as many of our employer partners observe guidance on social distancing, and have concerns about their financial health.
“We have already seen a number of apprentices (four in 48 hours) being made redundant across the construction and event management sectors.”
All NCG’s face-to-face learning at its seven colleges has been transferred online for its students and apprentices, and they have put workplace assessment by in-house assessors on hold.
“There is no doubt that this will impact on apprentices’ timely completion of their programmes and may well significantly reduce our income over time.
So financial support “will be needed,” she continued, “to protect the capacity of providers into the future, to maintain the confidence of employers, and to enable the apprenticeship market to grow in strength again.”
A college on the south coast, which did not want to be identified, has said the impact on their apprenticeship provision had been “immediate” and they have “well over 100 potential starts at serious immediate threat”.
Other employers they work with, like those in the aviation supply chain, have been quick to act in pausing or even cancelling recruitment.
Private provider Qube Learning said while they had seen a reduction in new enrolments, by working closely with their employers to offer online solutions they had managed to limit the damage.
But, a spokesperson said, there needs to be “some sort of profile payment support measures put in place to help providers through this period of uncertainty”.
Another provider, which wished to stay anonymous, warned they would have to consider staff redundancies if learner numbers fall off as they predict they will, after around 200 took breaks in learning already.
They said “the clock is very much ticking” for government support for the sector, but even if the support is not yet coming, confirmation it is on its way would mean providers “can plan with a bit of certainty about the future”.
The warnings come after Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Mark Dawe called on the government to guarantee providers’ income from non-levy contracts, the European Social Fund, sub-contracts and adult education budgets, and for rules around that funding to be relaxed.
One provider reported that while they had yet to see employers pause their training programmes, small businesses had already, in effect, stopped paying their co-investment fee, which is what non-levy payers contribute towards training when they recruit an apprentice.
They added that even if government announced support measures, “it will probably be too late already for some redundancies to not happen, because the impact is already being felt during this month”.
They chastised the Department for Education and the Education and Skills Funding Agency for “remaining very quiet” and for “no real messaging going out”.
At the time FE Week went to press, the government had yet to publish any guidance on how providers will be funded and what help they will be receiving as the UK grapples with coronavirus.
A leading apprentice assessment organisation has told FE Week they are already experiencing “significant cancellations” following the coronavirus outbreak.
A spokesperson for Highfield Group, one of the busiest end-point assessment organisations (EPAO) that is approved for 38 apprenticeship standards, said the cancellations were mainly as a result of employers restricting site access to visitors, as well as apprentices being redirected to frontline activities during the current situation.
Mark Dawe, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, claimed that “a significant proportion” of EPAs would not happen without dropping face-to-face assessments, and said that there had been thousands of cancellations already, in a letter to members on Thursday.
He called on the government to drop end-point observations and replace them with “a remote professional discussion” to allow apprentices to achieve their programme.
While some assessments can and are being conducted online and remotely, some have warned that this will not be possible in many cases.
At the time of going to press an announcement on apprenticeship assessment flexibilities appeared imminent.
The FE and skills minister Gillian Keegan told FE Week: “We are continuing to work closely with the sector to work through a range of areas that have been raised in order to provide clarity and certainty.
“I would like to thank everyone for their continued support and cooperation during these challenging times and we will provide an update as soon as we possibly can.”
FE Week spoke to a number of EPAOs to find out what impact the pandemic has already been having.
Charlotte Bosworth, managing director of Innovate Awarding, which is approved for 39 different standards, told FE Week 80 per cent of their planned assessments had been cancelled this week.
She said remote assessment was proving “very difficult” in many cases and called for the announcement of a similar policy on apprenticeship exams as there has been on GCSEs and A-levels, where planned summer exams will no longer be going ahead but students will still receive their qualifications.
“Learners who have demonstrated sufficient competence through the knowledge, skills and behaviour during the programme, and are able to successfully complete their gateway conversations, should be put forward to EPAOs who would ratify this decision through professional discussions on the telephone,” Bosworth continued.
Jamie Holland, EPA commercial and planning manager at City & Guilds, said the organisation had experienced “minimal changes” to the way it works with EPAs at this point in time.
“However, we do expect this to change over coming weeks, with more EPAs to be completed remotely and some potential cancellations,” he added.
Holland stated that “many” of the more than 50 standards for which City & Guilds completes EPAs have on-line functionality already. But he also acknowledged that many other standards would not be able to operate observations remotely.
“In these challenging times, we would hope that IfATE would be able to allow all parties to utilise professional discussions in the place of technical observations, so that the knowledge, skills and behaviours are still assessed, albeit through an alternative method to that stated in the assessment plan.”
Similarly, a spokesperson for NCFE claimed employers and providers had not wanted to cancel EPAs over the last two weeks.
But in anticipation of cancellations, the EPAO has been expanding digital assessment options and implementing options which could be undertaken from apprentices’ home environments, in attempts to keep EPAs on track.
The spokesperson added: “We are currently in discussions with the DfE, IfATE, Ofqual and other regulators to identify a viable suitable alternative to face-to-face observation, which is the only assessment method we are currently unable to offer.
“We have proposed a number of options to our regulators which would allow apprentices to complete all components of their assessment.”
A spokesperson for the Institute of Apprenticeships and Technical Education told FE Week: “We are working on a package of measures with the Department that will assist providers, EPAOs to respond to these exceptional new circumstances, while protecting the interests of apprentices and maintaining quality.”
College accounts, which showed Waltham Forest generated a £482,000 deficit before tax in 2018-19, say it “remains at risk from adverse short-term cash movements” and its cash flow dropped by £274,000 from 2017-18, to £663,000.