A high-profile QC has worked with solicitors to write to the apprenticeships minister, Gillian Keegan, arguing that the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s provider relief scheme is “unlawful”.

James Goudie QC, a senior silk at 11KBW, as well as a deputy High Court judge and a master of the bench of the Inner Temple, was instructed by the law firm VWV to help present the case in a letter on behalf of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers.

The letter from VWV, dated April 27 and shared with the media, comes after the ESFA excluded the majority of apprenticeship provision from the relief scheme launched last Friday on the basis it was not covered by the Cabinet Office’s coronavirus policy notice PPN 02/20.

Keegan had told MPs that where apprentices are recorded on the government’s digital system, the contractual relationship is between the employer and the provider, rather than the government.

The lawyers counter this argument, stating that “this is comprehensively wrong in at least three respects”.

“First, the source of funding is simply irrelevant. Second, there is a contractual relationship for the provision of apprenticeship services. Third, there is more than one contractual relationship and it is important to focus on the right one.”

Goudie goes on to explain that the “scope” of the Cabinet Office guidance states that it “covers goods, services and works contracts being delivered in the UK” – which all apprenticeship providers fall under.

“These are public service contracts, by way of duly procured framework agreements and all providers had to go through an application process with the ESFA to pass quality and financial thresholds to be admitted on to the Register of Apprenticeship Training Providers,” Goudie said.

“Our clients are calling for no more, and no less, than the straightforward application to their situation of straightforward guidance.”

His letter states that the AELP’s case is that apprenticeships funded through the digital system have a “plain and obvious entitlement by way of legitimate expectation to supplier relief under the guidance” and it is “unclear on what the failure to pay is based”.

The failure not to provide supplier relief, if persisted in, will be “unlawful”, it continues.

“This is on each of two broad grounds. First, the failure is not in accordance with, but is contrary to, the guidance. Second, it is discriminatory.”

It goes on to list a number of aspects of the DfE’s decision that “display a multiplicity of legal errors” including that failure to comply with Cabinet Office guidance is an “abuse of power”.

The letter concludes: “We understand that you are conducting a review. We trust that the threatened injustice will speedily be removed.”

A DfE spokesperson confirmed they have received the letter from the AELP and “we will respond in due course”.

There are 1,624 main and employer providers on the register of apprenticeship training providers currently, of which 593 have non-levy allocations this year, amounting to £690 million.

That means there are 1,031 providers that only have access to levy funding, and are therefore not eligible for the supplier relief.

The DfE has also confirmed that non-levy apprenticeships funded via an employer transfer or that have recently transitioned on to the government’s digital system will not be eligible for supplier relief.

FE Week analysis shows that of the 198,632 apprenticeship starts in the first six months of 2019-20, around two-thirds of the provision would be ineligible for supplier relief.

The provider with the largest number of starts in that period was Lifetime Training.

FE Week analysis shows that of their 10,000 recruits, more than 90 per cent were funded through the government’s digital system and are therefore ineligible.

Lifetime’s chief executive, Alex Khan, told this newspaper they will not be applying for the financial support as a result.

But Khan is not expecting the lack of additional help to have a big impact on his business, as it may do for others.

“Whilst the government furlough scheme is in place the main cost burden for Lifetime can be managed. However, it is worth noting that we do not have many training facilities or academies that we are exposed to funding whilst they are vacant,” he said.

“This is not true, however, for large portions of the sector, where the financial exposure to such indirect costs will make things incredibly difficult.”

The dramatic impact of the coronavirus crisis on apprentice recruitment is laid bare for the first time in a survey of over 300 providers.

Responding to an FE Week request for data on the last day of April, 304 providers said they had between them planned 13,732 starts in the month but only achieved 2,693, missing their pre-coronavirus expectations by 80 per cent.

And 137 of the providers that responded, whilst planning 3,756 starts in the month, said they had not been able to start a single apprentice.

The findings will come as a concern to the apprenticeships minister, Gillian Keegan, who earlier in the week had said her “biggest worry is the recruitment of new apprentices”.

On an FE Week webcast Keegan said the ESFA would be receiving data on starts in early May “so we’ll have a couple of weeks probably to look at that and analyse it”.

She acknowledged that “potentially businesses and others are not going to have this top of mind right now” but was concerned about “how to keep the whole pipeline going with all this uncertainty”.

Many providers spoke openly about the impact on recruitment this month, with employers hit by the lockdown and focused on little else other than survival.

Grant Glendinning, principal at Carlisle College, said they had no starts in April, despite originally planning for 180, covering construction, engineering, motor vehicle mechanics, accounting, business administration and health and social care.

He told FE Week: “There is huge disruption to the apprenticeship ‘supply chain’ currently. Employers are in survival mode, and there is little capacity for them to focus on training over business continuity.”

Lee Acton, chief executive at Skillnet Limited, planned 120 automotive starts in April but in reality there were none “as in the main they would have no members of staff to mentor them as they are either furloughed or working flat out to deal with existing business”.

Other providers continue to start apprentices, but far fewer than planned.

HIT Training, one of the largest training providers in the country, had 102 starts out of 700, representing just 15 per cent of the plan. Managing director, Jill Whittaker, said: “80 per cent of the hospitality sector is on furlough, and the care sector is either closed (early years) or extremely busy (healthcare and adult care).”

But not all providers have seen reductions.

Jo Phillips, apprentice operations manager at Staffordshire University, said all 34 starts on police-related apprenticeships that had been planned did take place in April.

Responses to the survey suggested the ability to continue to start apprentices was highly dependent on the industry.

In the case of Capital City College Training, with 27 starts out of a planned 100, their managing director, Jackie Chapman, said they haven’t recruited the planned starts in healthcare, construction and catering but they did go ahead in project management, pharmacy and management.

The provider feedback also suggested that where starts are still taking place, they were typically from public sector organisations.

One respondent from a large apprenticeship provider with 200 out of a planned 400 starts in April said: “The impact is almost a clear split between public and private sector. The public sector has shown significant growth in comparison to normal months.

“Whereas, as a provider, we traditionally see 10 to 15 per cent of total starts being from the public sector, April has seen this jump to almost 60 per cent. Even this number in comparison to a ‘standard’ month is showing comfortable growth. This has been heavily driven by cohort level starts in central government departments.”

Keegan was keen to point out earlier this week that it was important to make sure “everybody is aware that furloughed employees can start apprenticeships”.

September is the “peak” month for recruitment, she said, so “we really need to stay close to this over the next few months to really do the best job we can”.

A cross-party group of MPs is fighting to save a land-based college they fear could be closed following the launch of an FE Commissioner review of its provision.

Conservative MP Neil Hudson, who represents Penrith and the Border in Cumbria, has been joined by other local members of parliament, including former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron and former education select committee member Trudy Harrison in an attempt to preserve Newton Rigg College.

FE Commissioner Richard Atkins has been ordered to review the provider by its parent college.

Askham Bryan College, based 100 miles away in York, took over the running of Newton Rigg from the University of Cumbria in 2011.

While Askham Bryan has remained tight-lipped on the reasons behind the review, Hudson told FE Week it is “looking at how the needs of the students can be supported and what provision is required locally and what alternative options are required for delivery”.

The governing body will consider the findings and decide what further action is needed

The worry for the community and himself is “what does this mean for the long-term future of the college?”. His understanding was that the review would look at whether its provision could be run elsewhere.

Because of that, he decided to launch a campaign to secure that future and seek support from like-minded stakeholders to discuss “viable future plans for the college”, which they can present to Atkins and the Department for Education.

Hudson is currently running a petition for people to show their support for Newton Rigg College, which he said has been signed by over 900 people at the time of writing.

He said the college, which is over a century old, had a “tremendous” heritage and is “unique” in the county for specialising in land-based sectors.

Newton Rigg offers apprenticeships between levels 2 and 4, as well as a number of short courses, in a range of land-based disciplines, including agriculture, arboriculture and animal and vet nursing.

Just eight months ago, plans were being drawn up for a new state-of-the-art “high tech” centre for the college, after a £2.4 million dairy unit was opened there in 2014, followed by a £450,000 sheep husbandry centre in 2017.

Hudson said the Covid-19 crisis had put into “sharp relief the importance of training people up to go into the land-based economy” as the pandemic highlighted the importance of both food security and “good supplies of locally provided food”.

The FE Commissioner was invited to carry out the review in December, according to the Department for Education, and when it is finished, the findings will be given to the college, who will have discretion on when to publish it.

Askham Bryan principal Tim Whitaker said it was “an independent review of educational provision”, anticipated to conclude in May.

“The governing body will consider the findings and decide what further action is needed,” he said, adding:

“All courses at Newton Rigg campus are continuing as planned for this academic year, 2019-20.”

The college declined to comment on why it had commissioned the review.

Were Newton Rigg to close, the nearest FE college would be Carlisle College – which is over an hour away on public transport.

Hudson’s petition can be found here.

He is not the first MP to stand up publicly in recent months for under-threat local campuses.

In February, Conservative MP for Rother Valley, Alexander Stafford, organised a meeting with Atkins over plans by the RNN Group to shut its “under-utilised” campus in Dinnington, South Yorkshire.

After Cornwall College Group announced plans at the start of the year to sell off its Saltash campus in her constituency, Conservative MP Sheryll Murray called for an investigation into how the group used a £30 million government bailout the year before.

And former Conservative MP and minister Margot James held a debate in parliament last October to raise her concerns with minister Michelle Donelan over the sale by BMet of Stourbridge College, in her constituency.

Meanwhile, Labour MP Mike Amesbury has called on Warrington & Vale Royal College principal Nichola Newton to stand down over plans to sell off the college’s Hartford campus, telling FE Week last month that a “more concerted effort” should have been made by the college to develop “a good FE offer” at the campus.

The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education has today launched a new apprentice satisfaction survey.

It comes a week after the Department for Education scrapped this year’s FE Choices learner satisfaction survey, which included apprentices, on the basis to do so would “reduce the impact and burden on the public during this [coronavirus] crisis”.

The IfATE’s online survey will be run by its panel of apprentices, which has recently recruited 20 new members.

Questions will focus on the duration and quality of training apprentices across the country are receiving as well as their end-point assessment experience.

They will also be asked for the average percentage of their working hours spent doing off-the-job training.

It will also ask apprentices for comments on the impact that Covid-19 is having on their learning.

Jennifer Coupland, chief executive of the IfATE, said: “I’m delighted that this new survey will help us to gather more information and feedback from apprentices than we have ever done before.”

She added that she would like to “welcome” the institute’s new apprentice panel members, who have joined six existing members staying on for a second year.

“They will play an important role in providing the institute, along with employers who help us develop new apprenticeships, with invaluable insight into the experiences of the people who matter most – the apprentices themselves,” Coupland said.

“This is more important than ever in these challenging times.”

The institute said each apprentice panel member has been tasked with supporting “apprenticeship standards related to their own apprenticeship, grouped into different ‘occupational routes’”.

They report to institute-run groups of employers who make decisions over the future of apprenticeships, known as “route panels”, as well as the IfATE’s board.

The apprentice satisfaction survey will close on 29 May. It can be viewed here:  https://www.cognitoforms.com/InstituteForApprenticeships1/apprenticeshippanelsurvey.

The members of the IfATE’s panel of apprentices:

Amber Storey, Historic Environment Advice Assistant (level 4)

Joel Roach, Chartered Manager Degree (level 6)

Saarah Zaman, HR Consultant (level 5)

Luke Grayston, Joiner (level 2)

Jade Jones, Digital Marketer (level 4)

Jamilah Simpson, (former) Digital Marketer (level 3)

Marcus Kaye, Data Analyst (level 4)

Ekansh Sharma, Digital and technology solutions (level 6)

Amelia Russell, Business Administrator (Level 3)

Dillon Jones, Installation Electrician/ Maintenance Electrician (Level 3)

Raisa Matadar, Engineering Technician (Level 3)

Zuza Wnekowska, Aerospace engineer (level 6)

Louis Curtis, Mineral Products Technology Higher Apprenticeship (Level 5)

Leon Jacobs, Manufacturing Engineer (level 6)

Kat Pricos, Food Industry Technical Degree (Level 6)

Benjamin McKenna, Science Electrical Engineering Technician (level 5)

John Alfred, Hair Professional (Level 2)

Jacqueline Kankam-Hoppe, Advanced and Creative Hair Professional (Level 3)

Nikki Greaves, Laboratory scientist (Level 5)

Sam Davies, Laboratory Technician (Level 3)

Angela Hogg, Digital Technology Solutions Specialist (Level 6)

Samantha Ross, Solicitor (Level 7)

Ricardo Costa, Commercial Procurement and Supply (Level 4)

Molly Parnham, Junior Management Consultant (level 4)

David John, Bus and Coach engineering technician (Level 3)

Joel Shevlin, Transport Planning Technician (level 3)

 

The deadline for providers to submit bids for supplier relief from the Education and Skills Funding Agency has been extended.

The application process launched last Friday and the closing date had been set for today, but this has now been changed to midnight on Sunday 3 May.

We have extended the deadline to submit applications to the Provider Relief Scheme. Eligible providers now have until midnight Sunday 3 May to request support.

We have done this as a result of feedback from training providers and look forward to receiving your applications.

— ESFA (@ESFAgov) April 30, 2020

Our full story on who is eligible for the financial support can be read here.

The Department for Education appears to have backtracked on a decision to scrap monthly apprenticeship data releases by now committing to “replace” and “repurpose” them.

In a controversial announcement on Tuesday described by one sector leader as “staggering”, the department said it would “cancel all in year further education and apprenticeship releases” from May until further notice due to the coronavirus pandemic. They added that they would still publish the end of year releases normally in November.

But in their apprenticeship stats to include the month of February published this morning, the DfE said it would now be “replacing the remaining in-year dates” to “enable us to provide release(s) with more relevant information to cover the period affected by the pandemic”.

They “intend to make headline statistics” such as apprenticeship starts available on a “regular basis, and to similar timescales to those currently, but we intend to repurpose our releases to focus on the most relevant information available”.

The publication explained that the current releases and measures “may now provide very little value and/or may be misleading given how the pandemic will have impacted on both apprenticeship training and provider reporting from March”.

“While collections remain open we have no way to quantify how robust any reporting by providers will be during the period affected by the pandemic,” it said.

“Where there are updates they may well be small corrections to pre lockdown periods. Therefore, given the expected large drop in starts from March, comparing a participation measure in say the third quarter of 2019/20 to this point in 2018/19 would offer no meaningful insight to activity in the third quarter.”

It continued: “While we expect to include some headline summary we wish to repurpose our releases to focus on the most useful and relevant measures and comparisons.

“We are therefore consulting users on this and seek your feedback on key data needs in terms of the regularity of data needed and also the type of breakdowns users would find most useful, e.g. similar to those we currently publish such national apprenticeship starts by age, level and individual framework/standard etc, so we can consider going forward and in light of continued data quality assessments.”

The apparent U-turn will be welcomed by many in the sector, including Mark Dawe, the chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, who described the DfE’s original decision as “staggering”.

Labour’s new apprenticeships and skills minister Toby Perkins said earlier this week that scrapping the monthly releases would be “alarming”.

Following today’s announcement, he tweeted: “I very much welcome DfE’s decision to reverse their previous edict about not publishing apprenticeship data.

“Hiding data that points to problems is no way to tackle them, and glad that government have realised that.”

I very much welcome @educationgovuk decision to reverse their previous edict about not publishing apprenticeship data.
Hiding data that points to problems is no way to tackle them, and glad that Government have realised that. https://t.co/xDlDSqKhZ4

— Toby Perkins (@tobyperkinsmp) April 30, 2020

Government plans to axe the controversial MBA qualification from the level 7 senior leader apprenticeship have been put on hold.

The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) has revealed the move will not happen until at least November, possibly even 2021.

It was set for the chop after education secretary Gavin Williamson requested a review of the popular programme, worth up to £18,000 per apprentice, as he was “unconvinced” it provides value for money.

A revised level 7 senior leader standard that excludes the MBA was drawn up by its trailblazer group earlier this month and has been consulted on.

But in a blog post this week, the IfATE’s senior relationships manager for standards development, Sally Timmins, said that due to Covid-19, they have agreed an “update to the envisaged development timeline to project when the revised apprenticeship standard could be approved for delivery if it got through the institute’s approval process without any problems”.

“We have agreed separate submission dates for the standard and the end-point assessment plan/costings which now means a final approval date of end November/early December,” she added.

“Consideration will also need to be given as to whether a notice period needs to be given between its approval and final implementation.”

As previously reported, the IfATE ordered the trailblazer group of the level 7 senior leader apprenticeship to remove the MBA from programme as it would no longer “meet the intent of our policy on mandated qualifications”.

However, the institute has since confirmed to FE Week that providers would still be allowed to offer the MBA as a non-mandatory qualification, though costs for qualification registration, certification and any training not directly related to the standard would not be fundable from the levy.

An employer could choose to pay these costs out of their own pocket to enable their apprentice to acquire the qualification in addition to passing the apprenticeship via the end-point assessment.

FE Week has spoken to a number of universities that have said they intend to continue offering the MBA in the apprenticeship after it is scrapped as a mandatory qualification.

The IfATE previously told FE Week that as the changes to the occupational standard and end-point assessment plan are likely to be significant, they expect to change the funding band, which currently sits at £18,000.

The level 7 senior leader apprenticeship has proven extremely popular since its launch in February 2018. FE Week analysis shows it had 6,387 starts on the programme up to the first quarter of 2019-20, worth up to £115 million.

Apprenticeship starts for the month of February 2020 fell 11 per cent on the previous year, figures published this morning show (see below).

The statisticians at the Department for Education said: “Apprenticeship starts reported to date have decreased to 198,600 from 214,200 in the first two quarters of 2018/19, a decrease of 7.3 per cent.”

They go on to say that of the 198,600 starts in the first half of this academic year, 64.9 per cent (128,900) were on the apprenticeship digital system and 74.3 per cent (147,600 starts) were on standards.

Reaction to the latest figures:

Gillian Keegan, minister for apprenticeships and skills, told FE Week: “The reforms introduced in 2017 mean apprenticeships are longer, more rigorous, and quality assessed by independent organisations. This has resulted in a slight decline in the number of starts, but we will continue to prioritise quality over quantity.

“While the impact of the coronavirus is still becoming clear, we are supporting employers, apprentices and training providers during this challenging time so people can continue to access high-quality apprenticeship opportunities. Apprenticeships are a valuable route into good quality employment and will play a vital role in securing our economic recovery, post-coronavirus.”

Mark Dawe, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers said: “These pre-pandemic figures are bad enough which is why the government should be getting round the table with us to discuss how covid-19 provider support measures should apply to all apprenticeships and not just to those offered by SMEs.

“New apprenticeship starts are falling off a cliff and the more time the government vacillates over the covid-19 guidance, the worse it’s going to get. Furthermore we must get full transparency in terms of publishing the starts data over the coming months because the statement the DfE made about this earlier this week was very alarming.”