Ofsted watch: A ‘reasonable week’ for new apprenticeship providers

It has been a mostly positive week for new apprenticeship providers according to Ofsted’s monitoring reports.

Together Training Ltd was praised for ‘significant progress’ in one of three areas, nine independent learning providers received ‘reasonable progress’ across the board and two providers were given ‘insufficient progress’.

The only employer provider graded by the education watchdog this week, HMRC, was found to have ‘reasonable progress’ in all three themes evaluated and the Elstree UTC was labelled ‘good’ in a full inspection.

Independent learning provider Dv8 Training was deemed to have made reasonable progress in the six themes assessed in a second re-inspection monitoring visit having been found to be inadequate in November 2018.

Dv8 Training, a Brighton based specialist college, had 157 learners aged 16 to 18 at the time of the inspection, the majority of which were studying level 2 and level 3 courses in media and music.

Managers at the creative college were praised for frequently reviewing learners’ education and inspectors noted learners with high needs, in which there were 32 in total, benefit from “appropriate support to ensure that their needs are met.”

It was reported that staff had made reasonable progress to set effective improvement targets, accurate monitoring of progress and measurement of impact on learners’ experiences and were “more confidently implementing the priorities” outlined.

Together Training Ltd, an advisory service by Oaklands College and West Herts College, was awarded significant progress in ensuring that effective safeguarding arrangements are in place, and reasonable progress in the other two themes assessed.

Inspectors reported that “staff and apprentices understand the potential local dangers that may affect them, and how to avoid them to stay safe.”

The eight other independent learning providers that received early monitoring reports this week scored reasonable progress across the board.

These were: Easi Hairdressing Academy Ltd, Global Skills Training Limited, J & E Training Consultants Limited, Juice Talent Development Limited, KS Training Ltd, Learning Innovations Training Team Ltd, London College of Business and Law Limited and Reach4Skills Training Limited.

Ofsted found employer provider HMRC made ‘reasonable progress’ areas across the three themes judged but criticised the tax office for keeping hundreds of apprentices on programme for the same duration.

It also reported that “managers and assessors do not use the outcomes of the assessment of apprentices’ starting points well enough to address gaps in knowledge, skills and behaviours.”

Moreover, the education watchdog found security firm EGS Nationwide Limited, which trains nearly 500 apprentices, and the London Design and Engineering University Technical College (LDE UTC) both made ‘insufficient progress’ across two themes following their early monitoring visits.

EGS Nationwide Limited, which works with G4S Care & Justice Services (UK) Ltd – itself branded ‘inadequate’ across the board in 2013, does “not take enough steps to ensure that the employer fulfils its obligation to apprentices.”

Moreover LDE UTC, the first university technical college to receive an early monitoring visit for its apprenticeship provision, also received heavy criticism from the inspectorate.

It can now expect to be suspended from recruiting apprentices after the two ‘insufficient progress’ scores in Ofsted’s report.

In contrast, the Elstree UTC, based in Hertfordshire, was awarded ‘good’ across the board in a report released this week following being graded ‘requires improvement’ in a previous inspection.

The UTC was praised for its “caring and supportive ethos,” which helps pupils who have missed schooling re-engage with meaningful learning.

The inspectorate found the UTC’s strengths lie in its specialisms, including production technology and production arts, and the provision of opportunities to work on creative projects and film and theatre events.

The report stated pupils have not achieved as well in English, mathematics and science but “the quality of education is improving.”

Independent Learning Providers Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
Dv8 Training (Brighton) Limited 25/09/2019 18/10/2019 M 4
Easi Hairdressing Academy Ltd 01/10/2019 16/10/2019 M N/A
EGS Nationwide Limited 26/09/2019 17/10/2019 M N/A
Global Skills Training Limited 26/09/2019 17/10/2019 M N/A
J & E Training Consultants Limited 26/09/2019 17/10/2019 M N/A
Juice Talent Development Limited 26/09/2019 15/10/2019 M N/A
K S Training Limited 04/10/2019 18/10/2019 M N/A
Learning Innovations Training Team Ltd 19/09/2019 17/10/2019 M 2
London College of Business and Law Limited 25/09/2019 15/10/2019 M N/A
London Design and Engineering UTC 20/09/2019 17/10/2019 M N/A
Reach4Skills Training Ltd 03/10/2019 17/10/2019 M N/A
Together Training Ltd 13/09/2019 18/10/2019 M N/A

 

Employer providers Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) 27/09/2019 14/10/2019 M N/A

 

Other (including UTCs) Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
The Elstree UTC 25/09/2019 18/10/2019 2 3

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: EDITION 293

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

Emily Giles, Trustee, Prisoners’ Education Trust

Start date: September 2019

Concurrent job: Policy and communications lead, Adfam UK

Interesting fact: She is currently researching the impact of austerity on reoffending for her Cambridge MSt in Criminology and Penology.

Dr Paul Phillips CBE, Trustee, Prisoners’ Education Trust

Start date: September 2019

Concurrent job: Principal, Weston College Group

Interesting fact: He was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to Further and Higher Education.

Vicki Morris, Trustee, Prisoners’ Education Trust

Start date: September 2019

Concurrent job: Deputy director, Centre for Justice Innovation

Interesting fact: She started her career as an English teacher in mainstream secondary education.

Richard Ward OBE, Trustee, Prisoners’ Education Trust

Start date: September 2019

Concurrent job: Formerly prison education policy lead, Ministry of Justice

Interesting fact: He is a school governor.

More UTCs to recruit from year 7 as trust softens stance on entry age

Two more university technical colleges have ditched their 14 to 19-year-old intakes to recruit from 11, with predictions that many more will follow.

UTCs in Plymouth and Wolverhampton have been granted permission to open to 11-year-olds from next September.

They join The Leigh UTC in Dartford, Kent, which opened a feeder school on its site in 2017.

Other UTCs are expected to follow suit.

Policy experts and ministers have long suggested the recruitment of younger students to solve the pupil recruitment crisis that has faced the UTC model since its inception.

But until recently the influential Baker Dearing Trust, which supports the colleges, has vehemently opposed a change in entry age.

However, Simon Connell, the trust’s new chief executive, told FE Week last month that it could be a “pragmatic solution” for colleges with low rolls.

A Baker Dearing Trust spokesperson said it expects “many more UTCs to apply to extend their age range in 2021”.

“Baker Dearing is supportive of UTCs wanting to do this where it is appropriate,” they added.

Plymouth UTC, which has struggled with recruitment and standards since it opened in 2013, is hoping the addition of year 7 and 8 learners will improve its fortunes.

The college already accepts year 9 students, but has only 150 pupils in total, although it has room for 650.

Polly Lovell, its principal, said that since joining the Reach South academy trust last year the UTC had been running taster sessions for year 4 and 5 pupils at nearby primary schools and has had “real interest from parents”.

She admits that recruitment at 13 or 14 is “not a natural transition”, especially in Plymouth where parents have a “quite traditional” approach to education, and said the move to recruit students at 11 “will definitely support our financial survival”.

“It’s a difficult sell to say ‘actually you’re going to move after you’ve made all your mates and got to know people in your year group’. Year 7 is much more of a natural move.”

Lovell said the UTC, which went into special measures in 2016 shortly after she took over, had been on “a really challenging journey”.

“It was a long, hard battle of changing pupils’ views of the UTC,” she said.

“We’ve changed the curriculum, the staffing, we’ve changed the uniform, the whole model really.”

In Wolverhampton, recruitment at the West Midlands UTC was already starting to improve after Ofsted rated it ‘good’ with some ‘outstanding’ features last June.

However, it is still only one-third full.

Av Gill, West Midlands’ principal, said he wanted to extend the UTC so that more students could benefit from its offer.

The struggle to recruit at upper ages was not his “main rationale”.

However, he acknowledged his student numbers would “definitely be healthier moving forward” as a result.

“We were actually already seeing a pickup without [recruiting at year 7], probably because we had the Ofsted. I was expecting an uplift anyway, and slowly I felt that would feed through.”

Both UTCs will require some changes in order to accept year 7s.

Plymouth UTC has the space, but Lovell acknowledges she will have to make timetable changes and recruit more staff with key stage 3 experience.

There are also plans to build a new games area, and a nearby mothballed building can be brought into use if numbers explode.

West Midlands UTC will need new buildings, Gill admits, but he said government funding would be available.

Providers risk handing back £38m in next 20 years if they quit T-levels

Colleges will have to keep on running T-levels for at least 20 years if they want to avoid handing back millions in capital funding.

A pot of £38 million has been made available to colleges and schools to help build new classrooms and refurbish buildings in readiness for the introduction of the new technical qualifications next year.

The Department for Education this week confirmed to FE Week that providers who win the funding risk having to hand it back if they stop offering T-levels within the next two decades.

“The terms of grant will require providers to use the premises funded for supporting the T-level curriculum for 20 years,” a spokesperson said.

“If a provider withdraws from T-level delivery, we reserve a right to recover any capital grant we have paid.”

Sixth Form Colleges Association chief executive Bill Watkin called this “a significant commitment” which sends out a clear message: investing in T-levels is a long-term strategy.

He said the capital grants are helping providers invest in dedicated teaching spaces and industry-standards kit which “will make a huge difference to schools and colleges’ ability to hit the ground running from September 2020”.

But, Watkin added, colleges will always be reviewing their curriculum to reflect student voices, shifting population profiles and a changing local economy: “Who knew, 20 years ago, that the Ebacc would be shaping student choices today, or that maths would be the most popular A-level, or that criminology would be booming?”

Deputy chief executive at the Association of Colleges Julian Gravatt said the clause was a “backstop” and his organisation was “confident T-levels are here to stay”.

But he added: “T-levels will only be suitable for a minority of college students so the DfE needs to get a move on and sort out its capital funding plans for the facilities used by the majority; the Post-18 review panel recommended a £1 billion three-year programme.”

Eleven colleges have been awarded a slice of the £38 million capital funding pot to date, with grade one Barnsley College the prime beneficiary so far, receiving £2.2 million.

There have been a number of changes with regard to which providers will be delivering the flagship new qualifications as the sector hurtles towards roll-out: it was announced this month Scarborough Sixth Form College was pulling out of offering the digital qualification in 2020.

At the time, Gavin Williamson, the secretary of state for education, welcomed the decision, which Scarborough cited as being “due to our geographical location, it is proving difficult to secure sufficient work placements”.

Furthermore, Big Creative Training and the London Design and Engineering UTC were removed from provision in February because T-levels “did not fit with the specialist nature” of the former and the UTC received a grade three from Ofsted.

Providers must have either a grade one or two from Ofsted, and ‘satisfactory’ financial health to deliver T-levels.

A school was removed from the programme for receiving an Ofsted grade three, while two others pulled out, in October.

But at the same time, Suffolk New College was added to the list of providers from 2020.

“We always expected there to be a certain amount of fluctuation of providers, and the pathways they offer, as we progress towards September 2020,” a DfE spokesperson said when Scarborough withdrew.

“However, we continue to have an excellent group of high-quality providers offering a variety of pathways across the country.”

Let’s work together to agree where the inappropriate spending line is drawn

Since FE Week successfully fought to reveal the £150,000 expenses by the principal at Highbury College, the sector reaction has been split.

One college principal told me: “The alcohol, lobster, executive transport, any form of first class travel. The list goes on. It’s inexcusable. It needed to be exposed.

“Signed off or not, it’s an inappropriate use of public funds. Particularly when you think the college is in difficulty.”

But they had been told: “Being vocal might be bad for my career.”

Another principal took a very different view and in the FE Week comments section wrote: “Very good journalism, factually accurate after dogged pursuit.”

But, they also said I was wrong in this editorial column to call for the principal to consider resigning as there was “no breach of rules” and “no suggestion of impropriety/malpractice and the college has confirmed it was all properly authorised”.

Highbury College governors did restrict the use of the corporate card and first class travel in May, but there remain other colleges that will, and have, defended a policy permitting the principal to travel first class at full price.

For a highly respected college principal to conclude “no breach of rules” and so defend the use of a college card on a cocktail-fuelled lobster dinner and £434 headphones should
concern everyone.

Why? Because the spending revelations, particularly the lobster, reached well beyond FE Week readership and made most of the national newspaper and has since been followed up by Private Eye.

And if FE Week had not exposed the spending, the national media would have simply lifted it from the Portsmouth News website.

So, if college principals cannot agree amongst themselves what is appropriate behaviour and expenditure, let’s try and agree through self-regulation.

And let’s move quickly, before the new FE college oversight minister, Lord Agnew, rewrites the rules and or Conditions of Funding Agreement between the Secretary of State and
colleges.

College leaders from across England should work together to agree, for example, if full cost first class travel is appropriate and as a minimum whether there should be greater transparency of expenditure.

A code of ethics, or ethics charter, could be drafted and then adopted.

This might include, for example, a commitment to publish the details of certain spending as a matter of course.

The media will always try to expose the inappropriate use of public funds – so let’s work together to agree where the line is drawn.

Principals interested in joining a task and finish group to develop such an ethics code or charter can get in touch with me at nick.linford@lsect.com

Thousands celebrate second ever Colleges Week

Thousands of students, staff and people who love colleges across the country signed pledge cards and handed them to their local MP to mark this year’s Colleges Week.

Members of Parliament were asked to commit to writing to the chancellor to ask him to include a long-term funding plan for colleges in the next comprehensive spending review, ask a question in the Commons about FE funding, and to go and “see the life changing work that colleges do every day”.

Now in its second year and organised by the Association of Colleges, the week of activity is part of the Love Our Colleges campaign. It is used to demonstrate why investment in the sector must be sustainable.

A march on parliament was the centre-piece of the inaugural campaign in 2018 and appeared to make a difference after the Treasury announced a £400 million funding boost in August.

Social media was where support for the campaign was most visible this year, with multiple ministers expressing their support, and colleges sharing their achievements.

On Monday, the Department for Education tweeted a video of education secretary Gavin Williamson from his visit to Exeter College the week before.

“It’s really important that we celebrate everything that’s done in our colleges,” he said.

“Not just about what the students are doing there, but of course also the teachers and the lecturers and all those who make our colleges such an amazing success.”

Many Twitter users responded to a call out to #makeasongFE.

Rhian Short, marketing and communications manager at the Learning and Work Institute, started the trend off with ‘Oh what a night school’.

Other suggestions included the reimaging of Robyn’s ‘Dancing on my (adult learning) loan,’ Stevie Wonder classic ‘Isn’t FE Lovely’ and the Spice Girls’ ‘2 Become 1’ being proposed in reference to area reviews.

Trade union UNISON also joined in the fun with an adaptation of Rage Against the Machine’s Christmas number one ‘Skilling In The Name Of.’

AoC chief executive David Hughes said: “Colleges Week 2019 has been another great example of colleges proudly showing the impact they have on our society.

“I’m really pleased with how the week has gone – following the hashtag alone has introduced me to hundreds of student stories, staff passionately describing the work they do, events with employers and students signing pledge cards.

“The key message behind the week is that colleges are vital to every community, to millions of people, to communities and to the labour market.

They need to be supported and invested in, and now that we have raised the profile I am sure that will happen.”

Profile: Charlotte Bosworth

Charlotte Bosworth is quite happy to be known as the “end-point assessment woman”. Jess Staufenberg meets the very determined champion of apprenticeships

The managing director of the small apprenticeship assessment body, Innovate Awarding, has the ear of the Department for Education. How? She has a history of turning up when no one tells her to, and it’s got her a long way.

Charlotte Bosworth’s extraordinary career begins from a council estate in the West Midlands to a top role at the examination board OCR, before joining Innovate more than two years ago to focus on apprenticeship assessment. Under her watch, revenue has increased fourfold and the number of permanent staff has more than tripled.

Her staff numbers are nothing of the size of the big assessment players such as Pearson, but apprenticeships are the name of the game for the DfE, and it knows it needs help. A chat with the bubbly Bosworth, 46, reveals that she is becoming its “end-point assessment woman” – and today she’s got straight-talking words for the department.

A determination to be taken seriously started young. A self-confessed “ginger geek”, at 10 she was already worried about her prospects at the local comprehensive in Coventry – so she decided to try for a selective school two bus rides away. “My family didn’t really have a large amount of money and educational ambition wasn’t a thing. But I’d gone to a library and read about this school. So I pushed myself so I could go.”

I didn’t want anyone to know I was the poor kid

Her parents couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to go to the local comp, but she was determined. She was interviewed and accepted at her chosen school and made the one-and-a-half hour journey there and back every day until she was 16. Many years later, when working on assessments for the same school, the same headteacher told her: “You are the only child we ever interviewed who arrived without their parents.”

A young Bosworth also realised she wouldn’t be able to join school skiing trips if she didn’t take things into her own hands. At13 she began working in a hardware store every Saturday. She saved her pay and was able to visit France with her fellow pupils. “I was desperate to go, I’d never been to another country. But I didn’t want anyone to know I was the poor kid. There was an element of not wanting to share that.” Her favourite subjects were English and drama, and she talks glowingly of a teacher, Mrs Chadwick, who “absolutely inspired me throughout”.

But Bosworth’s personal outlook has not become that of the fanatical grammar-school advocate who promotes a classical education. She is too aware of the pull for paid employment, which led her to eschew sixth form for secretarial training. “I wanted to earn money for some of the reasons I’ve laid out,” she says. And so she entered a “youth training scheme” that she jokingly calls “apprenticeships for old people”.

Placed in a law firm, her boss decided after three months she should be trained as a legal executive instead, briefing barristers before court. She also took two jobs in pubs. By the time she was 18, she had her legal qualifications and a mortgage on a 1930s terraced house.

But despite benefiting from an apprenticeship-style education, Bosworth’s commitment to a career in apprenticeships was an accident. Aged 22 she was working as a legal executive for a big plant hire company, flying to the US and back, when she discovered she was pregnant with her son. International travel out the window, she returned home to Coventry and became an administrator because the 2-10pm shift fitted in with childcare. Where was the job? At RSA, or, as it became known in 1998 following a merger, the OCR examinations board.

There were so many development opportunities and I just sucked it all up

“There were so many staff development opportunities and I just sucked it all up,” Bosworth says, who was juggling single parenthood at the same time. “I kept getting more qualifications along the way!” In three months she was the manager for her shift team, and by 30 she was a senior manager. From 2013 she was director of skills and employment, responsible for vocational qualifications. Her husband – she met him at OCR – still works there as director of operations.

By the time of her departure in May 2017, Bosworth “realised that vocational education brings out the passion in me – maybe based on my own story”. She’s been a governor at Walsall College in the West Midlands for a year, and a board trustee for Career Colleges for three years. The FE sector was becoming her new home. You can see why: having fought so hard to work and qualify in the face of disadvantage and single parenthood, the sector’s embrace of employment and learning must resonate.

“I wanted to be working with employers to improve education. Ultimately, everyone is in education to one day get a job.” Bosworth felt too “constrained” in her OCR role to try out new ideas, and so leapt at the chance to lead Innovate Awarding. She explains, for instance, that routine work with the transport company Stagecoach led her awarding body to create new end-point assessments in passenger transport.

Innovate approves 39 apprenticeship standards across hospitality, retail, adult care, health care and more, including my personal favourite, mixology, or cocktail-making. Bosworth’s team has grown in just over two years from 26 to 87 full-time staff, plus 98 temporary workers. You were a good appointment, I tell her. “It seems so,” she says with a smile.

But for someone who has made a success out of arriving keenly and unprompted, Bosworth is now facing the opposite problem from the apprentices she works to help. Of all the end-point assessments booked with Innovate, an astonishing 60 per cent were rescheduled or cancelled this year. 

The government has been in hot water about not sorting end-point assessments quickly enough. But Bosworth says the DfE is “not on top of” the fact that even where end-point assessments are ready, the logistical challenges mean many are not happening – a huge waste of time and money.

Apprenticeships are where you can have real impact

“If I had a wishlist for the DfE and Institute for Apprenticeships (IfA), it would be for them to fully understand the infrastructure and logistical issues of end-point assessment. You’ve got to get three people – the employer, the apprentice and our examiner – in the same place at the same time. But then if that employer suddenly has a huge barrage of additional sales, the apprentice is being put on other shifts and the assessment is cancelled.”

She also ticks off apprenticeship providers, who she says are abandoning their charges as soon as the apprentice decides he or she is ready to be assessed. “Providers often act like they’ve got nothing to do with them anymore. They should be checking projects are submitted on time and the apprentice actually turns up to the assessment.”

One suggested solution is new vocabulary. She wants “end-point assessment” to be called “end-point examination”, so apprentices understand the importance of turning up. “It’s not about putting the fear of God into people. It’s about saying, you’ve done all this hard work, and this examination is to show that.”

She’s in the position to push the change. She chairs the end-point assessment group at the Federation of Awarding Bodies, and the end-point assessment group for the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP).

Such influence gets noticed. Bosworth has got “massive engagement from the DfE” and meets regularly with the Education and Skills Funding Agency and the IfA. I ask if she is the “end-point assessment woman”.

“That’s where I’m trying to get myself to. It particularly interests me because the apprenticeship space is where you can have real impact. It doesn’t matter what your starting point is, it doesn’t matter what your background is, apprenticeships can really unleash talent in people you didn’t know they had.”

Ministers should remove the high-vis and get to work on apprentice stereotypes

If Gavin Williamson seriously wants the UK to match the technical and vocational education opportunities offered by Germany by 2029, he needs to address the persisting stigmatisation and stereotyping of apprentices, says Niamh Mulhall

As an apprentice I am all too aware of the perceptions and misconceptions surrounding apprenticeships. Young people are not just active consumers browsing the education and training supermarket and making choices based on price, quality and value; their decisions are influenced by a multitude of socio-structural constraints and, not least, by their family, friends and teachers.

Many professions could be almost exclusively apprenticeships if it weren’t for the marketisation of higher education that has turned degrees into lucrative courses for universities to sell. The fact that Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, refers to the “forgotten 50 per cent” – the half of young people who don’t go to university – reinforces a divide between academically-inclined students who go to university and the “others” who presumably will be trained to fill the jobs which his new skills and productivity board will tell him are needed for the modern economy.

In his first appearance in the Commons as prime minister, Boris Johnson, replying to a question from the former skills minister, Anne Milton, said: “The other kids should acquire the skills they need which can be just as valuable, can lead to just as fantastic careers.”

The other kids?

Last week, education minister Lord Agnew met engineering apprentices at Sunderland College. It says something about the lack of imagination of the government’s communications department that these publicity stunts always call for a hi-vis jacket and goggles – a far remove from the uniform the minister wore as a Rugby School pupil.

We must challenge the image of overalls and wrenches

Research by the charity Education and Employers and others consistently find careers advice, information and guidance in schools is scarce when it comes to apprenticeships. Most teachers have limited knowledge of them and don’t feel confident enough to suggest them to students. Factor in a school’s interest in retaining students into sixth form, and the default position is bias towards A-levels and university, something that I felt pressured to do.

Nearly two years ago, the Baker clause attempted to reset the balance, but just two in five schools are compliant and many training providers say it has had no impact in getting them access to schools.

We need to ensure that young people are aware of all the options. Having quality engagement with a breadth of employers and professionals throughout school life not only expands horizons, but can help to challenge stereotypical images of overalls and wrenches. This is just as true about gender where received perceptions of boys as doctors and girls as nurses are formed before the age of five and become ingrained; the job choices of seven-year-olds mirror those of 17-year olds.

Our research at The Apprentice Voice recently revealed that two-thirds (67.5 per cent) of apprentices still face stigmatisation or stereotyping, with 58 per cent saying the stigma came from colleagues and peers.

Williamson went to university, perhaps itself a testimony to the socially transformative effect of higher education advocated by Michael Gove and others all the way back to Tony Blair’s ambition for the “first” 50 per cent. Sadly, the reality for many is a university degree that doesn’t make them industry-ready, does not open the doors they hoped for and takes a long time to pay off.

Yes, we need quality apprenticeships above quantity and we need better careers education in schools so young people can make informed choices. But the fundamental difference between our vocational and technical education provision and Germany’s is that choosing an apprenticeship there is seen as a positive, not the second-best option that it is often perceived to be in the UK.

Until our policymakers model that attitudinal shift, the “other kids” will remain our ‘othered’ young people, and the chance to beat Germany will be lost to an own goal.

What to expect under the new framework when an inspectors calls

Ofsted’s new-style inspections have been much publicised, but some AELP members have been surprised by the new format. Simon Ashworth sets out what providers should expect and how to prepare.

The Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) has been hearing from its members that inspections under Ofsted’s new framework (EIF) was not what they expected and differed to what they had previously seen. Their comments echo those of Woodspeen Training in FE Week that the EIF represents “a pretty significant shift in focus”. So what are the main changes and how can providers be ready for them?

First, far less of the inspection process will be channelled through the nominee. The inspection team will instead work with the key individuals responsible for “curriculum areas”, which we believe is a really positive change.  

Second, Ofsted will review the provider’s curriculum – and that doesn’t simply mean programme content or materials. Inspectors now want to look at the whole end-to-end process of the provider’s programmes; hence the importance of having strong curriculum leads who are prepared for the new process.

Effective “curriculum sequencing” will be inspected to ensure that the provider’s programme has been designed, structured and delivered coherently and logically. This becomes even more important for programmes where there is now more teaching and less assessment.  

A good example to consider is how providers who deliver training to level 2 apprentices plan for and deliver not only the level 1 functional skills, but also the current requirement to work towards and at least take the level 2 functional skills test. The short answer is that it should not be an afterthought bolted on at the end.

Curriculum doesn’t simply mean programme content or materials

“Deep dive” inspections have now been added to the sector’s unrivalled liking for jargon. Much of the previous inspection activity was sometimes seen as operating in silos; for example inspectors would observe a class or hold a focus group with learners and report back on, say, teaching effectiveness. Under the deep dive regime, they may follow the journey of different learners all the way through their entire experience with the provider from recruitment to the preparation for end-point assessment.  

Data is less important, but from our discussions with Ofsted, providers should still be able to explain the reasons for their performance. With apprenticeships specifically, there is little comparable performance data for standards because of the move away from frameworks, so this is a sensible change. 

Nevertheless, one area of focus on is progression and destination data. A provider might have low achievement rates that look relatively poor on paper, but what is the story behind that? In the case of traineeships, qualification achievement rates might be low, because the learners left early as they got a job (one of the main aims of the programme) and didn’t have time to complete their maths and English qualifications as a result. Being able to articulate examples such as this is key to showing inspectors the whole picture.

On recognition of prior learning and off-the-job training, AELP is hearing reports of providers being misled and incorrectly advised to rip up their self-assessment reports (SARs) and quality improvement plans (QIPs) and rewrite these against the new EIF. Ofsted does not require this.

As providers move through their individual self-assessment cycle, they will naturally self-assess against the new framework. In the interim, it is worth considering the use of a positioning statement to sit alongside the SAR and QIP to help articulate to inspectors the transitional process and journey they are on.  

Remember that the SAR and the QIP are for the benefit of the provider and not a paper exercise to simply provide to Ofsted for inspection. Commensurately, Ofsted will place less emphasis on the accuracy of a SAR, but more on how effectively the provider uses the SAR and QIP to drive improvements. 

By understanding and preparing for these changes, a “deep dive” inspection should be limited to a few ripples rather than whipping up waves for providers.