T-levels: The colleges selected to run courses in 2021

The names of the 64 colleges chosen to deliver T-levels in the second wave of their roll out have been announced.

They’ll deliver the new post-16 technical education qualifications from 2021, in four routes: digital, construction, education and childcare, and health and science.

An initial 50 providers will deliver the first T-levels from 2020.

Unveiling those selected for wave two today, education secretary Damian Hinds said: “Everyone agrees that a radical shake-up of technical and vocational education in this country is long overdue. T-levels are our chance to do that – offering young people high-quality alternatives to our world-class A-levels from September 2020.

“The second wave of post-16 providers we have announced today demonstrates our commitment to making this happen. They will play an important role in ensuring more young people across the country can access these courses and help develop the skilled workforce the country needs for the future.”

An additional £3.75 million boost for the first T-level providers, which includes one-off payments to help them recruit learners from 2020, has also been announced today (click here for full story).

Of the providers in wave two, 14 have never been inspected by Ofsted. The rest are rated ‘good’, with the exception of grade one Burnley College.

The DfE said if a T-level provider’s status changes against any of its published criteria, including holding a grade one or two Ofsted rating, between when it considered their expression of interest and delivery, then the department reserves the right to review their continued participation.

The second wave of T-level providers

College
Digital route
Construction route
Education
and Childcare
route
Health
and Science
route
Ofsted grade
Abingdon and Witney College
X
  
X
X
2
Activate Learning
X
    
X
N/A
Barking & Dagenham College
X
X
    
2
Bath College
X
  
X
X
2
Bedford College
X
X
X
X
2
Bexhill College
X
  
X
X
2
Bolton College
X
X
X
X
2
Buckinghamshire College Group
X
  
X
X
2
Burnley College
      
X
1
Bury College
X
X
X
X
2
Calderdale College
X
    
X
2
Cambridge Regional College
X
  
X
  
2
Cheshire College South and West
X
X
X
X
2
City of Sunderland College
X
X
  
X
N/A
DN College Group
X
X
X
X
N/A
East Norfolk Sixth Form College
X
    
X
N/A
EKC Group
X
X
X
X
N/A
Furness College
X
  
X
X
2
Gloucestershire College
X
X
  
X
2
Halesowen College
    
X
X
2
Harlow College
X
X
X
X
2
Heart of Worcestershire College
X
  
X
  
2
Herefordshire, Ludlow and North Shropshire College
  
X
  
X
N/A
Hopwood Hall College
X
X
X
X
2
Hugh Baird College
X
X
  
X
2
Kendal College
  
X
  
X
2
Lakes College – West Cumbria
X
X
X
X
2
Leeds City College
X
  
X
X
2
Leicester College
X
X
X
X
2
Loughborough College
X
X
X
X
2
LTE Group
X
X
X
X
2
Middlesbrough College
X
X
X
X
2
MidKent College
      
X
2
Milton Keynes College
X
X
X
X
2
Mulberry UTC
      
X
N/A
New City College
    
X
  
N/A
New College Swindon
X
  
X
X
2
Newcastle and Stafford Colleges Group (NSCG)
    
X
  
2
Newham College of Further Education
X
    
X
2
Newham Sixth Form College
  
X
X
  
2
Nottingham College
X
  
X
X
2
Oldham College
X
X
X
X
2
Petroc
X
X
X
X
2
Preston College
  
X
  
X
2
Reigate College
X
    
X
N/A
Richmond Upon Thames College
X
X
X
X
2
Sandwell College
X
X
X
X
N/A
SCC Group
X
    
X
2
Solihull College & University Centre
X
      
N/A
South Devon
X
X
X
X
2
South Essex College
X
X
X
  
N/A
Stanmore College
    
X
X
2
The College of West Anglia
    
X
X
2
The WKCIC Group
X
  
X
X
N/A
The Trafford College Group
X
X
X
X
N/A
United Colleges Group
X
X
    
2
Wakefield College
X
X
X
  
2
Warwickshire College Group
X
      
2
West Midlands UTC
  
X
    
2
West Suffolk College
X
  
X
X
2
Wigan & Leigh College
  
X
X
X
2
Wilberforce College 
      
X
2
Wyke Sixth Form College
X
    
X
2
Yeovil College
X
  
X
X
2

Amidst low take-up predictions DfE to give £30k per T-level and ‘tolerance’ for under-delivery

The first wave of T-level providers are expected to recruit half the amount of students the government predicts, research shared exclusively with FE Week has revealed.

It comes as plans for one-off payments of up to £90,000 for the early providers are unveiled by the Department for Education, as well as confirmation that a “tolerance” will be applied for under-delivery.

The National Foundation for Educational Research conducted interviews with half of the first 50 providers to deliver T-levels in 2020.

We intend to introduce additional one-off payments to providers

All but one said they were planning to recruit between 12 and 20 students in the first year, in “recognition of the challenges in setting up a new programme”.

The Department for Education previously projected the 2020/21 cohort would total 2,500 students, but then revised this down to 2,000.

If all of the 50 providers in wave one recruit 20 students each, then just 1,000 would be studying the new qualifications in that year.

To help the first wave of providers, in part to recruit more students, the DfE said today it would offer them one-off additional payments – as part of a £3.75 million package of financial support.

The plan was revealed in the DfE’s response to its T-levels funding consultation, which confirmed funding rates will range from £4,170 to £5,835 per year, depending on the size of the qualification, despite 62 per cent of respondents opposing the proposal.

In “recognition of the additional costs that are unique to the early T-level providers”, the department said the additional one-off payments will amount to £30,000 per provider for each new T-level introduced in 2020, and of £20,000 per provider introducing the Transition Framework in 2020.

“This is to recognise the costs associated with engaging in co-design of the qualifications and providers’ work with the department on T-level and Transition Framework policy development,” the consultation document added.

Sixteen of the first 50 will offer all three of the first T-levels, which will be taught in education, construction and digital, and will therefore benefit from one-off payments of £90,000.

The funding will be paid in 2019/20 and at the moment is only for the providers delivering in 2020/21.

Considerations are being made to also offer the payments to those set to deliver in 2021/22, but there is “no plan to extend beyond this”.

The consultation continued to say that officials “understand providers are concerned they will not be able to predict recruitment to T-levels far enough in advance to feed accurate student numbers into the allocations process”, and if recruitment “does not reflect the student numbers used for the allocation then this could lead to over or under funding”.

To ensure providers “invest in T-levels with confidence” the department is proposing to operate a “tolerance before making any funding adjustments”.

“We envisage a tolerance for under-delivery during the implementation phase which will be tightened as T-levels become more established,” the document stated.

“We will review actual enrolment against the first data return of the academic year. Any downward adjustment to funding would apply to the number of students outside of the tolerance.”

The full NFER report on T-levels will be published on Thursday.

Click here to see the full list of providers in the second wave of T-levels.

 

Shedding light on Leeds City College’s rebrand and expansion

One of the biggest FE providers in the country is going through a momentous upheaval. Leeds City College Group is juggling a major rebrand while taking on another struggling college, as well as the imminent opening of a £60 million state-of-art campus. Jessica Fino headed to Leeds to find out how the group is handling the change

Two months ago it was announced that Harrogate College was being offloaded by the cash-strapped Hull College Group as part of its recovery plan, following years of financial turmoil.

But eyebrows were initially raised when it was revealed that Harrogate would be joining the Luminate Education Group – a name that isn’t on the UK Register of Learning Providers, the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s allocations data, or Ofsted’s inspection database.

It turns out that Luminate is the new name for one of FEs most established providers: Leeds City College Group.

Luminate was the only name on the shortlist that wasn’t practical

Located in the educational quarter of Leeds, the college’s Printworks Campus is a modern and bright building. As I arrive, I enter a big café with sleek décor and freshly prepared cakes and sandwiches. It definitely does not look like your ordinary cafeteria.

I am greeted by a young barista, who is one of the apprentices working at the café.

Colin Booth is seated at the back of the café waiting for me with a grin on his face. Once we are served with drinks prepared by the apprentice, Booth starts explaining the reasoning behind the group’s new name, saying it was needed to represent a “change of direction”.

Colin Booth, CEO of Luminate Education Group

“When we were called Leeds City College Group everybody assumed that LCC ran the other organisations, but we are all part of the same family.”

The group comprises LCC, Keighley College, Leeds College of Music and the White Rose Academies Trust. From August this year, Harrogate College will also join.

The new name represents a change in how the group manages itself, rather than being a new group, Booth tells me.

He says coming up with a shortlist of names took a “long time of going out and talking to a lot of people externally, as well as to our students and staff”.

As well as Luminate, ‘Changing Futures Group’ and ‘Forward North’ were two other possible names included in the shortlist.

When it was time to vote, Booth did not know what the board was going to go with, but tells me the results were “quite a surprise”.

I am not convinced the name was his first choice, as he points out that it was “the only name on the shortlist that wasn’t practical”, and he explains that it’s more a stakeholder-focused name, rather than student-focused.

We are absolutely fine if anybody wants to join us

The new branding comes at a time of growth. Once Harrogate joins the group, it will have a total of 30,000 students and over 3,000 staff. The college’s budget for next year will be £94 million while the academy trust’s budget will be £20 million.

It is creating a new group board, plus individual boards for each institution. The main central services and the executive team, located in Park Lane, in an LCC building, will likely move to a brand new head office within the next five years – although this hasn’t been finalised yet.

With all these future plans in sight, is Booth planning on expanding the number of colleges even further?

“We are absolutely fine if anybody wants to join us but we don’t have an aggressive strategy to try and recruit other colleges,” he says.

“Our growth is mainly the fact that individual members of the group are growing. We are focused on providing fantastic-quality education and I believe that the consequence is that colleges tend to grow.”

The addition of Harrogate College will by itself be a challenge, since it “desperately needs to grow very quickly when we take that over”. Hull College Group, which Harrogate is still part of, received the biggest amount in restructuring grants from the ESFA last year to support its “fresh start” arrangement and to help its “significant financial and operational turnaround”.

Booth says: “Actually, a number of people keep asking me, ‘If it’s struggling that much financially to attract students, why do you want to run it?’ As a town of 100,000 people, Harrogate should have an FE college, and it was heading to a position where it could soon not have one any more.

“They had been losing student numbers in the last three years, contracting in size and not making ends meet financially. The biggest challenge will be to reverse that contraction and help them grow again.

We don’t have an aggressive strategy to recruit other colleges

“Our belief was that we can probably make it work. Time will tell if we can, but we believe we can make it work.”

The chief executive adds that Luminate’s main problem now is lack of space, a result of the student numbers growing by 11 per cent last year and likely to grow by a similar number next year.

A new £60 million campus at Quarry Hill has been primarily built to improve the group’s resources, but since it started to be designed and built three years ago, the group has outgrown its additional space. “So on day one, the building will be at the fullest capacity and beyond.”

The construction site of Quarry Hill campus

The college’s schools of Creative Arts and Social Science will be relocated to the new campus, as well as facilities and space for Leeds College of Music, which is based nearby.

The project received £33.4 million funding from the Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership, delivered by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority.

After wrapping up the interview and finishing off our coffees, I toured Quarry Hill. With one month to completion, more than 100 people were working at the site. Some rooms, including an impressive 200-seat theatre, were very close to completion.

But despite its state-of-art classrooms, recording studios, dance rooms and theatres, the new campus is not just another new modern building.

The group was also keen to include some details to give character to the building, including an artwork on its façade depicting Jack Longbottom and Mary Brady, two residents of the Quarry Hill Flats in the 1930s.

Demolished in 1978, these were the largest and most modern of their kind in Europe, housing around 3,000 people – the same number of students who will be on campus once it opens in a few weeks’ time.

Making T-levels and A-levels the only options of choice – really?

Don’t force young people to choose solely between A and T level, argues Bill Watkin. Instead, let’s understand that T-levels and AGQs co-exist, serving different purposes for different people

The arguments in favour of Applied General Qualifications (AGQs) are well rehearsed. They offer an alternative academic route to higher education, a closer relationship between classroom study and the workplace, and an opportunity for skills acquisition. I have yet to hear a single teacher or student in schools and colleges say that AGQs should be discontinued.

It is one thing to seek to rationalise a complex landscape of thousands of vocational qualifications; it is quite another to consider removing an entire post-16 pathway to clear the way for the introduction of T-Levels.

To do so would be to fail to appreciate that when young people are faced with a choice between T-level and A-level they are not going to choose the former just because AGQs are no longer available.

What will students choose, if not AGQs, if they don’t know at 16 what occupation they want to pursue?; if they don’t want to do a single-subject programme of study, or a 900-hour programme?; if the pathway that interests them isn’t offered in their local college, or if there aren’t enough local employers?

This is not to say we don’t need T-levels. The benefits of a more streamlined suite of qualifications and a less acute skills gap are undeniable, but we should have both T-levels and AGQs.

Let T-levels and AGQs co-exist

For any government to consider doing away with AGQs would show a lack of understanding and awareness of their importance to young people, their employment prospects and the country’s economy. So what needs to happen following the consultation?

• We need reassurance from ministers that AGQs are here for the long term. The switch from the Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF) to the Regulated Qualifications Framework (RQF) does need to happen but there are time, workload and resource implications.

• Advocates of T-levels need to stop repeating the line that AGQ students are less likely to finish university, since this doesn’t consider factors such as the lower prior attainment and greater socio-economic disadvantage of many AGQ students.

• Set aside the language of gold-standard qualifications. AGQs should not be thought of as second-class. We should recognise their contribution in delivering skills valued by employers.

• Keep AGQs for those who, at 16, haven’t decided on a particular career pathway; AGQs are less occupation-specific, more general, and keep more options open.

• Provide for the 20 per cent of students who currently drop at least one A-level and who currently may take up an AGQ to replace it.

• If the ambition is to reduce the number of level 3 vocational qualifications, let’s start with those that have had no enrolment in the past two years, but let’s distinguish between “no enrolment” and “little enrolment”. For example, there may be only 12 cabinet-makers on a course at Chichester College, but it is still valuable and should be preserved.

• Ensure that students in all communities have an opportunity to study a level 3 vocational course in a subject area that interests and inspires them, regardless of the local employment landscape. Otherwise, we may increase the skills gap, not reduce it. Also prospects of social mobility will suffer.

• Protect AGQs for those students who are suited to level 3 study but who do not pass GCSE English and/or maths. If English and maths level 2 is set as a condition of passing a T-level, many providers will make this a condition of entry and render many ineligible for T-levels, leaving A-levels (or NEET) as the only options.

• Let T-levels and AGQs co-exist, as they serve different purposes for different people. Possible exceptions include extended diplomas (3 A-level equivalent) not being offered alongside an overlapping T-level; and a single institution not offering both qualifications where there is a clear overlap in content.

The FE sector needs to prepare for what parity with HE will actually involve

Further education will need to contend with scrutiny from the Office for Students to access funding prescribed by the Augar review, says Martin Vincent

The Augar Review’s recommendations have the potential to address deep-seated imbalances in post-18 education and put colleges on more equal footing with universities, both in terms of prestige and funding. However, now we’ve had time to digest the report in full, the further education sector must quickly realise what this parity would mean in practice.

Philip Augar has recommended that the Office for Students (OfS) should become the national regulator for non-apprenticeship education provision at levels 4 and above, and establish a working group with the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) to develop new regulation that covers this extended remit. Whatever the outcome, this means the OfS will be significantly more involved in further education. This will come with a layer of scrutiny that colleges and other vocational training providers are unfamiliar with and, arguably, unprepared for.

The most significant impact of this change will be in relation to funding. How new revenue streams for FE would be structured is only hinted at in Augar’s report. As an overview, it recommends that an additional £3 billion should be made available to FE annually, in addition to a £1 billion capital investment from the government in a newly formed national network of colleges.

Two specific measures it does recommend are free level 2 and 3 qualifications for everyone over the age of 18 and a drop in the tuition fee cap from £9,000 to £7,500, which will impact the growing number of colleges offering validated degree programmes.

We can expect that a system that is more dependent on teaching grants from the OfS will emerge to bridge the funding gap left by a reduction in student contributions. This means FE could be reliant on the OfS and subject to all of the accompanying regulation this brings for the first time – a radical departure for colleges.

The FE sector needs to prepare for a step change

Currently, the most significant regulations the sector must adhere to are the statutory provisions of The Higher and Further Education Act and the financial probity conditions and performance guidelines set by the ESFA. FE funding is not currently dependent on areas such as teaching excellence and student experience.

This would change if the Augar Review’s recommendations are fully enacted. Teaching grants from the OfS are linked to the body’s Teaching Excellence Framework and league tables that certify institutions as gold, silver or bronze depending on performance. The system is designed to increase competition and deliver value for money to students, but if colleges are not up to scratch, the funding could potentially be reduced or cut altogether.

Colleges would also have to officially register with the OfS to be eligible for grants. The Augar Review recommends that colleges are given protected titles to increase their standing at a national level. Achieving this status will inevitably come with conditions. For universities, the status of Registered Provider carries with it responsibilities, rules and standards covering everything from student welfare and education delivery, to engagement with the community. If an institution breaches any of these requirements, the OfS can launch investigations, levy financial penalties and, in extreme cases, remove teaching licences altogether. Colleges can expect a similar framework to be introduced and would be wise to start reviewing the steps that universities have taken to comply. 

Beyond this, colleges that offer validated degree programmes will need to understand how their relationships with universities could change if HE and FE are both subject to OfS regulations. If, for example, a college’s OfS classification drops from gold to bronze, a university that validates degrees for that institution may review the arrangement to protect its reputation.

The Augar review recommendations still need to be transposed into legislation, but it is likely to usher in changes that improve FE’s position. To take advantage, colleges and training providers need to understand and prepare for a corresponding step change in what is required of them in terms of regulation and compliance.

On the job T-level placements: how we can avoid a high-vis failure

If there are not enough willing employers capable of designing and delivering good-quality work placements, T-levels may prove to be an expensive, very public flop, warns Ewart Keep

Everyone knew from the outset that T-level work placements would be a major challenge for the new courses that kick in this September, and delivering them will be a central test of the initial pilots.

It’s why the design of the placements has been evolving since the new qualifications were first announced in 2017. Tweaks already made at the drawing board are reflections of hard reality dawning: the decision to allow a student’s placement to be broken down into chunks rather than delivered as one single continuous block, for example; similarly, the switch to allowing a placement to be spread across different employers rather than hosted by just one.

Despite this, it is far from clear at present that enough places can be provided beyond the pilot phase. If a sufficient volume of employers willing to offer the placements cannot be found, and if there are not enough willing employers capable of designing, supervising and delivering high-quality work placements, then T-levels may prove to be an expensive and very visible failure.

A central problem is the capacity of firms large and small to design high-quality work placements that complement and enhance the learning students do in the classroom. To achieve this would require the firm to have a manager capable of liaising with the college to ensure that the integration of curriculum and learning outcomes is carefully orchestrated across these two learning environments.

They should be supported by skilled in-company trainers who could design work processes and tasks that can support structured learning and reflection and monitor and oversee that learning process.

These requirements would not be too onerous in countries like Germany, where well-established apprenticeship systems are in place that require firms to have significant expertise in melding together on- and off-the-job learning, and appropriately qualified in-company trainers. In England, by contrast, this may be a rather big ask.

When even large employers, such as Jaguar Land Rover, contract out their apprenticeship provision, then the chances that small and medium-sized employers (SMEs) will be able to cope with on-the-job training may be slender.

A pilot project run in 2017-2018 by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development for the JP Morgan Foundation to provide SMEs with free human resource management advice to get them ready to take on young apprentices demonstrated the problems. Most of the resources were spent on getting them to become legally compliant because it turned out that many companies were operating in breach of basic employment legislation.

It is far from clear at present that enough places can be provided

A separate pilot project undertaken in 2017-2018 by the Institute of Education’s Centre for Post-14 Education and Work (again funded by JP Morgan) reinforced the scale of the problem: the East London Vocational Education and Training (ELVET) project found that many employers in sectors such as digital and creative struggled to cope with offering work placements. Many workers were self-employed and coalesced around one-off projects, firms lacked expertise on learning design, and there were practical problems with safeguarding and insurance. The further education colleges involved in ELVET had to expend considerable time and effort building employer capacity to manage work placements.

Some in government believe that colleges can do the employers’ job for them and in effect supervise the placement – an unlikely prospect. Those external to the workplace will struggle to deliver good on-the-job learning if there is no on-site expertise.

What is to be done? Building employer workplace training capacity will be key. Getting groups of firms, particularly SMEs, to work together and to build shared capacity is one potential route to success. Another is reviving a national, publicly-funded training of trainers programme which was around in the 1970s and early 1980s and was highly regarded. It would also help with apprenticeship quality.

Bank forced to gift millions to college

Government officials forced a major bank to halve a £40 million unsecured loan after threatening to put a college into insolvency.

In a highly unusual move, Lloyds Banking Group agreed to slash Bradford College’s debt to £20 million in return for halving the write-off costs with the Department for Education.

The details of the last-minute deal, struck at the end of March just before the DfE’s “restructuring facility” closed, are secretive and complex but the college has said it is “grateful” to both the department and bank for being kept afloat as it tries to find a further £3.5 million in savings.

Any future negotiations will take place under the shadow of the administration process

Latest accounts for Bradford College, where more than 130 jobs are currently at risk, shows it had a total of £40 million debt, all of which was due to be repaid within one year after it breached one of its banking covenants.

Knowing this repayment deadline could not be met, negotiations began and FE Week understands the ESFA argued that the unsecured loan had been irresponsible lending on the part of Lloyds and used the threat of insolvency to strike a deal.

Rather than potentially losing the entire £40 million if the college went bust, which is allowed to happen following the launch of the FE insolvency regime in April, Lloyds agreed a financial arrangement with the ESFA’s transaction unit.

This meant the college was given £12.8 million by the ESFA to pass on to the bank and the bank gifted an equal amount of £12.8 million to the college, in what they called “debt forgiveness”.

These payments resulted in the loan halving to £20 million, repayable over 15 years, and also covered the £5.6 million loan break costs.

In addition, the ESFA also wrote off its own £9 million loan with the college and provided £5 million for infrastructure improvements, making a total payment to the college of £26.8 million, excluding the £12.8 million passed on to the bank.

A financial advisor to the college sector told FE Week they understand the gift by the bank to be the first such significant debt write-off for a college.

When covenants have been broken in the past, banks would typically renegotiate quickly and change the loan to very high interest rates – knowing the DfE would have to bail the college out if it ran into further trouble.

A spokesperson for Lloyds said a financial arrangement was offered to put the Bradford College on a “stronger financial footing”.

“In conjunction with the EFSA, we agreed a refinancing to all parties’ satisfaction and which allows the college to move forward with a more confident future,” he added.

“This was a standalone transaction and reflected a very specific set of circumstances for Bradford College.”

The college’s bank loans had been taken out to fund a number of capital projects.

Julian Gravatt, the deputy chief executive of the Association of Colleges, explained that Bradford “missed out on capital funding when that budget was cut in 2009, so they used their own funds and a bank loan to redevelop their campus to meet student needs”.

Asked if he thought the insolvency regime might give more colleges a stronger hand when renegotiating loans in the future, Gravatt added: “Any future negotiations between a college and its bank will take place under the shadow of the statutory education administration process. We’re finding out right now how this works.

“There is a bigger point that government has assumed colleges will borrow when allocating capital but has failed to provide adequate revenue funds. Funding colleges properly would avoid the time, effort and money lost in individual financial interventions.”

Julian Gravatt

Minutes from a January board meeting stated that current staff costs at Bradford College have increased compared to previous years and now sit at £33.5 million, which “is not sustainable”. It is now consulting on cutting 132 jobs.

The college’s income for 2019-20 is predicted to fall by £3.5 million for three reasons: its 16-to-18 budget has dropped by £2.5 million, it has lost £800,000 via adult education budget funding in Manchester due to devolution, and has suffered a £200,000 decline in higher education provision.

The job losses will lead to “significant financial savings and ensure the future sustainability of the college”, the Bradford College spokesperson said.

Bradford College went for more than a year without a permanent boss until March 2019, when former Ofsted grade one Barnsley College principal Chris Webb became its chief executive.

The college’s last permanent boss, Andy Welsh, resigned at the end of the 2017-18 academic year after the college received both a financial notice to improve and an Ofsted grade three in quick succession.

An FE commissioner report, published in March 2018, revealed that the college’s dire financial position had come as a surprise to the governors.

Interview: Chris Jones, CEO, City & Guilds

Last month, education giant City & Guilds raised a few eyebrows by calling for the creation of a new independent body to oversee skills policy in the UK.

Not convinced that a new quango is what the sector needs, FE Week editor Nick Linford sat down with the organisation’s chief executive to see if he could persuade him otherwise. Here’s how it went.

City & Guilds has a long history, not just in terms of being the most recognisable name in the vocational education space for 140 years.

They have also for many years invested in commissioning research and advising governments around the world, rarely holding back from presenting potentially unflattering views.

This has continued under their current chief executive, Chris Jones, who since 2008 been at the helm of the group that last year turned over £144 million, employing nearly 1,400 people.

Jones has not shied away from a bit of Department for Education bashing, being regularly critical on social media on whether T-level reform represents value for money to date and most recently “highlighting the urgent need for more considered policy development that is based on substance, not style”.

And with reference to the recent level 3 and below qualification consultation, he accused the DfE of “sadly” having “no track record” when it comes to having “clear outcome
measures established at the outset”.

One solution to the FE policy failures, Jones told me in a broad-ranging interview, was to establish another quango, to be called the Skills Policy Institute.

Reviews are applauded, debated, then shelved and forgotten about

This is not the first time Jones has proposed a new organisation to “hold the government to account by scrutinising skills”.

The recommendation featured in the first City & Guilds Sense & Instability report in 2014, and again in the 2016 update.

However, the “body with independent oversight” was not given a name and was at that point compared to the Office for Budget Responsibility.

So now, in the third Sense & Instability report we have the proposed name, Skills Policy Institute, and this time the Education Endowment Foundation is used as a comparison – a research organisation established with £120 million of public money.

There had been some disquiet on social media about the idea of another quango – to add to the myriad organisations with oversight of just apprenticeships that featured in the National Audit Office’s most recent report into the sector.

Jones has been critical of constant policy change, so he wants to be clear that his idea of a new “quango is not necessarily being designed or considered as a way of saying to driving more change in policy.

“So it’s not saying, ‘Let’s create something that is independent, and more policy for the sake of policy’. It about getting the policy right and making sure the policy that is put in place gets delivered well.”

A new Skills Policy Institute would build institutional memories – what has worked and what has not

My challenge back to Jones was to ask him: why create another quango with all the associated bureaucracy when the government can instead commission research or high-profile independent reviews, such as Wolf in 2011, Richard in 2012, Sainsbury in 2016 and most recently Augar, as task-and-finish groups?

But Jones dismisses reviews “that can be applauded at the time they are published, much debated, but then potentially be put on the shelf and forgotten about.

“And I think that, for me, is one of the risks that what we have here is something that typically sees lots of research reports being commissioned with lots of recommendations, but do they all make sense over time? Do they connect with each other? I would argue perhaps not.”

Instead, he insists a Skills Policy Institute would build “institutional memories, the basis of what has worked and what has not”.

He goes on to say that it could be “quite small. About 10 to 15 people. So it’s not substantial. It doesn’t have to be. This is not about creating bureaucracy for the sake of it. It’s about creating something that has substance in what it says and does.”

Intriguingly, before I ask where the money would come from to pay for this new quango, Jones offers up the apprenticeship levy.

“We are talking about something that could be funded with a relatively small proportion of the levy and arguably could be a very good use of a very small proportion of the levy,” he says.

What then follows is a rather critical view of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE), a quango that is in fact funded from levy receipts and has quickly now grown to around 150 staff.

“I don’t see anything yet that is coming out of the IfATE that has been research-led. Looking closely at the specific outcome measures it needs to be putting in place, it’s filling a slightly different purpose at this moment in time.”

This strikes me as the first time I’ve heard Jones or City & Guilds criticise the relatively new IfATE, and when I point out that they have researchers, he is quick to express a “hope” that they would consider value for money.

“If the IfATE is there to help administer apprenticeship policy, it is essentially a ministry of apprenticeship policy,” he says.

I think they [the IfATE] should be doing more

When asked whether the IfATE was meant to be independent, Jones says: “That was the idea. Do we see that coming through? I don’t see enough evidence of that, personally, coming through of this being something that has genuine independence. I haven’t seen them publish a report about the future of the workplace in 2030 and how the apprenticeship strategy must evolve to support that. Funding has to move from A to B, we need to have these standards… I haven’t seen that.”

Jones claims he hasn’t given up on the leadership at the IfATE, “I just don’t see what they are doing today as fulfilling the role of what we see in terms of the Skills Policy Institute. They (the IfATE) are administrating policy. If they believe they should be doing more, that’s for them to determine what they should do. I think they should be doing more,” he adds.

During the course of the interview Jones compared his proposed Skills Policy Institute to the small National Infrastructure Commission and even the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, shut down in 2017 but described by Jones as “forward thinking, beginning to look where some of the potential interventions might need to be over time, thinking where and how employers can begin to shape the policy to a greater extent than they perhaps are at this moment in time”.

My experience was that the UKCES had few fans before being shut, few mourned its passing and it is now rare for it to be mentioned on the FE policy circuit. 

So Jones has failed to persuade me that a new quango is part of the solution for avoiding poor policymaking or to stop good policies failing.

No matter how independent a Skills Policy Institute would claim to be, its income and thus survival, along with the actual decision making, would be in the hands of the democratically elected officials.

And frankly, the skills sector is not short of quangos, policy influencers and talking shops, at both a national and regional level.

Put bluntly, moving deckchairs around or adding new ones will not stop the sinking feeling.

What we are really short of is sufficient investment in the delivery of further education and skills.

Source: City and Guilds, Sense & Instability report, 2019

Huge adult education budget procurement underspend by colleges

Colleges underspent their original funding allocations awarded through the controversial 2017-18 adult education budget (AEB) procurement by a huge 26 per cent, new FE Week analysis has shown.

In stark contrast, all other providers exceeded their initial contracts by 31 per cent.

On top of this, four of the 19 colleges that won in the tender failed to deliver any of their procured AEB funding, and admitted that their non-procured contracts were sufficient to meet demand. Despite this, all four were awarded much larger procured contracts in 2018-19.

Perhaps it’s time the NAO took a hard look at what’s going on

The findings will be frustrating for the many private providers who were given much smaller than expected AEB contracts, or denied them altogether, following the tender.

“How much evidence does the government need that the current system of AEB funding is totally discredited and delivering poor value for the local communities that the programme is meant to support?” said Mark Dawe, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers.

“As the latest FE Week analysis once again shows, independent training providers have no problem using up their allocations in full, and when they hear that the Department for Education hands back to the Treasury over £300 million in underspends from various budgets, they get doubly frustrated.”

Independent providers were told in 2016 their AEB contracts would come to an end in July 2017, rather than being automatically renewed as normal, and they were forced to take part in a procurement process for a pot worth around £110 million.

Colleges did not have to take part in the bidding war, as their contracts were to be automatically renewed, but they were allowed to tender to gain additional funding.

Nineteen colleges subsequently won £5,071,369 between them.

FE Week’s analysis compared figures showing the ESFA’s final 2017-18 funding year values with the first contract allocation for November 2017 and their final allocation for June 2018.

By June, their combined final allocation dropped slightly to £5,063,495.

Figures published last week show the colleges actually ended up spending £3,999,962 – which means they missed their year-end allocation by 26 per cent compared to November, and 21 per cent compared to July.

Just four colleges achieved or overspent their year-end allocation.

The DfE said the funding that was not utilised was taken back and then recycled into the next year’s allocations budget, which is then distributed across all AEB providers. 

Non-college providers were awarded £81,964,837 between them in November 2017, but their allocations increased to £115,705,143 in July 2018. Final figures show all non-colleges spent £107,609,652 by the end of the academic year, which is 31 per cent up on their original allocation but 7 per cent down on their July figures.

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The four colleges to not spend any of their procured contracts in 2017-18 were: Abingdon & Witney, Middlesbrough, South Gloucestershire and Stroud, and St Helens.

A spokesperson for Abingdon & Witney College said: “In 2017-18 our non-procured AEB allocation proved to be sufficient to meet the demands of the local market. However, in 2018-19 we will fully utilise our procured contract.”

The DfE extended the contracts it procured for 2017-18 to 2018-19 and maintained funding levels.

However, it said allocations could have increased for several reasons, including: the previous year contracts were only for nine months following delays with procurement, and growth funding available in 2017-18 was consolidated into the following year.

Abingdon & Witney College was given a £230,679 procured AEB to use in 2018-19 – a 250 per cent increase on the £65,869 available to it in 2017-18 that it failed to spend.

A St Helens College spokesperson said following its merger in December 2017 with Knowsley Community College that it “revisited all business plans and as a result, the additional procured allocation was deemed to be no longer required”.

It has been given £328,208 procured AEB for 2018-19.

Zoe Lewis, principal of Middlesbrough College, said when her college bid for procured adult education budget funding in 2017-18 that it was in the process of setting up “sector-based work academies to expand our work with unemployed people”.

But this took “longer than we’d anticipated and we therefore did not use our allocation last year”. 

However, Middlesbrough College’s new academies are “now established” and it is “on track” to spend its procured contract for 2018-19, which amounts to £416,974, as well as “exceeding our AEB contract delivery by more than 3 per cent”.

South Gloucestershire and Stroud College, which has £263,674 procured AEB to use in 2018-19, declined to comment.

The DfE said it was aware of non-delivery issues but would not comment on specific cases. It added that options for future contracting of AEB are being reviewed.

Dawe said giving bigger procured contracts to institutions who didn’t deliver on their previous ones “just adds insult to injury”.

“Perhaps it’s time for the National Audit Office to take a hard look at what’s going on here,” he added.

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