New applicants trying to get onto the refreshed apprenticeship provider register have been left hanging by the government six months after its launch, and officials can’t say when they’ll be told if they’ve been successful.

The register of apprenticeship training providers finally reopened on December 12 with more “stringent and challenging entry requirements”.

This was more than a year after the last window closed – a time period which left my providers wanting to get on frustrated. Some even exploited a loophole and attempted to buy their way on.

It is our aim to assess applications within 12 weeks

Since the register’s reopening, FE Week understands the Education and Skills Funding Agency has received a higher than anticipated number of new applicants.

This will largely be because the register now requires all subcontractors delivering apprenticeships to be listed on it, including, for the first time, those delivering less than the previous threshold of £100,000 a year.

The ESFA’s “aim” is to assess applications within 12 weeks.

But none have been added to date. At the time of reopening the register in December, 2,571 providers were on it. In an update published this month, it went down to 2,545.

Numerous organisations have got in touch with FE Week to express their frustration at the delay and want to know what the hold-up is.

A Department for Education spokesperson couldn’t shed any light on the situation or say when the new providers will be added.

“As outlined in our guidance it is our aim to assess applications within 12 weeks,” she said.

“However, there may be occasions when this will take longer as we have been working through the applications to ensure we are consistent and robust.

“More details on the next stage of applications will be available in due course.”

All providers currently on the register are being asked to reapply in segmented groups throughout this year – with those that are deemed “high risk” and not delivering training being invited first.

FE Week analysis in December showed that almost a third (580) of providers on the register did not deliver any apprenticeships last year.

Any providers without any delivery within a 12-month period face being removed, under the new strict rules.

The government began inviting reapplications in January. If all of the inactive providers were chosen to be reassessed at the beginning of this year that might go some way to explaining why the ESFA hasn’t got around to sorting the new applications yet.

Key changes to the register include that it will stay open indefinitely – meaning that providers can apply on a rolling basis, rather than having to wait for an application window.

New questions during the application process have been introduced to “test a provider’s ability to deliver” high standards.

There will also be greater scrutiny: companies will have to have traded for 12 months at least in order to be eligible for application and provide a full set of accounts to be on the register.

All providers can make two applications to RoATP within a 12 month period.

The changes come after FE Week has reported extensively on the problems with the original application process, and discovered, for example, one-man bands with no delivery experience being given access to millions of pounds of apprenticeships funding.

Three struggling colleges have been hit with a notice to improve by the government this afternoon, after they were all assessed to have “inadequate” financial health.

Both Hadlow College and West Kent and Ashford College, which together make up the Hadlow Group and have hit the headlines in recent months, received the warnings as they are currently reliant on exceptional financial support to survive.

Hartlepool College received its notice following an ESFA review of their 2017/18 accounts.

Colleges subject to financial notices to improve are put into FE Commissioner intervention and must run most spending decisions past the government.

The commissioner’s team began intervening at Hadlow and WKAC earlier this year following allegations of financial mismanagement.

It has been alleged the group’s former deputy chief executive, Mark Lumson-Taylor, forged emails from the ESFA to justify additional funding from the government.

When the ESFA checked those emails against their own server, they could find no record of them and the agency demanded the money back.

Hadlow Group has embarked on a number of failed business ventures in recent years that had left it in a financially precarious position.

This, combined with a failed application for £20 million from the ESFA transactions unit and the ESFA’s demands for funding to be returned, has left the college group reliant on government bailouts for survival.

Lumsdon-Taylor, several governors and the principal of both colleges Paul Hannan, quit following the FE Commissioner’s intervention.

The notice to WKAC supersedes one issued when it was part of K College in 2012, which came only two years before K College collapsed and Hadlow College adopted its West Kent and Ashford campuses, forming WKAC and the Hadlow Group.

Hartlepool College generated a deficit of £841,000 in 2017/18, has net liabilities of £2.7 million, an operating cash outflow of £230,000, and was subject to an FE Commissioner diagnostic assessment in May 2018.

It has also been borrowing in 2017/18 for the development of a new campus on Stockton Street in Hartlepool.

The college admits its accounts indicate “there may be a deterioration in the college’s unmoderated financial health grade,” but states the college is still a going concern.

This is because its three-year forecasts indicate a return to profitability, sufficient cash to meet its debts, and an ability to meet its covenants.

Despite this though, the notice means Hartlepool had to prepare a draft financial recovery plan by 29 April, following the issuing of the notice on 3 April; must provide the ESFA with monthly management accounts; and allow the ESFA to attend governors’ meetings.

The notice on Hartlepool will be lifted when its financial health grade has improved from ‘inadequate’ to at least ‘satisfactory’.

Among the conditions listed in the notice to WKAC, the college must submit all monthly individualised learner record (ILR) returns for all funding streams, for the remainder of the 2018/19 academic year as well as submit monthly management accounts to the ESFA and invite the agency to its governors’ meetings.

The notice does not specify what conditions must be met before it is lifted.

Nor does the notice for Hadlow College, which must also submit its ILR returns, its monthly management accounts and allow the ESFA to attend governors’ meetings.

The Institute for Apprenticeships will soon start evaluating the impact of its controversial funding band reviews, and promises to “take action” where reductions have made delivering apprentice training unviable.

It comes just weeks after FE Week revealed that major retailer Halfords has been forced into scrapping all of its level 2 apprenticeship provision – a move it blamed on the institute’s decision to slash funding for the level 2 retailer standard by 20 per cent in December.

“I can confirm that we will be starting to evaluate the impact of the funding review in the coming months,” Lucy Rigler, the IfA’s  head of funding, said in a blog today.

The institute wants to ensure that quality apprenticeship training is still viable with a reviewed funding band

“We will assess the impact of any changes to funding bands on numbers of starts as well as additional measures where appropriate.

“This process will take time given the staggered implementation of any funding band changes and we will need time to collect enough data to analyse any trends.”

She insisted that the institute is “open to ongoing discussions with Trailblazers once we have this data”, and it wants to “ensure that quality apprenticeship training and assessment is still viable with a reviewed funding band”.

“And where evidence suggests this is not the case, we will want to act,” Rigler added.

To date, the IfA has been asked by the skills minister Anne Milton to review 61 apprenticeship standards since May last year. She has so far approved recommendations for 41 of these, with the latest 11 announced last week.

Many decisions involved huge funding cuts, including to the popular chartered manager degree apprenticeship by £5,000 despite a high-profile appeal from employers including the likes of retail giants Tesco and Next.

Just last week, FE Week revealed how Scania, a leading manufacturer of heavy trucks and buses, warned that reducing the funding band for the level 3 heavy vehicle service and maintenance technician standard by £3,000, as the IfA is planning to do, threatens its industry’s longterm skills strategy.

The IfA said the evaluation of funding reviews is not based on any particular standard, it is responding to “wider feedback”.

Many disputes have arose because employers and providers believe the institute is secretive about how it does funding band calculations.

In an interview with FE Week in February, the IfA’s chief executive Sir Gerry Berragan promised to become more transparent about how the costs are arrived at, but said he was not willing to share the formula it uses to calculate funding bands as he fears employer groups will “misuse” it to “inflate their costs”.

Rigler said in her blog today the IfA is “fully aware that our work on funding has not always been well-received” and it has now launched its “first wave” of improvements in this area.

“One of the new things we will be doing is ensuring that a funding section is included in intensive workshops our Relationship Managers have with new Trailblazers,” she explained.

“We have also created a clear decision-making flowchart, showing how we prioritise data points used in funding band decisions and the dependencies between them.

“My team has also developed improved funding forms. This is to help Trailblazers supply the right information first time to help us reach the most appropriate funding recommendation. Employers involved can now use the forms to identify standards they think are similar to their own, to help us draw the right comparisons.”

Rigler said the institute will also provide employers with “model forms and answers to frequently asked questions” and has “committed to improving communication with Trailblazers throughout the funding process, to set clear expectations about their input and timescales, and make it clearer how the final funding decision was made”.

She added that the IfA has listened to the feedback from Trailblazer Groups about the initial funding band that they receive when an occupational proposal is approved and it’s “clear that this hasn’t been working as we intended, so it’s right that we take this opportunity to remove this from the funding process altogether”.

Instead, it will share information about the funding bands assigned to apprenticeships that “share the same characteristics as their own, to give an early sense of likely funding bands and help trailblazer groups with their planning”.

Rigler said a second wave of improvements will be announced later in this year “following further review and engagement with stakeholders”.

The Association of Colleges has won a contract with the government to develop a “transitional” course for T-levels, following a secretive and restrictive procurement.

It will now design the offer and support providers with its “phased” implementation running up to first delivery of the new post-16 technical qualifications in 2020 and 2021.

The course, recommended by Lord Sainsbury in his technical education report in July 2016, will be for 16-year-olds to take if they are not ready to start a T-level at level three, but can “realistically achieve it” by age 19.

“The T-level transition framework will help young people, who may not quite be ready, get up to speed with the skills and gain the confidence they need before starting their T-level,” skills minister Anne Milton said today.

“I’m thrilled that we have appointed the Association of Colleges to support the first T-level providers to run a phased implementation of the transition offer in 2020 and 2021.

“The Association of Colleges has a wealth of FE technical expertise and will be well-placed to take this important work forward.”

A tender for an organisation to develop this offer was finally launched in February but only ran for 15 days.

The DfE was then accused of “locking out” small firms, as the procurement was only made available to suppliers in a specific category in its Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS).

The DfE refused to release the tender documents, list who is eligible to apply or even say how much the contract is worth.

The department again today would not reveal how much the contract is worth, saying the information is commercially sensitive.

David Hughes, chief executive of the AoC, said: “We bid for this work, in the normal way, because it is important to our members and because we have lots of expertise and understanding of the issues.

“We were pleased to win and are getting on with delivering the work needed.”

Timescales for developing the transition course will be tight, as there is just over a year to go until the first three T-levels, in education and childcare pathway, design, surveying and planning, and digital production, design and development, are delivered.

Six more new providers have received temporary bans on recruiting apprentices following early Ofsted inspections that found them making poor progress.

Since October 2018, the watchdog has been carrying out monitoring visits at every directly-funded provider which won a contract to deliver training after April 2017.

The Education and Skills Funding Agency has released an updated version of the register of apprenticeship training providers for May, which shows 33 providers are currently banned from taking on apprentices.

Six providers were added to the list this month, including: Cogent Skills Training, EMA Training, Moor Training, Piper Training, Right Track Social Enterprise, and Vogal Group.

Each of them had been found to have made ‘insufficient progress’ in at least one area during an Ofsted monitoring visit.

They will now be prevented from recruiting apprentices until they have received a full Ofsted inspection and been awarded at least a grade three for apprenticeship provision.

The providers can still carry on delivering training to their existing apprentices, but cannot train new apprentices as a subcontractor, or take on new apprentices as a subcontractor.

Cogent Skills Training, which had 106 apprentices at the time of inspection and specialises in life and industrial sciences, was found to have made poor progress in ensuring the provider is meeting all the requirements of successful apprenticeship provision, with inspectors reporting “too many” learners were “accomplishing little more than accrediting existing skills”.

EMA Training was marked down by Ofsted in the same area, because its 28 apprentices, who are training to be train conductors and drivers for Southeastern Trains, received no time during work hours to develop skills and behaviours after an extended period of training at the start of their programme.

Managers at Moor Training, which specialises in areas such as plumbing, heating and gas engineering, were found to have not kept accurate information on apprentices’ start dates, of which it had 44, whether apprentices had withdrawn from training, and the number of learners who had achieved their apprenticeships.

Piper Training, an arm of the trade association the Building Engineering Services Association, had 123 apprentices at the time of the inspection on heating and ventilation courses.

It has been barred after leaders were found to have concentrated too much on contractual compliance and financial and business developments, and not enough on ensuring employers know how to support their apprentices.

Its leaders were criticised in the report for not observing any teaching in the subcontracted colleges where most of its apprentices are taught, and for not checking whether subcontractors’ plans for learning are clear and logical.

Training director Tony Howard previously told FE Week they had had ongoing issues with subcontractors not submitting enough information for Piper Training to monitor progression.

“We are working with our sub-contractors to drastically improve on their capability to report at the frequency we are requiring,” he added.

Ofsted reported the quality of training received by 23 apprentices at childcare, business administration and customer services provider Right Track Social Enterprises did not always take adequate account of an apprentice’s job tasks and responsibilities, or the specific needs of employers.

And inspectors found staff at Vogal Group, which had 18 apprentices on engineering and manufacturing courses, did not have “appropriate awareness” of safeguarding, its policies of which were out-of-date, and apprentices only had a basic understanding.

Ofsted has started conducting full inspections of new apprenticeship providers that were previously banned from taking on new starts following ‘insufficient’ monitoring reports, and awarded them grades that allows them to start recruiting again.

The first was at Watertrain Ltd, which was rated ‘requires improvement’ in February. Since then, other turnaround providers have included Unique Training Solutions, rated ‘good’ in April, and Mitre Group, also rated ‘good’ in April.

 

Ofsted has today published its new and final education inspection framework that will come into effect from September.

It follows a three-month public consultation, which prompted more than 15,000 responses – the highest number the education watchdog has ever received.

A new FE and skills inspection handbook has been created as a result, which includes a number of changes to the way inspections are carried out in the sector.

FE Week has gone through the 63-page document as well as Ofsted’s 39-page consultation response and listed what it means for FE providers.

 

Number of provision types reduced to 4 – but WILL include high needs

Arguably the most controversial proposed change for FE was to reduce the current six provision types graded in inspection reports: 16 to 19 study programmes; adult learning programmes; apprenticeships; traineeships; provision for learners with high needs and; full-time provision for 14- to 16-year-olds.

Ofsted wanted to cut these to just three: education programmes for young people; apprenticeships; and adult learning programmes

Half of respondents in the consultation agreed or strongly agreed that reducing them would make inspection reports more “coherent and inclusive” but around one in five disagreed, mainly because of the exclusion of the “high needs” grade.

“Often, the concern was that this would lead to providers reducing the priority given to high-needs provision and not making its quality sufficiently clear, especially in providers that have a small proportion of learners with high needs,” Ofsted said.

As a result, the education watchdog has been “persuaded” and will include a category specifically for high needs in FE reports, along with education programmes for young people; apprenticeships; and adult learning programmes.

Clare Howard, chief executive of Natspec, which represents specialist FE providers, welcomed the U-turn and said it is “right that provision for learners who attract high needs funding is inspected and graded alongside the other funding streams for young people, apprenticeships and adult learning”.

 

Shift in focus to the “quality of education” rather than data

One of Ofsted’s most supported moves in developing the new inspection framework has been the promise to put “less emphasis” on data, such as achievement rates, and more on progress and destinations.

The inspectorate has confirmed it will proceed with its headline proposal for a new ‘quality of education’ judgement, after it received support from three quarters of respondents.

“Many understood how this would help reduce the incentives for schools and colleges to focus on just achieving better published outcomes at the expense of a rounded education,” Ofsted said.

It means that inspectors will make judgements on the following areas for FE providers: overall effectiveness, and four key judgements: quality of education; behaviour and attitudes; personal development; and leadership and management (see image below for example new FE report).

 

Four-point grading system here to stay – but new timescale for re-inspecting grade 3s

All inspection judgements will continue to be awarded under the current four-point grading scale: outstanding; good; requires improvement; and inadequate.

Ofsted said reports will be redesigned and shortened to only give the key information about each provider.

Each overall effectiveness grade will continue to carry specific consequences (click image to read what each means) for FE providers.

Providers that are judged ‘requires improvement’ overall will have the timescale for their next full inspection extended from 12 to 24 months to 12 to 30 months. This will “allow us to recognise whether rapid improvement has taken place or whether it may need more time,” Ofsted said.

 

A new model for short inspections – but no on-site planning

As is the case under current Ofsted rules, providers graded ‘good’ for overall effectiveness will usually be inspected within five years of the publication of that inspection report, and most will receive a short inspection. This will “determine primarily whether the quality of education/training that learners receive is good”.

Ofsted said these inspections will change from September to focus on particular aspects of the provision – principally the quality of education, safeguarding and leadership – as a “subset of the full EIF criteria, while allowing the lead inspector some discretion”.

The education watchdog had proposed that inspectors would arrive at a provider the day after they are notified of a short inspection, to complete planning the visit on-site, but providers voiced concern that the move would “effectively reduce the notification period and be the cause of stress and workload in providers”.

“Following the outcomes of the consultation and our experience on pilots, it is not clear that on-site planning is always beneficial to providers and inspectors,” Ofsted said, adding it will not move forward with the proposal.

 

Campus-level inspections ruled out for now

Ofsted previously said that if “more granulated performance data” was available it would be open to performing the inspections, which are being called for by large college groups such as NCG.

But in an interview with FE Week in November, chief inspector Amanda Spielman (pictured) ruled out introducing campus-level inspections in the new framework for 2019.

Its exclusion can be blamed on a lack of performance data for individual campuses from the Department for Education.

 

New provider and merged college inspection timescales to remain the same

Ofsted will continue to carry out a monitoring visit within 24 months to any provider that becomes newly, directly and publicly funded to deliver education training.

When a provider receives one or more insufficient progress judgements, it will normally receive a full inspection within six to 12 months of the publication of the monitoring visit report.

A newly merged college will receive a full inspection within three years of the merger, and will be treated as a “new” college – meaning it will not carry forward any inspection grades from predecessor colleges.

Those with an overall effectiveness grade of ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’ at one or more of the predecessor colleges will normally receive a monitoring visit before the first full inspection.