The boss of the Education and Skills Funding Agency has promised MPs that management apprenticeships will be “increasingly” audited to ensure they are “additive” amid fears they offer little value for public money.
During last night’s Public Accounts Committee hearing on apprenticeships Eileen Milner (pictured) was asked if she was concerned at the increase in levy-funded MBAs while the number of starts on level 2s continue to plummet.
She told the committee’s chair Meg Hillier that the take-up of level 7 apprenticeships is “new and growing” but it is “still a very small proportion of the totality”, before explaining how the ESFA is tackling the situation.
We will be checking very carefully to ensure they are deploying tests in advance
“Where we see MBAs the test that we have to do and that providers of MBAs have to do is that what they are delivering is something that is genuinely new knowledge, skills and behaviours that is equipping somebody for an occupational standard,” Milner said.
“And that is something that we will increasingly be testing around, so that when people go onto these things and when we are auditing them we will be checking very carefully to ensure they are deploying tests in advance to ensure that they are meeting that test that it is new, that it is additive.”
The ESFA chief executive said that at the moment MBAs are “very nascent programmes” but in “due course I’ll be hoping to come back to you to report on hopefully the success of programmes where employers are saying we do want those higher level skills, they are providing something additive”.
Prior learning refers to skills, knowledge and behaviours gained by learners before they start their apprenticeship, and must be taken into account by providers when negotiating a price with an employer to ensure cash is not being used to teach an apprentice something they already know.
The repercussions for not conducting these assessments are severe, as the funding rules state that funds “may be recovered” where there is non-compliance.
And last month FE Week reported that the DfE had commissioned research to review high prices for apprentices with prior learning.
Employers are doing more than they have ever done before and we should be supportive of that
The crackdown on the rule comes after Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman said in her annual report for 2018 that many apprentices were “not learning anything new”, and were just getting accreditation for knowledge and skills they already had.
Hiller quizzed Milner on this yesterday, and questioned whether it was a “good use of public money” to “fund something an employer might have already introduced for highly paid employees” in the past without levy cash.
“I would say an exceptional employer who has made the time commitment to off-the-job and the investment to the amount of time and duration they will give to occupational readiness, I think the balance sits that employers are doing more than they have ever done before and we should be supportive of that,” the ESFA chief executive said in response.
Jonathan Slater, the Department for Education’s permanent secretary, also appeared in front of the PAC last night and admitted hard choices will need to be made in the face of an imminent apprenticeship budget overspend. One option would be to “prioritise some apprenticeships over others” in terms of funding.
The Department for Education’s top civil servant has admitted “hard choices” will need to be made in the face of an imminent apprenticeship budget overspend.
Jonathan Slater, the department’s permanent secretary, was one of a number high-profile government officials quizzed by the Public Accounts Committee this afternoon on the affordability of the apprenticeship programme.
Asked by Layla Moran MP if it is “right” that a bank employee who already earns a six-figure salary should have their MBA funded through the levy, Slater said if there is enough funding in the system “there is no reason for government to get involved in that decision”.
One of the choices for government would be to prioritise some apprenticeships over others
However, he quickly pointed to the recent National Audit Office report which warned the apprenticeships budget will shortly be “constrained”, and “something is going to have to give” in the upcoming spending review.
FE Week was first to report that the budget could soon go bust, after finding out the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education estimated that it could be overspent by £0.5 billion this year, rising to £1.5 billion during 2021/22.
“In 2020/21 it [the levy] could be significantly overspent if we carried on, on the basis of current trends,” Slater said today.
“One of the choices for government as resources get constrained would be to prioritise some apprenticeships over others.
“The problem with doing that is we are putting ourselves in the employers’ shoes but that sort of choice will have to be made one way or another.”
Asked what the government might “prioritise”, Slater said there are a “whole range of choices” including the fact that there “isn’t a requirement to collect the amount of money we currently collect” – a hint that levy contributions could be increased or the current £3 million threshold for employers to pay the levy could be reduced.
He continued: “One could change the levy on the basis of productivity gains, fund from general taxation, or one could prioritise from within.
“It will be self-evident to the committee that if the amount of money were to be constrained at its current level that would require choices to be made between level 2 and level 6, the balance between one sector and another.”
Last week the Association of Employment and Learning Providers made the radical proposal that all level 6 and 7 apprenticeships, including those with integrated degrees, should be removed from the scope of levy funding to relieve mounting pressure on the budget.
But many champions of degree apprenticeships, including education select committee chair Robert Halfon, strongly opposed the proposal.
Slater raised this issue during today’s hearing: “Layla Moran suggested I had given her an opportunity for a campaign against higher level apprenticeships, but if I was in front of the chair of the education select committee its chair would be demanding I push harder for degree and post-graduate apprenticeships,” he told MPs.
It is really important from the programmes point of view we think about the social mobility aspect
“These are genuine choices and it is our task to expose those different choices.”
He continued: “Bear in mind all of this money being spent is what employers put in a pot. It’s public money sure, but they put it in, and the question about the extent to which we decide what they spend their money on is an interesting political choice from let them do whatever they want through to no you can’t have an MBA no matter what. There isn’t a right answer there.”
One reason the AELP wants to stop government funding for higher level apprenticeships is because of the huge drop in level 2 starts.
Slater shared his concern about this today: “We are concerned as we monitor the objectives we set out in that benefits realisation strategy that as the NAO points out the number of starts for the most disadvantaged has gone down from 25 per cent to 22.6 per cent.
“Clearly we need to meet the needs of disadvantaged young people when it comes to apprenticeships so that will be a key factor for the review we carry out later this year.”
The ESFA’s director of apprenticeships, Keith Smith, added: “It is really important from the programmes point of view we think about the social mobility aspect.”
Slater concluded: “The clear challenge for us in the forthcoming spending review is that in the year ahead all the money will be spent and the year beyond that more if we carry on as we are and so there are going to have to be choices made about how to cope with that imbalance that is coming between supply and demand.”
The Royal Air Force introduced apprenticeships within 18 months of its formation. One hundred years on, it has more than 3,000: Cath Murray meets the man who looks after them all
Shortly after taking over as head of apprentice training for the Royal Air Force in 2017, Air Vice-Marshal Warren James bumped into his former cadet flight sergeant at the Cosford airshow.
Peter Hiley was now squadron commander of the same 366 Squadron where James got his first taste of the Air Force as a teenager more than 30 years ago. Delighted, Hiley invited him to meet some of the teenage cadets.
James describes a young cadet messing about with a go-cart, who couldn’t get his head around the fact that this impressive figure, decked out in regalia, had once been in his shoes.
“They explained to them I’m an ex-cadet, even though I’m now an air marshal, from the same unit he’s come from in secondary school in Sheffield. And he looks at me, ‘I don’t believe you’. He almost couldn’t compute that he could come from where he was to do this.”
The cadet challenged him as he was leaving. “If you’re really one of our cadets, will you come back to our Christmas dinner?”
He remembers the moment, six months later, when he turned up with his wife. “This cadet opened the door and he’s like ‘You meant it’. ‘Yeah, I meant it.’”
In his after-dinner speech, James told the cadets to find his picture in the squadron scrapbooks. “I’m not special,” he told them. “I didn’t come from a fancy family, a clever school. You can look across the Air Force today and we are remarkably more like that than people realise.”
A mechanical engineer inspects an aircraft propulsion system.
Sitting in his office at the RAF headquarters in leafy High Wycombe, Bucks, the 52-year-old talks passionately about the RAF’s role in motivating young people to succeed. “In essence, you’re able to say to them ‘What’s stopping you?’ Because it’s probably in your head rather than in your ability. There are a lot of youngsters who could do something and be more than they probably believe at the moment, and try it.”
He joined at 18, having wanted to fly from the age of six – inspired by his grandfather who, as a steel worker during the Second World War, was in a protected trade so couldn’t enlist. “I think he was a bit frustrated, so he duly imprinted this,” he says.
“So I did a bit of time in the air cadets, was very single-minded about what I wanted to do. Then when I was 15 I applied for a scholarship, and to my parents’ delight and my surprise, I got one. That guaranteed me a flying scholarship, an Outward Bound course, and direct entry to the service. I joined never imagining 34 years later that I’d be a vice-marshal, basically the chief executive of all Air Force training. And a fair bit of defence training. I’ve got Army, Navy and Air Force engineers, nuclear, maritime, aviation, ground, electrical are all underneath my current command.”
Highlights of his career include Hong Kong in 1997 when all the military bases were handed over to the Chinese. On his wall is a framed picture of a helicopter with the signatures of all the major figures in the handover, from Chris Patten, then governor of Hong Kong, to the Chinese major general who took over the command.
His father was in the merchant navy, then the oil industry, and his mother worked in catering. He and his younger sister grew up in Sheffield, before moving to the tiny town of Lochgilphead on the west coast of Scotland.
It’s funny to think of the RAF as a modern institution, but it’s a spring chicken compared with the Army and Navy.
Founded in 1918, its relative lack of history can be a benefit in terms of social mobility, James says. “It has allowed us to just find talent and competence. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have university graduates and public school boys and girls here, we do. But we have everything and we have them at every level.”
One area where they do have history is with apprenticeships. Lord Trenchard, who’s often called the father of the Royal Air Force, drove the training agenda from the start. “He got us into apprenticeships within the space of a year and a half of being formed.”
One hundred years on, they offer apprenticeships in 24 different trades – from police officer to air traffic controller or dog handler – have an Ofsted outstanding rating, and a completion rate of a staggering 97 per cent across all of their apprenticeships (the national average is 68 per cent).
Having been historically reluctant to toot their own horn, the service started to make more noise in the run up to their centenary, entering and winning the Macro Employer of the Year category at the 2017 National Apprenticeship Awards.
“There’s been a good recognition this last couple of years that we ought to stay slightly noisy, all of us,” says James. “Because in fact it’s a good story. It’s positive. And actually we can show the way.”
In general they prefer to take a collegiate approach to national competitions, he explains. “I think if the Army, Navy and Air Force went to war to try and compete, you could actually drown it out and you would stop other people from growing – particularly some of the small companies would think, ‘I can’t compete with that, you’re winning everything’. So we deliberately don’t. We choose occasionally to step in just to maintain a profile, but we try and work in the background with others – you want others to do well.”
Having such established training programmes that already fit its needs, the RAF worked closely with the government on the apprenticeship reforms “so that the changes didn’t damage a recognised formula”.
At the same time, he realises the value to the apprentices of having an industry standardised accreditation, which makes their skill transferable. “Everybody always leaves defence eventually, it’s just a case of when. So how do you treat them? And what do you do for them on the way through? So there’s a virtuous cycle of attract, recruit, train, develop, retain, but then transition.”
Weapons technicians working on a Paveway 4 precision-guided bomb
Most of the RAF’s 3,000 apprentices are on levels 2 and 3, and the force is clear that it sees apprenticeships as giving career opportunities to young people who may not have been academic high-flyers at school.
To this end, the armed forces were a strong voice against a disproportionate focus on higher-level apprenticeships. “If you’re not careful, then you’re effectively just supplanting a university education with a degree-level apprenticeship education, and you will cream off exactly the same people,” James says, echoing concerns that are rippling through the sector.
“What about the kid who got a B or a C – or didn’t even do that – but actually has more common sense than the rest of them put together? Or has a drive to do something that’s interesting?”
He describes his own officer training as a “horrible surprise” – the sudden shift from schoolboy to grown-up work. “It wasn’t quite what I expected. It wasn’t bad, it just was a shock. It’s a real change of life, you grow up really quickly.”
He rejects my repeated use of the D-word to describe RAF culture, insisting it’s less about punishment and more about creating the structure for young people to succeed. “Strict discipline’s probably the wrong phrase. There’s structure. So there’s structure about the way you do your daily life, it’s everything from sort of being on time to being smart, to being ready, to being planned. People struggle with that, particularly when they’re 16, 17, 18, 19, 20-years-old.
“But our staff are trained to mentor and assist and coach these people through this.”
But what if they just have a bad attitude? “If they’re not committing or their attitude seems bad, in essence they’ll be given the pastoral care to understand why,” he says.
“I’m actually growing somebody for life here, and they’re in a job. And part of that job is that bit of training. But there’s actually an awful lot more to it. In essence I want an incredibly flexible, adaptable human being who has a skill. But they’ll be able to adapt that, move it, change it.”
Sir Gerry Berragan sets out his institute’s programme for the new financial year
The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education is two years old next month and has developed considerably in that time. We have reduced the time it takes to approve new apprenticeship standards, effectively doubling our approval rate, and learner and employer engagement with the reform programme has increased. But we will not rest on our laurels and this year are looking at how we continue to improve, with a key focus on quality.
Our aim is for apprenticeships to enjoy a respected and prestigious status as an attractive route to skilled employment and further development. To do this they must be universally associated with the highest standards.
To that end, this week we have published the Quality Strategy, developed with our partners in the Quality Alliance. This sets out best practice expectations before, during and after apprenticeships.
The institute chairs the alliance, whose members include the Department for Education, Ofsted, Ofqual, the Quality Assurance Agency and the Office for Students. The Association of Employment and Learning Providers, the Association of Colleges, the Federation of Awarding Bodies and Universities UK attend meetings as observers.
The strategy is a commitment to ensuring that the training apprentices receive, on and off the job, is of the highest quality, leading to an end-point assessment that demonstrates that they are occupationally competent.
As part of this, we are developing a revised framework for external quality assurance and working with the Education and Skills Funding Agency to strengthen the criteria applied to the register of end-point assessment organisations.
The institute is always happy for feedback and to consider how we can evolve and improve.
We have been criticised for being too secretive. Any new organisation tasked with such important responsibilities for ensuring the success of the technical education reform programme inevitably would be initially cautious in how it communicated with employers, the FE sector and wider world.
But our established position in the apprenticeships and T-levels arena is enabling us to engage more freely with the press and public.
Wherever possible we are happy to share information with our stakeholders and the public so they can understand the work we do – although there will always be cases where commercially sensitive information cannot be shared.
But to improve transparency we are reviewing our processes, including how funding bands are calculated and what supporting information can be shared. We hope to make more information public in time.
We also launched our Faster and Better programme with the aim of working more closely with employers to refine our processes so that standards could be identified, developed and approved more quickly and effectively.
We published our 400th standard last month, two months ahead of schedule, and have now moved on to more than 410.
Now we are looking to a second wave of improvements and to having 500 approved standards before the end of this next financial year.
We are also proud to have played a key role in creating a rich training landscape that provides a range of opportunities at all levels. We don’t see a “middle-class grab”, but rather a broad system that supports learners from a diversity of backgrounds and education to learn new skills in a wider range of apprenticeships.
Most recent provisional figures confirmed that employers and apprentices are throwing their support behind the new apprenticeships, with starts on standards now topping 300,000.
Our preparations for T-levels are also going to plan and, as things stand, the first wave will be available for teaching from September next year.And this week we have released the Invitation to tender for the next seven pathways in wave two of T-levels, two weeks ahead of the original release date.
This approach allowed the government and the institute to work with providers, employers, awarding organisations and other partners to design the new system for successful further rollout.
It all points towards exciting times ahead for technical education and an established and successful institute.
The number of HMRC investigations into the underpayment of the apprenticeship levy at big employers has more than doubled in a year, according to an accountancy group.
Figures obtained by UHY Hacker Young from the tax office show that 84 investigations were carried out in 2018-19, compared to 33 in 2017-18.
As a result, HMRC collected £6.2 million through these investigations, up from £5.2 million the year before.
A spokesperson for the tax office said it “initially” allowed time for employers to meet with their obligations in respect of the levy and issued “reminders as to those obligations”.
He added that buy using data from the first full year that the levy had been in operation, HMRC was “able to gain a better understanding of compliance and focus more resource to interventions accordingly”.
The amount that HMRC suspects businesses to have underpaid through the levy was £13.6 million in 2017-18, according to UHY Hacker Young.
Since April 2017, any business with an annual payroll of more than £3 million has been required to pay 0.5 per cent of its total wage bill into a pool which it can then draw on to fund apprenticeships.
But many employers forced to pay it have reportedly complained they find the levy complex and difficult to comply with, while some have also found there aren’t apprenticeships that fit their own requirements.
In January, the Confederation of British Industry called on the government to allow employers to appeal for more time to spend their apprenticeship levy funds if the standards they want to use are still in development but not yet available.
Under such a system employers would have the right to request an extension on the 24-month limit for spending their levy funds “as long as the business commits the funds” in their accounts.
The Department for Education and Treasury is currently reviewing the levy in an attempt to make it more flexible.
One change that officials have already committed to is allowing employers to transfer 25 per cent of their levy funds to others from April 1, 2019, up from the current 10 per cent limit.
UHY Hacker Young believes the levy as it currently stands is leading to businesses underpaying which “potentially leaves them exposed to substantial fines”.
The accountancy group said difficulty of using the scheme is “demonstrated by new figures showing more than £3 billion paid through the apprenticeship levy has yet to be drawn by businesses to fund training programmes. Only £480 million has been used as of 30th November 2018”.
Clive Gawthorpe, Partner at UHY Hacker Young, said: “The fiendishly complex apprenticeship levy is clearly causing problems for businesses.
“We have seen additional problems arise amongst large businesses where several different parts of the same businesses group may be liable to pay the Levy. However, there is little guidance to help businesses calculate their liabilities.
“The high number of investigations HMRC is launching into underpayment is a symptom of the wider problems that are hampering the schemes effectiveness. These urgently need addressing.”
England’s largest college group this week announced plans to slash up to 300 jobs across its two training providers to “strengthen” its “already robust provision”, but FE Week has since learnt the truth behind the move.
The redundancies consultation at Intraining and Rathbone Training, part of NCG, comes off the back of a slamming Ofsted inspection as well as an Education and Skills Funding Agency mystery audit that found major data manipulation.
FE Week understands the education watchdog recently conducted a monitoring visit of Intraining following its ‘requires improvement’ report published in June last year, which downgraded it from ‘good’.
The unfortunate effect of these proposals would be substantial redundancies
The inspectorate found no signs of improvement at the provider, and is expected to hit it with ‘insufficient’ ratings across the board when the report surfaces.
The visit was only for Intraining and not NCG as a whole, although the group is anticipating its own monitoring inspection soon as it also got downgraded to ‘requires improvement’ in June last year.
Meanwhile, Intraining was one of a number of providers to receive a short-notice audit from the ESFA. It is understood the agency is not only demanding a significant clawback from the NCG division after finding evidence of achievement rate fiddling, but contract termination is also likely.
The confusing picture of NCG’s and Intraining’s latest official data (see tables below), for 2016/17, shows their overall achievement rate for nearly 7,000 apprentices was under 60 per cent.
NCG declined to comment on Ofsted’s and the ESFA’s findings.
The college group ran itself into financial trouble in 2017/18, generating a deficit of £7 million, according to its latest accounts. This was largely because a substantial drop in apprenticeship provision.
According to the ESFA’s official data, total of 9,470 apprentices started across the whole group in 2016/17, but this declined to just 3,820 in 2017/18 – a 60 per cent drop.
The group has also seen a huge decline in subcontractors. It had 50 of these partners in 2016/17 with contracts totalling £12.3 million. NCG retained a 20 per cent top-slice to gain £2.4 million in management fees, according to figures published by the ESFA.
NCG’s divisions
But as of May 1, 2017, NCG was working with just 10 subcontractors according to their published self-declaration, with the combined total of contracts totalling just £1.3 million. If the group took a 20 per cent top-slice on average from the deals its management fee income would only be £264,997.
Intraining and Rathbone Training currently train 4,500 learners between them, of which two-thirds are apprentices. Some could be forced to find alternative providers if their 19 centres end up shutting, as NCG is proposing.
Last year, FE Week reported that staff numbers were being cut by up to a fifth, from 500 to around 400, at the providers in an effort to save £3 million and NCG Group accounts show they injected cash totalling £1 million into Intraining and £2.55 million into Rathbone Training.
“We have opened consultation with Intraining and Rathbone staff on some fundamental changes to the way in which we operate in England, including the closure of our network of training centres and a radical refocussing of our apprenticeship proposition,” a statement on the NCG website said this week.
“Intraining and Rathbone accounted for less than 20 per cent of group revenue in 2017/18. The changes we are proposing will strengthen NCG’s already robust position, supporting our ambition to invest in teaching, learning and facilities.
“The unfortunate effect of these proposals would be substantial redundancies.”
A spokesperson confirmed the providers between them currently employ 425 people and 300 jobs are now at risk.
He said that moving forward, NCG will “put the interests of learners first and support them to finish their programmes wherever possible”.
“If we proceed as currently proposed following consultation, we will in future operate a single, smaller, digitally-enabled business focussed on delivery of high-quality apprenticeships for the tech, management and professional occupations,” the spokesperson added.
NCG, which is chaired by former Education and Skills Funding Agency chief executive Peter Lauener, has experienced a turbulent couple of years.
Peter Lauener
Aside from the Ofsted visits and falling achievement rates, staff at its colleges in London have gone on strike in a row over pay, and a free school that the group sponsored, the Discovery School, was forced to close down by the government.
NCG is currently subject to intervention from the FE Commissioner owing to the Ofsted grade three, and is expecting a “diagnostic visit” before the end of the academic year.
As well as this, it is expected that the group will be dropped from the government’s final bidding round for Institutes of Technology as a result of its ‘requires improvement’ rating.
NCG’s former boss Joe Docherty resigned in October.
As revealed by FE Week earlier this month, the college group has paused recruitment for a new chief executive until the Spring, after its initial hunt proved fruitless and it turned its focus to “improving standards”.
Intraining hit hard by ESFA mystery audit
In early March, FE Week reported that the ESFA had undertaken mysterious funding audits at many large apprenticeship providers.
It is understood that Intraining was one of the providers visited in an effort to uncover data manipulation that would inflate achievement rates and funding levels.
At the time of the audit the ESFA refused to say what they were looking into, but have in recent days written to providers outlining their findings.
Sources close to the audit told FE Week that the ESFA found significant issues with the way Intraining apprentices had been reclassified as NCG’s and generally moved around the providers that make-up the NCG Group.
The audits also focussed on whether withdrawals and ‘breaks in learning’ were recorded in a way that would inflate both funding and achievement rates.
NCG would not comment on the audit or what is believed to be a significant sum of funding the ESFA is looking to clawback.
It is believed Intraining is one of several dozen providers hit with the mystery audits that face not only a clawback, but also being removed from the official achievement rate tables, due for publication next Thursday.
As previously reported by FE Week, this major review of apprenticeship data is expected to result in the sector being officially warned about unacceptable data practices, as was the case nearly a decade ago when the then chief executive of the funding agency published a letter to the sector.
Something similar is likely to be in the pipeline from the current top brass at the ESFA.
Huge decline in apprenticeship business and subcontractors
NCG Group saw a huge 5,650 (60 per cent) fall in the number of apprenticeship starts in 2017/18, according to figures published by the government.
As shown in the table below (click to enlarge), the seven of the eight providers that form the current NCG Group all suffered huge reductions. It remains unclear why apprentices were shifted onto the NCG provider, rising from 30 to 830 starts.
Intraining and to some extent Rathbone Training were heavily reliant on apprenticeship subcontracting, as shown in the table below. They had 50 subcontractors in 2016/17 generating over £12 million of which NCG Group retained £2.4 million. Since then this has sharply declined to as few as 10 subcontractors generating less than £2 million.
Quality concerns and lack of clarity over data
The latest published qualification achievement rate (QAR) data shows just what a complicated mess the NCG Group has got themselves into.
As the table below shows (click to enlarge), official data says the NCG provider had more than 3,000 apprentices with a very low achievement rate of 55.6 per cent.
Unofficial data also published by the government suggests the figure is 48.2 per cent for less than 2,000 starts. And if that was not strange enough, the official starts figure in 2016/17 for this provider was only 30.
FE Week understands that the ESFA is now investigating why apprentices were moved around the various provider UKPRNs, often many times.
National Education Service? Labour would do better to develop a new national education entitlement for those aged 18 to 74, says Tom Bewick
Twenty years ago, the Labour government published a seminal green paper, The Learning Age. It was responsible for a lifelong learning strategy that many in the sector still talk about. Two central policy tenets – individual learning accounts and the university for industry – were a recognition that society had moved on from the statist, monolithic provision of public services.
The learning age “will be built on a renewed commitment to self-improvement… learning supports active citizenship and democracy”, wrote David Blunkett, then education secretary, in a foreword to the paper. Blunkett came from a social democratic tradition within the Labour movement. As a council leader in the 1980s he had seen the limitations of central diktat from Whitehall. He also had no time for municipal Marxism, preferring instead to follow the pioneering efforts of the early trade unions who had set up their own workers’ educational institutes and correspondence courses.
Of course, the individual learning accounts and university for industry policies ultimately failed. Not because they were wrongly conceived, but the result of extremely poor implementation. The learning accounts, hugely popular with adult returning learners, closed because of fraud.
And the so-called university for industry never really engaged with enough companies, making the whole proposition null and void.
The recent history of lifelong learning policy is important because, it seems, Labour – now in opposition – has no intention of drawing any lessons from it. The Learning Age should be compulsory reading for every member of the commission it has tasked with putting flesh on the bones of its rather nebulous National Education Service (NES). What they’d soon discover is that the goal of achieving a widespread learning culture where everyone is empowered to take part has little to do with tinkering about with institutional structures – central or local.
You would expect a serious consultation like this to focus on what barriers to learning need to be addressed to equip citizens with the skills to succeed in the fourth Industrial Revolution. Instead, the focus is about “local accountability” structures. It’s a throwback to the 1970s and the glory days of the Inner London Education Authority, no doubt a period fondly remembered by those around the current Labour leader.
The paper drips with anti-market rhetoric. Education has been treated like a “commodity”, it says, “with the needs of the private sector prioritised instead”. Absolutely no recognition that the only reason apprenticeship opportunities quadrupled under the last Labour government was because the independent training providers stepped in.
Private providers still deliver 76 per cent of all apprenticeships. Or that our qualifications are envied and exported the world over because they have always operated in a mixed-market economy, constitutionally independent from the state.
If Labour really wants to look forward, not back, it needs to change the rhetoric. Post-compulsory education has always been a collaborative partnership between the state, private companies and individuals. The model of the National Health Service is not the one we should be basing a 21st-century lifelong learning policy on.
Sure, the NHS concept has provided a catchy slogan for politicians to talk about how learning should be “free at the point of use” and available “from cradle to grave”. But the public is not stupid. The NHS has gatekeepers at every level rationing the medicines and treatments patients can receive. And while the NHS is close to a national religion, people also understand the limitations of how much taxation can be increased to fund it.
Labour would do better to develop a new national education entitlement for those aged 18 to 74. It should resurrect individual learning accounts and empower citizens through those to seek out the skills and retraining that is required. Ultimately, education is a public and a private good.
What people care about most is not which democratic structures oversee them, but the real purchasing power in their pockets that allows them to find the courses they need.
Labour’s new commission is a chance to establish truly integrated lifelong learning, says Joyce Black
The first three months of 2019 have shown us that C can mean celebration, centenary and, of course, commission. Lifelong learning is the thread that brings them all together.
Three important adult education organisations are celebrating this year: the Open University and Aontas, the national adult learning organisation in Ireland, have both reached their 50th birthday, while the iconic London adult education centre, City Lit, is marking its centenary. These organisations are all very different and were set up with different purposes, but they have all transformed the lives of adult learners who might have otherwise missed out.
Another centenary being commemorated this year is the Ministry of Reconstruction’s 1919 report on adult learning, which described adult education as “a permanent national necessity” that should be “both universal and lifelong”. One hundred years on and we’re still having to make the case, even though there is so much more research and evidence, including from the Learning and Work Institute (L&W), which clearly demonstrates the impact adult learning has on the individual, communities, economies and society.
For the past 26 years, L&W’s Festival of Learning – the biggest celebration of lifelong learning in England – has highlighted the many and varied opportunities learning can bring to individuals, their families, communities and employers. It has been my privilege and pleasure to read the nominations for the past 17 years, to read first-hand the transformative examples of lifelong learning and retraining.
And so on to the C for commission. It seems that a new commission is either announced, launched or has published a report every week, but I have a particular interest in Labour’s new Commission on Lifelong Learning. Its task will be to develop proposals that will create a system of lifelong learning that is genuinely integrated across all types and providers of education; proposals that give individuals access to the education and training they need throughout their lives, not just to serve the economic need, but to improve their own life chances.
While this can sound like so much familiar rhetoric, one question that is also included is, “can and should lifelong learning support other government policy priorities – health being one such example?”
This for me is the key question and if the answer is “yes”, then not only for health. If a future Labour government is serious about this, then those cross-departmental discussions need to take place now. Government departments need to be embrace the demonstrable value of adult learning and education in addressing more of their strategic priorities and policies in health and social care, social integration and community cohesion, social mobility – and not forgetting industry, in the context of the fourth Industrial Revolution.
While we know that there is much international evidence of the impact of adult learning across other public policy agendas, three recent L&W reports (Healthy Wealth and Wise; Learning Work and Health; Time for Action) bring together the evidence and the arguments as to why and how lifelong learning should support other government policy priorities.
Some of the suggestions I will be making to the commission include: taking a more co-ordinated and integrated and longer-term focused approach to health and associated services, including adult learning and employment programmes; supporting learning linked to health, work and communities (social prescribing) much more strategically across the UK; linking social prescribing with entitlements to a personal learning account to help give individuals greater choice and ownership over their learning, as well as more flexible help with the cost. I could go on.
I have joined with other colleagues on the commission, bringing more than 40 years’ experience in FE, and am looking forward to developing a genuinely integrated lifelong learning system that meets the ever-changing needs of individuals and our country. This is the time not to just be bold and radical, but to also be creative and credible.
It’s been a week of mainly highs for FE as one provider was rated ‘outstanding’ in its first ever inspection, while another was found making ‘significant progress’ across the board in an early monitoring visit.
The week wasn’t without its lows, however, as several providers scored ‘insufficient progress’ ratings in their own monitoring reports.
White Rose School of Beauty and Complementary Therapies Limited went straight in with a grade one after winning an adult learning and apprenticeships contract in 2016.
The provider has trained more than 700 learners over the last year, and its report recognised how the principal has “successfully implemented an ambitious strategic vision to provide outstanding training in beauty and complementary therapies that meets the needs of local and national industries”.
“Well-qualified tutors have extensive industry experience,” inspectors found.
Learners make “very rapid progress in the development of their vocational skills; the very large majority go on to achieve their qualifications”.
Another private provider, Development Manager Limited, which has 171 apprentices training in computer software development, technical support and engineering, or digital marketing, made ‘significant progress’ in all three areas of an early monitoring visit.
“Senior managers and governors, led by the chief executive, have a very distinct and positive approach to the delivery of apprenticeships,” inspectors wrote.
“They are clear that the development of positive behaviours and attitudes is as important as the development of new knowledge and skills.”
Two providers that were rated ‘requires improvement’ last year – Newcastle upon Tyne City Council and Learn Plus Us – were also found to be making ‘significant progress’ in at least one field judged.
Things are not so rosy at Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, which made ‘insufficient progress’ in two areas of a monitoring visit.
“Most trust employees who become apprentices already have the practical skills, knowledge and behaviours needed for the apprenticeship,” inspectors wrote.
“Consequently, the apprenticeship is of little benefit and does not develop or extend the apprentices’ knowledge, skills and behaviours.”
WDR Limited was found to have made ‘insufficient progress’ across the board after inspectors found staff at an employer were being forced onto their apprenticeship programme. You can read FE Week’s full story about this report here.
Meanwhile, the Paddington Development Trust, a private provider, was hit with a grade three in its first Ofsted inspection.
Inspectors found that trustees and senior leaders “do not have a secure enough oversight of the quality of provision and do not use the data available to them well enough to bring about improvement where needed”.
Chadsgrove Educational Trust Learning Centre, an independent specialist college, also received a grade three in its first inspection.
Ofsted said directors, managers and staff are “not suitably experienced in working with students in further education settings”.
The centre opened to provide provision for young people aged 19 to 25 with a physical disability and/or complex medical need in 2016.
Senior leaders were criticised for focussing too much on securing funding and seeking off-site accommodation away from the main site, and not having “sufficient focus on the quality of teaching, learning and assessment”.
Greater Peterborough UTC also received a grade three from its first inspection.
In the first year of the UTC accepting students, “too much emphasis was placed on maximising pupil numbers and too little attention was given to matching pupils’ interests and aspirations to the UTC’s curriculum,” according to Ofsted.
“This contributed to the first set of results last summer being very poor.”
Meanwhile six providers – Central Training Academy Limited, JGW Training Limited, Trainingplatform Ltd, Linden Management (UK) Limited, Complete Lean Solutions, and Herefordshire, Ludlow and North Shropshire College – all made ‘reasonable progress’ across the board in their various monitoring visits.
Babington Business College Limited retained its grade two in a short Ofsted inspection.
