Learndirect has started to win government funding to deliver skills training again, after its new owner secured more than £20 million worth of European Social Fund contracts.

FE Week understands that the nation’s former largest FE provider won the funding, which is used to deliver employment and skills support to disadvantaged people, in four different areas across England following a recent tender.

It now has contracts worth more than £10 million to deliver programmes in the Marches Local Enterprise Partnership, while £3 million is to be used across Derby and Nottingham, £4 million in the West of England, and nearly £3.5 million in North East London.

The win comes six months after Learndirect had its various Education and Skills Funding Agency contracts, which totalled nearly £100 million, wound down following a damning grade four Ofsted report which surfaced in August 2017.

The training provider came under new ownership in June following a sale to Wayne Janse van Rensburg (pictured) for his firm Dimensions Training Solution to take the reins.

The £20 million ESF contracts will be run by run by ‘Dimensions Training Solution – Learndirect’.

Mr Janse van Rensburg was approached but declined to comment as the results were in a 10-day standstill period, which ends on January 28.

Dimensions Training Solution – Learndirect is nowhere near the size that it used to be, after Mr Janse van Rensburg sold its apprenticeships business in July and the government banned the company from being able to gain funding from the adult education budget following failures by its old leadership team.

It can however bid and win ESF cash, which is not inspected by Ofsted because much of it does not fall under “education or training”.

The ESF is funding that the UK received, as a member state of the EU, to increase job opportunities and help people to improve their skill levels, particularly those who find it difficult to get work.

The current funding round is worth about €3 billion (£2.3 billion) across England over the period from 2014 to 2020.

ESF funding for this country is administered through the Education and Skills Funding Agency, the Department for Work and Pensions, and the Big Lottery Fund, which each provide match funding.

Many projects co-funded by ESFA, delivered with the involvement of local enterprise partnerships, focused on young people not in education, employment or training.

Although Learndirect’s £20 million contracts sound like a large win on the face of it, it is actually less than half what the provider won during a previous ESF tender.

In 2017, Learndirect secured 26 deals worth almost £49.5 million.

A college has terminated its contract with the controversial Saudi Arabian Colleges of Excellence programme due to “on-going delays” in receiving payments resulting in an alleged £500,000 debt.

Dudley College, rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, began work with the Saudi government in 2011 and has taken part in various ventures in the country over the last eight years.

Most recently the college has delivered Capacity Building Contracts in Hafr Al-Batin Girls College from September 2017, which was due to conclude in 2020, as part of its work with Saudi’s Colleges of Excellence scheme.

But Dudley felt it had “no choice but to terminate this contract” after repeated failures by the programme to pay the college.

Speaking candidly about the decision, principal Lowell Williams said: “Despite the invaluable support provided by the UK’s Ambassador to the Kingdom and the Department for Trade and Industry, contractual payments remain in arrears to the value of £0.5 million.

“The position we find ourselves in is very frustrating. We believe we have been making a real difference to the lives of young women in the Kingdom.

“Whilst we understand that governmental issues in Saudi might have contributed to delays in payments, unfortunately as a result CoE have breached their contract with us.”

He added that it would “not be appropriate” for Dudley to use UK public funds to “sustain the cash flow of the project in Hafr Al-Batin Girls College”.

Colleges of Excellence was founded in 2013 to boost technical and vocational education and training in Saudi Arabia through partnerships with international providers.

But a number of providers dropped out of the programme early on as challenges with operating in the region became apparent.

An FE Week investigation in 2016 uncovered grave financial problems at some of the colleges taking part.

Lincoln College and the Hertfordshire Vocational Education Consortium won huge contracts from the CoE programme of around £250 million each in 2014. But both experienced significant losses associated with these contract in their accounts for the following year.

Mr Williams said today that Dudley’s “primary concern in reaching this decision is to protect the interests of our UK learners and to ensure they are not disadvantaged in any way”.

“We have always made it clear our international activity must be self-sustaining,” he explained.

“We would not continue to trade at risk with any other partner if there were significant contractual arrears.

“Since we began our work in Saudi Arabia we have generated an income of just over £3 million which has delivered a surplus in the region of £0.5 million.

“In the unlikely event that we are unable to recover the outstanding contracted sums, the college’s overall Saudi operations will have delivered a break even performance.”

Mr Williams said his college remains “fully committed” to its “other flagship international projects, particularly our work in India with the UK India Education Research Initiative and our British Council funded projects in South Africa and Pakistan”.

Dudley’s decision to terminate its Saudi contract because of unpaid debts comes a week after FE Week revealed that Highbury College called in the lawyers to recover a long-running £1.4 million debt held up in Nigeria, after a technical education project in the country went pear-shaped.

Colleges were warned off overseas ventures in 2016 following the collapse of AoC India, which fell just four years after launching when 25 UK college members quit.

A maths charity has been awarded £60,000 to investigate the “feasibility” of a new GCSE curriculum in the subject for post-16 resit students.

Mathematics in Education and Industry will run a review independent of government, with the aim of developing a curriculum that has a greater focus on applying maths in real-life situations.

The project will include a small-scale study to assess the suitability of the curriculum as a basis for an alternative to the existing GCSE maths, which many resit students find tough to succeed in.

MEI chief executive Charlie Stripp said: “Resitting a GCSE maths qualification designed for 16-year-olds does not meet the mathematical needs of the large majority of students who do not succeed in maths at age 16.

“These students need a different post-16 GCSE maths curriculum that can motivate them to develop fluency and confidence in the fundamental maths skills they need for everyday life and employment.”

The current condition of funding rule, introduced in 2014, means that all students without at least a grade 4 – or a C, under the old alphabetical grading system – in English or maths must continue to study these subjects as part of their study programme.

Those with a grade 3, or D in the old system, must resit the GCSE exam rather than an alternative.

The requirement remains in place until the young person has completed 16 to 19 education, or achieved at least a grade 4.

Many FE representative bodies have asked the government to review the resits policy, mainly because of the sector’s tight resources due to the increasing number of students required to retake the qualifications, and they find that resitting a GCSE over and over again demotivates learners.

Over 170,000 young people resat GCSE maths in the summer of 2018, but only 23.7 per cent achieved at least a grade 4 or equivalent.

Josh Hillman, the director of education at the Nuffield Foundation, which is funding the project, said: “Performance in GCSE maths has both immediate and long-term impact on the education, training and employment trajectories of 16-year-olds.

“Previous Nuffield Foundation-funded research has found that students’ past experiences mean they lack both motivation and confidence when required to retake their maths GCSE, and the resit success rate remains stubbornly low.”

The MEI said that the standard GCSE maths curriculum, which is designed for 14 to 16 year olds, attempts to do two things: prepare students for further academic study of maths, and develop the knowledge and skills to apply mathematics to practical problems encountered in the workplace and other aspects of life.

“Most resit students need to focus on the latter,” the charity said.

The project will report towards the end of 2019.

FE funding was the most popular topic of correspondence from MPs and stakeholders to education ministers in the last eight weeks of 2018.

Skills minister Anne Milton revealed the topic had been consistently among the top three at the end of last year at the winter conference of the Sixth Form Colleges Association on Wednesday.

In her keynote address, Ms Milton said: “Congratulations to you on your campaign ‘Raise the Rate’ and the wealth of stakeholder support you have managed to get behind the campaign.

“The level of correspondence sent to the department has resulted in further education funding being a top subject for eight weeks at the end of 2018.”

This refers to the amount of correspondence the department’s ministers get from MPs on a certain subject.

The Department for Education has since provided figures to FE Week which show in the last eight weeks of 2018, the department received 103 separate pieces of correspondence on FE funding.

For three of those weeks, the topic had the most pieces of correspondence.

The second most popular subject of correspondence from MPs and stakeholders over the eight-week period was school funding or school funding policy, with 43; the third-most popular was teacher pay, with 41.

The interest in FE was in part thanks to the Raise the Rate campaign led by the SFCA to secure at least £760 of additional government funding for each sixth form student in the Treasury’s 2019 spending review.

The campaign is also calling for sixth form funding to rise in line with inflation each year.

It was supported by the Love Our Colleges campaign, which launched in October and focused on securing extra funding for colleges more generally. It included a march on Parliament attended by FE staff, leaders, students, unions and MPs.

A petition, launched by students at Brockenhurst College, to increase FE funding was launched in October as part of the campaign and has reached nearly 70,000 signatures so far.

As a result, MPs will debate the issue in parliament on Monday.

Despite the campaigns, Ms Milton urged the delegates to get better at mobilising support for the FE sector among the press and politicians.

“There is no shortage of school teachers willing to talk about funding,” she said.

“Schools and universities are good at mobilising, so I need you to be as good.

“Please continue to highlight the challenges you are facing, as well as the outstanding work you are doing, and remember to please, please reach out to your local MP to invite them to visit once a year.

“It’s hard to get traction with the press and we need to use every means we can.

“You are a key part of filling this country’s skills gap and making us more productive as a country; if there’s one case that might get traction [with the press], I think that’s the one that does.”

Ms Milton told delegates at the SFCA conference that she could not commit to any funding increases, but she was aware of problems.

But she said the 16-19 base rate of funding will be part of her submission to this year’s Treasury assessment of all departmental spending, formerly known as the spending review.