The FE commissioner has criticised “serious corporate failure”, lack of oversight and a “financial crisis” at West Nottinghamshire College in a damning report.

The intervention report, published today but written in back in August, warned the college’s board and then-principal Dame Asha Khemka had “overseen a serious business failure which will impact on the whole college.

“There needs to be an urgent review that ensures that those with ultimate responsibilities are held to account,” it added.

It is understood the college board conducted a review as advised, and Dame Asha (pictured) departed shortly after.

West Notts received a £2.1 million bailout from the Education and Skills Funding Agency in July, which FE Week revealed was requested just 48 hours before it was due to run out of cash. Dame Asha, one of the highest paid FE leaders in the country, stepped down from her post at the start of October.

The college, which has 25,000 full and part-time students, was relying on selling a minority stake in its subsidiary company BKSB to cope with a “significant financial shortfall”, and was forced to request the financial support after the sale fell through in the summer.

The commissioner’s report said the planned sale “was the only strategy the board had to avoid financial instability, and when this plan failed there was no contingency in place”, and criticised the board at West Notts for lacking expertise in finance, auditing and accounting.

FE Week reported earlier this year that West Notts had blamed changes to subcontracting rules for the fact it was having to cut more than 100 jobs in an effort to make £2.7 million in savings.

It was the largest college provider of apprenticeships in 2016/17, and had contracts to deliver apprenticeships and traineeships worth £19.8 million last year, but the overwhelming majority of this was subcontracted. New rules that came into force in May 2017 mean lead contractors can no longer subcontract entire apprenticeship programmes but must “directly deliver” at least some of each programme.

The FE commissioner report highly criticised the college’s attempt to adapt to this change, describing the board’s oversight and challenge as “lacking” and having a “damaging effect”. It said leaders were “slow to implement the change” and had not “adequately prepared” the schools of learning.

“The college’s highly ambitious strategy for the replacement of the majority of its subcontracted apprenticeships with direct delivery has fallen significantly short of target, resulting in an unplanned decline in income and contributing to a substantial operating loss in 2017/18,” the report said.

“The budget plan to treble direct apprenticeship delivery from 2016/17 to 2017/18 was a fundamental risk which clearly materialised with forecast direct delivery for 2017/18 almost 40 per cent short of the budget target.”

A “steady decline” in the college’s cash reserves over recent years meant they were not able to cover the loss, and the report warned that West Notts run the risk that “bankers for the college may now change their attitude to the college’s debts.”

Excluding income from subcontracting, pay costs made up 87 per cent of the college’s turnover in 2016/17, but despite significant redundancies this year the report warned that further cuts of between three and five per cent may still be needed to reach the FE commissioner’s benchmark of 65 per cent.

However, the report also acknowledged that the college had been rated ‘good’ by Ofsted in February 2017. It said approaches to quality assurance and improvement were “very good”, and learners “clearly value the opportunities the college offers them”. 

The report recommended that the college reviews “the accountability of the principal/CEO and accounting officer and her capacity to deliver a timely and successful recovery plan” and takes “urgent steps” to improve the effectiveness of governance, including the “suitability of the chair and vice chair and their ability to successfully guide the college through its current corporate crisis”.

It also recommended the college was placed in administered status, and urged it to finalise work on its business recovery plan and two year financial plan. 

A spokesperson for West Notts College said they were working closely with the commissioner’s office and the ESFA to “improve our financial situation” and had appointed an interim principal and strengthened the governing body. 

“We are not complacent. We deeply regret that the college finds itself in this position and are resolutely determined to secure the improvements needed to regain long-term sustainability and come out of administered college status. 

“While the scale of the challenges we face cannot be underestimated, the senior leadership team and governing body are united in their ambition to return the college to a stable financial footing and ensure it has a thriving future.” 

The founder of one of the largest providers in the country has hit out at plans by the Education and Skills Funding Agency to limit the amount of apprenticeships cash he and other providers can earn.

John Hyde, who also co-founded the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said it would be “absurd” to introduce funding caps while billions remained unspent.

His remarks followed the announcement earlier this week by Keith Smith, the ESFA’s director of apprenticeships, that the agency intended to introduce a “financial cap in terms of how much we say you’ll be able to earn in the system” – which would apply to all providers, not just new ones.

FE Week contacted a number of the biggest apprenticeship providers for their views on the proposals.

Mr Hyde, chair of HIT Training, which had an apprenticeship allocation of almost £24 million in 2017/18, said he could “understand the rationale for doing this” but “if we’ve spent up to our cap then employers are going to walk away and look for other providers”.

The caps would have to be transparent, and made publicly available alongside information about any underspend, he said.

“It’s absurd to cap people if they have, as they do at the moment, £2 billion sitting around and not being used,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Learning Curve Group, which had apprenticeships allocations worth £7.6 million in 2017/18, said a cap on funding was useful “only if it is linked to quality and performance”.

“Care will need to be taken when implementing any cap scheme to ensure that large employers which use their levy-funding to scale are not prevented to choosing providers best-placed to deliver the best results,” he said.

Neither Lifetime Training, which had an allocation of £30 million last year, nor Babcock, which had funding worth £28.7 million, was able to respond to FE Week ahead of publication.

Mark Dawe, AELP chief executive, urged the ESFA to “adopt a risk-based approach” to introducing the caps.

“The final employer-driven model should allow employers of all sizes to freely choose a quality provider and not stifle the growth of innovative and responsive providers,” he said.

Speaking at the AELP autumn conference in Manchester on Tuesday, Mr Smith gave no detail of how any funding limits would be set or applied, and instead said the agency would be testing the approach.

“We’re going to work with you as a sector over the coming weeks to help us to identify what’s the best way to do that,” he said.

Their introduction is intended to ensure that “we have a process and a system to manage the way that organisations can be funded”, with a particular focus on new providers.

“It’s not intended to stop really super-big providers from becoming super-big, but it is there to control risk to a certain extent and it is there to control quality,” he said.

He insisted the plans were not “driven by any individual circumstances”, including the recent collapse of mega-provider Aspire Achieve Advance, leaving 4,500 apprentices and 1,500 employers without a training provider.

However, Meg Hillier, chair of the influential Commons public accounts committee, said the plans were a sign that the agency was starting to learn the lessons from both that and previous failures – including last year’s Learndirect debacle.

It also follows the collapse of First4Skills in March 2017, which held an annual £15 million apprenticeship allocation and trained as many as 6,500 apprentices a year.

“Frankly they were right in their face, thanks to some of the good work you [FE Week] did. Two big problems in the space of a year,” she said.

These problems were “foreseeable”, but “now at least they’re doing something about it”, she said.

“The limit itself may not be a complete panacea. It may be a start but there’s a lot of risks about how it may be implemented,” Ms Hillier said.

A new tool to let employers directly post apprenticeship vacancies is being launched by the Education and Skills Agency.

From this month, levy paying employers with an apprenticeship service account will find a ‘recruitment’ link on their account homepage, which will give direct access to the ‘recruit an apprentice’ tool.

The service will let employers create and post apprenticeship vacancies and manage any applications they receive, and aims to have all vacancies either posted or returned for amendments within 24 hours of them being submitted.

The Apprenticeships 2020 Vision guidance first laid out plans for the tool, but initially intended for it to be launched “by February 2016”.

It said: “We already offer ‘Find an Apprenticeship’ as a free online recruitment tool for employers to advertise for and fill their apprenticeship vacancies and for potential apprentices to look for and apply for opportunities.

“We are developing this further so that by February 2016 employers will be able to post their own vacancies on the system, working with education and training providers where they want to.”

However, in order to use the tool, employers must already have a relationship with a training provider.

The ESFA blog said this was because “user research” with potential candidates had shown that “individuals want to see which training provider will be delivering the apprenticeship”.

In order to post a vacancy, employers are “required to have a relationship with a training provider”.

Once submitted, vacancies will be “quality checked within 24 hours and are either posted, or returned for amendments and review”.

The recruitment tool comes on the heels of the ESFA’s new employer review feature.

The new Trip Advisor-style system allows employers to rank training providers and leave feedback on their strengths and weaknesses.

Employers that do not pay the apprenticeship levy and do not have an account on the apprenticeship service can still post their vacancies on Recruit an apprentice, either with the support of their training provider or by contacting the National Apprenticeship Service on 08000 150 600.

 

A huge private university is expected to be banned from recruiting new apprentices after Ofsted warned it was making ‘insufficient progress’, mainly by managers being unaware of the “slow progress” learners make.

BPP University, part of the global BPP Professional Education Group, was criticised in its early monitoring visit report for making poor headway in ensuring it meets the requirements of successful apprenticeship provision.

Inspectors found that leaders and managers “do not have access to timely, accurate or reliable data on apprentices’ progress” and as a result do not have “sufficient oversight” of apprentices’ progress.

Managers were described as being “too reliant on subjective information from assessors on the progress of their apprentices, which at times misrepresents the slow progress that apprentices make”. 

Although BPP managers were said to “make clear to employers the importance of this off-the-job component”, inspectors found that “a minority of apprentices” employed by different companies said they “found it difficult to identify time to be release from work commitments”.

The university has around 15,000 students studying law, business and technology, nursing and health. BPP University turnover in 2017 was £85m, as one of many subsidiary companies to AP VIII Queso Holdings, based in the USA.

The Ofsted visit focused specifically on apprentices on programmes from level two to level five in professional vocational areas including legal, insurance, financial services and technology. At the time of the visit on September 26, BPP University had 350 apprentices aged 16 to 18 and 900 adults on apprenticeship programmes.

Too reliant on subjective information from assessors

The monitoring visit also said that “too many apprentices make slow progress”, with a “significant minority” failing to submit assignments on time. Assessors were also criticised for taking too long to intervene when an apprentice falls behind and giving “superficial” feedback on work.

However, the report also commended several positive traits in the provision. Leaders were said to have a “clear vision” for the organisation and “very strong links” to a range of “high-profile employers in the City of London and beyond”.

Staff ensure the apprentices they recruit are suitable and will benefit from apprentices, and have put in place sound management and governance structures to oversee the organisation.

Despite criticisms, inspectors conceded that assessors do well to engage apprentices and have a “broad wealth of specialist knowledge”, with apprentices speaking highly of the “value” they gain from their sessions.

The university was also said to be making ‘reasonable progress’ in ensuring safeguarding measures were in place.

A spokesperson for BPP said the company had not yet been told whether it would be banned from taking on new starts, and that it would continue to recruit until told otherwise.

She said the report “on the whole is positive” and BPP was “disappointed” with the criticisms of inspectors, which she insisted “relate largely to systems that track the progress of apprentices”.

“Unfortunately, inspectors were not able to judge our new tracking system in its entirety, which is in the process of being implemented and which has been successfully installed in our other businesses,” she said.

“We are confident that when it is fully operational it will address Ofsted’s concerns and we look forward to the full inspection in the near future.”

BPP appears of the register of apprenticeship training provider four times. As well as BPP University, it has the approved providers of BPP Holdings, BPP Professional Education and BPP Actuarial Education.

So far, all 16 apprenticeship providers found to be making ‘insufficient progress’ in at least one area up until October 11 have been barred from recruiting new apprentices until their next full inspection.

The Education and Skills Funding Agencies can overrule the ban, but only if it “identifies an exceptional extenuating circumstance”.

BPP University is the third university to receive a monitoring visit from Ofsted, but the first to have been rated ‘insufficient’.

 

 

The Department for Education will spend £10 million on 200 “external experts” to advise it on policy areas including university technical colleges, vocational education and sixth forms.

A tender document published this week reveals that the department is searching for organisations to join a “register of external experts”, made up of “individuals who have expertise and experience at a senior level in the education sector”.

In particular, the government is looking for experts in safeguarding, counter-extremism, free schools, university technical colleges, the curriculum and general education. The register will initially only include a maximum of 200 experts, but may be reopened in the future, the tender document states.

When FE Week enquired about the decision to have no FE-specific representation in the six categories, a DfE spokesperson claimed that the sector would be covered under “general educationalist”.

He said further tender documents state that this category has a subsection for FE and sixth forms, vocational education and studio schools.

Kevin Courtney (pictured), the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said the planned £10 million register was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

“If the government’s education policy was coherent and well-thought-through, they would not need to throw taxpayers’ money away on experts employed to put a spin on the problems they have caused,” he said.

“To avoid yet more mistakes and to ensure that children and young people get an education system that works, the DfE should be seeking advice from the teaching profession.”

The government is likely to face particular criticism for its plans to spend even more money on advisers for free-school and UTC programmes, after FE Week’s sister paper FE Week revealed last year that the DfE spent almost £100 million on advice for these projects in just three years.

According to the tender document, the new register of external experts will encourage applications from those “with a broad range of experience and expertise” from across England’s nine regions.

However, appointment to the register will not guarantee the award of any work, but will allow advisers to “bid for specific work opportunities made available by the DfE”.

A DfE spokesperson defended the register.

“We are doing exactly as suggested – using experts from the education profession to support the department’s decision-making,” she said.

“We regularly use a range of education experts. This includes individuals with years of hands-on experience working as teachers and leaders within the education profession.

“This procurement will focus on securing important operational expertise at improved value for money.”