How DfE can better support colleges in crisis

As she leads her new institution to financial recovery, principal Karen Redhead reflects on what can help and hinder this difficult process

I took over at Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College in September, in the wake of a financial notice to improve from the Education and Skills Funding Agency, and an intervention from the FE commissioner, fully aware of the scale and extent of the issues faced by the college.

This is my initial insight into what it’s been like leading a college towards financial recovery, what is working and what could be done better.

The first stocktake visit from the commissioner’s team in October was thorough and purposeful. It genuinely gave me access to what felt like high-quality consultancy, coaching and mentoring that is vital in such a challenging scenario. It acknowledged that we’d done an overwhelming amount of work but that there was still much to do.

The process has been as burdensome as it has been supportive, and there’s a real danger of overwhelming a college that is by definition already weak. Deteriorating financial health is often the first sign to the outside world that all is not well. But that’s usually the tip of the iceberg.

The financial controls at West London College were certainly weak, but in addition, the college had no strategic plan, no costed curriculum plan, no workforce plan, a financial plan that was not fit for purpose, no estates strategy – despite having multiple and complex projects on the go – and the risk register hadn’t been updated since 2016.

Compounding this can be the difficulty in attracting senior leaders and board members. At one point we had vacancies in the post of chair, vice chair, clerk, deputy principal for curriculum and quality, director of finance and resources, and director of management information systems. I’m really pleased to have appointed some strong candidates to the executive team, but they don’t take up their posts until the new year.

The hoops the college has to jump through become the biggest barrier to improvement

We have to report to three separate agencies: the ESFA, because we’re under a financial notice to improve; the FE commissioner’s team, following their diagnostic assessment in July; and the transaction unit, because we’re in receipt of an exceptional financial support loan.

And perversely, what happens is that the hoops the college has to jump through, mainly in relation to the financial support loan, become the biggest barrier to improvement.

There’s simply not enough time to do the crucial development work with the finance department and senior team because they’re too busy providing data about the college’s weekly cash flow, in order to calculate the bare minimum loan payment we need each month.

We’re lacking some of the underpinning processes that would be taken for granted in a well-running college, and due to the onerous reporting requirements, the team doesn’t have time to set them up.

Data requests include items such as course-level costing. But if the college is still developing its curriculum plan and workforce plan, that information is not available. It can feel quite challenging when the various agencies are making demands for information for which the processes are not yet in place.

The power imbalance in this kind of situation leads to a temptation to acquiesce to administrative requests, in the interest of maintaining harmonious relationships, that under other circumstances I would question.

The three agencies are trying hard to minimise duplication of demands on the college. However more could be done to achieve this. Rather than the separate processes requiring different recovery plans, it would make more sense to combine these into one plan from the outset. It would also have helped to have access to a model recovery plan template that could be modified according to the circumstances.

More clarity about the new insolvency regime would also help. Asking a college in crisis mode to create its own specification for an independent business review, for example, is just one more unnecessary burden.

And finally, if we’re to avoid these situations in the first place, leaders must be encouraged to ask for help early – and this requires a radical rethink. If the only option is to trigger a formal process with high personal consequences, then of course leaders will be reticent.

We know very few people set out deliberately to do a bad job, so we need to think about how to create a no-blame, no-shame process.

College-run academy trusts in trouble

An academy trust run by a college has been warned it will be stripped of its only school if standards don’t improve – the latest in a string of college-run trusts falling into trouble.

The Burton and South Derbyshire Education Trust – set up by Burton and South Derbyshire College – was warned the Kingfisher Academy could be rebrokered unless standards improved.

 In a minded to terminate letter, published last week and sent in October, the government highlighted the school’s ‘inadequate’ Ofsted rating, after its first inspection in September 2017.

Although a monitoring visit in June found leaders were taking effective action to make improvements, the government has asked for further information to ensure progress is being made.

The trust has since said they have provided this information, and claimed closing the school had now been taken off the table.

Among the other college-run academy trusts to face problems is the Salford Academy Trust, founded by Salford City College, the University of Salford and Salford City Council.

In June it confirmed that it would give up all four of its schools and close. Salford City College retained 75 per cent control over the trust, which, according to accounts published in February, had been identified as “high risk” by the Department for Education after a review of one school identified “serious weaknesses”.

And in March the multi-academy trust Marine Academy Plymouth, sponsored by the University of Plymouth, Cornwall College and the Plymouth local authority, was warned its namesake school could be transferred to another trust after being put into special measures in November last year.

Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said colleges are “very good” at providing post-16 education, but warned that “does not qualify them to run schools or manage academy trusts”.

He said: “The government was wrong to assume that a college provider could simply take over schools and run them successfully.”

According to DfE statistics, 21 colleges are listed as the main sponsors of academy trusts, with a total of 57 academies between them. They range from having one to 13 schools.

FE Week analysis found just one of these academies is rated as ‘outstanding’: Heath Lane Academy run by The Midland Academies Trust, which is sponsored by North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College.

However, the trust’s three other schools are rated ‘requires improvement’. Three more of its academies, including two studio schools, have closed.

In total, 13 college-run academies are rated as ‘good’, nine as ‘requires improvement’ and five as ‘inadequate’. The rest have not yet been inspected by Ofsted.

Julian Gravatt (pictured), deputy chief executive at the Association of Colleges, said it was important to note that colleges “mainly” sponsor trusts with schools that were previously failing, or which run ventures such as university technical colleges or alternative provision academies.

He said there have been “many successes” in college-run trusts, but added: “Colleges don’t have deep pockets like some sponsors do, and the different legal structure of academies has been an unhelpful obstacle.”

The obstacles he referred to include the fact that colleges have a different financial year end, and that colleges can’t recover VAT although schools can.

Mr Gravatt also said that the DfE and Education and Skills Funding Agency have more than 1,000 officials who work on issues associated with academies but only a few hundred who work on colleges.

 “The former don’t always understand the latter,” he added.

 Kevin Gilmartin, post-16 and colleges specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said colleges can bring “great benefits” to trusts because of their “close links to employers and their expertise in vocational and technical education”.

He added the biggest challenges to education are inadequate government funding and teacher shortages.

The DfE offered this comment when FE Week asked why it thinks some college-run trusts have underperformed: “One of the benefits of the academy system is that sponsors are from a variety of backgrounds and can tailor their expertise to suit pupils’ needs.

“This freedom in the hands of school leaders is driving up standards across the country, with more than half a million children now studying in sponsored academies rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ that often replaced underperforming schools. This includes academies that are sponsored by further education colleges.”

Let’s spend more cash on SEND learners and less on admin

Some of the funding that used to be spent on support for learning disabilities now goes on administration. Students would benefit if the money went direct to providers, says Graham Razey

Throughout the 25 years I’ve worked in further education, there have been a number of clichéd expressions thrown about. From Cinderella service to cash-strapped, the sector has a lot of aphorisms. However, my personal favourite right now is the phrase “what goes around, comes around”. At present, in the world of SEND funding, it has never rung more true.

There was a time I’m sure many of you can remember, when the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) would provide colleges across the length and breadth of the land with an annual funding allocation. This could be used to address the disabilities and learning difficulties faced by students, which were often – but not always – articulated through a Learning Disability Assessment (LDA).  Under this system, providers were trusted to use the funding to most efficiently and effectively deliver the support required for their students.

While there were imperfections in the system, it gave providers the autonomy required to ensure the needs of students were met, along with a minimal administrative burden. This meant the maximum possible funding could be spent on front-line deployment, ensuring students reaped the most achievable benefit. In fact, the audit regime ensured no more than 20 per cent of any funding was spent away from direct support, and that every penny was accounted for in actual spending in any given year.

Wind forward to today’s more hostile environment, and we are faced with a multitude of challenges within the system. Local authorities have been added into the mix and a significant proportion of funding is now being used to manage these additional layers of bureaucracy. The number of posts within both local authorities and providers has increased exponentially.

Jobs have been created to compete over who can provide the most eloquent arguments

Worryingly, however, these posts have not, as one might hope, been created to improve the quality of the offer, but to compete over who can provide the most eloquent arguments for why a student should or should not be eligible for element two and three funding.

The resulting impact is a reduction in funding being provided to support the young people, many of whom are some of the most vulnerable in our society. In fact, evidence provided by the Department for Education itself suggests the volume of tribunals is increasing significantly as more and more parents and young people are told that they are not eligible for an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) or that they are unable to access their placement of choice.

While a strong argument can certainly be made that the amount of funding in the high-needs system is simply insufficient, I do feel that the first place to start would be to remove unnecessary bureaucracy.

The first step to achieving this would be to change the relationship between local authorities and providers, based on the mutual understanding that the young person should be placed at the heart of the process. We must work hard to agree that providers are not, as some local authorities would claim, “trying to game the system to achieve margin in this work” and conversely, that local authorities are not trying to “drive down costs to use the money in other parts of the education system”. Neither is helpful, and stereotypes and assumptions of this nature are certainly not making for harmonious relationships.

So rather than waste precious resources constantly arguing about individual students, why couldn’t we have a country-wide return to the block-grant funding system? Block grant funding enables providers to plan the service for the whole, rather than the individual constituent parts. It gives the provider the flexibility to deliver a whole service, rather than having to tag costs at an individual level and claim in year. The agreement is also in advance of the year, enabling the provider to plan the service rather than being forced to react.

Whether that comes through local authorities or not, I am convinced we can save significantly on administration costs and maybe, just maybe, we can be trusted to do the right thing collectively for our young people.

FE commissioner: check with me before appointing a principal

The FE commissioner has urged college governors to check with him before appointing a principal as part of a crackdown on “serial offenders” ahead of the incoming college insolvency regime.

Richard Atkins was speaking exclusively to FE Week in the same week he was reappointed to the role for another two years.

“I would encourage every single chair or clerk on their behalf, before they interview their final shortlist, to do due diligence with others in the sector – the Association of Colleges, the Education and Skills Funding Agency, my office,” he said.

“You need to be extremely careful because the appointment is so critical to the future success of the college. And the sector is small enough for people to be aware.”

While he said “I don’t believe in witch hunts”, Mr Atkins warned that “we do as a sector need to guard against a very small number of people either getting let go or jumping ship and then turning up somewhere else and then adopting the same behaviours that caused the trouble before”.

Mr Atkins’ remarks follow the resignation earlier this month of Garry Phillips from City College Plymouth, less than two weeks after the publication of an FE commissioner report into his previous college, Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College, that was deeply critical of his leadership.

We do as a sector need to guard against a very small number of people jumping ship

Mr Phillips faced anger from members of the University and College Union at Plymouth, who returned a vote of no confidence in his leadership and in the governing body’s decision to hire him.

His resignation was one of a spate of departures by senior leaders in the sector, many of whom – but not all – had been working at colleges that Mr Atkins and his team are involved with.

Following a “pretty good year” in 2017/18, this year got off to a less positive start for the FE commissioner with a number of high-profile interventions – including West Nottinghamshire College and EHWLC.

One of the “big causes” in many of these cases was the incoming insolvency regime, which Mr Atkins described as a “game changer” that had “brought several of these cases to a head more quickly than would have happened in the past”.

The regime, which will allow colleges to go bust for the first time, will come into effect at the end of January. Exceptional financial support will be withdrawn from the end of March, at the same time as the deadline for spending cash from the restructuring facility.

While there is likely to be “some money to support colleges that have become insolvent to get back on their feet in some way”, it is likely to be a “much smaller amount of money” than is available at the moment, Mr Atkins said.

“Colleges now face the most rigorous challenge if they suddenly or unexpectedly run out of money,” he said.

In those cases “there is a very focused conversation with the governors and leaders of those institutions about how we return the college to sound financial health” and “that is a really serious conversation because potentially on the April 1 or 2 those colleges will become insolvent”.

But, he added, “I don’t necessarily see the insolvency regime leading to closures”.

“What I do see as an outcome is governors and senior staff being held to account in a more transparent and more robust way than ever before,” Mr Atkins said.

His “earnest hope” as colleges adjust to the changes is that “people ask for help sooner, they improve further their financial planning, particularly their management of cash, which is critical, and that governors and leaders stay right on top of that”.

“Cash really is king in incorporated colleges, and you really can’t afford to run out at short notice,” he said.

That’s what happened to West Nottinghamshire College, which hit the headlines in September after it emerged it asked for a bailout just 48 hours before it would have run out of cash.

Mr Atkins stressed the importance of colleges having at least two financially qualified governors on their board to both challenge and support the principal and finance director.

Colleges now face the most rigorous challenge if they suddenly run out of money

On a “number of occasions” he and his team had intervened at colleges without any, which he said he found “genuinely staggering in 2018”.

Mr Atkins wouldn’t be drawn on whether any colleges were at immediate risk of going bust.

“I think there are a small number of colleges, a very small number, who still find it difficult to take advice or ask for help,” he said in response to the question.

He acknowledge that there will be “a small number” of failures, but he hoped to “keep that to the absolute minimum”.

“I do think there will be a small number of colleges who battled through area review to remain standalone, who will do anything rather than have a discussion about what might be in the long-term best interests of that institutions, and therefore one or two of those might fail,” he said.

He urged leaders to “realistically assess” and come forward to ask for help if necessary as “there’s no shame in that”.

Mr Atkins said there were a few college leaders “who are in denial, who underestimate how close to the edge they are”.

“I would genuinely like to visit or help those colleges come to terms with a sustainable future for their learners,” he said.

UCU strike closes one college and affects five others

A walkout by more than 700 University and College Union members caused disruption across six colleges this week – and even forced one to close for the two days.

Bradford College shut eight of its 12 buildings and called off all its planned lessons on Wednesday and Thursday, while at least three other colleges cancelled some classes.

Further disruption could be on the horizon, as ballots opened at another 26 colleges in an ongoing dispute over this year’s pay deal.

“Despite the weather, members have been out on the picket lines explaining to their students why they have been on strike,” said Matt Waddup, the UCU’s head of policy and campaigns.

He acknowledged that the action had “meant serious disruption” but insisted the union’s members “have been left with no alternative”.

Staff are demanding a five per cent pay rise, and are angry over Association of Colleges’ offer in July for a “substantial pay package” over two years, dependent on government funding.

UCU members at New College Swindon, Bath College, Petroc, Lambeth College and Croydon College, as well as Bradford College, took part in this week’s action.

A spokesperson said the union had balloted around 700 members across the six colleges, and expected all of them to have walked out – although the actual numbers will be higher as new members had joined since the ballot.

Bradford College said it had “made the very difficult decision to close the college to students in order to minimise disruption and to enable students to make alternative arrangements for their learning” on November 28 and 29.

New College Swindon posted on its website that it had to “cancel a very small number of classes” on both strikes, and texted all affected learners.

The UCU said feedback it had received from both Bath College and Petroc indicated that “significant numbers” of classes had been cancelled at both colleges, and that “scores” of learners at the latter had joined staff on the picket line at lunchtime.

Wera Hobhouse, MP for Bath, gave her support to striking staff at her local college ahead of the walkout.

“Further education needs proper funding, and the staff who work in this vital area should be properly paid. I fully support UCU members taking industrial action in Bath,” she said.

However, a notice on Bath College’s website, published November 22, said it expected the “majority of teaching and learning activity to proceed as usual”.

“Whilst we are disappointed that some staff are striking, we understand the reasons why,” the notice said.

A spokesperson for Petroc told FE Week there had been “minimal disruption” and “where there has been we have put alternatives in place”. 

Neither Lambeth College nor Croydon College responded to FE Week ahead of publication.

Ballots on possible action at a further 26 colleges opened on Wednesday and are set to close on December 19.

Mr Waddup said the results from those colleges “will be back before Christmas and we hope that will focus college leaders’ minds”.

“If they refuse to act then we will be looking at further waves of strikes with more colleges in the new year,” he said.

This week’s action follows a “landmark” deal agreed between the UCU and Capital City College Group last week, which will see staff receive up to a five per cent pay rise.

But, as previously reported by FE Week, the deal will cost the group more than £3 million, and will turn a projected break-even budget for the year into a £2.3 million deficit.

The AoC held its first-ever week of action last month to “make a lot more noise” about the funding issues affecting the sector – including pay.

The Love Our Colleges week was prompted by the Department for Education’s decision to fund a 3.5 per cent pay rise for school teachers while ignoring college lecturers.

Ofsted is wrong about arts and media courses

The obsession with STEM is causing misperceptions about the value – economic and social – of participation in the creative industries, believes Debra Gray

I like Amanda Spielman. I think she has been a force for good at Ofsted. I spent a day with the chief inspector of education, children’s services and skills last year when she came to visit us in Grimsby, and she was remarkably forgiving and gracious when I nearly crashed us both into a truck at a roundabout in Immingham.

However, her comments about students on arts and media courses being sold an “impossible dream” made at the Association of Colleges’ conference last week incensed me. The substance of Ofsted’s argument lies within its Level 2 Study Programmes report published on 21 November. This identified that art and media courses were generally perceived to give the least chance of gaining employment within those industries.

The interesting term here is “perceived”. The research is based on the perceptions of a small number of providers. There appears to be little triangulation with verifiable labour-market intelligence from reliable sources to see if perception matches reality. What appears to be credible research is simply an account of provider perceptions presented as fact.

The methodological dangers of relying on anecdotal evidence rather than empirical evidence are legion.

What appears to be credible research is simply an account of provider perceptions presented as fact

So, what is the reality?

The creative sector is worth £92 billion annually to the UK economy, two million people are directly employed in the creative industries and over three million work as creative professionals in non-creative industries.

Employment in the creative sector is growing at four times the rate of other sectors.

The Creative Industries Council states that between 2010 and 2016 the creative industries sub sectors – which include advertising, film and TV, architecture, publishing, music, design, games, museums and galleries, fashion, crafts, and the creative use of technology – grew their economic contribution by 44.8 per cent, outpacing the purely digital sector, which increased its GVA (gross value added) by 23.3 per cent during this period.

A career in the arts is an impossible dream? I don’t think so.

The problem doesn’t just lie with assumptions that anecdotal evidence is generalisable, there is an issue over the right question being asked in the first place. The chief inspector states in the report: “I am therefore concerned about the number of courses on offer that college leaders know do not lead to good local employment.”

The report assumes we have a common understanding of the term “good local employment”. Fifty per cent of Grimsby’s catchment area is the North Sea, but we have road and rail links to Hull, Lincoln and Sheffield, all of which are thriving creative cities. Is this “local” enough? It is also vital to point out that a significantly higher proportion of jobs in the creative industries are freelance and commission-based than is typical in other sectors. Is this considered “good” employment?

Arts and media are both completely local and completely global, and everything in between, from the microbusinesses in ceramics and jewellery operating in a spare room to multi-billion transnational media empires influencing governments. Creative jobs are some of the most future-proof over the next 20 years – they cannot be taken by automation and AI is not a replacement for the human imagination – so we must prepare more creative professionals for the repercussions of the fourth industrial revolution, not fewer.

Arts education in the UK has been decimated in the push to advance the STEM agenda, as if they are two different things. Without imagination and creativity, scientists and engineers cannot show us the future – we must value creative skills, not further banish them owing to flawed perceptions.

So thank you to the creative professionals who designed my clothes, my furniture, the news I read this morning, the film I saw this afternoon, the documentary I watched with my reluctant children, the artists who put the pictures on my walls, the musicians who help me through dark times, the authors who take me to magical worlds, the comedians who make me laugh, the actors who transport me to places I wouldn’t go alone aand the digital and creative industries team at Grimsby Institute who go above and beyond to make sure no learner’s dream is impossible.

Without you, the world is a very bleak place. I am proud to stand by your side.

Richard Atkins re-appointed FE commissioner for further 2 years

Richard Atkins has been re-appointed FE commissioner for a further two years, the Department for Education has revealed today.

The announcement, which comes two years after the former Exeter College principal took over the reins from Sir David Collins, follows an exclusive FE Week interview with the commissioner earlier this week in which he recapped on his role to date and how it has changed.

It’s a fixed term appointment from October 21 2018 to October 20 2020, and involves an ad-hoc time commitment for which he’s paid £800 per day.

Two of Mr Atkins’ deputies, Steve Hutchinson and Andrew Tyley, have also been re-appointed for a further two year period.

Skills minister Anne Milton offered her congratulations to Mr Atkins and the two deputies on their re-appointments. 

“Together they have made fantastic progress to drive improvements in the further education sector. I look forward to them building on this success,” she said.

Mr Atkins spoke to FE Week about the “encouraging” signs of improvement in the sector in 2017/18 – which is the first year since his role was extended to include more work with colleges at risk of failure, before they hit rock bottom.

“We reduced the number of interventions and we made good use of these diagnostic assessments – where we go to a college earlier to do a private intervention, share advice and make recommendations,” he said. 

As well as a decline in the number of colleges rated ‘inadequate’ there was an increase in the number of colleges going up from grade three to two – a number of which followed involvement by Mr Atkins and his team.

“That’s about the most rewarding work I do,” he said.

“If I can then look back a year on and think that that college is now in a safer sounder more stable position that’s really good news.”

He acknowledged the recent spate of high-profile interventions, as well as the number of leaders to have stepped down with immediate effect as a result.

“I’m not yet disheartened because it’s early in the year, let’s see what happens. Clearly if it continues at this pace and we have lots of serious interventions I’d be disappointed and concerned, and be reflecting on how we can do more to prevent them,” he said.

He also revealed that 36 colleges had been awarded a total of more than £5.5 million in the first round of the strategic college improvement fund, following on from the 14 colleges that received grants totalling £2 million in the pilot round earlier this year.

This is the fund that allows struggling colleges, with the support of a stronger institution, to gain extra cash to help them improve in specific areas.

The 36 successful colleges are expected to be named next week, when applications close for the second round of the fund. However, details about the projects will not be included.

David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said it was “great to see” that Mr Atkins would remain as FE commissioner.

“Having someone with his level of experience can only be good for the sector,” he said.

“At a time of uncertainty in the political landscape, it’s good to have continuity and we look forward to continue working with him moving forward.”

Today’s announcement comes after Mr Atkins was quizzed over “serial offender” principals at last week’s Association of Colleges annual conference.

He was asked by a college chair if there was any mechanism to ensure that poor-performing leaders were held accountable for their failings.

Mr Atkins told the audience that the sector had always had a “very small number” of leaders “who have driven one college into the ground and then got a job somewhere else and done the same thing”.

“At the moment, I have powers of intervention and beyond that everything is essentially kind of persuasion and so on. People do move on.” 

One of the reasons for publishing intervention reports “when things have gone seriously wrong” was to “disclose serial offenders and make them known to the sector”, he said.

“If we intervene and publish that means my team thinks something very serious went wrong, probably involving a number of people, and I think that should be put in the public domain. I don’t think that should be swept under the carpet and if you put that in the public domain then we have a free press that does that.”

For more on our exclusive interview with Richard Atkins see this week’s upcoming edition of FE Week.

It’s now obvious that urgent action is needed to quality assure all loans-only providers

In 2013 the government moved several hundred million pounds of level three funding out of the adult skills budget, replacing some but not all of it with advanced learner loans.

At the same time, the then Skills Funding Agency decided it was a good idea to give companies, many with no history of receiving public funding, access to the Student Loans Company funding.

The result was both predictable and exposed by FE Week: misuse of funds by several firms that went bust owing millions.

An outright ban on subcontracting and heavy capping of growth requests followed.

Now, after waiting years for Ofsted to conduct 20 full inspections, we find that the overall quality at these loans-only providers is shocking.

A massive 94 per cent of learners, close to 3,000 at the time of inspection, took out these government loans for courses at providers rated grade three or four.

Of which, half the inspections were rated grade four.

Our investigation also found that Ofsted has been slow to inspect and appears publicly disengaged, with little to say about FE Week’s findings and in no rush to visit the remaining loans-only providers.

This is shocking, not only given the typical quality of the provision they are observing, but because their own inspectors have even found examples of learners that claimed to not even be aware they had taken out a loan!

At the very least, Ofsted’s new early monitoring visits to apprenticeship providers should be extended to include those only funded by loans.

The chair of the education select committee, Robert Halfon, is right to call for urgent action. But not just from Ofsted.

After we ask the DfE why some loan-only providers were not featuring in achievement data reports, they admitted that the ESFA was allowing some to not even submit data.

These figures are then hidden from Ofsted and official statistics, despite the companies being in receipt of Student Loans Company funding.

According to the DfE these providers are below a ‘threshold’, but when FE Week asked what this threshold was, at the time of going to press no answer was forthcoming.

As always we will keep seeking an answer from the DfE, as may Ofsted.

Star learners and employers celebrated at National Apprenticeship Awards 2018 ceremony

The country’s best individuals and employers who champion apprenticeships have been honoured at the 15th National Apprenticeship Awards – including a new accolade for ‘Rising Stars’.

Old Billingsgate in London held the glitzy ceremony on Wednesday night which was co-hosted by apprentice Lois McClure and TV presenter, George Clarke.

The awards were bigger than ever before, with prizes up for grabs in nine different categories. Entries came from over 1,100 apprentices and employers across England. 

Joe truly is a shining example of what his employer was aiming to achieve through recruiting apprentices

To be crowned winners at the national final, apprentices had to battle through tough competition in regional heats and demonstrate how they have benefited from their apprenticeship, before showing their contribution to their employers’ business objectives.

Winning the new rising star award, which showcased trainees who have made “impressive progress in their careers to date and have the potential to go even further”, was intermediate retail and enterprise apprentice Joe Buck.

He is employed by Mitchells and Butlers and currently works in Toby Carvery as its duty manager.

Joe was crowned the winner after his work was recognised as “exceptional by a panel of judges” and through a public vote where over 7,000 people voted for their ‘rising star’.

 

Lauren Carroll, the vocational learning attraction manager at Mitchells and Butlers, said: “As one of the first apprentices recruited by Mitchells and Butlers, Joe truly is a shining example of what his employer was aiming to achieve through recruiting apprentices.

“Joe has gone above and beyond his expected role at Toby Carvery, becoming an expert in both the kitchen and front of house, providing the business strong pipeline for management roles both sides of the pass.”

 

Other individual awards went to: Muhammad Uddin from Yorkshire Housing – intermediate apprentice of the year, Daniel Millington from HydraForce Hydraulics Ltd – advanced apprentice of the year, Jordan Coulton from Weightmans LLP – higher or degree apprentice of the year, and Natalie White from the National Nuclear Laboratory – apprenticeship champion of the year.

 

 

 

Full award winners table

A special recognition award was also presented for the first time.

It was won by The Armed Forces – The Royal Air Force; Royal Navy and The British Army – for their “commitment to apprenticeships”. All three services are have been recognised as ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted and combined, are the “largest apprenticeship employer in England”.

A ‘Recruitment Excellence Award’ was also introduced this year which recognised employers who have “attracted a diverse and high-quality apprenticeship workforce through new and innovative approaches to recruitment”.

It was picked up by BAE Systems plc, who also took home the macro employer of the year award.

Other employers to win were: Troup Bywaters + Anders – SME employer of the year, and KMF Precision Sheet Metal Limited – large employer of the year.

Skills minister Anne Milton, who was in attendance on the night, said: “A huge well done to all the winners, finalists and rising starts.

 

“The winners tonight will have stepped out of their comfort zone to learn new skills and many will have changed the direction of their life. Congratulations to them all and they should be very proud of all they have achieved.”

Also in attendance was Keith Smith, the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s director of apprenticeships. He added: “I want to congratulate everyone that was a part of this year’s awards. All of the winners’ stories demonstrate that apprenticeships change lives, lead to rewarding jobs, and transform businesses for the better.”

Host George Clarke said it was “great” to see that the winning employers and apprentices are from “such a rich variety of sectors, showcasing beautifully the broad range of skills that apprenticeships deliver”.

“I am delighted to have been part of this celebration of excellence in apprenticeships,” he concluded.

Education secretary Damian Hinds, who delivered a brief speech on the night, said: “The National Apprenticeship Awards is a fantastic event to celebrate the achievements of apprentices, employers and training providers, and I want to wish all the winners and nominees congratulations on their incredible efforts.”