During a hot-topic panel session at the Association of Colleges conference, several new college governors asked about how to avoid “serial offender” college principals.

Nazir Afzal OBE became chair of Hopwood Hall College on September 1, 2018, after stepping down as pro-chancellor at Brunel University the previous month, before which he was chief crown prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service.

Mr Afzal, addressing new West London College principal Karen Redhead on the panel, said: “I heard your story about your college and the failings that the senior team were involved in.

“If they were running a company they would be disqualified.

“If they were running a police force they would never run a police force ever again.

“Is there any mechanism to ensure those individuals are held accountable for what you have to deal with?”

Richard Atkins, the FE commissioner, responded that he was “really pleased that the question came from a chair because chairs are a really crucial part of the accountability structure”.

This sector has always had a very small number of serial offenders who have driven one college into the ground and then got a job somewhere else and done the same thing, he said.

“At the moment, I have powers of intervention and beyond that everything is essentially kind of persuasion and so on. People do move on.” He added that he thinks it is right that we have a free press “and that the press report on these situations because how else are people going to know not to employ them?”

“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.”

He said that “personally I don’t comment individually on cases, people will know that, the press who are in the room know that, but I think that when we publish intervention reports in that way when things have gone seriously wrong, one of the reasons for doing that is to disclose serial offenders and make them known to the sector.”

Picture: From left: FE Commissioner Richard Atkins, EHWLC new principal Karen Redhead, Association of Colleges boss David Hughes, Ofsted deputy director for FE Paul Joyce, and the ESFA’s director for FE Peter Mucklow

A high-profile college in financial crisis is expected to make another 75 redundancies over the next four months as it continues its efforts to find savings, FE Week understands.

The move at West Nottinghamshire College, which was headed up by Dame Asha Khemka until she resigned last month, follows the loss of about 100 jobs earlier this year.

The college is in dire financial constraints. It received a £2.1 million emergency government bailout in July, just 48 hours before it would have run out of cash and is currently in FE Commissioner intervention.

“The college is continuing to work on its recovery plan to resolve the significant financial issues that it faces,” a West Notts spokesperson said.

“Unfortunately, this is likely to lead to a need to further reduce our staffing base. However, the detailed plans are still being finalised.

“Whatever staffing reductions the college makes, it is absolutely committed to protecting the excellent experience and high-quality teaching and learning that our students receive.”

It is understood that around 75 redundancies will be made by the end of February, as the college looks to reduce total staffing by 10 per cent. The college spokesperson did not deny this when asked by FE Week.

In March, West Notts 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.

The FE commissioner criticised “serious corporate failure”, lack of oversight and a “financial crisis” at the college in a damning report published earlier this month.

It warned the college’s board and then-principal Dame Asha 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.

The college has now been placed in “administered status”.

One of the highest paid principals in FE, Dame Asha received a £262,000 remuneration package in 2016/17.

In 2014 she received a damehood, and was named woman of the year at the GG2 Leadership Awards.

When she left the college she refused to accept any financial payout, walking away from at least £130,000.

Martin Sim has been appointed interim principal ahead of a search for a permanent successor to Dame Asha.

The cabinet office is reviewing the training providers used for civil service apprentices, to decide who will take over from a government provider with “unsafe” recruitment practices.

Last week, FE Week exclusively revealed that the Education and Skills Funding Agency had terminated the levy funding of Premier People Solutions following a shocking monitoring report from Ofsted, which warned that “leaders and managers cannot be sure that their members of staff are safe to work in the sensitive environments of the employers for whom their apprentices work”.

The provider, which trades as Premier Partnership, delivered apprenticeship training to government departments including the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs and the UK Visas and Immigration service. It will be removed from the register of apprenticeship training providers next month.

The cabinet office said a decision was still being made on what to do for the 686 apprentices that trained with Premier.

 A spokesperson said: “The cabinet office is currently reviewing education and training providers for civil service apprentices and will appoint a replacement in due course.”

A source with knowledge of the situation said the apprentices may be transferred to Capita (see table), but neither the cabinet office nor Capita would confirm this.

Ofsted’s poor verdict on Premier was made more surprising by the fact the company had successfully tendered to get on to the Crown Commercial Service call-off list from September 2017.

The CCS is an executive agency sponsored by the cabinet office, and making its list is seen as a badge of quality for any provider.

However, Premier made it on to the list of approved apprenticeship providers despite the fact it only began recruiting its first levy-funded apprentices in August 2017, and its apprenticeship provision had not been inspected by Ofsted.

According to the “find apprenticeship training” service, it had provided apprenticeships to the government for the last six months, meaning it was accepted on to the CCS list after providing apprentice training for less than a year.

Premier is not the only outlier to have reached this prestigious list of cabinet office-approved providers, although it is the only one the cabinet office has plans to replace.

Fifteen suppliers are listed under the CCS’s “apprenticeship training and related services” contract page. Two of these – Encompass Consultancy and Kaplan – are currently rated as ‘requires improvement’ by Ofsted.

Three of the providers on the list have not yet had their apprenticeship provision graded by Ofsted: The Open University, CIPFA Business and BPP Professional Education.

BPP Professional Education is one of four BPP providers to appear on the register of apprenticeship training providers. The global education group was rocked earlier this month after an Ofsted monitoring report slammed the apprenticeship provision at sister company BPP University and warned leaders were unaware of the “slow progress” apprentices make.

The ESFA will now have to decide whether to temporarily ban BPP University from taking on new starts, but it is not clear whether the other BPP branches, including BPP Professional Education, will be allowed to take over their apprenticeship training.

Two other providers on the CCS list – University College of Estate Management and Estio Training – are still classed as “new” apprenticeship providers and have only been subjected to early-monitoring visits by Ofsted.

Of the remaining providers, five are ‘good’, two are ‘outstanding’ and one – Ashridge Executive and Organisation Development – does not appear on Ofsted at all.

 

Ofsted’s chief inspector was quizzed by FE Week’s chief reporter, Billy Camden, on a selection of topical questions at the Association of Colleges’ annual conference

 

College finances – should they feature in the leadership and management judgment?

Several college leaders and boards have come under heavy criticism from the FE commissioner for their management of the finances.

So why doesn’t the education watchdog take into account financial management during its inspections? To find out, FE Week asked the chief inspector, Amanda Spielman.

“I think it’s very clear that our responsibilities are mainly about quality, and theirs [the FE commissioner’s team] are mainly about finance,” she said.

“We don’t have the remit to look at that side of colleges, and that’s something that’s down to the Department for Education to decide if it wants to shift the split. But it is important. They affect each other clearly. Neither we nor anyone else should say they’re completely independent of each other.”

Asked if Ofsted inspectors may take a closer look at college finances future common inspection frameworks (CIF), particularly around the leadership judgment in reports, Ms Spielman didn’t rule it out.

“There are a lot of different ways that you could cut this particular cake,” she explained.

“If a conversation begins at some point about ways of taking that forward I’d be happy to have it. At the moment we’re developing our framework on the basis that the responsibility is where it is at the moment.”

Campus-level inspections – will they happen?

Campus-level inspections are also not going to feature in the upcoming CIF, Ms Spielman confirmed.

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

But the chief inspector ruled out introducing them in the upcoming CIF, being launched in September 2019.

“It’s still very much on the list of things we’d like to do but looking at the logistics, looking at when the data, the campus-level data that’s needed to do it is going to become fully available, it just doesn’t fit with the timing of this framework,” she explained.

“There’s no point in trying to consult on a proposition now. It’s something we’ll have to do down the line.”

How many is too many grade-three reports for one provider?

Earlier this week, high street giant Boots was hit with a third ‘requires improvement’ rating in a row. Before Ms Spielman’s time at the helm of Ofsted there was a rule which said three grade-three reports in a row for a provider would equal an ‘inadequate’.

But the current chief inspector wasn’t a fan of it.

“I changed that rule very shortly after I came in because I thought it was flawed in conception,” she said.

“The job of inspection is to report on what we see when we inspect. Notwithstanding that something may still be at ‘requires improvement’ level, that does not of itself say right, really what we inspected was ‘requires improvement’ but we’re going to say it’s ‘inadequate’ because we saw ‘requires improvement’.

“To artificially say that something is ‘inadequate’ and trigger all the consequences that we know go with grade-four judgments, because we want to heap up pressure, I don’t think that’s the right thing for us to do”.

Asked if she would give a provider five grade-three reports in a row, for example, she said it would be “interesting to see what conclusion that took us to on governance if we got to something that looked like a fifth ‘requires improvement’”.

Tick-box apprenticeships, is Ofsted still worried?

The inspectorate’s deputy director for FE and skills, Paul Joyce, raised concerns in May that the quality of apprenticeships is in decline, and the programmes are starting to resemble the doomed Train to Gain initiative.

Is this a concern that Ms Spielman shares, currently?

“We have started monitoring visits to all the levy-funded apprenticeship providers because I was really concerned about opening that up to a raft of new providers and leaving them for several years without scrutiny,” she said.

“We’ve done well over 100 visits so far and happily the majority of them are doing what they’re doing, but there’s a significant portion of them that aren’t making sufficient progress, where there is reason to be concerned.”

She continued: “I think everybody wants to see the apprenticeship reforms to do well, and to have a flow of excellent high-quality apprenticeships and training, and part of doing that is weeding out the stuff that shouldn’t be there as quickly as possible before it messes up any individual’s life too much.

“Getting to the end of an apprenticeship and discovering that you haven’t actually had what you were supposed to have and that what you’ve got has got zero labour-market value is not a great place to be. I don’t want that to happen to learners.”

Will Ofsted urge Treasury to increase FE funding

Ms Spielman has long said that the base rate for 16-to-18 education needs to be boosted.

She reiterated this view last month in a letter to the Public Accounts Committee but revealed for the first time that inspections are now finding that a lack of cash has directly led to falling standards in FE.

Asked what Ofsted could do to get the Treasury to invest, the chief inspector said: “I think the main thing I can do is to talk honestly about what we see and what I do is to try and speak about the things that I think really need attention rather than absolutely everything under the sun.

“I think you have more impact if you really go for the things that matter.”

Defunct apprenticeship firm Aspire Achieve Advance paid for its former managing director’s child’s school fees as part of a “generous bonus”, FE Week can reveal.

Andy Palmer (pictured) worked at the provider, better known as 3aaa, from September 2013 to October 2015 before becoming managing director of another disgraced FE giant – Learndirect – in October 2016.

In an email to co-founder Peter Marples, seen by FE Week, Mr Palmer requests a payment is made to the school.

If you’re still happy to do this then would it be possible to pay £9,300 into the account

“When you and Di [McEvoy-Robinson] gave me the generous bonus a couple of months ago you kindly said that I could look to take it as ‘product’,” the email, sent December 31, 2014, says.

“We discussed the payment of school fees for the year and I have spoken to [the] school and they are happy to accept a year’s payment in advance.

“If you’re still happy to do this then would it be possible to pay £9,300 into the account below using the reference below?”

He added: “Hope this is ok and really appreciate both the bonus and the offer to work it in this way.

“With the remaining £700 I had hoped to buy a camera. Maybe this is something that we can discuss in the New Year?

“Again, thanks Pete.”

In reply and with 3aaa’s commercial director Lee Marples copied in, Peter Marples said: “I am happy for this to be processed but I didn’t get the original e-mail.

“Lee – please make the payment when the direct contract comes in and charge to payroll so it is lost.”

FE Week asked Mr Palmer if paying the fees direct to the school was away of avoiding paying tax, but he categorically denied this and said all tax was paid.

When asked why he requested the unusual payment arrangement he refused to comment any further.

Mr Palmer describes in the December email the request of “school fees as part of the generous bonus that you and Di gave me in November”, the same month Ofsted published a grade one report for 3aaa.

At the time of inspection, Mr Palmer was a non-executive board member for Ofsted, a role he held from August2011 to December 2014, which the inspectorate has confirmed.

The school-fees revelation follows last week’s FE Week front-page investigation which exposed the truth behind the government and police investigations into 3aaa.

The company, which had 4,500learners and 500 staff before it went bust last month when the ESFA pulled its £16.5 million skills contract,allegedly manipulated Individualised Learner Records, to artificially inflate achievement rates by a huge amount and misused employer-incentive grants.

Lee Marples, the nephew of Peter, is understood to be central to the data manipulation part of the investigations.

3aaa received nearly all of its income from the ESFA. Its most recent accounts show that the company recorded a £2.5 million post-tax loss in the 18 months to January 2018.

Despite this, Peter Marples and Ms McEvoy-Robinson took out huge directors’ loans totalling more than £4 million between them.

At the end of 2015, both owners purchased multi-million pound properties.

3aaa also splashed its cash on £1.6 million sport-club sponsorships, an Elton John concert and Tesla supercars.

Learndirect was England’s biggest FE provider before the ESFA pulled its skills contract earlier this year following a grade-four report from Ofsted.

Under Mr Palmer’s leadership the company tried to suppress the report by taking Ofsted to the High Court, unsuccessfully, and imposing an injunction on reporting the case, until FE Week overturned it in August 2017.

He was later the subject of scrutiny from the Public Accounts Committee and National Audit Office following an outcry that the government offered Learndirect special treatment by keeping its contracts running until the end of 2017/18 instead of terminating them within the usual three months.

The boss of the Association of Colleges has told his members Ofsted is “quite right”, after the inspectorate found some colleges risk giving students “false hope” by putting them on courses where there are slim job prospects.

Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector, drew gasps from delegates at the AoC conference this week when she questioned whether some colleges are chasing income over students’ best interests.

She was referring to the inspectorate’s new report on level-two qualifications which found some subjects, namely arts and media, “stand out” as areas where there is a “mismatch between the numbers of students taking courses and their future employment in the industry”.

“Some students get a bit deflated and lose that momentum they built when they discover it is an impossible dream for most of them,” she said.

There was push back from the audience during a question-and-answer session, in which Grimsby Institute principal Debra Gray pointed out that the arts and creative industries contribute “£92 billion to the UK economy, two million people work directly in creative industries and three million work in allied professions where people are creative in non-creative businesses”.

“That doesn’t sound like an impossible dream to me, and it isn’t one that we sell to our students,” she told the chief inspector, before receiving a round of applause from the audience.

AoC chief executive David Hughes stepped in on the debate and said that colleges need to “face up to the fact”.

“I think the report is very helpful. I had the immediate defensive reaction to it and it’s very easy to get into that,” he said.

“I think the response from Ofsted is proportionate and quite right. We need to face up to the fact that sometimes we’re not challenging learners enough to make sure they are understanding the courses they go in because it does happen in some places, not everywhere.

“The problem whenever you say that is that two thirds of the room will say ‘well we don’t do that’ and that’s true, but it does happen and we just need to face up to it.”

He continued: “As a sector we need to face up to what I call the dispassionate evidence that gets presented to us and come back and show actually what we are doing and how we can up our game. It’s an interesting case study for us.”

We need to face up to the fact that sometimes we’re not challenging learners enough

Clarifying her point again during the question-and-answer session, Ms Spielman said: “This isn’t a report which says everyone should be marching towards a job that has been designated for the same sector, but the college sector does perform that role of creating some level of match between supply and demand, and where that goes a long way adrift we’re not necessarily doing the best thing for students.

“This is absolutely not to say these are bad courses in themselves, just that when so many people opt for them with little or no prospect there is a risk of setting up problems.”

Ms Gray wasn’t alone in feeling aggrieved by the chief inspector’s comments.

Tim Chaundy, curriculum leader in performing arts at City and Islington College, part of the Capital City College Group, told FE Week: “To assume that a level-two arts course must translate into a job in an arts field misses the fundamental reason why many learners opt for a level-two arts subject.

“In our experience, level-two arts subjects are seldom a direct route into work in their own right, but are a stepping stone into a level-three course for those who, for whatever reason, didn’t achieve the GCSE grades they needed. Indeed, almost all our learners who do a level-two arts course also do English and maths GCSE resits.”

He continued: “For many of our level-two students therefore, college represents a second chance at education. And doing an arts course alongside their GCSE resits develops students’ life skills and massively improves their confidence and prepares them for further study.”