Ofsted watch: Mixed results for FE providers

It has been a varied week in the FE sector, with three providers receiving ‘good’ grades from Ofsted while three others were told they require improvement.

The education watchdog also published four monitoring visits, where two providers were found making ‘significant progress’.

Good news came in for the Open University and the University of Sheffield, who both received a grade two.

This was the first inspection the Open University has received, where it was praised for quickly developing apprentices’ clinical skills and knowledge that meet the high standards of employers.

Apprentices, of which there were nearly 165 on level 5 healthcare assistant practitioner and nursing associate courses, “benefit from a wide range of good support provided by university staff”.

This “helps them to overcome barriers to learning”.

The University of Sheffield improved from grade three to grade two after “successfully” creating an inclusive culture of high expectations throughout its apprenticeship provision.

Ofsted said most apprentices acquire valuable knowledge and skills that meet and sometimes exceed the needs of their employers.

Access Skills Ltd, a private provider which trains nearly 500 apprentices and work placed adults, was rated ‘good’ in its first ever inspection.

“Leaders have a clear strategy to train effective leaders and managers of care settings,” Ofsted found.

“They have developed highly effective partnerships with employers to achieve this aim.”

Two providers, Blackrock (London) Ltd and employer provider UK Power Networks (Operations) Ltd, received early monitoring visits, where they were found to have made ‘reasonable progress’ and ‘significant progress’ respectively.

At the time of the visit, Blackrock had six learners on programme of the 15 that started in 2017. Earlier this year, the provider told the Education and Skills Funding Agency that it will no longer continue as a levy-funded apprenticeship provider. The final six learners will complete their end-point assessments next month.

Ofsted found it had developed a programme that prepares apprentices “effectively”.

UK Power Networks was foudn making ‘significant progress’ across the board as its senior leaders provide “effective oversight” of the apprenticeship programme and “place a high priority on off-the-job training, which is of a very good standard”.

The employer currently has 69 apprentices. Inspectors said senior leaders and managers “ensure that the apprenticeship programme is central to their strategy to recruit and retain staff to meet the needs of the business now and in the future”.

Meanwhile, Ofsted said that Chichester College, which has a grade one rating and has since the last inspection gone through a merger with Central Sussex College, has made “significant progress in strengthening the leadership and management of the merged college”.

In the first monitoring visit since the merger took place in 2017, inspectors visited the group’s Crawley College campus.

They found the ethos of the college has changed to “putting students at the heart of everything done and to placing greater importance on the quality of teaching, learning and assessment”, and student achievement has improved has a result.

“Leaders and managers have improved the monitoring and tracking of student participation, progress, attendance and retention,” Ofsted said.

South Staffordshire College has made ‘reasonable progress’ since last year’s inspection, when regulators said at the time the overall effectiveness of its provision required improvement.

Since then, governors have increased their level of scrutiny and challenge of the actions being taken by leaders to support college-wide improvement, while the senior management team implemented a “suitably challenging” quality improvement plan. However, some of the actions taken by governors have been “too slow”.

Two private providers, Aspect Training Ltd and Quality Transport Training, were rated ‘requires improvement’ this week in their first inspections.

And Springboard Sunderland Trust, an adult and community learning provider, saw its rating decline from a grade two to a grade three.

Inspectors found leaders and managers have been “slow to react to he decline in the proportion of learners on study programmes who complete their courses and achieve their qualifications”.

They were also accused of not monitoring the progress of leaners on study programmes and the quality of the provision thoroughly enough.

GFE Colleges Inspected Published Grade Previous grade  
Chichester College 27/02/2019 29/03/2019 M 1 SSSS
South Staffordshire College 06/03/2019 27/03/2019 M 3 RRR

 

Independent Learning Providers Inspected Published Grade Previous grade  
Aspect Training Ltd 11/02/2019 25/03/2019 3 N/A  
Access Skills Ltd 26/02/2019 25/03/2019 2 N/A  
Quality Transport Training 05/03/2019 28/03/2019 3 N/A  
BlackRock (London) Limited 26/02/2019 26/03/2019 M N/A RRR

 

Adult and Community Learning Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
Springboard 05/03/2019 29/03/2019 3 2

 

Employer providers Inspected Published Grade Previous grade  
UK Power Networks (Operations) Limited 15/02/2019 28/03/2019 M N/A SSS

 

Other (including UTCs) Inspected Published Grade Previous grade
Open University 26/02/2019 28/03/2019 2 N/A
University of Sheffield 12/02/2019 26/03/2019 2 3

Grade one college chief executive says sorry after dodgy data exposed

The chief executive of a grade one college has apologised after an audit exposed data manipulation that resulted in more than £500,000 being paid back to the government.

Lowell Williams (pictured), the boss at Dudley College, told FE Week he even considered resigning over the “blunder”, which has led to the college being excluded from this year’s national achievement rate tables.

Following complaints from a whistleblower last year, the allegations of which are unknown but which have been “dismissed”, the Education and Skills Funding Agency conducted a “review” of the college’s data in December. This found numerous late withdrawals of apprentices and work-placed learners.

There’s no question that the college is at fault in this matter

Once notified of these “concerns”, the college began an internal investigation, which identified the late withdrawals in 2015/16 and 2016/17, which artificially inflated achievement rates.

It also found some learners’ end dates were inaccurate, which resulted in one senior member of staff tendering their resignation.

Dudley College then appointed auditing firm RSM to undertake an “advisory audit”, in agreement with the ESFA, which confirmed the findings this month.

RSM reported that the college had “historically had a poor system for tracking and monitoring the continued activity of apprentices and adult education budget learners where delivery is offsite”.

As a result, “funding has been overclaimed for both adult education budget learners and apprentices as withdrawals have not been actioned in a timely manner to ensure funding was returned in the correct year”.

Williams, who has been at the college for over 10 years and led it to being rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted in June 2017, told FE Week he was “mortified” by this “professionally and personally”.

“There’s no question that the college is at fault in this matter,” Williams said.

“The management of large work-based learning programmes, delivered offsite on a national basis, is complex, but it is our responsibility to get it right and we didn’t.

“We have made provision to return £504,000 to the agency, which represents less than 1 per cent of our total funding claim in these years and does not have any material impact on the college’s financial health.

“I recognise the reputational damage caused by these errors to the college, our stakeholders and the wider sector. I apologise for these mistakes.”

Asked if he considered his own position in the course of the investigations, he added: “The truth is absolutely yes. I’m a national leader of further education and I considered that my position was compromised.

“But advice I received from people I’ve worked with over a career is not to let a single mistake wipe out a lot of good work that has been done over a number of years.”

Williams said the college is “extremely disappointed” to be excluded from the national achievement rate dataset for 2017/18, which was published by the ESFA today, after the agency “could not confirm the accuracy of the college’s achievement rate for adult apprentices” in time.

He added that the college’s website has published the unofficial data instead, which show achievement rates for all apprentices at 80.7 per cent in 2016/17 and 77.2 per cent in 2017/18. 

I considered that my position was compromised

Williams was “grateful” that the ESFA brought the dodgy data to the college’s attention, and said it would be “helpful for the sector in the future if there was a more effective system to analyse and report on late withdrawals and an automatic reconciliation of funds between Individualised Learner Record years”.

“I note that we are not the only college to have fallen foul of these complexities, so it is a good time for us all to take stock and learn lessons for the future,” he added.

FE Week revealed last week that Intraining, a provider part of England’s largest college group NCG, was one of several dozen providers hit with recent mystery audits, and faces not only a clawback but also being removed from the official achievement rate tables.

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.

IfA chief ‘stepping down’, claims headhunters

The chief executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) will step down when his contract is up, FE Week understands.

In an email seen by this paper, the headhunters Gatenby Sanderson said Sir Gerry Berragan would not reapply for the post he has held for the past 16 months.

He refused to tell FE Week in January whether he wanted to stay on.

“It’s none of your business,” he said.

A job advert, posted on the Civil Service Jobs website earlier this month, says the postholder will earn an annual £140,000. Applications close on April 29.

A spokesperson for the institute said: “Nothing has changed since the job advert was published.

Sir Gerry has not announced his intentions and it would not be appropriate to comment further
while the recruitment is live.”

He added that it was a “spurious story”.

Berragan, chief executive of the former Institute for Apprenticeships since November 2017, has overseen massive change.

In December 2017, the institute launched the “faster, better” programme to make the process of
approving apprenticeship standards more efficient.

Since last year he has also been steering IfATE through the controversial funding band reviews
in which the bands for a number of apprenticeship standards have been cut, some by as much as £5,000.

IfATE sparked controversy in the FE sector when it estimated the apprenticeship budget would
overspend by £0.5 billion in 2018-19, rising to £1.5 billion during 2021-22.

And in February this year it took over the delivery of T-levels and the technical education brief from the Department for Education.

Berragan told FE Week in January that IfATE’s increased staff numbers from about 86 in summer last year to about 150 in January to accommodate the new T-level responsibilities.

Its budget has also doubled this year from £8.6 million to £15 million, and is expected to rise to “around £20 million next year”.

The chief executive’s contract limits him to serving a two-year term, as he did not go through a formal recruitment process and instead volunteered for the role.

In an interview after he started the job, he told FE Week about the unusual recruitment process.

IfATE began recruiting for a replacement for Peter Lauener in April 2017.

Its initial drive and a later foray by headhunters were both unsuccessful.

“There was a bit of an imperative to get someone in place,” he told FE Week. (Lauener was due to retire at the end of the year.)

A breakthrough came during a two-hour working dinner with two fellow board members, Antony Jenkins, the IfATE chair, and former Barclays chief executive, and Dame Fiona Kendrick,
who chairs Nestle UK.

“That’s when I said to the Antony Jenkins, ‘well, you know, if you want, I’ll throw my hat in the ring’,” Berragan said.

“The only way they could appoint me was for a two-year period because I hadn’t gone through the formal recruitment process. After that, I’d have to go through another recruitment process if I wanted to stay longer.”

Funding clawback for college at risk of cash crisis

A college already in financial difficulty is being forced to pay back nearly £1 million to the government as a result of working with a subcontractor investigated for falsifying learner records.

In a report published last Friday by the FE commissioner, North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College was warned that it needed to take “urgent action” to secure its longterm future after it was over-optimistic in its forecasting, with “overly complex, expensive” staffing costs to income ratio.

According to its 2017-18 accounts, the college generated an operating deficit of £2.9 million, up from £612,000 the year before.

But the accounts also reveal its financial situation could deteriorate as it faces a liability of up to £900,000 to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), following an investigation into its use of a subcontractor that entered into liquidation in 2017.

Before its merger with North Warwickshire and Hinckley College in 2016, South Leicestershire worked with Ambertrain Ltd, which the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMchE) bought in November 2015.

Two years later, IMchE announced it was placing the provider into liquidation after uncovering “historical practices undertaken by some individuals at Ambertrain that have given rise to claims against the company”.

In May 2017 the ESFA wrote to the college about its concerns with the learning provision carried out by Ambertrain, and requested an investigation.

At the time of its insolvency proceedings, liquidators said Ambertrain had debts of £167,456 due from colleges, including South Leicestershire, which was “investigating claims against the company for falsification of learner records”.

Despite the result of this investigation being expected to translate into a large clawback to the agency, North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College did not make provision for it in its 2017-18 accounts because the sum had not yet been agreed.

However, a spokesperson for the college said it had “fully provided” in its three-year financial plan for the impact of Ambertrain’s liability.

“This plan, which shows the college returned to the ESFA’s financial health grade of satisfactory in the current year and moving to good in 2020-21, was submitted to the ESFA and to the FE commissioner last November,” she said.

Before the merger, South Leicestershire and North Warwickshire colleges were already in a precarious financial situation. After a visit to the colleges in 2015 Dr David Collins, then commissioner, recommended that they speed up plans to merge after he saw how their recurring deficits were hitting finances.

This week Richard Atkins, the current commissioner, said the college “should be able to avoid insolvency for the time being” only if it improved the way its “costed curriculum plan is monitored in year and adjustments made accordingly”.

The commissioner’s report, dated November 2018, said the college, which received a financial health notice to improve after the government assessed its monetary situation as “inadequate”, was at risk of a “cash crisis” this year. However, it stressed it was “not currently in crisis”.

According the FE commissioner, the current financial situation was driven by poor forecasting, an overall decline in apprenticeship contract and provision, failure to attract enough students to deliver the adult education budget contract, an “over-dependence” on a late increase in distance subcontracting and the requirement to accommodate more than 100 unfunded 16 to 18-year-olds, which cost £1 million.

The report said the college now needed to review its organisational structure, which Anne Milton, the skills minister, said was “unnecessarily complex” in a letter published alongside the commissioner’s report.

Milton agreed with the report’s findings, saying it was clear “urgent actions are now required”.

Marion Plant, the college’s principal, said the college had since made “rapid and significant progress” against all the recommendations.

Apprenticeship off-the-job calculation change? Wait for further clarification

There has been some confusion about the off-the-job training funding rule since it was introduced for all apprenticeship starts on frameworks and standards since May 2017, particularly how to calculate the minimum 20 per cent hours.

The ESFA has worked hard to help providers understand what counts as eligible activities and the associated calculation of the minimum hours, by publishing additional guidance and myth busting documents.

Last Friday afternoon the ESFA updated the guidance, and to their credit it includes a helpful spreadsheet which employers can use with providers to agree a compliant delivery model.

Unfortunately, however, paragraph 69 has left employers and providers scratching their heads, as it says: “For funding purposes 30 hours represents a full-time role and should be used in all calculations, even if the apprentice works more than 30 hours.”

The reference to a 30 hour per week cap in the calculation has never been said before. In fact, in the first version of the guidance there was even an example based on a 40 hour cap.

But far from being a mistake or even a change, when FE Week asked the Department for Education for clarification they said: “To be clear the published guidance does not contradict ESFA apprenticeship funding rules”.

Accordingly, providers have begun revisiting training plans and associated commitment statements, recalculating the minimum off-the-job hours.

One person on the ESFA message board FE Connect wrote: “The 30 hours cap will significantly reduce the number of off-the-job hours required for our learners, some by around 100 hours.”

Another wrote about the 30 hour cap: “I’ve managed to create and negotiate a plan with senior managers to put this to delivery staff, learners and employers.”

When I asked the Director of Apprenticeships at the ESFA, Keith Smith, about the 30 hour cap in a question and answer session at FE Week’s Annual Apprenticeship Conference, he agreed there was now a “contradiction” between the funding rules and this updated guidance.

He told delegates the ESFA would provide further clarification shortly, within a few days.

So my advice (at 18:54 on 28 March 2018) would be to ignore the latest guidance that includes reference to a 30 hour minimum calculation and wait for another ESFA clarification.

AAC Awards 2019 winners crowned

The country’s best apprenticeship providers, employers and champions have been honoured at the Annual Apprenticeship Awards 2019.

More than 500 people celebrated the winners at a glittering gala dinner at the Annual Apprenticeship Conference, held in Birmingham. This is the second year of the awards.

Organised by FE Week and the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, there were two types of awards: Route Apprenticeship Provider of the Year, and National Awards.

A new award to recognise employers and providers who increase diversity in apprenticeships, as well as working with apprentices who have special educational needs and disabilities, were introduced this year.

After assessing 350 entries, judges named the Royal Air Force as the Apprentice Employer of the Year, while In-Comm Training took home the Apprenticeship Provider of the Year award.

Martin Dunford OBE, chair of the AELP, received the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Shane Mann, managing director of FE Week’s publisher Lsect, congratulated the winners for their “outstanding work”.

“These awards are a brilliant opportunity to demonstrate and celebrate the importance of apprenticeships in England and the incredible hard work that employers, providers and individuals put into them,” he said.

“The calibre of applications was tremendously impressive this year and deliberations were tough in the extreme. The volume of entries we’ve received was overwhelming and showcased just how much talent there is in the sector.

“A huge congratulation to all our winners, who are truly making a difference through their work in apprenticeships.”

Mark Dawe, chief executive of the AELP, said: “The second year’s entry nominations for these awards underlined why it was totally right for FE Week and AELP to team up and shine a spotlight on the work that employers and providers are doing to promote apprenticeships.

“It never ceases to amaze me what fantastic training is being delivered to young people and to existing employees who need to enhance their skills in the face of current economic uncertainty.

“Providers, employers and the apprentices themselves never fail to rise to fresh challenges and tonight’s awards winners perfectly illustrate why.”

Look out for FE Week’s AAC supplement next week which will report on the winners in full.

Apprentice Employer of the Year – Royal Force 

Royal Air Force took home one of the most anticipated awards of the evening. Being one of the largest employer-providers, it has 2,900 apprenticeships spanning 24 different trades, from police officer to air traffic controller or dog handler. It rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, and has a completion rate of 97 per cent across all of their apprenticeships.

In 2016, it achieved and retained Top 100 Apprenticeship Employer status and won the Macro Employer category of the 2017 National Apprenticeship Awards.

Apprenticeship Provider of the Year – In-Comm Training

In-Comm Training was recognised for the way its apprenticeships are delivered by pioneering an employer-led approach involving 450 companies across the UK.

It has placed engineering and manufacturing firms at the heart of its delivery, having an impressive 40 per cent uptake in starts over the last twelve months.

The provider said the award will help its plans to take its employer-led model to a national scale.

Lifetime Achievement Award – Martin Dunford

Over the last 20 years, Martin has been chief executive of two national training providers which have secured jobs and provided high quality skills training to thousands of young people and adults across the country.

The judges said he is truly a champion of social mobility in that he and his team deliver on it as well as promote it.

Throughout most of this period, Martin has voluntarily served with distinction as chairman of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, overseeing its growth from an organisation that started off as representing about a dozen national training providers in 2002 to about 900 work based learning providers of all types and from all sectors today.

 

Full list of winners:

Agriculture, Environmental & Animal Care Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Haddon Training Ltd

Apprenticeship Diversity Award: Lookers Plc

Business & Administration Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Seetec

Care Services Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Qube Qualifications and Development Ltd

Catering & Hospitality Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Lifetime Training

Construction Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Fareham College

Digital Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Arch Apprentices

Education & Childcare Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Interserve Learning & Employment

Engineering & Manufacturing Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Uniper Engineering Academy

Hair & Beauty Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Milton Keynes College

Health & Science Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Gower College Swansea

Legal, Finance & Accounting Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: CILEx Law School

Outstanding contribution to the development of apprenticeships (Employer): Thatchers Cider

Outstanding contribution to the development of apprenticeships (Individual): Steve Williams

Promoting Apprenticeships campaign of the year: Umbrella Training Ltd

SEND Apprenticeship Champion Award: Weston College

Transport & Logistics Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: Outsource Training and Development

Outstanding contribution to the development of apprenticeships (Provider): Skills Training UK

Apprentice Employer of the Year: Royal Air Force

Apprenticeship Provider of the Year: In-Comm Training

Lifetime Achievement Award: Martin Dunford OBE

Blow your own trumpet and shake off your victim mentality, providers told

FE providers have been urged to “blow their own trumpet more” after research found they have developed a “victim mentality” because they have been “unfairly blamed for deficiencies in a highly complicated system”.

A study, conducted by the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) and the Further Education Trust for Leadership (FETL), found that providers now acted in a way that minimised risk and optimised regulatory compliance to “just survive”.

The study followed a series of nine roundtable discussions with 81 sector leaders across the country.

It found a “feeling within the sector that it has been held to blame for a perceived unsatisfactory state of the system, when even the government’s own evidence often doubts whether it is as unsatisfactory as it fears”.

More alarming was a “realisation” that over time providers had “not been effective enough in countering this view”.

They were often “too willing to accept this position instead of pushing back against it”, because the market was “too risky and uncertain to do otherwise”.

Dame Ruth Silver, the former principal of Lewisham College in south London and president of the FETL, told FE Week the sector currently had a “victim mentality” because it had been taking the blame for “inadequate policy implementation”.

“People set themselves up to deliver the original design and requirements and then that changes, depending on how much money government needs to take back from the sector,” she said.

“This is no way to run the future of our economy and people.

“One thing that I would wish for the sector is that there was a promise to not interfere with things for a period of five years. To let things take root, to let things have stability, to let managers and leaders have the time of perspective.

“Government officials keep changing their minds. This is due to political incompetence and some impatience and, of course, the fact that we have ministers in FE who do not stay very long. I used to say that the skills brief in Whitehall is the apprenticeship for being a minister.”

Silver also said ministers had tried to make public servants of employers, to change their ways and mind-sets, instead of understanding where they were coming from, what they wanted and how they saw their role.

“As a result, employers lose interest, feel frustrated or ill-served, and withdraw, at great cost to learners and the sector, not to mention the treasury and economy.”

As reported last week by FE Week, the report also called on the government to move away from its “unhelpful” mantra of “employers in the driving seat” in UK skills policy because this was “more rhetoric than reality”.

The FETL president added that for decades politicians had “scratched their heads” about how employers could become more engaged in FE – and were still asking themselves the same question today.

Meanwhile Mark Dawe, the chief executive of the AELP, said that providers and colleges often knew how they should work with employers, but government red tape, restrictions and a lack of funding did not allow them the “flexibility” to do it.

The report said there was now a “strong sense of risk aversion” among providers who felt their expertise and achievements were “under-recognised”.

It concluded that the sector needed to “blow its own trumpet more and be more assertive of what its role should be”.

Incentivise the apprenticeships that actually boost productivity

Apprenticeship funding mechanisms should be weighted to favour those standards that boost employability and earnings, argues Nicole Gicheva

The best apprenticeships provide an alternative entry route into employment to academic education. They make it easier for people to reskill and change career. High-value apprenticeship programmes also increase skill levels, enhance productivity in firms and in the economy and increase the wages of workers.

But our new Social Market Foundation report, Making Apprenticeships Work, highlights a huge variance: some apprenticeships deliver these outcomes. Some do not.

The recent reforms have aimed to improve the quality of apprenticeships offered and undertaken across the economy. Yet the ten most popular standards in 2017/18 include hairdressing, care work, customer service and hospitality; historically, these fields lead to lower returns to both apprentices and the economy.

The new funding mechanisms and incentives should go a step further than their current scope (to cover the cost of provision of standards) and reflect the outcomes that would be most useful to society now and in the future.

Employers should be encouraged to offer apprenticeships in sectors and occupations with a history of delivering good returns in the form of employment opportunities and productivity-enhancing skills. Introducing apprenticeship value premiums for each occupation could help achieve this.

Apprenticeships that perform well when evaluated by their productivity gains (measured principally by the average wage returns to apprentices), the level of employment or progression into higher-level training, and the degree of transferrable skills associated with the programme would attract an additional financial grant (a premium), deposited into the digital accounts of employers.

Conversely, schemes that systematically perform poorly on those metrics should see a cut in the maximum contribution to training and assessment costs provided by the government and be moved to a lower funding band.

In 2017, only a minority of apprentices undertaking training in education (33 per cent), leisure (37 per cent), health (40 per cent) or retail (42 per cent) reported receiving a pay rise afterwards. This compares to 71 per cent in construction and 65 per cent in engineering. Under our proposed reform, employers in the construction and engineering industries who hire apprentices could receive more funding to encourage more such training.

We accept that this course of action is likely to make some schemes less attractive to employers and providers, and to make some uneconomic. However, if schemes are not delivering the skills that improve the employability or productivity of apprentices, then it is right that we question whether alternative training or jobs should be pursued instead.

While the role of employers in determining the nature of apprenticeships is vital, the employer-led approach could entail a risk of apprenticeships being created with short-term needs of businesses in mind rather than future skills requirements and the changing nature of the economy. That is especially important as robotics and artificial intelligence become increasingly commonplace.

The high take-up of apprenticeships in lower-skill fields – which Bank of England analysis suggests are highly at risk of automation in the future – raises questions around the extent to which apprenticeships are being sufficiently future-proofed. As the risk of automation is much higher in lower-level occupations, there is significant crossover between the sectors of the economy where apprenticeships are most prevalent and the occupations that are most likely to have been made redundant by technology. In other words, there is a significant risk that some individuals who undertake apprenticeships could find that their training soon becomes redundant.

In this context, the government’s industrial strategy is unambiguous about the implications of automation for the economy and low-skilled jobs, as well as the need to ensure workers have the right skills to maximise their earning potential.

Employers and prospective apprentices might not be aware of the risk of automation for each occupation. So this risk should be reflected in apprenticeship value premiums. Unless alterations can be made to each specification, funding for apprenticeships at a high risk of automation should be reduced, or these schemes can be discontinued altogether.

The best apprenticeships do not just offer skills and pay, they also prepare their holders for the economy of the future. This is where we should focus support and resources.

 

Apprenticeship quality not improving, says Ofsted chief inspector

The quality of apprenticeships is “sticking” instead of moving forward, according to Ofsted’s chief inspector who today urged the sector to “improve”.

Amanda Spielman (pictured) delivered a keynote speech on day one of FE Week’s Annual Apprenticeship Conference and provided delegates with an update about what the education watchdog is finding during inspections.

She said last year Ofsted inspected the apprenticeship provision at just over 100 providers, of which nearly 60 per cent of those were ‘good’ or better.

More recent inspections “show that, for now, the sector is holding steady – despite so much new provision coming on stream”, Spielman explained.

“Since last September, of the 52 full inspections that reported on the quality of apprenticeships, nearly 60 per cent were found to be good or better.”

So, while the picture “isn’t getting worse, I think that you would all agree that there is still work to do”.

The challenge is to “move past this 60 percent”, she said.

Meanwhile, the findings from over 150 monitoring visits to new apprenticeship providers show that around 60 per cent were making ‘reasonable progress’ across all three lines of enquiry, while almost a quarter received at least one ‘insufficient progress’ judgement.

AAC host Kirsty Wark later quizzed the chief inspector on the 60 per cent figure for full inspections, saying “it seems to me that’s not particularly good” considering the other 40 per cent of providers will be offering bad quality apprenticeships.

“That is why I wanted to talk about it today, it’s a figure that seems to be sticking,” Spielman said in response.

“We see this across last year and this year, the monitoring visits, it is a higher figure than in other areas of education that we inspect and we’d really really like to see that improve.”

The chief inspector’s comments come after Ofsted’s deputy director for FE and skills said in May last year that the quality of apprenticeships was actually in decline, and the programmes were starting to resemble the doomed Train to Gain initiative from the mid 00s.