The embattled Hadlow Group has been bolstered by the appointment of two new interim chairs for its colleges’ boards: an ex-chief executive of the Association of Colleges and a mergers and acquisitions expert.

Martin Doel, who will chair West Kent and Ashford College’s board, and Andrew Baird, who will chair Hadlow College’s board, are the latest appointments to the group since the start of an FE Commissioner investigation into financial irregularities at the group over a month ago.

Baird is on the FE Commissioner’s National Leaders of Governance scheme, appointed last October and the Department for Education pays £300 per day for supporting colleges identified as needing extra help.

Doel is not a member of the NLG, but FE Week understands he was asked to assist and will also be remunerated.

Since leaving the chief executive role at the Association of Colleges in 2016 after spending eight years at the helm, Doel has become a Further Education Trust for Leadership (FETL) professor of leadership in FE at University College London.

He’s also a governor of Cambridge Regional College, a trustee of education charity CVQO, the Challenge Network and Royal Society for Blind Children, as well as an independent member of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education’s audit and risk committee.

Doel, who had a multitude of leadership roles in the Royal Air Force before joining the AoC, said: “Having visited the College and spoken with the interim principal, staff and stakeholders, it is clear that West Kent and Ashford College faces a range of financial and related problems.

“However, these conversations have also demonstrated to me how talented and dedicated the staff are and how highly regarded the service that they provide is to students, communities and employers in Kent. I look forward to doing all I can as interim chair to ensure that this vital work continues in a sustainable way.”

Baird has been a governor at Oakwood School in Surrey since 2013 and was elected permanent chair of governors at East Surrey College last July, for the period September 1, 2018 to August 21 2020.

Between December 2018 and February 2019, in his capacity as a member of the NLG scheme, he also acted as interim chair at financially struggling West London College.

According to Baird and Partners website: “Andrew is the founder of Baird Partners, working in Mergers and Acquisitions since 1988 when he ended his career in International Banking, having filled roles  in London, Geneva, Paris, Jersey (CI) and Amsterdam.

“In the last 30 years he has concluded over 80 transactions in a number of sectors, including Banking, IT, Plastics, Facilities Management, Steel, Electronics and Industrial Services. Has also served on the boards of several IT and Plastics businesses and  is currently Chair of a FinTec startup.”

“From my time at the college so far I’ve been really pleased to see the work being done by the staff to ensure the learners are unaffected by the current troubles the college faces,” Baird said.

“I’m pleased to be appointed as the interim chair whilst we explore options for the future of Hadlow College.”

FE Week reported earlier this month how the boards at the Hadlow Group went into meltdown as serious governance failings and financial inexperience were put in the spotlight.

Theresa Bruton, the chair of both Hadlow College’s and West Kent and Ashford College’s boards, resigned last week.

She was filling the latter role on an interim basis following the departure in February of Paul Dubrow, who claimed he and the board had been “misled and lied to”.

The Hadlow Group has seen a number of other departures since the FE Commissioner began an investigation into the group: five other governors aside from Bruton and Dubrow, including several members of the finance committee, as well as group principal Paul Hannan and the group deputy principal Mark Lumsdon-Taylor.

The FE Commissioner was sent to visit the group following a request for over £20 million in restructuring funds as part of plans to merge.

With cash running out, the group has in recent weeks been in receipt of government bailouts.

The commissioner’s team, the Education and Skills Funding Agency, and Hadlow’s own board are all currently running their own separate investigations into Hannan and Lumsdon-Taylor.

Pictured left to right: Martin Doel and Andrew Baird.

Up to 300 jobs are on the line at England’s largest college group, after it announced plans to close its two private training providers.

Staff at Intraining and Rathbone Training, which are part of NCG, are being consulted on the redundancies.

The providers currently train 4,500 learners between them, of which two-thirds are apprentices. Some could be forced to find alternative providers if the centres do end up shutting.

Last year, FE Week reported that staff numbers were being cut by up to a fifth, from 500 to around 400, at the providers in an effort to save £3 million. Intraining had already shed more than a third of its 1,200-person workforce back in 2015.

But the staff-cutting efforts do not appear to have been enough to save the providers.

“We have today opened consultation with Intraining and Rathbone staff on some fundamental changes to the way in which we operate in England, including the closure of our network of training centres and a radical refocussing of our apprenticeship proposition,” a spokesperson for NCG said.

“Intraining and Rathbone accounted for less than 20 per cent of group revenue in 2017/18. The changes we are proposing will strengthen NCG’s already robust position, supporting our ambition to invest in teaching, learning and facilities.

“The unfortunate effect of these proposals would be substantial redundancies in Intraining and Rathbone. We will confirm our future plans once the consultation has concluded.”

The spokesperson confirmed the providers currently employs over 400 people across 19 centres, and 300 jobs were now at risk.

He said that moving forward, it will “put the interests of learners first and support them to finish their programmes wherever possible”.

“If we proceed as currently proposed following consultation, we will in future operate a single, smaller, digitally-enabled business focussed on delivery of high-quality apprenticeships for the tech, management and professional occupations,” the spokesperson added.

NCG, which is chaired by former Education and Skills Funding Agency chief executive Peter Lauener, has ran into trouble in recent years.

Achievement rates across the group fell way below the national average in 2016/17, staff at its colleges in London went on strike in a row over pay last year, and a free school that the group sponsored, the Discovery School, was forced to close down by the government.

All this happened before Ofsted downgraded the group from ‘good’ to ‘requires improvement’, which triggered intervention from the FE Commissioner.

Earlier this month NCG told FE Week it expects the commissioner’s team to carry out a “diagnostic visit” as a result of the grade three, and while he has “not yet visited”, the group expects this to happen “before the end of the academic year”.

As well as FE Commissioner intervention, it is expected that NCG will be dropped from the government’s final bidding round for Institutes of Technology as a result of its grade three Ofsted rating.

Following the turbulent year, NCG’s principal Joe Docherty decided it was time for him to resign in October.

As revealed by FE Week earlier this month, the college group has paused recruitment for a new chief executive until the Spring, after its initial hunt proved fruitless. Instead, they will focus efforts on “improving standards” as it awaits a follow-up visit from Ofsted following the grade three rating in June.

NCG comprises Newcastle College, Newcastle Sixth Form College, Lewisham College, Southwark College, Carlisle College, Kidderminster College, West Lancashire College, Rathbone Training and InTraining.

The future of thousands of applied general qualifications including BTECs hangs in the balance as the government launches its first consultation on plans to withdraw their funding.

The Department for Education has been reviewing vocational qualifications at level 3 and below since announcing plans to introduce new “high-quality” T-levels.

The review includes applied generals, tech levels and technical certificates, which are vocational alternatives to A-levels. While these cover a wide range of courses, BTECs, awarded by Pearson, are the most popular.

The key issue will be to ensure the government is not artificially trying to close down market choice

The government claims many of these qualifications, of which there are more than 12,000, are of “poor quality” and their existence leaves young people and employers “confused”.

Today, at 09.30am, the DfE will launch the first part of a two-stage consultation to decide their futures.

Open for 12 weeks, the government is firstly consulting on “only providing public funding for qualifications that meet key criteria on quality, purpose, necessity and progression” and “not providing public funding for qualifications for 16 to 19 year olds that overlap with T-levels or A-levels”.

A second consultation will follow later this year setting out the proposed criteria that will be used to determine whether a qualification continues to receive public funding.

Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said the “really significant” element of the consultation is the “review of applied general qualifications, which include the very popular and well-understood BTECs and CTECs (Cambridge Technical Extended Certificate)”.

“And this is not a minority pursuit,” he explained. “More than 200,000 16 to 18 year olds study these courses every year, often studying a combination of A-levels and applied generals on a blended timetable.

“The government may see the introduction of T-levels as the best way to address the skills gap, about which it is, quite rightly, concerned. But this should not be at the expense of applied generals.”

Tom Bewick, the chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, told FE Week the “devil will be in the detail”.

“The key issue will be to ensure the government is not artificially trying to close down market choice for learners and employers; or to manipulate the existing level 3 technical qualifications, like applied generals, in order to make the T-levels effectively the only qualification learners and employers can choose from in future,” he said.

“Governments have a very poor history of second guessing the needs of diverse learner communities and the labour market, so we should rightly proceed with caution over the weeks and months ahead.”

Last year, exams regulator Ofqual ordered exam boards to strengthen their controls on certain types of applied general qualifications, after evidence was uncovered of grade inflation on old-style BTECs.

The regulator has also warned of “confusion” between legacy BTECs – which don’t feature any external assessment – and new versions of the qualifications. Sally Collier, the chief regulator, told MPs last week that outcomes for reformed BTECs would be under scrutiny.

We can improve the quality of the options out there

Education secretary Damian Hinds (pictured) said today: “We can’t legislate for parity of esteem between academic and technical routes post-16. But we can improve the quality of the options out there and by raising quality, more students and parents will trust these routes.”

The response to the first consultation will be published alongside the launch the second consultation later in the year.

OCR, which offers many applied generals, welcomed the consultation.

“We are confident that it will be open and wide ranging, taking full account of widespread views, and will ensure that young people continue to have access to high quality qualifications which will, in many cases, include Applied General Qualifications,” a spokesperson for the exam board said.

Catherine Sezen, senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges, said it is “crucial that there are study programmes and qualifications which meet the needs of all students as well as those of business and the economy” and this review “kick starts this important conversation”.

T-levels, which will attempt to streamline the 13,000 or so technical qualifications on offer into 15 routes to present a clearer choice between A-levels and T-levels, will be rolled out from 2020.

The tender process for the second wave of T-levels has been launched by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.

From today, awarding organisations can bid for an “exclusive license” to develop and deliver the next seven T-levels, which will be taught from September 2021.

They will be split across six separate contracts worth over £30 million, with the bidding lots being:

.               LOT 1 Construction: Building Services Engineering and Construction: Onsite Construction (£5.83 million)

.              LOT 2 Digital: Digital Business Services (£4.78 million)

.              LOT 3 Digital: Digital Support Services (£4.65 million)

.              LOT 4 Health & Science: Health (£5.78 million)

.              LOT 5 Health & Science: Healthcare Science (£5 million)

.              LOT 6 Health & Science: Science (£4.87 million)

The bidding window is open until May 10.

The awarding organisations that will develop, deliver and award the first three T-levels from 2020 were announced in February.

NCFE has been awarded a contract to deliver the education and childcare pathway, and Pearson has been awarded contracts to deliver T-levels in design, surveying and planning as well digital production, design and development.

Sir Gerry Berragan, chief executive of the institute, said: “The launch of this second invitation to tender is an exciting milestone and shows that the Institute is well on track for the delivery of T-levels.

“These seven new pathways – split across six separate contracts – will provide high quality, stretching and engaging new qualifications for young people.

“We’ve involved employers and businesses of varying sizes throughout this process, ensuring that T-levels will be fit for purpose and relevant to the world of work.”

He added: “We were very happy with the level of interest for the first set of contracts and have worked hard to prepare awarding organisations for this second wave, through in-depth pre-market engagement. We encourage awarding organisations of all sizes to be part of this exciting new procurement process.”

The full suite of procurement documents can be found through the Institute’s online procurement platform Proactis, procontract.due-north.com/Login.

Paul Hannan has resigned as principal of the Hadlow Group following investigations into financial irregularities at its two colleges.

The announcement comes hours ahead of the group’s first board meeting since December, at which it is expected two new chairs for the boards of Hadlow College and West Kent and Ashford College will be appointed, who will then conclude investigations into Hannan and former deputy principal Mark Lumsdon-Taylor.

The pair were suspended in February after the FE Commissioner came knocking, who was sent to visit the group following a request for over £20 million in restructuring funds from the agency’s Transaction Unit.

With cash running out, the group has in recent weeks been in receipt of government bailouts.

The commissioner’s team, the Education and Skills Funding Agency, and Hadlow’s own board are all currently running their own separate investigations into Hannan and Lumsdon-Taylor.

A spokesperson for Hadlow Group told FE Week today that Hannan (pictured) has now resigned, but would not provide further comment.

The group has been asked for its plans for appointing a permanent principal. Graham Morley was appointed on an interim basis in February while Hannan was on sick leave, before being suspended days later.

FE Week revealed what was behind the Hadlow scandal earlier this month, which includes allegations of doctored ESFA emails to gain additional funding. You can read our full investigation here.

FE Week also reported earlier this month how the boards at the Hadlow Group went into meltdown as serious governance failings and financial inexperience were put in the spotlight.

The appointment of two new chairs expected tonight will follow the resignation last week of Theresa Bruton, the chair of both Hadlow College’s and West Kent and Ashford College’s boards.

Bruton filled the latter role on an interim basis following the departure in February of Paul Dubrow, who claimed he and the board had been “misled and lied to”.

The Hadlow Group has seen the departures five other governors aside from Bruton and Dubrow, including several members of the finance committee.

An experienced commercial training provider new to the apprenticeships market has been heavily criticised after Ofsted found staff at an employer were being forced onto their apprenticeship programme.

WDR Limited, which has 83 apprentices, received insufficient ratings cross the board in its first monitoring visit since it started receiving public funding to train apprentices in 2017.

Inspectors found level 3 team-leading apprentices “were given no choice by their employer about participating on an apprenticeship programme”.

Apprentices were given no choice by their employer about participating on an apprenticeship programme

This led to a significant number of them dropping out of the course: “In one group of team-leading apprentices, only four out of 12 who started in June 2018 remained on the programme” at the time of the inspection.

FE Week asked WDR Limited, which has operated as a commercial training company offering mostly leadership and management courses for nearly 50 years, for the name of the employer, but it declined to release it.

Bosses at the provider did change their recruitment policy after realising what was happening, but Ofsted said it was too soon to judge whether the change had made any difference.

Under Education and Skills Funding Agency rules, any provider with an ‘insufficient’ rating in an early monitoring visit Ofsted report will be banned from taking on any new apprentices until the grade improves.

WDR declined to comment when asked if it had been suspended from recruiting new apprentices yet.

Summing up what they found at WDR, Ofsted’s report said: “Leaders and managers have not sufficiently implemented the full requirements and principles of an apprenticeship.

“They do not have effective arrangements in place to monitor and review the progress apprentices are making or understand how they benefit from their training.”

Inspectors found WDR’s coaches do not identify a starting point so they can effectively measure how apprentices develop.

In addition, leaders and managers do not have a “clear overview of the skills, knowledge or behaviours apprentices are developing”; and do not check apprentices are receiving their entitlement to off-the-job training.

“Apprentices are not able to link what they are doing in the workplace to their apprenticeship programme,” Ofsted added.

“Apprentices are not always aware of the progress they are making or what they need to do to complete their full apprenticeship.”

Leaders and manager also do not comply with the statutory requirements of ‘Prevent’ and inspectors considered apprentices to have a poor understanding of safeguarding.

WDR has and will continue to take significant actions in response to the findings

Ofsted did however praise WDR for establishing “good working relationships with employers”, and for recently recruiting “new senior managers to strengthen the management of the apprenticeship provision” who have started making “improvements”.

A WDR spokesperson said: “As a learning provider with 50 years’ experience, we are extremely disappointed with the outcomes of our first Ofsted monitoring report.

“We are a new apprenticeship training provider and we take this feedback very seriously.

“WDR has and will continue to take significant actions in response to the findings of the report and has every confidence we will achieve a successful outcome at full inspection in the coming months.”

WDR is the tenth provider out of 158 to be rated ‘insufficient’ across the board since Ofsted started monitoring new apprenticeship providers in August 2018.

The police has today launched a formal criminal investigation into disgraced apprenticeship firm Aspire Achieve Advance (3aaa).

It follows a meeting between the Department for Education and police yesterday where a number of allegations of fraud against the firm were discussed.

FE Week understands the allegations against 3aaa, which had over 4,200 learners and 500 staff before it went bust when the ESFA pulled its £16.5 million contracts, relate to manipulated Individualised Learner Records to artificially inflate achievement rates and misuse of employer-incentive grants.

The company, which received nearly all of its income from government skills funding, was co-founded by Peter Marples and Di McEvoy-Robinson in 2008, but the pair stepped down in September as the ESFA came knocking.

In a statement released today, Derbyshire police said: “A formal criminal investigation has today been launched into 3aaa.

“This follows a number of allegations of fraud that have been made by the Department for Education against the firm.

“Officers from Derbyshire Constabulary’s specialist fraud investigation team will now begin the process of making formal inquiries into these allegations.”

A DfE spokesperson said: “As a criminal investigation is now underway, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.”

3aaa was one of the biggest apprenticeship firms in England when it went into administration on October 11.

It received over £31 million in government funding last year and had the largest allocation for non-levy apprenticeships – standing at nearly £22 million.

Derbyshire Constabulary started making enquiries into the defunct provider, following a referral from Action Fraud in October , while the DfE continued to conduct its own investigation separately, which got underway in the summer.

While the government and police investigations have been ongoing, FE Week has shone a light on the truth behind the 3aaa scandal.

Evidence from a whistleblower shows how achievement rates were inflated by more than 20 percentage points at the provider, which would ultimately lead to it gaining a high Ofsted grade and more public funding.

In addition to the data manipulation, 3aaa sales documents obtained by FE Week showed a potential £700,000 ESFA clawback. It is understood that this related to a range of apprenticeship and traineeship funding overclaims made via Individualised Learner Record submissions.

On the other side of the investigations was the alleged misuse of grants from an apprenticeship incentive scheme in which 3aaa held on to £1.2 million that was supposed to go to employers.

The defunct apprenticeship firm’s latest accounts show that the company’s directors took out huge directors’ loans totalling more than £4 million between them, and at the end of 2015, both owners purchased multi-million pound properties.

Meanwhile, 3aaa splashed its public funding on £1.6 million of sports-club sponsorships, an Elton John concert and Tesla supercars among other luxuries.

This isn’t the first ESFA investigation into the company. In 2016 auditing firm KPMG was asked to carry out an investigation and found dozens of success rate “overclaims”.

It is understood this resulted in 3aaa paying back a substantial six-figure sum at the time.

But this didn’t stop the agency from giving the provider a £7 million apprenticeships contract increase in the same year.

After launching its second investigation into 3aaa in June, the DfE called in an independent auditor to investigate the ESFA over its contract management of the former apprenticeships giant.

Ofsted paused its inspection at 3aaa, which was expected to result in another ‘outstanding’ rating, in the summer after the DfE launched its investigation. The education watchdog told FE Week in November it was continuing to look into the provider but a final outcome has still not been reached.

In January FE Week reported that more than half of the apprentices that were affected by the collapse of 3aaa had still not been found a new provider.

Outsourcing giant Interserve is reportedly going to be put into administration today with nearly 5,000 apprentices on its books.

However, the company has insisted this will not be a Carillion-style collapse and it is very much business as usual, with no big job losses anticipated.

Shareholders at Interserve, which employs 45,000 people in the UK, today failed to secure investor backing for a rescue plan, meaning lenders who lent the company more than £600 million will now seize control of it, according to the BBC.

The outsourcing giant is an international support services and construction group with huge UK government contracts in areas including health, education and defence.

It also runs a large UK training provider called Interserve Learning and Employment Ltd, which is rated ‘good’ by Ofsted and holds ESFA contracts worth £10.6 million – but this doesn’t factor in its apprenticeship levy contracts.

According to it websites, the provider trains “around 14,000 apprentices each year”. Skills minister Anne Milton said Interserve had around had 4,567 apprentices on programme as of November 2018, in an answer to a parliamentary question in December.

Interserve told FE Week it will be business as usual if the company does go into administration, and it will honour all of its contracts, meaning there will be minimal disruption to the apprentices it trains and employs.

A formal statement is expected to be released later today.

Interserve accumulated debt after construction project delays and a failed energy-from-waste project.

The crisis surrounding the outsourcing giant has sparked fears that it could be heading for the same fate as its former rival Carillion, which went insolvent in January 2018.

Over 1,100 apprentice bricklayers, carpenters and builders were left jobless in the wake of the collapse.

Interserve told FE Week today its position is not the same as Carillion.

 

UPDATE: Administrators Ernst and Young were appointed late on Friday and the company’s assets were moved immediately to a group controlled by Interserve’s lenders.

Debbie White, chief executive of the Interserve Group, said: “With a stronger financial platform in place, Interserve will be able to concentrate on delivering value for our customers.

“Interserve is fundamentally a strong business and with a competitive financial platform in place we see significant opportunities ahead as a best-in-class partner to the public and private sector.”