With all eyes on the 52 providers taking care of wave one of the T-level delivery in 2020, the process to decide which awarding organisations will get their custom might seem like a comparative sideshow.
In fact, removing providers’ choice of awarding organisations is not only controversial, it is where legal challenge seems most inevitable, and thus where most of the risk to timely implementation lies.
Later this month the DfE will run two ‘market engagement’ events with awarding organisations, before launching the first tendering round.
The aim is to actually ditch the market in assessment organisations and create instead a monopoly of supply, or award “exclusive licences”, as they are called.
Damian Hinds overruled his own permanent secretary and insisted there will be no delay to the 2020 roll-out, so there is little to no contingency if this relatively short procurement process takes longer than planned.
But delays in dishing out contracts due to legal challenges seem quite likely, given that huge awarding organisations like Pearson and City & Guilds are going head to head in winner takes-all competitions.
Then there is the thorny issue of how the winners will be compensated for the expensive process of developing qualifications that they might lose and have to give to the competition once the contract expires in a few years’ time, given the government will own the intellectual copyright.
In fact, the lawyers will be so busy tendering, writing contracts, undertaking due diligence, and managing contracts and dispute resolution that they are being employed full time.
The Institute for Apprenticeships will take responsibility for T-levels from wave two, and has appointed a legal counsel, who reports to a head of legal, who reports to the deputy director for commercial delivery.
This is in addition to paying for legal services from Mills & Reeve as well as lawyers from the Department for Education and the government legal department’s commercial law group.
So with armies of lawyers on both sides busy battling it out over assessment contracts, the 52 chosen providers should be in no rush to recruit students for a September 2020 start.
I hope to be proven wrong on what I believe is the need for further T-level delay, but the lawyers will get paid what ever happens.
Finding new work for apprentices left jobless in the wake of the collapse of Carillion cost the government around £3 million, a National Audit Office report has revealed.
A total of 1,148 trainee bricklayers, carpenters and builders suddenly found themselves out of work when the outsourcing giant went into liquidation on January 15.
A rescue attempt to ensure they were not left to find new jobs alone was immediately launched and the Construction Industry Training Board, an “arm’s-length body” of the DfE, assumed responsibility for finding alternative employers.
The apprentices had their wages paid until they were placed into new work.
A new NAO report, which focuses on the role of the government in preparing for and managing the liquidation of Carillion, has now revealed the official receiver expects to incur costs of around £3 million as a result.
This money is expected to be paid back to the government.
“The special managers expect to incur around £9 million in other costs that would not be incurred during a conventional liquidation and which must be borne by the taxpayer and not the creditors,” the report explains.
“One of these costs involves the CITB finding other providers for Carillion apprentices’ training. Carillion had 1,148 apprentices when it collapsed. At the end of March, 729 (64 per cent) had found or started work, or returned to education; 329 (29 per cent) remained without work, but are being paid by the official receiver; and 90 (eight per cent) could not be contacted.
“The official receiver expects to spend around £3 million in total on costs associated with apprentices.”
FE Week spoke with the CITB this week to get current figures for how many apprentices have so far been helped.
Gillian Cain, head of apprenticeships at CITB, said that 924 apprentices now have new jobs.
“Our efforts to help Carillion apprentices find new work are unwavering,” she added. “Our dedicated team are constantly in touch with learners and working with employers, colleges and training providers, to create new job opportunities.
“We are optimistic we can place the remaining learners looking for employment as we enter our peak recruitment phase.”
The CITB is continuing its matchmaking service for the remaining out-of-work apprentices, who are still being paid by the government.
The success in sourcing new work for the apprentices has in part been put down to cash incentives of £1,000 which are being offered to employers.
The payments are part of a £1.4 million package that sees firms receive £500 up front, and a further £500 after six months if they’ve retained the displaced trainees.
Carillion was the UK’s largest employer of construction apprentices before it went into liquidation in January.
They were being taught at the company’s skills division, Carillion Training Services, which held a £6.5 million ESFA contract last year.
The Department for Education exceeded its own target for recruiting apprentices last year.
Ever since the apprenticeship levy was launched last April, public-sector bodies have been obliged to make sure at least 2.3 per cent of their workforce start and apprenticeship every year.
One year on and the DfE has met the target and then some. It is now giving all other eligible public bodies until the end of September to report their figures.
“At the end of March 2018, 2.9 per cent of the department’s workforce were undertaking an apprenticeship,” minister Lord Agnew revealed yesterday.
“The civil service has pledged to deliver 2.3 per cent of the workforce in England as apprenticeship starts annually. The department met its target in 2017/18.”
A DfE spokesperson told FE Week it had 178 apprenticeship starts last year out of the 6,068 staff that make up the DfE and the Education and Skills Funding Agency.
In response to a separate parliamentary question, which asked for the total number of public bodies to meet the target last year, Lord Agnew reminded the public sector that it has just over four months to submit figures.
“Figures on the number of public-sector apprenticeships are not yet available,” he said.
“Public-sector bodies in scope of the public sector apprenticeships target are required annually to publish and send to the Department for Education their progress towards the target. The first reports will be due by September 30.”
The public-sector apprenticeship target requires public bodies with 250 or more employees to have a minimum of 2.3 per cent apprenticeship starts relative to its overall workforce numbers.
It covers the period April 1 to March 31 each year.
It’s an average target across the years 2017/18 to 2020/21 to “give flexibility to organisations to manage peaks and troughs in recruitment”.
Employers have used just 10 per cent of their apprenticeship levy funds in first 12 months since it was introduced.
The education minister Lord Agnew admitted to parliament that between May last year and the end of this April, levy-paying employers “drew down £207 million from their apprenticeship service accounts for new starts”.
This amounts to just 10 per cent of the ring-fenced apprenticeship budget which has been set by the government “regardless of how much levy receipts are each year”.
The parliamentary under-secretary at the Department for Education explained this budget was set at £2.01 billion for the 2017-18 financial year, to “fund new apprenticeship starts in levy and non levy-paying employers and to cover the ongoing training costs of apprentices that are already in training”.
He added that as the apprenticeship programme is demand-led, and employers “can choose which apprenticeships they offer, at what level and when”, actual spend to April 2019 “is still unknown”.
“We will publish details on aggregate apprenticeship spending in our departmental end-of-year accounts as part of our normal financial reporting cycle,” he continued.
Large employers have been forced to pay the apprenticeship levy since it was launched last year.
The money goes into a pot which they have two years to claim back to spend on apprenticeship training.
The government had hoped that the levy would force more employers to invest in training, and help it hit its manifesto target of three million apprenticeship starts by 2020.
But starts have actually fallen since its launch. They were down a massive 40 per cent in February on the same period in 2017, as revealed by latest provisional government statistics.
There were 21,800 starts reported for the month, compared with February 2017’s provisional total of 36,400, according to the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s monthly apprenticeship statistics update, published this morning.
This represents this biggest year-on-year percentage drop since last August.
The new head of the Education and Skills Funding Agency is a very busy woman. And I’ve been offered just 30 minutes to find out all about her life and do a photoshoot. Simples.
Poised on the edge of a hexagonal table in a small conference room, Eileen Milner sits in the eye of the hurricane, while three women whirl around, dismantling half of the glass-walled cubicle – moving chairs, unplugging wires, ripping various safety announcements off the walls to create the perfect studio.
She hates photos with a passion, and feels excruciatingly unconformable in front of the lens. But between the photographer, the press officer and I, we manage to cocoon her in sufficient frivolous chat to carry her through. By the time Milner and I are sat across from one another, we have just about enough time left to zip through her career history, and ciao.
But she moves slowly, with purpose, settling into the conversation as if she has all the time in the world.
She won her latest role as the chief executive of the government agency that manages billions of pounds of funding for schools, FE colleges and apprenticeships after cutting her teeth in public-sector senior management in a tricky role at the Care Quality Commission.
The health and social care regulator had just been branded “not fit for purpose” by the British Medical Association when she took up the newly-created post as director of corporate services in early 2014. Part of her job was to “build confidence back into the organisation and to give it a sense of purpose and a sense of future”.
The role was a natural fit for a woman whose career has the thread of public-service reform running throughout – from academic research to roles in the public and private sector, notably for three years as executive director of Northgate Public Services, a software company with almost exclusively public-sector clients.
Milner’s biggest takeaway after almost four years at the CQC was “the confidence that, in the darkest times, and sometimes the bleakest times for people, if you are able to step up as a leader you can make a real difference. I will always be proud of what the team at the CQC achieved, and immensely proud of the people within it.”
Even if things appear broken, they’re usually not
No one is claiming the ESFA has lost the confidence of its stakeholders. But it is facing a whole swathe of new challenges, including an entirely new system of funding apprenticeships, devolution of the adult education budget and the nascent T-levels programme.
Nothing is broken, she insists: “Even if things appear broken, they’re usually not. What you can do is most often a recover a situation and improve it.”
“Incremental change rather than revolution” is her mantra.
“Do small things, do lots of small things, and talk to people about how small things make a difference for them,” she insists. “And actually, bit by bit, brick by brick, you do start to build a different experience – and that’s a better experience for people inside the organisation and outside of it.”
Eileen Milner
Her approach is heavily informed by an uncompromising public-sector reformer she worked with in Australia, who became one of her role models. Sue Vardon – who was chief executive of various government departments at the state and commonwealth level in Australia for 23 years – has laid out her approach in a book called A bias for yes, in which she argues that public services should do a whole lot more saying “yes” to the people they serve, and a whole lot less saying “no”. Her stories include the time she sacked the entire staff of a prison, moved in and ran it with the help of the prisoners, literally locking the cell doors herself every night.
Milner spent time with Vardon back in the late 1990s when she was researching public service reform, first at Sheffield University and the University of North London, then on the ground in Canada and Australia.
“She completely and quickly had to reengineer the whole of the welfare space in Australia,” gushes Milner. “To observe what she did, and the fact that everything was centred on how the system leaves people feeling, how easy it is to work with – I really did take an awful lot from that time.”
One of the ways this manifests in her philosophy for the ESFA, is that she wants the organisation to focus on “how you leave people feeling, and how easy are you to do business with?”
“Public service organisations, by necessity, do complex things, but what they should not appear to those who use them is complex”, she explains.
While she has spent plenty of time working in the private sector, she is staunchly defensive of the public sector and rejects the notion that she wants to make it function more like private business. “I challenge the hypothesis that private-sector organisations are innately slick. They’re not. They’re just perhaps a little bit better hiding the complexity and some of the muddle that goes on behind the scenes. And they are inherently not as complex as public service organisations.”
“Purpose” is a word scattered throughout Milner’s discourse, in phrases such as “shared purpose” or “social purpose”, although she becomes a little cagey at my attempts to pin that to her Catholic upbringing, going only so far as to admit that this was “a helpful framing, which often gets a bad press”.
Rather, she emphasises her parents’ belief in education as the key to a purposeful life.
“They were very keen that as a family we gave a huge emphasis to having access to good educational opportunities, and then really taking those opportunities and using them to better your life and to make a contribution to society,” she explains. “The thing about social purpose was there from the very start, in terms of you must give back, you must support, you must engage.”
I’m very fond of people who challenge me
Her parents, both nurses who moved to Cornwall from Ireland as economic migrants, sent Milner and her younger sister to “what Alistair Campbell would call a ‘bog-standard comprehensive’”.
Her family ran against the grain in putting such weight on education.
“Out of the very large sixth form, a tiny proportion progressed to university, and not because people weren’t bright,” she states, matter-of-fact, “it was just because the parental ambition was not to the forefront. And I think that’s hugely regrettable.”
When her parents died, both at a relatively young age, some truths hit hard: “I think particularly my mother, who died when she was 50, that gave me a real framing of the fragility of life and how important it is to make decisions which are based around things that you are not going to regret, if life is as fragile as it proved to be for her.”
This affects her decisions about what to give her time to.
“You never know what is going to happen,” she admits, so her life has to be “about doing things that matter, where I feel there is a sense of purpose”.
One of those things is family. Until four years ago, she didn’t work full-time “because I was prioritising that part of my life. I felt that the family needed more of me.”
Like every working parent ever, she still never felt like she’d cracked it. “People who’ve worked with me would say that they experienced me in terms of knowing that nothing is more important to me than family, and I would encourage them to feel that way. My family will say that they experienced me as being quite distracted about work,” she says, aware of the irony. “Somewhere in the middle is the person who is trying to navigate and weave their way through.”
Once the press officer has called time, and we’ve wrapped things up, she prolongs the chat for a while. She’s a woman who seems comfortable in her own skin, and I reckon she can take it, so I ask one of my favourite interview questions: who challenges you?
Her teenage daughter, “on both the important and the trivial”, she quips, before a more honest reflection, that chimes with my impressions of her: “I’m very fond of people who challenge me. And I’ve got some very good people who occupy that space – some more challenging than others! You kind of need to know, through your address book, who you need to go to depending on the gradient of challenge that you’re up for on that particular occasion!”
It’s a personal thing
What do you consider a good gift?
I’m very shallow. I love jewellery. I’ve got a nice husband who has got good taste. Although obviously I can’t accept any gifts from anybody I don’t know!
Which motto would you put on a billboard?
I used to have a teddy bear that said “enjoy life, this is not a rehearsal”, so I’ll go for that.
If you could escape anywhere for a month, where would you go?
I would do the east coast of Canada again: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. If I could spend a month there and just be filled with fresh air and beauty, that would be wonderful. Nature, fresh air, the coast, the sea is very important to me. If you grow up in Cornwall, you have the Atlantic at your footsteps. So eastern Canada is also Atlantic coast but it is much quieter than Cornwall, and it’s beautiful.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I don’t plan that far ahead, but in 10 years, I would really love to make sure that we were well on course to having apprenticeships and technical education really well embedded and on course to being a sustainable part of how we do education and training in this country. The second would be for further education and the college network to be seen and regarded as being part of the national infrastructure that helps to deliver that.
What’s your favourite book?
I think my absolute favourite book is a series, the Anne of Green Gables books, for all sorts of reasons, but they did lead me to eastern Canada. I went to Canada as part of the research work, and I took the opportunity to go to Prince Edward Island, to walk in the footsteps of Anne of Green Gables.
CV
Nov 2017 – present: CEO, the Education and Skills Funding Agency
2010 – 2013: Executive director for business strategy, Northgate Public Services
2009 – 2010: Managing partner for public services and political advisory, Independent Advisory
2004 – 2009: Director for public services and government relations, RSM Robson Rhodes
London will shift its adult education budget payment model away from funding qualifications towards wider outcomes such as progression into work, its first ever skills strategy has confirmed.
The mayor Sadiq Khan unveiled the final plan in the launch of his ‘Skills for Londoners’ strategy today, ahead of the Greater London Authority’s takeover of the AEB in 2019/20, which will amount to roughly £311 million per year.
When it replaces the national funding formula, it will be the first time any FE funding, with the exception of the traineeship programme, has been dependent on positive progressions.
The move to outcome-based funding is likely to be controversial amongst colleges that for decades have simply been paid for delivering qualifications.
National control of the skills system has created a system too heavily focused on delivery of qualifications, rather than quality and outcomes
“National control of the skills system, combined with funding reductions by successive governments, has created a skills system that is underfunded, under-utilised, fragmented, and too heavily focused on delivery of qualifications, rather than quality and outcomes,” said Mr Khan.
“The mayor and London’s boroughs are determined that London should be at the cutting edge of innovation in adult education and skills, particularly in enabling improved social mobility for adults from low-income backgrounds.
“This will start with a more strategic approach to commissioning via the AEB when it is devolved to London in 2019/20, ensuring that funding is targeted to better meet need.
“This will also involve a move, over time, towards outcome-based commissioning to ensure that our focus is on effective skills provision in London that supports adults to gain the relevant skills they need to enter in to and progress in employment.”
Mr Khan recognised “long-term structural issues that directly affect London and other city-regions that need radical overhaul” and insisted the capital requires “greater commitment from government to relinquish its powers to enable local control to direct provision to better meet need”.
Facilitating this move to outcomes will be one of the main responsibilities of the mayor’s new AEB unit.
The job description includes a line on developing “a more outcomes-focused adult education budget programme, including by ensuring funding incentives drive provider behaviour in London without destabilising the provider base”.
Stephen Evans, the chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute, said London’s mayor is “right to have a greater focus on outcomes, but not just limited to employment”.
“Where courses are clearly geared towards supporting learners into employment, it makes good sense to incentivise progression into work” he told FE Week.
London’s boroughs are determined that London should be at the cutting edge of innovation in adult education and skills
“However, it is also important to measure the impact on health, wellbeing, citizenship and so much more to make the case for greater investment in learning.”
And Mark Dawe, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers told FE Week that “the Mayor’s view that a more strategic approach to commissioning the adult skills budget is required and making it more outcome based will generate better results for London’s economy and communities.”
Today’s strategy, which is being launched by Mr Khan at the King’s Cross Construction Skills Centre, which is run by the College of North West London, is light on detail for how this new methodology will actually work.
It said a “Skills for Londonders Framework” will be informed by the strategy, which will “set out further detail on the mayor’s funding priorities, desired outcomes and delivery approach for the devolved adult education budget, European Social Fund, Skills for Londoners Capital Fund and other City Hall skills and employment programmes”.
Outcome-based funding has typically been associated with pre-employment schemes for the long-term unemployed, funded by the Department for Work and Pensions.
Mr Khan said he intends to work with London’s borough sub-regional partnerships, to “continue to support the devolved work and health programme, assisting very long-term unemployed people – particularly those with health conditions – to enter, or re-enter, work”.
The mayor will “explore how devolved skills funding could be better aligned with the work and health programme, to support the join-up of different funding streams and deliver stronger coherence across the skills system, achieve better outcomes and drive up employment for the most disadvantaged Londoners, particularly disabled groups”.
It follows an announcement made by Education and Skills Funding Agency last week that low-paid workers across the country would be eligible for free courses in 2018/19, through a one-year pilot.
However, London mayor Sadiq Khan has set the funding threshold significantly higher.
The ESFA’s policy will apply to adults aged 19 and above earning under £15,736.50 per year, based on the Social Mobility Commission’s low-pay threshold of £8.07 and the assumption of a 37.5-hour contract with paid statutory holiday entitlement.
Jules Pipe, Mr Khan’s deputy for planning, regeneration and skills, promised to increase this threshold to the London living wage – which is currently £19,890 a year.
Speaking to FE Week after the launch event, Mr Pipe said the GLA made the choice “because of the disparity of living costs in London”.
Jules Pipe, London’s deputy mayor for skills
“For it to have the same effect here in the capital the benchmark would have to be the London living wage rather than the national benchmark that the government has chosen,” he said.
The change will come into effect when the capital’s adult education budget is devolved next year.
Mr Pipe said he had been looking into offering other free training for low-paid workers, particularly English courses for speakers of other languages before the ESFA’s announcement.
“We want to be able to widen participation and potential access to people, specifically in low-paid work, to upskill and then advance in their careers instead of getting stuck,” he said.
The ESFA’s policy will see tens of thousands of adults on low wages become eligible for free training courses in 2018/19.
Adult learners currently have to be on benefits to receive full funding for education courses.
The living wage is calculated annually by the Resolution Foundation and the Living Wage Commission, and is based on the actual cost of living.
It’s currently set at £10.20 an hour in London and £8.75 an hour in the rest of the UK.
This translates as an annual salary of £19,890 in London, and £17,062.50 outside London.
The GLA is set to take control of its £311 million AEB from 2019/20, as one of eight regions with devolution deals in place.
FE Week revealed last month that Mr Khan was planning to top-slice around one per cent of this to fund over 50 new bureaucrats, who will form a skills and employment unit to dish the money out when devolution kicks in.
The government is preparing to launch its consultation on the design and development of the revamped register of apprenticeship training providers.
Employers and providers have been denied the opportunity to win a place on to RoATP ever since the third and most recent application window shut at the end of October.
However, according to a new job advert, the Education and Skills Funding Agency will launch a consultation on the refreshed register soon.
“The design and development of a new register of apprenticeship training providers that acts as market entry gateway and delivers and maintains a healthy delivery marketplace for employers and learners alike; and is fit for purpose in terms of providing assurance to the accounting officer and employers,” the advert stated.
“This will be through consultation and is planned to launch in September 2018.”
The Department for Education has been approached for more detail.
It is now eight months since the government paused applications, though some bodies have enjoyed special treatment during this period.
FE Week revealed in April that 36 teacher-training organisations joined the register during a secret application window.
The ESFA allowed for an “extenuating circumstance” following a “disastrous” previous round which saw most of these applicants get rejected.
A spokesperson claimed that the special window was to ensure there are enough accredited ITT providers in place to deliver the postgraduate teacher apprenticeship from September 2018.
Other employers and providers wanting to join the register have to wait until September to apply, as confirmed by Rory Kennedy, the Department for Education’s director of apprenticeships, at FE Week’s Annual Apprenticeship Conference in March.
He said the review of RoATP was not expected to be completed until the summer, even though it started in November.
He was hesitant to give a “flavour” of some of the outcomes of the review, though the DfE would “welcome views on” whether the window approach is the “right one” or “should we be talking about a rolling approval basis”.
A £3 million department created by the Greater London Authority using part of the capital’s adult education budget will also be used to lobby for control of 16-to-18 funding.
The plans were revealed in a job description for one of the top roles in the new AEB team, seen by FE Week, and have attracted more criticism for London mayor Sadiq Khan.
The unit will “act as the GLA’s in-house skills funding policy expert to inform any future cases to government for devolved budgets and responsibilities related to e.g. 16-to-18 technical education and skills activity, or other aspects of the skills system,” it says.
The news that it will now also pay for creating policy for learners who are supported by other funding streams has led to even more condemnation.
“There are some 457,000 Londoners without qualifications and thousands more with health issues and older learners,” said Naina Kent, the equality representative for the University and Colleges Union’s London regional committee.
“That is what the budget is there for, and not on creating policy for those learners who are supported by other funding streams.
“The plan to take money away from the devolved AEB in London by the GLA to fund highly paid administrators will directly impact on those who most need the funding.”
It has been no secret that Mr Khan wants the GLA to take control of more than just the AEB.
In his mayoral election manifesto in 2016, he said he wanted to “call for the devolution of further education funding for 16- to 19-year-olds”.
He also wanted the apprenticeship levy paid by London’s employers to be “ring-fenced to the capital to make sure this benefits young people and businesses in London”.
“Sadiq is motivated by his belief that no Londoner should be left behind and to emphasise his commitment to the skills agenda is setting up a new team to ensure he can deliver for learners of all ages,” a spokesperson for the mayor said.
The GLA is currently publically rowing with the government over Mr Khan’s plan.
“Presently the mayor is funding all of the posts out of his own budget,” the GLA spokesperson added.
“Unless he receives an administration budget for future years, he will be forced to fund those elements of the posts which are focused on AEB from the AEB.”
The Department for Education insists it had awarded the GLA “sufficient funds to prepare”, providing £235,139 in “implementation funding” between September 2017 and the end of March – more than any other local authority.
However, this was a third of what the GLA requested. In its business case for implementation costs, it said it needed £629,512.65 for the transition.
There will be no further cash to cover ongoing administrative costs after the London authority and seven other mayoral combined authorities take over responsibility of the AEB from next year, the government has admitted.
Mr Khan is launching London’s first-ever standalone skills strategy, Skills for Londoners, tomorrow. Follow @FEWeek on Twitter for live updates from 10am.
