Paul Rolfe, Commerical director, Chichester College Group Start Date: May 2018 Previous Job: Managing director, Highbury Commercial, Highbury College Interesting Fact: Paul is a keen gym goer and has recently discovered spin classes.
____________________________________________
Nathan Runnicles, Chief financial officer, QA Group Start date: May 2018 Previous job: Chief financial officer, Research Now Group Inc. Interesting fact: Nathan’s first job was selling washing machines and televisions in Rumbelows.
____________________________________________
Andrew Cropley, Principal and CEO, Craven College Start date: November 2018 Previous job: Interim principal, Cadbury Sixth-Form College Interesting fact: Prior to working in FE, Andrew held a number of roles in the Royal Navy.
____________________________________________
Nicola Carcone, Assistant Principal, Barton Peveril Sixth-Form College Start date: June 2018 Previous job: Director of English and foreign languages, Barton Peveril Sixth-Form College Interesting fact: Nicola taught in Australia for two years. Teaching Wuthering Heights in blistering heat felt a bit odd, but the experience was brilliant.
____________________________________________
Sunita Auger, Assistant principal, Barton Peveril Sixth-Form College Start date: June 2018 Previous job: Quality manager, Barton Peveril Sixth-Form College Interesting fact: Sunita also teaches modern calligraphy workshops and leads calligraphy retreats.
If you want to let us know of any new faces at the top of your college, training provider or awarding organisation please let us know by emailing news@feweek.co.uk
There’s no point in principals squabbling over the crumbs of the AEB, writes Ewart Keep, who wants the sector to take devolution much more seriously
It has not taken long for some in FE to fall into the trap that central government set for localities when it decided to “devolve” the adult education budget (AEB). In an era of austerity and massive cuts, devolution always means passing the buck on hard choices and blame.
The current spat between some FE colleges and the Greater London Authority (GLA) over its decision to top-slice less than a per cent of its devolved AEB to pay for local administration illustrates this point, but also suggests that FE may not be thinking hard enough about the long-term potential of devolution.
I have to declare an interest – I was a member of the GLA’s task and finish group that supported the development of the now-published skills strategy for London.
That said, the intemperate language used by some of those quoted on this issue is striking (“raid”, “pen-pusher”, “self-indulgent local bureaucrats” and “shocking” – to quote just some of the comments in FE Week). The government has provided no funding for any devolved infrastructure, so the money to organise the devolved budgets has to come from somewhere, and a one-per-cent top-slice is not a lavish administrative overhead (look at apprenticeship sub-contracting for a contrast). Moreover, without local capacity, there can be no localised AEB.
More broadly, is it the case that we do not want any element of local control? Should all decisions and funding allocations to be made at national level?
There are very few other developed nations in which the lead “world city” (and indeed all other cities and localities) would not have a major role in planning and administering educational spending and their own more broadly defined skills agenda. In England we have become used to massive levels of centralisation, and if FE does not exactly love this arrangement, the sector is at least familiar with it. In part, perhaps it is a case of better the ESFA you know, than the combined authority (CA) you don’t.
What is missing in the current devolution debate is any acknowledgement that there are bigger prizes to be had than the remains of an AEB which the government has already massively reduced. The tide of centralisation has finally, arguably begun to turn, and the long-term prospects for more power and better decision-making within localities are becoming apparent. As the CBI recently argued in its report ‘In perfect harmony’, “local leadership within a stable national framework is the key”.
One opportunity is the space to develop new approaches and funding models. In the current national set-up, centralisation means standardisation and almost no room for bottom-up experimentation. Colleges are meant to be fleet-of-foot responders to market forces, not innovative thinkers. Devolution, and local agendas and ambitions that outstrip what the AEB will support, generates experimentation, not least with co-funding models of the type piloted by Unionlearn in the early 2000s.
More broadly, what is emerging in some of the CAs is a new policy agenda that seeks to integrate economic development, a local industrial strategy, business development and support, innovation, inclusive growth, fair work, improved pay and job quality, progression and skills. This joined-up model, utterly lacking at national level, offers opportunities for FE colleges to play to their natural strengths and lead the delivery. Colleges bring together vocational skills and second chance, social inclusion provision in a way that plays perfectly into local strategies that aim to boost inclusive growth. Their links to local communities and small firms could also be invaluable, not least in relation to building business improvement support services, where infrastructure is often almost wholly lacking at the moment.
Put bluntly, FE in the CAs faces some significant choices. It can expend time and energy fighting over crumbs and small slices of the local AEB cake, or it can contribute to a broader agenda that helps make the cake bigger.
Ewart Keep is Director of SKOPE at Oxford University
Parity of esteem with A-levels is a laudable aim, but T-levels aren’t the root-and-branch redesign of technical education England needs, writes Rob May
The 1944 Education Act was an aspirational moment of policy entrepreneurship, setting out a structure for post-war education at a time of massive national uncertainty. Extending its legacy far beyond the school gates, it opened up secondary schools to girls and mobilised the impoverished working class. It introduced free school meals, abolished parents’ fees for secondary schools and tripled higher education enrolments.
Since then, not a great deal has happened. Scores of education ministers in the intervening years have languidly presided over decades of drowsy constancy, whilst the sector snoozes restlessly, waiting for a moment of political perspicacity to shake things up.
At least, this is the impression that a visitor from another planet would get upon hearing the prime minister declare that the introduction of T-levels represents the most significant reform in 70 years.
In this age of policy by press release, the platitudes continue: T-levels, we’re told, will be a “vital part of the industrial strategy”, a “gold standard’, and a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.
The implication is this: 70 years of other acts of Parliament relating to technical education didn’t go far enough. They were just the warm-up acts.
So confident are ministers that T-levels are exactly what’s required to revive UK Plc that they have belted through a consultation process, dismissing concerns from education experts, among them the Federation of Awarding Bodies, the Confederation of British Industry and the Centre for Education Economics. The government has ignored pleas to reassess the potential for system failure in its determination to adopt a single-awarding-body model, and the quality risks of hasty implementation.
Ministers have even ignored their own senior officials at the DfE, where Jonathan Slater, the permanent secretary, has openly questioned the “regularity, propriety, value for money and feasibility” of spending £500 million on T-levels.
But none of that matters, of course, because T-levels are going to revolutionise technical education. Aren’t they?
What is so special about this reform? Well, the special thing is, it isn’t a reform at all. A reform suggests systemic change. But T-levels are a product. A product which doesn’t exist yet, which employers haven’t asked for, and which – according to research conducted by City & Guilds – Over 80 per cent of employers are confused by. They are a new qualification, which on the face of it is not too dissimilar from others already on the market.
Damian Hinds recently bemoaned the fact that there are too many qualifications and courses, confusing young people and parents. Adding another set of qualifications hardly seems like the ideal solution…
It’s easy to find examples of critical or uncritical judgements about T-levels. All levity aside, the great driver of this “reform” is the desire to create parity of esteem with academic pathways, and this is a laudable mission. Yet this kind of balance-sheet approach to education system design has its limitations.
It doesn’t address the tension at the heart of the system. Technical education is too often seen as railroad switch for those who fail to progress their academic studies. Offering a different type of product for them to try – and which is markedly similar to existing vocational qualifications – is not going to challenge conventional views.
Neither is offering vocational options at 14+ going to shake off the perception of a twin-track education system. For vocational qualifications to have equal status to academic routes requires a bold redesign of the system, the inclusion of compulsory technical education at secondary schools alongside academic subjects, teaching a combination of GCSEs and “TCSEs”. What we need is for when it comes to 16+ choices, the technical track is part of the cultural, psychological and economic mainstream. Perhaps T-levels could be studied alongside A-levels.
Steering a course through the nuances of idealism, tradition and academic integrity – the conventional wisdom that sets apart academic and vocational education – is not for a faint-hearted government, or one that’s in a hurry. Introducing compulsory technical learning at 14+ would be radical reform and could sincerely lay claim to being the most significant and important change in 70 years.
Rob May is CEO of the Association of Business Executives
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”.
