The Institute for Apprenticeships has begun the recruitment process for membership to its 15 occupational route panels.

The groups are being created to lead the review and approval of new apprenticeship standards and technical qualifications.

They will be in addition to the panels set up by the Department for Education for T-levels, but once the institute takes responsibility for the new technical qualifications later this year they will have to merge the groups.

“We are looking both to strengthen existing route panels and also to identify individuals to manage changes in the existing membership,” the IfA said .

“You don’t need to be an expert in apprenticeships or technical education – but you do need demonstrable expertise (rather than generalist knowledge), leadership experience and credibility in one or more sectors of an occupational route.”

It wants people who can bring “real insight into the realities of working in their industry, who can demonstrate sound judgement when dealing with complex situations, who are themselves open to challenge and who potentially have experience of operating within a panel structure to arrive at balanced and timely decisions”.

“It goes without saying, those who serve on our panels are also passionate about ensuring the standards and qualifications they approve are of the highest quality,” the IfA added.

“As a route panel member, you’ll not only be helping to drive economic growth and social mobility nationally, you’ll also be making an important investment in building the capability of your own sector, ensuring that employers like you have the workforce they need for future success.”

The roles are two-year fixed-term appointments which “may be extended by mutual agreement”.

Members will need to be able to commit “up to two days per six-week cycle, including attendance at panel meetings”.

The closing date for application is midnight on Sunday June 17. Interested parties can apply here.

A publicly listed company is in talks to buy Learndirect Ltd, FE Week has learned.

PeoplePlus Group Limited, which is owned by Staffline and already trains tens of thousands of people each year, opened a dialogue with the nation’s biggest FE provider over a purchase last week.

Discussions are understood to be in the early stages and it is not yet known how much the deal will be worth if it goes ahead.

PeoplePlus is a business division of Staffline – an outsourced workforce provider – which recorded a huge turnover of £92.8 million in its most recent accounts.

It provides skills training, including apprenticeships and in prisons, claims to be the country’s largest provider of the work programme for the Department for Work and Pensions, and offers access to work programmes for disabled people.

The organisation is hoping to purchase Learndirect following a catastrophic year.

Its saga started with a legal battle with Ofsted when the provider unsuccessfully challenged its grade four report in the High Court.

The fallout saw the government single it out for special treatment by allowing it to see through the end of their current contracts – instead of ending them within the usual three-month termination period.

It was then subject to investigations from the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee.

FE Week revealed in April that Learndirect appeared to be on the brink of collapse, after a fresh round of redundancies belied the fact that its efforts to generate new business have proved “impossible”.

PeoplePlus has five operating divisions: employment, skills, health & wellbeing, justice and independent services.

Staffline bought welfare-to-work provider A4e in 2015 in a £35.4m deal and gave the work to PeoplePlus.

This move, it claims, means it is now the country’s largest provider of the Work Programme for the Department for Works and Pensions.

For skills, PeoplePlus provide “first class pre-employment training, apprenticeships and traineeships”, according to its website.

The provider was rated ‘good’ by Ofsted in August 2017, and has Education and Skills Funding Agency contracts totaling over £13.5 million this year, with the majority (£10.6 million) coming from the adult education budget.

In terms of apprenticeships, the company had an overall achievement of 64 per cent for training 1,430 learners in 2016/17 – marginally higher than the government’s minimum threshold of 62 per cent.

PeoplePlus also offers the government-run access to work programme, which is aimed at supporting disabled people to take up or remain in work, and offers training in prisons through the delivery of the Offender Learning and Skills Service.

PeoplePlus declined to comment.

Staff at the Hull College Group will walk out for seven days in June as part of an ongoing bitter row over plans to slash hundreds of jobs.  

University and College Union members, who represent nearly 400 of HCG’s 1,200 workers, announced today that they will strike for an initial five days starting on June 18.

They will then return to work on June 25 before walking out for a further two days on the 26 and 27 of that month.  

The row centres on plans to cut 231 posts across the college group’s three campuses in Hull, Harrogate and Goole – a move which UCU says would lead to around a third of the workforce being cut.

Staff have already walked out for three days as part of the dispute in May, after they delivered a vote of no confidence in the group’s chief executive, Michelle Swithenbank.

The union said there had “not been sufficient progress in talks to secure members’ jobs and they felt they now had no option but to take more action”.

It added that the “ball was in the college’s court and hoped the fresh strike dates would focus their employers’ minds”.

“UCU members at Hull College Group feel they have no choice now but to take further action to focus their employers’ minds,” said UCU regional official, Julie Kelley.

“Strike action is never taken lightly, but the college is not responding to our concerns about the impact these cuts would have for staff, students and the local community.  

“There is a clear timetable now with disruption set for the end of June and we urge the college to respond positively and work with us to explore alternatives to the cuts.’”

The vote of no confidence in Ms Swithenbank was delivered last month, when the union said her position was untenable after a failure to defend jobs at the college, as well as alleged efforts to “bully and then bribe staff” first with legal action and then ice-creams to deter them from a protest on April 18.

“We can confirm the receipt of the ballot to strike, and should the proposed dates go ahead, we will do everything possible to avoid the obvious disruption to the important GCSE exams taking place,” said an HCG spokesperson.

“It is disappointing and unclear why this decision has been taken, following recent positive meetings outlining the successful reduction of proposed compulsory redundancies.”

Detail on the government’s new adult education budget policy has been published, after FE Week revealed yesterday it would offer free courses for anyone earning less than £15,726.50.

The Department for Education will trial the policy in 2018/19, enabling AEB providers to “fully fund learners” who are employed on low wages and cannot contribute towards the cost of co-funding fees.

“This will help to increase AEB participation and lift social mobility barriers to learning for those who would not otherwise engage due to course fees being unaffordable,” the department said today.

“It will also support those who have been motivated to move out of unemployment and are in receipt of a low wage to further progress in work and their chosen career.”

Current AEB fee remission rules focus on providing full funding for eligible unemployed adults – such as those on benefits – young people aged 19 to 23 with skills below level two, and adults aged 19 and over who do not have English and maths up to level two.

Currently, individuals who do not fall into one of these categories may have to contribute up to 50 per cent towards the cost of their learning.

The new eligibility criteria now include those that “earn less than £15,736.50 annual gross salary based on the Social Mobility Commission’s low-pay threshold of £8.07 (hourly rate in 2016) and on the assumption of a 37.5-hour contract with paid statutory holiday entitlement”.

To confirm learner eligibility providers must “see and keep supporting evidence in the learner file, for example, this could be a wage slip within three months of the learner’s learning start date, or a current employment contract, which states gross monthly/annual wages)”.

They must also “enter the ILR monitoring code (363) for every eligible learner they fully fund through this trial. This is imperative as we will use data collected from this trial to inform future adult funding policy development”.

The DfE has “engaged” with representative bodies, mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority, which have been “supportive of the trial and its aims to make learning more accessible for the low paid”.

It is huge news for learners on English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) courses, who typically take low-paid jobs while they upskill themselves.

Dr Susan Pember, the director of policy at Holex, said she was “pleased that ministers have listened and have reinstated free provision for the those on a low wage”.

“Although this is a trial we believe it will help support those who have the ability to progress in their job and start to secure a more productive workforce,” she added.

Tens of thousands of adults on low wages are set to benefit from a new rule which will see their training fully funded from next year, FE Week understands.

Up until now, adults have had to have been on benefits to receive full funding for education courses.

But a radical adult education budget rule-change is expected to come into play in 2018/19 which will open the door to a huge number of other adults on low wages.

It will apply to those who earn less than the Social Mobility Commission’s low-pay threshold.

“This code is used to identify individuals who earn less than the Social Mobility Commission’s low-pay threshold of £15,736.50 annual gross salary, and providers use their discretion to fully fund using their adult education budget allocation,” says an Individualised Learner Record rule change.

This will apply from August 2018 to July 2019.

An ESFA update appeared to confirm the change this afternoon.

“This week we will publish version one of the adult education budget funding rules 2018 to 2019,” it said. “The main change from the draft version, published March 2018, will be to AEB learners on low wages. The rules apply to all providers of education and training who receive AEB funding through the ESFA.”

The news will be huge for learners on English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) courses, who typically take low-paid jobs while they upskill themselves.

Under current rules, learners can be fully funded if they “receive jobseeker’s allowance, including those receiving national insurance credits only, receive employment and support allowance and are in the work-related activity group”.

They can also be fully funded if they receive universal credit or other state benefits, and earn “either less than 16 times the appropriate age-related rate of the national minimum wage / national living wage a week, or £338 a month (individual claims) or £541 a month (household claims)”.

The cash to fund the free courses is likely to not be new money, but will come from huge underpsends of the AEB.

As revealed by FE Week last month, hundreds of colleges and training providers between them failed to deliver £73 million of allocated funding last year.

An early monitoring visit to Learndirect Apprenticeships Ltd has produced mainly positive feedback, with only a few downsides to its delivery.

Ofsted deemed the provider to be making “reasonable progress” in all fields it judges in an inspection undertaken as part of a series of visits to new apprenticeship training providers.

But no significant headway is being made at the firm – which was set up by the parent company of the troubled Learndirect Ltd as a separate entity to run its apprenticeships division in 2016.

LDA’s leadership team has implemented a “clear strategy to provide apprenticeships in carefully selected subject areas”, and has decided not to work with “certain” employers or in certain subject areas where they consider requirements of successful apprenticeship provision “cannot be met”.

Instead, they work with many “high-profile and prestigious” levy-paying companies, training nearly 4,000 apprentices in retail and commercial enterprise, business, administration, law, health, public services, and in engineering and manufacturing technologies.

Managers help employers develop programmes that meet apprenticeship requirements, and as a result, employers demonstrate a “strong understanding of the requirements of an apprenticeship and their obligations, in particular the requirement to provide sufficient off-the-job training”.

Communication between LDA staff and these employers is “frequent and effective” and “enables the content of the apprenticeship to be closely tailored to the needs of the business”.

LDA managers respond “quickly when training needs to improve or issues need to be resolved”.

However, the relationship with some employers who only have a few apprentices is the “less effective”.

“These employers are not always as aware of the progress that apprentices make, and line managers demonstrate a weaker understanding of an apprenticeship and their responsibilities to their apprentices,” Ofsted said.

The vast majority of learners “are receiving their entitlement to off-the-job training” – a significant component of apprenticeships which was not previously complied with by Learndirect Ltd that led to its infamous grade four.

Most apprentices also learn “new skills and knowledge as part of their programme; they gain in confidence and add value to their employers”, but for a “small minority” of learners the requirements of the apprenticeship are “not being fulfilled”.

LDA leaders were praised for creating a management structure with “clear lines of accountability”, but their improvement plans are “not sufficiently specific to allow managers to measure precisely the impact of their actions”.

Maths and English skills appear still to be a problem.

“Too many apprentices do not develop higher-level English and maths skills relevant to their job roles,” inspectors found.

“Although managers find out about apprentices’ existing English and maths qualifications when they start their apprenticeships, they do not use this information sufficiently well to challenge apprentices to develop their skills to a higher level.”

In terms of safeguarding, leaders have “developed and put in place appropriate policies and procedures”.

Apprentices feel “safe”, but “too many” have “limited understanding of the safeguarding risks they face in their local area”.

Jenny Parkes, LDA’s managing director, was pleased with the report.

“This is a positive step forward for our business and one which we intend to embrace and build upon,” she said.

“Having established constructive and lasting working relationships with employers, we can continue to ensure that the needs of our apprentices are met and lay the foundations for the future success of LDA.”