Employers clash with Institute for Apprenticeships over FE teacher funding bands

The group developing three long-delayed FE teaching standards is in a bitter stand-off with the Institute for Apprenticeships, claiming the funding bands on offer represent just half what these standards would cost to deliver.

The three standards, ranging between levels three and level five, have been in development since 2015. They were recently assigned funding bands of £5,000 to £9,000.

But the education and training trailblazer leadership group has rejected the IfA’s offers – insisting they are between 50 and 57 per cent lower than lowest estimate submitted.

Ian Grayling, the director of CETTacademy who vice-chairs the trailblazer group, told FE Week the situation is “extremely frustrating”.

“Any decision on a funding band needs to be based on evidence and on a formal, transparent process by which it’s arrived at,” he said.

“I don’t believe there is any quantitative process of scoring or metrics being applied here.”

The group has lodged an appeal with the IfA, but Mr Grayling admitted they weren’t confident it would succeed – not least because they were only allowed to appeal the process, not the funding band, “and there is no procedure we can appeal”.

For its part, the IfA has insisted the way it assigns funding bands to standards is “fair”.

A spokesperson for the body did not say why it had appeared to ignore the trailblazer group costings, or why they won’t share details of their new indicative rate setting methodology.

She said “a range of factors” are considered when making funding band recommendations, including “information supplied by trailblazers and providers” and “advice from industry-led route panels”.

“We are satisfied that our process is fair, and that the recommendations we make are appropriate for each apprenticeship standard,” she added.

The level five learning and skills teacher standard was first published way back in August 2015, while the level four assessor/coach and level three learning mentor standards were published in October the same year.

Assessment plans for the level three and four standards were only published last month, while the plan for the level five standard has yet to appear.

According to correspondence shared with FE Week, the standards were allocated final funding bands on April 20.

They were set at £5,000 for the learning mentor, £6,000 for the assessor/coach and £9,000 for the learning and skills teacher.

But they were rejected by the trailblazer group on May 3, based on the “unanimous decision” of its members, which included colleges, universities, training providers and the Education and Training Foundation, along with feedback from the sector.

Mr Grayling told FE Week the group had submitted a range of employer-delivery costings for the three standards, based on estimates from different providers.

“They clearly do not feature in the funding band decision – because if they did how could they award a funding band at 50 per cent below the lowest cost?” he said.

The 24-month level five standard included a teaching qualification, which in itself would cost almost as much as the entire funding band, Mr Grayling said.

In contrast, the equivalent school teacher apprenticeship, at level six, was also given a £9,000 funding band – even though it doesn’t include a qualification, and is only 12 months long.

The IfA’s website lists a number of factors it considers when recommending funding bands, only one of which relates to information provided by employer groups.

However, four relate to comparisons with other apprenticeships, and wider affordability.

Mr Grayling questioned both the openness of this process, and how it was possible to make a comparison when – as in this case – the standards are wholly new.

“Who’s comparing it? How is it being compared? How can we be sure of the validity of that comparison? How can you compare something that doesn’t exist?” he asked.

FE Week reported in December that 13 standards with approved assessment plans had been left in limbo for months as their costs hadn’t been agreed.

Shortly after that the IfA revealed plans to make its processes “faster and better” in 2018, and in February announced changes to the process for allocating funding bands.

This would align it with proposal and assessment plan approvals, and give employer groups an indicative funding band much earlier in the process.

Union fury as college boss gets 31% pay rise

The boss of a college that saw its turnover slashed last year was given a huge 31-per-cent salary increase in 2016/17 – taking his wage to £260,000.

Garry Phillips’ whopping pay rise made him the fifth highest-paid principal in the country last year, at a time when Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College’s turnover dropped from £41.1 million to £34.6 million.

His salary went from £198,000 to £260,000. On top of this, he took home £37,000 in pension contributions – taking his overall pay packet to £297,000, according to the college’s financial statements.

His salary was more than double the second-highest paid person at the college, which declined the opportunity to justify the figures involved this week.

Bumper pay rises for college principals are an embarrassment to the sector

In March, Mr Phillips (pictured above), who has been at EHWL since 2014, announced plans to leave this role at the end of this academic year, as he prepares to take up the chief executive position at City College Plymouth.

The University and College Union, on the other hand, which is currently in the middle of a huge national pay dispute with colleges across the country (see page 6), was not shy of slamming the raise.

“Bumper pay rises for college principals are an embarrassment to the sector, especially at a time when staff pay is falling in real terms,” said Andrew Harden, UCU’s head of FE.

“We urgently need to improve the transparency on how decisions about senior pay in colleges are made so leaders can be held properly accountable to students, staff and taxpayers.”

Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College is one of the largest colleges in the capital.

Its turnover dropped by £6.5 million last year, mainly because of the closure of one of its campuses.

Under Mr Phillips’ leadership, the college has risen from the depths of a grade four Ofsted report to a grade two, which was published in May last year.

However, his attempts to secure a controversial merger with Kensington and Chelsea College, to make it one giant group, were scuppered in January amid outcry from local campaigners.

The activists insisted the resulting super-college would not have allowed the local council to redevelop KCC’s Wornington Road campus, situated close to Grenfell Tower, which was devastated by fire over the summer killing 71 people.

READ MORE: UCU blasts 10% pay rises for ‘greedy’ college principals

It took interventions from both the FE Commissioner Richard Atkins and skills minister Anne Milton before a decision in favour of the campaigners was made.

Principals’ pay has been under a microscope in recent weeks, ever since the Department for Education released the college accounts for 2016/17.

The UCU has lambasted many principals as “greedy and hopelessly out of touch” after new analysis showed a third enjoyed raises of more than 10 per cent last year.

Seventeen enjoyed annual salaries of over £200,000.

These massive raises are all the more controversial, given that college staff across the country have been driven to strike action after they were offered a measly a one-per-cent increase of their own.

The figures also confirmed FE Week’s exclusive story from March, which revealed Matt Hamnett, the former principal of North Hertfordshire College, was the highest-paid principal last year.

He was paid £294,000 on top of a £47,000 pension contribution and benefits in kind worth £1,000 last year – or just over one per cent of its entire turnover of £30 million.

The DfE must stop ignoring Ofsted’s warnings on substandard apprenticeship provision

There appears to be a worrying disconnect between the DfE and Ofsted over their approaches to substandard apprenticeship provision from newcomers to the market.

Ofsted came down hard on Key6 Group in the first of its early monitoring reports on these types of providers.

It was unambiguous in saying that the training was “not fit for purpose”.

It is therefore hard to understand why the DfE allowed the provider to take on new apprentices again on the back of a mere recovery plan.

There’s no way that Ofsted or the ESFA could have been truly confident things had turned around within such a short space of time after the inspection.

At the very least Key6 should have had Ofsted back in to check what’s now happening with the hundreds of apprentices it is already training, before this provider with no track record was allowed to recruit more.

The DfE completely undermined the role of the inspectorate in this process, and rendered its monitoring report obsolete.

It is letting learners, employers and the many high-quality providers down by failing to maintain what ought to be extremely high standards.

Graphic designers take part in challenge to design a new skateboard

A student’s skateboard design will go into production after she won a graphic design competition.

Yang Hang (pictured centre), a first-year graphics student at Halesowen College, won after learners were asked to design something that raised awareness of an ongoing global issue, from plastic waste to equality, to animal experimentation and diversity.

The competition was run for graphic design students in partnership with SkateHut, a local company which will make the winning skateboard.

Seventeen-year-old Hang’s winning design was voted for by the public after SkateHut posted all 26 of the students’ creations on its social media channels.

“It was fantastic for the students to present their ideas to a real-world client. Their concepts are great and show that young people have real concerns about the world they live in,” said Gillian Dunkerley, BTEC course leader.

The students’ skateboard designs will form part of a display at the college’s end-of-year summer show.

“The students’ ideas were amazing. Many of them would work commercially as a real board,” added Amy Lou Holland from SkateHut.

Beleaguered NCG faces another full Ofsted inspection

It is crunch time at the nation’s largest college group, which is cutting staff and faces the return of Ofsted for a full inspection over its achievement rates.

NCG will receive visits from two teams of inspectors on Monday, FE Week can reveal.

One team will examine four of its colleges – Newcastle College, Newcastle Sixth-Form College, Kidderminster College and West Lancashire College.

The other will focus on its troubled training provider, Intraining, which is in the process of slashing staff numbers.

Both will be full inspections, which suggests alarm bells are ringing at the inspectorate. It would only be expected to carry out a short inspection, if there were no concerns that NCG’s rating could drop from grade two.

The group was rated ‘good’ in September 2016, following a five-month standoff during which it is understood they successfully overturned Ofsted’s plan to award a lower grade. Intraining was also given a grade two in June that year.

However, overall achievement rates at NCG are well below the national average.

In 2016/17, the combined overall apprenticeship achievement rate for NCG’s colleges was just 55.6 per cent, while Intraining’s was 58 per cent.

Both are 10 percentage points lower than the national average of 67.7 per cent, and lower than the minimum standards threshold of 62 per cent, according to the latest government data.

And for the all-important 16-to-18 study programmes, NCG was 4.4 points below the national average of 81.5 per cent.

It is understood that Ofsted wanted to reinspect NCG last year, but it was unable to analyse the group’s achievement rates because of “data glitches” which led to it being absent from the 2015/16 tables.

At the same time as dealing with these inspections, NCG is cutting staff numbers by up to a fifth at Intraining and its other private provider Rathbone Training, in an effort to save £3 million.

More than 100 of the 500 employees who work at the two providers face possible redundancy.

The group claims to have run into financial trouble as a result of new rules which restrict subcontracting apprenticeships, as well as the sudden downturn in the uptake of apprenticeships since the introduction of the levy.

“We anticipate a reduction in fewer than 70 roles,” Ian Webber, the managing director of both providers, told FE Week on behalf of NCG.

Intraining and Rathbone Training have had their combined ESFA contracts to deliver apprenticeships cut by more than half this year (from £35.8 million to £16.2 million), and the amount it is subcontracting out has reduced by nearly two thirds (from £11.9 million to £4.2 million).

They are now proposing to stop apprenticeship delivery in the south-west and East of England.

Both providers “are currently in consultation with colleagues as part of a process to transform our operations and achieve cost savings,” Mr Webber said.

READ MORE: London UCU members vote to strike against NCG paymasters

“We need to realise around £3 million savings to align the cost base of both organisations with anticipated income.”

The lower level of subcontracting is a “reflection of government changes in funding” and the “success of several partners” who are now on the register of apprenticeship training providers and able to deliver directly.

The introduction of the levy hasn’t helped matters.

As of March, there were 206,100 starts recorded for 2017/18, which represents a 24-per-cent drop on the same period last year.

Intraining had already shed more than a third of its 1,200-person workforce back in 2015.

The group was further shaken last month when staff at Lewisham Southwark College, which was involved in a long-distance merger with NCG, voted to strike over pay.

NCG will have Peter Lauener in its corner to deal with the challenges it faces, after the former ESFA boss joined the group as chair earlier this year.

He will work closely with Mr Webber who, when asked if either of his providers were likely to go bust, insisted that “the review of our operations is part of normal business processes to ensure sustainability”.

Brickwork students work on restoring medieval dry stone walling

Level two brickwork students have been learning how to restore and rebuild medieval dry-stone walling.

The team of learners from Lancaster & Morecambe College have been working on a five-mile stretch of dry stone walling at High Hampsfield Farm in Lindale, which has sections that date back to the middle ages, including a lime kiln.

Students have been rebuilding the sections of the wall using traditional techniques, as well as restoring the bricks, all under the watchful eye of Bill Pimblett, who runs the farm.

“It’s great for them to learn more about what’s on their own doorstep and how we can all help to preserve it,” he said.

“This has been an excellent opportunity for Bricklaying students to add something extra to their CVs and is a great introduction to walling techniques, which will hopefully enthuse students to want to follow this traditional skill further,” added Liz Smith, a tutor at the college.

National Audit Office slams DfE oversight of Student Loans Company

The Department for Education has been heavily criticised for its oversight of the Student Loans Company during the tenure of its disgraced former chief executive, in a new report from the National Audit Office.

The watchdog looked into how the DfE monitored the company while Steve Lamey, who was dismissed for gross misconduct last November, was in charge.

The report has identified a catalogue of monitoring shortcomings at both the DfE and the onetime Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

“There were many changes in the company during 2016,” the report stated. These included changes to its governance and senior leadership, “but the department did not consider whether its oversight arrangements were sufficient”.

Furthermore, “accountabilities, roles and responsibilities for the department’s oversight of the company are not up-to-date and lack clarity”.

The report also revealed that the DfE is reviewing its oversight and governance arrangements with the SLC. In fact, it will cover all its arms-length bodies, including the Institute for Apprenticeships, Ofsted and the Education and Skills Funding Agency.

A spokesperson said the department had “reviewed and introduced changes to our oversight measures, including quarterly shareholder meetings to discuss performance and risk management” after it assumed responsibility for the SLC in 2016.

The current review will look at “how we can build on those measures to ensure that the SLC is well-supported” in the future, she added.

Mr Lamey was appointed chief executive of the SLC in June 2016, despite concerns from BIS about his suitability for the role, according to the NAO report.

He was suspended in July 2017, following allegations made by two whistleblowers. He was subsequently dismissed without compensation in November, to be replaced by former Education and Skills Funding Agency boss Peter Lauener.

The report identified a number of areas where the DfE and BIS had fallen short in its oversight, including failing to update the framework which set out its relationship with the SLC for almost 10 years.

“We welcome the NAO report and have already implemented a number of changes to strengthen governance in the areas they identified,” a spokesperson for the SLC said.

Meg Hillier, chair of the Commons Public Accounts committee, said the report was a “story of the failure of two departments to effectively monitor a public body under their watch”.

Myerscough College emerges victorious at the 2018 Northern College Climbing Competition

Arboriculture students from Myerscough College’s Preston campus have won prizes in the 2018 Northern College Climbing Competition.

The team of level three BTEC students won £500 of arboriculture equipment for their college, impressing judges with their speedy tree-climbing in both of the competition’s categories: climbers with less than one year’s experience, and climbers with less than two years’ experience.

Students from the agricultural college’s Preston and Croxteth campuses took part, going up against learners from Reaseheath College.

The challenge is run by the Arboricultural Association, to give students an introduction to industry-standard tree climbing, building on their experience from college.

“Students from both our sites made superb times on their climbs and showed the north what awesome climbers they are. We’re proud of everyone who competed,” said Andy Taaffe, head of greenspace and creative studies at Myerscough College.

How can we get more women into engineering? Your opinion is needed…

Engineering is an area that’s historically been dominated by men. Sandra McNally is leading an inquiry into how to massively widen women’s participation in this vital area of the economy, and is asking for written submissions by May 21

In this ‘Year of Engineering’, the Skills Commission is running an inquiry into the pathways for women into engineering. Engineering contributes 26 per cent of the UK’s GDP, and developing skills in this area is a key element of the industrial strategy.

While gender imbalances are prevalent in engineering in many countries, the UK is one of the worst, according to statistics produced by the Women’s Engineering Society. Research from the Learning and Work Institute found that women are far less likely than men to apply for an apprenticeship in engineering, manufacturing and technology. The Centre for Vocational Education Research has shown that men who undertake an advanced apprenticeship have much higher earnings in the future than women – and much of this is attributable to the sector of specialisation.

Why are women so underrepresented in engineering and what might be done about it? These are the central questions I and my co-chairs of the Skills Commission inquiry, Lucy Allan MP and Preet Gill MP, are asking. Even the question is difficult, because engineering is a very broad area and can be studied within both FE and HE.

Part of the answer might lie in the narrowness of how people perceive engineering as an occupation, perhaps picturing hard hats and railway lines. Witnesses to our inquiry have been keen to stress that there is much more to engineering than that, but it seems to suffer from an image problem that needs to be turned around.

While gender imbalances are prevalent in engineering in many countries, the UK is one of the worst

This is not helped by the school curriculum, where reference to engineering is absent, nor by the quality of information, advice and guidance on offer. Positively, the Skills Commission has already called for a step change in information, advice and guidance at schools, and the Baker amendment to the Technical and Vocational Education Act has ensured that local FE providers can meet potential pupils to make pathways into further education more accessible. One message seems to be that if people knew what engineers actually do and the range of settings where many of them work, it would not be so much at odds with the hopes and expectations of young women.

On the other hand, gender stereotyping from an early age is a very pertinent issue for STEM in general and engineering in particular. One of the researchers giving evidence to the inquiry told us that many women in engineering have a family member who works in the sector and need to be resilient to jibes from others for choosing to study and work in this area. This societal problem is sometimes reinforced in advertising, the media and even children’s toys. On top of this, the workplace culture can sometimes be hostile to women: from very practical ways of overlooking the their needs (such as a lack of appropriate clothing and facilities) to “macho culture”. However, there are examples of firms at the other end of the spectrum – desirable places for anyone to work.

Our call for evidence is now being extended to May 21, looking for examples of good and bad practice at engineering firms. We want examples of initiatives that have been tried (in any area) to address the barriers to women’s decisions to study or work in engineering. We are seeking ideas on how policy at various levels might help to address problems. For example, can more be done to incentivise best practice ? Are there practical ways that larger employers can help small employers in their supply chain? At schools and colleges, how might information, advice and guidance or the curriculum be changed to accurately represent what engineering actually involves, in all its diversity? Is there something that those designing T-levels can do? More broadly, are there practical ways that the more deeply embedded stereotypes can be challenged and changed?

It’s difficult to see how the needs of the engineering sector can be met without doing more to attract the 50 per cent of the population, from whom the current supply is pitifully small.

The Skills Commission has extended its call for evidence deadline until May 21. We want to hear from the engineering sector and those in the FE and HE sectors training engineers of the future. If you have thoughts to share, please respond to our call for evidence. Written submissions can be made anonymously or contact Beth Wheaton at Policy Connect .

Sandra McNally is the director of LSE’s Centre for Vocational Education Research