A college that was recently rated ‘inadequate’ for the third time in five years has finally completed a merger.

Stockport College, which has also had a notice of concern for financial health since 2010, formally joined forces with grade two Trafford College today to form the Trafford College Group.

“Our aim is for our learners to be ahead of the competition in terms of successfully securing meaningful employment and progression to higher level study,” said Lesley Davies, group principal and chief executive.

“We are putting at the core of our programmes employability and professional skills development, underpinned practically with: a digital entitlement; a values-driven curriculum; an emphasis on professional behaviours; and setting the standards and aspirations for our students at a high level, working with them.”

The merged institution will have a turnover of £37 million and over 14,000 learners and apprentices, according to today’s announcement.

Stockport College received its first grade four rating in September 2013, followed by a ‘requires improvement’ in December 2014.

But in October 2016 it had slipped to ‘inadequate’ again – a grade it held onto in a report published this March, following re-inspection in January.

The college has also been struggling financially and has had a notice of concern for financial health since December 2010 – longer than any other college currently.

According to Trafford College’s 2016/17 financial statements the merger was dependent on “the successful outcome to the application for Restructuring Funds” to “address Stockport College’s significant legacy liabilities”.

Stockport was also slapped with notice of concern for inspection in November 2016, with a further notice for apprenticeship minimum standards the following March.

The college was placed in administered status by former FE commissioner David Collins in 2013, and it’s not clear if this was ever lifted.

It had emerged from the troubled Greater Manchester area review with a plan for a three-way merger involving Oldham and Tameside colleges.

But this was scrapped following intervention by current FE commissioner Richard Atkins in early 2017.

Trafford College, which had an income of £22.2 million in 2016/17, had been set to join the LTE Group on the same basis as the Manchester College, but “decided not to formalise this through structural change or merger”, according to its financial statements.

The government must “urgently” design a successor programme to the European Social Fund to avoid a “disastrous” post-Brexit funding gap, an influential group of MPs has said.

The work and pensions committee, chaired by Birkenhead MP Frank Field, made the call in its report, published today, which looked at what would happen if the UK government did not replace the £500 million provided through the fund every year for people in disadvantaged circumstances.

Leaving the European Union gave the UK a “historic opportunity” to “design a truly world-class successor” programme that was “entirely in its national interests: plugging skills gaps, boosting productivity and lifting up disadvantaged communities,” the report said.

But it warned the government “must act now to guarantee certainty for providers and communities and avoid a potentially disastrous interruption in funding”.

“We recommend the government proceed urgently with detailed design of a successor to the ESF so that there is no gap between existing and new funding streams,” it said.

The ESF was cash that the UK received, as a member state of the EU, to increase job opportunities and help people to improve their skill levels, particularly those who find it difficult to get work.

The current funding round is worth about €3bn (£2.3bn) across England over the period from 2014 to 2020.

ESF funding for this country is administered through the Education and Skills Funding Agency, the Department for Work and Pensions, and the Big Lottery Fund, which each provide match funding.

Many projects co-funded by ESFA, delivered with the involvement of local enterprise partnerships, focused on young people not in education, employment or training.

According to the 2016/17 ESFA allocations, 87 providers had ESF contracts worth a combined total of £456 million.

But, unlike contracts co-financed by the other agencies, all ESFA match-funded projects have to be delivered by July 2018.

It’s not clear what will happen to those projects once the contracts come to an end.

The government has committed to introducing a UK Shared Prosperity Fund once the current ESF funding streams end in 2020.

The 2017 Conservative party general election manifesto promised the new fund would be “cheap to administer, low in bureaucracy and targeted where it is needed most”.

According to today’s report, the Department for Work and Pensions plans to consult on a replacement for ESF at a yet-to-be decided date “later this year”.

“Effective reform here offers the government an important new chance to begin to fill our skills gap from the community upwards, instead of having a top-down approach,” Mr Field said.

“The government must act quickly so that those excellent existing suppliers are not bankrupted.”

Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute, which last year ran a campaign calling on the government to commit to replacing ESF funding, backed the report’s findings.

A proposed consultation on the shared prosperity fund “has been pushed back and back”, he said.

“It’s vital that the new fund is of at least the same value as ESF, that there is no delay in its starting, and that it is better targeted and less bureaucratic than ESF.”

 

Employers who are gearing up to transfer apprenticeship levy funds to other organisations from next month will only be allowed to handover the cash to one other company, the government has confirmed.

From May, large employers who pay the levy will for the first time be allowed to transfer up to 10 per cent of their annual funds to other organisations.

The change will enable large organisations with unspent levy funding to support smaller employers in their supply chain to recruit apprenticeships.

However, the Education and Skills Funding Agency has announced that the transfer can only be made to a single company initially, and not spread across multiple employers.

“For the first phase, employers can transfer up to 10 per cent of their annual funds to one other employer,” a government update said.

“The number of employers they can make a transfer to will increase over time and after user feedback from the first phase.”

It added that levy-paying employers who use the apprenticeship service will be able to see their transfer allowance at the end of April, and the transfer can then take place from May.

The number of employers they can make a transfer to will increase over time

The receiving organisation will be able to start adding apprentice commitments from May, and for these new commitments, training providers can then be paid from June.

The Association of Employment and Learning Providers predicts that this transfer restriction will change over time.

“We understand that this restriction of transferring to only one rather than multiple employers is a short-term restriction and hopefully from the new academic year [August 2018] it will be relaxed,” said the association’s chief policy officer Simon Ashworth.

“Small detail, but important when supporting and helping levy payers plan for their spending.”

Government guidance published in February explained that there are no restrictions on who employers can transfer funds to, except that they have to be registered on the apprenticeship service.

The ESFA advised those transferring the funds to be aware of “the funding rules around transferring apprenticeship funds, which will be published at a later date”.

Once a transfer is made, it can’t be refunded “to the sending employer”.

The intention to allow levy payers to transfer funds was announced in the Department for Education’s apprenticeship funding policy guide in October 2016, and later featured in the Conservatives’ general election manifesto.

Levy-paying employers who want to transfer funds can find companies who want money in a number of ways.

For example, they can “work with an employer in your supply chain”, “get in touch with employers in your industry”, “get in touch with an Apprenticeship Training Agency”, or work with “regional partners”.

The levy is currently paid by large employers with an annual payroll of at least £3 million, and is set at 0.5 per cent of gross annual payroll, less at £15,000 allowance.

It’s expected to raise £2.5 billion a year by 2020, which can only currently be spent on apprenticeship training.

A Northamptonshire college has been slammed with a grade four by Ofsted for delivering “unsafe” training in “highly dangerous vocational areas” such as construction and equine studies.

Moulton College is a specialist land-based college with onsite accommodation that also delivers programmes in animal management, sport and food and drink manufacturing.

It was today branded ‘inadequate’ overall, and in four of the eight headline fields, including for its large apprenticeships provision – meaning it will become the second college to lose the right to offer them under updated government rules.

The damning report will no doubt heap pressure on the college’s principal, Stephen Davies, who has overseen a gradual decline in the college’s rating from ‘outstanding’ when he took the reins in 2011.

Moulton, which has two sites across Northamptonshire, was particularly criticised for the extremely poor health and safety environment it has adopted – which puts learners, including those with high needs, in danger.

The curriculum includes a number of highly dangerous vocational areas, and learners are not safe

“Inspectors identified a number of serious breaches to health and safety regulations and a number of instances where practice was unsafe or sloppy,” Ofsted said.

“Not all managers with responsibility for health and safety have undertaken appropriate training.”

Not all students are “safe” while undertaking activities at the college, the inspectorate continued.

“For example, brickwork learners do not wear appropriate eyewear when cutting bricks, and staff do not adequately supervise students with complex needs during water-based activities in the swimming pool.”

In equine yards, gates are “left open” and a teacher “demonstrated unsafe practice” when tacking up a horse.

In brickwork, under the guidance of their teacher, apprentices “cut bricks without the use of eye protection”.

In one animal care lesson, Ofsted said a “poorly conceived” internet research task placed a high needs student “at risk of looking at inappropriate content”.

Leaders at the 2,500-learner college have however moved quickly to reassure the community they serve that effective safeguards are now being put in place to protect learners.

“We are naturally extremely disappointed by the results of the inspection,” Mr Davies said.

“We would want to take this opportunity to stress that the college remains a safe place to work and study; we have a strong safety record when compared to other colleges specialising in agricultural and horticultural provision, and students themselves told Ofsted that they feel safe studying here.”

He added that the immediate actions taken by the college include providing every member of staff with a refresher safety briefing, and “commissioning audits of both health and safety and safeguarding practices – which will be used to inform work going forward in these areas”.

Moulton College’s performance has gradually declined since Mr Davies took over in 2011.

Teachers pay insufficient attention to health and safety practice

At the time it was ‘outstanding’, according to Ofsted, but then fell to a grade three in 2016, until it ultimately slumped to ‘inadequate’ today.

During that time it has run into financial difficulties. Moulton has a turnover of around £25 million but got a financial notice of concern from the ESFA in January 2017.

At the time its bank loans totalled nearly £20 million after it made significant investment to improve the college estate.

Moulton was subsequently subject to intervention from the FE Commissioner – whose report found leaders had been “too slow” to address poor financial performance.

However, its financial health went back to “satisfactory” at end of July 2017.

Moulton will become the second college in the last two months to be taken off the register of apprenticeship training providers for getting a grade four in this area.

Barnfield was the first to be hit by the strict government rules, which were updated in January to reaffirm the consequence.

This action for Moulton could be a big deal for local businesses if they are reliant on the college to deliver training, as the college currently delivers over 650 apprenticeships.

Chair of governors, Robin Thompson, said he was “pleased” that Ofsted’s report noted the college’s strengths in “employability and work-related training, our commercial links with employers, what they described as our excellent range of specialist facilities and teacher expertise”.

He added that the college has a “proud history” of serving its “community – and the agricultural and horticultural sectors across the UK – for almost a century and during that time we have prided ourselves as much on our pastoral care as our educational impact”.

Main image: Moulton College’s main campus in Moulton village

UPDATED: To ensure we’re comparing like with like, the table has been updated to include provisional figures from August to December 2016, as the figures for this period in 2017 are still provisional. Figures for May to July are final for both 2016 and 2017.

Apprenticeship starts were down 23 per cent in December on the same period in 2016, according to provisional statistics published by the Department for Education this morning.

There were 16,700 starts that month in 2017, down from 21,600 provisionally reported in 2016.

This will be viewed as more discouraging news for the government, as it attempts to hit its target of three million apprenticeship starts by 2020.

Mark Dawe, the chief executive of Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said that “another month has passed and nothing has been done”.

He urged the government to stop charging non-levy-paying companies for hiring apprentices under the age of 25 for at least a year.

“We need more young people starting apprenticeships at levels two and three – good for social mobility and good for small business,” he said.

The figures from August 2017 onwards remain provisional, and the DfE stresses that they are subject to change.

We need more young people starting apprenticeships at levels two and three – good for social mobility and good for small business

Starts for recent months have generally been revised up since they were first published; for example, November starts now stand at 32,500, up 5,500 or 20 per cent since the month was first reported in February.

The Conservative government first introduced its target for three million apprenticeship starts in 2015, and repeated it in last year’s election manifesto.

Tim Thomas, the director of employment and skills at manufacturing body EEF, claimed the latest figures as “the final signal to government that now is the time for a review and change”.

“Since the levy was introduced nearly a year ago, we have seen a worrying fall in the number of new apprenticeships,” said Jane Gratton, head of business environment and skills policy at the British Chambers of Commerce.

“The government urgently needs to work with businesses to find ways to make the apprenticeship levy work better for everyone, and ensure that the UK economy has the skilled staff it needs.”

The government had hoped that the levy would help drive up starts, by forcing more employers to invest in apprenticeships.

Speaking at last week’s Annual Apprenticeship Conference, the boss of the Institute for Apprenticeships claimed that it was a myth that starts had plummeted since the introduction of the levy last year.

Sir Gerry Berragan admitted that while starts were indeed down, the drop is now closer to “about 30 per cent” – rather than the 60-per-cent fall recorded at one point.

During an exclusive FE Week interview last month, skills minister Anne Milton revealed she expected to see a surge in apprenticeship starts by September. 

“I will be told by my officials that I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to say it anyway,” she said. “I would hope that by September to see some real numbers.”

The skills minister did not comment directly on today’s overall figures, but did mention there had been a rise in the number of starts on apprenticeship standards and at higher levels.

“We want to see more people doing an apprenticeship with all the opportunities it provides. However it’s important not to sacrifice quality for quantity,” she said.

“I’m pleased to see an increase in people starting apprenticeships designed under our higher-quality standards, which we are developing with businesses so those programmes meet the needs of employers and apprentices.

“We’ve also seen a big jump in higher-level apprenticeships which can lead to a range of exciting, highly skilled jobs.”

 

Fourteen general FE and sixth-form colleges have received grants through a fund designed to support failing colleges to improve the quality of education and training.

Details of the successful applicants to the two pilot rounds of the £15 million ‘Strategic college improvement fund’, along with the colleges that will support them, have been published by the Department for Education.

The programme, which opened in October, is part of a package of measures announced by former education secretary Justine Greening intended to improve standards at failing colleges or those at risk of doing so.

Colleges rated ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’ overall, or for their apprenticeship provision, are able apply for grants of between £50,000 and £250,000. The exact allocations have not yet been announced.

Each application had to be supported by a stronger college, rated at least ‘good’ at its most recent Ofsted inspection.

Working with a partner college will “enable the applicant college to refine its understanding of the quality challenges it faces, develop a rigorous and costed programme of work, and use the experience and know-how of the partner college to put that improvement programme in place”, according to the DfE’s guidance.

Further details of the main programme, which is expected to run until at least March 2020, are due to be announced later this year.

In an interview with FE Week last November, the FE commissioner Richard Atkins said the fund was “enough money to make a real difference”.

“I’ve spoken to a number of colleges; if we made between £200,000 and £300,000 available in-year and focused it on key quality-improvement, they’ve all said to me that could make a real difference,” he said.

Eligible costs aren’t predetermined and can include diagnosing a college’s quality issues and developing a plan to tackle them, mentoring and other professional development activities for senior leaders, or the cost of staff time.

He said he wanted to learn from the pilot before deciding what will be funded during the main phase.

Three of the supporting colleges announced today are part of the FE commissioner’s national leaders of FE programme, announced in January.

They are Grimsby Institute, St John Rigby College and Dudley College of Technology, all rated ‘outstanding’.

The NLFE initiative aims to use the expertise of successful colleges to support struggling institutions.

Mr Atkins told FE Week in January that he expected principals and other members of senior management teams to work with a number of colleges in need to improvement – and that this work would lead to applications to the SCIF.

Two providers managed to pull themselves up from grade four this week – one to ‘good’ and the other to ‘requires improvement’.

But at the other end of the scale there was disappointment for another provider as it failed to improve from its previous ‘inadequate’ grade.

Adult and community learning provider Essex county council boosted its grade from four to two, in a report published March 29 and based on an inspection in mid-February.

Leaders were praised for having worked “tirelessly” to “secure a wide range of improvements to the provision”, the report said.

Leaders were praised for having worked “tirelessly” to “secure a wide range of improvements to the provision”

Teaching, learning and assessment had “improved markedly” since the last inspection, in December 2016, with the result that the “large majority” of learners and apprentices “rapidly develop their skills and knowledge”.

The proportion of apprentices completing their courses on time was also “greater” than before, although “not enough” learners on unaccredited courses progressed onto “courses that lead to qualifications”.

Epping Forest College saw its rating go up to ‘requires improvement’ in a report published March 29 and based on an inspection in late-February.

Inspectors noted that, “despite improvements since the last inspection”, in November 2016, “actions to strengthen the quality of teaching, learning and assessment have not yet resulted in good teaching and good outcomes for learners”.

Management of apprenticeships and subcontracted provision was ‘inadequate’.

But “more learners achieve their qualifications than previously” and “behaviour has improved”, the report noted.

Independent learning provider UK Training and Development Limited failed to improve on its previous ‘inadequate’-overall grade in a report published March 28 and based on an inspection in October.

The apprenticeship provider, based in Hemel Hempstead, also received grade fours in two headline fields – along with three ‘requires improvement’ grades.

Safeguarding arrangements “remain ineffective”, the report said, with leaders criticised for failing to ensure that “staff follow statutory guidance to ensure that apprentices are safe”.

Governance arrangements were found to be inadequate, with leaders and managers not being “challenged rigorously or held to account for all aspects of the provision”.

In addition, “too many” apprentices were failing to make the progress “of which they are capable”, the report said – although “most apprentices” demonstrated “effective teamworking skills and provide good customer care”.

Plumpton College became the latest college to see its grade improve to ‘good’, from its previous grade three, in a report published March 26 and based on an inspection in February.

Learners at the land-based college were “excited about their subjects and the wider opportunities that staff provide”.

Learners at the land-based college were “excited about their subjects and the wider opportunities that staff provide”.

The “excellent arrangements” for work experience and enrichment activities “develop learners’ skills, knowledge and confidence well”.

“Senior leaders have exceptional partnerships with local and regional employers, schools and community leaders which benefit learners and the local community,” the report said.

There was less good news for Chesterfield College this week, which saw its grade drop from two to three in a report published March 26 and based on an inspection in mid-February.

Study programme learners “make insufficient progress”, while the teaching, learning and assessment on these courses was deemed “not good enough” and “dull and uninspiring”.

But apprentices, adult learners and those with high needs “make good progress from their starting points”, inspectors noted.

Two independent learning providers had reports published from their first-ever inspections this week: Mediprospects and Beacon Education Partnership Limited.

London-based Mediprospects, which delivers loans-funded provision, was rated ‘good’ across the board, in a report published March 29 and based on an inspection in mid-February.

Leaders and managers were praised for having “high expectations” and for creating a “highly aspirational learning environment in which learners develop good knowledge and skills required to work in the care sector”.

Thanks to “very good academic and pastoral support” learners “achieve their qualifications and progress well into care-related employment”, the report said.

Beacon Education Partnership Ltd, which also delivers loans-funded provision, was rated ‘requires improvement’ across the board in a report published March 28 and based on an inspection in late February.

Leaders were unaware that “too few” learners were “making good progress”, because they “do not gather sufficient and accurate information about the progress learners make”.

They were also criticised for failing to have “high enough expectations” of their learners, or to have “a clear plan to promote and develop learners’ English and mathematical skills”.

As previously reported by FE Week, the report into the second monitoring visit to Learndirect Limited following its inadequate grade last year was published this week – with a mixed bags of findings.

And the first ever report of a monitoring visit into subcontracting, published this week, criticised leaders at Wigan and Leigh College for being slow to improve performance.

 

GFE Colleges	Inspected	Published	Grade	Previous grade
Epping Forest College	20/02/2018	29/03/2018	3	4
Wigan and Leigh College	01/03/2018	26/03/2018	Monitoring	Monitoring
Chesterfield College	13/02/2018	26/03/2018	3	2
Plumpton College	20/02/2018	26/03/2018	2	3

 

Independent Learning Providers	Inspected	Published	Grade	Previous grade
Mediprospects	13/02/2018	29/03/2018	2	–
Beacon Education Partnership Limited	27/02/2018	28/03/2018	3	–
UK Training & Development Limited	17/10/2017	28/03/2018	4	4
Learndirect Limited	27/02/2018	27/03/2018	Monitoring	Monitoring

 

Adult and Community Learning	Inspected	Published	Grade	Previous grade
Essex County Council	20/02/2018	29/03/2018	2	4