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Disappointment at lack of concrete pay offer, as AoC proposes package dependent on funding rise

Disappointment has been expressed at the lack of a concrete offer following pay talks with the Association of Colleges, which is instead proposing a “substantial pay package” over two years dependent on government funding.

The unions met with AoC bosses on Friday to discuss college pay, and were looking for a better pay offer than the 1 per cent increase recommended last year.

University and College Union general secretary Sally Hunt described the resulting proposal as “bizarre”, and warned the pay issue needed to be resolved now if colleges wanted to avoid strike action in the autumn.

“We are proposing a substantial pay package over two years contingent on government funding,” AoC boss David Hughes explained.

“We intend to pursue government for a specific cash injection for pay – to then be consolidated in the 2019 government spending review.”

But Ms Hunt said: “This bizarre offer does nothing to address the fall in pay that members in FE have suffered in recent years.

She did however “welcome” the fact that the AoC recognised that staff “need a pay rise”.

“UCU will work with anyone to call for more funding but as the employer body, the AoC cannot abdicate its own responsibility for improving staff pay,” she added.

Mr Hughes explained his case further.

“It is a well-understood truth that colleges have been hit hard in the austerity decade and simply cannot afford to match other pay awards,” he said.

“It is not right for the average teacher salary to be £30,000 in colleges, compared with £37,000 in schools. If proper funding is not forthcoming, that gap is likely to widen, making the recruitment and retention of staff even more difficult.

“We have called on the unions to work with us to demonstrate to government that additional funding in the sector is now critical.”

UCU wrote to skills minister Anne Milton last week setting out the case for extra funding.

In its letter, UCU claimed that FE has reached “a crisis point on pay”.

After a “decade of real terms pay cuts”, senior lecturers are now earning around £9,000 a year less than they would if their pay had simply kept pace with inflation, it says.

And even in colleges that have honoured the pay recommendations from the AoC, staff have “suffered a real terms pay cut of 25 per cent since 2009”.

Trade unions also wrote to the AoC last month to spell out exactly why they have resubmitted a claim for a raise of five per cent for the next academic year.

They originally made the request at a meeting at the start of May, but the AoC said it would not consider a claim while some colleges were still in dispute with the UCU.

Later that month the AoC, which represents college leadership, backed down.

The unions want a guaranteed minimum increase of £1,500 for the lowest-paid staff where a five-per-cent rise is lower than £1,500.

Last year’s 1 per cent pay offer sparked a wave of industrial action among disgruntled college staff.

The National Joint Forum, made up of the unions representing college staff, had requested an across-the-board rise of around six per cent in April.

AoC boss David Hughes expressed regret at the time that it was unable to offer more than one per cent, but “current funding levels for colleges do not allow us to do so”.

Wayne’s world: meet the new Learndirect boss

A little-known entrepreneur, Wayne Janse van Rensburg, has overnight become one of the most powerful figures in FE after taking the reins at Learndirect. He’s watched from afar as, over the past 12 months, the nation’s biggest FE provider lost a battle with Ofsted to suppress a ruinous grade four inspection report, with the fallout involving high-profile parliamentary investigations. Its government skills contracts will be fully wound down within two weeks, but that doesn’t seem to have deterred the ambitious new owner. So why would he take on such a tough project? Senior reporter Billy Camden interviewed him to find out.

The takeover of the nation’s largest FE provider has been “a baptism of fire”, Wayne Janse van Rensburg admits, referencing last week’s sudden departure of 22 key staff at sister company Learndirect Apprenticeships Ltd (LDA).

But the South African-born tycoon, who claims to have dreamed of running Learndirect since he was 13, is unfazed.

“Part of my vision, and people might question my sanity here, is to bring the brand back into the forefront of education,” he says.

“I have big things I need to do in terms of reputation repair, but we owe something to the sector both in terms of a sorry, and repayment of what we have done in the past. I need this business to be an asset to the sector.”

Mr Janse van Rensburg (pictured) is determined to bring Learndirect back to its glory days.

I need this business to be an asset to the sector

The takeover from Lloyds Development Capital seemed like a rushed deal, concluded less than a week after an agreement with a company called PeoplePlus Group fell through at the eleventh hour.

So did they really have time to carry out due diligence? “We already had a fairly good understanding of the business, so to speak,” responds the new owner, somewhat enigmatically.

“Our focus over the next two or three days following the call was to build a sustainable business plan for Learndirect and LDA going forward, and challenging some of that evidence that was there for the due diligence.”

Prior to the acquisition, Mr Janse van Rensburg was a relatively small player in FE. He was the owner of Stonebridge Colleges, a distance-learning college with around 150 staff and a turnover of roughly £10 million, including a government-funded training provider called Dimensions Training Solutions.

The group has worked with Learndirect over the past two years by supplying it with a virtual learning environment through its technology company, PEARL.

This is where Mr Janse van Rensburg wants to rebuild Learndirect – through technology. And they might even offer it for free.

“I plan to keep the business and run Learndirect Ltd as a commercial training provider, as there is no opportunity for us to receive any more government funding,” he says.

“It has great content, initial assessments and diagnostics, which a lot of money has been spent on over the years.

“My ambition is to bring that into the sector and allow other training providers to use our content to support their delivery.

“Whether we charge to do that or, as part of our ‘sorry’ statement to the sector, give it away for free, that is where we want to go with Learndirect Ltd.”

Learndirect was formerly a giant of a training provider, with turnover reaching £200 million and nearly 2,000 staff. But this will all change in August once government contracts end and redundancies are complete.

Mr Janse van Rensburg expects to need only about 60 staff for the soon-to-be commercial provider,.

But it will be “business as usual” at Learndirect Apprenticeships Ltd, which currently has 350 employees. Mr Janse van Rensburg hopes it will become the “largest and most successful apprenticeships provider in the sector”.

However, life at LDA has got off to a far from smooth start.

Four senior executives – including the managing director – and 18 other employees quit suddenly at the end of June and moved to the PeoplePlus Group, the firm that only recently had a purchase offer rejected.

“I do not know their reasons for leaving,” Mr Janse van Rensburg confesses. “They obviously thought there was a better opportunity for them elsewhere.” Legal action against the ex-employees is not an option he wants to pursue: “My focus has got to be about stabilising the business and the staff that remain.”

I acknowledge that our employers were rattled by the news

On top of this, FE Week has recently learned that LDA is losing business from high-profile levy-paying employers including William Hill and Lloyds Banking (see page 13).

“I acknowledge that our employers were rattled by the news [of the sale],” says Mr Janse van Rensburg, who is “not entirely sure we were providing the service to the best of our abilities previously”.

His job is now to “communicate to them what has happened and reassure them that the ship is steady”.

Learndirect was previously run by Andy Palmer, who has taken the brunt of the blame for its downfall over the past 12 months, but who has stayed on in an “executive chair” role. Mr Janse van Rensburg says the former leader will have a job at Learndirect for as long as he “proves his value”.

Asked who is officially the boss of Learndirect Ltd, he can barely disguise his excitement at fulfilling his teenage dream: “I am the chief executive of Learndirect, thank you very much.”

Aside from the staff departures, Mr Janse van Rensburg says, two weeks into his takeover “everything seems to be going according to plan”.

The focus now is to “drive revenue into the business so it can be sustainable, and bring Learndirect back to the sector”.

August is key merger month amid 17 partnerships for 2018

A partnership that was bitterly opposed by a local council, and the first university-college link-up in six years, are among four mergers set to go through on August 1.

They are among 17 partnerships due to be formalised this year, despite Ofsted’s recent warning that bigger colleges are not always better.

Financially stricken Epping Forest College will become the fourth member of New City College at the beginning of August, as confirmed by both colleges this week.

The merger will “secure the future of Epping Forest College”, according to its chair of governors, Martin Rosner.

In June, the chief executive of Epping Forest District Council spoke out against the plans, which he said risked losing the college’s local focus and identity through the merger.

Epping Forest has been in administered status following intervention by the FE commissioner in March last year, and currently holds four notices of concern from the Education and Skills Funding Agency.

One of these ruled that the college must agree a plan to “achieve a merger by August 1”.

Bolton College and the University of Bolton are also set to join forces on that date, in the first merger between a university and a college since 2012.

Their partnership will use an innovative merger model, described by the Department for Education as “exciting” and the “first of its kind”.

The college will retain its own principal and governing board, giving it greater protection than would be offered by a traditional merger.

Another university-college link-up, between cash-strapped Lambeth College and London South Bank University, had been set to complete on August 1.

However, the college refused to confirm if it is going ahead as planned.

The on-off merger was initially announced in December 2016, but by January the college was back on the market for a new partner.

However, the college announced in March that it was reverting to the original plan.

Lambeth has been in financial difficulties since 2016, and is understood to have received £25 million from the government’s restructuring facility ahead of the merger.

Lowestoft Sixth Form College and East Coast College are also due to merge on August 1.

Staff at the sixth-form college recently went on strike in protest at the merger, which is going ahead despite two thirds of the consultation feedback being against the plan.

The last merger scheduled for August 1 is between Stockton Riverside College and Redcar and Cleveland College.

A further five mergers are planned for later this year, which – in addition to the seven that have completed so far – will bring the total number this year to 17.

That is 12 fewer than in 2017, in which a record number of mergers were completed.

This was largely a consequence of the area reviews of post-16 education and training, which ended in March last year with multiple merger recommendations.

Speaking exclusively to FE Week last month, FE commissioner Richard Atkins said the sector’s appetite for merger “remains greater than I expected”.

All 19 structure and prospects appraisals he was working on with colleges were expected to result in mergers, although “they won’t all happen on the same day”.

However, Ofsted warned in late June that “big is not always beautiful” when it comes to colleges.

Paul Joyce, the education watchdog’s main man for FE, revealed it was considering whether to carry out a thematic review looking at the impact on quality of colleges formed through mega-mergers.

“We are concerned at the size of some providers, in relation to poor performance data, so big is not always beautiful,” he said.

Ofsted watch: Three ‘new’ apprenticeship providers make reasonable progress

Three ‘new’ apprenticeship providers have been found to be making ‘reasonable progress’ in all areas, while an adult and community learning provider has held onto its grade two rating this week.

Monitoring visit reports into apprenticeship providers SIGTA Limited, FWD Training and Consultancy and Northwest Education and Training Limited were all published this week, with all three making ‘reasonable progress’ in all themes under review.

But none of the three actually new – having all had previous experience delivering apprenticeships as subcontractors.

Early monitoring visits of new apprenticeship providers were first announced by Ofsted boss Amanda Spielman last November, and were were intended to sniff out “scandalous” attempts to waste public money.

Their introduction is believed to be a result of growing concerns around the number of untested training providers that had made it onto the register, and therefore had access to potentially huge sums of public money.

But only a handful of the visits carried out so far have actually been to genuinely new providers.

SIGTA Limited has “extensive experience” in offering apprenticeships as a subcontractor, which leaders and managers were found to be building on to deliver direct levy-funded provision, according to a report published July 11 and based on a visit in mid-June.

Managers at SIGTA “provide a thorough recruitment process” which employers value “highly”, and which results in a “high retention” rate of apprentices remaining on their programme.

Directors and managers at FWD Training and Consultancy “share a vision and ambition” to offer high-quality financial services apprenticeships, according to a report published July 11 and based on a visit in early June.

The provider was a subcontractor from 2014 until it began delivering levy-funded apprenticeships in 2017.

“The majority of apprentices are highly motivated, enjoy their apprenticeship and develop new skills, knowledge and behaviours relevant to their job roles,” the report noted.

Leaders and managers at Northwest Education and Training Limited have “transferred successfully” their previous experience as a subcontractor to a college and private provider since 2013.

They “recruit apprentices with integrity and ensure that each learner is on the right level of programme” and “work closely with employers to select appropriate apprentices”, including reducing the number of apprentices with employers who are “unable to commit to sufficient off-the-job training”.

Leaders at Enfield London Borough Council were praised for establishing a “strong and highly effective supportive internship programme”, in a report published July 9 and based on an inspection in mid-June.

The provider delivers work-placements and work-related qualifications for young adults with learning difficulties and disabilities, and had 12 learners on programme when it was inspected.

These learners “work in a range of placements which reflect their career aspirations, such as horticulture, early years settings and retail outlets” and “benefit from good impartial careers advice and guidance which enable them to make informed decisions about their future careers”, the report said.

Leaders and managers “work effectively” with parents and carers “to support learners to progress into employment”.

“Parents appreciate the opportunity for learners to become more independent in their daily lives,” the report said.

A third monitoring visit report for Learndirect Limited following its ‘inadequate’ verdict last summer was published this week.

While inspectors noted a number of improvements at the troubled provider, leaders were found to have been making ‘insufficient progress’ in ensuring a “smooth transition” for apprentices transferring to other training providers by the end of July, when its government skills contracts finally end.

Two other independent providers held onto the grade two ratings following short inspections this week: Lite (Stockport) Limited, and Focus Training (SW) Limited.

No inspection reports for general FE or sixth colleges, or for employer providers, were published this week.

Independent Learning Providers	Inspected	Published	Grade	Previous grade
SIGTA Ltd	20/06/2018	11/07/2018	M	M
FWD Training and Consultancy Limited	05/06/2018	11/07/2018	M	M
Northwest Education and Training Limited	25/06/2018	09/07/2018	M	M
Learndirect Limited	12/06/2018	09/07/2018	M	M

Adult and Community Learning	Inspected	Published	Grade	Previous grade
Enfield London Borough Council	18/06/2018	09/07/2018	2	2

Short inspections (remains grade 2)	Inspected	Published
Lite (Stockport) Limited	19/06/2018	12/07/2018
Focus Training (SW) Limited	14/06/2018	10/07/2018

Minimum 2-month notice period for reduced apprenticeship funding rates

Apprenticeship funding bands currently under review by the Institute for Apprenticeships will be given a minimum two-month notice period if their funding rate is reduced.

But in the case of standards whose funding rate increases, the change will be immediate.

Lucy Rigler (pictured), the IfA’s acting deputy director for funding policy, revealed the extra detail regarding the funding-band review of 31 of the most popular standards at a Westminster Employment Forum on apprenticeships this week.

We expect to make recommendations coming out of the review to the department in August

The review was launched in May at the request of the Department for Education, but information since then has been scarce.

“We’ve been working with all the trailblazer groups involved so they all do have an expected timetable,” Ms Rigler said when questioned on the change by FE Week.

“We expect to make some of the recommendations coming out of the review to the department in August. Some of them will probably be in the cycle after that, so more in the early autumn.

“It is all a bit dependent on how quickly those trailblazer groups are able to mobilise things like getting some expected costs or real costs in from training providers.”

She continued: “Where we have an agreed position, it is out there with the trailblazer groups.

“Where a recommendation is for a funding band to go up it will happen immediately, and where it is going down there will be a minimum period of two months’ notice.”

News of the funding band review rocked the sector after FE Week analysis showed that 21 of the 30 standards with the most starts this academic year are among those involved.

Universities were particularly outraged, as the chartered management degree apprenticeship is one of the 21. Its funding band is already at the maximum upper limit of £27,000. This means its rate has nowhere to go but down, and HE providers would receive less cash to deliver training.

It was predicted that many universities would stop offering degree-level standards if the rate were to drop, as delivering the apprenticeships would become unaffordable.

But both the IfA and DfE argue that a reduction in bands will be welcomed by employers who have felt unable to negotiate with providers on the price of standards, and will provide greater value for money.

As far as the review itself is concerned, early indications suggest that it is going well.

The IfA seems very keen to ensure that there is full input from employers and providers

“The IfA has been proactive in briefing the apprenticeship trailblazer chairs on the process for the review of the funding bands,” Petra Wilton, director of strategy for the Chartered Management Institute, told FE Week a few weeks after the review commenced.

“The IfA seems very keen to ensure that there is full input from employers and providers in terms of understanding the costs of delivery and to have real insights into the challenges.

“There is a welcome commitment from the IfA that the review should focus on quality, as well as taking into account affordability.”

Another trailblazer member whose standard is under review said its meeting with the IfA went “well and was perfectly amicable”.

The Association of Colleges is a fan of the review process, if it is carried out “carefully”.

“It is right and proper that IfA should review what has happened within standard development since their standards introduction,” Teresa Frith, the association’s senior policy manager, previously told FE Week.

“But we would hope that they will listen carefully to provider concerns about the actual cost of delivery and take these concerns seriously. It is one thing costing apprenticeships to hit a volume target and quite possibly a different thing to fund them for cost-effective delivery.”

Movers and Shakers: Edition 252

Your weekly guide to who’s new and who’s leaving

Peter Robinson, vice principal, Blackburn College

Start date: August 2018

Previous job: Assistant principal, Heart of Worcestershire College

Interesting fact: Peter once walked for 24 hours non-stop to raise money for charity.

Mary Curnock Cook, former chair, Kensington and Chelsea College

Resigned: July 2018 (replaced by interim chair Ian Valvona)

Previous job: chief executive of University and Colleges Admissions Service

Interesting fact: Mary left school at 16 to become a secretary, and didn’t go to university until she was in her 40s.

Simon Barrable, principal, Portsmouth College

Start date: September 2018

Previous job: deputy principal, Portsmouth College

Interesting fact: Steve started his career teaching history and politics at St Vincent College, Gosport, but before that spent some time living and working in France and the Netherlands.

Zac Aldridge, vice principal, Derwentside College

Start date: May 2018

Previous job: Assistant principal, Gateshead College

Interesting fact: Zac’s allergic to cats, but because his wife insisted they have one, they bought a hairless cat and called him Colonel Sanders.

DfE orders independent investigation into ESFA over 3aaa contract management

An independent auditor has been called in to investigate the Education and Skills Funding Agency over their contract management of apprenticeships giant Aspire Achieve Advance (3aaa), FE Week can reveal.

Alyson Gerner is carrying out the independent investigation on behalf of the Department for Education.

She is finance director of DfE-owned LocatED, which is responsible for buying and developing sites for new free schools in England.

It comes after FE Week revealed that Ofsted’s latest inspection of 3aaa – which holds the largest ESFA apprenticeship allocation – had been declared “incomplete” following intervention from the agency.

Ms Gerner is described on the LocatED website as a public financial accountant and a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply.

Most of her career is said to have been “in commercial roles in the public sector”.

She has served as director of NHS commercial development, head of procurement for the DfE, deputy director for risk analysis for the ESFA, and latterly director of financial accounting, operations and procurement for the Funding Agency Shared Services team, part of the ESFA.

The DfE would only say of her probe into the ESFA that it does “not comment on any investigations, ongoing or otherwise”.

3aaa has seen significant growth under the leadership of Peter Marples and Di McEvoy-Robinson, its chief executive and director respectively.

Its allocation for non-levy apprenticeships now stands at nearly £22 million, up from £5.5 million at the start of the academic year.

Direct ESFA funding to 3aaa increased from just £390,000 in 2012-13 to £3.6 million the following year. It rose again to £12.5 million in 2014-15 and to £21.7 million a year later.

Its apprenticeships include IT, software, digital marketing, accountancy, financial services, business administration, customer service and management.

The provider had been expecting a grade one outcome following Ofsted’s recent inspection, the same as its previous overall rating of “outstanding” in 2014.

This was put on ice owing to an investigation by the ESFA following claims made by a whistleblower.

It is understood that the investigation led by Ms Gerner, which we can now reveal is being carried out for the DfE into its own agency, is running separately to this.

Ofsted originally confirmed on June 20 that it had inspected 3aaa in May, and it indicated at the time it found nothing amiss.

“The report is currently going through our normal processes and will be published in due course,” a spokesperson said.

But there was a change of position shortly before the report was due to be published, and the inspectorate released a second statement to FE Week mentioning “new information”.

“Given new information that has come to light, we have decided to declare our inspection of Aspire Achieve Advance Limited incomplete,” a spokesperson said.

“In due course, pending further information from the EFSA, we will decide whether we need to return to the provider to gather further evidence.”

The IfA want a reputation for honesty. Well, here’s mine…

The Institute for Apprenticeships wants to develop “a reputation for providing honest, evidenced and high-quality leadership when developing opinion on apprenticeships and technical education”.

It also says it wants to use its “unique perspective to develop its authority and reputation as an expert and trusted source for information”, according to its five-year strategic plan published last week.

Talking with authority and honesty should be encouraged, but the lack of evidence for it so far is troubling.

The IfA has been quick to pat itself on the back for a “record breaking” June and hitting 300 standards approved for delivery, but falls silent when challenged over why it still hasn’t reviewed whether the standards developed over three years ago were ever fit for purpose.

The IfA has been quick to pat itself on the back for the rise in apprenticeship starts on standards, but neglects to mention that popular frameworks in sectors such as retail and hospitality were scrapped many months ago.

The IfA has been quick to pat itself on the back for end-point assessment organisation and external quality assurance coverage, but becomes passive-aggressive when asked whether coverage equates to capability.

The IfA has been quick to pat itself on the back for the increased proportions of apprentices starting on higher level apprenticeships, but never mind that an explosion in management apprenticeships accounts for half of them so far this academic year.

And alongside all the patting on the back, it was also shocking to hear the chief executive of the IfA, Sir Gerry Berragan, say in his speech to the annual AELP conference that once one issue is resolved, “people will have to find other reasons as to why they think the reforms aren’t working”.

This may well be a glimpse of what he’s really thinking, but it’s not the sort of thing a high-quality leader would say.

If it wants to become a trusted source of information, the IfA should discount standards where equivalent frameworks are no longer available the next time the minister claims the “number of people starting on new, higher-quality apprenticeships has increased by almost 1,000% this year.”

To develop a reputation as a source of expertise, the IfA should be publishing figures on changing markets, such as the explosion in higher level management apprentices,not leaving it to FE Week.

And high quality leadership in our sector is not combative. It requires a degree of self-awareness and reflection that people respect, even when they disagree with an opinion or decision.

If my perception of the IfA’s leadership is right, they will likely have dismissed this editorial before they even reach this sentence.

But quangos come and go. So if the IfA wants to see out its five-year plan, it will need to live up to being “professional”, the “P” in its four EPIC values.

Keep co-investment fee, but transfer non-levy cash to providers with demand, UVAC tells Milton

A membership body representing universities has written to the skills minister to say it would be a “massive mistake” to water down policy on employer fees for apprenticeships.

The University Vocational Awards Council issued the warning to Anne Milton this week.

The letter argued that the 10 per cent co-investment fee for non-levy payers is “not a barrier to employer engagement”.

It complained that some of its 78 university members who are engaged in apprenticeship and who were unsuccessful in gaining funding in last year’s non-levy tender are “turning employers away” and in desperate need of cash that is seemingly going unused.

Universities are turning away employers who would happily pay a 10 per cent co-investment

UVAC suggests transferring unused non-levy funding from providers who say the 10 per cent fee is a barrier, to those who have demand.

“Up and down the country UVAC has identified degree apprenticeship cold spots, resulting from the ESFA procurement, where as a result of regional scale-backs, there is no ESFA funding to provide degree apprenticeships to non-levy paying employers,” wrote Adrian Anderson (pictured), the council’s chief executive.

“Universities are turning away employers who would happily pay a 10 per cent co-investment.

“Could we suggest resource is transferred from providers who bid for funding who were well aware of the co-investment requirement and now claim employers will not pay the 10 per cent co-investment, to providers who did not secure non-levy funding from the ESFA and are turning employers away?”

The apprenticeship levy is paid by employers with an annual payroll of £3 million or more, who can then spend their contributions on apprenticeship training.

Smaller employers can also access the funds generated through the levy, although they must pay 10 per cent towards the cost of the training, through the co-investment model.

There have been a number of calls in the sector, led by the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, to remove this requirement for non-levy payers if they are delivering level two and three apprenticeships to people under 25.

AELP claims the requirement was responsible for the sharp drop in apprenticeship seen since the introduction of the levy.

But at last month’s AELP conference, Ms Milton said she was unwilling to make any concessions. Although the issues have been “noted”, she said, there would be no rule change any time soon.

UVAC backs the minister’s stance.

“The 10 per cent co-investment requirement is an essential component in ensuring the quality of the apprenticeship programme at all levels,” its letter said.

“Put simply, if an employer isn’t prepared to invest just 10 per cent of the cost of the apprenticeship, the apprenticeship is not exactly valued by the employer.”

The co-investment requirement is an essential component in ensuring the quality of the apprenticeship programme

It adds that giving away “free” apprenticeship provision may increase starts, but would “totally undermine efforts to improve quality”, and that a relaxation of the co-investment rule would “encourage some training providers to offer low level and low-quality programmes”.

As part of a social mobility policy submission in September, the AELP said that to offset the costs of offering full funding for level two apprenticeships, the government should raise employer co-investment up to 50 per cent for higher levels via a sliding scale.

This would start “with 10 per cent at level three, 20 per cent at level four, 30 per cent at level five, 40 per cent at level six and 50 per cent at level seven apprenticeships for apprentices over the age of 19”.

Mr Anderson believes this suggestion is “entirely inappropriate”.

“I think that is totally wrong both from a productivity and a social mobility perspective,” he told FE Week.

“If we want to develop a high-skilled economy that competes in a post-Brexit world, we don’t want to focus on level two.”

He pointed out that research by the Sutton Trust found that a “large proportion of individuals who have undertaken level two apprenticeships tread water educationally – so the social mobility argument is at best questionable”.

“Why would we want to disincentive employers, particularly SMEs, from investing in the high-level skills their businesses need?” Mr Anderson added.

“Are we really saying we want encourage employers to invest in business administration and customer service to develop their business, rather than say digital, engineering or management skills?”