What are the biggest problems with T-levels?

With the 2020 start date for the first T-levels fast approaching, Ewart Keep lays out just a few of what he sees as their biggest problems

It is apparent that T-levels are now yet another in a long line of government projects that have been deemed too important to fail, despite the long and failure-strewn history of reform to vocational qualifications. Does anyone (not least at the Department for Education) remember the 14-to-19 diplomas, to which T-levels bear a strong family resemblance?

“This time, it will be different” and “we will make it work” are phrases I hear repeated by officials. But will it be different, and will it work?

There are lots of reasons to worry about T-levels, but I only have space for a couple here. First, there is the issue of what might be termed “critical mass”. This has two aspects.

Will there be enough students, particularly at colleges outside large urban areas, to make some of the pathways viable? I am curious if anyone has run the numbers on this. Colleges report they need an intake of 18 to 20 students to make a course/pathway “wash its face” financially. How many colleges will get 18 to 20 applicants for some of the pathways?

This in turn reflects a second, much broader issue about student numbers.

“This time, it will be different” and “we will make it work” are phrases I hear repeated by officials

T-levels will operate at level three. In many colleges, the bulk of their 16-to-18/19 students are studying at level two or below. Thus in 2016/17 the enrolments at 16 to 18 at different levels were as follows: entry/foundation level – 119,450; level one – 198,830; level two – 427,780; level three – 620,650.

In the new world, large numbers will be on their transition year before T-levels. Official assumptions seem to be that the majority will ultimately move up to level three and onto T-levels. If current patterns of labour market demand and student achievement hold good this is unlikely, however. At many colleges, especially in less prosperous areas, the majority of students will not be on

T-levels, or at level three. Some will be doing applied general courses (if this category continues to exist) and A-levels rather than T-levels.

Moreover, so much 16-to-18/19 FE provision is remedial – it is trying to get students to achieve at level two (and sometimes the maths and English) after their schools failed to equip them during their lower secondary phase. This means that for many students there is the danger that the money will run out at the cut-off point at age 19, before they have completed the combination of the transition year and a T-level.

The other area for concern is one that other contributors to FE Week have already been highlighting: the willingness and ability of employers to deliver what is needed. T-levels are founded on the notion of co-creation and co-delivery, with employers acting not as semi-detached customers, but as full partners in the process. It is an admirable ideal, but making it work will be very hard.

There are at least two problems. First, will the T-level standards devised by small panels of employers be recognised by the wider employer community in the relevant sector/occupation? Evidence from the apprenticeship standards process suggests this may not always be the case.

Second, the work placements are a major ask. Employers are still adjusting to the demands of the levy and the associated apprenticeship reforms. They are also being bombarded with multiple and uncoordinated requests from education (schools, colleges and universities) for more work experience and work placement opportunities.

For example, in higher education, the Wakeham Review of STEM, and the Shadbolt Review of computer science provision have both stressed the need for more and better work experience provision to ensure employability and the relevance of courses to working life. Multiple demands on employers may lead to stress and disengagement. Policy on work placements needs to look at demand from education holistically rather than in discrete blobs like T-levels.

Selling T-levels to employers is going to be a major task.

Professor Ewart Keep is director of SKOPE at Oxford University

Apprenticeship provider’s ban lifted after just two months

An apprenticeship provider whose training was branded “not fit for purpose” just two months ago has been allowed to continue recruiting apprentices.

Key6 Group was the subject of Ofsted’s first early monitoring report on newcomers to the apprenticeship market, published in March.

The inspectorate’s criticism of a provider new to government-funded apprenticeships when it joined the register of apprenticeship training providers in March 2017 was particularly brutal.

Its apprenticeships were “not fit for purpose”, and most people received “a poor standard of training” according to inspectors who visited the provider in February.

Despite this damning verdict Key6 Group was suspended for just two months – and it is now allowed to take on new apprentices once more.

A spokesperson for the Department for Education said it had stopped the group from “taking on new apprentices until it addressed the concerns outlined in Ofsted’s report”.

“The suspension was lifted in April after it provided a robust improvement plan,” she said.

Key6 Group has not explained how it managed to turn things around in such a short time period, despite multiple attempts by FE Week to get in contact.

And its website gives no clue as to its activities, as it simply says “currently updating our website – back soon!”

READ MORE: Deputy editor Paul Offord’s view

The treatment of Key6 Group is in marked contrast to that meted out to existing providers given a grade four for their apprenticeship provision.

Under rules published by the Education and Skills Funding Agency in January, an ‘inadequate’ provider should be given five days’ notice of removal from the register.

Furthermore, they must not take on any new apprentices, and any existing apprentices would be able to stay on only at the employers’ discretion.

To date, one college and at least 10 independent training providers have been removed from the register as a result of a grade four rating for their apprenticeship provision.

But Key6 Group has remained on the register throughout its suspension, as the date it was added, March 13 2017, is unchanged.

Ofsted’s early monitoring visits, announced by chief inspector Amanda Spielman last November, 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.

Sixty-four providers currently on the register are listed as a “new organisation without financial track record”, 24 of which, including Key6 Group, were successful in the first application window in early 2017.

Four early monitoring visit reports have been published – but Key6 Group’s is the only one for a provider new to apprenticeships.

Jigsaw Training and the London College of Apprenticeship Training were both subcontractors before the introduction of the levy in April last year, while North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust is an employer provider.

Speaking at FE Week’s annual apprenticeships conference in March, Ms Spielman promised more monitoring visits.

“I very much hope that positive results will significantly outnumber the disappointments,” she said.

In a statement, Ofsted said Key6 Group’s return to favour was a matter for the ESFA.

 

Bitter pay dispute between unions and AoC escalates

An argument over pay between unions and the Association of Colleges has worsened, after the latter refused to enter negotiations while industrial action is ongoing.

The various FE teaching unions insist that the body which represents the sector has told them it is “not minded to consider” a pay claim for 2018/19 while University and College Union members “remained in dispute over the 2017/18 round at any AoC member college”.

This is “unacceptable” to the trade unions – which include the National Education Union, Unite, Unison and GMB as well as UCU – which have claimed in a letter to the AoC’s boss that he is “attempting to put pressure on some members of one union”.

“Attempting to avoid dialogue” on next year’s pay settlement “will not make the issue go away”, the letter said – and could in fact “increase the likelihood of greater and more widespread industrial action and disruption in the sector”.

“In the absence of a change of heart by the AoC, we will have no choice but to consider alternative approaches with a view to achieving progress for our members,” it concluded.

In response, Mr Hughes said: “While a small number of local UCU branches are taking action on the national pay claim, it would not be appropriate to open negotiations on the 2018/19 claim.

“We have written to all the unions to explain our position and we are optimistic that these few remaining disputes will be resolved soon, allowing us to begin negotiations for the next pay round.”

FE Week edition 244 cartoon

Earlier this week the UCU announced that staff at 10 colleges around the country would walk out for up to seven days during exam season, in the third round of industrial action over a “disappointing” pay offer of just one per cent made by the AoC in September. 

Staff at a number of colleges have already taken strike action twice this year as part of the dispute, with an estimated 1,500 staff walking out in the first round at the beginning of March.

The unions had submitted had submitted a claim for an across-the-board rise of around six per cent in April last year.

But the final offer from the AoC last September was just one per cent, or the sum of £250 “where this is more beneficial”.

Mr Hughes expressed regret at the time that it was unable to offer more.

“We wish we were in a position to make a better recommendation, but current funding levels for colleges do not allow us to do so,” he said. 

But in today’s letter the unions said the AoC’s current position “appears to be at odds with your acknowledgement that last year’s offer of 1 per cent wasn’t enough”.

It warned the unions would now “consult members on how to respond to what we regard as an unnecessary provocation which could undermine the credibility and relevance of the AoC to the sector”.

Staff at Hull College took action on Wednesday in protest at plans to slash up to 231 jobs at the college, in an attempt to balance the books, while UCU members at Lewisham Southwark College last week voted for strike action over their pay and conditions, which they say have got worse since the college joined NCG.

How can employers know which providers are good?

The marketplace is changing rapidly, and it’s awash with new standards and providers. Stefano Capaldo explains how to sort the wheat from the chaff

Twelve months ago, the levy gave employers control of apprenticeship funding in England. While this is welcome in lots of ways, it has become increasingly difficult for employers to identify a training provider able to support the delivery of these skills – and much of this is down to their methods of procurement.

The move to employer-led standards from the old-style frameworks, the introduction of the register of apprenticeship training providers (RoATP) and key requirements such as 20 per cent off-the-job training have left many employers unsure what apprenticeship delivery now involves, and consequently with little idea of what good provision looks like.

Learning development and procurement teams have fallen back on what they view as reliable indicators of performance, or “cultural fit”, in competitive scenarios. The problem is that many of these indicators are no longer relevant, or even available.

On price, procurement teams still expect providers to reduce costs in return for higher delivery volumes – but this makes a mockery of the fee-cap structure, and quality is harder to achieve. Fee caps for standards are based on experienced providers’ estimates of the resources needed to deliver a quality programme; asking them to deliver for less significantly reduces the quality of the offer.

Employers need to identify additional benchmarks of quality that can be fulfilled by all those providers accepted onto RoATP

Recent months have seen a trend towards lower price-weighting in tenders. But when the government claims it wants higher-quality delivery and increased market diversity – particularly more SME providers – why ruin it by continuing to weight price at all?

Meanwhile, according to FE Week’s latest analysis, only around 25 per cent of current RoATP members have a grade one or two from Ofsted, and the majority of the remainder are unable to provide any grade at all.

Just 32 per cent of RoATP organisations were even in scope for inspection in Ofsted’s 2016/17 schedule, but in a tender exercise, an Ofsted grade is the first thing requested by employers to demonstrate quality. Providers without Ofsted ratings are asked to give “alternative evidence of quality” or (in some cases) are excluded from tendering altogether.

This vague requirement for alternative evidence is difficult for providers to fulfil and equally hard for procurement teams to score, as it relies on evaluators having a specialist knowledge of the sector and bidders providing comparable evidence.

Employers need to identify additional benchmarks of quality that can be fulfilled by all those providers accepted onto RoATP – ideally with the help of the ESFA, which set the original RoATP criteria.

Standards were introduced in 2015 and take an average of two years to complete. As a result very few providers have any substantial achievement data – and what data they do have only goes back one year.

In the digital sector, the British Computer Society’s statistics show that of 4,205 registered apprentices on digital standards in March, just 196 had undertaken end-point assessment.

Employers, however, are continuing to ask for results data going back at least three years.

Providers may substitute achievement data from previous frameworks, but given the differences in structure, content and assessment requirements between frameworks and standards, it’s unwise to assume that this is any guarantee.

So, when it’s time to find a provider to deliver your apprenticeships, what are the questions you should be asking during procurement?

1)      Be as detailed as you can about your requirement. Do your homework on how many roles you need to fill, the specific role type, and whether this will be on a rolling basis or just a one-off. The clearer you can be about what you want from providers, the easier it is for them to show you how they fit your needs.

2)       Don’t start with just one if you’re trying to build a large-scale programme. A single apprentice gives you no idea of how effectively the programme can be managed at scale, whether it is effective or even whether apprentices are right for your business – you may strike very lucky or unlucky with a particular hire. Aim to hire a cohort of at least ten, and ask the provider to demonstrate how they will help you monitor and evaluate the programme’s success to build a long-term apprenticeship culture.

3)      Check the provider understands the importance of supporting the employer. They’re not just a ‘helpline’ for the apprentice; they should be supporting learning in the workplace by working with the learner, their manager and even their colleagues to show how the apprenticeship supports day-to-day business.

4)      Ask them to demonstrate. Don’t rely on a written procurement to get what you want. Invite teams to presentation. Ask to speak to the delivery staff, not just the salespeople. Check that what they claim they can do is carried all the way through to the end of the process, and that they’ve got a good grasp of apprentice management basics such as safeguarding.

These questions will get to the heart of what’s important; the fundamental relationship between apprentice, employer and provider that (if handled correctly) will embed apprentices into ‘business as usual’ across the company. 

Making these questions the foundation of your procurement process will help you identify the right provider for your needs, for every apprenticeship, in every sector, every time.

 

Stefano Capaldo is Managing Director of Firebrand Training

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”.