The £170 million funding pot for new Institutes of Technology will not enable them to have a significant impact on the skills system, the FE commissioner has told a parliamentary hearing.
Richard Atkins (pictured above) was asked about the role of the government’s new project during a House of Lords economic committee hearing on the funding gap between FE colleges and universities this afternoon.
He explained there would be a small number of IoTs and that their concept was a “very good idea” which will be “excellent” in promoting technical and professional education.
However, the “amount of funding going into them is modest and therefore I am not sure it will transform the system”, he claimed, adding: “But hopefully they will regionally add value to the skills agenda.”
A total of £170 million is available for providers that want to apply for new Institutes of Technology status.
A procurement process is underway for providers to apply for a slice of the funding, and it is expected that around 10 IoTs will be created from it.
Institutes of Technology were first mooted in the Productivity Plan in July 2015.
Even though the Department for Education repeatedly said it planned to “establish high-quality and prestigious institutions”, funding is a relatively small three-year wave of capital funding for mainly existing colleges, not to create new ones.
Julian Gravatt, the Association of Colleges’ deputy chief executive, agreed with Mr Atkins that IoTs are a “good experiment” but said he feared “too much pressure” had been heaped on them to “revolutionise the system”.
“It is a relatively modest programme and doesn’t necessarily deal with some of the wider issues about FE,” he added.
Mr Gravatt also pointed out that while T-levels are a “great opportunity”, he is “slightly concerned” that the “pretty big reform programme” is being done “a bit on the cheap”.
Talking to FE Week after the hearing, he explained: “All colleges are being forced to make difficult decisions as the impact of cuts continue to surface. The DfE 16-18 budget has fallen by approximately £1billion since 2010-11 and this is being felt across the sector.
“We welcome additional funding for T-levels but note that colleges are also being asked to cover the cost of additional staff time, support robust work experience programmes, and meet the cost of English and mathematics resists.
“When all of those factors are taken into consideration, there are question marks over whether this is really additional funding at all.”
Off-the-job technical qualifications can now be included in apprenticeships, the Institute for Apprenticeships has officially announced, confirming a significant U-turn which FE Week revealed last week.
It is one of a number of reforms from the IfA to make the approval of new apprenticeship standards “faster and better”, after skills minister Anne Milton admitted that “some oil on the wheels” was needed.
Strict rules preventing the use of qualifications, such as technical certificates that show evidence of knowledge, have frustrated many across the sector for years.
But officials at the Institute, who have committed to improving process and policies, have now overturned them (see image below).
“We are now adding one more reason why a qualification can be mandated,” new guidance states. “If it is an off-the-job technical qualification that does not accredit full occupational competence and would either add breadth to the apprenticeship or provide structure for the off-the-job training.”
We have listened and responded to what trailblazer groups have been telling us
Previously, the criteria permitted a mandatory qualification in an apprenticeship where it is a regulatory requirement, required by a professional body, or such a “must-have in the labour market that an apprentice would be disadvantaged in job applications without it”.
Last summer the rules were tightened to include a bar on allowing employer groups to submit a standard for approval if it includes a qualification that’s still in development. This ban has now been binned.
Today’s addition means that where there is no mandatory qualification for an apprenticeship, an employer can use one “voluntarily” if the content “aligns with the standard and the employer pays the registration and certification fees”.
Another significant change announced today is that the IfA will align the process for recommending funding bands to the timelines for approving proposals and end-point assessment plans, to “shorten the time a standard spends waiting for approval for delivery”.
FE Week reported in December that 13 separate apprenticeship standards with approved assessment plans had been left in limbo for two or more months because their costs still haven’t been agreed.
The Institute’s “faster and better” programme also aims to simplify aspects of the standards development process by “changing” some of the policy criteria for approval of apprenticeship occupations and standards, as well as introducing improved trailblazer guidance, and “intensive” trailblazer workshops.
Sir Gerry Berragan
“We have listened and responded to what trailblazer groups have been telling us since the Institute’s launch last April: that the apprenticeships standards development process needs to be faster and better,” said Sir Gerry Berragan, the new chief executive of the IfA.
“These improvements should address these concerns.”
Emma Horne, co-chair of the Human Resources and Learning and Development trailblazer group, welcomed the changes.
“We very much look forward to simpler guidance, clear templates, best practice examples, the use of videos and webinars,” she said. “We think the idea of intensive workshops will really help speed things along too.”
Neil Carberry, director for people and skills at the Confederation of British Industry, added: “The Institute’s plans to put the customer front and centre will be heralded by those businesses who are developing quality training for our next generation of apprentices.
“Speeding up the standards process and improving support to trailblazer groups are vital steps to delivering a system that is responsive to needs on the ground.”
Revised IfA approach to qualifications within new apprenticeship standards
Ofsted will increase its focus on management and quality in subcontracting, according to its most senior director for FE and skills.
The letter is being sent out today by Paul Joyce, with new “sample based” monitoring visits on the horizon.
“This letter is to inform you that Ofsted will be increasing its focus on the management and quality of subcontracted provision on its inspections with effect from February 12, 2018,” he writes.
“We will do this primarily through our regular inspections of directly funded providers, as they are accountable for ensuring the quality of provision delivered by any subcontractors they choose to use.”
Inspection reports will, where relevant, contain “more detail about the quality and management of subcontracted provision and may refer to named subcontractors in the body of the report”.
Ofsted will be “undertaking a sample of risk-based monitoring visits to directly funded providers to look specifically at the management and quality of subcontracted provision for specific subcontractors”.
These monitoring visits will focus solely on provision delivered by the subcontractors, he added.
“Her Majesty’s chief inspector is concerned that all education and training provision should be ‘good’ or better, including provision that is subcontracted.
“Some recent inspections have underlined that poor management of subcontracted education and training can be a key reason for poor quality provision.
“You will wish to inform any subcontractors you have of this increased focus on subcontracted provision and the form it may take in terms of inspection and monitoring visits. To that end, we recommend that you forward this letter to them.”
There has been an increasing focus on how Ofsted monitors subcontracting in recent months.
The chair of the Commons education committee called last November for a “wholesale review” into why Ofsted had not yet inspected a single subcontractor more than a year after the rules changed.
“We need a wholesale review into subcontracting and whether it enhances or curtails quality apprenticeships,” he told FE Week.
“I strongly believe that Ofsted needs to make the inspection of subcontractors a priority.”
It is “wrong that so many subcontractors are not inspected”, he continued, as it is hard to know otherwise whether apprentices get the quality of training “they deserve”.
The rules appeared to change in September last year, when Ofsted inserted a line into its handbook to emphasise that it “reserves the right to inspect and grade any subcontractor and its provision as a separate entity”.
Mr Joyce also explained in today’s letter that the extra efforts about to be ploughed into keeping watch over subcontracting standards “may entail additional inspection resource”, especially on inspections where the directly funded provider uses multiple subcontractors.
That could help strengthen Ofsted’s requests for more funding.
There are growing worries about the extra strain on Ofsted’s limited resources, through the massive expansion in the number of approved apprenticeship providers.
Ms Spielman has repeatedly warned of the “challenge” faced by the education watchdog following the influx of new training providers who deliver apprenticeships.
A college rated ‘inadequate’ for its apprenticeship provision more than seven months ago was given special dispensation to remain on the register of apprenticeship training providers.
St Helens College (pictured) was given the lowest possible grade for apprenticeships in a report published last June, but has never been removed from the register – even though other providers with the same grade have.
In the same week that new rules were published outlining when and how providers would be removed from the register, the Department for Education admitted that the college was treated differently due to its merger with Knowsley Community College, which completed on December 12.
It explained that merged colleges are considered ungraded by Ofsted, and are eligible to apply to the register under exceptional circumstances – and it is on this basis that the college is still listed.
St Helens itself claimed it had been removed from the register, but that following the merger it had reapplied and “is registered as an approved provider.”
However, this claim is contradicted by the date the college was added to the register, which is listed as March 13, 2017.
The majority of current apprentices are making slow progress on their qualifications
Previously the agency had said it would “exercise its right to terminate contracts where a provider is not meeting the standards expected” – and that any provider with a grade four would be “removed from the register in due course”.
But under the new rules, published by the Education and Skills Funding Agency on January 30, an ‘inadequate’ provider would be given five days’ notice of their removal from the register and must not take on any new apprentices, any existing apprentices would be able to stay on only at the employers’ discretion.
“A provider with a grade four Ofsted rating is ineligible to apply to the register and it is right that a provider is removed if they are later assessed as inadequate,” a DfE spokesperson said.
Eight independent training providers along with St Helens College have been rated grade four for their apprenticeship provision since being added to the register.
Of those, six ITPs have all been removed – Community Training Services Limited, Be Totally You, Matrix Training and Development Limited, EQL Solutions Limited, Compass Group UK & Ireland and First City Training.
All six had their reports published more than three months ago.
A further two providers, London Skills and Development Network Ltd and NLT Training, were rated ‘inadequate’ in December and have yet to be removed from the register.
St Helens is the only college on the register to receive a grade four for its apprenticeship provision – and the only provider to remain on the register beyond the standard three-month contract termination period.
The college would not reveal whether it had taken on any new starts since the Ofsted report was published in mid-June.
But it had a non-levy allocation of £315,928 between May to December, according to the ESFA.
And the college has continued to promote its apprenticeships provision on its website, claiming that “we have an excellent reputation for delivering high-quality apprenticeships and traineeships across all sectors”.
“The majority of current apprentices are making slow progress on their qualifications; just under half of current apprentices have completed their qualification within their planned timescales,” the report, published on June 16, stated.
But according to minutes from a board meeting on July 10, the college’s overall and timely achievement rates were both above the national average – and that it “anticipates that the picture will continue to improve”.
Two former professional footballers and two other men have been found guilty of scamming colleges out of £5 million in apprenticeship funding, through a con which involved “ghost” learners.
Mark Aizlewood (above right), who played for Wales 39 times in the 1980s and 1990s, and Paul Sugrue (above left), who played for clubs including Manchester City, Middlesbrough and Cardiff City, had the verdicts delivered today at Southwark Crown Court, following a five month trial.
Two of their former colleagues at the now-defunct provider Luis Michael Training, Keith Williams, 45, from Anglesey, and Jack Harper, 30, from Southport, were also found guilty on fraud charges.
Throughout the trial, the court heard that LMT used its well-known footballing names to defraud the taxpayer between 2009 and 2011 by persuading nine colleges to use it as a subcontractor, using cash they got from the government to deliver apprenticeships.
Sparsholt College came out worst off, having signed contracts worth more than £4 million, although not all of this money was handed over before the scam was exposed.
Also involved were South Staffordshire College, Hopwood Hall College, Newbury College, Barnet College, Barry College, Leek College, Dearne Valley College and South Thames College.
Many of them were living the dream thinking they would be coaches for clubs like Manchester City – but it was a farce
The total value of all the contracts the colleges signed with Luis Michael Training was £5,188,355, of which more than £3.5 million was actually paid.
The losses were all reimbursed by the Skills Funding Agency.
For the con to work, LMT had to prove they had learners enrolled and ready to train. It did this in part by creating “ghost” learners – where the personal information of real people was used to claim apprenticeship funding. The use of their data was unbeknown to these “ghosts”.
Others actually enrolled, but they were vulnerable young people, most of whom were not in education, employment or training and had dropped out of school before 16.
A total of 3,008 learners, all aged 16 to 19, were hoodwinked in this way. Those enrolled were under the illusion that they were doing an apprenticeship in NVQ activity leadership, which would lead them to a career in football coaching.
Some were told that this was an accredited FA coaching scheme.
Using this lure of a career in football coaching, LMT even employed other high-profile former players, such as Welsh international Neville Southall, the Republic of Ireland’s Alan McLoughlin and Manchester United player Russell Beardsmore, as tutors to deliver some of the training.
The provider also used almost 150 professional football clubs as part of the scam, roping in big teams like Manchester City, Leeds United and Nottingham Forest.
They would receive a “facility fee” for employing the apprentices, often amounting to around £10,000.
When working at the clubs, the apprentices had tasks such as handing out match day programmes and sweeping floors – nothing to do with coaching.
“Many of them [the young people] were living the dream thinking they would be coaches for clubs like Manchester City and gain an NVQ – but it was a farce,” said a spokesperson for the Serious Fraud Office, which investigated the case.
The learners were having trouble putting food on the table for their families
The learners were meant to be given 20 hours of guided learning per week, but they actually received much less, with just two to three hours per week.
To give the impression that students had completed all academic aspects of the course, LMT used a number of young people on work experience from a school in Wales to complete tests learners had been supposed to complete, and filled in false learner comment reviews.
To persuade colleges to join agreements, the court heard that LMT forged due diligence paperwork and submitted false accounts purporting to show the provider had a history of trading profitably.
Of the millions of pounds claimed by LMT, Sugrue, 56, from Cardiff, took home the majority (£516,568), while Aizlewood, 57, from Aberdare, cashed £424,002.
The former stars were spending the money on day-to-day luxury items, such as Range Rovers, trips to Paris, and shopping sprees in Harrods.
In the meantime, the colleges were cash-strapped. Sparsholt in particular had to put off building programmes as a result of the financial loss.
The court heard that the learners, who were meant to be paid £95 in weekly wages but rarely received more than £10, couldn’t afford Christmas presents for their children because of the scam.
“We condemn the deliberate deceit and criminal actions of these fraudsters who have either admitted their guilt or been convicted and we hope this acts as a deterrent to others,” Tim Jackson, principal of Sparsholt College, said.
“The college is pleased to have fully co-operated with the Serious Fraud Office throughout this long and complex investigation and subsequent trial.”
He added that college worked “tirelessly” to ensure as many as possible of the affected learners were able to complete their apprenticeships.
“As an ex-international footballer, Mark Aizlewood knew the industry and how the system worked and his gravitas helped the company get in with colleges, football clubs and learners,” the SFO spokesperson said.
Mark Aizlewood playing for Wales
“As a result of the failure of Luis Michael Training, many of the learners were having trouble putting food on the table for their families.
“They then had to attend court and were nervous and scared of what that meant. Instead of transforming their futures, this ordeal had made many of them even more vulnerable.”
The Serious Fraud Office was made aware of the situation in 2011 and arrested the men in 2012, as reported by FE Week. They were finally brought to court in September 2017.
These were Christopher Martin, 53, from Newbury, who pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation, and Steven Gooding, 53, from Bridgwater, admitted one count of the same charge, both in relation to the case.
All of the defendants found guilty are to be sentenced on February 26.
A company approved to provide external quality assurance for digital apprenticeships will fold in September, in a situation described as an “unworkable short-term solution”.
The Institute for Apprenticeships approved the Tech Partnership for the role in December, two months after it announced plans to shut up shop.
The IfA also confirmed that if no suitable replacement is approved by September, it may itself have to take on the quality-assurance role for the sector, “either on a permanent basis or for however long is necessary to cover any transition”.
Other parts of the sector are not best pleased with the situation: a source from an end-point assessment organisation for digital apprenticeships, who asked not to be identified, has hit out at the IfA.
“There are already far too many questions surrounding EQA and apprenticeships. For the IfA to grant the Tech Partnership a short-term contract is unthinkable,” they said.
“What we need now more than ever is continuity, comparability and fairness not more uncertainty.
There are already far too many questions surrounding EQA and apprenticeships
“More effort needs to be concentrated on a successor for the EQA and encourage more positive press for apprenticeships, as opposed to fuelling the fire with unworkable short-term solutions.”
The decision has split opinion across the tech industry. Some providers believe that the Tech Partnership is a “sensible” short-term appointment and that a replacement will be ready for September.
The EQA provider will be auditing end-point assessment procedures, and EPA providers will foot the bill.
It will be able to mandate changes to EPA organisations’ activities and can invoke sanctions if these are not met.
EQA firms are obliged to report back to the IfA on the quality and consistency of assessment, as well as the general operation of the standard and assessment plan.
The Tech Partnership announced on January 8 that the IfA had officially recognised its new employer-led Digital Apprenticeship Quality Board, and would assume “immediate responsibility” for EQA.
The board includes representatives from Google, Sainsbury’s, Auto Trader UK, Inspired Energy and Delta Financial Systems.
“Its primary responsibilities are to review the quality of end-point assessment decisions and the internal quality-assurance processes of all organisations approved by the IfA to administer EPA,” a spokesperson for the IfA said.
Responsibility for EQA “will be transferred to another organisation”, before Tech Partnership closes.
“This involves employers, through the Digital Apprenticeship Quality Board, deciding on the best approach, and overseeing an orderly handover,” he added.
“The most important point is that we now have over 5,500 digital trailblazer apprentices studying, and hundreds of apprentices now undertaking end-point assessment.
“It was therefore agreed that it was in the best interests of a rapidly growing body of learners and employers to establish an EQA panel as soon as possible to establish consistency, comparability and quality in the assessment process, and that the Tech Partnership was the best-placed organisation to arrange this on an interim basis.”
The Tech Partnership, which has not received a letter from the IfA confirming its EQA appointment, announced on October 4 that it would close the following September.
Its income in 2016 was £7.1 million, but its latest accounts show this had fallen to £2.45 million in 2017. The organisation retained just under £4 million in assets minus liabilities.
NOCN boss Graham Hasting-Evans has previously described situations in which the government’s own EQA regulator, the IfA, will effectively have to regulate itself for a number of sectors, as “bizarre”.
An IfA spokesperson said the Tech Partnership had been “very open about its position” and had been “working closely with the Institute and the relevant trailblazer groups in order to assure the quality of specific apprenticeships and to support the transition to an alternative EQA provider from late 2018”.
Robert Halfon is set to give the keynote address on the theme of social justice and skills at an event run by the Centre of Social Justice, the Learning and Work Institute, and the Open University on Monday morning.
The chair of the Commons education select committee will set out his vision for how FE and HE can help the economy grow and deliver social justice.
FE Week has highlighted six of Mr Halfon’s ideas for how this can happen.
Tapered levy payments for employers taking on disadvantaged apprentices
Mr Halfon – who has previously spoken passionately about the need to better support disadvantaged apprentices – will urge the government to be “smarter” about how the levy is used.
“We could, for example, introduce a taper allowing employers to pay smaller contributions if they develop apprenticeships for disadvantaged pupils, and if they address skills shortages,” he will say.
“Once we are clear about what works best, we could then make a powerful case for expanding the levy.”
Massive roll-out of degree apprenticeships
The former skills minister will repeat his earlier call for half of university students to be on degree apprenticeships – but also to propose a penalty for those universities that don’t offer them.
“There are currently just 11,600 degree apprenticeships. I hope that one day, half of all university students are doing them,” he will say.
He will urge the government to “ring-fence some of the enormous public subsidy that still goes to universities, so that universities can only draw down on this protected funding stream if they offer degree apprenticeships,” by way of incentive.
Functional skills not GCSE English and maths
He will add his voice to those of other major sector figures, including Mark Dawe, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, by calling for the controversial GCSE English and maths resit policy to be scrapped.
“FE can be a vital player in helping the current and next generation build the basic skills they need,” he will say.
“However, rather than swallow valuable resources by insisting on retakes for those who fail English and maths (with failure rates of over two thirds in each case), we should be offering these individuals functional skills courses to improve their basic literacy and numeracy.”
Better support for FE colleges to deliver higher-level and technical courses
“There is a strong need for intermediate skills,” Mr Halfon will say – rather than the “over-supply” of graduates that currently exists.
Instead, he will propose that colleges “which are ideally place to offer flexible and local options” should be “better supported and incentivised to deliver intermediate and higher technical courses”.
Universities as centres of technical excellence
The “graduate premium” – the extra money that a graduate will earn over their lifetime compared with a non-graduate – “varies wildly”, he will say – with some returns “paltry”.
As part of his plans for “rebalancing higher education” he will suggest that universities “that do not provide a good return on academic courses could reinvent themselves as centres of technical excellence”.
Clear routes from FE into HE
Mr Halfon will call for the creation of “clear routes” from FE into HE, which could be supported through “Next-step loans for individual higher education modules”.
“To build a continuum of learning, we must also make it easy for people to learn flexibly throughout their lives,” he will say.
Strict rules that apprenticeships cannot involve qualifications are set to be overturned next week, FE Week understands, potentially unsticking a series of standards held up for years by the ban.
The Institute for Apprenticeships is expected to announce that qualifications, such as technical certificates that show evidence of knowledge, will be considered in the future.
Both existing qualifications and those in development will be covered in the rule change, representing a significant U-turn on previous guidance.
The change – revealed exclusively to FE Week by a source close to the IfA – will be welcomed by many across the sector.
Current rules state that, except in “certain specific circumstances”, standards “should not incorporate qualifications”.
Exceptions exist where a qualification is a “licence to practise”, where one is required for professional registration, or if an apprentice’s career would be held back without it.
Last summer the rules were tightened to include a bar on allowing employer groups to submit a standard for approval if it includes a qualification that’s still in development.
Minutes from a board meeting held earlier that month reveal an upcoming shift in the rules.
These indicate that the board agreed to proposals from a presentation on mandatory qualifications, but noted that “there needed to be effective communication on the changes to both trailblazers and relationship managers”.
The minutes also reveal that, for the first time, Ms Milton attended the meeting, held on December 6.
A spokesperson for the IfA confirmed that this had been the skills minister’s first meeting, but declined to comment on the nature of the changes, ahead of a February 6 briefing on its ‘Faster and Better’ programme.
Since the IfA became operational in April last year, the process of standard development appears to have slowed down.
The number of standards approved for delivery fell from 84 in 2016, to 63 in 2017, according to the IfA’s own figures.
In total, just 222 (42 per cent) of the current 531 standards approved for development are available for delivery.
In a wide-ranging interview in November, Ms Milton told FE Week that she understood “where the sticking points are, where we need to put some oil on the wheels” in the apprenticeships process.
“Anything that the IfA does, anything on standards, it needs to be quick and responsive,” she said.
Anthony Elgey, the general manager at MP Futures, which is responsible for the national occupational standards for the quarrying, mineral products and mining sectors, told FE Week he’d been “fighting from the very beginning” to have qualifications included in standards for those sectors.
These included qualifications that were required by the Health and Safety Executive for someone to be permitted to work unsupervised.
But despite it appearing to fit the IfA’s criteria for an exception to the general rule, Mr Elgey said he’d been told “flat out” by the IfA that “you either remove that qualification requirement or we will never approve it”.
Without frameworks or standards the sectors could use for the last four years, “we’ve been turning apprentices away,” Mr Elgey said.
Richard Longthorp, the lead for three agriculture standards, said the issue of qualifications had “delayed the finalisation of the standards by a good 18 months”.
He enlisted the support of agriculture minister George Eustice, who raised the issue in a meeting with then-skills minister Robert Halfon, but “they still kicked it out”.
Meanwhile, Sarah McMonagle, the lead for two master builder standards, said employers in her sector had hoped to develop a “rebranded, high-quality, all-singing, all-dancing qualification” to include as the existing ones weren’t up to scratch – “but were told no”.
Employers are not alone in lobbying on the issue.
In a briefing paper published in September, the Association of Employment and Learning Providers argued that their omission “could adversely affect portability and transferability, while making it difficult to make comparisons between standards of level and breadth”.
The return of qualifications to apprenticeships is at the heart of the IfA’s ‘faster and better’ regime
The Institute for Apprenticeships, under the new regime of Sir Gerry Berragan, launched its assault against government red tape in December.
Under the heading “faster and better”, the IfA outlined a number of improvements it would make in 2018.
“We’ve always recognised some of the systems, policies and processes we inherited needed improving,” it acknowledged.
In addition to clarified qualification rules, it promised to work with the Department for Education to refresh policy in a number of areas, including occupation and standards criteria.
The institute committed to “developing a quicker and more transparent system for making funding band recommendations” aligned to a new approvals process, “to cut out unnecessary stages and make sure new apprenticeships are ready as quickly as possible”.
It’s also pledged to speed up the process of standards development, with new two-day workshops on offer “to complete the writing of standards or assessment plans from start to finish, saving about a third of the usual time”.
It also plans work with the groups so that “standards and EPA plans can be submitted and approved in parallel, saving about six weeks from the end-to-end process”.
Other promises included a simplified process for reviewing standards, fixed templates for drafting proposals, standards and assessment plans, “strong upfront support for trailblazers” and improved communications.
Two huge colleges are walking away from their 14-to-16 provision because the government’s new progress measures are too “onerous” and damaging to their reputation, FE Week can reveal.
London South East Colleges was the third-biggest college recruiter in this age group last year, and its principal has described the situation as a “travesty”.
NCG, one of the largest college groups in the country, is the other formally putting a stop to the provision more commonly known as “direct entry”.
It showed that the 17 colleges which offered direct entry last year scored -2.10 on average, by far the lowest of any type of educational institution (see Progress 8 explainer below).
Individual data was also published, and showed that all but one of the colleges were below the government’s floor standard of -0.5.
In an FE Week expert article, LSEC’s principal Sam Parrett (pictured above) describes the negative reputational impacts of this “misleading” measure on the wider college, which is rated ‘good’ by Ofsted, and claims direct entry is simply now too big a reputational risk.
Her college had 122 students in direct entry last year, with a Progress 8 average of -2.57.
“Every single student in our own year 11 cohort progressed successfully into employment, further education or training,” she said, asking: “Is this really what ‘underperforming’ looks like?”
But rather than being able to celebrate this success, Ms Parrett explained her board had to take the decision last year to close its 14-to-16 provision.
“Despite these young people making up less than one per cent of our total student community, the effect of these league tables on the reputation of our wider college is a risk we can’t afford to take,” she wrote.
“This is a travesty for young people in Bromley who wanted and indeed needed a technical alternative to mainstream school.”
She added that her college is not alone in its “disappointment” and expects others will “sadly have to follow suit”, a prediction that has proved true.
A spokesperson for NCG, also rated ‘good’ by Ofsted, had a cohort of 18 direct-entry students last year, who scored an average of -3.26.
A spokesperson told FE Week that the college had made the decision to stop direct recruitment in 2016 and “focus on school partnerships instead as the requirements to comply with Progress 8 and other national curriculum requirements were proving onerous in relation to the number of learners”.
Independent school data analyst Philip Nye, who works at the research group Education Datalab, is asking whether Progress 8 is an “appropriate” performance measure for colleges, and said it’s “clearly having big unintended consequences if it’s forcing them to consider whether they continue doing so”.
While the loss of 14-to-16 delivery at two high-profile colleges will be damning news to the government, it appears its progress measures are not the final nail in the coffin for direct entry.
Two colleges, South and City College Birmingham and Northumberland College, took on cohorts of 14-year-olds for the first time in September 2017.
This will keep the number of college delivering direct entry this year at 17.
Like nearly every other colleges currently delivering 14-to-16 provision, both are backing the Association of Colleges’ wishes to change how the “extremely misleading” Progress 8 measures are reported.
Alison Maynard
“It is like comparing apples and oranges”, said principal of Newbury College, Dr Anne Murdoch.
Nevertheless, she insisted that her college would continue to recruit key stage 4 students as it “provides an important service” to young people who’ve had barriers to learning at mainstream school.
East Durham College principal Suzanne Duncan said that for the DfE to present “the performance of our college’s near-4,000 learners in this way is extremely misleading to the public and detracts from the excellent achievements of so many of our students”.
Alison Maynard, the Tyne Coast College principal, described the data as a “slap in the face” for colleges who are “actually looking at alternative provision for all levels of learners”.
But she isn’t allowing this setback to stop her college delivering the provision.
“The devil is in the detail not the data,” she said. “Where are these young people ever going to get education if we pull away another opportunity for them?”
A spokesperson for Hugh Baird College agreed that the general public was “unlikely” to understand how “poorly” the Progress 8 measure fits the unique provision of direct entry, and that results would have a “negative impact” on the college as a whole’s reputation.
Niki McKenna, deputy head of Leeds City College’s 14+ Apprenticeship Academy, added that this provision offers an “invaluable lifeline” to young people who are struggling in mainstream education and shouldn’t be stopped.
The expert view: Colleges are treated ‘very harshly’
An independent researcher believes colleges are being harshly treated by the government when it comes to Progress 8.
The performance measure, brought in by the Department for Education in 2016, looks at the progress a pupil has made between the end of primary school and follows their results across eight GCSEs, comparing their achievement with other students of similar ability.
Schools are judged against the measure every year, and are considered to be below the floor standard if, on average, students score half a grade less (-0.5) across these eight GCSEs.
The government believes this to be a “fairer way” to assess overall school and college effectiveness, because unlike the previous five A*-C headline measure, Progress 8 allows them to “get credit for the good work they do with all their pupils, not just those on the C/D borderline”.
Philip Nye
But Philip Nye, a researcher at Education Datalab, believes college key stage 4 provision is unique and they are being judged “very harshly” as it stands, with almost all finding themselves below the DfE’s floor standard as a result.
“Pupils will only have spent two years in these institutions, and in many cases they will be pupils who wouldn’t have done well had they stayed at a mainstream school,” he explained.
“Progress 8 also measures the performance of pupils entering a majority-academic basket of subjects – and these institutions don’t always have curriculums well aligned with P8, so inevitably they do badly.
“We’d make the case – as we have with alternative provision – that mainstream schools should retain accountability for pupils who leave to pursue an education at a college.”
There is no automatic consequence to being below the Progress 8 floor standard, but scores are used as one factor when deciding if a school or college requires government intervention.
A Department for Education spokesperson claimed the data is “just a starting point for a conversation” about college performance.
“We are clear that while colleges should not be judged on the basis of 2017 figures alone, they are an important part of the picture of a school or college’s overall performance.”
She added the overall picture of Progress 8 is “one of stability” and many colleges are “rising to the challenge of higher standards.”
