Latest news from FE Week | FE Week

Is it wrong to make GCSE grade 4 our college entry requirement?

Dr Sue, director of policy and external relations at Holex, answers your questions on college governance, backed by her experience as principal of Canterbury College and in senior civil service posts in education and skills.

Question One: GCSE grade 5

You have previously urged colleges to set the new GCSE grade 5 as their entry criteria for English and maths. We debated the issue but went with management’s recommendation of grade 4. Were we wrong?

Answer: I wouldn’t go as far to say you were wrong and I don’t think a single college in an area can take a solitary stance. This has to be done with all your feeder schools and other colleges. However, I think it is a lost opportunity to collectively raise achievement.

The changes were brought in to raise standards and while I appreciate that many educators in our colleges don’t like the focus on end examinations and cannot see why grading has been changed to numbers, it is now in operation and we need to work with it.

The basic issue is that schools are judged on how many of their pupils get “5s” and 5+ is better for pupils’ prospects, so setting entry requirements at grade 4 (and letting pupils know that nine months before they take their exams) sends the wrong message.

This undermines schools when they are saying and working with children to get a grade 5 or above. This is an area where schools and colleges need to work together and not undercut each other.

Question Two: Valuing governors

Is the government prepared to acknowledge and value the work governors do in supporting adult education?

Answer: It does sometimes feel like that the sector isn’t valued. This year, however, there has been much more interest in adult education. The Financial Times and the Economist have both covered it. The Joseph Rowntree Trust is calling for five million adults to receive support for basic skills and all three political parties talk about lifelong learning in the post-Brexit world.

We are waiting for DfE to announce what the National Retraining Scheme will look like and we still have the commitment to English and maths entitlement for adults.

But this is not enough. We still do not have a national ESOL strategy or a political narrative on adult education, when both Scotland and Wales do.

On whether governors are valued, we know that DfE is doing further work on governance and we are always told that government does value the work they do. But it would be good to see some evidence of that, maybe in speeches or annual letters – something for the minister’s speech in November perhaps?

Question Three: Link Governor

How can I as a link governor spot where teaching quality may be declining before poor results make it apparent?

Answer: You need to follow the relevant policies. Before you make a visit, you should look at recent performance data and the latest self-assessment report and speak to the head of that subject area about any issues you think you may come across. One of the purposes of the visit is to triangulate information given to you and reality.

When you make your visit, speak to the teacher and the students; both are normally forthcoming with information especially when they are not happy. If you feel that the class lacks focus or students are not confident in talking about their goals, discuss with the programme lead whether this is normal. Remember you are not there to inspect but to feel secure that the senior leadership has a handle on any issues you encounter.

Ex-ITP boss on trial for alleged Sunderland College fraud

The ex-chief executive of a training provider and her former colleagues are on trial for allegedly defrauding a college and private provider out of almost £460,000.

Joanne Mounter, aged 46, from Willington, Paula Bolan, 45, from Gateshead, and Kym Adrian Norman, 53, from Sunderland, stand accused of fraud by false representation against Sunderland College between July 2014 and December 2015.

The trial, which is expected to last two days, has been set for December 14.

It is alleged that the trio, who appeared before Sunderland Magistrates’ Court on August 8, “dishonestly and intending thereby to make a gain for themselves or another” made representations to Sunderland College through invoices for a total of £304,858, “which was and which they knew was untrue”.

Ms Mounter and Ms Bolan are also accused of defrauding an independent training provider, Springboard Sunderland Trust.

They are alleged to have made representations to Springboard “through invoices presented, namely that a total of £154,674.01 was payable, which was and which they knew was untrue”.

As reported by the Sunderland Echo, it is understood the charges relate to their roles at Team Wearside, a training provider and charity based in Sunderland.

Ms Mounter was its chief executive, while Ms Bolan was quality and compliance manager, and Ms Norman was an assessor.

Team Wearside, a training charity, provides mainly apprenticeships and traineeships in a range of sectors including health and social care, and hospitality and catering.

According to Education and Skills Funding Agency figures, it had an apprenticeships and traineeships allocation worth £1.16 million in 2016/17, with an additional £99,000 for delivering adult education.

Team Wearside is also listed as a main provider on the register of apprenticeship training providers, and a subcontractor for both the lead providers that were allegedly defrauded, according to the ESFA’s most recent list of declared subcontractors.

That list, dated May 5, showed Team Wearside’s subcontract for Springboard Sunderland to be worth £182,000, while its subcontract for Sunderland College was worth a much smaller £29,146.

However, both confirmed this week that Team Wearside is no longer subcontracting for them.

Team Wearside declined to provide a comment for this article, stating that it “would be inappropriate to comment while the case is ongoing”.

FE Week asks: Neil Bentley on the vital role of WorldSkills

As Team UK packed their belongings and headed to the sandy deserts of Abu Dhabi for WorldSkills 2017, FE Week’s senior reporter Billy Camden caught up with WorldSkills UK’s boss Neil Bentley on the importance of the event given our country’s prominent new skills agenda.

The government’s desire to turn the UK into a nation of skills was made clear last week when Theresa May spelt out plans to create a “first-class” technical education system “for the first time in our history”.

WorldSkills UK’s chief believes this pledge shows just how important an event like the one taking place in Abu Dhabi is to the prime minister’s goals.

“This is bigger than just a competition,” he said.

“These contests are a means to an end but more importantly they act as a platform for government and business and young people to come together, and from a UK perspective, showcase the young talent we’ve got and who we are nurturing and developing.

“There is no better way of role modelling what the UK’s young people can achieve than by demonstrating it through skills competitions.”

He added that “inward investors won’t invest anywhere” if they can’t see a country has got the skills workforce, so WorldSkills in Abu Dhabi is the “perfect platform to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we have got what it takes to succeed post-Brexit”.

It has become well-known that WorldSkills UK needs more funding to keep pumping out the hot talent it does year-in, year-out.

Worryingly, government grants for the organisation have dropped by almost half over the past four years.

But Mr Bentley says he has cause to be upbeat about the company’s future.

“I would say the government really does get the importance of skills competitions and their interest has been increasing over the past year and that has no doubt been to do with the alignment around the agenda of
apprenticeships and technical education,” he explained.

“We have agreed with government to tighten our belt and have set a five-year business plan to bring more commercial funding to the business.

“At the moment, 60 per cent of our funding comes from government and the other 40 per cent from the private sector and other sources. We now need to balance that up so that more is coming in from the commercial side.”

He added that with skills minister Anne Milton visiting Abu Dhabi during competition it shows “we are all in this together”.

With a final word on the competition ahead, Mr Bentley said “success” for him in the Middle East would be for Team UK to maintain its top-10 position in the medal rankings.

“We know we will have a tough fight on our hands and the competition will be as hot as the temperatures in Abu Dhabi but we are gunning to do our level best to maintain our top 10.”

Machiavellian advice for college principals

Principals are often maligned, but they’re only mirroring government policy, argues Damien Page

It is not hard to find criticism of college principals: academic literature is littered with it, the trade press is awash with it, social media thrives on it, and the staffrooms of colleges mutter it constantly. Principals are greedy, overpaid, uncaring, narcissistic, ignorant of pedagogy, anti-autonomy, and a barrier to professional practice. In short, principals embody the worst excesses of neoliberalism.

Yet what is forgotten is the difficulty of being a principal. The environment is unstable, perpetually in turmoil, tossed on the winds of fortune by ministers that never quite know what to do with the FE sector. Colleges are complex organizations containing myriad tensions, be they financial, human and technological.

When people engage in disparaging commentary about principals, they forget about the external environment. Their criticism often positions principals in a vacuum where they are masters of their own fiefdom, governing capriciously for personal gain.

Yes, principals may make massive cuts to their staffing and they may impose new contracts that increase contact hours or make more use of zero-hours contracts; they may even create environments where teachers are continually surveilled and evaluated. But let us remember that these are not the voluntary acts of managerialist despotism that they may at first appear. The principal acts not in a context of governmental concern for the FE sector but in a context where FE is an afterthought, an easy target of austerity cuts that create little public outcry.

Colleges are not isolated outposts in control of their destiny. They can be merged as a result of area reviews, they can have whole sections of a curriculum removed through financial strangulation, they can have GCSE retakes foisted upon them to the detriment of vocational education. The principal’s sole responsibility is the survival of their college and the education of their students, and if that is threatened they must take whatever action is necessary, and pacifism in the face of an invading force is rarely successful.

Colleges are not isolated outposts in control of their destiny

Principals must engage fortune on its own terms: neoliberal responses for neoliberal times, autocracy for an autocratic government. The lamentations of academics’ insightful criticism of policy in peer-reviewed journals have not halted the march of funding cuts to colleges; the wailing of the left-wing press at the redundancies resulting from forced mergers has not stalled the march of devastation. No, principals are the ones keeping the neoliberal wolf from the door and ensuring students continue to be educated. The question is how. Machiavelli had a clear answer to this question: “I believe also that he will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of the times, and that he whose actions do not accord with the times will not be successful.”

What is required from leaders is that they choose a strategy that is congruent with the context. Machiavelli himself was a product of his times and The Prince was written in a dangerous context of intrigue, political manoeuvring, torture and assassinations. It was no time to recommend virtue, fairness and pacifism; it was a time to choose behaviours and strategies that could adequately combat the dangers of political life.

Principals, then, similarly need to select their actions according to the context, adopting a bullish neoliberalism to combat the invading horde of neoliberal governmental aggression. If colleges are forced to operate within a marketised topography, principals would be foolish if they didn’t in turn ground their strategy within the most marketised strategy of marketisation possible; when they are faced with performativity, the prudent strategy is to fashion the most performative institution they can create. In this context the principal who survives, whose college survives, is the one who becomes a paragon of neoliberalism.

In times characterized by ferocity of competition, where colleges have become players within the commodified education marketplace, where the government imposes throttling systems of performativity, where the sector continues to be stripped of resources, there is no place for lambs; there is only a place for foxes and lions.

This is an abridged version of a chapter in The Principal: Power and Professionalism in FE, edited by Marie Daley, Kevin Orr and Joel Petrie.

Damien Page is dean of the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University

Martin Doel, FETL Professor of Leadership in FE and Skills, Institute of Education, UCL

After eight years at the helm of the Association of Colleges, Martin Doel left in 2016 to take up the world’s first university chair in FE leadership. FE Week paid him a visit in his new post at UCL to find out how his life as an academic is shaping up.

Since leaving the Association of Colleges, one of the hardest things former chief executive Martin Doel has had to do is manage his own diary.

“It sounds pathetic” he admits, “but I realise now how much work Cheryl used to do for me, sorting out the world at the AoC.”

He’s also had to work out what gets him out of bed in the morning, without a team to lead – or “serve”, as he puts it. As chief executive of the AoC, and before that throughout a multitude of leadership roles in the RAF, his motivation was “a wish not to let down those people who look to you as the head of the organisation”. As a professor, conversely, “you’ve got to find the motivation to get on and do things from within yourself and your own intellectual curiosity”.

So 18 months into his three-year FETL professorship, where has curiosity led the 60-year-old ex-air commodore?

First, Doel wants to carve out a clearer definition of further education for the public, because “it defies easy definition”. Having spent years lobbying politicians on behalf of the sector, he movingly describes FE as “a survivor” which “does almost anything or everything. It’s mistreated. Neglected.

And when it’s not neglected, it’s subject to direction from people what don’t necessarily know much about what it is.”

Doel is a clever, thoughtful man, who despite having held academic posts before, at King’s College London during his time in the RAF, is patently uncomfortable with his current incarnation as a professor (or perhaps with sounding like one, to the ex-colleagues who will likely read this interview).

Every time he uses an even slightly erudite turn of phrase, he apologises for sounding “a bit pretentious” – as he does after he sums up, by lamenting that FE has “no unifying narrative”.

But his argument is simple: “There’s this act-react-act-react deal with the next crisis, you know; the register of approved training providers has gone wrong, the adult education budget procurement is causing problems. LearnDirect falls over. And there’s a scandal.”

I don’t think you can define the whole of further education; it encapsulates so many different things

In what feels like a slightly backhanded compliment, he assures me “Nick [Linford] and FE Week do a great job in this”.

But what we don’t often do is look at the pattern underneath it, the trend, which is where people like Doel come in. He sets his own research agenda: “academic independence is still alive and well”, he announces, as if genuinely surprised.

In that admirable yet infuriating way that academics refuse to simplify, the conclusion to the question he posed two minutes earlier is frustratingly lacking: “I don’t think you can define the whole of further education; it encapsulates so many different things.”

What individual institutions can do, however, is get a “firm sense” of their core purpose, which allows them to evaluate opportunities more wisely – and turn them down if they don’t fit.

“One of the key things that enhances your ability to deal with complexity is having a firm sense of yourself,” he says.

So what else has he been working on, apart from, in conjunction with FETL?

“Feeling our way forward” to work out what the chair’s role should be, and figuring out how to “be a good colleague” to the other academics at IoE, he jokes.

But he’s also been pondering how to turn the “moment” vocational education is enjoying, into a “long-term direction of travel”. His colleagues at IoE call it a “vocational turn” – a phrase he’s not quite comfortable with. “Older hands in further education” will say the sector has been here before; “it’s a hundred-year problem”, as the Sainsbury report showed.

So what could give the technical education revival more permanent status? T-levels is one element.

“We have a moment where practical learning, technical education comes to the fore, and then what I call academic drift, or the gravitational pull of the academic, pulls it back in again,” he explains. “So I think it’s really, really interesting to see whether or not T-levels become, for instance, distinctive, really distinctive.”

This will depend on several factors, assessment being one. If they’re assessed in the same way as A-levels, he warns, by written exams, “they will just become A-levels in STEM subjects. That’s not the same as technical professional education.”

Assessment has to fit a context in which “practice precedes theory”. Judgment skills should also be valued; as an ex-airforceman, he uses an example of servicing a plane. While there is a “right way and a wrong way” to do it and you don’t want people “experimenting on the wrong bits of it, I do want them to be innovative”. In a military context, if all the systems aren’t operating, but you want to know to what extent a plane can fly, “judgment skills become important”.

If you’re going to do an epoch changing approach to our educational system, you don’t try and do it in the lifetime of one parliament

Another factor is the difficulty level. He envisions T-levels as “high status”, which means they should be “difficult to complete and difficult to deliver”.

In other words, they are “not for the 50 per cent of the population that don’t do academic”.

Whether T-levels manage to live up to the hype will be pivotal, he admits, as “there will come a point if the reality is not consistent with the brand, that trust is lost”.

He insists that the development process should be performed in “a really consultative way but also a careful way, thinking about it more deeply” and take four or five years.

“If you’re going to do an epoch changing approach to our educational system, you don’t try and do it in the lifetime of one parliament,” he explains.

One observation that should hearten the sector is that he finds it hard to see how any schools would be easily able to deliver a T-level, due to the need for “industry-standard facilities” and close links with industry. If you don’t have all that, he says, “then it shouldn’t be a T-level”. Colleges, on the other hand are “absolutely” the place to deliver them.

He posits T-levels as access routes to apprenticeships, which should be grouped into “families that correspond with the route” and envisages a “really big piece of work aligning the apprenticeship standards with T-level routes”.

All well and good, but how does he envision these ponderings having an impact on the world of policy? Is anyone listening?

One perk of the post, he explains, is that he’s “inside the academic machine” at the “world’s leading educational research organisation”. This has two benefits: one, he can begin to impact some of the other academics working at UCL about further education and skills. Two, he can connect with academics already working in the field.

But will anything penetrate outside the ivory (or concrete, in the case of UCL) towers?

The key, he insists, is that his is a “public policy professorship”. Academics “quite often write for each other and solve problems for each other but it never gets out and affects practice”. Moreover, much of current FE research “isn’t as connected to practice in colleges and providers as it could be and most often it’s not done by people in the sector.”

His remedies seem relatively mundane: the usual round tables and lectures. But I can’t help thinking, as he outlines his vision, that it’s unfair of me to put lofty (sector-changing) expectations on this professor of FE with a mandate for public engagement, just because he’s the first of his kind. In fact, quite the opposite.

Doel laments the demise of the “old further education staff college” where college managers would go for study retreats during the 1990s, and which gave the sector an “intellectual home”. Similar organisations have since come and gone: “We just cycle through these things.”

One can’t help but wonder whether this professorship isn’t precisely one of those things and just as he hits his stride, bam! it will come to an end. Let’s hope the powers that be have a contingency plan mapped out…

It’s a personal thing

What do you miss most about AoC?
Having a PA to sort out my diary. And having a team that I felt I worked for.

Where was your favourite RAF posting?
RF Brunton and Witton, when I was station commander at both and merged them with a third station. But it wouldn’t be my favourite place now. It was the right place for me at that time. Every time you have a good moment in life, it’s a good moment at that time.

Being in Cyprus could equally be my favourite when I was in my late 20s, on top of the mountain, 45 miles away from a grown-up, working in a local community. Or it could have been in Germany, when I was deputy base commander and we were supporting operations in the Balkans and had people going into northern Iraq.

Where would you escape to for a month?

Trancoso, Bahia state, Brazil. It’s a resort embedded in a village in an undeveloped part of Brazil. We went to Brazil for three weeks when I finished the AoC, instead of going to the AoC conference last year.

We lived in a treehouse, but the rooms are very luxurious. The weather was in and out, Brazilians are really friendly. Just completely chilled.

What’s your favourite film?

Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence came from close to where I lived, in the New Forest, and his story is just fascinating.

He’s a flawed character but the way he went back after the First World War and became a private soldier there, an aircraftman in the Air Force, but at the same time was sending letters to Churchill. Then he had a role in designing power boats, which were used for rescue boats in the Second World War.

And you know, the film is just stunning visually, when you see him come out of the desert. I saw it as an early teenager. Sitting in a cinema, when you’re from a working-class background, which is one of the few things you could afford to go out and do, when you were about as big as a spot on Clint Eastwood’s chin, in the complete dark. It was all about the immersive experience.

What is the action plan for T-Levels?

FE Week’s resident policy expert, Gemma Gathercole, dissects the DfE’s latest document…

More than a year after the post-16 skills plan, and seven months on from the announcement of more funds to support its implementation, the DfE has published an update in the form of its T-levels action plan. But what does this action plan tell us, what are the next steps and, critically, which questions remain?

My overriding takeaway from the action plan is consultation: a word that gets no fewer than 10 mentions and is critical to successful implementation. However, what I think is more interesting is what’s open for consultation and what seems to be fixed. This will be the first opportunity for the sector and for employers, who weren’t part of the independent panel, to have their say.

The consultation will be launched by the end of 2017 and will cover a range of issues from the implications of this policy for current provision, to design principles for the T-levels themselves. I am sure they will be widely welcomed.

How many young people will be able to make an informed choice about whether to follow an academic or technical route at 16?

I also note a subtle change of tone in this action plan, which I’m sure will be welcomed, from the focus on consultation, to the need to discuss implications with a wide audience including providers and awarding organisations, making this the most inclusive document yet on the skills plan proposals. The planned “college-based route” is now called the “provider-based route”.

Perhaps of most interest to providers is the announcement of who will be able to offer provision and when. Although the intention to phase in the T-levels by sector and by the number of providers available to deliver has been openly discussed, the action plan explicitly sets out that phasing. Only a small number of providers will offer the first three pathways from 2020 and selected providers will offer the first routes in 2022.

The majority of providers will only offer T-levels from 2024. But which providers are these? We’ll have to wait a little longer to find out, as the DfE will publish further information later in the autumn for the 2020 process, and in spring 2018 for 2021.

There are also four big questions that remain largely unanswered and answering them will be crucial to the success of the policy.

The first is on bridging provision – where is the policy and does it really support learners to move between the academic and technical pathways?

There is only one mention in the action plan and that’s “coming soon”. Without the existence of bridging provision or understanding of how students move between the pathways, the policy risks creating silos that serve to limit ambition rather than support progression.

READ MORE: Will T-levels falter through a lack of work placements?

Regarding the “transition year”, or more specifically, what provision will be available for those not yet ready for level three study, what does the policy cover and does it have to be a year? Here we’re better served by mentions in the plan, and there is reference to research already undertaken.

But the detail is what matters here, so there will be much for the promised consultation to deliver on, and while the timetable focuses on the development of T-levels, it’s important that this transition year is available for implementation.

And what of plans for level four and five provision: what does the plan look like, when is it going to be delivered and how will it support progression?

Getting this right is hard, as the action plan recognises provision at this level is more complex, offered by a wider range of providers and supporting a wider range of learner ages and needs. However, our skills shortages do not start and end with young people; we have shortages among technician-level staff and in some sectors a rapidly retiring workforce. There’s little progress to be seen in the action plan and not even a promise to consult. More work is needed.

Finally, and perhaps the most critical question yet: how many young people will be able to make an informed choice about whether to follow an academic or technical route at 16? Is this binary divide practical?

I look forward to reading the long-awaited careers strategy promised for the autumn; perhaps I’ll even be able to answer my own question.

Gemma Gathercole is head of funding and assessment at Lsect

Outgoing ESFA chief takes “personal responsibility” for Learndirect decisions

The outgoing head of the ESFA has claimed personal responsibility for the decision not to terminate Learndirect’s adult education budget contract after its ‘inadequate’ Ofsted rating.

Although the DfE’s permanent secretary Jonathan Slater denied at the same meeting that the UK’s largest training provider had been given special treatment, Peter Lauener insisted it had been his decision to “take a different approach”.

The ESFA rule is to “typically terminate the contract and seek a better provider, subject to protecting the interests of learners”.

However, even though he first became aware at the end of March of Ofsted’s intention to hand out a grade four, Mr Lauener made the decision to allocate Learndirect £45 million of funding to pay for current and new courses for 12 months until July 2018.

Meg Hillier, the chair of the public accounts committee, asked Mr Lauener if Learndirect “was too big to fail” during a meeting on October 12.

“No, it wasn’t,” he replied. “In fact, we had a contingency team set up to allow us to put in place our standard closure arrangements if we judged that was the right thing to do.

“But, and I take personal responsibility for this, I looked at the case very carefully, and I felt the right thing to do in terms of continuity of provision for learners and other service users – Learndirect runs two big testing processes with significant numbers of people getting tests for citizenship and teacher skills tests – so I took the view that we should take a different approach in this case.”

Mr Slater added that his decision not to issue a three-month termination notice came about because of the impact for learners and because Learndirect had received grade three ratings in several categories despite an overall grade four – something Ms Hillier described as “hardly a ringing endorsement”.

“Learndirect have written to me welcoming the NAO and their team in to look at their books, so their books will be open to the NAO too as I understand it,” she went on.

“And we will no doubt consider whether we will invite them in as well and it’s likely to be in January so just to give you warning. I think, Mr Lauener, it will be your successor we have to invite.”

Mr Slater then jokingly encouraged her to “invite him back”.

Mr Lauener is due to retire from his post at the end of November, but insisted he would be “happy” to come back and face the committee.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have said that,” joked Mr Slater, the DfE’s most senior civil servant.

Mr Lauener added: “We considered very carefully what was the best thing to do. Our starting point with an Ofsted ‘inadequate’ expansion is the presumption what we would terminate the contract with three months’ notice.

“We’ve had 27 cases in the last two years, but in four of those, not counting Learndirect, we’ve terminated with more than three months’ notice – with between four and six months’ notice.”

Ofsted’s report on Learndirect was made known to the DfE in March, but was not published until August when the company failed in both a judicial review to quash the report and a gagging order to prevent FE Week from publishing the story.

The National Audit Office has opened an investigation into the affair, and how the government has handled it.

The provider’s chairman, Ken Hills, said the provider would fully comply with any investigation in a letter addressed to comptroller and auditor general, Sir Amyas Morse, dated September 14.

“I would welcome the NAO undertaking an investigation as a means of correcting gross reporting inaccuracies and establishing a clear evidence case for a more informed political and public debate around a complex issue,” he wrote.

Learn from recent history to avert apprenticeship disaster

Government figures have revealed a dramatic 61-per-cent drop in apprenticeship starts between May and July, compared with the same period last year, following the levy launch. As the sector waits to see if this forces a major rethink, FE Week’s deputy editor Paul Offord looks back to another apprenticeship policy catastrophe that sparked a quick U-turn.

The massive drop-off of apprenticeship starts comes as no surprise.

It has long been made clear to us by many providers, employers and those lobbying on their behalf, that the reformed system, rolled out from May 1, would have a slow start and many unintended consequences.

The idea of introducing what amounts to a tax that should force more companies to invest in training was a sound one, but the decision to let employers choose to spend it all on senior management training, allied with the ongoing farce around non-levy allocations, has left us in a mess.

Then-business secretary Dr Vince Cable, who now leads the Liberal Democrats, faced a nightmare scenario that bears comparison back in December 2013.

The advanced learner loans system had been launched that April – only for students aged 24 and above – which was a first for further education.

Take-up was disappointing across the board, but particularly for apprenticeships, which saw just over 400 applications over seven months.

People clearly weren’t prepared to pay their own cash for apprenticeship training in the same way they would for a degree.

I had only recently started as a reporter with FE Week, and the palpable sense of fear from government that this was going to undermine its drive to drastically increase apprenticeship numbers, was clear to me even then, as a relative novice to further education.

On that occasion, Dr Cable, the self-proclaimed “saviour” of our sector, acted promptly and scrapped loans for apprenticeships.

We are now faced with a situation where some employers, rather than learners, appear reluctant to invest in training or will simply save on existing training budgets for managers.

FE Week first reported the unstoppable rise in the management frameworks over a year ago, and today reveal it’s has overtaken business administration to become the second most popular.

Now, or rather since May, graduates can for the first time become funded apprentices, meaning big employers will look to invest as much as possible of the money they are being forced to invest in training, on upskilling older employees through, for example, management apprenticeship degrees.

This appears to be the shape of things to come in the post-levy world, as our editor Nick Linford warned in his editorial in this week’s paper, when what we actually need is for more young people to develop skills from a lower level to properly support the UK economy as Brexit approaches.

Something needs to change fast and removing levy and co-investment charges for all 16-18 year-old apprenticeships would be a good place to start for a government apparently determined to improve social mobility.

Governments are, perhaps understandably, always reluctant to admit to having made mistakes.

However, it seems to me that Dr Cable, his then-skills minister Matthew Hancock, and the old Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, set a good precedent for taking decisive and much-needed action.

Let’s hope the skills team now led by our current minister Anne Milton, who has after all repeatedly promised to listen to and act on sector concerns, will be prepared to learn from recent history.

Part Time Variable Hours Tutor of Early Years