Mark Dawe, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, calls for immediate government action to alleviate the pending “horror story” facing providers of apprenticeships with non-levy employers

The day the non-levy procurement pause was announced, I remarked to colleagues how appropriate it was that it was Maundy Thursday – the day of the Last Supper, when Peter was told of his three acts of denial.

No, the pause isn’t aimed at stopping subcontractors getting a contract; no (after a lot of lobbying,) the new subcontracting rules won’t apply during the pause; and no, this allocation is not designed to destroy the subcontracting market. Three denials, it’s but starting to get a little suspicious.

As things stand, over the next week we will witness something equivalent to a horror movie: “the slaughter of providers, part one”.

It wasn’t me who lit the bonfire of the providers

I have been accused of inappropriately fanning the flames, but it wasn’t me who lit the bonfire of the providers. As I explained, I am just reflecting the heat I am feeling from AELP members.  That’s my job.

So what is the problem? As levy business starts next week, there are many positive aspects about the apprenticeship policy and levy-paying employers, and many providers are very excited.

But let’s be very clear, it’s only the few thousand-odd levy-paying employers we are talking about here. They make up, as the government keeps reminding us, just two per cent of the employer market.

The horror story emerges in the non-levy world. For those involved, it feels like we are stumbling towards the edge of a precipice, and if the government doesn’t act in the next few days, there will be no return this time.

The allocations announced this week to prime providers, with a handful of exceptions, appear to be a fraction of what providers require to maintain their current run rate, i.e. apprenticeship starts and apprentices already on a programme.

Some providers will run out of money within weeks.

Closures and redundancies will start next week

When the government paused the process, it said it wanted to “achieve the right balance between stability of supply and promoting competition and choice for employers”. This latest decision has tipped the scales towards total instability.

The funding agency might argue that it has given opportunities to the primes to put in a business case for more money and tat they will receive results in July.

However the current reduction in allocation makes it impossible for providers to plan working on the basis of no guarantee of future funding and limited trust in the system.

But worse, subcontractors are being contacted by their primes, often with great regret, hour by hour, and told that there isn’t enough money to support them, so they won’t have any funded starts from May 1.

Closures and redundancies will start next week; come July many of these providers won’t exist anymore and the RoATP will shrink rapidly.

I really don’t think the government understands the seriousness of the situation. I have provided officials some examples, and have many, many more that underline the dire position we are in.

Many officials have voiced their concern about the capacity and readiness of the system and particularly providers.

Have they ever tried to develop a business which only has funding for six weeks? It’s not as if the funding can be claimed without an apprenticeship being delivered – we are not talking grant funding – and I thought the government wanted more apprenticeships, not less.

Without immediate action and additional money allocated, the government will have managed to destroy capacity and the consequences for non-levy businesses, employees and learners will be dire.

Our concerns of “apprenticeship deserts” will become a reality across the nation’s constituencies.

While AELP continues the fight at the centre, for many of their members and local provider networks, the only option is to talk to local MPs and prospective parliamentary candidates about the consequences of this approach.

If the government genuinely cares about delivery to SMEs and social mobility, it will act today. If the government genuinely cares about robust apprenticeships and skills policy to underpin its industrial strategy, it will act today. If this isn’t just an underhand way of wiping out subcontracting, the government will enhance allocations today.

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

Question One: GCSE resits

I don’t understand why the issue of GCSE resits is so divisive. At the college where I am a governor some senior staff use words like ‘failed policy’ and ‘not appropriate for college students’. However, my son benefited from this policy and is now successfully doing A-Levels at our local secondary school. Why does FE see it in such disdainful terms?

Answer: Like you, I can see the benefits of this policy. It gives a clear and forceful message to young people about the importance of English and maths. I hope it sends a signal down through schools to the younger pupils that you can’t “drop” English and maths and it is best if you take it seriously right now.

It is right that the state will pay for retakes and the data shows that around 27 per cent of those who resit get the equivalent of a grade C pass. However, for 70% of the young people who resit, it does not lead to an improvement in grade and it is these young people the sector is worried about.

Most colleges undertake some form of initial assessment and can identify those students likely to get a grade C pass and those who couldn’t. Likewise, they will know if students are very far away from getting a grade C and can’t do it in one year on the hours the government is willing to fund.

In many cases, students haven’t progressed all the way through secondary school and so are unlikely to do so with the same style of teaching that is expected on a GCSE programme. These young people need re-motivating, intensive support and different content, based on applied English or maths. Merely forcing such students to resit GCSEs is not appropriate and that is why there is such an outcry.

Question Two: Principals’ remuneration

My college has asked me to chair their new remuneration committee, which will set the salaries for senior post holders (including the principal and clerk). Previously this was done by the chair of governors but it was not very transparent and we want to move to a more structured format. What advice can you give on setting up, monitoring and benchmarks?

Answer:

It is excellent the governing body has adopted this approach, which is increasingly seen as good practice.

The first thing is to familiarise yourselves with the relevant college documents including: instrument and articles of governance; conditions of services for senior post holders; any existing performance policies; and past appraisals and salaries.

You will also need access to the national senior staff benchmarking exercise to review salary levels against other colleges of similar size and performance. For year one, you will use what were set as performance criteria for that reporting year but you should start to decide your performance goals for the next year – to be set out and agreed at least two months before that reporting year begins.

If the college’s largest student cohort is 16-19, you may want to consider the new DfE performance data. This is the information on which DfE will monitor schools, sixth form colleges and GFE colleges. DfE is requiring benchmark data under five headline measures which are: progress; attainment; English and maths progress; retention; and destinations.

You will also need to consider financial performance and student and employer satisfaction. Plus, you may want to add new performance targets such as the college’s share of the apprenticeship market.

The full governing body will need to sign off any recommendations.

Be sensitive to whether college staff are receiving any pay rises and also public views regarding public sector CEO pay rises. The rule of thumb is there must be a very good reason if your principal is to be paid a salary more than the prime minister’s £143,462.

Remember the amount paid to a CEO will get into the public domain and the number quoted will be pay plus pension contributions and any other benefits. So ensure you see the full package and not just the base salary – and as chair be ready to justify it.

Birmingham already had a college on the Register of Apprenticeship Training Providers, and it fills an important gap in provision, says Clair Mowbray

Over the past few editions FE Week has been telling us that from May this year the Second City will have no colleges able to deliver apprenticeships, as all four existing Birmingham colleges failed to get on the apprenticeship register.

While we were pleased to learn that South & City College Birmingham has now been added to RoATP, we would like to set the record straight that Birmingham would already have had at least one education institution offering apprenticeships from September, when the National College for High Speed Rail opens its doors.

We are filling a gap in FE provision

The Government has invested £80m to create five new employer-led National Colleges in Britain to make sure that our young people learn world-class skills in key sectors such as digital media, nuclear, creative, oil and gas and high speed rail.

In doing so it is filling a gap in FE provision. The tight links National Colleges have developed with employers mean business can shape these institutions and help them produce workers with the skills they need.

The colleges also provide highly targeted learning opportunities in sectors that are key to the future of the British economy, ensuring that British workers will be at the forefront of these growth industries by creating a pipeline of British talent.

The rail industry is a case in point.

Over the next five years it is estimated that businesses in Britain will need 182,000 new engineers every year. Right now, we’re falling short by 69,000 engineers a year. Moreover, one in five rail engineers is currently aged over 55.  

A lack of skilled workers within our workforce is one of the reasons that the productivity of British workers remains stubbornly low when compared with other nations. As our Chancellor Phillip Hammond lamented, it effectively takes a German worker four days to produce what the UK makes in five.

The new National Colleges will play a central role in producing a generation of young people who are genuinely ready to hit the ground running when they start their working careers.

These issues are symptoms of the brain drain

With campuses in both Doncaster and Birmingham, the National College of High Speed Rail will also help counter the northern brain drain.

Around 30,000 young people move out of the region every year after graduating from northern universities. And in 2013 alone, there were around 25,000 vacancies in the Midlands that were hard to fill due to a lack of suitably skilled applicants (around a fifth of all such skills shortages in England).

Both these issues are symptoms of the brain drain our regions suffer as talented young workers gravitate towards London, putting the future competitiveness and prosperity of our regions at risk.   

While there are excellent FE colleges already established across both the North and the Midlands, there is a dearth of institutions offering more advanced qualifications at Level 4 as the National Colleges will, and we are interested in partnering with colleges across both regions to help improve students’ skills.

At a governing level, we are also backing important initiatives such as the Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy and the Midlands Skills Strategy. 

We have an essential role to play in supporting the ambitions of both Transport for the North and Midlands Connect as these new transport bodies look to fulfil the ambitions of the Northern Powerhouse and Midlands Engine by creating transport-led regeneration to improve connectivity for businesses and workers across those regions.

The future success of Britain depends on us getting this right

If we are to solve the brain drain from our regions then we need to make these areas more attractive as places where people can learn world-class skills, then stay to find quality jobs and enjoy a higher standard of living.

With more than £500bn worth of UK infrastructure projects currently in the pipeline, this is a prime time for young people to begin preparing for a career in British industry.

The National Colleges will provide a new, employer-led blueprint for helping to tackle Britain’s skills shortages and provide businesses with the young talent they need. The future success of Britain depends on us getting this right and we are extraordinarily motivated to do so.

To avoid a conflict of interest, it would seem logical for Ofqual to take over external quality assurance for the Institute for Apprenticeships, but this would put off many organisations wanting to offer end-point assessment, says Simon Martin

Apprenticeship standards are intended to drive forward the workforce skills that UK employers have identified for competitiveness in the world economy. Yet many standards do not include any technical or vocational qualifications to benchmark the skills, knowledge and behaviours to be acquired by the apprentice, and even where they do, successfully passing the standard relies on passing the end-point assessment.

This means the robustness of EPA, and the quality assurance needed to underwrite that robustness, is a fundamental requirement for instilling confidence in the reliability of the new standards. But this remains highly questionable, given the fragmented approach that is emerging towards external quality assurance of EPA.

At the Annual Apprenticeships Conference in March, Peter Lauener, Shadow Chief Executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships, openly reiterated in a plenary session that the Institute’s primary function was to drive apprenticeship quality through its role as the regulator of standards and Assessment Plans. He added that one of the three key features of the new apprenticeship system was external quality assurance of EPAs; indeed, that IfA itself would ‘establish an approach to Institute-led external quality assurance’.

It is far from clear how this is materialising

It is far from clear, however, how this is materialising in a market where the employer groups themselves are choosing one of five different EQA organisation types, and moreover where one of these is the Institute itself, alongside the Quality Assurance Agency, Ofqual, professional bodies, and employer-led approaches.

Furthermore, in a workshop at the conference, Mike Keoghan, Deputy Chief Executive of the IfA, reported that a key area of concern arising from the sector consultation on the IfA was its role in ‘ensuring reliability and consistency of assessments with EQA organisations and the Institute’s role in quality assurance’.

There is, therefore, a core issue that needs to be resolved rapidly if the new apprenticeships are to be accepted as the professional and industrial Gold Standard that is hoped for.

At the conference Mr Keoghan described the Institute as the ‘back stop on quality’. This implies, and it would be reasonable to assume, that the Institute will therefore be the ultimate adjudicator across the mixed approach to EQA (there are already nearly 25 different EQA organisations). Yet the Institute itself is already being chosen by the standards development groups as the most popular EQA route, despite it supposedly being a ‘last resort’ option only. It is even more popular than the official qualifications regulator Ofqual.

There is manifestly a potential conflict of interest here

There is manifestly a potential conflict of interest here. To remedy this, Peter Lauener was clear at conference that the Institute will not employ staff to undertake EQA, but that this will be ‘tendered out’. In plenary and in workshops it was hinted at several times by senior representatives of both organisations that the Institute and Ofqual will be ‘talking closely’. This, however, is a problem.

If Ofqual takes a bigger space in the EQA arena – for example, by tendering for IfA/s EQA provision – any organisation looking to offer EPA where Ofqual is nominated as the standard’s EQA choice, has to become Ofqual-registered first.

This is a lengthy and daunting process for any organisation (such as an Awarding Body, for example) that is not already Ofqual-registered, and in reality has to be completed before even contemplating an application to the Register of Apprentice Assessment Organisations, which is in itself a considerable task.

Therefore, unless Ofqual changes its current rules, any move by the Institute for greater Ofqual involvement in EQA is likely to be off-putting for many organisations wanting to offer EPA.

Moreover, it will further delay the process, thus amplifying the travesty of current apprentices already following standards that do not have an identified EPA organisation in place – worryingly, already over half of all ‘live’ standards.