Vince Cable has accused the Conservatives of sweeping his “dual mandate” consultation for the FE sector under the carpet after he left government – so he sees a new joint report into post-16 skills from a learner perspective as his chance to put things right.

The new leader the Liberal Democrats spoke to FE Week in Parliament today, ahead of the launch of the report, entitled ‘Students shaping the post-16 skills plan’.

It was written in tandem with Shakira Martin, the president of the National Union of Students, after they spoke to FE students across the country.

The dual mandate, proposed while Dr Cable was business secretary, asked the FE sector how it wanted to reform itself looking ahead to 2025.

But the report on the responses and conclusions drawn from this was never made public, as the consultation closed shortly after the May 2015 election, at which he lost his seat and the Liberal Democrats left government.

He began his work on this latest consultation, which this time is focused on the views and needs of FE learners, before he was re-elected to parliament in June.

Reflecting on the demise of the dual mandate, he agreed this provided a chance to right some wrongs.

“I think there was a sense that this was coalition government, a Lib Dem minister, let’s try and pretend that never happened,” he told FE Week.

“It is rather regrettable because I think the colleges very much bought into it – this idea of looking at the mixture of remedial work for skills level one and two for young people who dropped out of school together, and advanced apprenticeships.

“Certainly, there was a lot of enthusiasm for a kind of rationalising.”

One recommendation from the new report is for a new applied level two qualification in English and maths, for those who don’t do well in their GCSEs.

“It kept coming up everywhere with students we spoke to,” he said. “I knew it was an issue, but I didn’t realise how strongly people felt about it.

“It’s the legacy of the introduction of [post-16 compulsory GCSE] maths and English resits.

“We found again and again you have huge numbers of people who just can’t cope with the academic approach, as part of their vocational courses, and they are either trapped unable to pass, or drop out.”

The report also calls for a review of plans for maintenance loans to ensure financial support is available for all learners on higher-level technical courses.

“One of the main complaints of the FE sector is that students can’t get maintanence loans, whereas at universities, the complaint is people can get them, but it leads to debt,” he said.

So why has take-up on the existing FE advanced learner loans, introduced during his time in government, been relatively slow?

“Probably interest rates is one factor,” he admitted. “The fact that a lot of people are adults with uncertain job prospects and income prospects, perhaps people with young families, means they are probably more cautious in their willingness to take on financial obligations.”

The needs of adults returning to education are declared a “glaring omission” in the report, something the government’s post-16 skills plan “does little to address”.

“The focus of the plan is clear on progression through both academic and vocational routes into higher-level qualifications, which we can presume adult learners can enter,” the report said.

“With an aging workforce, the retirement age getting later and later, and a rapidly changing employment market, the skills plan does little to address these challenges.”

Dr Cable and Ms Martin want a “voucher-style system” for older adults from disadvantaged backgrounds “to support them with the associated costs of re-entering education and training”.

The report was first conceived after concerns that students were not involved in the current wave of FE reforms.

Ms Martin said that while the NUS welcomed “many of the proposals” in the skills plan, “the discussions we have had with our members make it clear the government has really missed an opportunity to fully review the needs of FE in the round, not just skills and technical education”.

Labour’s shadow skills minister has demanded official answers on whether Learndirect is getting special treatment from the government after Ofsted hit it with its worst possible rating.

Gordon Marsden has tabled a series of probing parliamentary questions for the education secretary over the size of the adult education budget allocation the nation’s largest training provider has received – following reporting by FE Week.

The Department for Education recently admitted that instead of terminating Learndirect’s AEB contract, as is normal practice after an Ofsted grade four, it would fund the provider to recruit additional learners until July 2018.

The decision has caused consternation across the FE sector, and more than a few bigwigs are asking whether Learndirect, which has more than 20,000 learners, is being treated with kid gloves.

The DfE told FE Week that Learndirect did not apply for AEB funding in last month’s tendering round, but based on current rules, its allocation should fall from the £60 million it received in the last academic year to just over half a million in the nine months between November 2017 and July 2018.

But we understand that the Education and Skills Funding Agency has been reviewing its policy for providers that had either been unsuccessful or not tendered.

This review might see such providers receive a minimum allocation of 75 per cent of their 2016/17 sum – which would mean Learndirect takes in around £34 million for its next nine months of operation.

A spokesperson for the DfE last week refused to reveal the true sum Learndirect will be allocated from the AEB up to July 2018, and claimed the provider itself wasn’t yet aware how much it would receive.

They claimed the information was “commercially sensitive information”, though they then contradicted themselves when they conceded it would be “published at certain points in the year”.

In light of this uncertainty, Labour’s shadow minister Mr Marsden has now demanded official answers from Justine Greening.

He wants her to explain how much AEB funding Learndirect requested for 2017/18, how much was allocated between August 1 and October 31 of this year, and how much it will receive between this coming November and next July.

An irate Mr Marsden has also demanded to know why Learndirect has been permitted to recruit additional adult education learners in the wake of its ‘inadequate’ grade from Ofsted.

“We’ve put down these questions because the situation at Learndirect that was uncovered through the court proceedings and the work of FE Week is an extremely serious one which government ministers have been silent on,” he said.

“For the confidence of the sector and clarity for all those people who have been affected, we need answers now.”

It remains unclear why Learndirect failed to tender, but the ESFA did say that it “reserves the right not to award a contract to any applicant awarded grade four for overall effectiveness, after an inspection by Ofsted”.

Every private training provider has been given a three-month extension to its 2016/17 AEB contract until October 2017, after the tender evaluation process was rocked by a series of delays.

The results of the process were announced on August 4, but had originally been promised on May 19, while the sector was plunged into chaos after many providers with high scores failed to secure any funding at all.

Learndirect’s £60 million allocation in 2016/17 was 10 times larger than that of the second largest private training provider.

The AEB tender for private providers was first launched on January 27 and originally came to just £110 million for 2017/18.

Ofsted is asking young people in residential provision at FE colleges if they feel safe and able to raise concerns.

The inspectorate is kicking off its annual drive to obtain their views using “point-in-time” questionnaires, which will also be sent to boarding and residential special schools.

“Ofsted inspectors want to hear what children and young people, their parents and carers, and staff have to say about the boarding or residential provision of these schools and further education colleges,” a spokesperson announced today.

Ofsted has an important role in monitoring residential provision at colleges.

The watchdog has been highly critical, for example, of Hereward College, which offered on-site residential provision for 23 learners – as well as day provision for 255 more students – at the time of its last full inspection 11 months ago.

The college was rated inadequate-overall following this.

“Since the previous inspection, there have been reported a number of alleged incidents of peer-on-peer abuse in the college’s day and residential provision,” the main report warned. “One or more of the alleged incidents remains under investigation by another agency.”

The shocking scale of the problem was explained in more detail in a subsequent monitoring visit report, which described a “worryingly high proportion” of safeguarding incidents had “involved sexualised behaviour” or “in some cases sexual assaults by one learner on another”.

Another monitoring visit in April this year found “reasonable progress” had been made in resolving these issues for “all learning and residential settings”.

Responses to the new questionnaires are requested by October 12.

Questions include:

• Do staff look after you well?
• Do you feel safe inside your school or college accommodation?
• Can you talk to staff about what you think?

“Schools and colleges should provide children and young people, their parents and carers, and staff with a link to the questionnaire,” Ofsted’s spokesperson added.

Alternatively, anyone who wants to express their views can call the inspectorate on 0300 123 1231 (select option five, then option two) or email enquiries@ofsted.gov.uk.

Many charities will lose their direct contracts as a result of the controversial adult education budget procurement process, according to a major sector figure.

Even though the Education and Skills Funding Agency finally revealed how much cash private providers would receive to deliver AEB training in 2017/18 in early August, many providers have since complained of catastrophic repercussions for their businesses.

Now Tim Ward, the boss of the Third Sector National Learning Alliance, has warned that many such providers praised by Ofsted have not been awarded contracts – and a slice of the £110 million pot.

In an open letter published in full online by FE Week to Peter Lauener, the outgoing boss of both the ESFA and the Institute for Apprenticeships, Mr Ward wrote: “I have been contacted by third sector providers who cannot understand why they have been praised by Ofsted for their work with disadvantaged learners, but were not awarded contracts.

“It seems likely that this will lead to a further erosion of the number of direct contracted third sector providers, depriving local disadvantaged communities of opportunities to develop the confidence and skills to progress into further learning and employment.”

He raised four specific concerns.

Firstly he demanded to know why smaller providers had been advised to take part.

“In early presentations from ESFA staff, we were given to understand that the EU requirements only applied to contracts above a threshold of £589,148,” he wrote.

“It is not clear, therefore, why all providers were informed that they would need to bid if they wanted to be considered for a contract beyond 2017/18.”

Secondly, he pointed out that losing out in the bidding process had in the short term resulted in a “better outcome than winning”.

“I have heard from providers who have had an allocation which represents a very large cut compared to their previous AEB allocation,” he wrote. “Yet they have not been able to benefit from the transitional support offered to unsuccessful bidders.

“I am therefore asking that consideration be given to providing additional transitional support to those successful bidders who have had cuts larger than the 29 per cent applied across the board, given that the delays in procurement mean that they face massive in-year cuts.”

Thirdly, he wanted to know whether the procurement process took into account third-sector providers that had received “administration for community living funding”, which helps older and disabled people continue living in their local areas rather than in institutions, funding that was included in their 2016/17 AEB allocations.

Finally, he pointed out that a number of registered charities had been excluded from the planned “concession of lower contract thresholds for third-sector providers”.

“I understand that this was because they failed to identify themselves as third sector on the register,” he wrote, asking for their cases to be reviewed.

Neither the ESFA nor Mr Lauener were able to comment before this story was published.

 

The non-levy apprenticeship funding tender timetable has been “amended” by the Department for Education, and the deadline for submissions is now September 8.

In a statement, following the controversial relaunch of the process just over a month ago, the DfE said: “We have been responding to a high volume of queries and to ensure everyone has sufficient time to read these and reflect any responses in their bids, we have amended the dates in the procurement timetable set out at paragraph 8.1, table four of the invitation to tender.”

These deadlines are as follows:

The tender clarification deadline is at noon on September 1.
The deadline for responses to clarifications is at 5pm on September 5.
The submission deadline is at noon on September 8.

The DfE also confirmed that “these amendments apply to all potential providers”.

In April, the first procurement process was paused and then scrapped for the 98 per cent of employers which are not subject to the levy as it was “markedly oversubscribed”.

The DfE announced at the time that the “new procurement bid window will close at the beginning of September 2017”, with new contracts awarded in early December, and delivery from January 1.

The new tender was launched on July 28 by the new skills and apprenticeships minister Anne Milton, leaving hundreds of providers disappointed.

She claimed there were several “critical differences” from the old one, including new tender-value caps and contract-award limits to “ensure greater confidence that awards are set at realistic levels”.

The cap on the old tender for large existing providers was £5 million, but this was removed to make the cap limitless.

“We recognise that we didn’t get the previous procurement exercise for apprenticeship training provision for non-levy-paying employers quite right,” Ms Milton conceded.

“Not only was it hugely oversubscribed, it did not achieve the right balance between stability of provision, promoting competition and offering choice for employers.

“We want the sector and employers to have certainty and clarity.”