First4Skills: what happened after its disastrous collapse?

The apprenticeships giant First4Skills went bust in March after its skills funding was pulled due to an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted rating. Around 200 staff lost their jobs, while around 3,700 learners were affected, and 14 subcontractors found themselves without a prime. Jude Burke looks into what has happened since.

Six months after First4Skills’ collapse, 97 per cent of its erstwhile learners have been found new training providers.

But the future is less rosy for more than 50 learners being trained through one of its 14 former subcontractors, Lionheart in the Community, after its contract was moved to another provider that has since gone bust in shady circumstances: Talent Training.

Talent was disgraced in June after an FE Week exposé found it offering banned inducement payments to an employer.

Its skills funding was pulled and it went into administration in early September.

London-based LITC has now complained of being left “in limbo”, and having to endure a “nightmare situation” of not being paid since January [see below].

A Department for Education spokesperson said only one subcontract had been transferred to Talent, and claimed that the number of learners who had been on First4Skills’ books in Liverpool when it went bust was much lower than had been reported, at just 3,700.

Of those, “3,550 apprentices were moved over to other providers”, they said.

The remainder didn’t transfer for a variety of reasons, including some who didn’t want to continue with their studies.

“When providers are issued with a closure notice, we make sure to work with the provider and employers to put safeguards in place and ensure no apprentices lose out as a result of the contract ending,” he added.

It is not clear how long it took for the apprentices identified by DfE to be switched.

A former First4Skills employee claims apprentices were still waiting to be transferred up to three months after the provider folded, although FE Week has been unable to verify this [see below].

It’s also not clear if the number of learners transferred included adult learners as well as apprentices.

The provider had a 2016/17 apprenticeships allocation of £15 million, and an adult education budget allocation of £383,000.

The administrator brought in to wind it down revealed in April that the firm had £705,150 in the bank at the time of its demise.

A final contract payment of £670,000 had been due from the SFA by the end of March, but hadn’t been paid by April.

The delay was attributed to the SFA’s review of apprenticeship grants to employers paid by First4Skills.

But when FE Week asked the agency about this delay in August, we were told that “the ESFA considers this matter resolved”; this is corroborated by the administrator’s second report in July, which shows a payment from the agency of £591,778.

An intercompany debt of £81,167 also appeared in the April report, owed to the firm by its majority shareholder, City of Liverpool College, along with £412 owed by Shared Educational Services Limited, a subsidiary of the college.

However, by July, “further investigation of the transactions” between First4Skills and SESL meant the arrears had ballooned to £74,354.

FE Week asked City of Liverpool why this debt had grown so much, but it declined to comment.

In total, the amount realised by the administrators – including cash in the bank, money owed by the SFA, intercompany debt and other asset realisations – stood at £1,544,195.

But related costs amounted to £390,594 – including a cool £251,822 in administrator’s fees.

A spokesperson for the administrator, RSM Restructuring Advisory, said its remuneration was drawn from “asset realisation in accordance with approval obtained from creditors”.

She claimed the firm was working to “agree creditors’ claims”, but that none had yet been paid.

First4Skills’ creditors – of which there are 329, according to the April report – will “receive dividends” although the amounts still have to be confirmed, she added.

The April report estimated that £155,644 was owed to preferential creditors, relating to “employees’ arrears of wages and holiday pay”, and indicated they would be paid everything owed.

The former First4Skills employee, who did not want to be named, told FE Week that he and others had been paid statutory wage and redundancy claims.

FE Week contacted all 14 subcontractors, which were owed a combined total of £558,983 in April, to find out how they’d been affected by the collapse.

Of those willing to comment, all bar one said they were still waiting to hear how much money – if any – they would get back.

However, one told FE Week that – contrary to what the administrators told us – they had been paid.

A spokesperson for the Challenge Network, which held a subcontract worth £1,239,057, said it had “worked closely with the administrator to claim funds owed to us”.

The majority of subcontractors that spoke to FE Week told us they’d been able to transfer all their learners to new primes, with no break in their studies.

 

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“Nightmare” when Talent Training collapsed

Lionheart in the Community, based in London, delivers apprenticeships in business administration, customer service, health and social care, children and young people’s workforce, hospitality and retail, and had a subcontract value of £190,440.

A “nightmare” situation got worse after still it transferred its subcontract to the now-disgraced Talent Training.

Like many people in the sector, Alice Piller-Roner, its head of work-based learning, first heard about First4Skills’ collapse when FE Week broke the news that Friday.

But it was the following week before she received any official notification from the Skills Funding Agency, even though LITC had been subcontracted for First4Skills for two and a half years.

“That’s when the whole drama started,” Ms Piller-Roner said, as they were given just 48 hours to find an alternative prime for the 98 apprentices on programme at the time.

“The whole issue started on the Friday, and they gave us until Thursday on the following week – but we did it,” she said.

However, the contact name and number LITC had been given at the SFA suddenly became unavailable – “as in the phone number was no longer valid as of the following Monday” – so she had no idea if their proposal had been accepted.

After a period of calling and emailing the agency, LITC was able to get “initial approval” in April for a new prime – Talent – to take on board its learners.

But, she said, an official phone call to Talent to confirm the arrangement “never arrived”.

In the meantime, one of LITC’s employers got in touch with the SFA directly and was told “it had all been sorted and that now our centre was delivering under the umbrella of Talent”.

“That completely destroyed our relationship with employers. It makes us look like idiots,” she said.

It took intervention from the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, and LITC’s own contacts at the SFA via its loans contracts, before it finally got confirmation that it could transfer its learners to Talent in July.

But now LITC is “back in limbo” because Talent went into administration itself earlier this month.

While all of this has been going on, LITC hasn’t received any funding – in fact, Ms Piller-Roner said the last payment it received was in January.

The situation was “extremely difficult for the business”, and management were “only getting paid half our salaries”.

“We didn’t feel like we could or should abandon our learners because of our mission as an organisation,” she said.

While LITC’s apprenticeships delivery has taken a hit, Ms Piller-Roner said that, despite everything, she remained confident that “we will definitely manage to get through this”.

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Smooth apprentice transfer to JGW Training

JGW Training, based in Derbyshire, delivers primarily digital marketing and management training with some business administration, with a subcontract value of £950,157.

Less than 24 hours after FE Week broke the news of First4Skills’ demise, Chris Ash, JGW’s director, was already in communication with the SFA.

“I was having email communication with them over the weekend, which they were responding to instantly,” he said.

In fact, Mr Ash had nothing but praise for the support he received from the SFA “right from provider-manager upwards”, all focused on “trying to get things resolved as quickly as possible”.

JGW Training had around 200 apprentices on programme funded through First4Skills at the time it collapsed.

He was able to transfer around half of those learners to its own direct contract, but had to find a new provider for the other half.

With the help of the SFA, Mr Ash was able to organise a new prime for the remaining apprentices “within a week” – although the process of transferring the contract took longer.

But “not one learner suffered as a result of the process”, Mr Ash insisted.

“Every single one of our learners that was funded through First4SKills continued to be supported in exactly the same way as they had been before the administration process,” he said.

The First4Skills subcontract had been worth around “50 per cent of our monthly income”, so its loss did have an impact.

The four months when they “had a gap in revenue” were “painful”, Mr Ash said – although they didn’t have to make any redundancies as they were “able to essentially plug the gap financially ourselves”.

Perhaps surprisingly, he described the First4Skills fallout as a “positive experience” – due to the outpouring of support he received.

“That was brilliant,” he said. “Because when you know you’ve got that level of support from your own employers and learners – it’s fantastic.”

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Three-month wait for learners

Many of First4Skills’ learners may have gone as long as three months without being trained, a former member of staff has informed FE Week.

The ex-employee, who asked not to be named, said “there were some I know that weren’t trained for about three months” after First4Skills went bust in March.

The company’s demise had come as a “shock” even to those who worked there, they said.

Staff were told of the company’s fate on the Friday via letter, after being sent home from work earlier in the week, he said.

They and other staff members had received wages and redundancy payments they were owed – but were told they wouldn’t be getting any unpaid expenses.

“I was owed something like £500, and got nothing,” he said.

The whole situation had left them feeling “very disappointed, very bitter, and shocked”.

 

The questions-without-answers pile up

Since June, when Anne Milton took on the brief of skills minister, we’ve had all our interview requests either ignored or rejected and questions not fully addressed or answered.

In August a series of significant policies descended into chaos, from the special treatment given to Learndirect to the unfairness of the AEB tender. The minister was nowhere to been or heard.

The Financial Times described the AEB tender outcome as creating a “topsy-turvy world where losers end up winners, and where ‘winners’ end up on the brink of insolvency.”

And the chair of the Public Accounts Committee has asked the National Audit Office to investigate the handling of the Learndirect saga.

At a time of major uncertainty and scandal the FE sector needs visible and open leadership.

So if you happen to bump into the minister at the Conservative Party conference or elsewhere, we have 10 questions you might want to ask her on our behalf – I hope you have more luck than me!

  1. Before it was allocated a further £45m for Adult Education Budget funding, when did Learndirect Ltd withdraw its tender and why?

 

  1. Did the ESFA advise Learndirect Ltd to withdraw its AEB tender in order to allocate it the £45m outside the procurement process?

 

  1. Why does the DfE refer to the Learndirect Ltd AEB contract as being gradually wound down, when it is permitted to use the additional £45 million to recruit new learners?

 

  1. Why does the DfE say Learndirect Ltd contracts “will be terminated at the end of July 2018” when there is no Notice of Early Termination nor contract termination of any kind?

 

  1. How come the DfE says it is protecting the Learndirect Ltd Life in the UK contract, but the Home Office claims always to have “detailed contingency plans which cover a number of possible scenarios, including where a supplier ceases trading”?

 

  1. How can it be consistent for the DfE to say it is “entirely wrong” to suggest Learndirect Ltd has been given special treatment but it still wants to protect the Life in the UK contract with the Home Office?

 

  1. When and why did the ESFA change the AEB procurement rules for failed and non-bidding providers, such that the maximum allocation went from £589,148 to 75 percent of the 2016/17 allocation (£45 million for Learndirect)?

 

  1. The Somerset Skills & Learning AEB tender was successful, but its allocation has fallen from £3.4 million to £111,000. After at least two meetings with four concerned MPs representing constituents in Somerset, has the ESFA subsequently applied any special treatment? 

 

  1. Why are local authorities and colleges excluded from the AEB tendering process and allowed to keep up to three percent of funding for courses they have not delivered?

 

  1. Why does the AEB consistently underperform and what will happen to the unspent millions?

Review of apprentice provider list planned

The government is already planning to review its register of apprenticeship training providers, but not until the new window for applications has closed.

The ESFA offered training providers a third chance to get onto the register at the end of September, but admitted in its weekly update bulletin that this would be the last time before a review.

It wrote: “This will be the final time the register opens before we intend to review it to ensure that it continues to offer employers confidence that those listed can deliver the highest-quality apprenticeship training.”

FE Week has covered ongoing concerns with the RoATP since it was first published in March, when it was criticised about the numerous small and inexperienced companies that approved to deliver apprenticeships, including 48 “new organisations without a financial track record”.

A ban on companies with no financial track record from applying is likely to be on the agenda for the review.

The first two windows saw the number of registered providers directly receiving government funding for apprenticeships more than double, from 837 last year to 1,879 in May.

It has also worried Ofsted and Ofqual, which are now have to regulate this explosion in providers and assessments

Meanwhile, even though hundreds of approved providers with little or no track record have undergone mandatory training to allow them to deliver apprenticeships, promises made in June by Keith Smith, a senior ESFA official, that inexperienced providers would receive audit visits by September have not been honoured.

FE Week understands that one-to-one audits for new providers will begin next month.

In a letter sent to a twice-unsuccessful applicant in September, the skills minister Anne Milton meanwhile admitted that the ESFA was “working on improving the quality of its communications”.

“I sincerely apologise for any conflicting information you may have been given about the opening of the RoATP,” she wrote in the letter, seen by FE Week.

“The ESFA is working on improving the quality of its communications, and feedback like this really helps it to know where it needs to improve.”

The system has also come in for criticism from Ofsted’s chief inspector Amanda Spielman, who spoke to FE Week about the impact that the number of new providers would have on the inspection service back in March.

“We have very limited information but it is clear there are a lot of would be new entrants, a lot of people with very limited experience and potentially quite a lot of fragmentation,” she said.

“What that will actually translate into in terms of who gets contracts and actually starts providing apprenticeships isn’t entirely clear. I suspect that a lot of those registrations will be optimistic things that may never translate into actual learners on the ground.”

The first register saw a number of established providers fail to make it onto the approved list, including Bournemouth and Poole College, Hartlepool College and every single one of Birmingham’s general FE colleges.

Amongst the successful providers, there were three new companies with no track record at all on government apprenticeships, and which were run by one man from a rented office in Cheshire, and one training academy which had ceased trading by the time the register was first published.

Although many established providers that failed the first time around made it onto the second register, which opened for applications in March and was published in May, they were joined by several more one-man bands. These included one company with no previous experience registered to a semi-detached house in Birmingham.

The application window will close at 5pm on Friday, October 27, and the updated list is expected to appear in January 2018.

Click here for more on how to apply to the register (gov.uk)

Details of new T-level tendering timeline revealed

The Department for Education is moving forward with a detailed new timetable for the implementation of T-levels, FE Week understands.

A fresh schedule was laid out during a series of private briefing events, run by the DfE for awarding organisations this week.

According to an FE Week source, the new timeline sets out plans for procuring organisations to be licensed to award the new qualifications.

In July, the skills minister Anne Milton announced a delay to the implementation of T-levels, pushing their introduction back until September 2020, a year later than planned. That announcement also meant the DfE’s planned consultation was pushed back until “the autumn”.

In the DfE’s presentation to awarding organisations this week, the new timeline says the consultation will be released in “late 2017”, and the government’s response will be available by “spring 2018”.

Meanwhile, the DfE also confirmed it is ploughing ahead with plans for one awarding organisation per qualification.

The procurement process for each AO has been set out over a series of general stages. FE Week understands the process will start in “mid 2018”, with the announcement of successful bids in “late 2018” – although it is not clear whether all routes will be procured at the same time.

Successful organisations will then develop qualifications during 2018 and 2019 and will need to seek qualification approval from the Institute for Apprenticeships, whose remit will be extended to cover technical education in April 2018. 

Plans to proceed with single awarding organisations may come as a surprise to the sector, given the criticism the approach received in research published in July, which the DfE had itself commissioned.

The report, written by Frontier Economics, concluded that limiting access to a single AO may create a “risk of system failure” both in the short- and long-term.

FE Week understands that presenters at the events to awarding organisations this week were specialists in government procurement, rather than qualifications specialists.

These information events come shortly after the DfE tendered for T-level information events targeted at providers. The tender, which closed on September 20, will provide at least seven full- or half-day events between October 9 and December 15.

There was no confirmation at the event of which routes or pathways would be included in the first phase of implementation.

According to our source, the DfE said it intends to start with three pathways – with each route expected to have between three and five pathways – which would be decided by which areas are able to proceed first. FE Week understands that information should be available in advance of the consultation.

Delays in announcing plans for the pathways may have been impacted by the delay to the advisory panels, which we reported in July.

Comparable outcomes explained for college leaders

The first few years of any new qualification are carefully monitored, so your GCSE students haven’t been hurt, says Lesley Davies

My overriding priority as a college principal, when I think about my students’ exam results, is that everyone is treated fairly. This year we were all grappling with major changes to most qualifications, particularly GCSEs. How could we as college leaders be sure that our 2017 GCSE students weren’t disadvantaged as guinea pigs on the new 9-1 GCSE qualifications? And were our resit students doubly disadvantaged because they sat a different A*-G qualification 12 months before?

Before moving to Trafford, I was the responsible officer for Pearson’s Edexcel qualifications, so I know how the exams industry deals with these issues. Grade boundaries for GCSE, AS and A-level qualifications are set using an approach called “comparable outcomes”. This means that, at national level, if one year’s students are of a similar ability to the previous cohort, we would expect similar results in a particular subject.

The experts who write exam papers always try to make sure they are at the same level as previous years, but regardless of whether exams turn out to be slightly harder or easier from one year to the next, the system aims to ensure that students receive the grade they deserve, whichever year they sit their exams. There have been well-publicised plans to align key lettered grades to the new numbers for reformed GCSEs, so an A is aligned to the new grade 7, a C is aligned to the new grade 4 and G is aligned to the new grade 1.

At the start there can often be a dip in cohort performance

Comparable outcomes is not a statistical fix, whereby five per cent of students get a 9, and 10 per cent an 8 and so on; exam boards use statistical information about the students sitting their exams and historical data about results in each subject area, and balance it with the views of subject experts to set grade boundaries.

During this period of significant reform in GCSE and A-level qualifications, comparable outcomes is ensures there is stability in the system and creates an anchor between the old qualifications and the new.

As a reformed qualification beds in over time, factors such as familiarity, growing availability of professional development and support resources, increased teacher confidence, greater numbers of past papers and so on, can all contribute to improvements in cohort performance. But at the start, there can often be a dip in cohort performance, known as the “sawtooth effect”.

Ofqual has recently published a study into patterns of performance seen after the 2010 and 2011 reforms to GCSEs and A-levels, which showed that changes in average grade boundaries roughly follow the expected sawtooth pattern. Students and teachers took around three years on average to become familiar with the content and style of the new tests.

In the summer of 2017, we saw the first wave of reformed GCSE Maths and English and reformed A-level qualifications assessed for the first time, and these provide a useful example. Grade boundaries were in some cases set slightly lower than in the previous year. In the case of GCSE English and Maths, we had nearly 1,000 students sitting these exams, and significant changes to level of demand, content and assessments impacted on performance. In the case of some A-levels, coursework no longer contributed to the final grade, while in subjects such as science and psychology, more mathematical content was included.

Without using the principle that at national level roughly the same proportion of candidates should achieve each grade as in the previous year, a significant number of learners would have suffered from that lack of familiarity in the system – and might perhaps even have lost their university place as a result.

So we might see grade boundaries in the first couple of years of a new qualification set lower than in subsequent years, but this should build your confidence that the system will ensure students are not disadvantaged.

Lesley Davies is the principal of Trafford College

National Education Service proposal is flawed

Labour’s proposed new National Education Service could impoverish colleges and disadvantage learners, claims Professor Bill Wardle

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to the Labour conference included a rallying call that should alarm the education community, particularly colleges: the establishment of a National Education Service, offering free college education courses to all.

The watchwords “free, universal and empowering” echo the founding principles of the NHS. Corbyn’s proposal to rebuild society anew has been made against a backdrop of escalating global competitiveness and shifts in the use of technology and its effects on employment. Others have considered this political and economic theorem, including Lord Sainsbury, but Labour’s approach lacks consideration of implementation or consequences.

The Labour Party is in an abstract, even indiscriminate, bidding war, finding a “solution” for colleges along the lines of Angela Rayner’s boast that Labour triumphed over the Conservatives on HE tuition fees.

Colleges ought to be very worried. First, how will we afford free tuition? There could be raids on other budgets, unless new money is created via magic money trees or new taxes. The depletion of school budgets, as has happened in Scotland to fund higher education fees, might be of lesser concern to colleges than the fact that “free to all” might in practice mean “free only to those allocated a place”.

Growth is meaningful only if it is managed, and managed by the professionals

Scottish college education stayed publicly funded but the effect was reduced student numbers. Stark priorities were enforced and there were curriculum and institutional casualties, via forced mergers. Provision shrank away from the spectrum currently imagined by Corbyn and became controlled and confined. Part-time students, and work-based, employer-focussed programmes, disappeared.

Second, free provision is expected to enable all individuals to have the skills to move to higher, technology-focused levels. This is virtuous, but it does raise massive questions about investment, coherence and comparability across the sector. One of the biggest challenges for the NHS is how to achieve consistency across the country.

Will our preoccupation with waiting times for access to surgical services shift to one for access to courses based on higher skills and promising high-value employability? The NHS is a fantastic concept, but shackled with the necessary practicality of coexisting with other forms of separately funded provision.

Colleges have thrived on competition, and the sector is growing, becoming stronger and developing an identity. If it is now expected to receive all-comers and, at the same time, equip them with the skills of the modern knowledge economy, how does it square this with its current role as the perennial bulk-carrier for those who have underachieved at school?

Growth is meaningful only if it is managed, and managed by the professionals. What will worry colleges is how their funding is sourced, the potential reintroduction of an allocation system, and the levels of investment required to reengineer the curriculum.

Over the last 15 years, colleges have taken successful business decisions (and some bad ‘businesses’ have disappeared) and their balance sheets reflect their operational position and related capital investment and borrowing. Uncertainty over funding brings reflexive risk-aversion on the part of colleges and banks. Colleges have developed a sound business model, based on growth rather than neoliberal dogma.

College business plans will be thrown by a centralised system, more so since it is a flawed one. The focus on colleges would need to be accompanied by a new level of rigour regarding school outcomes. The silence on university tuition fees is disappointing and perplexing. In one sense, the raised level of expectation on colleges means that their budgets must be ring-fenced.

While Labour’s new national plan for education has shone a spotlight on colleges, it leaves schools and higher education in the shadows – not to mention apprentices. A truly national perspective would have been holistic but also recognised phases and the obligations on each phase. The speech mixes up expectation and entitlement but without spelling out the curriculum revolution, and the funding structures and investment shifts necessary to give credibility and confidence.

Bill Wardle is from WAW Consulting

Should FE colleges raise their HE fees?

Our universities provide a good service, but it’s not flexible enough for the needs of everyone, says Paul Feldman

It’s known that FE colleges charge less for higher education courses than universities, even while they are faced with funding challenges on all fronts. So could colleges increase their provision of HE courses to create new or improved funding streams?

This is just one idea raised by a recent report published by the Higher Education Commission, entitled ‘One size won’t fit all: The challenges facing the office for students’.

Diversity and choice

The report looks at the landscape of alternative providers for HE, investigating the barriers, current structures and possible options for widening the UK’s offering. There is no denying that there is already an amazing vibrancy and diversity in our universities, but current funding structures are a serious barrier to opening it up to those who want or need to access learning in an untraditional way. By promoting standard three-year campus-based courses, we limit diversity and social mobility. So this may open the door for colleges.

Opportunities

The report certainly calls for providers to work more closely with employers to develop sandwich degrees and degree apprenticeships to support the industrial strategy. And it recognises that vocational courses offered in an FE setting are often more flexible, responsive and adaptable than those offered by HEIs because colleges are used to juggling competing demands from their students and local employers.

Many colleges already have HE provision, but relationships could be stronger

Of course, many colleges already have HE provision, but relationships could be stronger. There are many that have synergistic partnerships but there are also some with tensions, in which colleges feel their voice goes unheard. The report’s recommendation for a stronger relationship between colleges and universities, is something we fully support. Improving HE provision in colleges will benefit learners, colleges and ultimately the whole of the UK.

The report also specifically recommends closer partnerships between learning providers and small- and medium-sized employers to ensure that their skills needs are being met. This is another area where colleges are ideally placed to take a lead, knowing, as they invariably do, their local area’s business community inside out.

Digital infrastructure

In the ongoing search for ways to increase funding and ensure long-term viability, colleges need to focus on their strengths and develop what they’re good at. Already well used to meeting the needs of diverse local communities, most are equipped to provide tailored and flexible courses that meet their students’ needs in a variety of formats, and it won’t require huge investment to start to offer blended learning solutions and technology-enhanced approaches.

For one thing, FE colleges in the UK all already have a connection to the same high-speed Janet Network as universities, providing the reliability and high bandwidth necessary to enable high-quality teaching, learning and assessment. For example, seamless connectivity when moving between university and college buildings is hugely important for learning and something eduroam does.

Widening participation

FE colleges have an important role to play in widening participation. During the inquiry, the commission heard from providers who described how college-based learning encourages individuals from low-participating groups to consider studying HE courses, and gave evidence that a fair proportion who progress to an HEI later transfer back to college to continue their course because it feels more supportive.

Many colleges feel beleaguered in the current climate. But both the Higher Education and Research Act and now this new HEC report offer plenty of opportunities for FE providers to expand their offer and develop additional funding streams. The challenge is to ensure that new and more flexible programmes are aligned to best meet the needs of the students who will pay for them. And given degree apprenticeships won’t be student funded, colleges will need to adjust to meet the needs of students and employers alike.

Paul Feldman is CEO at Jisc, and a member of the Commission

Institutes of Technology freighted with unrealistic ambitions

We’ve had a bit of clarity on the new IoTs, but Mick Fletcher doesn’t want to pop any corks just yet

The DfE’s latest on the Institutes of Technology doesn’t deserve three cheers – but it maybe warrants one and a half. The half is for the additional investment in FE: any extra cash is welcome though the sum is so small compared with the needs of the sector that a full cheer is out of the question.

More important is the confirmation that the new Institutes will build on existing infrastructure. After the Tories’ flirtation with focusing IoTs on universities, common sense has prevailed and the new institutions will promote rather than compete with existing colleges. It’s a small but sensible step.

Although it is a positive, results will likely still disappoint because the IoTs come freighted with unrealistic ambitions. There is more than just the normal hype associated with any loosening of the Treasury’s purse strings: people seem to expect that a small number of IoTs will lead a total transformation in higher technical and professional education (HTPE), will deliver a step change in the production of higher-level skills and revolutionise attitudes to sub-degree-level higher education. It won’t.

There’ll be little lasting change beyond a few plaques in college foyers

The sums involved are far too small. A total of £170 million spread over three years can do some good but no serious observer will see it as transformational. Moreover any impact will be further diluted by the approach we’re taking to develop IoTs: bids will be sought from consortia.

No doubt work is already under way to develop the “correct” type of consortium: a high-profile employer as figurehead, other employers promising support that will likely prove to be moral rather than financial, a big FE college coordinating the action as a hub and linked with a host of smaller colleges and training providers which reckon their best chance at a piece of the action is as a spoke. Once the hub has made a symbolic investment and each of the spokes has taken its modest cut, the impact will be minimal.

The DfE expects that, in addition to capital investment, any “transformation” will be driven by designating some institutions as “institutes”. This is likely to be undermined by the consortium approach. When one of the new national colleges, seen in some ways as prototypes for IoTs, describes itself as “a network of hubs” one can envisage how collaborative IoTs might develop. Like the Centres of Vocational Excellence promoted by the Learning and Skills Council some 15 years ago, giving them new titles will do no harm, but there’ll be little lasting change beyond a few plaques in college foyers and further confusion with nomenclature.

The DfE seems to envisage HTPE being delivered in a limited number of institutions with distinct specialisms – a set of monotechnics recruiting nationally. In practice HTPE is far more likely to thrive if it is available widely and on a part-time basis. It is not the case that the demand for most types of provision at levels four and five is geographically circumscribed.

Moreover, adopting a delivery model that looks very much like full-time undergraduate HE seems most likely to cause defection to the more benign funding and regulatory regimes of the HE sector. One has only to look at where almost all our art colleges and many agricultural colleges have gone in recent years to see the potential temptation.

Finally, the idea that to raise the status of technical and professional education requires a further stratification of institutions is a peculiarly English approach. It would be better to allow HTPE to grow naturally in a wide range of FE colleges than attempt to pick winners. To do so would add to the reputation of the sector as whole rather than give status to some at the expense of others.

Mick Fletcher is founder of Policy Consortium

How to embed Prevent in college life

It’s not enough just to do the bare minimum, argues Sam Parrett, who believes colleges have a true duty of care

With all the dreadful terrorist attacks on British soil this year, there has never been a more important time for colleges to ensure they are implementing an effective Prevent strategy.

Ofsted, quite rightly, demands that educators must comply in full. However, like many of these initiatives and new policies, this sometimes creates a tick-box culture, with organisations doing the minimum to meet requirements.

There is a huge amount of pressure on the FE sector at the moment and we all struggle to keep our heads above water with so many priorities that all seem to be urgent.

But Prevent is an issue we can’t afford to brush under the carpet. Rather than seeing it as a standalone policy, colleges should look to embed it in all areas of college life, including teaching planning and delivery.

The duty was introduced in 2015 with the aim of giving “due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”. Colleges and independent learning providers have a huge responsibility here and are under scrutiny not only from Ofsted, but from local communities, parents and students.

By widely and regularly promoting the right kinds of values, our aim is to minimise the wrong ones

A safe learning environment is the one of the most important objectives for any college, but in the current climate this has to be our number one priority. We need robust, risk-assessed safeguarding policies for Prevent and British values. And what about the management and business continuity implications of a terrorist attack in one of our colleges? I am sure principals will all be revisiting these issues at the start of term.

Last year we undertook a large consultation exercise with students and staff to create a set of unique values, which are separate from but incorporate fundamental British values. We have collectively identified the fabric of our college, and we are building these values into every aspect of college life, into tutorials, pastoral support and our enrichment programme.

We took a multi-agency approach to this work and engaged our local communities. We also recruited a college chaplain who uses a wide range of theatrical and therapeutic approaches to encourage even the most reluctant of students into this process.

Our student experience team holds debates throughout the year in which students have the opportunity to voice their opinions, thoughts and concerns on various issues, ranging from ‘Are you a global citizen?’ to human rights.

We also arrange visits to various places of worship for a number of faiths, and students have the opportunity to come back to college and discuss their experiences and any thoughts arising from the visits.

By widely and regularly promoting the right kinds of values, our aim is to minimise the wrong ones. Rather than focusing on explicit messages relating to radicalisation, we are working hard to promote a positive and supportive environment. We are ambitious about this spiritual and social aspect of college life and we have recently become a UNICEF rights-respecting organisation, which is also underpinning our approach.

This goes beyond a tick-box exercise to meet Ofsted’s requirements, or indeed the tutorial system and our pastoral approaches to the SMSC curriculum. We are aware of our responsibility and want students to feel safe and supported in their learning environment, allowing them to achieve their full potential. We also want them to feel empowered about speaking out, to be able to challenge and be challenged, and we want to be clear about what is and is not acceptable.

We have a responsibility to support any student at risk of radicalisation whilst protecting others. We have a much better chance of doing this if every single student, tutor and staff member is part of a collective drive to tackle this issue effectively in an environment where interventions to support the prevent strategy are invisibly woven into the values and behaviours of everyday citizenship and college life.

Sam Parrett is CEO of London South East Colleges