The Education and Skills Funding Agency has for the first time revealed the training providers that have been paid funding from apprenticeship levy funded employers.
The data, for the 12-month 2018/19 academic year, shows Lifetime Training at the top after it was paid a whopping £51.5 million – almost double the next closest provider QA Limited on £26 million.
In third was the British Army on £21.37 million, closely followed by Babcock Training on £21.3 million, and then Kaplan Financial in fifth on £20.8 million.
The college with the largest amount of levy-funding in 2018/19 was The Sheffield College with £3.8 million – which places it in 28th place overall.
The total amount of levy funding handed out in that year was £876,390,234, shared between 1,366 training providers. The average levy funding per provider was £641,574.
I hope the EFSA are auditing those employer providers to ensure they are only claiming eligible costs. BT for example have drawn just under £10m from their levy for 3,000 starts in 18/19 – nearly all immediate apprenticeships. Even accounting for the lengths of apprenticeships, seems a lot of money when only direct costs of the programme should be claimed.
what do you mean by “handed out” ? Please stop the tabloid muckraking (words like “whopping”) and assuming poor practice and only valuing bad news – it’s almost like you enjoy devaluing the sector – perhaps you forget you are affecting real people both learners, employees and employers most of whom are doing good work. A few are not so stop judging the rest of us when you are not in the position to do so.