Windsor Learning Partnership
‘apprenticeships’
The government has confirmed there are thousands of apprentices with no organisation responsible for checking the quality of their training – but has committed to fixing the issue following revelations by FE Week. However, a solution might not be found for some time as its proposed regulator, the Office for Students, has said no arrangement […]
News
The government has been left red-faced after FE Week found thousands of apprentices with no organisation responsible for checking the quality of delivery of their training. The apprenticeship accountability statement, published by the Department for Education, says responsibility for oversight of level six and seven programmes does not lie with Ofsted but with the Office […]
Employers have used just under 14 per cent of their apprenticeship levy funds in the first 18 months since the policy was introduced, FE Week can reveal. Last month, skills minister Anne Milton revealed the total balance of employers’ apprenticeship service accounts was £2.7 billion as of the end of September. In response to a […]
The proportion of learners taking management apprenticeships has doubled in the last two years, with just ten of the controversial standards now making up a fifth of all apprenticeship starts on standards. FE Week found that a single management-apprenticeship standard was responsible for a staggering 66 per cent of all level five starts on standards […]
A college has refused to explain why it has given £16.5 million over the last three years to a subcontracting partner that employs fewer than 10 people. Brooklands College relies on SCL Security Ltd, a private provider run by Andrew Merritt, to deliver hundreds of level-three IT apprenticeships every year, for mostly 16-to-18-year-olds. The company […]
Banning ‘insufficient’ new providers from recruiting apprentices may not be as simple as once thought, as confusion appears to surround the case of a private university. BPP University, part of the global BPP Professional Education Group, was warned it was making poor progress in an early monitoring visit report of its apprenticeship provision from Ofsted […]
The government has published its progress towards the public sector apprenticeship target for the first time – and FE Week can reveal that starts at seven departments made up less than one per cent of their workforce. The target, which came into effect last April, obliges public sector organisations – including the civil service – […]
Two years ago FE Week exposed thousands of apprentices on standards without any approved end-point-assessment organisations. At the time, a former director of the DfE described the situation as “diabolical”. The chief executive of the ESFA, responsible for recruiting the end-point assessment organisations, was given a ticking off by the education select committee and then […]
Opinion
A broker has admitted it was a “bad idea” to offer cash to former staff of Aspire Achieve Advance in exchange for referrals of apprentices affected by the collapse. The now-defunct apprenticeship giant, better known as 3aaa, ceased trading on October 11 when the government pulled its skills contracts following a second investigation into success-rate […]
