Windsor Learning Partnership
‘apprenticeships’
The Institute for Apprenticeships’ apprentice panel will have 21 new members when it next meets on July 4. A week ago, the former skills minister Robert Halfon said the IfA should “get its act together”, following revelations that the panel hadn’t met in nearly 10 months. “The voice of the apprentice is central to the […]
News
“Big is not always beautiful,” Ofsted’s main man for FE has warned, admitting he is considering the effect of mega-colleges formed through mergers on quality. Paul Joyce’s admission comes just a week after the nation’s largest college group NCG saw its rating slip to ‘requires improvement’. “We are looking at our survey programme as to […]
A second register for apprenticeship training providers is being created for the public sector, and the Association of Colleges is furious that its members must pay to reap the benefits. The apprenticeship dynamic purchasing system has been launched by ESPO, which describes itself as a public sector-owned “professional buying organisation”. Providers must register before they […]
A sharp fall in the number of 16-year-olds taking up level two apprenticeships is being blamed for a startling rise in people of that age who are not in education, employment or training. Provisional ‘participation’ figures for the year ending 2017 released by the Department for Education this morning show that the proportion of 16-year-olds […]
Media bosses have criticised the “red tape” that surrounds the government’s apprenticeships register, seemingly preventing providers from training journalists. In a letter to skills minister Anne Milton, the Society of Editors raised “serious concerns” over access to apprenticeship levy funds for media outlets. The problem specifically relates to the way the register of apprenticeship training […]
The Department for Education should have left more time to make sure T-levels go to plan, according to its top civil servant. Jonathan Slater was questioned by the Public Accounts Committee today about his ministerial direction, published in May, in which he asked to defer the start date from 2020 to 2021. He was overruled […]
Almost three quarters of training providers are unhappy with the amount of non-levy apprenticeship funding available, claiming it is “insufficient” to meet demand from small businesses. A new AELP survey, published on the second day of its national conference in London, reveals that the apprenticeship money set aside for SMEs this year is vastly lacking. […]
Excitement has been building ahead of the speech from the skills minister, Anne Milton, at AELP’s annual conference. There was a chance the speech would be used to announce a dramatic policy U-turn: scrapping non-levy employer contributions for at least some apprenticeships. And it has been many years since I can remember an FE minister […]
Supplements
Issues with the 10-per-cent fee that small businesses must pay when they take on apprentices have been “noted”, but there will be no announcement on a rule change anytime soon, the skills minister has said. There was a lot of anticipation over whether Anne Milton would scrap the fee altogether during her speech at the […]
