Six-month delay for Tees Valley adult education

Money earmarked for adult education in Tees Valley will not be released for another six months as the region’s mayoral authority reruns a procurement.

The three-year adult skills fund (ASF) contract, worth up to £21 million, was due to begin delivery last month, providing training for unemployed people studying up to level 3.

But Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) has now published a fresh tender, with a late September deadline for submissions and a planned contract start date of February.

The authority’s procured ASF contracts are worth £7 million a year but providers would lose money if they fail to spend the annual allocation in six months. However, it is understood TVCA expects contract-winning providers will compress a year’s worth of training into the shortened timeframe.

In the meantime, only grant-funded training from FE colleges will be available until February.

TVCA abandoned its original tender in May after independent training provider Learning Curve Group launched a legal challenge in the Technology and Construction Court, which handles procurement disputes.

At the time, TVCA said it needed to “review the specification” of its contract to ensure it met local skills needs.

The new tender says contractors will be expected to deliver “high-quality, innovative provision” aligned to regional priorities such as manufacturing, construction and digital skills.

Learning Curve’s challenge came shortly before TVCA commissioners were due to move the tender process from stage one, which assesses whether bidders meet compliance requirements, to stage two, which evaluates detailed submissions.

Although Learning Curve Group is understood to have submitted a bid for the TVCA contract, neither the provider or authority have confirmed whether the procurement withdrawal was linked to the legal claim.

Unemployed learners adrift

One independent training provider manager with knowledge of the bidding process, who asked not to be named, said the delay would affect thousands of unemployed learners who are helped into work through training programmes run by ITPs.

They estimated that at an average cost of £750 per learner, a £7 million annual contract would fund about 730 learners a month.

The manager said TVCA had “questions” to answer about advertising a public tender that was not “legally robust”, adding the situation had left some training providers “looking at potential redundancies”.

But they also criticised training providers that launched legal action when bids were rejected because they “think they have a given right” to public funding.

The manager explained that TVCA policy has a subcontracting clause so bidders for the new tender must avoid subcontracting for local colleges or local authorities.

Millions held back

The value of TVCA’s procured ASF contracts remains unchanged at £7 million a year for the next three academic years.

A spokesperson for the Conservative-run authority confirmed that previously procured contracts ended on July 31.

TVCA’s ASF and level 3 free courses for jobs provision has funded more than 18,000 learners per year in recent years. It is unclear how many of these learners were funded through grant or procured provision.

The £7 million sum represents the contracted part of TVCA’s total adult skills fund allocation it receives from central government. Last year, about £9.4 million of the authority’s annual adult skills funding was allocated to 14 ITPs.

This included around £1.5 million each to Learning Curve Group and Triage Central, and £1 million to Orangebox Training Solutions.

The remaining £32 million available to the authority for ASF was distributed to nine education colleges and five local authorities through grant funding.

Procurement disputes

Lancashire Combined County Authority (LCCA), which began its first year of devolved adult skills commissioning this year, has also delayed part of its ASF delivery contract.

An email to bidders, seen by FE Week, said one of the 12 contract lots in its new £5.7 million adult skills framework was “discontinued” due to an error made in the tendering process.

LCCA did not respond to a request for comment.

Legal action, or the threat of it, has caused other delays to devolved adult skills contracts in recent years.

East Midlands Combined County Authority delayed the awarding of £6.5 million in contracts last year after losing bidder CT Skills launched legal action.

And in 2024, West Yorkshire Combined Authority abandoned its £7 million ASF tender to minimise the risk of legal challenges to its botched procurement process.

Learning Curve’s latest ASF legal threat follows the payment of an undisclosed settlement in January 2025 by the Department for Education linked to the provider’s unsuccessful bid for a national adult education contract awarded in 2023.

Learning Curve Group declined to comment.