Here’s your weekly round-up summarising the top education stories from the sector’s press including FE Week and the TES.

Bosses face apprenticeship bill of up to £9K

The latest announcements from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) centre around the pilot for an employer-led funding model for Apprenticeships.

The model is based on the principle of employer’s contributing a minimum of 33% of the total funding amount for an Apprenticeship, with a government contribution of up to 66%.

The maximum cash value of the funding available would then depend on which funding ‘band’ the apprenticeship standard was applied to.

Concerns have arisen around the mandatory nature of the employer contribution, with fears it’ll create barriers for some employers to get involved and create an even more complex system of funding due to variables involved in allocating funding to smaller employers, 16 to 18 year olds and a percentage of funding being held back until the apprenticeship assessment is completed.

The funding pilot is being run with the first set of trailblazers, with the result informing the future of all apprenticeship funding – with this being one of the Skills Minister’s pet projects, it definitely ‘watch this space’ on this one.

Ofsted inspections brought in-house

Ofsted has announced it will no longer use private contractors to inspect schools and FE providers from the next academic year.

For the past 5 years, Ofsted has relied on contracts with Tribal, CfBT and Serco to run its inspections. From September these inspections will be run directly by Ofsted. The move follows historical criticism of some inspector’s expertise, as well as concerns that inspectors have not been following Ofsted guidance (such as not grading lesson observations, for example).

This has had a mixed reception from the education sector, with Joy Mercer, Director of Policy at the Association of Colleges (AoC) welcoming the move and the consistency it’ll bring to inspections, whilst the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) fearing it’ll lead to a loss of expertise in inspectors.

Party Politics worry over new quality mark

There are fears that the proposals for FE colleges ‘Chartered Status’ could become ‘a political football (kicked about by different governments) or simply sink without a trace’.

An FE week survey has highlighted that providers widely support the idea, but have serious concerns about the detail of the proposals. Chief of these is the worry that different governments would keep tinkering with the chartered status requirements to advance their own agendas, undermining the consistency of the standard.

There’s also concerns that it’ll just be seen as another quality mark (that would be ‘expensive…and sink without a trace’), and whether Ofsted inspections results will be taken into account.

Thought of the week: could the standards for ‘Chartered Status’ be used to dictate the future direction of the quals centres can offer?

Hancock issues traineeship pledge after rule omission

Skills Minister Matthew Hancock has revealed that he’d ‘take steps’ to stop providers delivering Traineeships in less than 6 weeks after revised guidance was released that implied that it could be delivered in as little as 3 weeks.

He was still keen to maintain the 6 week minimum duration for Traineeships (even though this requirement was removed from the guidance), to avoid providers ‘gaming the rules’ to preserve the high quality of the programme.

A BIS spokesperson supported this view, stating: ‘If we found that a provider was trying to deliver all three elements of a Traineeship in three weeks, the Education Funding Agency and the Skills Funding Agency would use their contract management processes to investigate and take action where necessary’.

It’s a pretty stark warning to keep in mind the original spirit of the Traineeship reform, and avoid a ‘compressed’ delivery programme.

Apprentice chief forces home cash message on funding reforms

Apprenticeships, they are a-changing, and pilots of the proposed new way of funding Apprenticeships have been announced. During discussions at the AELP national conference, Jennifer Coupland of the BIS Joint Apprenticeship Unit warned that the mandatory ‘payment’ expected from employers had to be in cash terms, contributions toward apprentice salaries or income would not be accepted.

This came after comments from Neil Carberry of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), who stated that members were calling for ‘co-investment and not co-payment’, to take into account the totality of an employer’s contribution.
David Pollard of the Federation of Small Businesses added that ‘any problems with the implementation of the reforms and any increase in the overall cost of Apprenticeships for small businesses…will risk reducing the volume of Apprenticeships in the short term.’

A delegate vote highlighted that only 9% of the 184 attendees agreed or strongly agrees that apprenticeship reforms would lead to a growth in places. We’ll have to await the outcome of the current pilots of the new funding system to see if this warnings ring true.

‘Overlapping’ GCSEs and A-levels under threat

The latest reforms to GCSEs and A-Levels are set to abolish dozens of courses in areas such as home economics, performing arts, catering and human biology.
The courses are being dropped as Ofqual feels that they have to much cross-over with other subjects, which it says ‘can be confusing, and […] makes standards difficult to maintain’.

TES speculates that ‘some at-risk courses, such as ancient history, film studies, law and media studies could be reformed to become new, tougher qualifications.’

‘Step up’ to engineer a solution to skills gap

There is a ‘serious need’ for the Further Education sector to play a bigger role in training the next generation of engineers and technicians, to address a national shortage.

Dr Rhys Morgan, education director at the Royal Academy of Engineering has set out that the ‘HE sector is full to capacity and on the whole doesn’t see any business reasons to expand…so we hope the FE sector can step up and play a much bigger role’. To support this, the Royal Academy will be carrying out a national audit of FE colleges to assess the needs of their engineering departments, and find out what facilities are available.