Colleges and training providers face an unprecedented challenge to meet the skills needs of the upcoming cohort of young people to prevent a lost generation.
Today’s skills-led recovery plan from the Association of Colleges contains practical and realistic demands that must be addressed quickly by the Department for Education.
Apprenticeship starts have declined rapidly since March. Sixty per cent of employers have stopped all new apprenticeship starts since the pandemic began and 75 per cent of them have stopped at least 80 per cent of starts normally expected at this time of year.
In September, a new cohort of students is likely to face a brutal job market. The AoC’s plan calls for modifications to the apprenticeship programme and a suite of work-based learning programmes to reflect the fact that there may be fewer firms in a position to recruit new apprentices.
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Colleges already face an estimated £115 million shortfall for the current academic year and a dramatic £2 billion reduction in funding predicted for 2020-21. An estimated 15 to 20 per cent of colleges and training providers are already considering making redundancies to balance the books.
This would be a disaster, both in terms of human cost for the staff affected and in wider terms: it would devastate the ability of the sector to deliver the training, retraining and apprenticeships which will be desperately needed in the coming years.
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Under the current funding arrangements, colleges may not have the funds to cater for all the students that arrive through their doors in September, because of the funding lag which funds colleges based on the previous year’s student numbers.
It is particularly unfair that the colleges that have done the most to follow the government’s advice, those that have done most apprenticeships under the apprenticeship levy and those with well-developed commercial partnerships, are likely to be the worst affected by the current funding crisis.
The government must be honest with young people. Without a programme to cover wage costs, any “apprenticeship guarantee” is a cruel deception. Paying the cost of apprenticeship training does not guarantee an employer willing to recruit an apprentice.
With unemployment rising and a further decline expected in many sectors, colleges and training providers need to be at the forefront of our economic recovery. This situation will impact hardest on young people – so often the biggest victims of recessions – particularly recent school leavers and graduates.
The importance of engaging with colleges
The government should engage with the sector and with the opposition to ensure a package urgently that reassures colleges about their finances, staves off job losses and ensures we have an FE sector ready and able to step forward in our nation’s hour of need.
This package must include a guarantee that systems will be put in place to fund student places in real time, rather than on a one-year time lag, to help colleges respond to demand as well as modifying apprenticeship and work-based programmes where necessary to cater for the potential that there may be more qualified apprentices than apprenticeship places available.
The government must also urgently investigate likely apprenticeship demand and put in place a programme that will assist employers and learning providers to create the opportunities that this year’s cohort of apprentices need, and work urgently, constructively and transparently with the sector and with all stakeholders, including opposition parties, for the wider good.
Toby Perkins is the Labour MP for Chesterfield and the shadow minister for apprenticeships and lifelong learning
