When I was a student, the required levels of Summer homework throughout my education was relatively superficial. However I have a friend who studies Law at Oxford where the beginning of each term commences with a series of exams, so their focus on studying is a great deal more serious over holiday periods than anything I have ever experienced. Perhaps there is a link to the way in which the Government arranges consultations or procurement processes over these same periods, often with little or no warning. Almost as though the Oxbridge dominated civil service and policy setters expect organisations which are keen to sell to them, will be prepared to forgoe their holiday arrangements even though Parliament itself undertakes long recesses each year irrespective of any serious issues impacting the nation. This Summer one of the procurement processes that has been underway relates to the provision of training for apprentices, whose employers have an annual wages bill of less than £3M. As I wrote a few months ago, at the beginning of April, the Government collected the first apprenticeship levy from businesses and organisations with a wages bill of more than £3M. The original plan was for all businesses irrespective of size to benefit from the levy from the 1st May, the level of benefit for larger businesses is a reflection of the amount they have paid in, and the amount for smaller businesses is up to a maximum of £15,000.  However as the April date approached the Government was forced to delay the process for smaller businesses, due to its own failings to prepare the ground in an adequate manner. Understandably the businesses with wages bill above £3M would not be willing to wait, however as beneficiaries of the scheme, the smaller businesses had less leverage, even though they have much greater capacity to provide apprenticeships, as they represent 98% of employers. One of the additional aspects for such businesses is that they are far more dependent on Further and Higher Education providers along with private sector for such training provision than the bigger business. Back in April it was announced that the provision for such businesses would be delayed until January 2018, caused in large part by the huge response from training providers, seeking to win part of the £440M or more training budget. Following on from this at the end of July the Invitation To Tender (ITT) process was launched with a deadline of 4th September by Ann Milton, the skills and apprenticeship Minister (she is pictured above). This mean that the staff who would usually be hard at work preparing for the next academic year, were suddenly forced to respond to the tender process. However allowing five weeks for the process did at least mean that the organisations could plan for the work being carried out as part of the other work they were due to carry out during the Summer and also allow for staff holidays. The real shock here is that on Friday the 1st September, the penultimate working day before the submission of the tender on the following Monday, and also the first day that some Colleges were opening their doors to students, the Department for Education (DfE) announced it was changing the criteria for the submission and as a modest concession to such agencies, they would allow the submissions to be made 4 days later on Friday 8th September. Of course every day of slippage means that the DfE has to work harder to give the same institutions warning that they have been successful in their application (or not) and to plan for the start of the provision in January. This sort of mistake is clearly unacceptable and people like Anne Milton need to be held to account. This may be a much less newsworthy issue than our Brexit negotiations, but it is disappointing that the news was not picked up by Marr and other Sunday politics programmes. After all the economy has a range of skill shortages which is why so much focus on immigration comes from business, so in fact the nuts and bolts of Brexit does have a huge bearing on our nations training needs.