Over the Summer one of the topics being debated in the press as well as on social media was the pay of senior people in our Universities. One focus of this was the pay of the Vice Chancellor of Bath University who now receives over £400,000 pounds, a decision that led to the resignation of four MPs from their advisory board. It would be easy to assume that such extravagance is at the heart of problems within education and if we see this boil lanced, all will be well. However the following story relates to around £45M of public money which has just been allocated to a training company that did not follow the process needed to apply for such funds and which has been judged to be ‘inadequate’ by OFSTED. Failing OFSTED often leads to an immediate end to Government funding and there are rules that limit funding to bodies that do not apply for funds or fail to win contracts to a maximum of £0.5M. It will be interesting to see how many MPs and even Ministers will resign from their roles overseeing this fiasco, perhaps this will be brushed under one of the many Westminster carpets.

There are numerous areas in which the Department for Education (DfE) operates which includes a new agency which was established earlier this year. The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) was formed from two bodies, the Skills Funding Agency (SFA), previously part of the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and the Education Funding Agency (EFA) was already part of DfE. ESFA focuses on the training of people through schemes such as apprenticeships and has a primary focus of training or retraining people for employment. As someone who helps run a small business this is a matter of huge interest, as we are constantly striving to improve the training available for our existing staff, but also require new applicants with skills that Schools and Further Education establishments currently do not provide.

The ESFA like all Government agencies has two sets of controllers, the Political decision makers and the Civil Servants. Both are likely to be at the heart of the decision to award Learn Direct around £45M despite its failings although as we saw in the case of Kids Company, Ministers are capable of overruling Civil Servants and in any case are ultimately accountable (in theory at least) for decisions that get taken. In the Political corner sits Anne Milton (pictured above) Minister of State for Apprenticeships and Skills and Justine Greening who is Secretary of State for Education and Anne’s boss. In the Civil Service the decision maker is Peter Lauener who was appointed as CEO when the Education Funding Agency (EFA) was formed in April 2012 and to the role of Chief Executive of the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) in November 2014. He took the two organisations through the merger in April and is due to retire in November. He is also Chief Executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships. The DfE is supposedly scrutinised by Parliament as a whole and by The Education Committee which monitors the policy, administration and spending of the Department for Education. The newly elected Chairman of the Committee is Robert Halfon MP.

Learndirect was established by the Labour Government in 2000 as part of a charitable Trust which it had set up two years earlier in response to the concept of a University for Industry. In 2011 the coalition government sold Learndirect to Lloyds Development Capital (LDC) for £36M. The Company is run by Andy Palmer who has previously worked for as Director of Education and Skills at BT with responsibility for BT’s Apprenticeship, Graduate and MBA schemes. During his time at BT, Andy was also a Board Member at Ofsted. He joined learndirect in 2016.

The issue of whether Learndirect is a Business, a Charity or part of the Public Sector has little bearing on its capabilities to deliver good quality training. However the fact that the Government has been so involved in its history (including through the salvation of Lloyds Banking group) creates all sorts of questions. The truth is this failure is not the only set of problems currently being caused by ESFA. As I wrote a few days ago they have placed a number of training and education providers in a very difficult position due to their inept approach to training for apprenticeships from January 2018. As an update to Sundays blog, the tenders which were due in on Monday, and have been extended to Friday due to a late piece of information that the ESFA released last Friday has been added to with 222 responses yesterday to questions that providers have asked since the new information was published last week. That means that each organisation submitting a tender now has to plough through each of these responses as well as rearrange their tender in time for Friday.

We need the Government and Civil Servants to be held accountable for this corrupt and incompetent practice which is a bit more difficult to explain than a £400,000 pay packet for a Vice Chancellor, but which has the potential to impact many more people and cost taxpayers far more money!