It was July last year when we at the Fellowship of Inspection Nominees started hearing complaints from members (mostly judged good or outstanding by Ofsted) that their funding for 2024-25 was under threat. The Education and Skills Funding Agency had instructed them to stop taking on new apprentices for certain programmes. In some cases providers […]
Do you have too many eggs in the one basket? During the past two months, there has been a significant increase in new providers, with44 new training providers, increasing the number of players on the pitch and spreadingrecruitment more thinly. Almost all of these are Independent Learning providers, and nearlyall offer boot camps. It’s worth […]
Following the announcement from the Department for Education regarding the removal of Functional Skills exit requirements for adult apprentices, we discussed the new rules, shared fresh analysis, and provided guidance for providers from a quality perspective. In partnership with the Fellowship of Inspection Nominees (FIN), this free webinar featured an in-depth analysis by Aptem – […]
The Fellowship of Inspection Nominees (FIN) secured another major policy win this week when @Ofsted announced as part of its reforms that every school in England will be asked to nominate a senior staff member to “work closely with the inspection team” in addition to the headteacher. This followed Ofsted crediting FIN in its Big […]
Ofsted’s reforms could yet prove successful if the inspectorate is able to learn from its own best practice and get its silos communicating with each other. Ofsted’s pre-Christmas announcement that it will start trialling ‘new approaches’ to inspection this month before its report card consultation opens was not universally welcomed. But if Ofsted can learn from it – and […]
What do good and better behaviour and attitudes look like? The majority of providers perform well in outcomes for behaviours and attitudes. Theextract from an outstanding 6th Form is an excellent example of what inspectors mayexpect to see and nicely sums up the criteria identified in the handbook. Students’ behaviour is impeccable. Students attend well, […]
Welcome to the first edition of Inspection Insights for 2025. During the past sixmonths of 2024, 224 inspection reports have been published. Almost 75% of thesehave been rated good, and just over 12% rated outstanding, with 87% graded goodor better. We have seen a progressive reduction in those not yet good to around13% and a […]
Are leaders focusing sufficiently on achievement? This area for improvement identified in a recent report indicates a closer focus on achievement than recently seen. “Accelerate the pace of improvements in apprenticeships so that more apprentices achieve their qualifications on time.” Achievement is increasing in frequency in reports, and of course, we have the ‘achievement’ aspect […]
WHAT IS YOUR STORY ? Established in 2004 as a private training provider, I gained valuable experience and in 2011 secured a subcontract with a large training provider. Due to the instability of subcontracting funding, we found ourselves working with four prime contractors, learning both what to do and what to avoid. We adopted the […]
WHAT IS YOUR STORY AS A PROVIDER? Like many universities, our apprenticeship provision developed organically through individual departments developing apprenticeship programmes without having a full understanding of apprenticeships and the systems in place to be able to ensure compliance with the funding rules. As the number of apprenticeships has increased, we realised that new governance […]
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