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 were forced to comply and apprenticeship programmes were closed down.
The reason, providers were told, was they were failing to achieve a qualification achievement rate (QAR) of at least 50 per cent for one or more standards in 2023-24.
During exchanges facilitated by FE Week editor Shane Chowen at the Association of Employment and Learning Providers autumn conference, the providers’ claims were disputed by the Department for Education, whose officials believed intervention had been triggered instead by judgements made on performance recorded on the apprenticeship accountability framework.
But the Fellowship of Inspection Nominees (FIN) subsequently undertook a member survey, to which 68 providers responded, and held member roundtables that confirmed the original complaints had substance.
Read the full article here No more shocks over apprenticeship achievement rates, DfE”