Member News
By Edward Leigh - 5th February 2010
When it was launched in 2006, the Train to Gain programme was portrayed as a flagship service which, by delivering training in the workplace, would transform adult skills provision.
Last month the Committee of Public Accounts turned its eye on exactly how much progress had been made. It found, alas, that good intentions have been marred by inept programme management, and undermined by targets that had little to do with reality.
Let me say straightaway that the news on Train to Gain is not all bad. By July last year, the programme had supported more than 1.4 million learners from 200,000 employers. The training is flexible, delivered by a large number of providers who visit learners in their workplace, and generally meets the needs of employers. Most people who have been on a course have benefited from it, and some employers have seen rewards to their business as a result.
However, there is a big ‘but’. Mistakes in programme management have compromised value-for-money of the £1.5bn spent on Train to Gain. The programme started badly with over-ambitious targets for the number of people who would use the scheme.
These were inevitably missed and resulted in underspending in the first two years of the programme. In the third year, the then Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills substantially widened the eligibility criteria which, particularly given the recession, increased the attractiveness of the programme for employers.
At the same time, the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) was pressing training providers to increase activity. The result was a swing from underspending to an over-commitment, and an overspend of £50m in 2008-09. We now have the unwelcome situation of there being too much training in the pipeline and no money left. Employers with new requirements are being turned away.
This bust-to-boom management of demand is not the only area of concern. While some training providers offer excellent training, others – too many, in fact – have relatively low success rates for their learners. In 2006-07, the most recent year for which reliable data was available, 26 of the 100 largest providers achieved less than the proposed ‘minimum level of performance’.
And the PAC found evidence of problems in providers’ claims for funding from the LSC, with £11m paid to providers in error. The LSC needs to sharpen up on this and pay more attention to the risk of fraud among sub-contracted training providers, improving the information it has on these organisations and monitoring how prime contractors manage the risk of fraud. Despite these problems, I do acknowledge that Train to Gain has avoided the calamitous mistakes of the former Individual Learning Accounts, which were riddled with fraud until they were scrapped in 2001.
Another issue the PAC uncovered, which I find particularly troubling, concerns the point of so-called ‘additionality’. That is, to what extent has taxpayer-funded activity genuinely added to what would have happened without the funding? The evidence indicates that around half of employers using Train to Gain would probably have provided similar training for their staff without public subsidy.
You do not need to be an expert on achieving value-for-money to know that this level of performance in a £1.5bn programme is simply not acceptable. One way of increasing additionality would be to sharpen the focus on employers who provide little or no staff training.
So there is plenty of work for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Learning and Skills Council (and its successor body, the Skills Funding Agency) to do. But where should they start?
The priority has to be to bring spending under control while minimising damage to the availability of good quality training.
The obvious way forward is to draw on experience gained over the last three years of what courses and qualifications have proved most valuable, and concentrate funding on the kinds of training and sectors that need it most. The training should also be delivered by the best providers..
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd