This week the Times Educational Supplement (www.tes.co.uk) reported that a director
of a private company (Elmfield Training) that delivers
taxpayer-funded apprenticeship training, had been paid £3 million
last year (getting on for $6m). Further Education’s first
ever Six Million Dollar Man!
Peter Mandleson famously got into trouble for
being “intensely relaxed” about the super-rich. To an extent
the criticism was unfair as he did caveat his remarks by saying
that super-incomes should only be achieved on the back of
super-performance. Conveniently that bit was left out of the
reports.
So how relaxed should we be about this?
The company has been defended by the National Apprenticeship
Service, and there has been criticism that many private training
companies have just become adept at finding ways of getting public
money for training that employers were planning anyway.
At one level it could be argued that, provided
that the quality of the training is good or better, and provided
the company is receiving the level of funding public sector
organisations receive, then shouldn’t we be applauding their
ability to do good work and make good profits, and look to
replicate that inside the public providers?
The problem is that funding systems for
something as complex as further education can never be
perfect. Public providers like Colleges are social assets and
have a duty to provide the fullest range of programmes for their
community. We accept this means that we will lose money on
some and make money on others, that goes with our public
duty. In contrast a private provider can cherry pick courses
where the funding is too generous and simply stick to those
courses, in that sense the profit they make will be “unfair”.
In Australia Colleges are given a premium of about 14% to recognise
this wider public duty, sadly that has not been pursued here.
There is no doubt that the opening up of the further education
market has brought many benefits, not least in forcing Colleges to
review and improve their own performance and flexibility.
Maybe we should see some of these things as a natural consequence
and simply accept there will be new loopholes which we just seek to
close quickly. As the Schools and University markets are
opened up, these are pertinent questions to address, and not easy
ones to answer.
