What’s in the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill?

A Skills England Bill was promised in the King’s Speech – as the meme would have it the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill may end up being the Skills England Bill we have at home.

The IfATE (TFe) Bill, as it will surely become popularly known as, does the legislative untangling required to abolish the little-lamented IfATE – transferring (with a few tweaks) the functions of that body to the Secretary of State.

The words “Skills England”, despite being all over the explanatory note, do not feature on the face of the bill. Everything IfATE does, owns, and has responsibility for will transfer in to the Department for Education as of a date or dates to be specified by the Secretary of State via a statutory instrument.

If you love statutory instruments, and who among us does noe, you should also note that the Secretary of State gets wide ranging powers to amend or repeal provisions made in any act (either currently existing or made later in the same session) if it is consequential to what is in this Bill with nothing other than the affirmative resolution (a vote in both houses) standing in her way.

The meat of the bill – sections one through three, backed by schedules one to three – transfers functions, property, rights and liabilities from IfATE to DfE, while abolishing IfATE.

After that, we get into what the explanatory note calls “amending some of the functions to be transferred. It achieves this primarily by amending the Apprenticeships, Children and Learning Act 2009 (as amended by the Enterprise Act 2016, and the Technical and Further Education Act 2017).

Clause 4 relates to the preparation of apprenticeship standards – the Secretary of State gains the power to develop apprenticeship standards herself or commission others to approve such standards. This tweak makes it technically possible for an apprenticeship standard to be prepared without the input of employers, providers, industry groups or indeed anyone. The Secretary of State could knock out an apprenticeship standard while bored on a train provided she is “satisfied that it would be more appropriate for the standard to be prepared by the Secretary of State than by a group of persons”.

Clause 5 does similar for apprenticeship assessment plans. Groups that prepare these are commissioned by the Secretary of State rather than IfATE, and again we introduce the idea that Bridget Phillipson could while away a dull hour writing one herself if (this time) “it would be more appropriate” for her to do so.

Clause 6 junks the idea that reviews of approved technical qualifications should happen at regular intervals. The reason given in the explanatory notes is “to enable flexibility to review standards according to priorities and employers’ needs”.

Clause 7 is straightforward enough – IfATE is currently required to ask an independent third party to carry out an examination of a standard or a plan, while under the new plans the Secretary of State may do so but is not required to. This has an impact, after a fashion, on the Office for Students – which currently carries out external quality assurance (EQA) on behalf of IfATE for higher and degree apprenticeships.

And Clause 8 brings the excitement of Ofqual accreditation to the world of technical qualifications. IfATE used to have this responsibility (and thus to avoid double accreditation Ofqual was exempted) – under the new regime, where the Secretary of State deems it appropriate, Ofqual may choose (it is given the discretion to) consult on accreditation and then accredit a particular qualification.

In the grand scheme of things this may not add up to much. These are mostly things that either need to happen (or that the government thinks would be helpful to have had happen) in the pursuit of the Skills England policy – but to be absolutely clear the bill does nothing at all to establish (or even determine the power and scope of) Skills England. For that excitement, we hope fervently for further primary legislation (although, it is not outside of the realms of possibility it could be done via the consequential changes powers in this act) so that this totemic and transformative policy can get the debate it deserves in Parliament.

The following morning saw the release of a Policy Impact Assessment and a Policy Summary. The latter clarifies that Skills England will be an “arms length body” and will not exist as a legal entity. This both suggests that no Skills England Bill will be forthcoming, and that the transfer of functions to the Department can be read as a transfer to Skills England.