A student has praised the teaching and support at City and Islington College (CANDI) after becoming one of only two students nationally to receive a bursary worth £2,500.
Arda Afsar, 19, received the Peter Roberts Bursary from Collab Group, a group of 26 colleges and college groups in England including Capital City College Group (CCCG), which includes CANDI.
He applied for the award while studying a Business Level 3 Diploma at CANDI, which he passed with a D*D*D. He is now studying for an economics and finance degree at the University of Manchester.
Arda, who is originally from Turkey, returned to CANDI to receive the award from Mark Dawe, CEO of The Skills Network, which works with the Collab Group and colleges across the UK.
Thanking Collab Group, The Skills Network and his teachers and support staff at CANDI, he said: “The challenges I faced, having come from a disadvantaged background and a different country and having to learn a completely new culture and way of life, make me extremely honoured and proud to be accepting this award.
“I would especially like to thank my mum. She came to this country with nothing and yet she has given me everything. It’s fair to say I would not be the person I am today, without her.”
Arda gave special mention in his thanks to Business lecturers Regina Oparaugo, Salima Abdallah, Reuben Cape and Zak Hussain, and Student Engagement Officer Elizabeth Millard.
He said: “My experience at CANDI was amazing because my teachers were so supportive. They helped with looking at the higher education options available to me, writing my UCAS personal statement and choosing the modules I needed to take for what I wanted to study at university.
“The course gave me many different perspectives on business including marketing, finance and recruitment. I learnt about trial balances, cash flow, accounting formulas and equations, which I have been able to use on my degree. I always tried to do the best I could in my assignments, and I achieved really good grades.”
Arda plans to use the bursary funds to buy an iPad and a graphic calculator and course materials including textbooks. He hopes to eventually become an accountant or work in asset management or investment banking after he graduates from university.
The Peter Roberts Bursary was set up in memory of the late Chair of Collab Group and Principal of Stockport College and Leeds City College, who was known throughout the further education sector for his professionalism and commitment to students’ success.
Any student at a Collab Group college who has an offer to study at university or other higher education institution, or is looking to start their own small business, can apply for the bursary.
Yvonne Layne, Head of School for Business at CANDI, said: “One of the things I love about my job is when you see young people grow from a place where they hardly say good morning, to a place where they could not be more present. Arda is one of those students.”
“One of the things I admire most about Arda is how he has risen to every challenge, to be bigger and better in the face of adversity. I am very proud of him and pleased he has got this award and I wish him good luck and every success.”
Find out more and apply for Business and Professional Services courses here.
By Jackie Chapman, Managing Director, Capital City College Training
For years we have heard the same line: ‘the apprenticeship levy doesn’t work’ – whether that’s because of the disengagement of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME apprenticeship starts are half what they were before the levy was introduced), the drop in apprenticeship uptake by 16-18-year-olds, or the amount of unused levy returned to the Treasury (according to the Financial Times, employers have handed back more than £3bn in unspent levy cash over the last three years).
This is ineffective for the economy and unhelpful for the workforce. Apprenticeships should be a central part of the employment landscape for people of all ages. They are a genuine alternative to T Levels or university for many young people who are eager to start their careers sooner or learn on the job; and they are invaluable for adults already in the workforce, who want to develop new skills and qualifications without having to give up work to study.
But apprenticeship starts are now far lower than before the levy was introduced back in 2017. What can be done to reverse this? How can apprenticeships become popular again?
Recently, we attended the Labour and Conservative party conferences, where we hosted breakfast events with the London advocacy group BusinessLDN – discussions with our guests addressed apprenticeships and other pressing skills challenges.
As we see it, the apprenticeships challenge is threefold: firstly, how apprenticeships are promoted – especially to young people; secondly, how they are funded; and thirdly, how flexible they are – for employers, educators and apprentices.
Promotion
If young people don’t know about apprenticeships, we can’t expect them to be interested in them. Many schools have failed to effectively point their 14–17-year-olds towards apprenticeships, as academic routes remain a central focus for schools.
The ‘Baker Clause’ should help this. Originally an amendment to the Technical and Further Education Act 2017 which was widely ignored by schools, the Baker Clause was made law in the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022. It requires schools to allow colleges and training providers access to every student in years 8 to 13 to discuss non-academic routes. It also states that schools need to impartially promote the full range of technical education qualifications and apprenticeships to their pupils.
The Baker Clause is an important part of a school or college’s careers education, information, advice and guidance (CEIAG) programme and, provided it is followed and enforced, it should widen pupils’ access to information about apprenticeships and other non-academic routes.
The introduction of T Levels may cause more confusion, so the message needs to be clear that apprenticeships are 80% in the workplace, whilst T Levels are 80% learning.
Funding and flexibility
The apprenticeship levy is the main mechanism for funding apprenticeships. Some £3.3 billion of unspent levy money has been returned to the Treasury over the last 3 years, so it’s fair to say that the level of funding is more than adequate.
Flexibility – what the levy money can be spent on and who can spend it – is where many of the problems, and opportunities, are. Businesses and apprenticeship providers have been calling on the Government to offer greater flexibility around the levy for years, but how would this look? And how would it work?
How do we improve the levy and encourage more apprenticeship starts?
It’s encouraging to see the Government responding to the sector’s conversations about the levy. In February of this year, Alex Burghart MP (then Skills Minister) introduced flexi-job apprenticeships and announced that businesses could transfer their surplus levy to other businesses to pay for their apprenticeship training.
Flexi-job apprenticeships aim to help sectors with short-term contracts to take on apprentices. Within this model, apprentices will be supported by their training provider to obtain multiple short-term contracts across different employers to complete their apprenticeship requirements.
We have already seen the benefits of this for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) at CCCG’s training arm, Capital City College Training (CCCT). For instance, in the creative industry, CCCT have been working in partnership with the NextGen Skills Academy to enable SMEs who only focus on one key skill to cluster together to take on an apprentice. Each apprentice is subsequently able to learn each skill through a different business to complete their apprenticeship.
These initiatives are a positive step forward for helping to increase the number of apprenticeships, but there is a more fundamental issue for many employers which needs addressing – the cost of wages.
Employers tell us that they are deterred from taking on apprentices because they must pay their wages while the apprentice is still relatively inexperienced, especially when taking on 16–18-year-olds. In addition, many employers want to pay their apprentices more than the National Minimum Wage, because it’s the right thing to do and it would encourage more people to become apprentices.
So, we think that employers should also be able to use their levy funds to pay between half and two-thirds of their apprentices’ wage costs for the first year of their time with the company. Covering most of the salary for this period will help some employers pay their apprentices more and would be a powerful incentive to smaller businesses, as an extra pair of hands at a subsidised cost would never go amiss!
A levy reform along these lines could be structured like the Government’s Kickstart Scheme, released in September 2020. Kickstart provided funding to employers to create jobs for 16- to 24-year-olds on Universal Credit, covering 100% of the National Minimum Wage – based on the workers’ age – for 25 hours per week.
By supporting employers with their wage costs in the short term, Kickstart enabled many small businesses to engage with young people and provide adequate support whilst they were developing their basic skills.
If the levy allowed for the funding of such a scheme, a valuable proportion of the apprentice’s salary would be paid until the they become skilled enough to not need continuous supervision – the reason why employers prefer to employ individuals who have sufficient skills to undertake the job. This flexibility will encourage employers to take on apprentices and will guarantee the apprentice a job at the end.
We’d also like to see levy flexibility go further, by allowing the transfer of the apprenticeship levy to the organisation that provides the apprenticeship training (typically a further education college or a private provider), so they can continue to support an apprentice when they change jobs – currently as soon as an apprentice ends their studies or changes employer, the provider can no longer support them. This initiative will also help boost apprenticeship completion rates, as apprentices are currently leaving at the point of triggering the End Point Assessment. Such a change would not cost anyone money, will allow colleges and training providers to use their unspent Levy funds, and will decrease the administration required for providers to sign up additional employers to support the final stages of an individual’s apprenticeship.
Apprenticeships can and should be a bigger part of the employment landscape. We think that increasing the flexibility of the levy will allow more employers take on more apprentices and will encourage more people to consider an apprenticeship. We’ll be advocating for these changes to the levy over the coming months.
What is the apprenticeship levy? And what are the problems with it?
The apprenticeship levy was introduced in 2017 to create long term sustainable funding for apprenticeships. The levy is a 0.5% tax paid by larger employers (those with an annual pay bill of more than £3 million), which is stored in a fund and must be used to pay for the cost of apprenticeship training.
The idea was that the levy would encourage businesses to offer more apprenticeships, but unfortunately, the number of people starting an apprenticeship has fallen by around 50% since the levy was introduced. It also had some unintended consequences. For example, the House of Lords’ Youth Unemployment Reportfound that some employers use the levy to reshape existing roles into apprenticeships, benefitting those who already work for their company and are usually older and more experienced.
Other criticisms are that because the levy is only paid by large companies, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) don’t pay it but have to use the online system to engage with providers and pay 5% to the cost of the apprenticeship. In addition, the apprenticeship system is considered too complicated and hard to navigate for employers and education providers alike. Perhaps because of these flaws, the number of SME apprenticeships has fallen since the levy started.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK hard – in London alone, unemployment rose to 7% in 2021. Through Levelling up and the skills agenda, the Government have announced a range of initiatives to help the UK recover, supporting people to up-skill and re-skill in the changing job market.
In light of the cost-of-living crisis, the talent-drain that has resulted from the UK’s departure from the EU’s single market and the after-effects on labour markets of the COVID-19 pandemic, boosting Britain’s skills is more important now than ever before. According to research by the accountancy firm BDO, some 26% of businesses say that finding staff with the right skills will be their biggest challenge over the coming months.
Levelling up can play a useful role in this process. Although it’s often categorised as a regional, ‘not in London or the south east’ issue, our experience as London’s largest group of further education colleges tells us that it doesn’t matter where ‘under-skilled’ people live – their needs, and the challenges that they face, are similar. Without key skills (be they, for example, basic literacy and numeracy; digital skills; or even more advanced technical skills to gain work in high-tech industries or the green economy), thousands of people face being left behind, excluded from the workforce and with only a lifetime of poorly paid and insecure work to look forward to.
What is Levelling up?
The Levelling up White Paper, released in February 2022, sets out how the Government plan to spread opportunity throughout the UK. While it is important to challenge geographical inequality in tackling the imbalance we see within the UK, the Government’s Levelling up plans do not take into account the fact that poverty and lack of opportunity is found even in wealthy areas.
The White Paper promises a “moral, social and economic” programme for the Government to follow, to improve opportunities and productivity for many parts of the country, but it does not address the needs of Londoners. London is used in the White Paper as a place of comparison – one with high levels of economic and social standards. Although this is true to a degree, many Londoners live (and learn) in some of the country’s most deprived areas – and this cannot be ignored. So, as well as improving regional inequality, levelling up must also help the most disadvantaged communities within our major cities and towns.
Cost-of-living crisis
The cost-of-living crisis, like Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic before it, highlights again just how important skills are for the people of this country and, if anything, makes the need and demand for new skills even more urgent. With rises in the cost-of-living and a predicted recession on the horizon, more people will lose their jobs and will need to re-skill or up-skill to gain sustainable employment. No community will go untouched.
So what’s to be done?
As well as their Levelling up White Paper, the Government have launched a range of ideas and initiatives in the last 18 months, including Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs). Enshrined in law in the 2022 Skills and Post-16 Education Act, LSIPs are coalitions of education providers, local/mayoral authorities, local businesses and business groups, and other local stakeholders, which will set out the key priorities and changes needed in a local area to allow local post-16 technical education and training provision to be more responsive to the changing needs of the local labour market.
The Government are expecting the roll out of LSIPs to have concluded by 2023 and have set aside £20.9 million for 38 areas including 10 mayoral combined authorities, the Greater London Authority and 27 local enterprise partnership areas. We will see in the next year how these developments progress and if they succeed in helping local businesses fill their skills gaps.
Supporting Further Education colleges to plug the nation’s skills gaps
As London’s largest further education college group, Capital City College Group know the vital role that colleges play in re-skilling and up-skilling their students and the positive impact that this has on their communities, as well as the key role that employers play in our students’ success. We already have strong partnerships with well over 900 employers every year, both through our delivery of apprenticeships and through work placements, paid internships and other activities. We fully intend to work in, or with, London’s Local Skills Improvement Plan, to ensure that the skills we teach are in tune with the needs of London’s labour market – and so that our, and our students’, voices can be heard.
While these recent initiatives are welcome, further education colleges have long been an after-thought for Governments, falling behind schools and Higher Education, both in respect and funding. If the Government is committed in their pledge to level-up the country and improve skills, they must acknowledge further education colleges as a key partner in the delivery of these vital skills and fund the sector accordingly.
Stay-tuned: Party Conferences
In September and October, we will be hosting breakfast events at both the Labour and Conservative Party conferences, where we will continue these discussions, as well as exploring the role of apprenticeships in Levelling up. In partnership with BusinessLDN (previously London First), we have invited key political and sector stakeholders to join us, to share their views on Levelling up and the skills agenda. Keep updated with developments and discussions here, and on our Twitter and LinkedIn feeds.
Students had the opportunity to voice their concerns about knife crime and youth services to a panel of experts during a debate at City and Islington College (CANDI).
Questions were put to representatives from the Metropolitan Police, The Ben Kinsella Trust, Godwin Lawson Foundation, StreetDoctors and IOTC Solutions on 14 June.
The discussion covered racism and under-representation in the Met, tackling violent crime and prevention, stop and search, exploitation and safeguarding, community projects for young people and the need for investment in youth services.
Inspector Ross Hickman, who heads up the Met’s Youth Engagement Team in Islington, said improvements were being made to stop and search following an independent review.
He said: “Stop and search in London is always criticised that it is not used in the right way and people are racially targeted.
“We continue to work with people about how we use stop and search, to make sure we are using it correctly. It’s a real policing power, we wouldn’t be protecting you if we didn’t use it, but I do accept some of the criticism it has had.
“I don’t believe that the Met is institutionally racist, but I absolutely get the fear in London that we are using it [stop and search] in that context,” he said.
Dr Angela Herbert MBE, who runs coaching and mentoring company IOTC Solutions and is also Chair of the Violent Crime Prevention Board, called for more transparency from the Met.
She said: “This is about developing and creating credibility of the police. Once there is credibility, then we can start building trust. When you are on the receiving side of policing, and it’s not done correctly, it causes problems and has a negative impact.”
Dr Herbert, who is also a governor of Capital City College Group (CCCG), which includes CANDI, warned that many young people caught with knives and end up in custody are often the exploited victims of organised crime.
This was echoed by Frances Breeveld, Communications and Policy Officer at StreetDoctors, a national charity that teaches lifesaving skills to young people to keep themselves and others safe.
She called for more investment in youth services and the need for early intervention to prevent youth crime and protect young people.
“A lot of the problems caused are because there aren’t safe spaces for young people, especially after school. I was talking to a police officer who said 4pm was when they had the most violent incidents,” she said.
“We hear from young people all the time about how important after school clubs and youth clubs are and how important good youth workers are, as role models, trusted people who are able to support and guide.”
Patrick Green, CEO of The Ben Kinsella Trust, a charity which campaigns to prevent knife crime, said successive governments had failed to tackle knife crime.
He said: “If we want to stop youth violence and knife crime and build a better future, we have to start by investing in young people.
“That starts with putting in services and recreational activities for young people, and it starts by also giving young people a pathway into meaningful employment, which is critical for social change and mobility. There’s a lot that needs to be done.”
Yvonne Godwin, CEO and founder of the Godwin Lawson Foundation, which aims to reduce knife crime and encourage young people to fulfil their potential, called for police to show more “cultural awareness and empathy” in the communities they serve.
She spoke about a programme being run at CANDI’s sister college, the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London (CONEL), to encourage young people to get involved in their community by befriending and being a role model to children in schools.
Sergeant Tony Quinn said the Met had been working with London boroughs on schemes such as Safe Havens, where public places like shops and cafés provide refuge and support for people in danger.
He added that force was also working with young people on crime prevention through role-playing sessions and has also funded a boxing club at Sobell Leisure Centre in Islington.
Insp Hickman said the Mayor of London’s office has promised an additional £25 million to keep streets safer, including tackling violence against women and youth violence.
“There’s always so much more that we can be doing but with Government funding there’s always a struggle as there is often not enough to go around,” he said.
“What is key is that we continue to work together with you to make sure we’re doing the right thing.”
CANDI offers a wide range of enrichment activities throughout each academic year including talks, workshops, careers fairs, and clubs and societies.
