Status: Draft

 

Train to Gain

What is Train to Gain?
Train to Gain is a flagship government training programme for England designed to meet the skills needs of employers.  Publicly funded support can be provided for:

• Training to help employees gain their first full Level 2 qualification and Skills for Life first numeracy and literacy qualification. This includes all training towards NVQ Level 2 or equivalent (equal to 5 GCSEs at Grade C or above), Skills for Life programmes, higher level skills and a wide range of other training for an organisation’s staff.
• Wage compensation for companies with less than 50 employees.
• Apprenticeships and Advanced Apprenticeships, NVQ Level 3 and above, such as higher education.

The programme will benefit from funding around £1 billion per year from 2010.  For 2007-08, the funding was £524 million.  Learning providers bid for funding through a system of open and competitive tendering managed by the Learning and Skills Council.  In response to the Leitch recommendations on skills, the Government has said that from 2010 state funds for adult skills provision will increasingly be allocated on a demand-led basis through either Train to Gain or new Adult Skills Accounts.

Train to Gain has helped more than 78,000 employers so far (source: LSC, May 2008) with an evaluation finding that 80% of 4,000 surveyed organisations were satisfied with the training received.  The LSC has acknowledged though that take-up of the programme is lowest among the ‘hardest-to-reach’ firms, i.e. those that employ fewer than 10 people.

ALP Policy
ALP fully supports, and is committed to, the Train to Gain programme.  The concept of positioning government support within an overall package focused on the needs of employers is correct, as indeed is the proposal that it should stimulate the creation of an employer owned workforce development plan.  That said, the first two full years’ operation following the successful Employer Training Pilots (ETPs) developed in the preceding three years could have yielded better outcomes.

After the first year, Train to Gain needed a fundamental redesign and ALP lobbied successfully for changes to be made to the programme.  These addressed issues such as an over-restrictive on an individual’s first level 2 qualification, learners disqualified because they already have a level 2 qualification even if it was no relevance to their current employer and the funding of training for the 19-25 age group, particularly in respect of apprenticeships.  Independent providers and colleges also expressed concerns about the effectiveness of the brokerage system set up by the LSC to target smaller businesses.  During the second year (2007-08), many providers found that level 1 provision was financially unviable and ALP was engaged in extensive discussions with ministers and officials to resolve an issue that was leading to a significant underspend of the programme’s budget for the year.  The LSC is working up a detailed specification for a comprehensive study of the true costs of delivering Train to Gain to inform their ongoing debate with the funding departments in order to put funding on a correct level for the 2008/09 contracting round. 

Over the long term, ALP believes that the Government’s numerical qualification targets should be abandoned.  By evaluating performance against a list of desired outcomes such as increased productivity and profitability, regular surveys of employers and individual learners would provide a more effective tracking of the impact that Train to Gain has made on customers.    

Links:

ALP Proposals Paper entitled 'Train to Gain – the need for some re-design'

ALP Train to Gain proposals received positively by LSC