While the Train to Gain programme, set up by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), has delivered a more flexible approach to training to meet employers' needs it could still be better managed, says a report by the public accounts committee (PAC).
In its recent report to MPs, the committee looked at how the two departments can get a firmer grip on demand and spending, to increase the effectiveness of training, and how the programme's efficiency can be improved.
By July last year, 1.4 million learners had been supported, and around 200,000 employers had staff involved in training through the programme. Most learners have benefited and some employers have reported business benefits.
But the PAC report has uncovered serious weaknesses in the way the programme has been managed by the LSC, an executive non departmental public body of the DBIS. It started badly with over-ambitious targets, it said, and under-spending in the first two years as the programme failed to sufficiently expand demand for, and supply of, training.
Conservative MP Edward Leigh, chair of the committee, said: "Despite providing work-based training for around 5% of the workforce, the Train to Gain programme has been mismanaged from the outset. In the face of evidence of what was achievable, targets for the first two years were unrealistically ambitious. The number of learners, the level of demand from employers and the capacity of training providers were at first all overestimated.
"By the third year, demand for training, fuelled by substantially widened eligibility for the programme and by the recession, had increased to the point where the programme could no longer be afforded. Funding to training providers has been stop-start, with many now having to run down the capacity they had been encouraged to build up. Employers with new requirements are being turned away."
With expenditure on Train to Gain totalling almost £900m last year, Leigh said: "What must happen now is for spending to be brought under control. In the light of experience gained over the last three years of what courses and qualifications have proved most valuable, funds need to be directed at the training and sectors with the most acute needs, and the training delivered by the best quality providers."
