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Over 50 City companies are backing a new financial services skills academy that opens at Tower Hamlets College this September. Skills academies, launched by the education department as a way of aligning vocational training with business needs, are funded by a combination of private and government money under the direction of the new sector skills councils.
The Financial Services Skills Council (FSSC) is planning to build a £6m network of four national skills academies to deliver cutting-edge vocational training, including the new business administration and finance 14-19 diploma, which will be rolled out from 2007. Besides the flagship launch of Tower Hamlets, another three skills academies will be established at City College Norwich, Park Lane College Leeds and in Manchester. More will be added as the business case strengthens and funding is increased. Most will be revamped facilities at existing FE colleges. Initially, Tower Hamlets skills academy will be in existing buildings but will move to a purpose-built facility a year after the launch.
Attracting business support for a new diploma that would link with A-levels and prepare the ground for the myriad of post-experience professional and regulatory exams would bring new business to FE colleges. Teresa Sayers, chief executive of the FSSC, says: "This is an industry that spends a tremendous amount on training - £300m-£400m a year is a conservative estimate - primarily to meet regulatory need. We have proved strong employer support for skills academies."
Concentrating specialist training in one location is nothing new. FE colleges have been establishing centres of vocational excellence (Coves) for many years and Tower Hamlets College has a Cove in finance.
What is new about skills academies is the level of industry support they will bring. "Skills academies will bring about wider employer involvement in setting the curriculum, innovation, consistency of quality throughout the country and sharing best practice," says Sayers.
Tower Hamlets College, which is on the doorstep of Britain's two largest financial centres, the City of London and Canary Wharf, sees its role as preparing a largely untapped local workforce for jobs in an expanding sector. The college has about 7,000 full-time students, of whom half are from ethnic minorities, mostly the Bangladeshi community. To meet their needs, the college runs a variety of courses, including basic skills catch-up and an intensive five-day course in core competencies and interview technique.
The college makes good provision for finance at all levels. Tower Hamlets offers 10 courses aimed at the 16-19 age group and a further 20 qualifications for older students, from the BTec right up to professional banking and independent financial adviser qualifications.
Most popular is extension work in financial literacy, long demanded by the industry to equip young adults with essential skills, together with basic knowledge of everyday financial products such as pensions, mortgages, loans and credit cards.
Among the most popular finance courses is the Institute of Financial Services' certificate in financial studies (CEFS), a level 3 qualification that sits alongside A-levels. "We've only run it for the past 18 months but it's proving extremely popular," says Sheila Bentham, Tower Hamlets College's head of employment solutions, a department that delivers employment-related training to around 2,000 students. "It's an enrichment course open to a wide range of students aged 16-19 from all disciplines."
The new 14-19 diploma will build on current best practice and inject a new employer focus. Employers who favour inducting staff into their business ethos rather than wasting resources on training staff in generic skill sets appear to prefer it to the old-style NVQ, which has proved extremely unpopular with some of Britain's biggest financial services groups. The Nationwide Building Society, which has 16,000 staff in 700 locations, pulled out of NVQs. John Wrighthouse, head of group training and development, explains: "We stopped using the building societies NVQ as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) removed our right to verify ourselves."
Besides balking at the additional cost of training an army of in-house NVQ assessors, the Nationwide wanted its own brand of training.
Wrighthouse says: "It's a straight choice. Do you try to do the right thing for employees from a social point of view - giving them increased job mobility? Or do you develop people for specific jobs within your own company? We chose the latter because people give us our competitive advantage. We do things that are unique to Nationwide. An NVQ would be too generic." Wrighthouse prefers a 14-19 diploma as it would allow companies to tailor the qualification to their own business.
Wrighthouse explains that his company's recruitment policy reflects customer focus, not qualifications. "We recruit on behaviour first and foremost because the attitude of our staff is what makes us unique. Knowledge and skills come later. I'm very excited by the idea of the skills academy as it will reflect innovation and best practice."
Bentham expects to build on links already established with Tower Hamlets College's Cove. "We want to deliver more customised programmes to meet employers' needs. The model could be the flexible, part-time financial advisers' course we deliver with HSBC. The bank provides weekend residential courses for our students, as well as work experience to back it up."
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