Department for Business, Innovation and Skills : reducing bureaucracy in further education in England, seventy-sixth report of session 2010-12, report, together with formal minutes, oral and written evidence

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Skills Funding Agency provide funding for further education students aged 19-plus.

The Department for Education and the Young People's Learning Agency fund further education for 16-to-18-year-olds.

These two departments provided GBP7.7 billion in funding to the sector during the 2010/11 academic year.

The various government bodies that interact with the sector have different funding, qualification and assurance systems.

Differences in the information required and collected create an unnecessary burden for training providers and divert money away from learners.

To provide value for money, the systems need to be appropriate, efficient, avoid unnecessary duplication, and balance the protections they provide for public money with the costs of the bureaucracy they impose.

No one body is currently accountable for reducing bureaucracy in the further education sector.

Instead, the two Departments and the two funding agencies maintain separate responsibilities based on their funding streams. BIS has a stated policy objective of reducing bureaucracy imposed on further education providers but would not accept overall responsibility for bringing together efforts to reduce bureaucracy in the sector.

Both BIS and DfE, and their funding agencies, have launched separate initiatives designed to simplify the requirements they place on providers.

However BIS does not manage the simplification as a programme with a clear and consistent goal.

While BIS has required the Agency to reduce its own administrative costs by 33%, there is no rational view on the amount by which they would like to reduce bureaucracy in providers nor do they accept that measurement of progress is necessary.