CACHE chief executive Richard Dorrance, who is also the chief executive of the existing NTO, has begun a nationwide campaign to secure the support of 225,000 employers and self-employed people in the sector. He said CACHE, which is formally responsible for the NTO, would be launching the bid.
Education and skills secretary Estelle Morris said the new skills councils due to replace the NTOs in a variety of sectors would 'build on the best of the NTOs', but there is no guarantee that existing NTOs will be replaced by a skills council. If the CACHE bid fails, the early years sector will come under the Sector Skills Development Agency.
Mr Dorrance said, 'That would not be a bad thing, but I don't believe the Sector Skills Development Agency would be able to deliver such good results. We have a big job to do to convince the Government that we are big enough within the national economy to have our own early years sector skills council.'
He said while the NTO fulfilled a strategic role, a skills council would have a larger budget and would be measured by its results. He said the number of staff could be reduced from the present eight employees, with work contracted out to teams of experts.
Currently the NTO, which loses its accreditation on 31 March next year, receives about 250,000 from the Government, while the largest sector skills councils will receive up to 1m. This money is for key sector activities but will not cover core running costs, which CACHE would have to finance if its bid is successful.
The Government wants the new skills bodies to secure a reduction in skills gaps and shortages, improve productivity and business performance, increase employment across the sector's workforce and improve training frameworks and standards.
Helen Mardell, a director of Smart Training, and a trenchant critic of the early years NTO, said it was vital that employers were consulted because many carry out their own training.
She argued that 'funding for training was not getting through to the workplace' and that the NTO had become 'divorced from reality'. Mr Dorrance said he could understand this point of view, but added that the NTO could not have been expected to meet all the sector's needs within its first three years. He was confident that a skills council would remedy this deficiency by being truly employer-led.
Stephen Studd, chief executive of SPRITO, the NTO for sport and leisure workers, including 30,000 playworkers, said his organisation was confident that its bid for a sector skills council would succeed. His NTO had a full review of its performance and structure last year.
