A Merseyside apprenticeship training provider has been judged as requires improvement at its first full inspection.
Raise the Bar Ltd, which is based in Prescot and provides UK-wide online leadership and management apprenticeships was criticised for taking "too little action" to improve education quality for students in a recent Ofsted Report.
The company currently trains over 500 apprentices across a range of programmes, qualifications and apprenticeship levels, including professional coaching and women in leadership.
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Following an inspection carried out by Ofsted in May, a report released this week said that while apprentices produced work to a "high standard" with many students achieving good grades, some students were left feeling "overwhelmed" by workloads.
The report said some students were not being sufficiently challenged at the level they were training to because "coaches do not use information on apprentices’ prior knowledge and experience at the beginning of their programme to plan and sequence an individualised curriculum."
As a result, "too many" students already had prior experience in their jobs of the subjects they were being trained in before starting the apprenticeships.
Although this was the company's first full inspection since it was registered with Ofsted in 2018, a monitoring visit carried out in 2020 identified several areas for improvement. This included problems with a lack of target setting and failure to challenge some of the wider educational gaps students may have.
In the most recent report, inspectors said leaders had "not successfully rectified all the weaknesses identified at the previous monitoring visit" with no "clear oversight" of apprentices' progress and too much focus on "completing tasks" at the expense of addressing knowledge gaps.
Career advice offered by the company was also criticised for not being "unbiased." The report notes: "Apprentices only receive information about further and higher study opportunities at RtB (Raise the Bar)."
The report stated that while an independent board member had been recruited since the monitoring visit in the hope of addressing some of the issues identified, the company places "too little focus on apprentices’ learning or how their educational experiences can be improved."
It added: "This results in too little action being taken to improve the quality of education that apprentices receive."
A spokesperson for Raise the Bar Ltd said the Ofsted report pointed to many positive aspects of the company's service provision, adding the organisation planned to continue to "delight" clients with its approach to managing and delivering programmes.
The spokesperson said: "Ofsted’s report highlighted our good practices in many areas, and we will continue to build on this.
"We have already put in place any additional measures to address the specific areas raised and these are now implemented across all our programmes.
"With our Excellent rating by Employers on the ESFA website and having been recently ranked 22 nd out of 430 providers by our learners on ‘Rate my Apprenticeship’, we continue to ensure that our programmes and the way in which we deliver and manage them delight our clients."
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