New Apprenticeship education provider announced

Recently we had to share with you the sad news that the Education & Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) had taken the decision to end funding for EEAST’s provision of learning for level three and four apprentices, following our recent Ofsted inspection.

This was incredibly disappointing for us as an organisation and it has been an incredibly difficult few weeks for both our learners, who were affected, and our education team.

Since the announcement, we have been working with Health Education England (HEE) who have helped us find a new education provider. The new provider will be Medipro with whom we already have a good relationship. Medipro will take on all our apprentices who have been training with EEAST, which I hope will make the transfer process smoother.

Now that this arrangement is in place, the next step is to transfer over all the apprentice learning from EEAST to Medipro. We expect this process to have happened within the next 12 weeks.

At EEAST we are continuing to offer the following support for anyone who has been affected by this:

• The apprentice support line is open Monday to Friday 9:30am – 5.30pm and offering support to all our apprentices, contact details have been sent to all apprentices who are impacted.
• We are also offering drop-in sessions for apprentices to ask questions. The details have been sent to all apprentices.
• For all other staff, the weekly ‘We are EEAST’ all staff briefing will continue to take place at 4pm, every Thursday.
• You can also get further information and support from your line manager, EEAST wellbeing or the Employee Assistance Program on 0808 196 2374.
• We will continue to update Need to Know and the Frequently Asked Questions Ofsted FAQs (eastamb.nhs.uk)

I want to reassure you all, we are committed to learning from this decision and are already working to improve our education and training offer for the future. We will continue to liaise closely with HEE over the coming weeks and months in order to make sure we can provide the best possible opportunity for our future apprentices and learners.

Finally, I know this is a very concerning situation and I am grateful to everyone involved for their understanding. However, there have been a small number of incidents with members of staff being abusive to education and training colleagues working on the support line. This is wholly unacceptable. Please do not take frustrations out on colleagues. Please do treat them with the dignity and respect that we all deserve.

On behalf of the organisation, I can only apologise for the distress this situation has caused, but I am pleased that we have secured a new provider relatively quickly and are now able to make the transition as smoothly and swiftly as possible for everyone involved.

Take care

 Tom Abell - Chief Executive 

Published 9th August 2021