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Peter Marples / 3aaa


therealhantsram

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Well this is ironic isn't it... 

Peter Marples training company 3aaa has gone into liquidation amid claims of fraud and a police investigation. 

https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/derby-news/3aaa-administration-apprenticeships-jobs-2099512

For those unaware, Marples over the last 18 months has been making public claims about how poorly Mel has been running DCFC.

Perhaps people in glass houses... 

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The article referred to a 6 week suspension but didn’t elaborate so there’s some sort of back story to this.

but any business built on a government revenue stream is by definition high risk as governments change priorities all the time.

not that it makes it any less upsetting and worrying for the staff and apprentices. And directors if any wrongdoing is proven.

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5 hours ago, HantsRam said:

The article referred to a 6 week suspension but didn’t elaborate so there’s some sort of back story to this.

Quote

The first ESFA investigation into 3aaa, carried out in 2016 by auditing firm KPMG, found dozens of success rate “overclaims”. Despite the findings, the DfE awarded the provider £7 million in growth that year.

https://feweek.co.uk/2018/10/11/dfe-refer-3aaa-to-police-following-investigation/

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4 minutes ago, RoyMac5 said:

Cheers RoyMac5, I followed some of the links back to the original KPMG report and have started reading that.

Nobody looks to come out with any credit. The report essentially states a few allegations that in a number of cases "funding was incorrectly obtained" and then on the basis of a sample test rates each of the allegations as RED....inferring a high likelihood of "proof".

Tempering all of this with a line to the effect that "no evidence found of deliberate policy" in falsifying records - just that they didn't reflect reality but were used as the basis for the company getting government funding.

Although what the government department was doing in INCREASING funding after they received the kpmg report is mind-boggling. Looks like shady dealing mixed with public sector incompetence to me...........but as usual, the innocent will suffer.

The next usual step in these sorts of cases is to see if there is any claim against the company directors - be that for breaches of companies act (eg approving accounts that they knew would be based on incorrect records) or even I suppose fraud.

All very sad.

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20 odd years ago I used to work in the government dept responsible for dishing out the funds to these training providers.

It was  a shambles back then and it doesn't seem to have changed. We had targets of how much money we had to distribute, and the training providers had targets of how many outcomes they would achieve. Let's just say that "creativity" was an asset. Pretty much every year we'd have a provider go bust and a few people would get sacked for pretending it was all fine.

 

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22 hours ago, RamNut said:

What do 3aaa's actually do?

aren't schools, colleges and employers the training providers?

Precisely ! .. If a government of any colour wants there to be more apprentices and training then surely they should deal with employers. Much easier to control and likely to be a lot more effective than having middlemen taking a cut. 

Oooops this might be .... shhhhhh politics 

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Peter Marples as also stepped down as chairman of Spencer Academy Trust. This trust run a number of schools in the Derby area. Hope the 3aaa's company had no involvement with the trust and the running of the schools.

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9 hours ago, RamNut said:

Welcome to the world of directly funded education. Its a honey pot. 

There's a lot I'd like to say about schools that aren't under the control of their local authority but it would be censored as being political.

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On 13/10/2018 at 15:45, jono said:

Precisely ! .. If a government of any colour wants there to be more apprentices and training then surely they should deal with employers. Much easier to control and likely to be a lot more effective than having middlemen taking a cut.

Easier to control, and more effective? Probably right - but a massive overhead on staffing costs.

In the 1970s that's pretty much how it worked (Manpower Services Commission) - then it was to all intents and purposes privatised in the 1980s and the mushroom farm of middleman "training providers" took hold. But on the upside, the Civil Service no longer had the staffing liabilities it took to run this. They just controlled the money tap that funded the whole shebang. The usual problem with privatisation in that for all the efficiencies, there are pockets of accountability that just fall down the cracks

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