TVCA Disrupts
Apprenticeships
Programme
Welding Apprentice. Photo courtesy of Heber Davies on Unsplash
Scott Hunter
12 September 2026
One of the consequences of the fatal crash on the A66 in August has been that an uncomfortable spotlight has been shone on Teesside. High levels of crime, especially drug-related crime, are now well known across the country. Less well advertised are high levels of unemployment, especially youth unemployment in the region.
Funding adult education is the responsibility of the Tees Valley Combined Authority, with a budget of around £30 million a year. The majority of this is spent on apprenticeships, where training is provided through the region’s FE colleges and also a number of private providers. Funding to these providers is allocated annually through a bidding process.
Further education trade paper, FE Week, reported in May (court-action-preceded-tees-valleys-skills-delay) that the process of allocating funding had been paused due to legal action being taken against the Authority by one of the private providers – Learning Curve Group. A second report (by the same author, Josh Mellor) - six-month-delay-for-tees-valley-adult-education - published earlier this month, reveals that the allocation of grants has been now until February.
That the Tees Valley is a region that can ill afford disruption to schemes that deliver skills to young people and reduce unemployment goes without saying. The question is, how did it come to this?
Mellor quotes the manager of one private provider, who states that the “TVCA had “questions” to answer about advertising a public tender that was not “legally robust”, adding the situation had left some training providers “looking at potential redundancies”.
Mellor reports in his earlier article that the TVCA was unusual in that, when procurement was last carried out, in 2021, both colleges and private providers were obliged to bid for contracts. The TVCA has since fallen into line with other combined authorities in awarding grants to colleges leaving only the private providers to bid for contracts.
This proved advantageous for Learning Curve Group, which received a significantly higher award than any other private provider, and more than many of the region’s FE colleges. Mellor goes on to say of the manager he interviewed, “… they also criticised training providers that launched legal action when bids were rejected because they “think they have a given right” to public funding.”
So, why might Learning Curve Group think it has some entitlement to public funding? If, as it appears, their bid was rejected by TVCA, that is a massive reversal of fortune for a group that had benefited so handsomely during the previous procurement process.
We are left wondering if the company’s change of fortune is related to the retirement of former TVCA CEO, Julie Gilhespie, in early 2025. Until 2016, shortly before her appointment to the TVCA, Gilhespie was a director of a number of the companies that form the Learning Curve Group. That may be entirely coincidental, however.
Information on how much Learning Curve Group earned from the TVCA prior to 2021 is patchy, given that the Authority has always assumed a ‘less is best’ approach to information sharing. However, the Authority’s statement of expenditure over £500 shows that from January to March 2020 Learning Curve was paid £329,982, identified as ‘grants’ (earlier statements are not available). Furthermore, it is unclear whether the payment, on 11 April 2022, to Learning Curve Group of £150,000 for ‘general consultancy’ is in addition to its earnings from providing training services or not. Either way, the partnership with TVCA has been lucrative for the company.
That the TVCA has once again dropped the ball during the pursuit of economic regeneration of the Tees Valley should, by rights, come as a surprise to those who have charted its progress. After all, it was the subject of a review in 2023 which made 28 recommendations to the way the Authority is run. As it made limited progress in implementing those, it was served with a ‘Best Value Notice’.
Issues were raised at that time in relation to Authority governance and the issuing of dubious contracts at Teesworks. What this adult education debacle demonstrates is that in yet another area of responsibility, the Authority has shown itself to be dysfunctional to the detriment of a particularly vulnerable group.
During a recent phone-in on BBC Radio Tees, the mayor expressed outrage when a caller linked high levels of crime in the region with lacklustre progress by the TVCA in generating new employment opportunities. Despite all the mayor’s protestations that thousands of jobs are just around the corner, young people will often find themselves unable to access them without proper training. That’s assuming that the jobs actually materialise, of course (at one time Teesworks alone, we were told, would generate 20,000 permanent well-paid jobs. The mayor is currently touting 12,000).
At TVM we have often criticised the mayor for the excesses of his well-oiled propaganda machine, and his autocratic leadership. Many of the Authority’s problems stem from this alone. However, the crisis in adult education is of a different kind. The problem in adult education arises from the work of TVCA officers. The dysfunction that plagues the Authority is not simply at the top but is in evidence in lower tiers of the hierarchy, including those responsible for procurement and for adult education.
This Authority is not fit for purpose and neither the Tees Valley Review nor the Best Value Notice have succeeded in shifting the dial. Meanwhile people in the Tees Valley suffer with high levels of crime, a chronically underfunded police force, and serious issues around youth unemployment. So far, the government appears not to have noticed that the continued existence of the TVCA makes a nonsense of its plans to extend devolution.
While the overcentralisation of power at Westminster undoubtedly results in a poor deal for people in more distant regions, a devolution plan that ignores the risks of recreating the kind of mediocrity in government that plagues the Tees Valley will not succeed.