State accreditation system left with many questions to answer

STATE-approved Empower Training closed its doors last Friday, leaving 25 employees with up to three months pay outstanding and about 1,000 learners concerned about what will happen to courses they have paid up to €4,600 to partake in.

Based in the south-east but running courses across the country and online, the company had received more than €1 million from state agencies Fás and Skillnets.

Since 2002, the husband and wife team behind Empower, Stephen Doran and Vivienne Hinton, have administered hundreds of courses for the public and private sector. In 2006, the company was granted FETAC Quality Assurance Registration status for programmes it offered in areas that included IT, health and childcare.

However, an investigation by the state agency that supports training networks concluded its initial stage in March with findings that some Empower training courses did not take place despite trainee profile sheets and signed attendance sheets being on file.

Skillnets paid Empower €319,520 for 24 training courses in total, eight of which had not been delivered.

The investigators also concluded that Waterford Institute of Technology certificates found on file as evidence of training were not genuine and not signed by authorised officials.

Throughout the investigations, Skillnets state it “liaised closely with all relevant bodies, keeping them fully informed throughout the process”.

The agency’s inquiry stays open as legal proceedings may be pending.

The initial findings of the Skillnets investigation uncovered enough evidence of Empower wrongdoing for the agency to end all commercial contacts with the company. In March, information on the case was also provided to the Garda Fraud Bureau.

The Gardaí claimed to have begun an investigation at that time, but snowed under with investigations into what was deemed more serious financial fraud, are believed to have done little work on the case until yesterday.

Throughout this period, Empower maintained its FETAC quality assurance status, which several learners said made them confident enough to hand over thousands of euro for courses.

On RTÉ radio yesterday, FETAC chief executive Stan McHugh was asked why he had failed to inform students of problems surrounding Empower until last Thursday, when a notice was placed on his organisation’s website. Mr McHugh stated: “We were working on the assumption that Empower would stay in business.”

He added that the feedback his agency was receiving about Empower was generally “positive”.

However, an inspection of the FETAC reports on Empower for 2009 show that no direct contact was made with students and assumptions about the firm were based on paperwork provided by Empower’s owners.

Yesterday a Department of Education spokeswoman said that FETAC-registered providers, delivering programmes of three months’ duration or more, had to have an agreement that learners can transfer to continue their programmes with another trainer should the provider cease operation.

Questioned about why these other private trainers would now meet their commitments to Empower students, Mr McHugh said that the companies “have a vested interest in supporting each other” and the accreditation system. This is a view which is likely to be tested in the coming days.

However for students taking Empower courses accredited by British universities, the position maybe even more fraught. One London-based company that had a contract to provide courses accredited by Kingston University through Empower stated that “they have no contact or business with that company”.