Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MR BRYAN
SANDERSON AND
MR JOHN
HARWOOD
MONDAY 9 DECEMBER 2002
Chairman
1. Today is Monday and we are talking about
skills and I see there are very few people from the press here
because most of them, except their worthy colleagues here, do
not take skills very seriously. They whinge in editorials about
skills but they do not actually report important sessions on skills.
Can I welcome Mr Sanderson and Mr Harwood to our deliberations.
A year ago more or less you could make as many excuses as you
liked to this Committee because you had not been there long, it
was all early days and you had not really had time to sort things
out and have a track record on which you could be judged. What
about this year? Anything you would like to say in mitigation?
(Mr Sanderson) We had our annual conference a couple
of days ago with the Secretary of State and all the DPs and Chairs
from around the country. You would all have been pleased if you
had been there with the buzz and the positive things going on.
2. We were not invited, were we, colleagues?
We would have been pleased had we been there.
(Mr Sanderson) We thought it might be prejudicial
to this meeting. It has definitely moved up a few gears since
we last talked to you and we do now have a well established functioning
organisation, a delivery vehicle for the Government. We have got
some streamlining to do still but we have had a significant input
into all the issues raised last time, including the proportion
of staff with direct further education experience. Every local
Learning Skills Council now is staffed with FE experience and
most of the LSCs also have staff with school sector experience
although that still needs a bit more strengthening. We have also
strengthened business representation, particularly on the National
Council. We have a couple of vacancies that we are evolving every
year from now on within some portion of the Councils and we have
had a very impressive response for the three vacancies this time.
We had 350 or so formal responses of which about half were business
people of very high quality, the best response that the Department
of Education has ever had.
3. Was that at national level?
(Mr Sanderson) Yes. As a result we appointed Digby
Jones from the CBI to the Council and Giles Clarke whom you probably
know from Majestic Warehouses. He is the entrepreneur who founded
that and also Pet Plan, the pet shop. They are two very high quality
and very well known people in the business world. We are in the
process of recruiting a sixth form head for the National Council
and we have also put on the Council Shirley Cramer to represent
the voluntary sector who is Chief Executive of the Dyslexia Institute.
She has particular attraction for me in that she lived in the
United States for 10 years and did considerable work there so
she knows about the type of community we are addressing. We have
strengthened the National Council a lot. We still of course have
an enormously challenging task to turn round a generation of neglect
which you touched on in your opening remarks and this is an area
that it is difficult to inspire people on with regard to culture
change. Our 2003 priority is to work closely with employers to
ensure that business gets the skilled workforce it needs, and
we still have the vision that virtually every citizen has the
opportunity to get world-class skills leading to successful careers
and employment, but most of all I think for personal fulfilment.
What have we done? The key achievements, if I can pick out a few.
are: smooth transition of the sixth-form funding which was a potentially
big issue, if you remember; we do not get many complaints about
that now; a continuing increase in 16-18 participation; implementation
of the Centres of Vocational Excellence programme which is moving
very rapidly; improved adult literacy and numeracy—we are
on track to exceed our basic skills target by about 8,000 places;
major improvements in quality. There has been a significant increase
in the percentage of providers assessed as excellent or good and
the learner survey which we did, which we can go into more detail
on, with our customers (our learners), showed a 90% satisfaction
response. That is all encouraging. In the coming year we intend
to build on this progress which we are making towards the long
term targets with the focus particularly on local businesses,
RDAs and the sector skills agencies which are now beginning to
emerge on the skills they need in local areas. I must say I still
think that the skills inventory of what is needed now, let alone
what we need in the future, a weakness in many areas. We intend
to work closely with the Government and other key stakeholders
to develop a national skills strategy for the needs of learners
and employers; they are not always the same thing, of course.
We are continuing the increase in participation—both John
and I are very keen on this—so that we stay on track to
meet the target we have been given of 92% participation in 2010.
That is the underpinning brick for all the other attainment targets
leading right up to the HE one, also in 2010, of 50%. We are working
on continued improvements in adult literacy and numeracy to get
that national scandal removed, or at least diminished, not least,
and I would like to mention this particularly, so that we become
leaner and fitter for purpose and cut bureaucracy. You will remember
we set up a bureaucracy busting task force, as we called it, and
they produced a trust in FE initiative which we have developed.
We now have further plans to change the skills base of the organisation
and we intend to increase productivity by 2006 (not far away)
by about two-thirds over our inherited base-line, thereby saving
the taxpayer about £100 million a year in administrative
costs. By that time our administrative overheads will be down
to below 2.5% which I can tell you, coming from the private sector,
most private companies would be rather proud of, and I think it
compares very favourably with most bodies in the voluntary and
public sectors. We are very pleased to confirm that we have funding
in place, courtesy of the Secretary of State, and the extra money
and flexibility that was announced at our conference last week
was very welcome and it does underline the importance that the
administration is giving to the FE sector and the skills needs
of the country; it is overdue and very welcome.
4. Mr Harper, do you want to say anything?
(Mr Harwood) Not at this stage, thank you, Chairman.
5. Can I open the questioning by saying that
it appears that the plans you put in place for the Learning and
Skills Council are now maturing rapidly, yet what one hears out
there on the street, not only in one's constituency but also here
in London and the south east particularly, is this dreadful shortage:
skills gaps. You cannot pick up a newspaper without people saying,
"Why is it that we have this tremendous tale of under-achievement
in our country—35% of the population under-educated, under-skilled?".
You as the Learning and Skills Council do not seem to be able
to turn these under-achievers into the skilled people that the
nation needs.
(Mr Sanderson) Not in a year anyway.
Mr Pollard
6. Why not?
(Mr Sanderson) This goes back, as you know better
than I, a couple of hundred years or so. We are trying. We have
set up specifically some pilot studies in some key areas.
(Mr Harwood) We all know that the reason why the country
is in the position it is in is for long-standing historical reasons
and we are not going to turn those round within one year. However,
we are making progress and part of that progress is about setting
things up and part of it is about doing things. Let us just go
through some of the components of the poor skills we have in this
country. The first is add-on basic skills. We know that there
are seven million adults who have real problems with numeracy
and literacy. That is why we have a target for reducing that number
and I am very pleased to be able to say that in our first year
we exceeded that target. That is the first step on the road to
sorting out the skills gap. The second is that we have generic
skill gaps in terms of the employability skills and the generalised
ability to do a job that either young people or adults face, and
that is why we have a number of employer training pilots in place
in order to try and find the best way of tackling those issues.
The third way in which we are tackling it is through tackling
particular skills shortages. As you know, we have a very ambitious
modern apprenticeship programme which has started. You will, I
am sure, have seen advertisements on the television, assuming
that you watch MTV and other channels like that, so you will have
seen or at least heard about that programme of encouraging young
people to want to take up crafts skills and apply those sorts
of skills even though they may be leaving school at 16, 17 or
18 and are not going on to university. Also, we should not lose
sight of our Centres of Vocational Excellence programme. We have
set a target of having 175 of those by 2004. We announced a few
days ago that we are already at 150 of those with another seven
being added in January, so we are already well ahead of our programme.
You will be pleased to know, those of you who are trying to get
plumbers, that the largest single group of centres of vocational
excellence is in the construction trade.
7. More resources have been announced last week
and indeed almost as we speak by the Secretary of State for Education
and Skills, so resources are not a problem. Maybe I am old-fashioned
but I thought that you had a strategy and then you got the resources
to deliver on that strategy. If my memory serves me right you
had the National Skills Task Force, the Government certainly did,
I think shared by Chris Humphreys. Then you have had, and I have
just been looking at your letter that you both signed, a workforce
development strategy. We then have the Minister now saying, when
most of us thought that perhaps by now, after five years of government,
we had a national skills strategy, that we were going to have
one but unfortunately we could not publish it until June. What
was Chris Humphreys and his team up to? What have you been up
to with your work and why did you need three goes at a national
skills strategy whereas I always say half a dozen others plus
this Committee sitting in a nice country house for a weekend with
plenty of sandwiches and coffee could come up with one? What is
going on here? Are you all blundering around in the dark because
you have got no idea where you are going because you have not
got a strategy?
(Mr Harwood) I do not think we are blundering around
in the dark. There is clearly a need to involve as many partners
as we can in this and, Chairman, you yourself said right at the
beginning that, sadly, compared with some educational topics,
skills is not seen to attract the media interest that you and
certainly we would like. That shows that there is clearly a need
for a wider effort in order to attract attention and to mobilise
a broader range of people. I think that the sorts of programmes
which are going to be envisaged in the national skills strategy
are about mobilising a broader range of employers and of statutory
agencies and so on in order to tackle the long-standing challenges
that we are facing. We do not have a doubt about what we are trying
to achieve. What we are looking for is more partners to engage
in trying to do that achievement.
8. Mr Sanderson, can you shed any light on the
reason why there are three different bodies all producing something?
Why have we got three? What is the difference between the three
of them?
(Mr Sanderson) I rather think I ought to be asking
you that really because this comes from the Government.
9. One comes from you. The Workforce Development
Strategy is yours. Tell us about it, and just tell us if you think
it is different from the National Skills Strategy.
(Mr Sanderson) It is part of our remit to address
the skills area of course. The complication arises because it
is also part of several other organisations' remits and we now
have a whole host of people involved in it. The RDAs are very
interested in it, and it is right and proper that they should
be, and the Sector Skills Agency is replacing the NTOs. What has
been missing, it seems to me, is somebody who is setting the agenda,
focusing it, pulling it together and who has got accountability
for delivery. There is an awful lot of goodwill around and a lot
of separate agendas, but the task of the Learning and Skills Council,
and you are quite right to raise the point, is to pull all this
together and make sure that we address it on a long term basis
and keep on doing it and make sure that there is some delivery
behind it. There should be a lot more recommendation and follow-up
delivery than there is at the moment.
10. This Committee is confused because there
seem to be three stabs at overall strategy. We are also a bit
confused about why the national training organisations were abolished—or
were they, because some of them seem to be limping on—and
why there has not been a systematic introduction of Sector Skills
Councils. Some of them have them, some do not have them. We understand
that other people are looking for someone to start one in a sector
where they do not have one. What is going on there? A lot of employers
say to us that they do not know what is going on. Do you?
(Mr Sanderson) If I just put an employer hat on rather
than this Learning and Skills Council one, some of the NTOs were
working quite well, a few of them, but quite a lot more were not
working very well at all (and this is just anecdotal), who were
really rather flimsy, bureaucratic organisations. I think the
Government was right to try and get some more attraction into
many of them. The problem is that business has to be persuaded
to do these things. You then hit issues of organisation. You cannot
have too many of them, but lots of business sectors are very jealous
of their independence, so it is very hard, for example, (and I
speak from experience on this) to get different boards of engineers
to combine together in one engineering group, because electrical
engineers and construction engineers do not talk to each other
too much. That I know has been part of the problem. It is really
not feasible to have much more than, let us say, 15 or 20 of these
in administrative terms. Focusing it down to 15 or 20 and getting
the agreement of people to work in bands like that, or in sectors,
has proved quite difficult. I know some of the apparent slowness
of introducing these is due to that sort of intransigence in business
itself.
11. Let me give you one more before we move
on. We went to Birmingham to look at education in one city. Almost
gratuitously we interviewed the Regional Office of Government.
We were surprised to understand from the evidence that we took
from that group that they did not seem to have much of a remit
with the Government on the ground in region for co-ordination
between yourselves, between universities, between education authorities.
They were not quite clear what they did and how they interconnected
with you or how you interconnected with the other people on the
ground like Regional Development Organisations. I just wondered
if you could tell us a bit more about how in a region you see
your organisation meshing in with the others.
(Mr Sanderson) I am very pro the RDAs; let me stake
my position on that because that is going to bias what I say.
I do think there is a regional agenda in this area and there are
many things better done regionally in the skills area than done
nationally. Equally it is true that quite frequently it needs
to be done at a sub-regional level and some of the best examples
I have seen around the country, particularly in the north-east
which I am more familiar with, are on a sub-regional basis rather
than on a regional basis. We clearly need to work with the RDAs
and we already are. We have in our remit something like 15 partner
agencies that we are working with. That is a hugely complicated
agenda. As a businessman I look at it and I acknowledge that there
are a lot of stakeholders who all have to be interconnected with,
but what seems to me to be often missing is a spotlight on who
is accountable for the outcome, who can carry the can for making
sure that this happens. Where the Learning and Skills Councils
are at their best they really ought to be the ones that should
make sure that the translation between business and the education
communities happens and that there is some delivering of this
sort of agenda. Goodwill is not enough. You also need to focus
down and make sure that the accountability outcome is properly
understood. I think that has been missing.
(Mr Harwood) One should not ignore the detail in relationships.
First of all, every local Learning and Skills Council has someone
from the Regional Development Agency sitting on the Council. Secondly,
every local Learning and Skills Council has an observer from the
Government Office who attends the meetings of the local Learning
and Skills Council and has other rights of access and rights of
liaison with the local Learning and Skills Council. Thirdly, the
Learning and Skills Council is in all regions a key partner in
the Framework Regional Employment of Skills Action which has been
developed, nine of which were delivered to ministers a few days
ago. I think there is a very clear, sound inter-relationship between
the Learning and Skills Council and the Regional Development Agencies
and the Government Offices at a local and regional level.
12. You should have the lead role and not the
RDA, you mean?
(Mr Harwood) I do not think it is a question of claiming
the role. I think it is a question of making sure that each party
brings to the table the understanding and the drive that it can
bring and making sure that we tackle some of these very long-standing
skills problems.
(Mr Sanderson) At the moment we are up and running
and they are not so it would make better sense perhaps for us
to have a lead role.
13. You would not be very happy with that in
the commercial situation, Mr Sanderson, would you, that no-one
seems to have the lead role?
(Mr Sanderson) No.
14. But you think you should have it and do
have it?
(Mr Sanderson) I think that is part of our remit,
at least for the moment, but I think working with the RDAs should
not be a problem. Already we are doing quite well in most areas.
Jeff Ennis
15. Going back to when the Learning and Skills
Council came into existence last year, you drew your staff primarily
from a larger organisation with the involvement of the FEFC and
from smaller organisations, the old TECs. How much of a challenge
was that, to get the staff to gel together, and what opportunities
or weaknesses did that throw up in developing your new organisation?
(Mr Sanderson) That is definitely for John to manage
but I will save his blushes a little bit by saying that that has
been a big achievement. Almost the worst possible position of
the TECs was that they were a rather independent culture. On one
side we were starting with the local officers, and on the other
side the FEFC, which did a great job in a very narrowly focused,
highly top-down national culture, was starting with most of the
head office, so there was a sort of built-in collision. In fact,
it has moved an awful long way from there now.
(Mr Harwood) The problem has not been getting people
to gel together in the way you describe, which I think has gone
remarkably well because of the support and the motivation of people
across the country. I think the real challenge has been to build
the experience of the staff of the Learning and Skills Council
about the new sectors which we are now responsible for funding,
particularly school sixth-forms and further education. We have
worked very hard over the last 18 months on a process both of
bringing people in, recruiting people, secondments from colleges
and indeed from some schools, and familiarisation of training
programmes in order to equip the staff of the Learning and Skills
Council with the knowledge and the understanding they need in
order to be able to take the decisions and add value in the process.
A huge amount of work has been done. It has been done, I think,
very effectively and I would like just to pay tribute to the staff
in colleges particularly for the support they have shown to the
Learning and Skills Council in getting that to work properly.
16. Has it been difficult getting the staff
to change their culture as it were from whichever background they
came?
(Mr Harwood) It is always difficult to get staff to
change their culture but I think that, looking at it now, one
can clearly see that that has happened. There is a completely
different cultural feeling. We have put a lot of time and effort
into building a new LSC culture and that has happened in a remarkably
short space of time.
17. Changing the subject somewhat, since you
last came to give evidence the government have obviously rolled
the education maintenance allowances out nationally and you mentioned,
Mr Sanderson, the fact that one of your main objectives is to
get more students to stay on into sixth form etc. How important
a step do you think that initiative is in achieving that particular
roll-out?
(Mr Sanderson) It is very important.
18. So you fully support it?
(Mr Sanderson) Yes. The decision has been taken for
it. It has not actually been rolled out yet.
19. The other point, going back to what you
said earlier, was the modern apprenticeships initiative. The performance
and the success of those seem to be rather patchy nationally.
In certain areas they have really taken off and are very popular
with the trainees, etc. I can quote Barnsley as an example of
that, where it has taken off, and yet in other areas they seem
to be very much under-performing. What do we need to do to try
and get a more stable and more successful modern apprenticeship
scheme coming up from the ground?
(Mr Sanderson) You are right; it is patchy and I suppose
that was inevitable. What we need to do above everything is to
get SMEs more involved. Many of the very big companies have been
doing this for ever; they look after their staff and their training.
For SMEs it is much more difficult and there are about a million
of them. About 700,000 of them we are hardly ever in contact with
at all, not just the LSC but any aspect of government authority.
We just need to find better ways (and we keep trying) of roping
them in. It is probably peer group examples and so on.
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