Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
MR BRYAN
SANDERSON AND
MR JOHN
HARWOOD
MONDAY 9 DECEMBER 2002
40. You say you want to know what people think
and the Government phrasing usually is 14-19, not 16-19, so, given
that remit, the whole area of 14-19, or even 13-19, which is what
is being looked at, is the LSC looking at that in terms of therefore
young people coming through and their needs as they move through
the system?
(Mr Sanderson) Of course we are waiting for the outcome
of the Green Paper discussion document. We have been given a very
positive response to that, and perhaps Mr Harwood could say something
about that.
(Mr Harwood) That is absolutely right and that is
why we have been working on the flexibility pilots which are about
broadening the curriculum for young people from 14 rather than
waiting until they are 16 and then offering them a much broader
choice. I think that is going to be extremely important for us
in widening participation to encourage more young people to stay
on if they see it is part of a four-year programme, and, secondly,
we are tackling some of the challenges we were talking about earlier
on in terms of what gets studied and making sure we change the
profile of people entering work.
41. So the LSCs will be involved in that debate
both nationally and locally?
(Mr Harwood) Absolutely.
Chairman
42. There was a time when many of us were trying
to raise the education leaving age to 18, that no-one should get
into the market entirely before 18, but now we have one or two
voices calling for people to leave school at 14. Which option
would you go for, Mr Sanderson?
(Mr Sanderson) I am certainly not the voice that you
have just mentioned. I think that is about as contradictory as
one could find for the economy. The extra skills we need are probably
not going to be satisfied by leaving school at 16. Very few people
do stop education at 16 now anyway. I think it has become a rather
fictitious barrier.
43. These people, to be fair to them, are saying,
leave at 14 into, rather than an academic qualification, more
of a vocational type of course with work experience.
(Mr Sanderson) But it was put in what I thought were
rather more disparaging terms than that. I do not think that is
going to help the economy or the individual. We need a more and
more highly educated population and, as you have probably heard,
I am more in favour of some Baccalaureate type of solution. I
think we have suffered enormously in Britain by focusing down
too fast. The fact that we are about the last European country
along with Ireland that does not have a second language to some
degree of competence is not at all helpful in business. That is
just one thing. To have people who stop studying science at 13
and 14 or vice versa just does not seem to me to be the way that
modern society should be going. We are getting to the stage where
people have to be interested in learning and have to be prepared
to move from one skill to another and focusing down so leaving
the education system too early will not help at all.
44. Mr Harwood?
(Mr Harwood) Absolutely right.
Jeff Ennis
45. I have a supplementary on all this from
the college point of view rather than the school point of view.
If we are going to address the skills gap to the sub-regional
level LSC successfully we have got to build up the relationship
and the needs and the demands of local businesses from the colleges'
point of view and the interaction between the two. What sort of
a role can the local LSC provide in acting as a bridge between
the local employers and the local colleges, both FE and sixth-form?
(Mr Harwood) That is the key role we envisage for
the LSC, that brokerage role of understanding what the needs of
the locality or the sub-region are. What is particularly difficult
is not just understanding what it is at the moment but actually
what it is going to be in three, four, five years or even longer
periods ahead than that. We talked earlier on about co-operation
with regional agencies and I think one of the things that did
not come out from that was the investment which is taking place
in skills observatories or those sorts of activities which are
about not just trying to plot existing skill shortages but are
also trying to establish what they are going to be and which way
the trends are going so that not only can the LSC and its various
partners make appropriate provision for that in colleges and other
organisations but we can also give, through connections, high
quality advice to young people about the way the world is going
to be when they actually finish their education.
46. Where do local business education partnerships
fit into the equation, Mr Harwood?
(Mr Harwood) They are one of the ways in which that
process actually works. The key role that the business education
partnerships have is about tuning the aspirations of young people
to the needs of business and what it is like when they are going
to leave school and the range of opportunities that they will
have to take part in employment. That is the key role that they
have undertaken, that sort of aspirational and motivational role,
in order to try and escape from some of the prejudices and the
stereotypes that we have all inherited from the past.
Mr Pollard
47. I wanted to pursue what you said earlier
on, Chairman, where you both seem to suggest that 16 is the absolute
minimum and you should not turn away from that. If you go on to
comprehensive schools you will find that a group of 14 and 15-year
olds are switched off and get to a certain stage and then you
cannot force-feed them with educational matters. You were quite
dismissive of 16 and no less than that, otherwise we will not
achieve. Is there not a system where kids at that age can be eased
into vocational education where the mix of vocation and academic
changes markedly, and therefore they have better self-esteem and
so on so that it is a win-win situation rather than saying, "No:
16 is in. No change".
(Mr Sanderson) I think that is right. Clearly there
is a big role for work based learning and what you have just outlined.
We are, as you know, encouraging that. The point I am trying to
make is that we are after all abut lifelong learning, and now
the idea that there should be some cut-off point at 16 I think
is wrong. To lower it to 14 would be even worse. That was the
implication, I think. I do not think that is appropriate for today's
world.
48. I agree with the broad concept.
(Mr Sanderson) Work based learning is obviously important.
49. We must encourage that. We are running courses
on plumbing and bricklaying and building and all of that. There
are messages coming from Government saying that it is okay to
be an apprentice, adverts on the television and all that, yet
we do not seem to be getting one group doing what we want them
to do. How do we close that gap? How do we psyche the kids into
doing what we want them to do?
(Mr Sanderson) We were saying when we were coming
here, because we thought this might come up by some chance, that
really a pure market economist could say that this ought already
to have changed. You really can get £50,000 a year in London
for being a plumber. I think it will change because of the publicity
that that is getting as long as we provide the enabling mechanism
through the Learning and Skills Councils to give people the appropriate
qualification. That is what we have set out to do, and I think
that should change it quickly.
(Mr Harwood) Can I add to the point which was made
earlier on about 14 and 15-year olds who are of the impression
that learning is no longer relevant for them? It is not just about
broadening the curriculum, although that is obviously important
and has a role to play . It is also about making the whole curriculum
relevant and improving the quality of teaching and learning in
those institutions. It is not just about somehow broadening the
curriculum. It is about the way that institution works, the relevance
of learning to those young people and also giving them something
to achieve. Many young people are turned off if they are not achieving:
it is not relevant, it holds no future. It is not part of their
future. Quite a lot of the work we need to do is about peer group
pressure, it is about families, it is about natural aspirations
in communities which we are trying to tackle and we have got some
interesting ideas about how to pursue that. It is also about what
happens in institutions and we have got some really interesting
work going on. I will leave you with the work that is going on
in Birmingham which you may have heard about when you went up
there. We have a number of schools at what we call a level two
attainment programme which is about doing things which enable
young people to be successful in the whole curriculum in their
particular field. We have published a leaflet about it and there
is a quote on the front of it from the Director of Student Services
at South Birmingham College who says, "The project has been
a roaring success. This has helped us to help students more than
anything we have ever been able to do before." It is that
investing in success for young people which will change the attitudes
to learning.
(Mr Sanderson) It is very worrying with some young
men particularly just to get them to lift their heads up and have
some aspirations.
Chairman
50. But how do you spread the good idea, a good
programme like that, throughout the other Learning and Skills
Councils?
(Mr Harwood) We do it through our internal briefing
and seminar systems that we put in place to make sure that where
we learn how things that work in a particular area we have a system
for replicating that across the country, but you need to make
sure that that works in context. Things may work in a particular
area because of the unique features and contexts in that area,
and therefore one has to avoid falling into the trap of simply
replicating things without understanding why they have worked
in a particular area. We aim to do that both through the paper
transmission of good practice to other parts of the organisation
but also through running seminars and understanding events where
people can actually work out why things work and what lessons
they can learn, because it may only be part of it that they need
to take on.
51. I hope you listened to the File on Four
programme about modern apprenticeships. It was pretty savage,
was it not, about performance and retention? It said that there
were a high number of people dropping out from modern apprenticeships.
I understand that it was saying that if the local college was
in contract with you to do so many apprenticeships you might think
you have got plumbers and electricians and they might produce
all hairdressers and you cannot do anything about it, can you?
(Mr Harwood) We can do something about that.
52. That is not what the Chairman of the Learning
and Skills Council told us in Birmingham.
(Mr Harwood) If I may help to explain that, we are
quite in a position to be able to discuss with colleges what it
is that we get for the money that is going in. The position, if
you are talking about work based learning, is slightly different
and I will readily agree with you that the quality of some work
based learning is not what it needs to be. There has been a lot
of discussion about that and that is something that we take extremely
seriously. We are putting a lot of effort into improving the quality
of work based learning which in some cases means that we have
to say that we are not prepared to contract any longer with those
providers because they are not, even after we have put resources
in to try and help them improve, able to supply learning at the
quality that we need from them.
53. Do you think the File on Four programme
was fair or did you know it was coming on?
(Mr Harwood) I did not know it was coming but the
File on Four programme is entitled to make what comments
it likes. What I am here to do is to talk about what we are actually
doing, which is improving quality. Quality is not as good as it
needs to be and it does need to be improved and that is what we
are here for.
(Mr Sanderson) One of the other problems, Chairman,
is that one of the reasons for not finishing is that less scrupulous
employers, particularly in the south east where there are skill
shortages, stand around places which are offering these courses
and do not let students finish. They say, "You do not need
to finish. We will take you now and pay you X and Y", so
quite a big slice of the drop-out rate is due to people getting
jobs before they have their qualifications.
Mr Turner: What proportion of members of the
area LSCs are (a) businessmen, (b) businessmen operating in SMEs,
and (c) businessmen operating in micro businesses?
Chairman
54. Mr Turner means businessmen or businesswomen.
(Mr Harwood) The answer to the first question is 41%.
The answer to the subsequent questions I would have to do some
further analysis on.
55. What was your target?
(Mr Sanderson) There is a statutory requirement on
us to have 40% at the moment.
56. The target was 40%?
(Mr Sanderson) No, the a statutory requirement is
40%.
57. What was your target when you started last
year? You told us a target.
(Mr Sanderson) Forty per cent.
58. Are you happy with 40%?
(Mr Sanderson) Yes. A lot of them are SMEs but I cannot
tell you the figure.
Mr Turner
59. My reflection is that micro business is
not well represented.
(Mr Sanderson) They do not usually offer themselves
up for anything like this in my experience. I do not know the
answer.
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