Examination of Witness (Questions 200-219)
TUESDAY 25 MARCH 2003
RT HON
MR CHARLES
CLARKE
200. Are you actually working with DEFRA on
that issue?
(Mr Clarke) If I look at the agenda I go through with
Alun and DEFRA, I would not say that communication strategy is
top of the list. I do think it is much more substantial questions,
such as the nature of schools in rural areas, that we are addressing,
and making sure that there are proper education and skills opportunities
in rural areas, for example, which I think is part of any sustainability
agenda rather than a government communication strategy.
201. Is that not rather more to do with rural
policy than sustainable development?
(Mr Clarke) Yes, it is, but the truth is, as any member
of parliament representing a rural area will tell you—though
I am not such a person—unless we can get sustainable education
and skills provision in rural parts of the country, we will have
a continuing drift away from the countryside to the town or city
in a way which is ultimately negative and, I would say, unsustainable.
I think it is partly sustainability. One of the problems with
this is, Mr Ainsworth, as I know you know, is the fact is that
you are talking about such a wide range of different issues, but
I would not say this, that or the other is the particular route;
it is a question of trying to identify the different channels
that we have to pursue.
202. Is it correct that the person in your department
with day-to-day responsibility for education is the person in
charge of the geography section of the curriculum division?
(Mr Clarke) Do you mean at an official level?
203. Yes.
(Mr Clarke) I do not think it is correct, actually,
but I am not sure. You may be right. I am not saying you are wrong
about that, but I have never looked at it like that.
204. It is the information we have. I wonder
whether you thought that might be an example of how it is easy
to pigeonhole education for sustainable development.
(Mr Clarke) Actually, it is an example of something
different, which I am trying to drive through the department as
well, which is what I call "subject specialisms", trying
to get focus on particular subjects, and I do not think we give
enough of a focus to geography, history and other subjects in
what we do, and we have shared responsibilities in those areas
and that no doubt gives rise to what you are saying.
Chairman
205. In terms of who is in charge of overall
policy, would you feel that you have regular meetings with the
overall policy officer? And I think it would be useful for us
to know who that is.
(Mr Clarke) I do not have regular meetings.
My style and approach, which may or may not be the right approach,
I do not know, is to try to take a subject then drive it forward
with a series of meetings relatively intensely and then maybe
not have a meeting for a period of time. At the moment I am in
the process of discussions with colleagues in my department on
the issues I have mentioned. For me, the area where I think we
can deliver the fastest rapid results is school transport, so
the people who are dealing with school transport in the department,
headed by one of my directors called Tom Jeffrey, are the people
to whom I am talking most about that area. I suppose I feel that
if you say to me: Do I think there should be an individual who
is at a certain level in the department who is "overall responsible"
for this? I would say with anybody other than myself or the permanent
secretary would be an appropriate place to put it, because I actually
think there is a range of different things that we do that we
need to take forward.
206. It is interesting that you have used the
word "fastest" because when Sir Geoffrey Holland came
to this Committee he was talking about the need to communicate
a sense of urgency to your department about what needs to be done.
I do not think we got the sense from the written evidence that
you gave to us that there is this sense of urgency about new learning
opportunities, particularly when the revised version of Education
and Skills: Delivering Results, which was published just before
Christmas 2002, has only one reference to sustainable development.
How would you respond to that?
(Mr Clarke) Guilty, in a sense. I think what you are
describing is a state of affairs which I am hoping to change.
When I was appointed I took responsibility for this and one of
my motives was to try to change that.
207. Would you expect there to be references
to sustainable development in future documents?
(Mr Clarke) Yes, but I am much more sceptical than
I ought to be about references to anything in documents. I could
produce pages and pages and pages and documents and documents
and documents, and I do not think references in documents add
up to very much at all. In fact, I think one of the weaknesses
of the environmental agenda across government is to focus on references
in documents rather than what we actually do. As far as I am concerned,
my priority will be what we actually do. As I say, the areas which
I would identify are school transport, in particular; the schools'
capital programme and the guidance we put out on the schools'
capital programme in terms of actually building new schools and
colleges with significant sustainability in them; the curriculum
as we develop that; and, as I say, the internal housekeeping of
the department. Those are the areas which I particularly identify.
I am more sceptical than I ought to be perhaps but I am a sceptic
about the number of references in documents related to what actually
happens.
208. In terms of what the department actually
do, I think it would be interesting for us to have some idea of
the preparations that have started for the United Nations Decade
for Education for Sustainable Development which I think kicks
off in 2005. Are you having talks? Do you have plans? Do you have
any ideas of how you might build up that UN Decade? There is the
issue of funding for it as well?
(Mr Clarke) I have a note in front of me of what we
are exactly doing on this, but the point is that I believe strongly—but
it is obvious from the tenor of questions that the Committee does
not agree—that statements and declaratory remarks do not
take us very far, including in terms of the UN Decade. I think
it is a question of what we actually do. I think we are absolutely
full up to here with declaratory statements. Again, you can criticise
me for this, and you may do, but if I was to say that I gave major
priority to our location within the UN Decade, the truth is I
do not. I give major priority to try to sort out our school transport
policy, to try to get a curriculum which moves forward and so
on and so forth. That is what I am focusing on—maybe wrongly,
but that is how I see it.
209. I think the concern as well is about learning
and skills. Yes, of course, school transport is important and
of course it is important to link up with, if you like, practising
sustainable development through doing, through local transport
plans, through the link up with local authorities and all that,
but what about the policy of learning and skills in terms of how
that filters down? Where do you feel the strategic aspect of all
that is?
(Mr Clarke) Very specifically, we are publishing a
skills White Paper in June this year. That will focus on the development
of our Sector Skills Councils and what we are producing. We have
a number which have already started and we are taking it further
forward. In each sector of the economy, we bring together the
educators and the employers and so on, the innovators, in establishing
precisely the skills that are needed for each sector. For example,
in retailing: What are the skills that are needed? Do we have
a skills gap? How shall we fill in the schools gap? What should
be provided? To what extent are education and colleges providing
the people who are needed? In all of that, in each of those, the
LSC has a specific mandate—and you will see it in the document
that is published in June—to see that the sustainability
and the environment is a key element in that approach. I think
that is the only way to go forward. When you are talking about
the automotive industry, for example, or retailing or whatever
it might be, you will find in that document that sustainability
is a key element in what is happening as we try to re-establish
the qualification for courses and so on which will make it go.
That is the reason why we are working closely with the DTI, because
we think it is the innovation skills relationship which is crucial
and where we think we are well short of where we ought to be,
and the innovation agenda takes you immediately onto the sustainability
agenda because it is actually in innovating that companies make
the difference. I would say we ought to be judged on how well
or not our skills White Paper, for example—as I say to be
published in two or three months time—meets those agendas
rather than any particular verbal statements we make about the
UN Decade.
210. The recent work that is being done on this
Sustainable Development Education Panel, jointly with DEFRA, are
you confident that the recommendations of that will be fed into
the forthcoming White Paper you have talked about?
(Mr Clarke) Absolutely.
Mr Challen
211. Reading through the two memoranda we have
received from your department, there are an awful lot of things
there which could be sustainable development or perhaps they could
be things that have just been redefined as sustainable development.
Would you say the department actually does have a strategy of
education for sustainable development or has it found all the
things that you do and simply redefined them?
(Mr Clarke) I think that is a very fair
question. I would say that we have not really had a strategy but
we are working towards a strategy. I have a document in front
of me, A Green Strategy for the Department, on which we
are working at this moment and which we will publish in the next
couple of months, which is directed at turning the descriptive
list of what we are doing, which I think is better than some people
give us credit for, into a strategy. I agree with you, we are
not yet strategic enough but I hope we will become more strategic.
212. Do you think that process will be aided
by the receipt of the SDEP's draft strategy, which I understand
you now have? What difference do you think that will make?
(Mr Clarke) It will help us refine what we need to
do. We are going to publish the report of Sir Geoffrey Holland's
Committee shortly, so people can make their comments more generally,
but I think we need input, including input from this Committee,
to refine what we ought to do. I have tried from the outset in
this hearing to say what I thought the things on which we should
focus were, and that is what I will try to carry through.
213. You have seen the draft strategy. Do you
think it will add substantially to what you are doing now or will
it be a refinement of what has taken place?
(Mr Clarke) I think we are still not focusing enough.
I want to bring focus to the strategic issues we have to take
rather than to a list of checks that we go through. I think strategy
means thinking of what we will prioritise on and where we will
go. I think we do not have enough strategic thinking—and
I think this is across Government, by the way—and we have
too much of a tick-box approach.
214. It proposes setting up this "sounding
board". What do you think that might add? Who will be on
it? What will it do?
(Mr Clarke) I am always in favour of sounding boards
but at the end of the day I think it is doing things which makes
the difference and I think we have to do that. Who might be on
it is a range of different people who have interest in the areas:
a lot of very good people who work very hard. I do not think we
link enough into the practical organisations, including businesses,
which have themselves—both in areas such as transport and
in developing software, and in terms of capital, in terms of buildings—actually
done work in these areas. I think it is to those people we need
to listen much more directly.
215. How do you think that will function within
departments and influence what you do?
(Mr Clarke) It will produce reports from time to time
and it will be a sounding board, as you say, for when we develop
our proposals for people to make their input at that point.
216. I do not know what the timescale is on
all this, but do not know if you have an idea about that.
(Mr Clarke) We just need to set it up as soon as possible.
I suppose my difficulty—and perhaps it is becoming apparent
as we go through the conversation—is that I am not myself
convinced that setting up sounding boards, having conversations,
having committees, producing reports, producing papers is actually
the way in which we make a difference. I think the way in which
we make a difference is by actually doing things and it is on
that which we should be judged.
217. That would imply that you already have
certain strategy developments in train.
(Mr Clarke) Yes.
218. Are you seeing any benefits from those
at the moment?
(Mr Clarke) Going through the areas of concern, the
Secretary of State for Transport and I have had a bilateral series
of meetings which I hope will lead to a series of very concrete
proposals in the area of transport. We are publishing our capital
strategy in the next couple of weeks. As I say, I hope it will
include reference to encouraging capital building using sustainable
development. On the curriculum, which in many ways is the most
important of all these areas, we are currently in discussions
with QCA about a range of curriculum reforms, of which this is
one. In relation to the Learning and Skills Councils, as I mentioned
earlier, we are publishing our skills strategy in June, which
I hope the Committee will feel when it sees it is addressing the
skills needed for sustainability. Those are the four areas which
I would particularly identify.
219. This question of skills I think is going
to be a key issue. Skills can be acquired and I suppose will help
in industry remaining sustainable, but we can have those skills
for an industry that is not of itself sustainable, if you see
what I mean—where we can teach people to do all sorts of
things we no longer see as being terribly beneficial, for example,
to the environment. Is that the thrust of the skills strategy
that you are talking about or is it really coming from this focus
of education for sustainable development?
(Mr Clarke) I think it comes from the focus of saying:
What will be the successful enterprises in the future, whether
in the public sector or the private sector? My answer to that
question is that it will be sustainable enterprises which will
be the most successful ones in the future. Therefore, how can
we twin together the innovation/sustainability in particular industries
and particular fields of employment with the skills needed to
make that happen? I think that is the debate which we will gel
in that skills White Paper. It is quite a difficult debate, because,
as you say, there are areas where you might say, "Well, maybe
that is not a sustainable way of life at all." You might
say, for example, that shipbuilding or mining or whatever is not
a sustainable way of life. I do not think I would go that far
in the process. I was up in Teesside on the day that Corus announced
its redundancies and I would not myself be part of the argument
which said steel does not have a sustainable future, for example.
I think one could not go down that course, but I think we can
say that with shipbuilding that is the case. But, also, with all
the other areas, the people who will succeed 15 years from now,
the countries which will succeed, are those which are most based
on a sustainable vision of the world. That is what we should be
training people to do.
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