Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540-559)
14 JULY 2004
MR DAVID
SHERLOCK, MS
LESLEY DAVIES
AND MS
BARBARA HUGHES
Q540 Chairman: Did that give you any
markers as to what you should be looking for?
Ms Hughes: We have inspected a
range of service establishments which have Learning and Skills
Council contracts; that is part of our standard work. A range
of issues has come out of those inspections. Certainly we did
three trial inspections last year in relation to Ministry of Defence
work and that is where we picked up some key points for our current
work.
Q541 Chairman: The military is a pretty
unique institution and what might apply in those which you have
mentioned might not necessarily apply. None of those guys you
have talked about would expect to go off and get shot or blown
to smithereens, which does give one a different perspective of
the workplace from the one with which you would normally be associated.
How are you training up and identifying people who would be able
to find their way around the military culture? The Army culture
is not the same as that in the Air Force and the Navy or the MoD.
Mr Sherlock: Indeed.
Ms Hughes: We have a core team
of nine full-time inspectors conducting these duty of care inspections
with the Adult Learning Inspectorate and they cover a range of
occupational areas. They are all lead inspectors, so they have
been into a range of establishments, including the armed services.
Some have worked with the police as well on survey reports. In
addition to that, we are training up about 20 of our part-time
associate inspectors. They will be working with us on the inspections
at different stages. They have both physical training background
as well as a health and care background and are particularly experienced
in residential care and mental health. We feel we actually have
quite a good range, alongside the colleagues who will be working
with us from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and the
Social Care Inspectorate.
Q542 Chairman: It might be helpful to
you and us if before you started you came along and had a good
chat with us so that we can disclose that information which is
disclosable. Almost everything we are doing in our inquiry is
either on the web or will be made available but it might be useful
if we exchanged information.
Ms Davies: Certainly.
Mr Sherlock: That would be very
helpful; thank you very much.
Q543 Chairman: Please write to us in
due course when you think it would be useful to hold such a meeting.
Many recruits to the armed forces are very young people under
the age of 18; some are as young as 16. How much experience do
you have of inspecting institutions catering for people under
the age of 18?
Mr Sherlock: Residential institutions.
There is a set of grades in your pack. We deal with residential
colleges, particularly for young people with disabilities and
learning difficulties who are extremely vulnerable and indeed
young people over the age of 18 in those categories too. We deal
with all work-based learning for young people over the age of
16, some of them have problems which are substantially the same
as those of some recruits. For example, the work on those going
into New Deals, Workstep and other programmes of that kind operated
by the Department for Work and Pensions share many of the difficulties
which have been identified to your Committee already. We fully
understand the range of challenges which young people, of the
kind who are entering the Army, particularly face and we are familiar
with many of the problems with residential contexts.
Q544 Chairman: There is some public concern
about armed forces training but it is not so much about learning
as about quality of care. This is something we come across when
we make our visits. What experience do you have of inspecting
the provision of care and welfare, which is not exclusively our
concern, but is largely our concern?
Ms Hughes: Care and welfare, pastoral
support, curriculum support, are all aspects which we inspect
against because we use the Common Inspection Framework which is
the framework for all post-16 education training inspection. That
includes specific aspects around support and guidance to learners,
Jobcentre Plus clients, inmates, whatever the situation, whatever
the context. The Common Inspection Framework actually has a great
deal of care support aspect within it which we will reference
against. We are also going to be referencing the care standards
which you also have a letter about in your pack and seeing how
we can dovetail those into the work we are doing.
Q545 Mr Jones: I accept that as an organisation
you have a lot of experience of dealing with inspecting difficult
organisations. This is not me speaking, I am playing devil's advocate
here. We have now been on quite a few visits and I accept it varies
between the establishments you go to: whether it is the Army,
Navy or Royal Air Force. How would you react to some of the undertones
we have picked up, certainly in the Army, "We know how to
do it. We have made some changes. Why do we have to have some
do-gooders coming to tell us how to train people when with the
best will in the world they do not understand quite how we operate
or how we are going to operate?". How are your inspectors
going to get over that? In some places I can see there being some
quite challenging situations with regard to obtaining information
and co-operation.
Mr Sherlock: We do recognise that
picture. I should perhaps say that at the moment we are doing
inspections of 10 Army education centres; in fact we have a team
in Germany at the moment. We carried out some very interesting
trials last year and Barbara led some of them and in some cases
we encountered some resistance. I would have to say that Admiral
Goodall and his colleagues have been extremely helpful and supportive
so far, as have Adam Ingram and Ivor Caplin. At the moment there
is a real determination to improve. That is what we would hope
to build on. You are right in saying that we have a slightly delicate
line to tread in that this exercise plainly is about public accountability,
about ensuring that the sort of things that you are being told
and that we are being told about improvements are in fact being
carried through on a consistent basis on the ground, not just
between nine and five but at weekends and evenings and nights
indeed, so that there is an emphasis on accountability in the
present exercise. What we are also trying to do is to build a
basis on which real culture change can take place. The memorandum
of understanding, which we have signed with the MoD, is for a
minimum four-year period and we anticipate it being a long-term
arrangement. What we would hope to do would be to put in place
regular self-assessment against the Common Inspection Framework,
a style of inspection which is very much about debate among peers,
with a shared aim, if we could build that, towards continuous
improvement. We would hope to disseminate good practice as much
as we are dealing with poor practice. We would hope to work alongside
DOC, which has also produced some impressive reports identifying
difficulties, building on the kind of partnership which, for example,
the Surrey police built with the armed services themselves, to
secure a real understanding of the problems. That is probably
a fairly long way of answering your question, but there is no
quick answer. One has to build confidence and understanding of
what we are seeking to do together.
Q546 Mr Jones: I do not for one minute
question the senior management's commitment to this, but how do
you deal, for example, with the instructors, who change on a regular
basis? I had one yesterday who said to me "Compared with
when I went through training . . . ". How do you get that
change of ethos, to which you just referred, all the way through
the chain of command?
Mr Sherlock: Those are major structural
questions and in fact so many of the answers you have already
received, from Colonel Haes and others, refer to possible structural
problems, things which perhaps need fixing in the medium term.
Q547 Mr Jones: You have a situation where
the trainers are changing on a two-yearly basis which is unusual
in other training establishment in the civilian world. You constantly
have a new set of people there.
Mr Sherlock: Retreading prejudices
in some cases I am sure. You have received assurances about the
level of training improvements in training of trainers. That is
the key to it. The DOC report last year made it fairly clear that
certainly at that stage some of those improvements had not come
through. There were people going into a training role who had
not yet at that point been trained. It seems to me that some of
the points Colonel Haes made to you about the training role being
a high prestige role, being seen as a step towards promotion,
improvement of career development generally for people who are
selected for it, is an important issue. We have to rebuild that.
I have to say that I was concerned by some of the things he said
about it being done on a word of mouth basis. It seems to me that
there are much better practices available where people apply for
roles of that kind if you want to give it prestige. We have to
break that cycle by ensuring that the training of trainers is
better, that it takes place before they take up their positions,
that they apply for it, that they are properly assessed for it
in terms of their suitability and that they receive some career
development as a result of high performance in that area.
Chairman: I hope the grading system you
use is not the same as the one Colonel Haes advised us of in that
establishment.
Q548 Mr Hancock: You have mentioned Colonel
Haes a couple of times. Have any of you actually interviewed him
yet about his experiences?
Mr Sherlock: Not yet, no.
Q549 Mr Hancock: I hope you are going
to. One of the worrying facets about what he was asked to do was
that he was not actually given access to what had gone before
and he had not read the documents which the Surrey policy in particular
were so critical of, which had not been implemented. Are you satisfied
that the MoD are going to make sure that you have all of that
information made available to you? Are you sure they are giving
you all there is?
Mr Sherlock: We shall certainly
seek all that information. That is one of the things the Surrey
police report contributes very importantly to this work in that
it is a full catalogue of the work which has gone on before. We
shall certainly be seeking to look at that and probably to speak
to Colonel Haes as well. The second part of your question is perhaps
more difficult. One of the reports, that on the profile of trainees
in Cardiff, we have not yet been able to run down with the help
of colleagues from MoD. I would hope that we can in fact run to
earth all of them over time, but we certainly do not have all
the information we need at this stage.
Q550 Mr Hancock: I would not rely too
heavily on that, because we did find out that it was a very, very
selective profile.
Mr Sherlock: Indeed; absolutely.
Q551 Mr Hancock: It was very narrowly
based and some fairly outrageous things were said in that report
based on all recruits, which was a bit misleading to say the least.
Mr Sherlock: I really answer that
in the hope that we shall have a completely comprehensive set
of all the documents referred to in the Surrey police report and
other documents.
Q552 Chairman: They probably want to
distinguish those which are relevant to your work. Some of the
things would not pass over, and perfectly correctly, but I am
sure there will be some things in the various reports identified
to which you should have access. My last question is almost about
dealing with the military. Unless you are prejudiced when you
go in, you will find they are a great bunch of people and it is
quite difficult to stand back. The temptation in many cases is
to empathise with them and what they are doing. Then you get charged
with being one of the gang. How are you going to assure people
that you are very professional, you are going in, you are watching,
you are listening but you have a distance? You must have thought
about that.
Mr Sherlock: We have that challenge
all the time in other very close cultures like the Prison Service,
for example, where empathising with the culture without becoming
cosy is a challenge. It is true of further education, indeed of
all the areas in which we work. We need to lay down what the ground
rules are. We need to make it absolutely clear that we will be
grading the work in the end, not in this particular survey report,
but after this. We need to make it clear how we arrive at our
judgments, based on evidence. We are open with people about how
we are arriving at our judgments and the evidence we are finding.
We train people to work with us; a nominee from each of the organisations
we are inspecting. We work very carefully to ensure that the process
is transparent. Once people understand precisely what we are doing,
then in fact the necessary gap tends to be maintained, even though
civilised relationships are easier to maintain.
Chairman: On the point Kevan made about
people saying you were busybodies coming from outside, I have
heard that in virtually every school I have visited which was
about to be "Ofsteded". The relationship you might have
or the criticism of you will not be unique.
Q553 Mr Cran: I dare say if I read through
the very extensive brief and package you have given us I could
find the answer to this question, but I want it on the record.
It really arises out of something Mr Jones said to you. In one
of our visits one of the senior people we met simply said this—it
does not matter who this individual was—"We will wait
to see what they bring to the party in terms of skills and expertise".
I guess you really have to assure the client what it is you bring
to the table and so on. Tell us about it.
Mr Sherlock: Which skills, or
how we are going to go about that process?
Q554 Mr Cran: Both. What you bring to
the party. That is what you have to assure them about.
Mr Sherlock: Yes. What we bring
to the party is independence, the authority built of looking at
a huge range of contexts, some of them blue chip companies, some
of them charitable organisations, some of them other parts of
the public service like the police and the Prison Service and
so on. People understand now, within the MoD certainly, that the
ALI is the specialist inspectorate for this country for preparation
for work and workforce development. How we convince people, what
we do on every inspection, is to submit the CVs of the visiting
team, not as a matter of negotiation, but so people have a clear
understanding of the background that our inspectors are bringing.
As I mentioned in my earlier answer to the Chairman, we also train
a person from that organisation to join the inspection team, joining
in every piece of work we do except for the grading. That nominee
process gives people a very clear idea about the ALI's operational
culture and the standards we achieve.
Q555 Mr Cran: The ministerial statement
was on 24 May, so quite a lot of work has been going on between
24 May and now.
Mr Sherlock: Indeed; yes.
Q556 Mr Cran: Are all the early indications
that you are going to get the co-operation of all that you need?
Mr Sherlock: I think so; certainly
Admiral Goodall and his staff have been exemplary.
Q557 Mr Cran: I did not mean the admiral.
I would expect him to be very supportive and all his staff. It
is when it gets out into the sticks; that is a different issue.
Ms Hughes: We have had quite a
bit of experience from going into establishments like that and
certainly with the three pilots we did last year, even though
they volunteered for it so they were working in co-operation with
us, naturally some people were uneasy about us going in, suspicious
about us going in, but we were very well received. We showed them
how professional and independent and objective we can be. They
took advantage of the situation and in one establishment which
we inspected they actually responded there and then to the inspection
and put in some of the changes in response to the judgments we
made. We have a track record of showing that we can persuade people,
because of our independence and objectivity and because we are
able to get on with such a wide range of people in different organisations,
that hopefully—hopefully; I cannot guarantee it—we
will be able to overcome some of those anxieties.
Q558 Mr Cran: Just to hypothecate for
a minute, let us assume just for a second, that it is not all
going to be quite like that and there are some people somewhere
in certain training establishments who are just not going to co-operate.
What are the means by which . . . I know you will produce an independent
report. Who does that go to?
Mr Sherlock: It goes to the minister
and I have assurances from both Mr Ingram and Mr Caplin that if
we ever find resistance that we cannot deal with at the establishment
commander level, or indeed at Admiral Goodall's level, then we
have open access to ministers at all times and that anything we
are concerned about that we take to ministers will be made public
and will come to you.
Q559 Mr Cran: You might get a deal of
co-operation under those circumstances, might you not? In addition
to this—everybody else might know, but I do not—how
much extra expertise are you going to have, full time or part
time and all that?
Mr Sherlock: The total programme
is around 900 days of inspection. We have seconded to us for the
whole period a full-time inspector from Her Majesty's Chief Inspectorate
of Constabulary, who is already a trained ALI inspector. That
is one of the useful legacies of our work with the Police Service.
At the moment we have agreement in principle with CSCI that two
of their inspectors will join us throughout that period. We shall
be operating three teams for many of the weeks, so we will always
have a range of the necessary experience to do the job properly.
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