Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MR IVAN
LEWIS, MP
3 DECEMBER 2003
Q1 Chairman: Minister, can I welcome
you to this session of the Select Committee. We very much value
our meetings with you and it is about a year since we had our
formal meeting on what we like to call your performance review.
We will be seeing a lot of you in the coming months because of
course we are about to embark on an inquiry into skills and that
means we are going to have to communicate on a very regular basis.
We intend to look at three or four specific topics in the skills
area and hope that will be helpful to you. Can I begin by asking,
reflecting over your last year since you appeared before this
Committee, what do you think have been the major concerns? We
understand of course about the major White Paper that you have
been involved in producing. Is there anything else that you would
like to draw to the attention of the Committee?
Mr Lewis: I am delighted to have
the opportunity of being here. I suspect, as you say, that we
are going to have a big conversation during the course of the
next 12 months and I would like to say that also we have spent
the last year really trying to please you, Chairman. We delivered
the Skills Strategy White Paper to time when you doubted that
we could and we also announced the roll-out of the Sector Skills
Council Network which I think is important. How I would define
the central issues that have taken place during the last year
is the production of that White Paper. I really think that it
has been widely welcomed. There seems to be a tremendous amount
of consensus out there for the content of the document. There
is a closer working relationship now than there has ever been
before, both between the organisations delivering the schools'
agenda but also between government employers and trade unions
as, on the last occasion that I appeared before the Committee,
you, Chairman, expressed that there ought to be. So, on the skills
agenda, I really do believe that there is a new energy and a new
focus. I also believe that we are really beginning to attack our
culture in this country which is negative towards vocational education.
I really do believe that we are beginning to make, as I hope I
will be able to reveal during the course of my evidence, significant
gains in terms of cultural change but also in terms of putting
in place the policy blocks which will enable us to have high status/high
quality vocational education in this country. The other issue
that I would like to draw to your attention is a new focus in
schools on the importance of attendance and behaviour as being
central to raising school standards, not as some marginal issue.
We know that, improving discipline, making sure that young people
attend when they should, is vitally important in terms of their
individual performance, in terms of our ability to create the
world-class education system in primary and secondary that we
seek, but also in terms of attacking some of the social exclusion-related
issues in our society such as antisocial behaviour and crime.
If you look at the figures, the direct relationship between those
children who are excluded, those children who are truanting and
those people who then end up in the criminal justice system and,
even worse, end up in youth offenders and prisons is frightening.
I believe that we have made tremendous progress, although I do
not pretend that the creation of a strategy is the same as delivering
change, on the skills agenda and I think that, for the first time
in a generation, we are seriously attacking attendance and behaviour
issues and, if you look at some the generational problems that
we have in our society, some of the antisocial behaviour, some
of the problems to do with teachers leaving the profession, some
of the issues to do with relationships between the older people
and the younger generation, I think that behaviour particularly
is something which merits far greater focus and attention than
it has been given in the past. That is how I would define the
priorities. I have also personally been working very closely with
David Miliband on the 14-19 agenda. We have put in place a serious
of building blocks in advance of Tomlinson, the new GCSEs in vocational
subjects, a more flexible curriculum at Key Stage 4, the flexible
14-16 partnerships where young people in many parts of the country
now have a mixed programme of learning, a couple of days in college,
a couple of days in school and maybe a day with a local employer.
So, beginning this process of creating a 14-19 curriculum which
is far more focused around the needs of individual young people
than has been the case historically. Also, a greater emphasis
on work-related learning—that will become statutory from
next year—and, as the Committee will know, the commitment
to introducing enterprise education fully into the curriculum
over the next couple of years. So, that is the span of my major
responsibilities and issues during the course of last year.
Q2 Chairman: Still in your list of responsibilities
as supplied by the Department, you have individual learning accounts.
Mr Lewis: Yes.
Q3 Chairman: This Committee looked in
some great depth at the way in which the individual learning accounts
scheme, which we very much supported as a committee, went, as
they say in the jargon, belly up losing significant amounts of
money, millions of pounds of money. Every minister who came before
us when we inquired into that assured us that you would get the
money back and that you would bring the people who defrauded the
system to justice. What evidence is there that you have done any
of that?
Mr Lewis: Chairman, I do have
figures but not on me in terms of the recovery rate and the resources
that have been recovered and I can write to you about that.[1]
There have been some prosecutions. Of course, in terms of ultimately
the total number of prosecutions, we are dependent on both the
police and the Director of Public Prosecutions but, make no mistake
about it, we have successfully chased many of the providers who
we believe were overpaid and there is a thin dividing line between
fraud and overpayment and that has also been an issue that we
have had to resolve. We have been very, very assertive in chasing
those people who we believe have had an excessive amount of public
money and I believe that we have recovered quite a significant
amount of that public money.
Q4 Chairman: What do you call a significant
amount?
Mr Lewis: I do not have the figures
on me; I can get the figures to you.[2]
Q5 Chairman: Come on, Minister. You know
and I know that if you had recovered a significant amount of money
or there had been serious prosecutions, somebody on this Committee
or one of our staff would have read it in the newspapers. Indeed,
you would have made sure that it would get in the newspapers.
There has been not one story about a successful prosecution that
we have read about apart from one small prosecution. If you can
draw our attention to successful prosecutions that brought back
some significant amount—and we are talking millions here—we
would very much like to hear it.
Mr Lewis: Well, I can get you
the detailed figures.[3]
We have never ever pretended to this Committee or anywhere else
that the individual learning account was anything but, in the
end, a disaster. The principles that underpinned it, the objectives
of the individual learning account, I believe, having gone through
the process of developing a skills strategy and looking at how
you do stimulate demand amongst individual learners, were absolutely
right. Unfortunately, in the design and in the delivery, the whole
principle, the whole vision if you like, was undermined and I
do not deny that to this day and we hold our hands up and acknowledge
that and we will have to learn from those mistakes. However, we
have not stopped the process of chasing the public money that
we believe has been inappropriately used and we continue to do
that.
Q6 Chairman: If this Committee and you
and the Government agreed that it was a great vision and a great
way of getting through to those people who need that sort of skill
and that range of skills, why have the Government not put it back
in a similar form much more quickly than they have?
Mr Lewis: Because I think that
we had to reflect on where the individual learning account went
wrong, frankly. What we have created in the skills strategy is,
for the first time in this country, a universal entitlement for
those without a first Level 2 qualification to have that Level
2 qualification. The challenge now is to make sure that we market,
promote and stimulate demand in a way which maximises the number
of people who do not currently have that qualification to know
how to access training in order that they can take advantage of
that new entitlement. I would argue that, by focusing resources
quite clearly on that category as well as redesignating ICT, for
example, as a third basic skill, we achieve almost a better product
potentially than the individual learning account where resources
went to people who did not necessarily always need those resources.
They were not focused always on giving people skills that they
clearly lacked and were important in terms of both their personal
development and our economic requirements. So, I believe that
the new first Level 2 entitlement alongside the designation of
ICT and alongside literacy and numeracy as a basic skill gives
us a tremendous opportunity to stimulate demand in a targeted
way amongst those individuals who we most want to bring back into
learning.
Q7 Chairman: What is the time gap between
what you have described, the end and the disaster of ILA as it
was all thought through and organised, and its replacement?
Mr Lewis: What we are doing at
the moment is piloting the introduction of the new universal entitlement
because we want to get that right in terms of making sure that
we do get the maximum number of people. We also know that there
are implications for the rebalancing and redirection of resources
in terms of the introduction of that entitlement. So, we are piloting
that this year and it will become fully available from September
2004. So, you can work out for yourself, Chairman, the gap between
the end of the individual learning account and the introduction
of the new Level 2 entitlement.
Q8 Chairman: Three years?
Mr Lewis: Roughly.
Q9 Chairman: That is a long time, Minister.
If it is an important gap to fill, it is one hell of a long time
to wait to fill it.
Mr Lewis: In the meantime, there
has been a lot of progress made in terms of, for example, getting
people to develop basic skill qualifications who have never had
them previously and other people have developed qualifications.
It seems to me that you were quite clear in saying that we needed
to replace a collection of initiatives in terms of skills with
a coherent strategy and it was also important that because of
what happened to individual learning accounts, we made sure that
that strategy was developed sensibly and that it was developed
in a way which had credibility and robustness and I would rather
have spent a little bit more time, although we did deliver the
skills strategy to time, getting it right and genuinely have the
capacity to stimulate demand in a way that we have not been able
to do before than we rushed it because superficially that would
have looked better, but we would not have designed a system that
really had the capacity to get to many more learners than has
been the case traditionally.
Chairman: Minister, we do not want to
dwell on this but we are just reminding you that sometimes you
go across to Sanctuary Buildings and it looks more like the Eden
Project than a Department! It is a very lovely place but when
a project like this goes belly up, we expected—and we said
this at the time—the lights to be burning all night while
you put together a new programme and replaced it and met the need
quickly. Quite honestly, I am sure this Committee will agree with
me that that is a long time to have the gap. So, lights burning
in Sanctuary House—environmentally a little bit dodgy but
we would allow you to work through the night when you have to
replace a programme. Anyway, I do not want to dwell on that. Thank
you for that opening group of answers. Let us get on to school
attendance.
Q10 Mr Pollard: Minister, reports suggest
that the implementation of the behaviour and attendance strategy
has tended to remain static and there have not been any great
improvements. If you progress through some of the strategies,
they have a negative emphasis such as fast-track prosecutions
and attendance councillors. Do you have positive strategies where
we can all enliven young students in order that they actually
want to take part in education rather than not to take part? I
bring your attention to the Prince's Trust which has been doing
the Excel Club Scheme which we had a demonstration of yesterday.
One LEA, Durham, have an Excel Club in every school and it has
brought attendance levels from the low teens up to the high nineties.
So, positive strategies seem to work and negative strategies are
not working quite so well.
Mr Lewis: I would agree with a
lot of what you have said about the importance of having positive
strategies. I do not accept though that we have an either/or scenario.
What I would say is that, in the context of a Government that
are investing more resources than ever before in preventative
work, in supporting families who genuinely have difficulties and
in intervening earlier, it is also right that there be, as part
of that package, an element of accountability and sanctions, particularly
in relation to a basic responsibility for parents, with the exception
of those who legally home educate, to get their children to school.
In direct response to your question, let us look at some of the
positive interventions that we are taking. The Key Stage 3 strategy
which is about stopping this historic stagnation and backward
performance of young people in those early years of secondary
school, which has often been a major problem in terms of attendance
and behaviour; the development and creation of the new Connexions
service; as I have already said, the flexibility at Key Stage
4 to build a far more flexible curriculum around the needs of
individual learners; the increased flexibility for 14-16-year-old
children to which I referred earlier; and the GCSEs in vocational
subjects that we successfully introduced in September of last
year. We also have now, as part of the behaviour and improvement
programme, for the first time ever, the right of permanently-excluded
pupils to have access to full-time education and, whilst there
are issues to do with the quality of that, I think it is a major
step forward that those who are permanently excluded have access
to a full-time education. In the behaviour improvement programmes,
we have small teams working close to primary and secondary schools.
These are small multidisciplinary teams consisting of people from
different professional backgrounds and different disciplines actually
supporting the school in working with some of the most challenging
young people and making the relationship between what is happening
at school and what is happening at home. We have the incredibly
successful learning mentors now in many of our schools who can
offer individual intensive support to young people. I met some
of them yesterday at the Pimlico School not far away from here.
They are really able to offer that intensive support. We have
learning support units as part of the programme where, instead
of a head teacher only having the option of permanent exclusion
or nothing, we give a serious option to withdraw the young people
on a temporary basis with a clear objective to reintegrate those
young people back into mainstream classes as quickly as possible.
Q11 Chairman: When are we going to see
signs that it is working?
Mr Lewis: There are several things.
First of all, if you look at teacher perspective on behaviour,
on the most recent survey, 76% of teachers and 87% of heads considered
pupil behaviour to be generally good and, in the context of a
debate about that, we ought to be clear. 87% think that standards
are being maintained or getting better.
Q12 Helen Jones: Could you just clarify
for us who did the survey because I do not think that teachers
are likely to report to the DfES that behaviour in their own school
is bad. Who did the survey?
Mr Lewis: It is a DfES commissioned
survey. As far as I am aware, teachers in no way have to identify
their individual institution in the course of giving their replies,
but I can let you know about that. [4]
Q13 Chairman: There is a shaking head
on your right shoulder!
Mr Lewis: Coming back to the point
about when it is going to work, I think there are several issues.
First of all on attendance, I believe that the combination of
the positive support that I have described—and we have not
talked about truancy suite, fast-track prosecution, fixed-penalty
notices, parenting contracts and parenting orders, all of the
things Mr Pollard has some doubts about—will begin to demonstrate
significant improvement in attendance school by school. We are
already seeing in the behaviour improvement area specifically
an improvement in attendance but I accept that nationally the
unauthorised absence figures to date have remained stubbornly
the same and our challenge is to get those down. We have the target
of reducing unauthorised absence by 10% between 2002 and 2004.
I am hopeful that we can get there; I cannot promise the Committee
that we will. I also want to make the point that it is my intention
once we have gone beyond 2004 to look at this issue again in terms
of that our objective should be far more about maximising attendance
in all of our schools rather than this artificial division that
sometimes is there between unauthorised and authorised absence
because head teachers have a tremendous amount of discretion when
they make those kind of judgments. In terms of the long term,
I want to make this very clear. The benefits of improving behaviour
and discipline in schools and in relation to young people's performance,
in relation to teachers' job satisfaction and in relation to antisocial
behaviour and crime do not occur in one year. They do not occur
in two years. This is a sustained generational challenge and,
if we are going to take these issues far more seriously than we
have done in the past, by expecting certain decent standards of
behaviour and believing that that is right for young people in
our society, that somehow this is not illiberal because, in the
real world, by being relatively wishy-washy on these issues, I
think we have allowed a small minority of young people first of
all to be let down by the system and secondly to get themselves
into all sorts of difficulties which frankly blight their life
chances and life opportunities. So, I think that having a focus
on expecting certain standards of behaviour is really important
but equally important is recognising that families who are genuinely
having difficulties and have many challenges need a lot of support
and a lot of help. Alongside that, it is right for the State that
is putting in unprecedented levels of help and support to demand
basic standards of responsibility and accountability from individuals
and, for me, asking a parent to do that, a parent who is refusing
to co-operate not unable to co-operate but refusing to co-operate
with the system in terms of getting their child to school, is
not unreasonable in a civilised society.
Chairman: Minister, we are going to have
to have slightly shorter answers to questions because we have
a great deal of issues to cover.
Mr Pollard: I do not think that I made
my question clear. It is easy to get a child to attend school:
you just nail their foot to the floor and there they are! That
is the negative side of it. What we have to do, following on from
that, is to excite children into accepting learning and having
some joy in development. There is no point in just having them
sitting there, is there? That was the point I was trying to make
and that is why I mentioned the Excel scheme. I talked to young
people yesterday and they were saying that it was only when this
scheme started that they actually took part in education and started
developing the skills that we all know are necessary. You are
absolutely right that these kids, if they are not excited into
education, are going down that slippery slope and it is drugs,
prison and all of those negative things that we all know.
Chairman: What is the question?
Q14 Mr Pollard: I am again focusing on
the positive part and talking about the Excel scheme which is
what I witnessed yesterday.
Mr Lewis: Very quickly, enrichment
and enjoyment in primary; the Key Stage 3 strategy in order that
children are not turned off education in the early years but are
turned on; the flexible 14-19 curriculum which enables us to build
it around the individual rather than say, "Here is a narrow
box, fit into it"; the Tomlinson reforms that we are yet
to hear the final recommendations from which are about creating
pathways through the system which turn young people on to learning
rather than turn them off. This Government have a very, very strong
and good record on looking at the curriculum, looking at the assessment
and looking at the teaching and learning to make sure that we
do create a system which turns the maximum number of young people
on to learning rather than turns them off. If you do not have
the co-operation of parents however in trying to do that, it becomes
very, very difficult for the Government and for the teachers.
Q15 Valerie Davey: I would endorse much
of what you said, Minister, and particularly the mentoring scheme
and indeed an organisation which again was represented in the
House recently from Birmingham, Black Boys Can. All of those things
are good. The concern I have is for the group I would call `out
of school' children, so they are not on anybody's register. It
alarms me that we do not have a clear idea of exactly how many
they are. Do you know, at this point in time, how many children
are not actually on the register aged between 5 and 16?
Mr Lewis: No, we do not know the
answer to that properly. We reject the 100,000 figure that has
been published recently; we do not believe that has any serious
foundation.
Q16 Chairman: Are you referring to the
Nacro work?
Mr Lewis: Yes.
Q17 Valerie Davey: The figure that I
think more consistently has come out has been possibly 13,000/14,000/15,000.
Do you think that is nearer the mark?
Mr Lewis: I think it probably
is, yes.
Q18 Valerie Davey: But that is 15,000
and, even if I take—
Mr Lewis: It is still far too
many.
Q19 Valerie Davey: Exactly. Even if I
take the 10,000 which I think is the bottom limit of that assessment—and
there are other departments you are working with but matters such
as, for example, bed and breakfast policies mean that they slip
through the nets occasionally but, after some of the horrendous
situations like the Ward murders in Gloucester, I think we did
a lot more work to try and identify children between schools—what
else are we actually doing?
Mr Lewis: We are working, as you
know, in each local authority to create an identification, referral
and tracking system which means that we minimise the possibility
of young people disappearing literally from the system. A lot
of the reforms identified in the Green Paper Every Child Matters
really seeks to address this point in terms of the relationship
between the education system, social services, housing, the local
authorities, the criminal justice system, youth offending teams
and the like. We need to have a far more joined-up system. What
we have at the moment are a lot of organisations and a lot of
professionals working with children and young people. We are not
spending that money as effectively as we could. We do not have
as much joined-upness on the ground as we desperately need and
you will hear stories of some young people who have five, six
or seven agencies in their lives without it being clear about
which agency is responsible and without any of those agencies
really making much of a difference in terms of impacting on that
child's opportunities or that family's situation. So, I believe
that the reforms that we have articulated as part of Every
Child Matters, the decision to create a new Minister for Children
and the bringing together of those functions is very important,
but we must not also think that that in itself is the panacea.
We still have to work, as you say, with ODPM on housing, with
health on issues that they are responsible for and with local
government and we have to make sure that we are providing a more
integrated, cohesive system both in terms of its preventative
capacity and also its protection, its basic requirement to protect
children and young people and, equally, we have to ensure that
this new approach minimises the number of children who are regarded
as missing. There are a variety of reasons why children—
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