UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 197-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE Education and Skills Committee
National Skills Strategy: 14-19 Education
Monday 9 February 2004 MR MARTYN SLOMAN and MS VICTORIA GILL Evidence heard in Public Questions 168 - 230
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 9 February 2004 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr David Chaytor Valerie Davey Jeff Ennis Mr Nick Gibb Paul Holmes Helen Jones Mr Kerry Pollard Jonathan Shaw ________________ Witnesses: Mr Martyn Sloman, Advisor, Training and Development, and Ms Victoria Gill, Advisor, Training and Development, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, examined. Q168 Chairman: Can I welcome Martyn Sloman and Victoria Gill to our deliberations and thank you for giving us your time. You know, I think, that the Education and Skills Select Committee has been away from an investigation into skills for a very long time and the recent White Paper on skills from the Department for Education and Skills gives us an opportunity to look at skills right across the piece. Although we are only at the start of this inquiry, we do not intend to confine ourselves to one department, because, as we were prodding the Prime Minister only last Tuesday, it is where a Government's policies run across many departments that possibly the delivery is most difficult. Actually, I gave the example of skills to him last week, so we will be pushing him further on this. We do know about the Department for Work and Pensions and the massive training programme of the Health Department, let alone the DTI being involved and the Treasury, and so on, so we know it goes right across. Martyn, you and I have known each other for many years, so you are doubly welcome. This is in the spirit of making this inquiry just as good as it possibly could be. It is the area that we believe has a very clear link between our lack of success in reaching the levels of productivity of some of our competitor nations where skills is vital. That is what we are looking at, and if you will be as helpful as you can to the Committee and perhaps try to enlarge our knowledge both in terms of the specific questions and also the scope of our inquiry. Can I start off by saying to both of you, as a Committee, we have just been to the United States, looking at a whole range of issues, and particularly in one State, California, they deliver a schools programme. One of the interesting things, if one looks at the link between productivity and anything else, is the fact that when foreign companies bring their activities to this country but using UK labour they tend to bring their productivity levels with them, and that is a part of the conundrum. Do you know why that is, is there any work on suggesting why that should be? Are they using the same people or the same educational processes, in terms of their background? Mr Sloman: Thank you very much. First of all, we are very pleased to be here and very pleased to have the invitation. On that specific one, I guess the answer is that a lot of the US companies who are here are the better end of the US companies, so they have got better practices, what we would call high-performance working practices, which can translate into the more effective use of people. Indeed, exactly the same could be said about British companies who are exporting their capabilities overseas, it tends to be the more successful ones which take their activities abroad. Perhaps also it would be helpful to say that, inevitably, the DTI is focused very much on productivity, and indeed the Chancellor is focused very much on productivity. In the skills debate in organisations and skills enhancement in organisations, the vocabulary tends to be rather different. Certainly productivity is not the only measure in organisations but in a lot of organisations it is not a measure that is recognised as important particularly, and I will be happy to expand on that if you would like me to. Q169 Chairman: I usually give a question just to get people into the mode of answering questions. People say that one of the real challenges to our country is to get its skills levels up, but that there is a level at which people think our higher education is delivering an increasing number of talented young people, and older people, into the market, but it is at that level of what we call skills, and technicians and a whole range of other skills that we seem to lag behind the United States, Germany and France. Is that a picture you recognise, or would you disagree with it? Mr Sloman: No, it is a picture that we would recognise at the CIPD. Perhaps it is worth emphasising that it is quite a complex issue in organisations, it is not just a question of what the education system delivers, and there is a lot of argument about whether people are overqualified. Essentially, when you come to skills requirements in organisations, activity in corporate organisations, or in public sector organisations or private sector organisations, is concentrated very much on business objectives, that is what takes the energy and that is what takes the focus. It is what is needed to get the organisation to succeed, whether it is expressed in terms of competitive advantage being better than the opposition, or in profitability, or in the public sector service delivery, these are the sorts of vocabulary that matter. Trained staff, while a requirement, are a derived demand, so, in other words, the main thing is to achieve the organisational objectives, and skills requirements are seen as an input to that. It is a complex picture beyond that because it is very, very specific to the sector, so we have got some exceptionally good organisations in this country, in terms of their training and learning, we have got some which clearly are lagging behind. There is a danger, with looking at this debate on the macroeconomic issue, that it tends to obscure and mis-focus on some quite distinct micro differences. Vicky, do you want to add anything, at that stage? Ms Gill: Just to say that you are talking about two quite different issues, in a way. You are talking about the supply of skills, actually going into the market, and what employers do with those skills. Very much the position we are coming from is the broader people performance angle, so the other things aside from training and development which organisations are doing to encourage discretionary behaviour performance with individuals. There is a much bigger picture out there and just talking about where there are skill needs is again sort of a personal section of that. Q170 Chairman: That is very useful. You said that there are some really good ones. Who are the really good ones? You do not have to mention the really awful ones but who are the really good ones? Mr Sloman: Can I put this in another context, if it will be helpful. One of the things that we see is a quite fundamental shift going on, and that is away from training as a top-down intervention, something that is done to people, so training is an activity that is done to you, you are going for some training. The modern approach to competition and service delivery is all about people taking responsibility for their own learning, seeking themselves the skills that they require, and again there is a lot of intervention that can take place. I have got many examples and many illustrations in our work of organisations that are really committing to best practice in order to do that. To give one easy example, the firm which was one of the finalists for our People Development award was an organisation based in South Wales but operating across the UK, called Ina Bearings, manufacturing. Q171 Chairman: In Llanelli. I have driven past it many times. Mr Sloman: I am sure you have, on your way to the Gower, from the old days. They are an absolute exemplar. What happened there was, they were a German-owned firm, with a subsidiary in South Wales, the productivity, which again is not particularly the measure they would focus on, was not good, they were the factory of last resort. A new, local director came in, a plant manager, and it has invested heavily in the skills of that workforce. The reason he has done that is because Romanian and Slovakian wage rates are about 15 per cent of what they are paying in South Wales, so there is no way that organisation can compete on costs. What they are trying to do, and they are succeeding, is to become the production facility of choice for the group as a whole. In order to do that, they have interviewed individually, every senior manager has interviewed individually all the workforce, they have partnered with the local college, they are a Learn Direct, if you are familiar with that, local centre, as far as that is concerned, and the sort of catch-line is "The rate of learning is greater than the rate of change." I have seen a lot and that is about the best example I have seen over the last couple of years, and I can give plenty of other illustrations of best practice. The important thing, I think, from the Committee's point of view, is that it is seen in the context of the organisation. It is not somebody coming in and saying "You must have better-skilled staff," nor is it somebody saying "Your productivity should be higher," there is a burning business platform there which requires more effective and skilled staff in order to become the production facility of choice for the group, and an organisation which understands that fully. Q172 Chairman: You are saying two important things there. One, on this impetus coming from within a company. The other, which reminded me of our recent, separate inquiry into the recruitment and retention of teachers, where many of us had thought about the cruel world where you have got to have five jobs in one lifetime. Whereas what we found, as we got the evidence, was that there are a lot of people out there who do not want a job for life, actually they want five careers in a lifetime, so really it was rather on the other foot. What you were saying was that it was the individuals that were going to choose and deliver training for themselves. That is quite novel to the Committee. Tell us a little bit more about that. What is the evidence that is happening or is it just something for the future? Is it happening now? Mr Sloman: Yes, it is happening now. The evidence is secondary and anecdotal evidence, a lot of it, but if you look at the training figures, which are activity figures, I have been a training manager myself and what you tend to record is courses, so how much training you do, how many people went on a course, or, with e-learning, how many people click the machine, etc. A lot of the important learning activity which is going on now is informal learning in the workplace. A very good example will be systems change. I dare say, most of your Committee know how to do various things with Word, on Word spreadsheets, but I doubt if many of them actually have gone on Word courses. What people tend to do is learn themselves, and when stuck you go and find the two or three people who are rather better than you and ask their advice, and there is a huge amount of that informal learning going on. If you wanted a sort of strap line, it would be what people choose to do, how they choose to perform and how they choose to learn is much more important than what they are told or taught to do. We call it discretionary behaviour or discretionary learning in our models, but that is the thing which is the important driver of business success. You can make people sit on courses, just as in your school classrooms you can make the pupils sit there, but you cannot actually make them learn and you cannot actually make them apply. Vicky, do you want to add anything to that? Ms Gill: May I say again, in the sort of wider people performance, we have got quite a lot of research into discretionary behaviour overall, discretionary learning being one part of that. We have done a lot of work with organisations like Tesco to look at how they are motivating their staff to exhibit what we have phrased discretionary learning, so giving that little bit more improved productivity, I guess, is how you would refer to it, but there are a number of symptoms of it. We have been working with organisations like that, with researchers down in Bath, over a number of years and we have been able to come up with some quite firm evidence that it is the performance or the people management practices which are making the difference. Q173 Chairman: Does that fit in nicely with the Government's intention to have more demand-led training? Do these two go together, is this a nice, convenient marriage? Ms Gill: Yes, it does, but I suspect it is going to prove a lot more difficult to have demand-led training than it is to say it, which has been part of the problem over the past few years. Our response to the Skills Strategy was, as you referred to earlier, that it has to be a collaborative process, it cannot just be the DfES, the DTI have to be involved, purely because we are talking about things like encouraging high-performance working. The example that Martyn gave earlier of Ina Bearings, that is a classic example of the stuff that Porter was coming out with, so he is saying people are competing on low cost rather than high product, high services. That has to be rolled out and people have to be looking at the bigger picture rather than how the training courses supply skills into the workforce. Chairman: That is interesting. Q174 Paul Holmes: Following on from what you have just been saying, you have been talking about what industry does and more so about what individuals do, and yet all the emphasis from the political side is Government planning and Government intervention. You have got the Green Paper 14-19, the White Paper on FE, you have got the Learning and Skills Council with £91/2 billion to spend, you have got all those sorts of intervention, are they missing the target, do they know how to spend the money? Mr Sloman: I will restrict myself to saying that the frustrating thing for Government is that there is only so much it can do, and, at the end of the day, training in organisations or learning in organisations, we can pick out the terms but both of them are activities which take time and resource, it is time or financial resource. A sensible organisation will do it only if they are convinced it is in their interests appropriately to do it. You can persuade them and there are a lot of other activities that Government can do. For example, it can ensure, and you have got an ongoing debate, and you have looked at this a lot, I know, in previous submissions, about the skills that school-leavers bring. Typically, employers want people coming into the labour force who have good habits, who turn up on time, are presentable and, I would argue, now, increasingly, are willing to learn. In other words, rather than saying "I've finished at school, that's the end of it," they see that it is an opportunity to learn and develop within organisations as well. There is a lot that Government can do and some initiatives have been very successful. Investors in People have been successful, we hope that Learn Direct will be successful. Generally, I think, Government has got to recognise that it is going to be those business drivers, they have got to get the message and get through to that high-performance working, invest in their staff, get their staff on board, committed to that, and it is a win-win situation for everybody concerned. People are a lot happier at work if they are developing. Ms Gill: I read a really interesting paper the other day, by an academic colleague of mine down in Kingston, and he came up with something which I thought actually was quite simple but worked really well and his idea of where we could go with this. He said we have got two choices really. We can either find out what employers want and provide it, from Government policy often, or, as policy-makers, we can decide what we want to provide and persuade employers then to take it up. It seems very much that the latter has been the approach to date. There were going to be difficulties with taking the former approach because whether employers have a cohesive idea of what they want is a different matter and something which the Sector Skills Councils are going to have to wrestle with. Really that sort of hit the nail on the head for me and gave me a moment of clarity, I guess. Something we come across again and again is that the qualifications which have been designed, a lot of the interventions which are going out, they need things like clear audit trails, they need to be measurable, they need to meet targets. That does not ally easily with what employers are faced with, the flexibility, the circumstances they face, the situations they need to respond to flexibly, the changes that they need to undertake quite quickly and the development that they need to do at particular times in organisation and development. The two are not very closely allied, as I said. Mr Sloman: Could I give you another illustration of something which has not really happened, which is the European computer driving licence, the ECDL, you are familiar with that. That one has taken off, there is no doubt at all. It was developed originally in Finland, by the Finnish Informatics Society. It defines seven modules, which basically are what people need to know about IT in the workplace, and it has just cascaded in growth in the UK, 860,000 people, according to the British Computer Society, have registered, it is going to get to a million shortly. The public sector has taken it up, the NHS, HSBC (the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank). That has a huge advantage because it is an indication to an employer that people have got the basic skills, that they can operate the sorts of systems changes which are necessary. Also it gives the employee a portable qualification, so it is something they can take elsewhere and it gives them a lot of self-confidence in their capabilities to manage the systems changes which are absolutely inevitable. That was not a Government initiative as such but it was something which entered that market and formed really a useful niche. It is quite hard to second-guess the market in training qualifications and employment, it is a market as much as anything else. Q175 Paul Holmes: On that point and what Victoria was just saying, you have got the Government, quite rightly, on the one hand, saying, "Well, £91/2 billion through the Learning and Skills Council, we've got Work and Pensions who are one of the biggest commissioners of adult training that there are, through Jobcentre and New Deal, and everything, we want a measure, we want to record that we're actually getting something for the money." You have got people like the private sector providers and the Association of Colleges, on the other hand, saying, "The things the Government want to measure, formal exam. qualifications, are not the things which the employers and the individuals want." How do we square that circle? Ms Gill: With a great deal of difficulty, I should say. It goes back also to a sort of fundamental difference, that with policy intrinsically we are talking about getting a better-skilled and more mobile labour market. As Martyn said earlier, training for employees is a derived need and it is something which is very particular to their workforce situation and very particular to the experiences that they are going through. It has to come down to flexibility, in the end, and, we talked about the US earlier, when you look at some of our European counterparts actually the Government interventions are fairly minimal in a lot of cases yet we can see that the productivity is much higher. Certainly picking up the particular example of the LSCs, they are in a difficult situation because they are being measured by targets, yet evidence that we have from our surveys and case study work that we have done shows that actually employers do not feel they are particularly meeting their needs and they are not responding to them in a way that they would wish. Q176 Paul Holmes: You have talked in fairly glowing terms about what employers might put in and might do, but is that true? One of the criticisms we hear quite often is that employers, like having the CBI, at Christmas, saying, "The Government should do, for Christmas and New Year, this, this and this," and thinking, "Well, what is industry doing?" People do say often that British industry, in particular, does not invest in training its manpower. We had figures presented to us suggesting that the productivity gap between Britain and its western competitors is 20 per cent skills and 60 per cent lack of investment in capital. Does industry deliver, and especially again do small and medium enterprises and big industry have separate angles to that? Mr Sloman: Some industries do deliver and some industries have been very successful in investing in their people, others have not. I think the difficulty we have got is that it is very, very patchy. You mentioned small- and medium-sized enterprises, which are recognised as a particular problem, but that is a very, very, very broad sector. Within that are some highly knowledge-intensive firms in IT and consultancy, lawyers, etc., who are competing very, very well indeed and they are doing that because their staff are constantly updating their skills and capabilities, whereas others are not, pretty clearly. There are some training black holes in our economy, but the only way they are going to get the message is if they see that they are at risk competitively and it will lead to business success. I think, from a Government point of view, that is depressing, but that is how it is. Q177 Paul Holmes: The suggestion that other countries do it better though perhaps, that industries in other countries put more into training, is it true or is that an apocryphal story, and, if so, why is it true? Mr Sloman: I would doubt if you could really indicate some sustained statistics which are done on a like-for-like basis which indicate that the other European countries have a better tradition overall for training than we have. There are particular circumstances, the German model is quite different, measurably different, but, by and large, no, there is no evidence of a sustained training disadvantage for Britain compared with its European competitors. Q178 Chairman: Victoria, you would agree with that, would you? Ms Gill: Yes. Q179 Paul Holmes: Do other Governments, other education systems, do it better then? If it is not the employers in Germany or the USA who are doing it better, is it the state education system which is doing it better, for some reason? Ms Gill: To a certain extent. You picked up on a key issue earlier, when you said somebody else giving evidence picked up on the fact that skills was a contributing factor to the productivity gap, but also there were other factors which were incredibly important, so other investment issues. That is not our particular area of expertise and we would not profess it to be, but I believe there is some evidence that when you look at innovation, those sorts of areas, there may be evidence that investment is greater in other countries. Q180 Mr Pollard: I was very encouraged, Martyn, when you mentioned that factory, which I thought was a cracking example of good practice and clearly it works. We cannot compete with developing countries, and nor should we try, we should follow that model, so I am pleased about it. As the Chairman said, recently we were in California and the Chamber of Commerce there told us that what they wanted from their employees was the basic skills, the three Rs, reading, writing and arithmetic, and that they would add any other skills that were required themselves and that there was a shortage there. Would you agree with that? Mr Sloman: Yes, I think would be the short answer. What employers want is people entering the workforce with the basic skills, and general intelligence, whether we like it or not, is a key factor for success in any job whatsoever. Whatever you are looking at, that is a fair correlation. The other side, of course, is that employers therefore have got to commit at an early stage to developing their staff through, and again we come back to this, increasing numbers are getting the messages but not everybody is getting the messages at present. Those employers, incidentally, who are not getting the messages and are not prepared to invest in the skills of their staff and develop their staff, are precisely the ones who are grumbling, quite often, about the level of basic entry staff, so recruitment difficulties, but I do feel that it is improving. Q181 Mr Pollard: Thank you for that. Moving on, I have some experience of care home operation and that is an industry whose employees are lowly paid, generally, and it is at the bottom end of the skills agenda. We are trying generally to up-skill and we are having some real difficulty with that. Many of the employees there will say "I know how to make beds, I can do the washing-machine, I can do all the other bits and pieces, what will I need?" Whilst I thought discretionary training was a good idea, it does not seem to be working. How can we get them to aspire to that? Mr Sloman: That can be frustrating, although, again, I think we are making progress. I came up originally through the Coal Board and, even at the highest levels, the assumption was, if you needed to know anything the Coal Board would train you, but I think things have moved on quite a bit. The important thing, I think, is to make the offer, and this is where the skills of a profession come in, to make that learning offer, that training offer, of a high quality and as accessible as possible and in terms that the learner can understand, so that their first experience is as positive as possible and to make more general opportunities available. Another case study is Glasgow City Council Housing Services, and what they have done on the European computer driving licence. These are dealing with caretakers, out in the various estates, they call them concièrges but they are caretakers, out in the various council estates in Glasgow. They need those people increasingly to communicate with the centre via the PC, so they have offered everybody the opportunity to come in on the European computer driving licence, and they have brought in a coaching scheme so that they can have individual IT coaches, and that again has been very, very successful. I do not know who is running the HR function in your care home. I hope he, or she, is a member of the CIPD, and, if so, we would be delighted to get in touch with them and tell them about best practice. I will leave my card. Q182 Chairman: We do not often get commercials from witnesses. Mr Sloman: I am sorry. Q183 Mr Gibb: Mr Sloman, you have said that those employers who do not develop their staff tend to be the ones who are most vocal in their complaint about the basic skills on entry. I wonder if you would expand a bit more on that. What is the view of the Institute about the basic skills levels of employees generally that your personnel managers are interviewing? Mr Sloman: Vicky, do you want to pick up that one? Ms Gill: We have surveyed our members, as do lots of organisations, and come up with various statistics as to what people want from their employees. Certainly there is a difficulty in recruiting people. Our survey last year showed that, I think, 93 per cent of those who were advertising vacancies were having difficulty recruiting for them. Interestingly though the top skill, or however you want to phrase it, that they were lacking was technical expertise rather than basic skills deficiencies, but that is not to say that there is not a basic skills problem. Things like some of the softer skills which are often alluded to, so the communication skills, came much lower down actually in what they were suffering difficulties in recruiting, but certainly there is growing evidence. In a previous job I worked on the Moser Report, and the evidence is still there that basic skills problems are very high in this country. I think employers are starting to wake up to the fact that they have a responsibility to bear on this as well. As Martyn said earlier, there is an expectation that people come out of the education system with the appropriate and suitable basic skills, but employers are growing to realise that if then they enter the workforce and they have not got them then it is largely up to them as well to contribute to this and move them forward. We are very supportive of things like the employer training pilot and the skills for life programmes which have gone on. The difficulty is that, as with a lot of initiatives, they tend to have reached out to and worked with those people, those trainers, those organisations, who are already pretty positive about training. I was reading through the stats about the employer training pilot. Those that were participating, I think there was quite a high statistic that they were people who had a training plan already, which is great, and if those employees are getting more training then that is a very positive thing. It remains that segment of the market, that segment of organisations which are not training at all, which we need to keep targeting and need to keep pulling in. Mr Sloman: I think this is always a difficulty with any, what might be called, exhortative voluntarism, i.e. it is voluntary but you are trying to persuade people to participate, because you are never going to get at the people you really want to get at. They are just not the people who are going to be present at those launches of schemes or will attend a meeting to talk about the new opportunities, and that sort of thing. Q184 Mr Gibb: Is it not a cost for the small- and medium-sized enterprises to have to engage in this sort of training, particularly in these soft skills or the basic skills? Mr Sloman: Yes. Undoubtedly, training cannot take place without a cost. I think that the big shift over the last years has been a move away from cash cost to consider time, so time is the scarce resource in organisations, "Can we release someone for half a day, a day or two days?" Undoubtedly it does cause problems, the smaller the organisation the more difficult it is to release people to participate in any sort of training or learning activity. Q185 Mr Gibb: Who should do that? The small companies who cannot afford a training manager, who do not have the economies of scale, who should be providing that training to the smaller organisations? Mr Sloman: At the end of the day, it has to be the organisations themselves making that commitment, it cannot be done by an outside party. We can make it easy for them but, at the end of the day, they have got to commit. Ms Gill: All I can say is that there is a growing body of evidence that 'on the job' training is increasingly popular in small firms, partly because it sells that argument, to a certain extent, of releasing people to be away from the workplace. Q186 Chairman: Are we not dwelling here on pretty low-level skills? Surely, what Britain needs, more than anything, is that higher level, people who are going to be the technicians, that are working in our health services, they are going to be highly-skilled technicians working in engineering, it is this much higher level of skills that we are missing out on? These are not people you are going to take at 16 and turn them into highly-qualified people with technical skills in three days or three months? Mr Sloman: I think what we would say is, if there is one area that really is important, in terms of the skills gap, it is the front-line managers' ability to have those interpersonal skills to manage and develop and coach their staff, and coaching is the word which enters the vocabulary more than anything else. It is the ability to work with people and get the best out of them in that situation and to encourage them to do their own learning, actually to develop themselves in that organisation. That, I think, is the most important single area and that is something which is eminently trainable, people can learn feedback skills, they can learn the skills in giving clear instructions, in setting objectives, indeed listening skills, all those things are trainable. That, I think, is the single area which is going to make this model of a committed workforce, of high-performance working, discretionary behaviour, whatever terms you want to use, it is at that level it is going to work. Q187 Chairman: Let us get this right, Martyn. The energiser in this process is what Michael Porter calls the middle management, it is the middle management's competence that really is the problem, not these people that we are getting in, it is the middle management that knows how to energise and to construct the programme round the person? Mr Sloman: Yes, that is right, and to support, engage, encourage, give feedback, all those sorts of words. One of the first things I learned when I came into personnel management was that people do not leave organisations, they leave bosses, and it is your immediate boss who turns you off. Q188 Mr Pollard: Chairman, I want to explore the area of small businesses, which Nick Gibb was pursuing earlier on. My experience of small businesses is that they can be either single-person operations or small, family operations with fewer than five employees, and it is almost impossible to get somebody who is part of the widget-making bit to drop out for even a short time, and you said it is down to the company to try. Our SME sector is vital to our economy and I think we are in danger of it falling behind again and again with the skills, if we follow the model that you are suggesting? Mr Sloman: I think my model needs to be viewed in context. We said earlier that the small business sector is quite a heterogeneous sector. Certainly, the small business lawyers are updating themselves, they have got an obligation to be updating, the small business, IT people, graphic designers, those sorts of areas are always updating their skills, and, in fact, in that sort of sector the suppliers are providing an enormous amount of training. Cisco Systems is a huge trainer worldwide, through their Global Academy, so you have got that sector. There is an awful lot of informal coaching going on all the time of transmitting best practice. I live in North Norfolk with the boat-building industry. You are dead right, if you have got a five-man business you do not release people for three weeks to go to Havant, or wherever, but the transmission of those skills is evident and is there, and that is something we can always improve upon. Q189 Jonathan Shaw: The fact that we have training programmes, grants available, do we create dependency amongst some employers, with a lack of willingness to train, to respond to the market, so they think "We'll blame the Government, we'll blame someone"? Mr Sloman: I do not think so. I am sorry to keep repeating myself but we have got this huge variance across sectors. I think an organisation which did it properly would see their training and learning activities as being so central to the business drivers that they would take an appropriate judgment to manage it in a way which gave them that business advantage, rather than, frankly, looking round to see what was available and plugging into that. Ms Gill: I would echo that really, and that goes back to the statement I made earlier, of the engagement with things like the employer training pilots, it tends to be those organisations who are already active in that area. Q190 Jonathan Shaw: Are we all throwing money away then? Most of these employers, you are saying, have their own system of training programmes, they will have spent their own money on their employees in the way that you advocate, but along we come and say, "Here, have some public money," for something they have spent their own money on already. Is that a good use of taxpayers' money? Ms Gill: There are particular initiatives which are targeted at particular areas of the workforce. Q191 Jonathan Shaw: I know about the employer training pilots and I asked officials who came before us, but they were not able to give us a percentage of the larger companies, and it seemed that was the case rather than lots of the small companies which my colleague, Mr Pollard, was talking about. Is it a good idea or is it not a good idea, are we targeting the wrong people? Mr Sloman: Because of the expertise that Vicky has, I would not speak in detail about the employer training pilot. What I would say is, generally, I have seen plenty of examples of very effective partnerships between private sector employers, indeed public sector employers and Government provision. Coming back to my Ina Bearings example, the College of Learn Direct came in and gave them a platform when, frankly, they just could not have managed otherwise. I would not wish to generalise from some waste on that. I have seen good examples there. Q192 Chairman: There was not a great bureaucracy involved in the Ina Bearings story, was there? Mr Sloman: No. Q193 Chairman: Part of our job is to scrutinise the spending of Government on particular projects, and the biggest quango in this country in spend is the Learning and Skills Council. Are you saying, the two of you, that really you do not need this sort of state apparatus, that, given the right environment, employers would get on with it themselves and you do not need something like the Learning and Skills Council to get in the way? Mr Sloman: Certainly I would not go that far. I would agree with your previous statement, that our members are reporting that a lot of the systems are far too complex, there are too many of them and they are not getting clear signals as to what is available. Ms Gill: That is really the overwhelming picture which comes through. Q194 Jonathan Shaw: Can they use that as an excuse to blame, as I said about this dependency, "Oh, we can't get hold of anything so we don't bother. I tried to make one 'phone call once and no-one knew where I was going to go, so I can't do any training"? It is not what I think, can we explore this? Ms Gill: Some will, some will not. When you look at things like Investors in People, the general response to that is very positive, and when it first started there were criticisms of bureaucracy, of jumping through hoops, all the usual things. They have been able to overcome that and it has been seen increasingly as a very positive initiative and used by a lot of organisations to look at the benefits of training in line with their business plans. Where they do feel that something meets a particular need and is appropriate to their situation then they will adopt it and take it forward. Q195 Jeff Ennis: We have not had a discussion or a question yet on the role of trade union learning representatives, which obviously is something very actively promoted by the Government and I think it is a good initiative, personally. How effective are trade union learning representatives in up-skilling the workforce, shall we say? Mr Sloman: Vicky has done a great deal of work on this and will talk about our research on it, but what I can say is, again, in many illustrations of best practice, it has been the trade unions which have been solidly behind it. I am sorry to keep coming back to this, but Ina Bearings is a very, very specific example. They have moved away from adversarial industrial relations to a recognition that they are all on board in the up-skilling of the workers and it is in their members' interests. Ms Gill: The overwhelming response we have had is that it has been a very positive initiative and, as Martyn said, really it has improved relations a lot between the traditional HR training department and the union. Where it has worked best is where there has been a partnership arrangement in place, where the HR, the training department, has been working very closely with the union learning reps and they have been sharing information and working in partnership together. Q196 Jeff Ennis: Has there been a perceived reluctance, at any sort of level of industry, in big business or the SMEs, or in certain sectors within industry, to promote the concept of a trade union learning representative? Ms Gill: When first the idea was put forward there was lots of discussion as to whether there would be reluctance. I have not experienced any. As I said, the people that I have spoken to have all spoken very positively about it and there are some glowing case examples, so certainly not that I have experienced. Q197 Jeff Ennis: Is the positive role of the trade union learning representative more successful when you are dealing actually with basic skills, up-skilling or higher skills, where they are there as well? Ms Gill: It does tend to be, with the basic skills and the lower skills. What is very interesting about the union learning rep story is that the more people I speak to the more you realise that actually those who have been involved in programmes, who have been encouraged to go on programmes by union learning reps, are the very people now who are becoming union learning reps themselves and are promoting learning and really have bought into the idea now of lifelong learning. Beforehand, they were what I guess you would refer to as the reluctant learners. Q198 Jeff Ennis: Going back to something you said earlier, Martyn, that people need to take responsibility for their own learning, which is another thing I agree with, given that premise, how big a set-back to reducing the skills gap in this country was the demise of the Individual Learning Accounts initiative? Mr Sloman: The Individual Learning Accounts were an unfortunate experience because they came and went, would be our view on that. There is plenty of literature on this and I do not want to get involved in the arguments. Q199 Chairman: We have produced a lot of it. Mr Sloman: Yes, you produced a lot of them. Certainly I think that some way of incentivising or recognising the commitment that an individual undertakes to learn is a big and helpful thing within that model. Providing you can get it to work without excessive bureaucratic controls or, alternatively, scope for abuse, that is something which really ought to be very positive indeed. Q200 Jeff Ennis: Have you got anything to add to that, Victoria? Ms Gill: We were fairly supportive of the Individual Learning Accounts. Certainly, when we were doing our submissions to the Skills Strategy, etc., we did argue that something similar should be in place, precisely for that point, to put some of the emphasis and the onus on the individual and give them that recognition for the work they are doing. Chairman: Are not trade unions all the same? Surely, some trade unions are not interested in education and training at all, are they, some of them are absolutely Neanderthal, some of the people, when you talk to them about training? Which did you find were the good ones and which were the bad ones? Jonathan Shaw: Name them, all? Q201 Chairman: Give us an exemplar, give us a trade union that really was doing the job? Ms Gill: I will give you a good example. UNISON have done amazing work. Mr Sloman: To get Vicky off that hook, being a Neanderthal is not a property of any particular class or political persuasion. Having been a training manager in an investment bank, I can assure you that the most difficult problem was with the senior managers, right at the top, who would visit our courses and say "I've never received any training in my life and I don't know what you're here for, but I'm a far better person for it." Then they would go and interview someone in such a disastrous way that they would complain subsequently. There is a serious point here, that the message has to be got across that it is in everybody's interest for everybody to update their skills on a continual basis in the modern workforce, and that is how we are going to compete in the future. Chairman: What you are describing really is a successful partnership. On Individual Learning Accounts, what we found, and certainly those of us on that inquiry, was that USDAW, for example, was a phenomenally good union, it is not one that I belong to so I feel that I can say this. We found that USDAW, acting as the kind of partner intermediary with Individual Learning Accounts, made it extremely successful, and, of course, they were not prone to fraud where they had that intermediary. Q202 Helen Jones: Can I take you on to explore this notion of partnership further, because you said quite rightly that training works best when everyone realises there is a continuous need to update it. The difference between many companies in this country and, say, in the situation we see in Germany, or in Finland, is that there is much more of a shared vision between employers and their trade unions about where a company should be going, what are its needs and, therefore, how they should get to their goals. Do you have any evidence for us from this country about where that works well, about which companies have adopted it and, consequently, do you have any feelings about whether training is held back because there is not that sharing of information, and hence sharing of goals, right at the beginning of the process? Ms Gill: I was going to pick up again on the Bath research which I alluded to, and one of the key things which came out of that, and this is not relating particularly to trade unions but it is about having a vision for an organisation, that was one of the key things which came out, was linking people to performance. It was the organisations which had a very clear goal, so the Nationwide, it was to be a mutual organisation, and the one, clear goal was transmitted down through the workforce, with unions, where they were in place, and that was a key factor across the board in motivating the workforce. Mr Sloman: It is all about getting a successful spiral, and the vocabulary differs a little bit. We all love our jargon and our jargon is about discretionary behaviour or people performance or high-performance working. At the end of the day, there is plenty of evidence now, statistical evidence from the UK, we have just done a huge amount of work on this, and from overseas, that you can identify best human resource practices, and there is a list of those factors. The way that they work is, if people have a commitment to the organisation so they are proud to work for the organisation, and one of the best questions you can ask in any survey is "Would you be happy if members of your family joined the organisation?" or "Would you recommend this to anyone else?" those sorts of questions about commitment to the organisation. It is about their individual motivation and whether they are given the scope within their job to apply those skills, because it is no good having faulty job design so that people have got the skills and feel very frustrated that they cannot use them at all. That just creates a negative atmosphere for themselves and other people. When that is right and if line managers, it comes back to the successful middle managers, are applying it correctly then you will get those sorts of commitment and behaviour which lead to people taking the extra step to meet the needs of the business. That is where the evidence is. A person seeking to acquire the skills is a product of that, so actually they will think "What do I need to do?" Also they will share information with other people, so if they learn something about the customers or the systems that they are using they will think "Who else in the organisation, who else amongst my colleagues, needs to know this?" It is possible, over time, to build up those sorts of practices. Q203 Helen Jones: You can have a top-down vision, can you not, or you can have a vision of the company's future which is worked out between employers and employees, "We want to move from making product X, which we know will be obsolete in a certain time, to product Y and that is the reason we want you to train"? What evidence can you give us about the impact of that sort of look at a company's economic future and its impact on training? Mr Sloman: What our results demonstrate is that a key vision is part of that model which drives through the best HR practices, they lead to a higher commitment to training and learning and they lead to business success. Obviously, it is very sector-specific when you follow that through, but there is enough general evidence to suggest that indeed is the case, and we can prove that. Q204 Chairman: Martyn, can I press you a little on this, because it is all very interesting, but is not the kind of model that you at the Institute are more involved with a model that is of yesterday's companies, in the sense that we used to have lots of very large employers, increasingly the more sophisticated, developed economies are made up of many, many small and medium enterprises? They are the difficult ones. You do not have even the size of Ina or the ICIs, they are abnormal now, are they not? What we have are myriads of small and medium enterprises which present a totally different challenge to training and skills needs, and are we not sort of talking about what was appropriate for the 20th century rather than what is appropriate for the 21st century? Mr Sloman: I do not think so. I think perhaps what we would preface all this with, which is the modern movement, today's problem, today's issue, is this shift from training to learning, so learning is an individual activity in which people will participate away from training as a top-down intervention. I would say also that, pretty much irrespective of the size of the organisation and the sector, those basic principles that people have to have, the ability, the motivation and the opportunity, it is called the AMO model, those would apply absolutely irrespective, so even in the smallest size of organisation, people must have the ability, that motivation and that opportunity. I think that is the way in which firms will compete in the future, irrespective of size. Q205 Chairman: It is a very individual concept. Everything you are saying to us, in a sense, does seem to shout at us, "Well, you don't need great state bureaucracies to do that, do you?" You need to change the culture within companies, you do not need state bureaucracies, perhaps they would make it more difficult? Mr Sloman: Certainly I think that great state bureaucracies are not going to drive that model, that much must be right, and it will come down to that individual commitment and that investment over time and building up that trust and confidence in the firm. Chairman: We are moving on now to curriculum and qualifications. Q206 Mr Chaytor: Chairman, actually that leads into my opening question. In this model, which depends fundamentally on discretionary behaviour of individuals, what is the role for the state, how would you characterise the responsibility of Government in ensuring that this bottom-up, decentralised model works? Mr Sloman: I think that Government has got a clear responsibility at the educational interface and with people who have been out of the employment market to ensure that they are in a good state to come back into that labour market. I think that Government must be realistic, it must not oversell or overhype any particular initiative. One of my particular subjects is e-learning, for example, and I think that was considerably overhyped at the beginning. There is no silver bullet and it does take time. I think that Government has got a variety of roles, in terms of sector planning and planning the economy and looking at those shortages in the labour force. Ms Gill: I think it is having a general understanding of the principles. It is something which I know the DTI in particular are wrangling with and trying to get their head around, and they are talking about high-performance working a lot more and trying to put it through when they are talking about what they are doing in respect of innovation and competitiveness, all those sorts of issues. I think it is having it there more as an underlying principle than particular initiatives to respond to any need. Q207 Mr Chaytor: Really what you are saying is, Government has a responsibility for the Education Service, but in terms of training in the workplace Government has just got to establish some basic principle? Mr Sloman: I think so. Q208 Mr Chaytor: What about qualifications, the national qualifications structure, should this be decentralised completely at a company level as well? Mr Sloman: No. Let us be clear what qualifications are, as far as the employers are concerned, then I will let Vicky pick up the specifics on NVQs. To an employer, qualifications are a link between the training market and the labour market. What we are saying here is that what employers need is individuals who are acquiring skills and capabilities and can apply them and a qualification is, in some cases, a clear indication that they have acquired those skills and capabilities. Also, from the individual's point of view, they are useful because they are a portable qualification, and fashions in qualifications change. At one time, accountancy was the surrogate management qualification, in this country, if you wanted to go into management you became a qualified accountant. Then the MBA appeared suddenly. A lot of qualifications have taken off very effectively. I mentioned the ECDL, which seems to us to be one which has taken off in a big way. I will risk another commercial, our own CIPD qualification. We have gone from 70,000 members in 1995 to 120,000 now because people who go into human resources see our qualification as valuable, so they go two evenings to the local college to acquire it and they develop skills, etc., on that. Unfortunately, not all qualifications can achieve that credibility in the market, and I think that is how we would see the problem with qualifications for employment. Ms Gill: It is about fitting purpose, is it not? In certain circumstances, the Modern Apprenticeships, the NVQs, work very well, in others they are not considered appropriate, and there have been pressures in the past to have an almost blanket approach to "We will move everybody up to this qualifications framework." I think there is a real danger at the moment, because we are all talking an awful lot, and I am as guilty of it, I am sure, as anybody else, of Level One and Level Two and Level Three, and, as Martyn and I find, when we go out and talk to numerous employers, you say Level Two to somebody and they are going to look at you quite blankly and probably point you in the direction of the lift. We are talking a different language to them, in a lot of circumstances. Q209 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the qualifications which, Martyn, you mentioned, the MBA or the European computer driving licence, these are not the inventions of Government, are they? Mr Sloman: No. Q210 Mr Chaytor: Are you saying that the Government qualifications structure is utterly irrelevant to what happens in the labour market for adults? Mr Sloman: No. Certainly it is not irrelevant. It cannot be irrelevant because that is what drives a lot of aspiring people who want to move in the labour market or improve themselves. One of the ways of doing it is actually to achieve a qualification which demonstrates a commitment and an acquisition of a set of skills or knowledge. Vicky is our expert in this area but I feel that there is a danger in this total, blanket approach. When you are trying to map qualifications across the whole of the labour market, there is a worrying tendency to create a static solution to what is essentially a dynamic problem. If I can give you a nice little illustration, which is e-learning, that is an area I follow very closely, none of us knows where e-learning is going to go. We can guess, but nobody knows what skills are going to be required to deliver successful e-learning in five years' time. If you try to define now a rigid qualification for someone specialising in e-learning, the chances are you will guess the market incorrectly. Q211 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask Vicky, in view of your comments about employers' perception of Level Twos and Level Threes, do you think there is no case for a national qualifications structure? Is it just that the case has not been made to employers or there is some gap between what Government is wanting to do and what employers think is necessary or relevant? Ms Gill: I think there is a case for the structure. Like a lot of things, it goes back to the issue of terminology, that we are talking two different languages, almost. There are some excellent examples going on. I have spent quite a lot of time with Selfridges recently and they have been working with their new Sector Skills Council to establish what is essentially a Level Three, junior manager qualification, which is going to be part of the national qualification framework, I believe, maybe an NVQ. It works because it has been done with a number of other retailers and it builds in the in-house induction training they are doing already, so immediately it has a core relevance to them and their business. That is the key to it all really, it is the partnership working, and that is where you see the success stories, where they are, in Foundation Degrees and in Modern Apprenticeships, where it is meeting a very particular need which the employer has identified. Q212 Mr Chaytor: One of the Government's initiatives to raise the status of the vocational dimension and the skills dimension to the school system and the further education system is the attempt to reform the 14-19 curriculum, and you will know we have the working party which has produced its interim report, arguing for this diploma at the age of 19. The CBI has immediately come out against this reform, as has the Headmasters' Conference, and they seem to be the only two organisations which have come out against it. Is it not strange that the CBI is sticking by A levels and GCSEs as the only qualifications they seem to value and is turning its face against the attempt to give parity and esteem to the new vocational qualifications? What is the Institute's view of the 14-19 reforms? Ms Gill: Obviously, I cannot speak for the CBI, but I am guessing, from reading the material that they have put out, sort of support material for their statement. I think what they are saying is let us not get lost, let us not forget that the key issue is ensuring that people leave school with appropriate skills, let us not get that lost with a big debate around whether it should be a diploma or GCSEs or A levels. From our point of view, our experience is primarily in workforce development, so although our members necessarily have a view I would not say that there is a cohesive view as to what they feel we should do with 14-19 education. I think the general concern is that whatever is brought in is done in a thorough and appropriate manner and is given appropriate funding, time, etc., to bed in, and that they feel has relevance to them. If there is going to be a new stream of vocational qualifications or a new scheme of more workforce involvement then I guess they want a seat at the table and an assurance that they will get their voice heard. Q213 Chairman: One of the concerns that some of us had when we looked at the American model was that their high schools seemed to be going through something of a crisis, and just by attendance that people seemed to get at 18 a high school diploma for the entirety of their effort, which does not actually pinpoint real performance in particular subjects. Compare that with GCSE and A level. Would it not concern your members if we had a kind of more general 18 qualification, or do you think it is a good thing that you have that? Mr Sloman: As Vicky says, we are tentative, we do not pronounce on the 14-19, we pronounce on workforce issues. What concerns our members is the general level of skills of school-leavers coming in, and you have had Alison Wolf's evidence previously, and we have read that, and I do not think we depart very much from that. She has picked up the main points, the mathematical skills, for example, the comprehension skills, and that sort of thing. Also, I think our members need to be able to read what is coming on, so they need transparency in the system, and it can be quite difficult if they are confused by continual changes which have not had time to become embedded. That is what they are looking for, the basic levels of skills and that they can understand them. They are recruiting a lot, they have a lot of experience. We are not trying to be SMEs now for whom a recruitment decision is a one-off, but most employers are pretty sophisticated in their recruitment, so they can read. Q214 Chairman: Are you being one dimensional, as an Institute, then Martyn, that really what you are telling us is what the private sector wants? There is a massive world out there, of the public sector, of the health area, local government, so much public sector education and skills, and you would not have an opinion on any of that? Mr Sloman: No. I am sorry, there is a misunderstanding here. I am talking right the way across sectors, I am talking private, public and voluntary sectors, we do not manage the voluntary sector. What I am saying is that, as an Institute, our statements and our interests are in the workforce, so it is organisation in the workforce. Q215 Chairman: Public and private? Mr Sloman: Public and private and voluntary, yes, we have a very, very high proportion. All I was saying, Chair, was that we do not, as a rule, issue policy statements or respond much on things which are in the education system, as such, so we do not look at the 19 year olds. Q216 Valerie Davey: Can I move on to the workforce qualifications and who ought to be paying for them. I can remember a time in Bristol when Rolls-Royce had its own college. Finances took a dip and the local FE college took on that training, and you could see that influence in the way it happened. Therefore, who should be paying? It is just a historic fact that in some areas of work it has always been the employer, in other areas it has always been the state, and is that okay for the future? Mr Sloman: Employers generally will have a positive attitude, and again we have surveyed this, towards people pursuing relevant qualifications through the education system. There might be a requirement that if they leave the organisation afterwards they will pay back some of the money towards that. I think you are right in your central premise, which is there are certain old jobs, as it were, which were always seen as part of the education system, and similar jobs in the new economy are not seen as something that the education system delivers, initially, and I think you are highlighting an anomaly there. I think, generally, employers will bear the costs of what they consider to be relevant training in order to equip the workforce. Q217 Valerie Davey: The individuals, by comparison, want a transferable, recognised qualification, do they not, so in a way they are pulling in different directions. Interestingly enough, when we went to San Diego recently, we were told about the skills which Microsoft were demanding and the huge input which a college there was making to skills which were absolutely specific to that company. When I asked them "Surely, that is quite selfish, that's exactly what they need?" I was told, "Oh, no, this qualification is such that because of the nature of the company it can, of course, be taken anywhere." You see almost a full circle coming through. Are companies in this country more concerned about the cost, if it is a transferable skill, because then they are going to lose their employee to another company, they are paying the training costs for another company? Mr Sloman: I think economists looking at training have always tried to differentiate between company-specific skills and transferable skills. The point you are making, which I think is a very valid one, is that the number of transferable skills is increasing, so those transferable IT skills, which would have been very company-specific and regarded as technical skills within the company, have crossed that boundary to transferable skills. In my evidence, I do not see employers actually looking at it in those terms. I have never known a training department look at and treat differently those skills which were transferable outside and those which were inside, with the exception of long-term, portable qualifications, sponsoring people for the MBA, or indeed sponsoring people for the CIPD qualification, where they would want a payback, in many cases, if people left. I do not think they think in those ways, they think in terms of "What are the skills that people need to do their job better?" Ms Gill: I agree. We have talked a lot about employers thinking about business performance, competitive advantage, all those kinds of things, but also they are looking a lot at individual performance, a lot of training will go down to the individual and they will look at what that individual needs. I agree with Martyn really that they do not view it particularly in that way. To a certain extent, they are looking at the bigger picture of what they want to achieve. Q218 Valerie Davey: That is interesting. Are they looking at the bigger picture as perhaps the state ought to be? Barry mentioned that we looked at teacher retention and this country is skilling huge numbers of people who stay in teaching, let us say, for about seven years and then move on, and I am not sure whether the state gets value for money out of that or not, in the way in which those skills are transferred. Some of us who are sitting here are former teachers, so I am not sure whether the Government is so pleased occasionally. Are you saying that some of these big companies are saying actually, "Okay, we are skilling the UK plc workforce," or not? Ms Gill: They will still look at their own business objectives and what people are doing. I guess what we are saying is they are not perhaps overly paranoid about where the people are going to go afterwards. Yes, they want to keep them, and training and development are seen as key recruitment and retention tools. That is the really important point to make there, which is so often used as a way of keeping people within the organisation rather than worrying that if you train them they are going to go elsewhere. Mr Sloman: Indeed, it is very sector-specific, if I might add. Your school-teacher example. I worked for Ernst & Young. I was Director of Management Training at Ernst & Young, which is a big accountancy firm. A model there was a recognition that a lot of people would leave after they had qualified as an accountant, that was the time when they would leave, if they chose, or felt that they were not going on to achieve partnership. That was the deal, that was the sort of, the phrase is, psychological contract, but that was the clear understanding on which people came. A lot of management consultancies, IT firms, knowledge-intensive firms, do not expect to hold their people but what they do want is that those people get a very good deal in terms of their own personal skills development. Q219 Chairman: Should we not be identifying these kinds of lead players then in education and training? Something which you will know more about than most people in this room will be the BBC. The BBC were always seen as the great trainers of people in the media, whereas the so-called independent, commercial, did not train at all, they just lived off the training of the BBC. I am just trying to draw out of you how we move on in our report. Do we say in each sector there should be a lead player, they should be identified, encouraged and perhaps rewarded? Rather than paying this large bureaucracy, you just subsidise some really fine trainers? Mr Sloman: There are several questions there, Chair. What would scare me to death is if you went out and sought really successful organisations and put them up as models for everyone else. Goodness knows how many Enron case studies we had written in the management literature over the last couple of years. That seems to be the kiss of death. What I would urge the Committee to consider is that there is a lot of best practice out there, there is a lot of very, very good practice in all sorts of industries, in all sorts of circumstances, and that ought to be recognised as such and any initiatives ought to recognise there is a lot of good stuff as well as bad stuff going on. The real problem we have got in this country is that the bad exists alongside the very good, and the bad are not listening. There is precious little incentive, other than the ultimate threat of business collapse, which does come and does happen, to get the non-investors in people actually to listen to us and I think that is the problem we have all got. I am not offering much of a solution, but I think we are only going to go forward together if we recognise that as the nature of the problem. Ms Gill: I would just pick up on the BBC example, to a certain extent, and it is where I guess the Sector Skills Council remit should be, this is what they have been tasked to do. I think, if I were to give any one recommendation to the Committee, it would be (a) to give them time to do what actually they need to do, and (b) to give them the space to be a true employer voice, rather than what they are expected to do being dictated to in some way by any number of government departments. The survey that we have just done shows that where employers go for guidance and training development on different issues, aside from CIPD, obviously, is employer networks. If we are trying to set up Sector Skills Councils in that kind of remit they must really believe and the employers that participate in them must really believe that they are putting forward an employer force and their needs are being heard, rather than the agenda being dictated by the DfES, the DTI, or any other agency. Chairman: We are going to move on to our last section, which is Government initiatives and they have been running through our debate. Q220 Jonathan Shaw: There is a major concern from the DfES about participation and achievement at post-16, one level who do very well, but we have got one of the lowest staying-on rates in the OECD, I think that we are 27th out of 30 countries, so we are third from bottom. That is what the Government view as one of the key challenges, in terms of improving the skills of the workforce, staying on post-16. Is that something with which you agree? Does your organisation have a view on it? Ms Gill: Again, it is not our particular area of expertise, but I think we would be generally very supportive of that goal. Again, we are talking about technically-specific skills, we are talking about the intermediate skills, and that is where, to a certain extent, there are the big shortages. We can all talk about the fact that the larger employers are able to have the Modern Apprenticeship schemes which fit their particular needs and also, coming up, the Foundation Degree programmes, but I guess that is where we have to start off, we can take people forward through those. Q221 Jonathan Shaw: As you have mentioned Modern Apprenticeships, I wonder if you have a view on Modern Apprenticeships, are they assisting the workforce to become more skilled? Can you give us some examples of where you think it is working well and examples where you think there needs to be improvement? Ms Gill: It is the age-old problem, where they work well they work very well, where they do not, they do not. Rolls-Royce is an example, they have a famous Modern Apprenticeships scheme and it works incredibly well for them. The work that they are doing, they do feel constricted at times by the pressures which are put on them, the specific units which they have to achieve, and a lot of organisations find that. The difficulty has been that, with the Modern Apprenticeships programme, increasingly a large percentage of it has been done outside the workplace rather than workplace training, which was what initially it was set out to be. All I would say, I guess, is it works very well where there is real employer commitment and where a lot of it is done, granted, in partnership, with FE or other organisations but it is seated very firmly within the workplace. Q222 Jonathan Shaw: At one point the large construction companies used to have a huge apprenticeship programme, where they would have their own direct labour force. That does not happen any more, it is all contract work, so you are talking about a whole series of sub-contractors and one-man bands. It is very difficult for that to be work-based, is it not, for the one-man bands to be able to provide all the necessary training? Inevitably, it is going to be part college, training place based, do you not agree? Ms Gill: Then it is about it being tailored to that particular circumstance and that particular sector. Again, both Martyn and I keep saying it has to be sector-specific, it has to be particular to that circumstance, and that cannot be said enough really, because that statement, I guess, is often undervalued. Q223 Chairman: You are really at the heart of the problem, in one sense, are you not, that, on the one hand, you identify that it is these middle managers that are the weak link, in terms of our comparative performance in productivity and skills with Germany, France and America, yet that is your market, is it not, you are supposed to be helping to educate and train to higher levels? What is it about this middle management area that you do not seem to be getting to, or anybody else, to be fair? Mr Sloman: I think that is a little bit harsh. One important point, Chair, is that this middle management issue has got to be seen within the context of best practices, what we call high-performance working practices, which are the best HR practices. What we are saying is that it is the middle managers who will deliver them to the individuals and to get those middle managers in place. The short answer is that it is a long struggle and things have improved no end, but we have got a very, very long way to go. I guess, when you say that we are part of the problem, we would like you to say we are part of the solution. If we can get better and more effective and better-trained HR specialists in place, who are putting in the effective training programmes, so that our line managers throughout the country know how to get performance feedback, anyone who has worked in any situation has been on the receiving end of some appallingly-given feedback and appraisals, etc., and once you have been through it you have picked it up and you know the message and you want to see it done properly. We have got to get into a situation where that is valued, where those sorts of skills are developed and valued, and that can happen. We are going to risk going round in circles like a broken record, but obviously some sectors, some employers, are much better at this than others, and, frankly, they either get the message or they do not, and once they have got the message it sticks. The great hope is that the next generation of people coming through the workforce will pick this up at a very early stage and when they go through the management process they will be reinforcing those sorts of sensible values which develop those effective middle managers. That is the battle we have got to fight and it is a long haul. If there were silver bullets they would have been fired a long time ago. There has been a raft of efforts, some successful, some unsuccessful, but that is the battle we have got to fight. Q224 Jeff Ennis: Going back to the issue of the variety of Government initiatives which have been looked at to try to reduce the skills gap, in mainstream education they have brought in a specialist schools programme and, coming from the type of deprived constituency I represent, one of the main problems in achieving Special School status has been to raise the £50,000 from local employers to make the bid. The one exception to that has been Ridgewood High School, in Scawsby, in Doncaster, in my constituency, which was one of the first five engineering specialist schools in the country, primarily because of the history of heavy engineering in Doncaster, i.e. the rail works, etc., and mining engineering, and what have you. They raised £70,000 odd overnight from, I think, nearly 100 different companies in Doncaster. Does this not underline the importance of this type of initiative, having to resonate with the local employers to achieve success, rather than picking an abstract specialism, shall we say? Mr Sloman: Obviously, I do not know the circumstances, Mr Ennis, but it sounds exactly that. It has caught the right niche market, it makes sense to people and it is using the language and vocabulary which the community understand. Q225 Jeff Ennis: Is it for the educationalists in that particular circumstance to try to draw out the demand from industry, or should industry be going to schools or colleges and actually banging on the tables (the Chairman usually says) to try to get what they want? Ms Gill: There is evidence that people are doing that, that there is growing collaboration. Again, our most recent survey shows, out of all the agencies, Investors in People, the LSCs, the proliferation of organisations which are out there, actually the contact with the FE and the HE sectors was the greatest and the satisfaction levels in the contact they were getting also were pretty high up there. That is increasing. Employers are recognising, particularly those that are operating in regional circumstances, that the closer links they can have with the particular local organisations then, as you say, they can have a direct impact upon the skills and the people who are coming into their workforce. Q226 Chairman: Can you share the results of that survey with the Committee? Ms Gill: I cannot, as yet, because it will not be published until April, but we can then. Q227 Chairman: Can we have a look at it privately and promise not to publish it until April? Ms Gill: Yes. Mr Sloman: Yes. Q228 Mr Pollard: Forty-five years ago there were 750,000 people working in the mines, underground, now there are about 10,000. I was a chemical engineer for donkeys years and 250,000 people worked in the companies I worked for, now it is down again, and you could go on and on and on, with our great industries shutting down. Does it not mean, therefore, that the Government is obliged to put in a massive amount of training, otherwise it will not be done, and that is probably managing the change from great industries to SMEs, and we have not managed that change very well? Mr Sloman: To some extent, we are showing increasing signs of managing that transition well. Employment levels are much better, as you are well aware. I guess what I would say to you is, the challenge of that is that those sorts of adjustments are inevitable, and I was one of the 750,000 people at the Coal Board so I am well aware of that. What you have got to get is people who are confident that they can acquire the skills to make those sorts of adjustment, and that opportunity is out there and it is transmitted clearly, that by acquiring those skills that will increase their employability. That is what the ECDL has done, there is no doubt about that, and, in a sense, that is what our qualification has done. Government has to be, obviously, a positive agent in that process but ultimately it is all about individuals being prepared to acquire for themselves the new skills to compete in the modern workforce. Q229 Chairman: This has been a very good session, Victoria and Martyn. Do you have a last couple of thoughts you would like to give us? Victoria, I am looking at you, because you have got a formed base of research in this area, and I see you worked in the Open University publishing sector at one stage, as well as the Basic Skills Agency. I do not want you to say there are two things that ought to be in this report. What do you think we should have mind to in a report like this, where we are trying to get under the skin of what is going on, in terms of the skill deficiencies in our country, what sort of flavour would you like to see coming out of our report? Ms Gill: I guess I would go back to the comment I made at the start of this afternoon's session, that, at the end of the day, we are faced with quite a stark choice, we can either find out what employers want and provide it, or Government can provide what they want to provide and persuade people to take it up. I do think that is quite a fundamental shift and, as I said before, there are huge amounts of things associated with trying to get employers to articulate exactly what they need and, exactly the points I made about the SSCs, the role they have to play. I guess, to me, that is a fundamental shift. We talk a lot about the shift from a supply side system to a demand side system, but that just gets to the heart of it. Q230 Chairman: Thank you for that. Martyn, you have got more experience than most people in this area? Mr Sloman: I think we need to understand that activity in organisations, whether public, private or voluntary sector, is going to be concentrated inevitably on the business objectives. Time is always going to be a scarce resource, and it would be wrong to assume that there is hostility to investing in people, training, etc., but I think we have got to make sure that our policies actually work with that grain, and a recognition of that. This is why there has been so much emphasis from Vicky and myself on looking at the sector as a sector, rather than adopting the blanket solutions. Chairman: This has been a very useful session. Please remain in contact with the Committee, and when you are travelling home to Norfolk, or wherever it is Victoria is going, if you think of something that you should have said to the Committee and did not, please e-mail us or contact us in some way. Thank you. |