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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 197-vii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
National Skills Strategy: 14-19 Education
Monday 29 March 2004 MR ROB HULL and MS CAROL HUNTER Evidence heard in Public Questions 595 - 725
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 29 March 2004 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr David Chaytor Valerie Davey Mr Nick Gibb Paul Holmes Mr Kerry Pollard Mr Andrew Turner ________________ Memorandum submitted by Department for Education and Skills Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Rob Hull, Director, Qualifications and Younger People, and Ms Carol Hunter, Divisional Manager, 14-19 Division, Department for Education and Skills, examined. Q595 Chairman: May I welcome Rob Hull, the Director, Qualifications and Younger People from the Department and Carol Hunter, the Divisional Manager, 14-19 Division of the Department. Thank you very much for responding to our invitation. As you heard outside, we went to Scandinavia and Germany last week looking at skills, so we are pretty much fired up about what our system looks like compared to the those two particular countries' experiences.. Can we start off with what you might perhaps find an unusual question? You have been asked to improve your productivity in the Department, as I recall. Given that you are asked to look at productivity, the Committee is interested in the way that you are going to do that. Mr Hull: Is that across the Department or in relation to 14-19? Q596 Chairman: That is in your Department? Mr Hull: You really should be asking David Normington that question. In thinking about the way in which the Department should be constructed in the future, people have been thinking quite hard about our strategic role and about the way in which we should deliver education and training, or how we should arrange for the delivery of education and training across the country. For example, you will have heard or seen reference to David Miliband's speech at a north of England conference in which he envisaged a new relationship between the centre and schools: a single conversation was the theme - the idea that increasingly we are empowering people at the front line and giving a broader strategic direction. The same sort of issues arise in relation to the sector funded by the Learning and Skills Council where we see similarly the opportunities for the Department to set a strategic direction but not to attempt to manage in detail the way in which delivery takes place, giving the Learning and Skills Council greater scope for judgment and, in turn, for the schools, colleges and workplace providers themselves to be making judgments about how they should respond to the market in which they are. That is the broad picture. So we see a broader strategic direction with less hands-on management happening from the Department. Q597 Chairman: We are familiar with the general picture and you have given us a good summary. Have you done a training needs analysis of the Department? Mr Hull: Not yet; that is the sort of work that is now being done. The broad signals have been given but there is a lot of work going on at the top of the Department at the moment to look at the implications for numbers of staff in different areas and for the kinds of staff who will be needed, but there is a lot of work still to be done on that. Q598 Chairman: You would be doing a training needs analysis for the Department? Mr Hull: I personally would be just one of a number of people doing that work. Q599 Chairman: Yes, but from where you sit, the Department would commission such a study? Mr Hull: I am not sure that I understand the question. Q600 Chairman: If you as a department ask a part of government or part of the educational establishment outside of your Department, you would expect them to assess their training needs, would you not? Mr Hull: Yes. Q601 Chairman: What I am trying to get at is this. At the heart of the delivery of education and skills, if you are intending to have that sort of analysis, it is no good saying you are going to spin stuff out from the centre and have fewer staff in the centre without a proper training and needs analysis so that you could deliver what you intend to deliver. Mr Hull: I am getting there. Already the Department has embarked on a management and leadership programme, which involves all the people like Carol and myself who are engaged in quite an extensive programme of learning about our own management and leadership needs. When we move towards implementation of the sort of changes we are talking about, and also to the changes involved in developing a 14-19 strategy forward, then, yes, we need to look very carefully at the kinds of skills we need across the Department. There will be issues about whether we have enough projects and programme managers, whether we have enough people with the strategic skills and what we do either to recruit or train people for those posts, yes. Q602 Chairman: We can get on with some other more detailed questions, but there is one more general question that is coming over in the sense that when we asked you to come in, we did ask you both if you wanted to cover 14-19 and how that related to the skills agenda. I think it was very clear that this dynamic duo of Hull and Hunter could deliver on all of that. Is that the case? Mr Hull: I hope that is so. Both Carol and I are primarily responsible for the 14-19 issues. Yes, we do interrelate with the skills agenda, as you saw when you met Carol some months ago. Q603 Chairman: It is a concern to this Committee in the sense of how you in the Department work across this area, which is pretty fragmented. You were just talking about the learning and skills councils' responsibilities. If we are going to go through all the departments that have a major role in skills, we are going to be here a long time, as you know. Again, sitting where you are, how good is the quality of the cross-departmental work that you do on the skills agenda? Mr Hull: I think it is very good. I am involved in Ivan Lewis's Skills Strategy Steering Group. I work with Steven Marston, who is the lead Director for the Skills Strategy. I am in the same management group with him. We were inevitably engaged quite a bit in the intersection between my responsibilities and his, whether on modern apprenticeships or on vocational qualifications. We are interacting quite well. Q604 Chairman: How many departments are included in the national group across departmental boundaries? How many departments are represented? Ms Hunter: In the National Skills Alliance we have Treasury, DTI, DWP and DfES, the four key departments. Q605 Chairman: At what level does that meet? Is that at ministerial level? How many officials meet? How often do the Ministers meet? Ms Hunter: I do not know the answer to that. We can certainly find out for you but I am not myself a member of the National Skills Alliance, so I do not know how often they meet. Q606 Chairman: Rob Hull, do you go to these meetings? Mr Hull: No, I do not. I do not go to the National Skills Alliance. I go to the Skills Strategy Steering Group. Q607 Chairman: How many departments go to the Skills Strategy Steering Group? Mr Hull: I think it is all those that Carol mentioned. Q608 Chairman: You would not have the Department of Health or the Department of Defence in that, all big trainers in their own right? Mr Hull: No. Ms Hunter: They are involved in the work, but, as far as I understand it, they are not members of the key Skills Alliance. Q609 Chairman: Do you understand where I am coming from with these questions? When I have looked at the regional level at just how many bodies are trying to do something to improve skills across the piece, some seem to come straight down from the Office of the Department for Regional Government, in my case in Leeds, and all sorts of committees now seem to spin out of the Regional Assembly on Skills and out of the Regional Development Agency for Skills, a new group that links at a regional level the sector skills councils. I have heard people in my region say that if they attended all the meetings, they would never actually do anything else. At national, local and regional levels it seems to be extremely complex to get one's head round the skills agenda. Do you think you are doing that successfully in the Department or across departmentally? Mr Hull: I think we are but no doubt we could do it better. Q610 Chairman: Do you think you are doing it better because of recent changes or because you have always done it well? Mr Hull: No, I think the Skills Strategy document and the process around that strategy have brought together these departments in a way that probably was not happening before then. Q611 Chairman: How harmonious is agreement on the general direction that seems to be coming out of Mike Tomlinson's 14-19 agenda here? Mr Hull: I think that Mike Tomlinson's review is generating quite a bit of consensus at the moment. The interim report, when it was published in February, received a very warm reception. I think there is still quite a long way to go to the final report due later in the year and quite a lot of detailed work to do. The key is going to be to carry that consensus through that process. Our Ministers at the moment are watching the way that develops. Charles Clarke has indicated a set of tests that he wants to apply to the final result. Until we see the final result and can see the extent to which it both carries support across the country and also satisfies the quite demanding tests that our Ministers make of it, we will not know whether we have a clear way forward or not. Q612 Chairman: Do you regularly discuss things like the Tomlinson Report and 14-19 strategy in the Strategy Group that you attend across departments? Mr Hull: Not regularly. Q613 Chairman: Have you discussed it? Ms Hunter: There was a presentation in fact under the last Skills Strategy Programme Board by my team on the 14-19 strategy, so it was discussed. Q614 Chairman: This is the group that you attend? Ms Hunter: Yes. I think on that occasion Rob Hull was not present. Q615 Chairman: What part does No. 10 and the Policy Unit play in this? Mr Hull: No. 10 takes a keen interest in all aspects of policy. Q616 Chairman: Do they turn up at meetings? Mr Hull: Yes, No. 10 is represented at the Skills Strategy Steering Group. Q617 Chairman: At what level are they represented? Mr Hull: I think one of the advisers from there attends. Q618 Chairman: Is it Mike Barwell? Mr Hull: I do not remember the name. Q619 Chairman: Do you pick up from the departmental review that, as a department, they seem to be quite positive about the 14-19s and that there are certain views coming out of No. 10 that they are not so keen on this direction? Is that something you recognise? Mr Hull: I do not recognise that. I think there is a range of issues which has to be kept in balance in the 14-19 policy and different people will have a different emphasis on different aspects. If I can rehearse some of the issues, there is an issue about whether Mike Tomlinson's recommendations will seriously stretch the able; there are issues about whether Mike's group will make proposals which engage the disengaged and promise to tackle the drop-out problems that we face; there are issues about the mode of assessment and volume of assessment; there are issues about the nature of the vocational route and the way in which we engage all young people in the world of work. Those five things can be seen in tension. At some times people will have a different take on those five considerations. Q620 Chairman: You can see where we are coming from on this. The fact is, as I posed to the Prime Minister at the Liaison Group meeting fairly recently, where any government finds it difficult is to deliver policy when it is about joined-up work across departments. I use skills particularly as a difficult one. When I talk to officials from your Department, your colleagues, and they give evidence to this Committee, they have a pretty good competence for those things for which they are entirely responsible, by and large, and for delivering on that. What concerns me and members of this Committee is that it is much more difficult to get a handle on something as complex as skills running across departments. I am trying to push you on say at around what date the departments started feeling that they had to get a grip on this right across departments, right across every department, in order to deliver? Was that at the publication of the White Paper or the work on the White Paper? Mr Hull: I think the work on the White Paper was clearly a catalyst but a range of issues over time has led in that direction. If we think about the reform of modern apprenticeships, that is something which has galvanized departments to work together as well. Q621 Mr Chaytor: Mr Hull, if you cannot remember the name of the No. 10 Policy Unit adviser represented on the Skills Strategy Task Force, presumably there has been no communication between the No. 10 Policy Unit and the Department over that area of work? Mr Hull: I do not follow that at all. There are a number of people in the No. 10 Policy Unit who have an interest in the Skills Strategy. I simply could not remember the name of the person who was there. Q622 Mr Chaytor: Does the same person attend each of the meetings, and that is not a person with whom you have communicated? What does that say about the level of communication between the Department and the No. 10 Policy Unit? Mr Hull: That is for you to draw your conclusions. I am sure my colleagues who are more actively engaged centrally in the Skills Strategy would be able to answer that question. Ms Hunter: In terms of 14-19, when we were developing the 14-19 policy, we had regular contact with the No. 10 Policy Unit throughout, and have continued to do so. In fact, that is with a different member of the Policy Unit from the person who sits on the Skills Strategy Group, but I do not know whether that is material. We have had a strong involvement with the Policy Unit. Q623 Mr Chaytor: What explains the difference then? If there was regular communication over the preparatory work on 14-19 but there seems to be little communication over the developmental work on the Skills Strategy, why should there be a difference? Ms Hunter: I do not think there is. I think those officials who are more deeply engaged in the development of the overall Skills Strategy than we are do have regular engagement with the Policy Unit, in the same way that we do on 14-19. As we are different officials in the Department, so they are in the Policy Unit. We had a lot of contact in fact with Patrick Dymond, an official whose name I can remember, during the 14-19 phase, and still have contact with the unit now. We now have the name of the person: (Rammell Burden) is the No. 10 Policy Unit person who is engaged on the Skills Strategy and who how attends the meetings. Q624 Mr Chaytor: The name is not the point, but the level of communication. You mentioned the tests that the Secretary of State has set. How many and what are they? Mr Hull: I actually went through them just now: stretch the able; engage the disengaged; assessment; high quality vocational route; and engaging all in the world of work. Q625 Mr Chaytor: The document that you have supplied on 14-19 reforms, and it is implied in your comments as well, reinforces the concept of the vocational/academic divide. We read in the document regularly of the vocational progression route. Is it not the case that much of the thinking underlying the Tomlinson work is to try and get away from that divide and have a far greater integration of different streams of the curriculum? Does it not follow therefore that a new language is needed because the language that the Department is currently using is simply reinforcing the old divide? Mr Hull: I think there is indeed a language problem. We know that we have a century of attitudes towards the vocational and academic which have not been helpful, and which many commentators have commented on over the years. We do have a problem over language. The difficulty is finding the words which do not have that sort of loaded characteristic about them. I think the key to our forward policy on 14-19 learning is about personalisation, about responding to individual needs, and recognising that different individuals will be motivated and will achieve best in different ways. That means for some of them there will be more practical learning; for some of them there will be much more serious engagement with the work place. It is our aspiration that whatever package young people are offered, it is a high quality package and enables them to do well and give them a route for progression. I think for some young people we will be talking about some things which are predominantly practical and predominantly vocational. Q626 Mr Chaytor: But you are equating the practical with the vocational, whereas a young person who would be doing physics, biology and chemistry leading towards medicine will also be pursuing a vocational route? Mr Hull: Exactly so, and I am in danger of getting trapped by the language, too. I believe that there are many young people on a predominantly academic track who will be motivated and respond well to some access to the work place and some access to practical types of learning, too. We do need to be very wary of stereotypes of any kind. We need also to recognise that for quite a lot of young people a mix of academic and vocational makes a lot of sense. In the past, we have talked about parity of esteem between the academic and vocational. The trouble is that there is no magic wand that will make that happen. We believe the key is about getting the quality right and getting the options right. Q627 Mr Chaytor: You would accept that if we continue with the current implication of the concept of vocational and it is entirely linked with practical things, then there will never be parity of esteem because conceptual areas of study will always have a higher level of esteem in the eyes of most young people and most parents? Mr Hull: I agree that there is a dilemma there and I agree very much that some areas of study like medicine and law are vocational but have not attracted that kind of attitude. Yes, we need to work hard on language. Q628 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask about the link between the 14-19 work and the Skills Strategy? You have a very helpful section in your document that explains how the Skills Strategy supports the 14-19 strategy and the following paragraph explains how it is dependent on the 14-19 strategy. Which came first and which do you think is the driving force? Mr Hull: I would prefer to duck that question. I think it is a chicken and egg sort of question. We were thinking about 14-19 issues when the Skills Strategy began to gel and we saw the way in which the two came together. Our rhetoric in relation to 14-19 policy right back to the Green Paper we published two years ago was very much about not only enabling young people to achieve but also about the future skills needs of the economy, of the country. I think the two have always gone together, and so it was quite natural when the Skills Strategy developed that it should be building on some of the things that were there in the 14-19 strategy. Q629 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the links with the economy, is it primarily a question of skill shortage or primarily a question of productivity? Mr Hull: It is about level, it is about the 21st century economy needing high level skills and more higher level skills. It is also about meeting some of the generic skills needs that employers say they need for the 21st century, generic skills and both the basic skills - maths and English - but also the wider, softer skills that employers are constantly telling us they need and they are not finding in young people, even if they have graduated. Q630 Mr Chaytor: In terms of productivity, what can be the impact of training on levels of productivity? Of all the things that impact on productivity, what is the relative weight of government policies on vocational training? Ms Hunter: In terms of skills, skills are only one of a number of factors that bear on productivity, as you know. In fact, if we look at, say, a comparison with ourselves and the USA, we do not think the difference in productivity, though it is substantial, is down to skills at all. In that case, it is much more down to the use of capital, particularly IT capital. If we look at the relationship between ourselves and our European competitors, I think that the figure is that about 20 per cent of the difference between ourselves and them is down to the skills in the workforce. When you try to say, therefore, what government's contribution to that is, I think it is very difficult because obviously employers are training their staff for increased skills all the time and they are not dependent necessarily on government policy to do that. What we are trying to do through the Skills Strategy is to create a climate in which employers are more aware of the relationship between skills and productivity; we are trying to create more research evidence on how skills actually relate to productivity, particularly when looking at profitability, because there is not at the moment a great deal of hard evidence. We are working to try and create that and to create a climate in which we work on both the demand side, encouraging employers to understand that they need more skills, to want more skills, and also on how government policy can help to create a flexible supply side where the providers of skills that are doing so with government funding are better enabled to meet the needs of the employers. Q631 Mr Chaytor: Really what you are saying is that the Skills Strategy is largely about an employer awareness-raising exercise rather than something that can actually guarantee to raise levels of productivity? Would that be a fair characterisation? Ms Hunter: No, if that is what I seemed to be implying, it is not what I intend to imply. What we are trying to do is work on both sides of the equation. Certainly one of the things we are very clear about is that this is not only about improving the supply side, which is what Government has tended to do in the past, and looking at how we can improve the supply of skills training and how can we make colleges and other providers more responsive. All of that is important but if we cannot create a demand on the other side from employers for that service, then we are not going to succeed. So we need to do both: we need to improve the supply and we also need to generate the demand and bring those together so that they can work together flexibly to meet the demands of employers. Q632 Mr Chaytor: Finally, may I ask a question on the 14-19 sector again, and particularly on the structural side? The learning and skills councils are working very hard on their strategic area reviews to try and bring greater coherence into the sector, but at the same time we are seeing the establishment of new city academies and the proliferation of small sixth forms and schools are encouraged to develop their own sixth forms. How do you reconcile, on the one hand, the move towards greater co-ordination and rationalisation within structures and, on the other hand, the proliferation of separate institutions providing 16-19 education? Mr Hull: Six months ago we issued a set of principles which should guide organisational decisions locally on provision for 16-19 year-olds. Those principles include some of the things you would expect about value for money and quality, but they also include principles about choice. Certainly a variety of providers locally can give the choice which young people and their parents are looking for. It is also the case, we believe, that by enabling institutions to specialise in one way or another, one generates quality and motivation in the institutions themselves. I think these things can be held together. We have a mixed model by which local learning and skills councils and LEAs can help to orchestrate a mixed economy, a mixed picture of provision. Carol Hunter has the six principles there. Ms Hunter: The six principles seem to have reduced to five now in fact! The key one is quality, as Rob has said, that all learners actually have access to high quality provision, whatever it is that they choose. There is one about distinct 16-19 provision, by which we do not mean; as I think I said last time I was here, that young people should not be taught alongside adults. We do not mean that that should not happen. We do mean that because young people have particular needs for support, pastoral care and management of their programmes, the management of their provision should be distinct within the organisation in which they are being taught. There are two principles about diversity. One is diversity in curriculum breadth, so that through provision within the institution, or more often through collaboration between institutions, we have broad curriculum choice for young people. Then there is the one that Rob Hull mentioned about diversity in learner choice of institutions, so that there is a range of different types of learning provider available to them and they can choose the environment in which they feel comfortable. Then the fifth one is about affordably, value for money and cost-effectiveness within the system, to which clearly we have to have regard. Q633 Mr Chaytor: How does diversity of institution increase choice? Have each of the institutions remained their own admission authorities? Ms Hunter: Effectively, we are trying to encourage a system whereby we have a diversity of institutions, each with their own particular mission - not a word I particularly like - each providing a particular specialism or range of specialisms, and then those institutions or learning providers working together to provide a broad and balanced curriculum so that young people have a choice of where they study. It is certainly true that there cannot be unlimited and completely unfettered choice because the system needs to be managed, so that some young people might not be able to take their first course of choice in their first choice of institution. Our objective is that as many people as possible will be enabled to follow a learning programme that suits them within an institution or a group of institutions and learning providers available locally. That is difficult to manage. That is what the learning and skills councils are trying to do through the strategic area reviews. Q634 Chairman: Going to Rob Hull's remark about no magic wand to change the vocabulary, we are not looking for a magic wand but there is no doubt that if the Department and the Government Ministers keep banging on that the only criterion for success is an increasing number of students getting five A to Cs at GCSE and if you do not get that you are a failure, it is very difficult to get any kind of parity of esteem because nothing else exists. You listen to a Government Minister and you do wonder about the other 48 or 50 per cent; they are not failures. Many of them go on to good modern apprenticeships and do all sorts of interesting things. Why does the Department seem always only to concentrate on A to C GCSE scores?* Mr Hull: I challenge your assertion there. Certainly in our statement of policy on 14-19 last year we made clear our intention of bringing a wider range of qualifications into the count for performance at age 16 and indeed subsequently, and that remains our intention. We are looking at ways of counting a range of vocational qualifications alongside GCSEs in that count. Although five A to C GCSEs remains the shorthand at the moment, it is a shorthand that will cover quite a lot of other qualifications. Q635 Chairman: Rob Hull, you may describe my remarks as an assertion. They are actually the translation of the voice of all the leading educationalists, including the heads of schools in my constituency whom I met on Friday afternoon. One of their central complaints was this obsession with how well people do in GCSE levels at A to C. That comes straight from a lot of experienced practitioners. I did not dream it up or merely assert it. I have it on rather good evidence through spending two hours with the people. Mr Hull: We now have GCSEs in vocational areas which cover more traditional subjects. Q636 Valerie Davey: I want specifically to ask what the Department is doing to promote the vocational qualifications available now for 14-19 year-olds to make those positive in the eyes of young people and their parents. Mr Hull: There is quite a lot of work going on at the moment in relation to the new GCSEs in vocational subjects, work to help the schools deliver them effectively. We are also involved in the increased flexibility programme to promote the use of GCSEs, giving young people an opportunity to study them in colleges and in the work place. We are, through a variety of means, generating more opportunities to take those qualifications. There remains, I think, the reality that there is still quite a lot of confusion about the range of vocational qualifications which is available, and the work which Mike Tomlinson is doing now and the work that QCA is doing in rationalising vocational qualifications will help that public understanding in due course. Q637 Valerie Davey: Why have we got ourselves into this position where it still seems that people think vocational is for the less able? Why have we not been able, in launching this new group of qualifications, to say, "This is across the range for people who have an aptitude or an interest" and give it that status? Quality is not enough if it does not have status. Mr Hull: There are limits to what we can do to change attitudes. We are doing what we can. I think the status will come gradually as people come to recognise the quality of the qualifications that are being provided. In the increased flexibility programme that I referred to, there are quite a few more able young people who are pursuing them. Our Ministers are clear that they do want to promote them for those groups. Yes, we are doing that. Your question why goes quite deep into our cultural attitudes. Q638 Valerie Davey: The people you mentioned presumably are the employers essentially? Employers need to recognise the value of and need for those qualifications as well as young people thinking, "This is a nice idea and I will do it" or their parents thinking this would be suitable for their son or daughter. This has to be something which is needed in the workplace. Mr Hull: Absolutely and so, yes; a qualification is worthless unless people in the workplace or in higher education recognise it. Q639 Valerie Davey: Have they been involved? Mr Hull: Yes, the employers have been involved in the design and development of the qualifications. People like the engineering associations have been extensively involved in that. Q640 Valerie Davey: Then you must be pretty disappointed at today's report from Ofsted which says that the Advanced Vocational Certificate in Education is not popular and that "it is neither seriously vocational nor consistently advanced". Mr Hull: Yes, I am disappointed with that report today. Partly it reflects a historical position and some of the early teething problems with that qualification, problems which have and are being tackled. Next year a revised version of the vocational "A" level is going to be introduced, which has the same sort of structure as the ASA2 structure for the normal "A" level, but some of the issues around with the vocational "A" level are wider, more general issues, which led to our remit to Mike Tomlinson. In trying to get parity between the vocational qualifications and the academic qualifications, we have tended to impose more external examination and assessment than is appropriate for some vocational qualifications. One of the challenges we put to Mike Tomlinson's group is to see whether he can develop an appropriate assessment regime for vocational qualifications which matches the kind of learning but also generates public confidence in the quality. We are doing things to the existing qualifications but we also think there are longer term issues, which we are looking to Mike Tomlinson to help us with. Q641 Valerie Davey: Immediately, for young people and their parents who want them to start this course in September, how do we give them the confidence that this is something worth doing and that it will equip them for their future work? Mr Hull: I think we do that by some of the things we are already doing with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to enable schools and colleges to deliver those qualifications more effectively. I also indicated that there are some changes to the qualifications coming through. Q642 Valerie Davey: Do you see any work necessary with the universities as well to encourage them to recognise that these are qualifications which their young people coming to university may also have and be of value for their purposes? Mr Hull: Yes, I think so and we do engage in dialogue with higher education, particularly the admissions tutors, to help them to understand what qualifications are coming through, but it is not easy to influence higher education at large because each admissions tutor is making his or her own decisions, at the end of the day. Q643 Valerie Davey: You said the employers were involved. Were universities and higher education involved as well? Mr Hull: Yes, there was some involvement there as well. Q644 Valerie Davey: So they have a responsibility for what they have produced? Mr Hull: They do to some extent, yes. Q645 Mr Turner: Mr Hull, how long do you think it took for the GCSEs to command the confidence of employers after their introduction? Mr Hull: I do not know the answer to that. I was not involved in this area of work at that time. My impression is that by the end of the 1980s it was pretty well established as a qualification and well recognised. It was introduced in 1986. Q646 Mr Turner: So that is four years; and the A2? Mr Hull: It is only a couple of years since the A2 was first examined. I think people are still coming to understand it, though the A2 is close in standard to the "A" level. Q647 Mr Turner: Indeed, and even with that two years, they are still coming to understand it. My concern is that when you have launched something and it has gone wrong, you not only lose credit and the students who have gone through the system perhaps lose credit and credibility, but you lose credibility with future generations of students as well and employers. How will you prevent that if you change the system? Mr Hull: You mean in the future? Mike Tomlinson's work on reforming qualifications is deliberately seen as a long-term programme of work. I think, if we plan that work over an extended period, if we work hard on communications strategies and on getting the theory right, then there is a prospect for dong that, but it is a significant undertaking to maintain confidence through that process, and we will be worrying a lot about that to get it right. Q648 Mr Gibb: What went wrong with the GCCE exams, on this same line of questioning? Mr Hull: I thought the question was about the vocational "A" level. The one in the press this morning is about the vocational "A" level. Q649 Mr Gibb: I am not asking about the vocational "A" level. I am asking you about the GCSE. Mr Hull: In the 1980s? Q650 Mr Gibb: No. Why are you getting rid of it? What is the concern with the GCSE? Mr Hull: The issues around the GCSE are about the extent to which you should put weight on a qualification at 16 as opposed to 19. The rationale for 14-19 reform is about moving towards a programme of continuous learning through from 14 to 19, so that we move away from an expectation that young people will leave school at 16 and stop learning at 16 to a programme of learning through from 14 to 19. If we move from where we are now to a 14-19 programme of learning, then for all young people we ought to be putting increasing emphasis on achievement at 18/19 and less so on achievement at 16. Achievement at 16 ought to be more of a stepping stone than seen as a terminal examination. That is one kind of argument about the way in which the GCSE exam is positioned in the overall 14-19 programme. Then there are arguments which I do not know whether Mike Tomlinson brought out when he met you about the extent to which the GCSE qualification is now apt for 14-16 year-olds. The claim is made, and I think there is some force in it, that by taking a series of exams at the same level in related subjects and doing the same sort of course work again and again, the same sort of exams again and again, the young person is being tested repeatedly for the same things and that if one moved to a different framework of assessment, you could do it in one shot rather than doing the same sort of things in geography coursework and history coursework and so forth. Q651 Mr Gibb: May I just halt you there? You have been far more informative than Mike Tomlinson was. Are you saying then, that there will not be an exam in every subject under the diploma system and that you need to be testing the core skills? Mr Hull: No, I am not saying that. What we have asked Mike Tomlinson to do is look for ways of reducing the burden of assessment and making sure the assessment is appropriate to the learning programme so that you do not need to assess the same thing twice necessarily. Q652 Mr Gibb: That is the point I wanted to hone in on. Mr Hull: You would still be tested in geography and history if those were the subjects you were doing in your main learning programme, but you might not be doing the same range of assessment tasks as you do at the moment in those subjects. Q653 Mr Gibb: Please explain to me what is being assessed twice at the moment when you do an exam in history and an exam in geography? Mr Hull: That is selected coursework, and in coursework in many subjects you will be doing some sort of project; you will be going through the skills of getting a project together to present in your written work in a particular way, and so on. Those kinds of things are being tested in several different ways as opposed to the subject matter which, of course, is not replicated in the different subject areas. Q654 Mr Gibb: So one plan is to reduce the amount of coursework, is that the idea, and have more assessment by examination under the new system? Mr Hull: There is a variety of options being canvassed by Mike Tomlinson in his interim report, including assessment by teachers but not by the structured coursework that we have now. Q655 Mr Gibb: So more self-assessment by teachers and fewer exams than currently is the system? Mr Hull: That is what he is canvassing. Q656 Mr Gibb: Can I ask you about exams at 16? Will there be fewer exams generally for people at 16 than currently? Mr Hull: You are talking as if I know the future. I made clear earlier that we are waiting to see Mike Tomlinson's final proposals and then we will take a view on the way forward. I would expect Mike to be recommending a reduction in the amount of external examining, yes. Q657 Mr Gibb: Could you also say what was wrong with the D to G grades at GCSE? Why did that not work? Mr Hull: I think initially, back in 1986, the D to G grades were working quite well. What we see in the late 1980s and early 1990s is an increase in performance by young people at 16 which looks as if it fed through into increased participation post-16. Young people who previously had experienced failure, in their terms, were experiencing the D to G grades as success and were feeling that they could take them forward. Over the last 15 years, I think increasingly the D to G grades have come to be seen as failure as achievement at the higher levels has become more important and as the economy has needed the higher level skills. Something has happened to perceptions. Certainly that sort of perception has not applied in the GNVQ qualification at the equivalent level. We had a foundation GNVQ, which is equivalent in level to D to G grades, and you could succeed in the foundation GNVQ and it had a different sort of effect on you. Q658 Mr Gibb: Is that because it had a different name? Mr Hull: It may have been something like that, yes, indeed. Q659 Mr Gibb: What you are saying in essence is that one exam encompassing a whole broad range of abilities will tend to result in the lower grades being regarded less well, as a failure almost? Mr Hull: I am not saying that. I am saying in this case that seems to have happened. I am not sure. Q660 Mr Gibb: The way this is being dealt with is by introducing another type of exam with a different sort of name to it, and so entry level diploma, intermediate level diploma, and thinking that will help deal with that problem. Is that the intellectual drive behind what is going on? I am trying to get to grips with it myself. Mr Hull: Certainly Mike Tomlinson's group does regard the entry level and foundation level qualifications as an opportunity to demonstrate how well people have done, so, yes, I think there is something in that. Q661 Mr Gibb: So in essence we are gong back to the CSE/GCE split that we had before the GCSE came in 1986, but with a different name obviously? Mr Hull: I would not say that, no. Q662 Mr Gibb: Why not? Mr Hull: Because the conception of the Tomlinson diploma, at whatever level, is much larger and broader than the CSE. CSEs were individual subjects. The foundation diploma will require achievement across a broad subject area. Q663 Mr Gibb: But there will be lots of individual subjects within those areas, will there not? You are not just going to teach one blank subject, are you? You are going to teach geography, history and science. They will all lead to a qualification at the intermediate diploma level? Mr Hull: If that is the level at which it has been studied. Q664 Mr Gibb: I am just trying intellectually to grasp how that differs from a CSE in geography, history and science with GCE geography, history and science. Mr Hull: The proposal from the Tomlinson group is that all young people should be required to achieve in some sort of functional maths and in communications, whatever subjects they chose. Q665 Mr Gibb: They are choosing compulsory subjects, as they were under CSE/GCE. What I can see happening here is a cycle: you are trying to achieve something that is unachievable and we will go back to CSE/GCE split, and then in 15 years' time we will decide that discriminates against people doing the intermediate level, and then we will have one qualification again with one level or set of grades, and again in 15 years' time after that, we will decide that the lower grades discriminate. You are just trying to change things and you will achieve nothing. Have I got that wrong? Mr Hull: I hope you have got it wrong. Q666 Mr Pollard: I have two questions. In talking about qualifications and achievements in those, people with ADHD, learning disabilities, dyslexia, dysphasia, are at a great disadvantage currently. Will they be at the same disadvantage or will this new system cope with them? I will give you a couple of example. My grandson, Jake, who has ADHD and other difficulties, has not achieved very well at school and is not now on the full curriculum, but if he got one GCSE at a grade A to C he would be doing exceptionally well. I do not think he will do that. Amy came to my surgery with her mum on Friday and she has two conditions; she can hardly cope with English and yet she has been told she has to do two modern languages as well. This is really putting challenges in front of people and we are setting them up to fail. I know these kids are at the margins in the generality of things but nonetheless each child is important to each parent and we must allow them each to aspire and achieve. There was a question in there, honestly. Mr Hull: I hope that the reform of qualifications ahead will be one which promotes the inclusion of people with special needs. Of course, different special needs need different handling within this. There are some very able young people with special needs and one needs to take account of whatever the need is in order to enable them to achieve of their best. There are other young people who will always struggle with some of the basics. Mike Tomlinson's ideas about an entry level diploma allow for that. These issues are never easy. Ms Hunter: It is perhaps worth saying, in terms of the entry level diploma, that Mike Tomlinson is particularly looking with a group of experts in the field at how the entry level diploma can be as inclusive as possible because he is well aware of those needs and he has been taking account of that all the way through the discussions he has had. Q667 Mr Pollard: I was at a meeting of residents on Friday night - not as erudite as the Chairman's - and we were talking about education and the 50 per cent target for university. Their view was that although percentages were going up in A to C grades, really standards were coming down; they were just allowing more people through. That seems to me to be quite a widespread perception. How do we get round that? What do we need to do to convince people that standards actually are rising and that our kids are doing better and our teachers are teaching better? Mr Hull: There is a huge dilemma here, as demonstrated by the newspaper headlines we see every August. When achievement rates go up, it is because the standards are going down. When achievements go down in August, that is also because standards are going down, according to the press. We all have to work on helping people to understand the extent to which schools and colleges are actually doing better each year. Mr Pollard: Would it help if we had some stability in the system? I take the point that Nick Gibbs made. I have a lot of time for him. He is a good man! He said that we are going round in cycles rather than circles. That disturbs me and I think it disturbs educationalists as well. We need stability, not new initiatives perhaps. That is a statement. Chairman: I think the Conservatives are supposed to believe in that, are they not? I do not know quite whether we should measure contentment with the achievement in higher education based on what the Daily Mail and the Sun say in August or September. Q668 Paul Holmes: I am interested in the research background to the suggestions that are now being made for moving towards work-based learning before the age of 16. The Government is talking about junior apprenticeships where a pupil might do two days in school, two days in work, and one day at college. On which country's or countries' successful scheme is this based? Mr Hull: I am not sure that we are starting from other countries. I think we are starting from the experiences which are manifest in quite a few places. I talked about the increased flexibility programme, which does look to be quite a successful operation, where some young people are having access to the workplace and some to colleges. We are seeing them greatly motivated by that. Ivan Lewis is interested in exploring whether a bit more workplace access would make sense. That is where it is coming from. I would emphasise that this is not an idea about categorising young people at the age of 14 into a narrow track. It is about giving young people motivational experiences which will point them towards good quality qualifications and which will open up possibilities for them from 16. Some may decide at 16 that they want to revert to a traditional, more academic based learning. For others, it will be quite natural to progress from that sort of work-based experience pre-16 into a modern apprenticeship of the kind we have now. That is the sort of idea that surrounds this. I do not think international influences are the driver behind that so much as simply looking at what seems to be working at the moment with young people. Q669 Paul Holmes: I would be interested if there was anything you could send on to us about where the driver comes from. It is an idea which I wholeheartedly support. I was a teacher previously and, from what I have heard now, I support the concepts. As the Chairman has said, we were in Denmark and Germany last week looking at their systems. I had been led to believe anecdotally that there was a lot of this in Denmark and Germany, but in fact what we found was that there is quite a rigorous divide at 16. Before 16 there is very general academic education and the vocational element only comes in quite explicitly after the age of 16. I was surprised at that. I thought this scheme perhaps was based on successful examples in other countries. Mr Hull: You have been to Germany more recently than me, but I thought when I was in Germany some time ago and went to 11 to 16 schools in Germany that they were giving quite a lot of practical learning in one form or another. Q670 Paul Holmes: Perhaps you could let us know where the driver comes from. In terms of the practical difficulties of moving in this direction, for example, if in a few years' time it becomes the norm that many pupils will only be spending part of the time in school and some of them will be doing vocational work placements with employers, how does that register in the league tables? At the moment, the standard cry of schools is that the emphasis on league tables and league table performance is absolutely essential for everything, for the status of the school, for the teachers' performance-related pay prospects, for everything. If you have quite large numbers of pupils who are spending two or three days a week not earning brownie points for the league tables, how are you going to get round that? Mr Hull: The answer to that goes back to what I was saying to the Chairman about the prospect ahead of introducing more qualifications into the league tables. If someone is going into the workplace and getting a vocational qualification through that route, that sort of qualification would count towards the league tables prospectively in the future. That is one part of the answer. Another part of the answer is about the way in which we might in future look at the performance of groups of institutions. If we have colleges working with schools, we ought to be able to find ways of measuring their collective performance as well as their individual performance, so that if a young person is gaining qualifications by experiences in a variety of places, all those places will get recognition for what they are achieving. Q671 Paul Holmes: That was going to be the next question. In the memorandum you sent to us you talk about that being something that you are looking at. Do you have any more definite ideas how you would achieve that? For example, if somebody is spending half the week in college and half in school, do their exam successes at college count for the college or for the school or for both. Ms Hunter: They count for the student. Q672 Paul Holmes: That is not the way league tables work at the moment. Ms Hunter: We do not have a final answer to that. We hope that we have a final answer to the question of how we bring other qualifications into the tables so that if the evaluation that is currently going on is successful, that will be done next year. We are working on two other aspects of the tables with groups of potential private schemes that are interested in this. One is to answer precisely that question you have just asked as to whether, if we want to measure the success of groups of institutions, we do that by apportioning the attainment or actually by it counting for anybody who is involved and therefore effectively double counting it. The other thing we are looking at is how you incorporate differences in the pace of learning into tables. That is relatively straightforward to do in as far as anything is straightforward with performance tables for accelerated progression, but is more difficult to see how we are going to do it for progression where young people are actually taking their qualifications slightly later than they would normally be expected to do. We do not have a final answer to either of those, but we are working with groups at schools around the country to try and work out what the best solution will be, and then to operate some pilots next year to test those solutions out. I am sorry I cannot give you an immediate answer to the question but I hope we will be able to do so in a few months' time. Q673 Paul Holmes: I welcome a lot of what you are saying. In listening to some of the answers you gave earlier on, it struck me how much we do keep reinventing the wheel, rushing into things and then saying, "Well, perhaps that is not such a good idea". The school I worked at had to scrap a brilliant City and Guilds course because those did not appear in the league tables. Now you are saying that perhaps we ought to go back and introduce more of those kinds of courses that will count in the league tables. It seems a shame perhaps that we did not listen to teachers more a few years ago when we were scrapping all these things that you are now taking about reintroducing. To move on to another subject that came out of what we were looking at last week, in Denmark we were impressed by the sheer scale of their vocational training after the age of 16, but they have 1 per cent levy on every company to pay for that. In Germany they are in the middle of a big debate about whether they should have a compulsory levy on every company to pay for this because they feel they cannot provide enough training places based in companies through the voluntary method, and so Germany is agonising whether to do the same or not. We used to have a training levy, but we scrapped it. Are there any thoughts where we are going on that? Mr Hull: I think that is probably a question you should ask my ministers when you meet them in a month's time because it seems to me essentially a political issue about the way in which one looks to employers to contribute to learning. You know the way in which, in the skills strategy, we have tried to articulate the responsibilities that employers should have in relation to learning and the responsibilities of the State, with the responsibilities of the State predominantly in the initial preparation of young people and also basic skills and the Level 2 entitlement. That is where we are. Obviously there are other ways of doing it, one of which is compulsion of one kind or another. So far we have not gone down the compulsion route. Q674 Paul Holmes: The White Paper keeps saying it is the last chance for employers; that unless something happens the implication must be that we go back to a compulsion levy. Can we really provide high quality vocational training for everybody in the target audience without either the taxpayer picking up the whole bill or the employer picking up the whole bill? You understand; you do not know. Mr Hull: No. Q675 Chairman: How do you see modern apprenticeship in the greater scheme of things in terms of producing higher skilled people in our society? Mr Hull: I think for those young people who are not on a traditional academic tread through to university there are a range of options for them, one of which is to go on a route which is predominantly work-based, another one is to take a vocational route in full-time education through a further education college and in the further education college route there are qualifications like B-Tech National which are quite widely taken. The work-based route is clearly an option. It is an option which is highly motivating for some. It gives the young people a real experience of the workplace and it is different in that they became employees: they are productive members of the work force. At the moment we have got about 24 per cent of young people taking that route; we have got ambitions for increasing it. Obviously one can take different positions about precisely how far we should increase that route. The key issues, I think, about the apprenticeship route are about the extent to which we can raise the quality of the route, and there is a lot of work being done on that now, and also the extent to which we can generate the employer places, the extent which we can generate, that we can persuade employers to get involved. That is why Savoy Gardener's taskforce is working with us on the market to employers looking at ways of penetrating the service sectors to those that have not traditionally taken apprenticeships. There is great potential there as one important route into the workplace and into vocational learning. Q676 Chairman: Why then do you think... Why does it not lead to the next stage, the modern apprenticeship? Mr Hull: Not lead to the next stage? Q677 Chairman: It does not lead to anywhere, does it? Mr Hull: It can lead and does lead to higher education for some. Q678 Chairman: It is not a qualification. Mr Hull: The modern apprenticeship? Q679 Chairman: Yes. Mr Hull: Success in the modern apprenticeship gives an NVQ, a technical certificate, which is also a qualification, and qualification key skills. Those three together make up something called the Modern Apprenticeship Diploma, and there is no reason why not, indeed, it is possible to move on from there through to higher education, through to foundation degrees. Q680 Chairman: Why is it the people out there do not see it in that way, they do not see it as a stage or even a rung on the ladder or part of a climbing frame of opportunity? Most people who talk about the modern apprenticeship talk about it with those people who are not going to go on, whereas what we saw in Denmark and Germany was a system whereby you could carry on from an apprenticeship and go perhaps along a more applied route but into higher education. It seems to us we have been stuck in having this modern apprenticeship system that stops: it does not key into anything else? Mr Hull: It is our firm intention that it should key in, any route a young person takes should progress to a higher level, whether through to higher educational for some or whatever, and we certainly believe that for modern apprenticeships. We need to make sure that the achievements that young people can get in modern apprenticeships can lead into higher education. We certainly see a route through from an advanced modern apprenticeship into a foundation degree as a natural progression; and it is the sort of thing that does happen in engineering, for example, now. Q681 Chairman: It certainly historically used to happen in engineering and many other professions where people would start off and end up with an HNC, an HND and a degree? Mr Hull: Yes. Q682 Chairman: That seems to be the dislocation. On the one hand you have got this rather stunted qualification, so it is not a true qualification, of the modern apprenticeship and, at the same time, you can have the Vice Chancellor of Bournemouth University saying this morning all her courses, the whole of Bournemouth, were vocational; yet there does not seem to be a link between an expansion of vocational education at the higher education level and a clear way in which you get on that ladder so that you can go in a different way. I presume most of the people who end up at Bournemouth University do so by the traditional academic route? Mr Hull: I do not know about the admissions practice of Bournemouth University, but certainly your intention, Chair, is precisely our intention, that modern apprenticeships should lead through naturally and we need to do more to make sure that is happening for more sectors. Q683 Chairman: When you look at your own department's performance, do you ever wonder why it never happened? Why did ministers, the previous ministers, previous civil servants, not deliver a system that seemed to be joined up? Where did we get it wrong? At what stage did it go wrong? Mr Hull: I am not sure I know the answer to that. Of course, there is a history to apprenticeships, the way in which apprenticeships went into decline 20 years ago or so and a history of recovering that decline in more recent years. Q684 Chairman: Why did that occur? Mr Hull: Of course, there may also have been issues in the machinery of government at one time where we used to be an Education Department and an Employment Department. That is no longer the case. I would have thought there certainly is potential for joining those things up. Q685 Chairman: Carol. Ms Hunter: I was going to say, I think that Rob is right, there was a period during which apprenticeships fell away during which the vocational route, and by that I mean, I have been engaged in education, training rather than education, for quite a lot of years and we have never been able to establish the importance of the vocational route in relation to higher education. I do think we have a chance to do that now. There is a lot of work already going on between the Learning and Skills Council, the Sector Skills Councils and the higher education institutions, or some of the higher education institutions, to try and make sure that there is a good progression route between advanced modern apprenticeships and some of the new foundation degrees that are being developed, and I think that gives us an opportunity to start to mend this problem, which you have identified, which clearly is there. There are some people already who go from modern apprenticeships into a form of higher education, but not nearly enough. Q686 Chairman: Was it in the 1980s from the emphasis from government on "free markets would provide" that they just thought that this escort of education was not important? Ms Hunter: I do not think... The decline of apprenticeships, I think, was not an issue particularly raised by government, I would not have said, at the time. I think it was more that there began to be a feeling that the time-served apprenticeship--- Q687 Mr Pollard: Had served its purpose? Ms Hunter: I was trying very hard not to say that, but certainly, yes, that the time-served apprenticeship was not actually delivering well-qualified people in the way it perhaps used to do. There was too much time-serving and not enough skill involved. I think in most sectors gradually the apprenticeship decayed away. I do not think that was because of government action. You might argue that no government action was taken to arrest it because it was felt that this was a matter for business and industry rather than government. What it has meant is that we are now starting from quite a low base, or we were starting from quite a low base and having to build up modern apprenticeships again and, given that that is the case, we know that we have got a long way to go, but the fact that we have 24 per cent of young people in modern apprenticeships now - and we are doing a lot of work with businesses to improve the quality and improve the numbers - is a sign that we are actually at least moving in the right direction again. Q688 Mr Pollard: We had a recent meeting with the Confederation of Builders, who were actually taking on employees rather than contractors, and taking on employees would mean trained apprentices, and that is really good news, I think. The reason they gave is that we are now in a fairly stable economic situation with interest rates stable - all of that - the framework is right. Chairman, on your analogy about the climbing frame, I thought it was very apt. I have to say it was a good one. On a climbing frame you can actually circle round, you do not need to climb up. If you do climb up you just go over the other side and come down. If you circle round, that means you do not need to go to university, for example, you do not need to have Higher National Diploma, Higher National Certificate, you can be an ordinary brick-layer with a competence in that, or an ordinary door-fitter with a competence in that. You do not need to become a master whatever it might be. Is that in your thinking as well? Mr Hull: Certainly the possibility of moving around as well as moving up is part of our picture, yes. Q689 Mr Pollard: Reaching a level where you think that is as much as you want to do or as much as your competence or confidence might allow you to do? Mr Hull: Yes, you could step off at any level in the system. Yes. Mr Turner: I was just imagining stepping off a climbing frame at too high a level. Chairman: For those who want consistency, Val and I know that the climbing frame concept is the one that was used in the early years' strategy, which we used extensively when we did our Early Years Inquiry. Mr Pollard: It is a good one. Q690 Mr Turner: The message I seem to be getting is that a lot of youngsters are going through to higher education but through a broadly academic route; not many are going through the vocation route which is available. You feel that it would be appropriate to replace some of the academic route with an expansion of the vocation route - I assume I am right so far, tell me if I am wrong in a moment - because the academic route is less suited to those youngsters than the vocation route. Is that correct? Mr Hull: I think we have two things going on. Yes, there are some young people who are probably taking an academic route at the moment because of attitudes towards A-levels. They are told that is the sort of thing they should be doing, when actually they would be better motivated and they would achieve better by taking another route. So, yes, for some young people they are currently probably taking the wrong route. They need to have their eyes opened about the choices. That is one issue. The other issues is about the potential of young people to get into achieving higher education and about the skills needs of the country. There are young people at the moment who may be taking the modern apprentice route, or maybe taking some other route, or maybe taking no route, who have the potential for higher education, and they ought to have the opportunity to enter higher education, and, when one analyses the needs of the economy, one concludes that there is a need for higher technician level qualifications and a need for young people to come through with those higher technician type qualifications which a vocational degree, a foundation degree, would offer. So there are issues about what is good for the young person; there are also issues about what kind of skills society needs. Q691 Mr Turner: I might ask you in a moment what you see "higher technician level" as meaning. This is the most difficult one of all. Could you put some figures on it? What proportion of youngsters are we talking about for whom the academic route is less appropriate and the vocational route is more appropriate and whom we expect or aspire to end up in higher education? Q692 Ms Hunter: I think that is a very difficult question, for a number of reasons. One is because it is too easy to say we have something like 52 per cent of young people who are gaining five A to Cs at GCSE at the moment, most of whom will go on to take A-levels and many of whom will then go into higher education and all of those people should be doing the courses that they are doing. It may well be, as Rob said earlier, that some of those young people would actually achieve more and be more personally satisfied if they were doing a different sort of course. They have not done it because they have not been offered it. Q693 Mr Turner: This is why I am asking what proportion? Ms Hunter: As I say, it is a very difficult question. I do not know that we know the answer to that, because what we are trying to do is to have a system of learning which is more personalised to the individual's aptitudes and needs. What I was going to say is what that means is--- Chairman: They have not got the figures. If they have the figures and find them when they get back to the Department, they will let us have them. I am keen to get on to the last two sections of the questioning. Q694 Mr Turner: Okay. There were a couple of other questions, one of which is what proportion of those with five A to C GSCEs have them in five what you might call "hard subjects" like English, maths, science and a foreign language, humanities - have that range. Do we know that? Mr Hull: I pause on your definition of "hard subject". It sounds as if--- Q695 Mr Turner: I meant range of subjects? Mr Hull: I think I am right that there are about 40 per cent with A to C GCSES in English, maths and science, something like that. I may be wrong. Chairman: I am sorry; we do have to press on. I want now to look now at school and college provision. Nick. Q696 Mr Gibb: Can I ask how long either of you have been at the DfES? Mr Hull: A singularly long time. I have been, on and off, in the Education Department in its various manifestations for the last 20 years, and I was in the Higher Education Funding Council during the 1990s. Ms Hunter: In my case I have been in the DfES for only 18 months. I was before that in the Department of Work and Pensions for a period, I was in the DfEE earlier for about four years, and prior to that I was in the Employment Department for some of my career, the Manpower Services Commission, which some of you may remember, and I also worked for a period on urban regeneration in the Department for the Environment, as it was then. Q697 Mr Gibb: This question is aimed at Mr Hull really. How do you account for the fact that 23 per cent of adults do not have basic skills in reading and maths in Britain? Mr Hull: Some of those adults were educated before I was at the Education Department. I think we have moved over the last 20 or 30 years from a position where we were content to accept that a significant number of young people would leave school at 15 or 16 and take a manual job which they were going to stay in for the rest of their lives to a position where it really matters considerably whether our workforce has these key skills. So I think there are issues about the extent to which we bothered about those skills 30, 40 years ago. Q698 Mr Gibb: More recently, how do you account for the fact that in 1997 57 per cent of 11-year olds were not reaching the required level of reading - Level 4? Mr Hull: I think there are all sorts of causes in the history of primary education, which I am no expert on, but clearly literacy and numeracy were neglected before 1997 and the strategies that were introduced from that date have had an enormous effect. Q699 Mr Gibb: Can I ask you about the 14-16 programmes in colleges. They are complaining about money and the fact that there is no certainty of continuity, and schools are complaining also that, collaborating with the FE colleges, sending kids off for three days a week to do these valuable courses there is also costing money and they do not know what is going to happen. Can you say what the long-term future is of these vocational programmes in colleges? Mr Hull: I will turn to Carol in a moment, because she has been responsible for many of the Pathfinder projects which have been looking at exactly those issues. The fact is that there are a variety of collaboration methods locally which have different impacts on funding and on organisation, and we need to find the best way of managing that kind of collaboration, managing vocational provision, and to look at the best ways of channelling the money. We are still looking at that. Do you want to elaborate? Ms Hunter: Yes, through the increased flexibility programme which is being evaluated this year, and the 39 14-19 Pathfinders that I am responsible for, one of the things we are looking at there is what the costs associated with this type provision and this type of collaboration are, how we can use the flexibilities that there are in the current system to deal with those, whether we need to introduce some new flexibilities into the system, and I have got some 14-19 Pathfinders who are running slightly different methods of funding, which again we are again evaluating this year to see whether any of these gives us a better handle on vocational provision. We have already made it possible for local education authorities to change the weightings that they give for various students so that schools that are running quite a lot of vocational provision can have a higher weighting. I have to say that there is not much evidence that many LEAs have done that so far, but the flexibility is there and we try to encourage them to use it. Q700 Chairman: Can I interrupt there, Carol Hunter. The evidence we got, for example, from Bury College and from Bedford College was that these were very successful experiments, these pilots. Are we talking about the same thing? Ms Hunter: Yes, we are, but they are very successful in terms of the provision that they are making, the impact they are having on young people and also the impact they are having in many cases on the institution - they are finding this collaboration useful - but the specific question was about funding for collaboration. Q701 Chairman: What drives people on the ground mad about your Department is that when you talk to them and say, "Yes, we are doing really interesting things. We now have four, five, 600 young people from 14 to 16 in our college and it is working because they get their basic skills in school and they do more applied things with us and it keeps them in the educational process and they do well." But then, if you go, as I did, to my constituency providers, they say, "The only trouble is you just get used to a system that enables you to cooperate across schools and colleges, but, because of different funding schemes or someone clever in the Department of Education and Skills, it ends and the cooperation ends, and the opportunity ends. It is the instability of funding that drives the people on the ground crazy, and it is not a good way to manage them. Ms Hunter: I am sorry if I have taken too long to get to my point, which perhaps is what the problem is. What I am trying to say is we are looking through all of these experiments that we are doing, which are proving very successful and which were are funding separately, and were are looking at what will be the best way of trying to incorporate that funding into the mainstream in the long-term: because one of the things people say to us a lot is that they do not want lots of little different bits of funding because it causes difficulty for them, and they have to bid for it separately. What they want is this put into the mainstream. Q702 Chairman: And continuity? Ms Hunter: And continuity. So what we have to do is to work with them, as we are doing, to try to find out what is the best way of achieving that continuity and what is the best way of getting the funding into the mainstream. If we try to devise something clever right at the beginning, the danger is we would have got it wrong because we would have made assumptions about how it was going to work. What we are doing now is working with all of these partnerships to see how it does work on the ground and then get the evidence back through the evaluation so that we can expand it and extend in the most effective way. Q703 Chairman: Is it looking good at the moment? Ms Hunter: It is. It is looking very good. The early evaluation of the increased flexibility programme has shown very good results in terms of the way people feel about the programme, but also in increased participation, in better behaviour from young people. We do not know about attainment yet, because the first qualifications are being taken this summer, but I think the prospects there look hopeful. In terms of the 14-19 Pathfinders, we have just had our first year evaluation and it was not universally favourable; it showed that we still have some way to go, I think as one would expect after only one year of operation. We had very good evidence on collaboration, a lot of extension of the opportunities that were available to young people, again good evidence on motivation, participation, but there are still some problems about making sure that we are covering the whole cohort, about introducing some of the improvements and advice and guidance that we were looking for - that is taking longer to come through than we had hoped - and one or two other things still need further development - so not universally favourable but a good start. Chairman: Nick, I cut across your question. Q704 Mr Gibb: Thank you. When will you reach a decision? You say you are going to look at ways of incorporating it. When will you make a decision on that? When will we know whether these programmes will be permanent? Ms Hunter: I do not know when. It will be ministers obviously who make the decision, and I do not know. We will have lot of evaluation evidence by this summer and we will be needing to look also at that point at the report of the Tomlinson Working Group, because one of the important things is to try and make sure that you are moving towards whatever ministers decide they want to do post Tomlinson. We are moving these programmes in a way that is going to be helpful to that. So I think we will be making some decisions by the end of the year, but it is difficult to be precise about it. Q705 Mr Gibb: The discrimination that people talk about between the way sixth-forms are funded and the way that FE colleges are funded. Is that discrimination that they talk about, particularly for the colleges, so that they have to pay a cost that the LEA will bear for schools? Is that discrimination going to come to an end? What is the rationale for current funding arrangements vis à vis colleges and sixth-forms? Ms Hunter: The arrangements for colleges and sixth-forms effectively, certainly in terms of sixth-forms, the position we are in at the moment is an historical position. Ministers, as you will know, announced in their education manifesto that they wanted to move towards closing the funding gap between colleges and school sixth-forms. We are making progress on that, but, with effectively always limited resource, it will take us some time. Mr Gibb: When we were in Denmark and Germany, and the Chairman also went to Sweden--- Mr Pollard: On his own! Q706 Mr Gibb: ---it was clear that there was a lot of involvement of local businesses and trade unions in assessing the vocational courses that are taught in the FE colleges, and it is my understanding there will be StAR reviews, such as tutorial reviews, or the equivalent, trying to assess or gauge the local business needs. Ms Hunter: Certainly that is a strong part of what they are doing. They are looking to assess the business needs, assess skills needs and also clearly to assess the needs and desires of young people too, and of adults, in the areas so that we can get a sensible range of provision which meets the needs of the local economy and the needs of the local people. There are a lot of other ways in which we are now seeking increasingly to engage employers in helping to design qualifications and curricula and, indeed, helping to deliver some of the things we are doing on work-related learning and enterprise learning, which are also intended to bringing employers much more to the forefront in helping us to design the education system. So StAR is one way of doing it but only one way of bringing them in. Mr Hull: The sector skills councils are an important part of this process. The sector skills councils in defining the standards required for vocation qualifications in their area are influencing quite significantly, and will do so even more, the qualifications and therefore the courses leading to them in colleges. Q707 Mr Gibb: Would it not be better to have the Governors of the Board of the FE colleges being manned by trade union people and employers. In that way they would then determine what the college teaches? Mr Hull: Well, the colleges need to teach to national qualifications, so we need the national process with the Sector Skills Councils as well. I do not know what the statistics are on the composition of college governing bodies. My impression is that employers are a significant presence on many college governing bodies. I do not know to what extent trade unionists are on them as well. Q708 Mr Gibb: You mentioned, Carol, the increased flexibility programme. I understand the drive behind that. Was it necessary to remove the compulsory modern language in order to achieve that flexibility? When we were in Europe the youngsters all seemed to be fluent, to varying degrees, in English, and, okay, in Denmark you have to be very concerned that people speak Danish, but I wondered why we felt it so necessary to drop compulsory modern language? Mr Hull: This is not an issue about the increased flexibility programme; this is an issue about the Key Stage 4 statutory requirements where we have dropped modern languages as a compulsory component of the Key Stage 4 curriculum. It is now an entitlement but not an obligation. The reasons behind that need to be put in the context of a modern languages strategy being developed which emphasise a lot more opportunities for learning modern languages in primary schools and at earlier stages in the belief that, if we get earlier learning in modern language right, then young people voluntarily will carry on with the modern languages post 14. What we do not believe is that compulsion post 14 is the best way to raise the linguistic competence of the nation. In the previous regime, where people could be "disapplied", I think was the expression, from modern language at Key Stage 4, it was modern languages that was most often the subject that people wanted to disapply because you had the phenomena of demotivated youngsters who were not getting anything from the programme. So it is not an argument about downgrading modern languages, it is an argument about getting modern languages: teaching, writing, in schools so that young people are able to want to pursue it, basically. Chairman: I am conscious something is happening in the Chamber. A brief question, please. Q709 Mr Gibb: It seems to fly in the face, the broadening of the curriculum that Tomlinson was talking about: here we are narrowing it, in effect, when it comes to modern languages? Mr Hull: I understand the point, and we always have this dilemma at Key Stage 4, there are always a lot of arguments for including a lot in Key Stage 4 which would reduce the flexibility that we need. Valerie Davey: Can I come in briefly on Connexions? Chairman: You can. Q710 Valerie Davey: The work of Connexions in supporting young people into their future has been, I think, recognised certainly in my area. Other people may have had a different experience, but in my area it has been excellent. There seems to be a question mark over its future and some concerns about its funding. Can you clarify for us the nature of the £25 million that seems to be at issue over the future funding? Ms Hunter: I am not familiar with it in detail, so let me tell you what I do know, and, if you would like to know more, I can certainly find out and someone can write to you. It was determined that £25 million needed to be taken out of the Connexions service budget for the current year, and the Connexions service has been looking at ways in which that might be done. Some of it is a very technical issue around Value Added Tax, which I am not competent to understand, and some of it is from steps that local Connexions services are going to take to make themselves more efficient. Q711 Valerie Davey: Do you think the Department could please send us a very clear note about the nature of the £25 million, because I had certainly been led to understand that it was related to Value Added Tax and the way in which some of the contracts were organised such that the need to pay value added means that, within the total amount of money, a certain amount was needed for value added, i.e. £25 million? Mr Hull: Yes, we will make sure you have a note on that. Q712 Valerie Davey: None of us sitting round the table earlier had a clear picture as to exactly how that was being dealt with. Could you clarify for us, secondly, either now or in a future note, the nature of the review which we understand is starting into the work of Connexions and whether it relates, i.e. specifically in relation to the funding nature of it or to the actual professional nature of the work they are doing? Ms Hunter: I can help you on that because I sit on the steering group for that review. I think first of all the thing to say is that it is not specifically a review of Connexions, it is a review of the careers education advice and guidance that we give to 11 to 19 year olds, and so obviously that engages Connexions heavily; but we are also looking at the advice and guidance that young people get through their schools, their colleges, any other agencies who advise them. The reason being that we are looking in connection with 14 to 19, and certainly later on when we are thinking about implementing Tomlinson, for a significantly enhanced offering of advice and guidance to young people in that phase. There are lot of agencies who are engaged in that at the moment and there have been some reports recently which have criticised, to a certain extent, the joining up of those agencies, including Connexions; and so it was decided that we should do an end-to-end review of the service that young people are getting in that phase to see whether we could actually organise ourselves more effectively to provide it better. So it is not specifically about Connexions, it is not specifically about Connexions funding, but what it will be looking at is how we can get the best out of the general system. Q713 Paul Holmes: Moving back slightly to a question that Nick started asking you about: strategic area reviews. I want to ask you a question about that. There are 47 LSCs who are all engaged in a review in their area and one or two have already reported. I think one of the first ones was Carlisle. That was very controversial. There was a debate in Parliament about its recommendations to close down every sixth-form. It has issued a new report which seems to be backing off from that. How free a hand do the LSCs have in their 47 areas to come up with whatever they regard as being the best answer to their local problem? Mr Hull: We referred earlier to the principles that we issued 6/9 months ago, five it turned out, rather than six. Those principles are intended to guide the local learning and skills councils in formulating their proposals. They are free to put forward proposals, their statutory proposals, for reorganisation. They know that we expect them to develop their proposals in dialogue with the other interested parties, including the local authority, including the existing providers and including other local interests including local MPs. When they put forward proposals there is a statutory process which, in some circumstances, involves a Secretary of State decision at the end of the day. Yes, in the case of Carlisle, I understand that the original proposition that they came forward with they withdrew in consultation. That is the nature of the consultative process. Q714 Paul Holmes: I sat in and listened to the general debate in Parliament on the Carlisle one, where you had a situation, which you will get all over the country, where you have got one or two schools who have said, "We do not want to lose our sixth-form". There is obviously a big argument about that. Thinking of other areas of the country, are there no-go areas that the LSCs cannot touch? For example, if you were covering an area where you have a lot of the Government and the DfES's pet projects, like 11-18 city technology colleges, city academies, specialist schools, grammar schools, are the LSCs in those areas, if they have had to back off in Carlisle where there are just one or two traditional sixth-forms, are they going to be able to touch some of the areas where all the DfES pet projects are based? Mr Hull: I would like to think that wherever there are weaknesses in provision local LSCs will come forward with proposals for tackling those weaknesses. In putting forward those proposals they will need to take account of all the interests involved in the status quo, whoever they might be. Q715 Paul Holmes: So the answer is probably "No". If an LSC is recommending that all the school-based post 16 provision should close, so that you get a large, or a couple of colleges, tertiary colleges, sixth-form colleges, the funding arrangements there, where again we had the earlier question about the five to ten per cent differential whereby the Association of Colleges say that they are under-funded by up to 10 per cent compared to school-based provision, does the LSC take the funding side into account? Does it recommend that the funding should go up to the school level if you close all the sixth-forms down, or does it go down to college levels? Mr Hull: I think the LSC would follow its normal funding formula rules for any reorganisation. Of course, it will be unusual for them to be putting forward one monolithic proposition, because, as we were saying earlier, individual choice, diversity of institutions, are important criteria for us as well. Q716 Paul Holmes: But in the Carlisle case that was one proposal: all the sixth-forms would close in favour of one college? Mr Hull: Yes. Q717 Paul Holmes: So if sixth-forms were funded at 10 per cent higher, those people would have been funded 10 per cent lower if the system had gone ahead and changed? Mr Hull: I think that is right, but that would not have been the driving consideration. Q718 Chairman: It does seems strange to someone who is on this Committee that here we have the Education and Skills Council which post-16 can take an overview, can be an energiser driver when they work well, whereas consistently you weaken that ability in the Department under various ministers from 11 to 16. Mr Hull: I am sorry; I am not following the point. At 11 to 16 the LSC are not responsible. Q719 Chairman: No; and I was drawing the comparison between the LSC being able to take that overview in an area, whereas the fragmentation and the weakening of the LEA generally makes it very difficult to do that pre-16. Do you not agree? Mr Hull: It is an interesting observation. Q720 Mr Chaytor: Just pursuing the point of strategic area reviews, in your document you say that "the variety of conscious structures and institutional arrangements at 10 to 19 is a distinctive strength". Surely it is the existence of that great variety that led to the formation of strategic area reviews to start with. So if this great variety of cultures, structures and institutional arrangements is strength, why bother having strategic area reviews? Mr Hull: Strategic area reviews are looking to see whether the provision for the area is apt for present needs, whether it is about the skill needs of the area or about the needs of the young people and adults that have been served by those institutions. It is not the diversity of institutions which is the driver so much as the needs of the area. When you are looking at that diversity of institutions there will be all sorts of local specific considerations, whether geographical or the inheritance of institutions, which will mean you need to take decisions locally, which means you cannot just impose one national model across the country. Q721 Mr Chaytor: It is about outcomes and performance, entirely about outcomes and performance and not about structures? Mr Hull: Structures may be a solution to outcomes and performance. The driver is whether we have the range and quality of provision that is needed for employment in the area for young people and adults in the area. Q722 Mr Chaytor: Could I just switch back to Connexions? On the issue of the Connexions review, you make no reference to it in the section of your submission about Connexions? Mr Hull: That is probably because when we wrote this submission in January it was not yet conceived. Ms Hunter: My colleague is right. Q723 Mr Chaytor: Accepting your defence of the point that Val Davey raised about this being an early review of the Connexions service, you point out that is not just about Connexions but about a whole panoply of services 11-19. Surely the biggest provider of the whole range of career services is Connexions, and in many cases the Connexions partnerships have been established for less than two years. My question is can you think of an example, of another major government initiative that has been launched at any time interesting your careers that has been subject to such a comprehensive review within two years of being launched? Mr Hull: I think the process of reviewing implementation as you go along is pretty well established in government now. We have the Office of Government Commerce which regularly conducts what is calls "gateway reviews", which are checking at each stage whether the ambitions are going to be delivered. Q724 Mr Chaytor: So this is a routine on-going process. If so why was it announced in The Times Education Supplement as a new striking development in the debate about Connexions? Ms Hunter: To be honest, I was not aware that it had been. I must have missed that particular report. I think it is not unusual when you have got a big new player. It is a questionable, I think, about whether Connexions is the biggest provider. It is certainly the biggest separately funded provider, but schools provide an enormous amount of careers education and guidance for young people; and when you have got a newish provider there and other providers in place, I think it is quite reasonable for us to say that we should be looking at how that system works in practice, not to say the Connexions service should not exist or other services should not exist, but how do we make sure that we are all working together in the most coordinated way that we can to provide the best service. I think there is a feeling at the moment that we are not certain we are yet doing that. That is what this review is intended to look at. Q725 Mr Chaytor: The question follows then: should the review have been established before the Connexions service was established? Would that have been a more logical way of dealing with the issue? Ms Hunter: What has happened is that when the Connexions service was set up there were a lot of discussions about exactly what the Connexions service should do as against what other services should do, and ministers collectively took a decision about the nature of the Connexions service. I think now that we have got a couple of years in many cases of experience of how that is actually working in practice, then it is right to review. We did review all of those questions before the Connexions service was set up, but I think it is right to look at it again to say is it actually working in practice as we thought to it was going to work? Are there things that maybe we did not take into account sufficiently at the time? As there are new services coming on, as there are new demands that we are placing on the service for the 14 to 19 programme, let's have another look at it and see whether we are it in the best way we can. I do not feel that there is a problem with that. It seems to me it is a logical progression for us to have taken forward. Chairman: Thank you very much, Rob Hull and Carol Hunter. It has been a good session. We have perhaps some concerns that we would like to pursue perhaps with your ministerial bosses regarding joined-upness and work across departments, and so on, but thank you very much for your very full answers. Thank you. |