Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
MONDAY 12 JANUARY 2004
MR CHRIS
HUMPHRIES AND
PROFESSOR ALISON
WOLF
Q1 Chairman: May I welcome Professor
Alison Wolf and Chris Humphries to our deliberations? We have
only just started looking at a whole range of issues in the skills
area. This Committee has been away from the skills sector for
a long time and we thought it was appropriate, what with the Government's
current interest in 14-19 and the new White Paper on Skills that
we should be looking at a similar area to see whether we could
add value. To that end, we had a briefing from the Department
last week and now we thought what better way to start than by
inviting the two of you. Both of you are known for your excellent
contributions in this area, but also for your very strong opinions
and that is what we want. Let me start with a question to you,
Chris. You are now involved with City and Guilds which has been
around for a long time and has been celebrating its long history.
Here you are, head of an organisation which has been there for
a long time with a strong responsibility for imparting skills
in our society, yet we are by all accounts a failure in terms
of imparting the relevant skills to generations of young people.
Do you feel guilty about this? City and Guilds has been around
but it has not been very effective.
Mr Humphries: In part, would be
the true answer to that question. I would look back at the history
of City and Guilds and say that yes, I suspect we missed some
key issues over the years and I would also look back and look
at the mix of decisions between Government and City and Guilds
over the years and ask whether policy and practice necessarily
work hand in hand. I give you an example. One of the criticisms
of the system is that there is an over-abundance of qualifications
and confusion in the marketplace. Until around 1970, there were
really only three or four awarding bodies operating in the field,
the main ones being City and Guilds and RSA, and the decision
to split those bodies and create a multiplicity of bodies was
in fact the Government's of the time and against the will of City
and Guilds. I could point to quite a number of policy decisions
over the last 30 or 40 years which fit into that category. To
what extent would I say I feel guilty from City and Guilds' point
of view? I think City and Guilds did not fight hard enough. I
think they should have stood by what they believed in rather than
rolling over or at least should have fought harder and stood up
for the needs and interests of the employers and trainees whom
they are meant to serve. In that sense, did the organisation serve
the UK well by fighting against things it did not believe in?
Probably not. I can look at NVQs. At the time NVQs were introduced,
City and Guilds was the body who came most strongly behind the
Government's initiative. That is why we still do more than 50%
of all NVQs in the country against the other 100 awarding bodies
which do them. The commitment of the organisation to making NVQs
a reality was great. Having said that: did we fight hard enough
to make it the right qualification and absolutely fit for purpose?
Probably not, because I do not think they fit the classification
of "absolutely fit for purpose" and that is one of the
reasons why we are in a major review of vocational qualifications
today. Does the organisation share some responsibility? Of course
it must.
Q2 Chairman: It is very noble of
you to say that. In terms of your analysis for putting it right,
how do we tackle the under-skilling of the population of the United
Kingdom? We come out pretty well in higher education, do we not,
in international comparisons? We are not the best, but, in terms
of that layer of people you would expect to have a reasonable
skill base, we do not seem to be anywhere near the competition
in France, in Germany and some of our other major competitors.
How do we get on a competitive level with them?
Mr Humphries: The short answer
to that would be to say that I wrote four volumes of reports on
that for the Skills Task Force, so to summarise it very quickly
is difficult. Let me pull out four or five key issues. The first
has to be the extent to which we have succeeded, through our foundation
education system, our school system, in creating an outflow from
that system in which the vast majority of young people actually
come out with training skills, education, knowledge and understanding
which suit them for work. Yet what we still have today is a system
where 50% of young people fail to meet the expected standard for
passing. In part that is because the school curriculum is narrowly
focused, has tended to be highly academic, highly elitist in that
sense, has failed to meet the needs of the 100% but rather has
focussed on acting as a giant filter to draw out those who are
fit for academic pursuits. Many countries quite some years ago
recognised the need to design their school system to meet the
needs of 100% of young people rather than acting as a filter.
We have not yet cracked that. That is the history of successive
policies and initiatives over 60 years since the 1940 Act, so
I do not think you can fix it overnight. Some of the ideas which
are built into the 14-19 review at the moment are meant to do
that. However, the problem is that addressing that sort of system
and fixing the school system does little for the 80 to 90% of
the workforce which are already in work today and which actually
suffer from that history and have lower skills. The second thing
one needs to do is to focus on the skills of those in the workforce
or those who would like to be in the workforce and overcome the
weaknesses which the foundation system in a sense sentenced them
to. The third thing undoubtedly is to do something about coming
to grips with the role of employers. If you want to look into
Europe you see a fundamentally different cultural and social system.
Despite the fact that we helped to establish the Chamber of Commerce
framework of the Germanic countries after the Second World War,
we failed to do in this country the things we actually gave authority
to German employers to do through the Chamber of Commerce system.
We could have done a lot more to engage the business community
directly in the design and management of training, particularly
that training which feeds in from about 13 or 14 onwards. We chose
not to and we retained a system which failed to engage employers.
Can we reverse that and replicate current German practice? No.
The culture is now totally different. The idea of establishing
the sort of framework which the Germanic countries have with mandatory
registration, with licence to practice on almost every job there
is . . . These are the sorts of ideas we may experiment with and
develop, but we cannot simply block impose them on the country.
We need to work cleverly with employers. Undoubtedly we need to
fix the qualification framework; it has become terribly fragmented
and terribly confusing to employers. The university system is
remarkably simple, despite the fact that the complexity is real.
To the public it appears that there is one institution, universities,
and there is one qualification, degrees, and then there are bits
on the side. We have not created that clarity about the further
education system: it is highly confused and indeed driven by a
whole set of competing policy initiatives which complicate the
system, like "Let's have nice short disconnected courses
because that is what people want", even though what we need
is organised, coherent training on a large scale for occupational
purposes. There are many contradictions and anomalies in the system
caused by competing policy priorities, so that would be the fourth
bit: fix the qualification system and the incoherence in the current
framework. The final one I would offer at this point is to try
to ensure that our policies and our practices are joined up. It
is amazing how often and how easy it is in complex systems to
have a clear policy and then create perverse incentives by the
funding regimes, the quality assurance regimes, the inspection
regimes, the target setting and key performance indicator regimes
which we have, so that what appears to be a common policy in fact
gets reflected on the ground as a set of incoherent practices.
If I may give you one example, when colleges were incorporated
and the FEFC came into play, every college sat down as soon as
they received the tariff regime, because they were then financially
independent, and worked out which courses would give them the
best surplus and which courses would give them the biggest loss
and they cut all the ones which would make a loss on the grounds
that they thought if that was what the funding regime was designed
to do, to make them do the right things, they should follow the
incentives of the public regime. In fact the intention of our
policy was quite different. There needs to be a long hard look
at the extent to which policy and practice interrelate effectively
to drive the system in the right way and I incorporate joined-up
practice between government departments as a part of that.
Q3 Chairman: Talking informally amongst
ourselves, there was some disagreement between us about what the
central thrust of your recent book was. All of us have dipped
into it and some of us have even read it right through. In Does
Education Matter? what were you really driving at? What was
the central thesis?
Professor Wolf: In terms of policy,
the central thesis of that book is that one should be very cautious
about how ambitious one is as a central government policy maker
about one's ability to fine-tune and organise education for the
economy. In policy terms that is perhaps the most important thing
that I wanted to put over. Some of the things which I dissect
there in terms, for example, of growing "credentialism",
which is worldwide, the pressure on young people to go for academic
qualifications which is worldwide, and just as strongly felt in
Germanic countries as here, is not something we can do anything
about. Maybe it would be nice to go back to 1950 and do things
differently, but we cannot. There are things we can do differently
and that does relate to how far we are wildly ambitious in terms
of what we can direct from the centre and I also think we can
and should understand—and that is the sub-text to this point
about governments needing to be more realistic—that there
are inherent pressures in anything which is run centrally. It
is not simply that it is a bad idea to have targets—which
is a point I should like to return to later if I may—but
that the minute you try to run something centrally you are caught
up in the dynamics of the governmental process and that means
that you have to have clear objectives which are measured, you
have to have clear policies which go into the files and are passed
through. Therefore, unless you are very careful, if you start
by being extremely over-ambitious and thinking you can run something
from the centre, that you can fine tune, you can plan the economy,
you can, if not plan the economy plan the qualifications and skills
of the economy which basically implies that you know exactly where
the economy is going, it is absolutely inevitable, given the internal
workings of a large complex governmental machinery, that you will
end up with a large number of unintended and undesired consequences.
The policy message of that book is that we should be much, much
more careful about what we think can be done centrally and much
less inclined to hubris in thinking that as informed, platonic
guardians of the system we know better than young people and their
families or individual employers what they should be learning
and what they should be doing.
Q4 Chairman: Fine; thank you for
that. Would you counsel us to go to a laissez-faire system where
government really has a minimal role with the background that
we do not have the greatest reputation in terms of our employers
looking benevolently on their workforces and training for the
future and not poaching.
Professor Wolf: May I mount a
slight defence of our employers at this point? Actually if you
look at OECD statistics, they are doing really quite well. One
should not simply assume, as we are all very prone to do in this
country, that everything we do we do worse than everybody else.
I should like to footnote that.[1]
It depends what you mean by a complete laissez-faire system. I
think very much that we do need to move to a position where we
are empowering individual learners and to some degree individual
institutions more than we have. It is always very easy to paint
extremes and to some extent I have done that on one side in terms
of criticising the attempt of previous governments to plan exactly
the qualifications which were needed from the centre and I have
argued, I hope convincingly, that it was predictable that this
would not work. Clearly it is almost impossible to imagine a situation
in which governments do not have any say about things which are
needed. One of the roles of government has to be to notice when
things are going very badly wrong. It is also true that when you
are trying to do everything, you also tend to miss a lot of the
things which are going very badly wrong, because you are so occupied
with running things that you do not need to be running. There
is a lot of evidence that if you give people, by entitlements,
the chance to choose their own courses and their own education,
they will make choices which are at least as good and very often
much better than those which are made for them. What worries me
at the moment is that although on the one hand we talk about empowering
learners, in fact we are still very much in an environment where
we are encouraging Learning and Skills Councils to have detailed
plans of how many hairdressers you need in Skegness and how many
plumbers you need in Liverpool. I am not joking; this is the way
we are going and we are also driving our further education colleges
and other places in terms of numbers of qualifications, which
are classified in the most simplistic way by levels. I cannot
see any evidence anywhere, either in my own experience or in other
people's experience, to suggest that is likely to be more efficient
or more equitable than genuinely leaving it to learners and indeed
employers to make decisions.
Chairman: We shall come back to several
of those points later on but I am hogging the questions. Let us
move on to looking at the skills background in more depth.
Q5 Mr Chaytor: What do you think
the relationship is between skills and productivity, if there
is one?
Professor Wolf: Genuine but very,
very difficult to work out exactly would be my answer. This is
one of the problems. Clearly at some level you cannot have a productive
economy without a skilled workforce. You start from that fact.
If you look at why our countries are so productive compared, for
example, with some of the countries of the world which are labouring
at levels of poverty which it is almost impossible for most of
our citizens to imagine. Of course it has to do with this constellation
of skills which we all have, including ones which we have inherited,
a large amount of know-how which we have actually inherited, and
it is why, just to give you a concrete example, one of the things
which is quite interesting is how rarely multinationals invest
in very poor countries; not how often they do, but how rarely
they do. They do not, because there is not the infrastructure
of skills and the know-how and understanding and all these very
complex things which go to make a productive economy. At one level,
it is just tremendously important; it is also tremendously important
in the sense that if you are looking towards the future, it is
all the things we have not thought about yet. That is where the
importance of having high general levels of education comes in:
it is all the things you might want, but which by definition you
cannot plan for exactly because they are the things which have
not yet been created. Part of the problem is very clearly there.
To give you another concrete example, I recently did some case
study research with a colleague, Professor Celia Hoyles at the
Institute of Education, looking at the use of maths in the workplace.[2]
We were looking at how maths is used in the modern workplace.
It is used, but it is not used in the way where you make a list
and say John needs to know Pythagoras and Edna needs to know a
bit of co-ordinate geometry. It is not like that at all. It is
very, very important in terms of ways of thinking. At that level
it is clearly very important, but in the sense of saying you can
actually show X% of where we are behind the Germans—assuming
you can even agree on your measure of productivity—is because
there are fewer qualifications here or, if you want to make that
industry more productive, the most sensible thing for them to
do is to send everybody off to college to get a new qualification,
it is really very hard to find examples where you can actually
say that. It does not usually work in that nice neat, plug-it-in
way. Occasionally you will have very clear skill shortages, but
I have to say that the skill shortage concept is often a very
murky one; it is not really like that. Often when you try to do
that, what you come out with is the answer that you have too many
skills and not too few, which is quite common.[3]
The answer is that it is there, but the idea that if you have
an economy you pile up some skills and throw them in and everything
will change seems to me quite wrong. The British economy over
the last 20 years is surely a monument to that, is it not? We
seem to have been doing rather well, exactly at the time when
we have been getting more and more anguished over education. I
am sure we have been right to in some ways, but it underscores
how complex and non-simplistic the relationship is.
Mr Humphries: I would agree with
that and I would add a few other considerations. The contributions
to productivity are numerous. There is no doubt that investment
has a huge impact on productivity, there is no doubt that competition
can actually be a huge driver towards, although not a causative
factor in, productivity. Innovation has been demonstrated as being
in that set of contributors. I would certainly agree with Alison
that trying to break that down and identify what proportion is
accountable for which is impossible. It is equally impossible
to see any one of them as a sole solution. You can invest all
the money in the world in skills, but if in fact a huge contributor
to the productivity gap was a systemic lack of investment over
the last 40-50 years, which is actually pretty true of the UK
economy, then believing you can fix it with skills alone and do
nothing about investment would be to miss the point as well. This
is part of the problem. We are not sitting there in a situation
where it is possible to say that this is our productivity gap
and this bunch of skills, this much investment, that much innovation,
fix those and oops we are suddenly all okay again, because they
interact with each other. If you are going to make a big investment,
for instance in UK technology, and you do that without upskilling
the workforce to make the most effective use of that technology,
you have wasted the investment in the first place. These things
are complicated and integrated and I would agree that skills are
a critical element of it and it is very easy to have a negative
impact on productivity by ignoring them, but no-one has succeeded
in taking a snapshot of the UK economy and seeing how much of
that problem is skills.
Q6 Mr Chaytor: You cannot measure
the impact of skills on productivity.
Mr Humphries: Probably the NIESR
has done some of the most serious work on attempting to quantify
the different proportions each make to the productivity gap and
they would confess that they did it because they were asked to
do it rather than because they had a firm handle on how to do
it. The reality is, if you ask me for the two or three biggest
contributors to the UK productivity gap, I would defer to the
work I did at the British Chambers of Commerce in those years
and say it is down to systemic under-investment over many, many
years associated with the boom-bust economic cycle which transcends
any single government. It also undoubtedly reflects for me the
large number of young people who come out of the education system
without a set of skills which equips them properly for work and
that is an historic problem as well. Probably our lack of success
in converting a highly inventive culture into an innovative culture
would be my third one where we are undoubtedly one of the world
leaders in invention, but very poor often at converting good inventions
into integrated business practices which work. I would put those
three there; I would find it very difficult to separate them out.
Q7 Mr Chaytor: Does it matter that
we have half the number of qualified technicians that the French
or the Germans do?
Professor Wolf: I am not sure
it does, but I will let Chris disagree with me on that. I think
that one of the things which is really getting in the way of sensible
policy here is undoubtedly counting the number of qualified people
at different "levels". I do not know whether other people
in the room remember when cargo cults were around in the Pacific;
I do not know whether I was alive but I remember learning about
them. It was this idea that you worship the aeroplane and if you
had a model of the aeroplane it would shower you with gifts, the
way they seemed to drop out of aeroplanes which flew over and
dropped food supplies. I do feel sometimes that qualification
numbers have taken on a kind of cargo cult aura in this country.
The fact that people have a number of certificates at an artificial
level, which is what the qualification framework really involves,
does not tell you anything very much about whether or not people
are learning anything. It may be an extremely imperfect indicator,
but it is perfectly possible for people to learn a great deal
without having a formal certificate. It is also perfectly possible
to acquire a formal certificate which is put in a framework and
labelled level 2 and which has not actually added anything to
what somebody knew before they started the course. This is why
we are finding that when you look at the impact on people's earnings
of acquiring additional low level qualification, there is very
often no evident impact whatsoever.[4]
When you start digging away this ceases to be surprising. The
answer is that it only matters if we have fewer qualified technicians,
if we have all sorts of other reasons for supposing that we have
real problems in developing those industries which are related
to skills. Coming back to where I started, there are areas where
we have very clear indications that we are seriously under-skilled
and things to do with quantitative mathematical skills would be
one of them. There are also very clear indications that in construction
and engineering we have genuine skill shortages. If you look,
for example, at the most recent research on the number of jobs
in an economy which are classified as needing a level 2 or level
3 or a degree qualification in the broader sense, you find that
we already have "too many" people qualified at each
of those levels.[5]
The conclusion I would draw is not in the least that that means
we already have far more skills than we need in the economy. That
would seem to me to be a crazy conclusion to draw. We do need
to improve our education system and we have far too many people
who are being ill served and we are short of some very specific
skills. It does in a sense underline the flip side of worrying
about not having as many qualifications as the French, because
then if we find we have all these mismatches in the sense that
there are "too many" people, if we really believe that
the numbers matter, we should at this point pack up and go home
and say we have licked it.
Mr Humphries: I may surprise Alison
by not disagreeing with her as much as she thinks. To take your
question in the way you ask it, I would probably say, probably
not. But, there is a whole series of issues surrounding the skills
base in the UK which we tend to seek to measure by the proxy of
qualifications which are real and which we need to recognise.
The first thing is that although employers will often tell you
they do not care about qualifications, ask them how they first
filter the long list of applicants they receive for any job. I
can tell you that the very first thing they use is qualifications.
The very first filter is probably used to eliminate 90% of most
application groups down to the first long list; it even plays
a key part in eliminating the next 5%. When they tell you qualifications
do not matter, what they are telling you is that actually they
do not bother with them internally, but they do use them as a
proxy for skill on a regular basis. Ask individuals whether qualifications
matter to them, in terms of their access to productive work, to
promotion, to progression, and they matter like heck. The second
issue which then has to be looked at is the extent to which those
individuals have the necessary skills for progression and development.
We know that anybody, no matter what level of qualification, even
if none at all, who gets a job and spends any time in the workplace
develops adaptive and coping strategies; even some highly illiterate
and innumerate individuals working in the workplace can be amazingly
clever at hiding and concealing those weaknesses and at being
able to develop coping strategies in the workplace to deliver.
However, find out what happens when that job or their skills in
that job actually disappear. Then they have to enter the next
programme of learning which will give them the skills for the
next job and find out how they cope and the reality of course
is that they do not. This is one of the points NIESR often make
about adult skills and whether qualifications matter. The point
is that these people are capable, they have adapted and coped.
What they cannot do is continue to participate very effectively
and they account for large numbers of those who, when they lose
work find it very difficult to get back into work again. That
is a second area where they matter. Are our current qualifications
the right qualifications for today? Almost certainly not. In that
sense I would agree with many of Alison's concerns. If we do not
have a framework which is highly fit for purpose and highly related
to the real skills needs of today and the future, then we can
have as many qualified people as we like, but they will not solve
the productivity issue. For me the issues are around the extent
to which they provide a key entry ticket to the labour market
and a ticket to opportunities for promotion in the labour market—the
extent to which they are the first filter. Ask employers what
it is they are looking at when they are talking about skills shortages
and set aside for the moment those employers who are simply telling
you they are not very good at recruiting and look at those areas
where there are real skill shortages. What you will find they
are talking about is a shortage of people with the right qualification
on a piece of paper applying through their door. So do they matter
in that context? Yes, they do. Are they some sort of magic formula?
Undoubtedly not. Is it feasible to train a workforce to all the
scales and standards you need but not have them qualified? Of
course it is. The thing I would remind you of in return on that
is that I was working in the Hertfordshire TEC at the time of
the huge British Aerospace closure in Hatfield. Remember that
one? Thousands of jobs, the whole of our regional aircraft industry
shut down in a year. My TEC was involved in trying to get that
workforce back into work. These were some of the most highly capable
and highly skilled individuals the UK has probably ever produced
in metal working, electronics, mechanics, engineering and so on.
We could not get them jobs. They could not get jobs. The outplacement
consultant could not get them jobs. British Aerospace could not
get them jobs. It was because the British Aerospace policy was
very simple: they trained their workforce but they did not qualify
them. The moment you tried to place those people into work somewhere
else, the response of the other employer is that they know the
people worked for British Aerospace, but their company does not
make aircraft, they make fridges, or they make metal parts or
this sort of thing and there is no indication that these people
are capable of adaptation. Yet within six months of us upskilling
and doing accreditation of prior learning and qualifying those
people we had virtually every single one of the workforce into
work. Do qualifications matter? Yes, they do, but not quite in
the way of the immediate assumption which says "qualifications
mean productivity".
Q8 Mr Chaytor: You are both describing
a system in which the state cannot accurately predict the impact
of increasing the overall level of qualification. There is no-one,
apart from maybe the odd esoteric academic here or there, who
can calculate the impact of qualifications on productivity. A
system in which a state, over a generation, has created a fragmented
marketplace for qualifications which is confusing to employers.
What is the state's responsibility at all in getting this right?
Alison, you are saying the state should have no involvement in
delivering qualifications.
Professor Wolf: I am saying significantly
less.
Q9 Mr Chaytor: Leave it to the individuals
to decide on their own training. Chris was quoting a very good
example where the state did need to intervene to correct a situation.
Professor Wolf: No, it was not
the state in the Hatfield example, which is what is so interesting
about this example.
Q10 Mr Chaytor: It was the Hertfordshire
TEC.
Mr Humphries: Undoubtedly the
TEC was the organisation which made it happen. The issue could
have been solved easily by their outplacement consultants or anyone
else, indeed it could have been solved by the company in the first
place by simply recognising that they had a responsibility which
went beyond the workplace.
Mr Chaytor: My question really is: is
British Aerospace not an example of the flaws in the system which
emerge when training is the responsibility of the employer and
there is no responsibility to qualify and therefore there is a
need to intervene. The TEC, as the agent of the state, had to
intervene to ensure that these individuals who had been trained
by their employer were subsequently qualified to work with other
employers?
Q11 Chairman: Professor Wolf's argument
would surely have been that it would all have sorted itself out
without any intermediaries at all. These were highly skilled people
without outside qualifications and many employers do not like
transferable qualifications, do they, because employees can be
poached? Is that your view, Professor?
Professor Wolf: May I answer that
because I do not want to be caricatured as saying that the state
has no interest whatsoever and no responsibilities whatsoever.
I do think it is an interesting example. What happened was indeed
an issue, that these people were thrown onto the labour market
and they did not have qualifications. It is an important role
of the state to hold the lead in terms of setting general rules
and authorising people, as they authorise the university sector,
to give qualifications. That seems to me to be the classic weights
and measures function of the state. It does indeed have some such
requirement. One of the things which Chris said earlier and I
found very interesting was that we have no problems understanding
what universities do, that they give degrees; we have some concerns
about individual universities but basically people understand
it. It seems to me that this is a clear example where yes, the
employers did not qualify, but the higher education sector was
able to do so with minimal direct involvement of the state, because
it had been set up and authorised by the state to be a trustworthy
institution which could do that. This encapsulates the philosophy
which I should like to put forward, not that the state has no
role whatsoever, but that when the state starts to get involved
in the minutiae, for all sorts of unavoidable reasons, which has
nothing to do with bad intent on the part of the state but has
to do with the dynamics of state involvement and the problems,
it is as likely to do harm as it is to do good by creating unnecessary
bureaucracy, unnecessary complexity. I do think that this whole
issue of what has happened to vocational qualifications really
encapsulates this. The period during which vocational qualifications
have become more and more incomprehensible to the population has
been exactly that period in which the state decided time and time
again that it had to do something about them. This is actually
an argument from experience, not an argument from first principle
that I am trying to put forward here. This is what tends to happen
and the state does indeed have obligations: it has obligations
to give people the wherewithal to get their training, it has obligations,
for example, to make it certain that if they are thrown onto the
labour market they are in a position to get qualifications and
to get their experience accredited and it has above all the responsibility
to set up and monitor at a distance the institutions which do
this. Trying to get involved in the minutiae of companies' training
policies and the minutiae of particular qualifications which Chris
and other awarding bodies set up is something which we now know
from experience the state is not very good at.
Q12 Chairman: You are surely in danger,
if you said the one thing you have to have is individuals with
the ability to make judgments about what is the best course for
them and the best decisions to take. Surely where your argument
fails is that the state has to make sure that those people are
literate, numerate and can judge the evidence reasonably.
Professor Wolf: We are talking
about adult skills here rather than children, right? That was
my understanding. There is a difference between children and adults.
Q13 Chairman: How many people do
we have in our country who do not have literacy and numeracy?
Professor Wolf: It depends on
your definition and on which survey you believe.
Mr Humphries: You have hit on
one of the most critical issues that the skills strategy has to
address and that is: what is the responsibility of the state,
what is the responsibility of employers, what is the responsibility
of the individual? It is in the strategy itself and this is the
real issue. For me, why does the prospect of the level 2 entitlement
matter? It directly relates to David's question and to yours as
well. It matters because surely the population, the constituency,
has a reasonable expectation that the education system under the
management of the state should provide a sound foundation of learning
to all as they enter adulthood and the workplace. If you like,
one of the most important thrusts of the strategy is to say yes,
that is right and if 50% of them are coming out without those
skills then actually it should be the responsibility of the state
to fix it. If we did have a good solid skills base amongst the
vast majority of the adult population, whether there would be
any need for a continuing state intervention at higher levels
is the interesting question. My suspicion is that the system would
work much better if we had equipped the whole of the population
with a sound platform of learning. This is why I do think this
does matter, the 14-19 agenda and children do matter in this context,
because it is the failings there which have often led us to have
to intervene at the adult level.
Q14 Chairman: This Committee sometimes
has to have hard examples. Let me give you one which is a prejudice
of mine. How do you both feel about a country which allows children
to leave school at 16, to leave full-time education into employment
with no guarantee of skills or educational training of any kind?
What do you think? Do you think that is okay? Many of our competitors
think it is certainly not okay to allow a 16-year-old child to
go into the workplace with no guarantee of anything happening
to them in educational terms.
Mr Humphries: Personally I would
say we let a frightening proportion of the young population leave
school at 13 or 14. They may still be physically attending the
institutions, but they have left in their minds and they have
left because they are actually in a system which is very narrow,
very focused, very elitist, makes a very strong assumption that
the only route forward that matters is the academic one and we
condemn them at the age of 11, 12 or 13 rather than 16. The problem
is creating a system which does not cause them to disengage at
13, 14 and leave at 15 and 16. I would agree with you, but the
problem which needs addressing is how to create an education system
which serves the 100% rather than the 50%. It is the 50% who do
not get anything at 16 who leave in the situation you describe
and the solution to that starts at 11 rather than 16.
Professor Wolf: I agree with everything
Chris said. I do think it is very important to look at it that
way round. There is always a major difference between adults and
children and a 16-year-old is not a full adult and therefore has
to be thought of as not a full adult. I also think it is extremely
important to understand that the history of the last 20 years
is of increasing numbers of our young people staying on longer
than ever before and then dropping out again quite soon afterwards.
That is a failure of the provision. It is not a failure of the
legislative framework whereby you say it will all be fixed if
you force them to stay until 18, or if you finally implemented
things which were expected back in 1944 which said that everybody
who is in work has to have some further education training. The
real problem is that we are physically not providing a large number
of our young people with anything they think is worth staying
for.
Q15 Paul Holmes: May I push you to
clarify what we are talking about in terms of whether it is training
people to come out of school with or adult training and retraining
at 40 or 50? One of the criticisms some people make of the current
drift of policy making is that we have an FE White Paper looking
at 16 and all the way upwards. We have a Green Paper on 14-19
and the two are separate, they overlap but they do not talk to
each other. Are you saying that as far as the skills gap is concerned,
as far as there is one, we are not really looking at what people
come out of school at 16 or 18 with, but we are looking at adults?
Mr Humphries: Are we not facing
a situation where we have to address both? It seems to me that
if the description I have given of the 50% problem is genuine
and the proportion of young people getting five A-Cs has not changed
for a long time in significant terms, then you have two jobs:
the first one is to fix the 14-19 system so that it does serve
the 100%. Even if we do, and let us say we succeed in that brilliantly,
for the next 20 years there will still be 80% of the adult workforce,
who came out of the system before we fixed it, lacking skills
in all sorts of ways and at all sorts of levels. Alison mentioned
mathematics as one of them but it is not pure, academic mathematics,
it is people's ability to use numbers and analysis to solve real
work problems. If we do not address those sorts of issues as well,
then we are going to take 30 years to solve the problems because
it will take that time for the new generation to age through the
workforce. So you have to do both. Yes, of course, policies must
be joined up, but the things we need to do to solve the issues
of the low-skilled 40-year-old and the things we need to do today
to solve the 14-19 system actually are fundamentally different.
What they should do over time is converge, but they cannot until
we start to do enough to address the adult who is disengaged and
low-skilled at the same time as we ensure that the 14-19 system
starts to produce a cohort which is 85-95% work capable and having
opportunities for progressing into the workplace.
Q16 Paul Holmes: In so far as we
try to fix the 14-19 curriculum or the 11-19 curriculum for the
50% which, I would agree with you, as a former secondary school
teacher, schools do not deal with very well, what are we talking
about? Are we talking about simply giving them at that age better
basic skills in maths, English and ICT presumably, or are we talking
about bringing in vocational and work-based training back to age
14 instead of waiting for people to leave school for that?
Professor Wolf: I do not know
whether this is something on which we disagree or not.
Q17 Chairman: We quite welcome disagreement.
Professor Wolf: We might; it has
been slightly surprising that we have not disagreed more, but
maybe we are finally going to. I do not believe in bringing vocational
education back to 14-year-olds in the sense it is very frequently
thought of. I think this is a disservice to the idea of vocational
education; it implies that it is something which is for kids who
cannot cope with anything. This is completely misconceived and
the idea that large numbers of employers are just waiting for
a dissatisfied 14-year-old to come and be around the place for
a day and a half seems to me just nuts. I do not know who these
saints are. There is a serious challenge in terms of how you conceive
of the curriculum for 14-19-year-olds who are not finding the
current more academic end more satisfactory. It has been a consistent
failure of the last 15-20 years in this country. It is the worst
failure in our education policy and we have kept re-inventing,
kept re-inventing and kept, in my view, being seduced by qualification
structures rather than worrying about the curriculum content inside
them. It is not just about basic literacy, basic numeracy, basic
IT, it is about trying to develop slowly, in a costly and consistent
fashion, good general education which may have a lot of practical
and vocational flavour to it, but which is not about turning 14-year-olds
into bad plumbers. Trying to feel that you can re-invent and get
young people who have good prospects to make almost irrevocable
vocational choices at 14 in the way our grandfathers may have
done is not possible. You cannot and should not turn that far
back. First of all, that is the thing which has to be done and
to me the biggest priority for 14-19 education is about the curriculum
for the other 50% and not about qualification structures. I do
actually agree very strongly with you about the two bits not being
joined up, because it seems to me that over the last 10-15 years
we have in fact been separating out the qualification, the curriculum
for full-time young people from what was available, often to adult
returnees, in FE colleges, without getting it straight in our
heads. If we are serious about making it easier for adults who
left school without high levels of skill to come back and to get
general skills—when I talk about skills I do mean come back
for an education which may or may not have a direct impact on
their working lives tomorrow, but which will have an impact on
all their lives further down—then the other thing we have
to think about is what we are offering them. Traditionally one
of the strengths of this country has been that it has been very
easy to come back by the standards of most of our continental
neighbours. You could come back into an FE college and you could
pick up an O-level or a GCSE later, or you could come back and
do an A-level in two years and there are many access courses.
The way the 14-18 curriculum is developing is that it is more
and more conceived of in terms of young people in full-time education
and we are inadvertently losing quite a lot of the flexibility
and access to what used to be adult GCSEs, which do not exist
any more, to one-year A-level courses, to many of the general
education components which used to be available to adults. That
is something we are at real risk of losing sight of. We are focusing
on 14-19 as though that took care of general education and it
does not.
Q18 Paul Holmes: Both of you are
very critical about: the way government sets too many targets,
such as "We need X number of hairdressers in this town"
and the way it arranges the financial targets' measurement. When
David Milliband sits in that chair, he is very fierce, in talking
about secondary education, that we must have testing, we must
have targets, we must have league tables or we will not know what
is happening in education and we cannot drive the schools to improve.
If you do not have targets for FE, how would you know your money
was going to a useful purpose, how would you know what was going
on?
Mr Humphries: I have to be careful
about criticising targets and the way in which we sometimes do
them. It is of course perfectly legitimate to say it is very difficult
to manage anything if one does not understand what is happening
and in that sense management information indicators and targets
actually help. I must admit I do think it is more important to
measure than to set targets. Knowing what is going on rather than
assuming you know where to take it in the long term are very different
issues. Equally, there is a problem with setting too many targets.
There is a wonderful little mathematic programme called Langton's
Ant. This is a classic example of the problem Alison was addressing.
It is a very simple mathematical formula. All you do is decide
which way an object on the screen turns. It only has two parameters
and everyone would think that it is just going to produce a standard
set of outcomes, but it is very interesting. It behaves one way
for the first 25 or so moves, it behaves totally differently and
randomly for the next 1,000 or more moves and then suddenly it
does something entirely unexpected and goes off at a tangent which
is totally unpredictable; nothing intuitively could ever have
predicted that outcome. It is a remarkably simple formula. The
basic thing it illustrates is that the moment you have too many
targets, too many variables, too many things you are trying to
manipulate, you produce a system which becomes unpredictable.
I am certainly not saying you should not have measures and you
should not be able to manage the system through measurement and
that you should not have targets. What I am saying is that the
more you try to design and run a system by a mix and complexity
of targets, the more likely you are to have absolutely no idea
what you will produce at the end of the day. We see that regularly
with what are often talked about as perverse outcomes: a sound
policy strategy, what looks like a sensible set of approaches,
suddenly producing output related funding. Some of you must remember
that from the TEC regime, where the intention was to address the
fact that students were staying on their course for too long but
never actually closing or finishing their assessments and graduating.
What was introduced was output related funding; a small incentive,
10, 15, 20 to 25% of the funding held until the end and paid over
when that person finally completed. It sounded great. What was
the impact of it as the proportion grew? What it actually did
was cause the providers to pre-select those who would pass and
ignore the training needs of those who were most disadvantaged.
It is a classic case of an entirely sensible policy, and what
looked like a sound management strategy, actually leading to a
fundamentally perverse outcome. What I am saying is too many targets,
too many different policy initiatives, all seeking to measure
different aspects of the system are more likely to produce surprise
outcomes rather than the outcomes you want. I am never against
management information, I am never against sensible management
performance observation and performance assessment, but make the
system too complex and you almost certainly lose the ability to
manage it.
Professor Wolf: I agree absolutely
that measurement is not the same as targets. That is a fundamental
difference and the more one hangs onto that the better. If you
pay institutions in terms of targets, you will absolutely, as
night follows day, devalue what is going on. Just to give you
a concrete example in terms of pre-selection, you can hit a level
2 qualification in maths either by going for a key-skill "application"
award or GCSE in maths. If you have a level 2 entitlement it is
one thing and you can leave it to the customer who will definitely
say that what they want is a GCSE because that is what the employer
wants.[6]
If you leave it to the institution, they are under tremendous
pressure to achieve the targets and they will go for the one where
they can pre-select and they will get the pass rates more easily.
That encapsulates the dilemma. Of course you have to have measurement
and of course you have to have this done by independent institutions.
So when David Milliband talks about the importance of having tests
within the school system to look at whether young people are achieving
anything I am completely with him. When you start trying to set
targets to which financial performance and financial rewards are
tied in a one-to-one fashion, you are automatically going to devalue
the product you think you are offering.
Mr Humphries: It is like teaching
to the exam, is it not? We have seen that concern expressed in
the press about teachers starting to teach to the exam rather
than teach to the syllabus or employers' needs or the needs of
the higher education institutions for those going in that direction.
There is that tendency and that is what we need to be wary of
and to work against it happening, but it is not about not measuring.
Q19 Helen Jones: I want to take you
back to what happens in secondary education, if I may. I agree
that we need to get the basics right there. My first question
is that we all talk so blithely about this 14-19 stage but what
evidence do we have that it ought to be a distinct stage beginning
at 14 rather than 13 or 15 and ending at 19? Why those figures?
Do you agree it is a separate stage?
Mr Humphries: There is an issue
here about stages of life and stages of development. What we have
ended up doing is turning an attempt to reflect the varying needs
of young people at different stages of development with some hard
and fast age boundaries which are actually proxies for what we
are talking about rather than reality. There is no evidence which
says it starts at 14 and finishes at 19 or that it is better at
13 and finishing at 18. The problem is that we are talking about
trying to pick up a young person at the stage where they are starting
to form and identify some of the expectations being placed on
them, seeking for themselves to struggle to find solutions which
fit their needs. We are really encapsulating almost a Piagettian
developmental stage with a robust or rigorous set, rigid set even,
of age boundaries which are in fact proxies. However, it is more
than just curriculum that we are talking about here. There is
also an element of pedagogy. Different young people actually respond
to different learning experiences in different ways at different
stages of their life. Some will always respond more advantageously
to certain types of teachers' styles and learning styles than
others. The issue I was going to pick up from Alison's answer
is that I think pedagogy is a key part of the problem as well.
I would not be pressing very hard at all to teach bricklaying
and hairdressing at 14 or at 13. In fact at a seminar recently
David Milliband asked a group of us whether we believed in streaming
at 14; I cannot think of anything worse to do to young people
yet that is what the implication of teaching bricklaying at that
age would be. I do think what we have to do is recognise that
young people are different, they need choice in the curriculum,
real choice and we also need to recognise that they learn in different
ways, that they need different styles, environments, that they
need treatments and we need to skill teachers and the system in
pedagogical variety, which is currently completely missing. That
also affects the age boundary and means that you are working with
a continuum probably from 11 to 21 for young people and that 14-19
has almost become a proxy for that. Tomlinson is not actually
talking about hard age boundaries. In the discussions in the Tomlinson
group, there is a recognition that this is about phasing, that
young people pass through this at different speeds and come out
of the system with different levels and at different times. That
is the critical thing. We are trying to use this to describe a
phase of development of a young person which is that phase prior
to them becoming adults and entering the workplace.
Professor Wolf: I do not know
where 14-19 came from. It is a DfES organisational thing, is it
not? In a sense I agree with you absolutely, I cannot see why
14-19 should be particularly the key issue. It seems to me that
there are various things which you can see in the compulsory and
immediate post-compulsory years which are problems in our education.
I would have thought they were centred around 15 through 17 in
the sense that that seems to be where things most often go wrong
for young people. It seems to me that 14-19 is just taking a cut
which you could perfectly well have made 13-18 or 15-21. That
is absolutely right. This comes back to one of the questions the
Chairman posed to me earlier about whether government have no
real responsibilities. Government does have very real responsibilities
to young people; every country in the world has a compulsory education
system of some sort even if that does not mean you have to be
educated in schools. One of the things which in a sense is very
interesting in this country—and indeed in most countries
I suppose—is that it is felt that about 16 is where the
common element tends to break up. I do not have any real quarrel
with that in terms of the age of young people and all the rest
of it, but in terms of where we seem to me to be not getting it
right most visibly and most importantly, these remain interestingly
parts of that compulsory period—the end of the compulsory
period and the end of the immediate post-compulsory period—when
we are visibly not getting it right for at least half of our young
people and have continually not got it right now for some time
and where we are also creating stored-up genuine skills shortages
for the future in very specific areas. I suppose what I am arguing
for is sometimes zeroing in on the problems rather than worrying
too much about getting the whole structure complete and neat.
1 Note by witness: Evidence from international
surveys, such as the International Adult Literacy Survey, or the
regular Labour Force Survey, show that, in the last 20 years,
there has been a very marked increase in the number of UK workers
receiving training and that this country now ranks at or very
near the top of comparative tables showing training incidence.
See eg P J O'Connell Adults in Training: An International Comparison
of Continuing Education and Training (OECD 1999). Back
2
Note by witness: Celia Hoyles, Alison Wolf, Susan Molyneux-Hodgson
and Phillip Kent. Mathematical Skills in the Workplace. Final
Report to the Science, Technology and Mathematics Council. June
2002. Available from STMC. The findings, based on seven industrial
sectors, underline the growing importance for employees of an
ability to deal with data and understand relationships between
data and underlying structures, and are consistent with research
showing increasing financial returns to Maths A-level and to degrees
with quantitative content. Back
3
Note by witness: For example, the recent, large DfES-sponsored
survey Work Skills in Britain, looked at job requirements using
the Government's own general categories of "level 1 skills",
"level 2 skills" etc. When this sort of approach is
used, and the qualifications which people say are needed for a
job are then allocated to and classified in terms of the relevant
"level", and when the totals are then summed across
the country, the result is a clear excess supply of qualified
people compared to the number of jobs occurring at all levels
except "no qualifications required". In other words,
the total number of employed people with qualifications greatly
out-numbers the number of jobs for which qualifications are deemed
necessary; and this is true, to varying degrees, within each qualification
level. See A Felstead et al Work Skills in Britain 1986-2001 (DfES
2002). Back
4
Note by witness: See, for example, A Jenkins et al. The
determinants and labour market effects of lifelong learning Applied
Economics 35, 2003. This reports data showing that people who
obtain aub-degree qualifications in their 30s do not, on average,
appear to obtain any earnings benefits as a result: almost identical
results are reported for Sweden (E Ekstrom Earnings effects of
adult secondary education in Sweden: Institute for Labour Market
Policy Evaluation Sweden). Many of the UK qualifications are,
it should be noted, low-level vocational ones, which may often
be taken as a requirement of a job which the holder already fills.
Conversely, we know that skilled craft qualifications can and
do bring income benefits (compared to individuals with otherwise
equivalent education levels) provided the holder actually follows
that occupation. Back
5
Note by Witness: The reference here is to the same work
discussed in footnote 3, which is itself consistent with all recent
work on graduate employment in the UK (summarised in Alison Wolf
Does Education Matter?) The allocation of all qualifications to
one or other "level", using the National Qualifications
Framework, means, of course, that many disparate qualifications
are ascribed to the same level or category, even though they may
be very different in their intrinsic demands and in whether they
are recognised or valued in the labour market. Back
6
Note by witness: Recent research on employers' recruitment
and hiring practices confirms that only a very few qualifications
are recognised and used by employers. A few general ones are recognised
and valued-notably GCSE English and Maths, A-levels, degrees-and
employers also are familiar with the particular vocational/occupational
awards that apply to their sector. See eg Wolf, A and Jenkins,
A (2002) The growth of psychometric testing for selection. Why
has test use increased, will growth continue, and what does this
mean for education? CEE Discussion Paper No 29, London: Centre
for the Economics of Education. Back
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