Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20 - 39)

MONDAY 12 JANUARY 2004

MR CHRIS HUMPHRIES AND PROFESSOR ALISON WOLF

  Q20  Helen Jones: That is very interesting, thank you. If, as you say, we have to offer a choice to young people, how do we do that and combine it with a bedrock of knowledge and skills which everybody ought to have? I should be interested in your views on what that basic entitlement for all young people ought to be and whether you think vocational GCSEs have a role to play in that or whether that risks us training people for jobs which may no longer exist when they leave school. How do we get round that? How do we give them the core, basic skills, whether they are going to go through an academic route or any other route, which will actually make people employable and generally able to cope with life when they leave?

  Mr Humphries: It seems to me that the purpose of the foundation learning system—and I use that to describe what it is we provide for young people to prepare them for work and adult life—is about a core. It is not just employability, because the state owes as much to its young population to help them understand the social complexity of life as much as the employment complexity of life, but you are right, the core of our education system should be something which actually does not exist in the national curriculum. What does not exist enough in the national curriculum? Anything which is actually called or relevant in any real way to that broad preparation for work and adult life. If you look at many of the submissions to Tomlinson, you will see that much of the discussion which is in there is about what this core looks like and the debate we are having about this for the first time is actually seeking to understand some of that. What we have ended up doing is creating a curriculum which is essentially driven by academic subjects: what GCSEs are you doing? Are vocational GCSEs the answer? From my perspective, absolutely not. Certainly a system which seeks to inculcate the capabilities and skills of hairdressing or retail working into a young person and starts to narrow their choices at 14 to me is something which concerns me enormously. We have to be looking at a curriculum which does at its heart, have the intention to enable every young person to have the understanding necessary to prepare them adequately for work and adult life. Every aspect of social communication, family, citizenship, employability, basic skills, all of those things for me are the core of what the education system should be about, and that richness of practical and vocational flavour should be at the heart of the system and the range of subjects from which a young person can choose should be quite broadly based and include a good mix of those things which are general education in the sense in which we know them, but with the option to do some of the subjects we have almost taken out of the curriculum, which have a design, technology, vocational dimension and allow people to see that we value those capabilities as much as we do the traditional subjects.

  Q21  Chairman: People like you and Professor Wolf have sat on influential advisory bodies for years designing a curriculum. Then another group of experts pitches up here and says the curriculum is the real problem, it is awful. How on earth did we get to a curriculum which is so universally condemned when so many people must have given advice on what was needed?

  Mr Humphries: I can honestly claim never to have sat on any of those bodies on the schools curriculum until now.

  Professor Wolf: I have actually designed one in the last ten years of which I am very proud; I was not solely responsible for it, but it is partly an answer to your question on the cause. It was a new set of maths qualifications which are still out there, which are embedded in practical activities and which are very popular with the people who do them and which do not get done that much because of funding mechanisms, equivalence things and all the rest of it. This is a long story, but it is extremely unusual for people like us to have a go and I should like to come back to it, because it does relate to the answer about what should be guaranteed. I would want to put it rather differently.[7] In a curious way I think the most important vocational qualifications you can have in the modern world are actually the most traditional academic ones. That does not mean necessarily the academic qualifications, but the academic skills, not just of numbers but of mathematics, of being able to think mathematically about the structure and the way things work and to be able to write well and fluently and correctly and to be able to read at a very high level; to find information; to be able to condense and comprehend prose. Those are absolutely core to your ability to function as a citizen, to enjoy life and to do well in a vocational world. If I am being invited to say what I would do if I were a minister, it would be to say that those are the things to which young people have an entitlement. Yes, in a sense everything around that is much more optional, it is not important whether it is design technology or geography, but those skills are absolutely fundamental and they are also the ones which employers recognise. Most of the time this evening I am conscious that I have been criticising the way we have spawned qualifications, and re-labelled them, but I also agree that there are some qualifications which have tremendous importance in the marketplace and which are extraordinarily important. This again goes back to asking adults what they would like to do and they will want to get the qualifications which they know the world recognises and they tend to be very well established ones. It does seem to me that whatever we do or do not do, we have to make a commitment and then create the curriculum and pedagogy which goes with it which gets every young person and every adult returnee back and up to a level where they get effectively to the English and maths GCSE. They do not need to be "GCSE" but to be something which is clearly recognised as difficult, as reputable, as much a piece of evidence of real skills as the traditional academic way of getting that. I actually think that if you could do that for every young person, you would have created a revolution in your citizenry and not just in your workforce. Those are the real skills of the modern world and if you have those then every other gateway is open. There are lots of ways you can do that and you do not have to turn everything into a vocational GCSE in which you then tick off punctuation or addition or things like that.

  Mr Humphries: I would agree with that entirely. The problem is that what we teach is the English GCSE. What we do not teach enough, or necessarily align completely with the English GCSE, are the applied capabilities which are associated with language and the use of language. It is the most important communicative device we have, but a large part of the young curriculum in English is nothing to do with the ability to communicate, it is not sufficiently to do with listening, it is not to do with communicating a message, it is not to do with debating, it is not to do with oral communications, it is not to do with written communication, it is to do with the grammar, it is to do with the association of words, it may be to do with the study of literature.

  Q22  Helen Jones: I am not sure that is correct. As a former English teacher there is an awful lot in the English curriculum which is to do precisely with looking at, listening, with—

  Mr Humphries: But it is not examined.

  Q23  Helen Jones: It is examined; writing in practical situations is examined. I take your fair point. We have to answer it from where we are and not where we were back perhaps 25 years ago.

  Mr Humphries: It goes a little bit further than that. Talk to the young people who drop out of English, the young people my institution tends to pick up who come out with poor GCSEs and poor maths, often with no results or with very low grades in a few subjects. The biggest thing they talk about is the sense of a lack of purpose in the learning they did. Purpose in that context is about the meaningfulness of it to them: not to the system, not to the teacher, not to the school but to them. It is the most common cry you get when you pick up young people who have been failed by the system and it is the meaningfulness of what they experienced which is the problem for them. Yet they know that they need to communicate effectively, they know they need to be able to argue for their outcomes, they know they need to be able to use language and mathematics in all its forms effectively. They suffer and they are very aware of the consequences of suffering caused by their inability to use numbers effectively and the exclusion that produces for them in the labour market. They will say that what they did not get out of their school environment was something which ended up being meaningful for them. We have been doing that consistently for a long time. Whatever happens we have never bettered 50% of young people coming through GCSEs at the level we expect them to and there has to be a genuine question about the extent to which what they have experienced is meaningful and appropriate for the needs they have at the time.

  Q24  Jeff Ennis: Turning specifically to the Government's Skills Strategy White Paper, this sets out five key themes. If you had been writing the strategy, would these five key themes have been your five key themes? Do you want me to run quickly through them? Putting employers' needs centre stage; helping employers use skills to achieve more ambitious longer term business success; motivating and supporting learners; enabling colleges and training providers to be more responsive to employers' and learners' needs; joint government action in a new skills alliance.

  Mr Humphries: When I do a presentation on this issue, which I do regularly, I usually have a list of eight rather than five. I will not go through it, but it is a presentation I think some members of the Committee have seen. It does start from a focus on adults, because the skills strategy is very much focused on adults. It talks about the need to understand the needs of the adult and engage with them effectively. That incorporates in it the need to ensure that those people for whom a system may have failed need access to information, advice and guidance which help them make informed decisions. One of the problems we know happens when you are dealing with adults is that even if one does persuade them to engage in learning, getting them engaged in stuff which actually meets the requirements they have identified is quite difficult. Engaging with the individual would be a key part of it. We do know as well that when one is working with adult learning programmes which successfully engage with both the individual and their employers, assuming they are in the workplace, they are more successful than those which engage with the individual alone. We are seeing it again in the employer training pilots. Engaging with employers, not determining what they have to do but engaging employers in that process would for me be a second critically important part. The qualification framework would be for me a third one, fixing a system is no longer fit-for-purpose. There are several propositions. City & Guilds have produced their own paper on what we believe that should look like and making that meaningful, simplifying it and making sure that the qualifications are coherent. The very idea that a level 2 in key skills and a level 2 which is a sort of full technical certificate in electrical installation are the same thing is just nonsense. Clarifying that so it is comprehensible would be my third one. For me the fourth one would be about addressing the most important priorities first. As someone who both wrote the Skills Task Force reports and has been heavily involved with the Government's development of the skills strategy I have had a key part in developing the proposition around entitlement. Why is that important for me at this stage? Because I think there is simply too large an adult cohort which has been excluded from learning for too long, so we need to put a priority behind getting them all up to a level which enables them to progress and equips them for success in the workplace. I put a fifth one here—the provider base—and getting the provider base to face off and meet the requirements of the employers and the individuals is an important one. The thing which is too often left out in that is the recognition that innovation is an incredibly important part of delivering training, otherwise you cannot meet the diversity of needs of an extraordinarily diverse population. I would certainly be looking at the whole extent to which we measure and manage it appropriately, for all the reasons we highlighted earlier. Would there be a huge difference between the Government and I, or would we end up describing the same set of priorities in slightly different words and grouping them in different ways? There is far greater commonality between my ambitions and the Strategy than there is difference.

  Professor Wolf: The real problem is that they are classic White Paper objectives. How can one disagree with motherhood and apple pie? What I really looked for there and did not find was a really clear set of reasons why we need this. There were one or two things buried in there but not at that level.

  Q25  Chairman: You are being rather polite there. I get the impression, reading your material that actually, what you really believe is that we have tried all this before, we have had these grand plans, we have had NTOs and we have had Learning and Skills Councils, we used to have TECs and there has been a lot of government apparatus and it still has not delivered. In a sense there seems to be a question mark in what you write: why should this be any different from what preceded it?

  Professor Wolf: Yes, that is a fair comment. I suppose I am realistic enough to feel that no government at this point in its term of office is suddenly going to turn around and tell me that all the things they did about three years ago have not been working very well.

  Q26  Chairman: It is worse than that. In your writing you are saying that everything happened under the last five regimes, whether it was Margaret Thatcher or John Major or the present one.

  Professor Wolf: Not everything. It is true that in order to have a reasonable read—and this is terribly unclear if people have not read me—I of course concentrate in particular in the area of training and skills on things which did not work because that was after all what I was trying to develop.

  Q27  Chairman: You did say it did not work under any administration.

  Professor Wolf: I do indeed say it did not work under any administration and I have said earlier that what I do feel increasingly strongly rather than decreasingly strongly is that individuals are better judges of what they want than governments can ever be, whether these are in Whitehall or at a local LSC level. Therefore, if I were asked to write a document of this type, it would be how actually to turn the structure round so that far more of the decision about what you want to learn and the circumstances in which you want to learn it rest with the individual learner. That is not what I would look for at this point in the Government White Paper, which was the question posed to me.

  Q28  Chairman: There is a smaller voice than government is there not in some of these documents which says give the money, give the incentive to the individual? Individual learning accounts was one of the—

  Professor Wolf: Of course and that sits there like a big lump between us and I do not know enough about the history to know whether that was inevitable or not. It may be that it was in fact something where various things which went wrong have actually caused serious problems.

  Q29  Chairman: I do not want to go off on a tangent there. What I want to keep you on is that one of the alternatives you seem to be articulating, rather than this massive sum of money—and we have the Learning and Skills Council report to Parliament through this Committee—and a massive bureaucracy, an enormous amount of taxpayers' money—

  Professor Wolf: Massive; absolutely.

  Q30  Chairman: You are saying that it would be better if you could give some of that money to the individual to control their own training and skilling.

  Professor Wolf: Yes, I am. I am also saying that if you have things like, for example, properly constituted awarding bodies, which have independent auditors, which have some government regulation setting the ring around them, if you have those sorts of bodies which are guaranteeing the quality of the measurements and if you genuinely have public sector and charitable organisations delivering the learning—we are not talking about completely doing away with the idea of public service and I want to make that absolutely clear—if you had that, not only would you reduce the bureaucracy, reduce the costs, but in my view, based on looking at what has happened and not merely on arguments from prejudice and first principle, you would get better development of skills and would actually enable the individuals to get what they need and what they want more effectively than we are doing by continuing to tinker at the edges of the current system.

  Q31  Jeff Ennis: This has been very interesting. Is there a role here for local business/education partnerships to try to act as a catalyst between the individual and the employer?

  Professor Wolf: There probably is. It is again something I am conscious I do not know enough about, but when I think of the things which have been really effective, they have tended to be locally grown. Leeds is a shining example of stuff which works really well, which actually has partnerships which really involve local business and which has a charitable trust. Yes, it does work and it is partly about scale. It is not that I believe large bureaucracies are in some sense evil in their intent, but when something gets too big and tries to develop everything, it is forced to make rules for everything and before you know where you are, you have a vast bill on your plate. It is about sending the decision-making onto the level, as far as you can, where people are directly involved and getting your safeguards and your accountability through structures such as setting rules for providing awards. I do think that the example which Chris started with, which is that the universities, who have all their problems, but they make awards which people understand and which they accept and the history of awarding bodies such as City and Guilds, which has a strong brand name and high respect, for good reason, indicates that it is possible to have measures which have respect and integrity and value without having to create a vast central planning structure telling individuals what they need.

  Q32  Jeff Ennis: I do not know whether my final question is controversial or not. The very building block in most areas for delivering mainstream education and level 2 qualifications is the local education authority. As we now have a Department for Education and Skills, is there not a case to look at re-designating local education authorities as local education and skills authorities? Are skills not being undervalued in the education currency at the present time?

  Professor Wolf: May I think about that one?

  Mr Humphries: I am not sure skills are undervalued.

  Q33  Jeff Ennis: No, it is the perception I am talking about. We have the Department for Education and Skills, but we have local education authorities.

  Mr Humphries: In that sense, yes, why not? Alison's concerns were about more bureaucracy and the issue becomes—

  Q34  Chairman: To what extent do local education authorities have a real bite into the skills agenda.

  Mr Humphries: The reality is: not a lot. At the end of the day it becomes yet another layer between the two people who actually matter in this. There are two people who matter in this: there is the individual who wants the skills and the employer who is going to give them the job for which they are trying to get the skills in the first place. My concern all the way through this is that we are almost trying to put too many layers in the way of a system where actually the critical third party who needs to enter between the individual and the employer is the person who can provide the training or the organisation or whatever it is. The question you would have to ask is: if the aim of the state in all of this is to try to maximise the amount of resource allocated for education and training which actually reaches the ground, reaches the shopfloor, then one should be looking for ways of reducing the scale of intervening bodies and reducing the volume of resource which is put into their roles and looking at how one does it. Individual Learning Accounts were a very sad example of a good idea and an idea which has been a shared view by both the labour and employer side of the marketplace since 1989 or 1991 when the CBI produced its paper on skills and success—I am trying to think what it was called—when they argued strongly for putting the resource as close as possible to the learner and the employer. It would make an imperfect market better. I would agree with that. The challenge then is to try to place a framework of responsibility around those resources because government, the state, has a role to ensure public funds are properly utilised. A smaller framework of controls will make the system work better rather than a multilayered framework. For me that means looking at the three key players, the learner, the provider and the employer and looking at how we can make that partnership work most effectively.

  Q35  Valerie Davey: I should like to come back to the entitlement of the young person still at school. It seems to me at that level that we must ensure that young person has the motivation, has the ability to choose, has the skills you defined and they are related to both the curriculum and the method of teaching. I think that is the analysis of what you have been saying.

  Mr Humphries: Yes.

  Q36  Valerie Davey: On the curriculum side, we are already saying we will reduce it, so how do you feel about reducing a modern language and design and technology? Secondly, how can we ensure that the catalyst for the kind of experience you have been sharing with us very graphically is enabled by a variety of teaching skills which perhaps the teaching profession is not always deploying successfully?

  Professor Wolf: I do not want to sit here and design the national curriculum in two sentences; that is the last thing we need. I do also feel that the point where things are most critical, in terms of looking at where young people vote with their feet, has been the first year after that.[8] We have had this huge increase in numbers staying on at 16 and then very, very large numbers leaving again within a year. They have accepted the importance of education and then what they are offered, particularly if they are not in the A-level stream or are not coping with it, just does not work. In terms of what we need, that is the number one priority. Within that it is also about ensuring that those who did not reach a critical level of mastery of English and maths—I am going to call it that, why not?—in their GCSE year continue to have ways of really improving those skills and getting reputable alternative certification of them. Re-doing GCSE again and again does not work and we can document that in terms of numbers. I do think that we need to think about where we put limited resources. This is another thing about how much weight you put on examining. My own view is that what is important is differentiating between the core entitlement, which is the one thing you absolutely want to make sure that every young person has, and the bits where you can loosen up and allow different schools, different young people, different awarding bodies to make different offers. I propose that trying always to rationalise and think the smallest number of awards has to be the best thing is not necessarily correct. People are quite good at finding their way through a supermarket because there are tracks through and you can also find your way through alternative awards in an area in which you are interested. Again, it is about the core which you really have a strong commitment to as a government and things around that. The issue of providing teachers is critical, but it is clearly not the core concern of these discussions as I understand it. It does seem to me to be absolutely central and vital and something which governments the world over tend to duck, because it is expensive and difficult. If we are serious at all about improving the skills of young people and adults, then we have to be infinitely more serious about recruiting and training and retraining and developing teachers than we have been for the last I do not know how many decades.

  Mr Humphries: If we start from the perspective of the national curriculum, we are starting at the wrong point. It is where we are today. However, if you are asking me what it is that young people should be entitled to as the consequence of their experience and the education system, then you would be better off describing that in terms of what they can understand and do—perhaps "know" is in there somewhere but I do not want to get into too much detail—because that is what they are looking for. At that point you would start looking at areas like language and communication, you would look in detail at their ability to apply mathematical capabilities in a whole variety of situations. That is very different from theoretical mathematics; I say this as a trained maths teacher. It is about the extent to which they can use maths to address real-world problems as they impinge upon them. I think there would be quite a degree of it which is around science for the real world and the extent to which they understand the basic systems and principles—scientific systems and principles—which shape the world in which they operate. What they actually knew in an academic sense after that would be for me the icing on the cake. The entitlement is about what it is that they understand and can do as a consequence of their experience in the learning system. That depends very, very fundamentally not just on the curriculum but on pedagogy, on learning styles. I remember being invited to address one of the first conferences of SCAA long before it became QCA and the topic I was asked to address was "What has happened to pedagogy?". I think this must have been 1992, perhaps 1993. The point which was being made at that time was that in fact over the period from about 1985 to the early 1990s we abolished almost every organisation in the UK which was doing research into pedagogy. It was the curriculum that mattered: what was taught, not how it was taught. We abolished the institutions which were doing that: the Schools Council was doing good pedagogical work and the Council for Educational Technology was doing it, the National Foundation for Educational Research was doing it, I could go on. They were all shut; all their pedagogical programmes were shut. Research into how people learn and how we should shape the learning experience to maximise achievement for young people just stopped.

  Q37  Chairman: What was the period of this?

  Mr Humphries: You can track it from about 1985 when the changes were first being wrought to the Council for Educational Technology and the Schools Council over that period.

  Q38  Chairman: Do you concur with this, Professor Wolf?

  Professor Wolf: I feel at this point I am not in my own area of expertise.

  Q39  Chairman: It is very interesting, if it is true. We ceased to have an interest in how we teach pupils rather than what we teach pupils.

  Professor Wolf: Yes. That seems to me to be quite true. What is certainly true, if you look at what we have been occupied with for 20 years, is that it has been defining and re-defining and re-defining qualification requirements and frameworks until they come out of our ears. That is certainly true.


7   Note by witness: The maths qualifications in question are the Free-standing Mathematics Units (available and certificated at three levels) and the AS in Use of Mathematics. These grew out of a report for the then-Employment Department identifying a lack of occupationally-related mathematics qualifications or any structured progression route in maths outside the main full time GCSE-AS/A-level Maths route. The original recommendation was taken forward with support from staff within the relevant government agencies, from political advisers and, critically, from The Nuffield Foundation: and the resulting qualifications, which relate maths to practical and occupational applications, have received consistent and highly positive evaluations from staff and students who take them. However, the length of time that it took to carry this forward; the fact that it was extremely difficult to get anything approved that was not part of the mainstream "qualifications framework"; the lack of precedent for the involvement of specialists outside the government agencies and established awarding bodies; and the fact that progress was only possible because of political and Foundation support underline the problems facing development of the type of curriculum being discussed by Chris Humphries and myself. Equally, the take-up of the qualifications has been heavily influenced first, by government funding formulae(which strongly promote certain qualifications, notably the "Key Skills" qualifications) and by the difficulty of assembling viable student groups for anything but "mainstream" qualifications. Back

8   Note by witness: Although attention is rightly focused on the numbers not achieving five "good" GCSEs at the end of compulsory schooling-ie the period covered by the National Curriculum-the big increase in staying-on rates at 16 that has occurred since 1990 indicates that young people do appreciate the importance of acquiring more education. The large numbers who then leave within the next year underscores the failure of the post-16 curriculum to provide many of them with something they feel it is worthwhile acquiring. Back


 
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