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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