Examination of Witnesses (Questions 512
- 519)
MONDAY 15 MARCH 2004
MS CAROLYN
CALDWELL, MR
CHRIS HEAUME
AND MR
KIERAN GORDON
Q512 Chairman: Welcome, Connexions.
We read in the TES only this week that you are going to be crawled
over by the Government, and there is going to be an evaluation
as to whether Connexions is delivering and delivering enough.
You have heard us asking questions about whether you give a full
service or whether you just concentrate on one bit of the market.
Where is the Connexions service at the moment, and how do you
feel about it?
Ms Caldwell: Thank you. We are
here from the Association of Connexions Partnerships which started
up less than a year ago in May 2003, and we are a member subscription
company limited by guarantee. We are here to tell you how proud
we are of our service. It is a new service—most Connexions
partnerships are still less than two years old—and already
we are starting to make a difference to young people's lives,
and we are doing that in a number of ways but I think it is important
to say that we are doing that by focusing on education, employment
and training, EET, not by focusing on NEET. Not by focusing on
the negative but trying to focus on young people going into education,
employment and training. We are trying to put careers guidance
into context for young people in their lives and make it more
accessible. We are helping young people who have difficulty making
it into EET on their own, and we are harnessing other agencies
to support that process in a number of ways, by sharing data which
we have and which no other agency has about the cohort of young
people in our areas, and also by feeding in young people's views,
which nobody else does in the way we do. We are proud of what
we are doing: we already are getting good reports from Ofsted,
and we wanted to come and tell you today about some of the work
we are doing because it feels like you have heard lots of evidence
from other people about Connexions, but we are here to present
it from our own point of view.
Chairman: Thank you, and we have lots
of questions for you.
Q513 Mr Chaytor: If you were designing
the system from scratch with a blank sheet of paper, would you
set up 47 Learning and Skills Councils and 47 separate Connexions
partnerships?
Ms Caldwell: I think we would.
Mr Heaume: Yes. What we have is
beginning to show how well it is working. There is a movement
in the LSCs towards a regional structure which has advantages
too, but we know that in terms of delivery we need to be close
to young people and all young partners; we need to be able to
know our schools and feel more intimately involved in their issues
rather than have something more distant such as a regional structure.
Looking the other way, down to a borough structure, we are very
clear that we can offer a great deal on a subregional basis, as
we do now in terms of the young people that move, who live in
one area but go to school in another area or to college. In central
London we have about 50% mobility borough to borough one way or
the other in terms of learning and residents, and a subregional
structure over a few boroughs can help us support the young people
in their bigger context of their lives rather than have to relate
awkwardly to people who are not our own service.
Q514 Mr Chaytor: So even if there
were a move to a regional structure for the LSCs, you would argue
that your existing 47 partnership areas were right for your work?
Mr Heaume: It is interesting to
see how the LSCs have done having put in an eight or nine region
structure above their subregional structure. I can see how much
less cumbersome that is for the DfES to relate to and others.
They have kept in place, though, their organisation for their
delivery on a subregional basis because it needs those local links,
yet we could see how across our region we could manage data in
a regional sense, we could manage staff and workforce issues in
a regional sense, we could manage increasing young people's participation
in driving the service forward structurally in that way too, yet
the delivery needs to be quite local.
Q515 Mr Chaytor: Overall the Government
spends the best part of half a billion pounds on the Connexions
service. What proportion of that total spend is on simply sustaining
the infrastructure, and what proportion is spent on funding advisers
delivering the service directly to young people?
Mr Gordon: Speaking for my own
area, I am the chief executive of the Greater Merseyside Connexions
Partnership, and we recently had our Ofsted inspection, and they
were keen to look at whether we did offer good value for money.
Over 80% of our resources goes into frontline services or supporting
them, and it is critical that we are able to do that. We have
over 330 personal advisers working across 219 schools and colleges,
and about 80 work-based learning providers, not to mention the
raft of work that goes on in the community, and we run that through
19 different centres across the Greater Merseyside area, delivering
services at a local level, as far as you can get local level with
economies of scale. The resources we have to provide an infrastructure
around that I would not say are divorced from front line delivery
because you do need good information and communications infrastructure.
We have other facilities as well because we are a company limited
by guarantee. We have an HO and a finance team who provide those
essential services, but over 80% goes into frontline delivery
and the support of it.
Q516 Mr Chaytor: Over 80% is going
into frontline delivery and the support of frontline delivery,
and nearly 20% is dedicated to maintaining the infrastructure.
Now in any organisation, if your administrative costs are almost
20%, I would have thought that was quite high?
Mr Gordon: You have to factor
in premises costs which I have not put in the frontline delivery.
The whole ICT infrastructure itself that comes with delivering
the service is in that 20%. They all do provide a support to the
frontline service but they are not included in the direct delivery
costs. We get greater economies of scale by handling them centrally.
Q517 Mr Chaytor: How do you deal
with the argument that there was a huge reorganisation of careers
services when it was hived off in the early 90s, and another one
when Connexions was started? There is now two years on a review
that may lead to a further re-organisation but the quality of
the experience for teenagers on the ground has not changed that
much. Is it not just rearranging the deck chairs on a massive
scale?
Mr Gordon: I have lived through
those changes you have mentioned and I would agree that there
has been a lot of change which does create problems because every
time you try to reorganise it does create a slowing down of momentum.
There is a danger that if we keep picking the plant up and inspecting
the roots naturally we cannot expect it to grow at the level it
would if we left it. We are just over two years old and have achieved
some remarkable results. The quality of service that young people
have received has not diminished and I would say, having listened
to the questions put to the Guidance Councils, that there is great
concern in the Select Committee for whether there is adequate
careers advice and guidance being delivered, and questions are
being asked within the House as well, and I would say there is.
I can speak for the Merseyside area and we have increased our
staffing quite considerably since Connexions came on the line,
because it has created extra resources for the Merseyside area.
73% of our personal advisers are guidance trained, that is, they
have a qualification in careers guidance or an NVQ in careers
guidance. We have an additional number of personal advisers we
have taken on since we started who have come from different backgrounds—social
work and so on—who we are now training to equip them with
similar skills to guide people in terms of learning choices and
career choices, and access to the service is better now than it
ever was. I would say there are still issues we have to deal with,
and some issues still remain now which remained when I first trained
to be a careers adviser in 1979 that we need to address, and Tomlinson
has taken us closer to some of those.
Q518 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the
training and the updating, given the rapid pace of change in the
labour market, you have 73% with a recognised qualification. Is
your target 100% or do you expect that it generally will remain
at that level?
Mr Gordon: I think it will remain
because not all of our personal advisers are operating at the
same level. Some young people just need access to information,
sign-posting and advice, and might not need necessarily a high
level of guidance skill, but it is critical that when they do
need support they are exposed to the kind of skill, knowledge
and understanding that is required. Not everyone needs that.
Q519 Mr Chaytor: Would that be typical
for other Connexions partnerships, or does it vary hugely across
the country?
Ms Caldwell: I have not got figures
but it varies. Each partnership is different in its own way but
how Kieran describes his distribution of staff is similar across
other partnerships.
Mr Heaume: From central London's
point of view we are quite different, although our catchment area
is very similar in some ways. We are a subcontracted partnership
which about half the Connexions partnerships are, so we do not
employ staff and place them locally but we contract with our LEAs
to do that and with careers companies, and they work together
borough by borough as two key partners to deliver one service.
In terms of budgets, the careers companies budgets have increased
by about 20% since Connexions has been in place so they have been
able to expand the staff to qualify through traditional careers
routes. The LEAs have recruited other staff who often have a social
work, teaching or youth work background in order to join together
to provide services between them. It is true to say that what
we are trying to do is provide something that is one whole although
it has different people from different professions contributing
to it, and therefore we are trying to make sure that every personal
adviser can be accessible to every young person no matter what
their professional background, and it does feel to a young person
like one service. Every personal adviser will perhaps have that
threshold element and open issues up, start to relate to the young
person, start to unpick it, and seek the specialism they need,
whether it is their own or someone else's, to take that case further
forward and provide solutions.
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