Examination of Witnesses (Questions 660
- 679)
MONDAY 29 MARCH 2004
MR ROB
HULL AND
MS CAROL
HUNTER
Q660 Mr Gibb: The way this is being
dealt with is by introducing another type of exam with a different
sort of name to it, and so entry level diploma, intermediate level
diploma, and thinking that will help deal with that problem. Is
that the intellectual drive behind what is going on? I am trying
to get to grips with it myself.
Mr Hull: Certainly Mike Tomlinson's
group does regard the entry level and foundation level qualifications
as an opportunity to demonstrate how well people have done, so,
yes, I think there is something in that.
Q661 Mr Gibb: So in essence we are
gong back to the CSE/GCE split that we had before the GCSE came
in 1986, but with a different name obviously?
Mr Hull: I would not say that,
no.
Q662 Mr Gibb: Why not?
Mr Hull: Because the conception
of the Tomlinson diploma, at whatever level, is much larger and
broader than the CSE. CSEs were in individual subjects. The foundation
diploma will require achievement across a broad subject area.
Q663 Mr Gibb: But there will be lots
of individual subjects within those areas, will there not? You
are not just going to teach one blank subject, are you? You are
going to teach geography, history and science. They will all lead
to a qualification at the intermediate diploma level?
Mr Hull: If that is the level
at which it has been studied.
Q664 Mr Gibb: I am just trying intellectually
to grasp how that differs from a CSE in geography, history and
science with GCE geography, history and science.
Mr Hull: The proposal from the
Tomlinson group is that all young people should be required to
achieve in some sort of functional maths and in communications,
whatever subjects they choose.
Q665 Mr Gibb: They are choosing compulsory
subjects, as they were under CSE/GCE. What I can see happening
here is a cycle: you are trying to achieve something that is unachievable
and we will go back to CSE/GCE split, and then in 15 years' time
we will decide that discriminates against people doing the intermediate
level, and then we will have one qualification again with one
level or set of grades, and again in 15 years' time after that,
we will decide that the lower grades discriminate. You are just
trying to change things and you will achieve nothing. Have I got
that wrong?
Mr Hull: I hope you have got it
wrong.
Q666 Mr Pollard: I have two questions.
In talking about qualifications and achievements in those, people
with ADHD, learning disabilities, dyslexia, dysphasia, are at
a great disadvantage currently. Will they be at the same disadvantage
or will this new system cope with them? I will give you a couple
of examples. My grandson, Jake, who has ADHD and other difficulties,
has not achieved very well at school and is not now on the full
curriculum, but if he got one GCSE at a grade A-C he would be
doing exceptionally well. I do not think he will do that. Amy
came to my surgery with her mum on Friday and she has two conditions;
she can hardly cope with English and yet she has been told she
has to do two modern languages as well. This is really putting
challenges in front of people and we are setting them up to fail.
I know these kids are at the margins in the generality of things
but nonetheless each child is important to each parent and we
must allow them each to aspire and achieve. There was a question
in there, honestly.
Mr Hull: I hope that the reform
of qualifications ahead will be one which promotes the inclusion
of people with special needs. Of course, different special needs
need different handling within this. There are some very able
young people with special needs and one needs to take account
of whatever the need is in order to enable them to achieve their
best. There are other young people who will always struggle with
some of the basics. Mike Tomlinson's ideas about an entry level
diploma allow for that. These issues are never easy.
Ms Hunter: It is perhaps worth
saying, in terms of the entry level diploma, that Mike Tomlinson
is particularly looking with a group of experts in the field at
how the entry level diploma can be as inclusive as possible because
he is well aware of those needs and he has been taking account
of that all the way through the discussions he has had.
Q667 Mr Pollard: I was at a meeting
of residents on Friday night—not as erudite as the Chairman's—and
we were talking about education and the 50% target for university.
Their view was that although percentages were going up in A-C
grades, really standards were coming down; they were just allowing
more people through. That seems to me to be quite a widespread
perception. How do we get round that? What do we need to do to
convince people that standards actually are rising and that our
kids are doing better and our teachers are teaching better?
Mr Hull: There is a huge dilemma
here, as demonstrated by the newspaper headlines we see every
August. When achievement rates go up, it is because the standards
are going down. When achievements go down in August, that is also
because standards are going down, according to the press. We all
have to work on helping people to understand the extent to which
schools and colleges are actually doing better each year.
Mr Pollard: Would it help if we had some
stability in the system? I take the point that Nick Gibbs made.
I have a lot of time for him. He is a good man! He said that we
are going round in cycles rather than circles. That disturbs me
and I think it disturbs educationalists as well. We need stability,
not new initiatives perhaps. That is a statement.
Chairman: I think the Conservatives are
supposed to believe in that, are they not? I do not know quite
whether we should measure contentment with the achievement in
higher education based on what the Daily Mail and the Sun
say in August or September.
Q668 Paul Holmes: I am interested
in the research background to the suggestions that are now being
made for moving towards work-based learning before the age of
16. The Government is talking about junior apprenticeships where
a pupil might do two days in school, two days in work, and one
day at college. On which country's or countries' successful scheme
is this based?
Mr Hull: I am not sure that we
are starting from other countries. I think we are starting from
the experiences which are manifest in quite a few places. I talked
about the increased flexibility programme, which does look to
be quite a successful operation, where some young people are having
access to the workplace and some to colleges. We are seeing them
greatly motivated by that. Ivan Lewis is interested in exploring
whether a bit more workplace access would make sense. That is
where it is coming from. I would emphasise that this is not an
idea about categorising young people at the age of 14 into a narrow
track. It is about giving young people motivational experiences
which will point them towards good quality qualifications and
which will open up possibilities for them from 16. Some may decide
at 16 that they want to revert to a traditional, more academic
based learning. For others, it will be quite natural to progress
from that sort of work-based experience pre-16 into a modern apprenticeship
of the kind we have now. That is the sort of idea that surrounds
this. I do not think international influences are the driver behind
that so much as simply looking at what seems to be working at
the moment with young people.
Q669 Paul Holmes: I would be interested
if there was anything you could send on to us about where the
driver comes from. It is an idea which I wholeheartedly support.
I was a teacher previously and, from what I have heard now, I
support the concepts. As the Chairman has said, we were in Denmark
and Germany last week looking at their systems. I had been led
to believe anecdotally that there was a lot of this in Denmark
and Germany, but in fact what we found was that there is quite
a rigorous divide at 16. Before 16 there is very general academic
education and the vocational element only comes in quite explicitly
after the age of 16. I was surprised at that. I thought this scheme
perhaps was based on successful examples in other countries.
Mr Hull: You have been to Germany
more recently than me, but I thought when I was in Germany some
time ago and went to 11-16 schools in Germany that they were giving
quite a lot of practical learning in one form or another.
Q670 Paul Holmes: Perhaps you could
let us know where the driver comes from.[1]
In terms of the practical difficulties of moving in this direction,
for example, if in a few years' time it becomes the norm that
many pupils will only be spending part of the time in school and
some of them will be doing vocational work placements with employers,
how does that register in the league tables? At the moment, the
standard cry of schools is that the emphasis on league tables
and league table performance is absolutely essential for everything,
for the status of the school, for the teachers' performance-related
pay prospects, for everything. If you have quite large numbers
of pupils who are spending two or three days a week not earning
brownie points for the league tables, how are you going to get
round that?
Mr Hull: The answer to that goes
back to what I was saying to the Chairman about the prospect ahead
of introducing more qualifications into the league tables. If
someone is going into the workplace and getting a vocational qualification
through that route, that sort of qualification would count towards
the league tables prospectively in the future. That is one part
of the answer. Another part of the answer is about the way in
which we might in future look at the performance of groups of
institutions. If we have colleges working with schools, we ought
to be able to find ways of measuring their collective performance
as well as their individual performance, so that if a young person
is gaining qualifications by experiences in a variety of places,
all those places will get recognition for what they are achieving.
Q671 Paul Holmes: That was going
to be the next question. In the memorandum you sent to us you
talk about that being something that you are looking at. Do you
have any more definite ideas how you would achieve that? For example,
if somebody is spending half the week in college and half in school,
do their exam successes at college count for the college or for
the school or for both.
Ms Hunter: They count for the
student.
Q672 Paul Holmes: That is not the
way league tables work at the moment.
Ms Hunter: We do not have a final
answer to that. We hope that we have a final answer to the question
of how we bring other qualifications into the tables so that if
the evaluation that is currently going on is successful, that
will be done next year. We are working on two other aspects of
the tables with groups of potential pilot schools that are interested
in this. One is to answer precisely that question you have just
asked as to whether, if we want to measure the success of groups
of institutions, we do that by apportioning the attainment or
actually by it counting for anybody who is involved and therefore
effectively double counting it. The other thing we are looking
at is how you incorporate differences in the pace of learning
into tables. That is relatively straightforward to do in as far
as anything is straightforward with performance tables for accelerated
progression, but is more difficult to see how we are going to
do it for progression where young people are actually taking their
qualifications slightly later than they would normally be expected
to do. We do not have a final answer to either of those, but we
are working with groups at schools around the country to try and
work out what the best solution will be, and then to operate some
pilots next year to test those solutions out. I am sorry I cannot
give you an immediate answer to the question but I hope we will
be able to do so in a few months' time.
Q673 Paul Holmes: I welcome a lot
of what you are saying. In listening to some of the answers you
gave earlier on, it struck me how much we do keep reinventing
the wheel, rushing into things and then saying, "Well, perhaps
that is not such a good idea". The school I worked at had
to scrap a brilliant City and Guilds course because those did
not appear in the league tables. Now you are saying that perhaps
we ought to go back and introduce more of those kinds of courses
that will count in the league tables. It seems a shame perhaps
that we did not listen to teachers more a few years ago when we
were scrapping all these things that you are now taking about
reintroducing. To move on to another subject that came out of
what we were looking at last week, in Denmark we were impressed
by the sheer scale of their vocational training after the age
of 16, but they have 1% levy on every company to pay for that.
In Germany they are in the middle of a big debate about whether
they should have a compulsory levy on every company to pay for
this because they feel they cannot provide enough training places
based in companies through the voluntary method, and so Germany
is agonising whether to do the same or not. We used to have a
training levy, but we scrapped it. Are there any thoughts where
we are going on that?
Mr Hull: I think that is probably
a question you should ask my Ministers when you meet them in a
month's time because it seems to me essentially a political issue
about the way in which one looks to employers to contribute to
learning. You know the way in which, in the skills strategy, we
have tried to articulate the responsibilities that employers should
have in relation to learning and the responsibilities of the state,
with the responsibilities of the state predominantly in the initial
preparation of young people and also basic skills and the level
2 entitlement. That is where we are. Obviously there are other
ways of doing it, one of which is compulsion of one kind or another.
So far we have not gone down the compulsion route.
Q674 Paul Holmes: The White Paper
keeps saying it is the last chance for employers; that unless
something happens the implication must be that we go back to a
compulsion levy. Can we really provide high quality vocational
training for everybody in the target audience without either the
taxpayer picking up the whole bill or the employer picking up
the whole bill? You understand; you do not know.
Mr Hull: No.
Q675 Chairman: How do you see modern
apprenticeship in the greater scheme of things in terms of producing
higher skilled people in our society?
Mr Hull: I think for those young
people who are not on a traditional academic track through to
university there are a range of options for them, one of which
is to go on a route which is predominantly work-based, another
one is to take a vocational route in full-time education through
a further education college and in the further education college
route there are qualifications like BTEC National which are quite
widely taken. The work-based route is clearly an option. It is
an option which is highly motivating for some. It gives the young
people a real experience of the workplace and it is different
in that they become employees: they are productive members of
the work force. At the moment we have got about 24% of young people
taking that route; we have got ambitions for increasing it. Obviously
one can take different positions about precisely how far we should
increase that route. The key issues, I think, about the apprenticeship
route are about the extent to which we can raise the quality of
the route, and there is a lot of work being done on that now,
and also the extent to which we can generate the employer places,
the extent which we can generate, that we can persuade employers
to get involved. That is why Sir Roy Gardner's taskforce is working
with us on marketing to employers looking at ways of penetrating
the service sectors - those that have not traditionally taken
apprenticeships. There is great potential there as one important
route into the workplace and into vocational learning.
Q676 Chairman: Why then do you think
. . . Why does it not lead to the next stage, the modern apprenticeship?
Mr Hull: Not lead to the next
stage?
Q677 Chairman: It does not lead to
anywhere, does it?
Mr Hull: It can lead and does
lead to higher education for some.
Q678 Chairman: It is not a qualification.
Mr Hull: The modern apprenticeship?
Q679 Chairman: Yes.
Mr Hull: Success in the modern
apprenticeship gives an NVQ, a technical certificate, which is
also a qualification, and qualification in key skills. Those three
together make up something called the Modern Apprenticeship Diploma,
and there is no reason why not, indeed, it is possible to move
on from there through to higher education, through to foundation
degrees.
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