Examination of Witnesses (Questions 680
- 699)
MONDAY 29 MARCH 2004
MR ROB
HULL AND
MS CAROL
HUNTER
Q680 Chairman: Why is it the people
out there do not see it in that way, they do not see it as a stage
or even a rung on the ladder or part of a climbing frame of opportunity?
Most people who talk about the modern apprenticeship talk about
it with those people who are not going to go on, whereas what
we saw in Denmark and Germany was a system whereby you could carry
on from an apprenticeship and go perhaps along a more applied
route but into higher education. It seems to us we have been stuck
in having this modern apprenticeship system that stops: it does
not key into anything else?
Mr Hull: It is our firm intention
that it should key in, any route a young person takes should progress
to a higher level, whether through to higher education for some
or whatever, and we certainly believe that for modern apprenticeships.
We need to make sure that the achievements that young people can
get in modern apprenticeships can lead into higher education.
We certainly see a route through from an advanced modern apprenticeship
into a foundation degree as a natural progression; and it is the
sort of thing that does happen in engineering, for example, now.
Q681 Chairman: It certainly historically
used to happen in engineering and many other professions where
people would start off and end up with an HNC, an HND and a degree?
Mr Hull: Yes.
Q682 Chairman: That seems to be the
dislocation. On the one hand you have got this rather stunted
qualification, so it is not a true qualification, of the modern
apprenticeship and, at the same time, you can have the Vice Chancellor
of Bournemouth University saying this morning all her courses,
the whole of Bournemouth, were vocational; yet there does not
seem to be a link between an expansion of vocational education
at the higher education level and a clear way in which you get
on that ladder so that you can go in a different way. I presume
most of the people who end up at Bournemouth University do so
by the traditional academic route?
Mr Hull: I do not know about the
admissions practice of Bournemouth University, but certainly your
intention, Chair, is precisely our intention, that modern apprenticeships
should lead through naturally and we need to do more to make sure
that is happening for more sectors.
Q683 Chairman: When you look at your
own Department's performance, do you ever wonder why it never
happened? Why did ministers, the previous ministers, previous
civil servants, not deliver a system that seemed to be joined
up? Where did we get it wrong? At what stage did it go wrong?
Mr Hull: I am not sure I know
the answer to that. Of course, there is a history to apprenticeships,
the way in which apprenticeships went into decline 20 years ago
or so and a history of recovering that decline in more recent
years.
Q684 Chairman: Why did that occur?
Mr Hull: Of course, there may
also have been issues in the machinery of government at one time
where we used to be an Education Department and an Employment
Department. That is no longer the case. I would have thought there
certainly is potential for joining those things up.
Q685 Chairman: Carol.
Ms Hunter: I was going to say,
I think that Rob is right, there was a period during which apprenticeships
fell away during which the vocational route, and by that I mean,
I have been engaged in education, training rather than education,
for quite a lot of years and we have never been able to establish
the importance of the vocational route in relation to higher education.
I do think we have a chance to do that now. There is a lot of
work already going on between the Learning and Skills Council,
the Sector Skills Councils and the higher education institutions,
or some of the higher education institutions, to try and make
sure that there is a good progression route between advanced modern
apprenticeships and some of the new foundation degrees that are
being developed, and I think that gives us an opportunity to start
to mend this problem, which you have identified, which clearly
is there. There are some people already who go from modern apprenticeships
into a form of higher education, but not nearly enough.
Q686 Chairman: Was it in the 1980s
from the emphasis from Government on "free markets would
provide" that they just thought that this sort of education
was not important?
Ms Hunter: I do not think . .
. The decline of apprenticeships, I think, was not an issue particularly
raised by Government, I would not have said, at the time. I think
it was more that there began to be a feeling that the time-served
apprenticeship—
Q687 Mr Pollard: Had served its purpose?
Ms Hunter: I was trying very hard
not to say that, but certainly, yes, that the time-served apprenticeship
was not actually delivering well-qualified people in the way it
perhaps used to do. There was too much time-serving and not enough
skill involved. I think in most sectors gradually the apprenticeship
decayed away. I do not think that was because of government action.
You might argue that no government action was taken to arrest
it because it was felt that this was a matter for business and
industry rather than Government. What it has meant is that we
are now starting from quite a low base, or we were starting from
quite a low base and having to build up modern apprenticeships
again and, given that that is the case, we know that we have got
a long way to go, but the fact that we have 24% of young people
in modern apprenticeships now—and we are doing a lot of
work with businesses to improve the quality and improve the numbers—is
a sign that we are actually at least moving in the right direction
again.
Q688 Mr Pollard: We had a recent
meeting with the Confederation of Builders, who were actually
taking on employees rather than contractors, and taking on employees
would mean trained apprentices, and that is really good news,
I think. The reason they gave is that we are now in a fairly stable
economic situation with interest rates stable—all of that—the
framework is right. Chairman, on your analogy about the climbing
frame, I thought it was very apt. I have to say it was a good
one. On a climbing frame you can actually circle round, you do
not need to climb up. If you do climb up you just go over the
other side and come down. If you circle round, that means you
do not need to go to university, for example, you do not need
to have Higher National Diploma, Higher National Certificate,
you can be an ordinary brick-layer with a competence in that,
or an ordinary door-fitter with a competence in that. You do not
need to become a master whatever it might be. Is that in your
thinking as well?
Mr Hull: Certainly the possibility
of moving around as well as moving up is part of our picture,
yes.
Q689 Mr Pollard: Reaching a level
where you think that is as much as you want to do or as much as
your competence or confidence might allow you to do?
Mr Hull: Yes, you could step off
at any level in the system. Yes.
Mr Turner: I was just imagining stepping
off a climbing frame at too high a level.
Chairman: For those who want consistency,
Val and I know that the climbing frame concept is the one that
was used in the early years' strategy, which we used extensively
when we did our Early Years Inquiry.
Mr Pollard: It is a good one.
Q690 Mr Turner: The message I seem
to be getting is that a lot of youngsters are going through to
higher education but through a broadly academic route; not many
are going through the vocation route which is available. You feel
that it would be appropriate to replace some of the academic route
with an expansion of the vocation route—I assume I am right
so far, tell me if I am wrong in a moment—because the academic
route is less suited to those youngsters than the vocation route.
Is that correct?
Mr Hull: I think we have two things
going on. Yes, there are some young people who are probably taking
an academic route at the moment because of attitudes towards A-levels.
They are told that is the sort of thing they should be doing,
when actually they would be better motivated and they would achieve
better by taking another route. So, yes, for some young people
they are currently probably taking the wrong route. They need
to have their eyes opened about the choices. That is one issue.
The other issue is about the potential of young people to get
into higher education and about the skills needs of the country.
There are young people at the moment who may be taking the modern
apprentice route, or maybe taking some other route, or maybe taking
no route, who have the potential for higher education, and they
ought to have the opportunity to enter higher education. When
one analyses the needs of the economy, one concludes that there
is a need for higher technician level qualifications and a need
for young people to come through with those higher technician
type qualifications which a vocational degree, a foundation degree,
would offer. So there are issues about what is good for the young
person; there are also issues about what kind of skills society
needs.
Q691 Mr Turner: I might ask you in
a moment what you see "higher technician level" as meaning.
This is the most difficult one of all. Could you put some figures
on it? What proportion of youngsters are we talking about for
whom the academic route is less appropriate and the vocational
route is more appropriate and whom we expect or aspire to end
up in higher education?
Ms Hunter: I think that is a very
difficult question, for a number of reasons. One is because it
is too easy to say we have something like 52% of young people
who are gaining five A-Cs at GCSE at the moment, most of whom
will go on to take A-levels and many of whom will then go into
higher education and all of those people should be doing the courses
that they are doing. It may well be, as Rob said earlier, that
some of those young people would actually achieve more and be
more personally satisfied if they were doing a different sort
of course. They have not done it because they have not been offered
it.
Q692 Mr Turner: This is why I am
asking what proportion?
Ms Hunter: As I say, it is a very
difficult question. I do not know that we know the answer to that,
because what we are trying to do is to have a system of learning
which is more personalised to the individual's aptitudes and needs.
What I was going to say is what that means is—
Chairman: They have not got the figures.
If they have the figures and find them when they get back to the
Department, they will let us have them. I am keen to get on to
the last two sections of the questioning.
Q693 Mr Turner: Okay. There were
a couple of other questions, one of which is what proportion of
those with five A-C GSCEs have them in five what you might call
"hard subjects" like English, maths, science and a foreign
language, humanities—have that range. Do we know that?
Mr Hull: I pause on your definition
of "hard subject". It sounds as if—
Q694 Mr Turner: I meant range of
subjects?
Mr Hull: I think I am right that
there are about 40% with A-C GCSES in English, maths and science,
something like that.[2]
I may be wrong.
Chairman: I am sorry; we do have to press
on. I want now to look now at school and college provision. Nick.
Q695 Mr Gibb: Can I ask how long
either of you have been at the DfES?
Mr Hull: A singularly long time.
I have been, on and off, in the Education Department in its various
manifestations for the last 20 years, and I was in the Higher
Education Funding Council during the 1990s.
Ms Hunter: In my case I have been
in the DfES for only 18 months. I was before that in the Department
of Work and Pensions for a period, I was in the DfEE earlier for
about four years, and prior to that I was in the Employment Department
for some of my career, the Manpower Services Commission, which
some of you may remember, and I also worked for a period on urban
regeneration in the Department for the Environment, as it was
then.
Q696 Mr Gibb: This question is aimed
at Mr Hull really. How do you account for the fact that 23% of
adults do not have basic skills in reading and maths in Britain?
Mr Hull: Some of those adults
were educated before I was at the Education Department. I think
we have moved over the last 20 or 30 years from a position where
we were content to accept that a significant number of young people
would leave school at 15 or 16 and take a manual job which they
were going to stay in for the rest of their lives to a position
where it really matters considerably whether our workforce has
these key skills. So I think there are issues about the extent
to which we bothered about those skills 30, 40 years ago.
Q697 Mr Gibb: More recently, how
do you account for the fact that in 1997, 57% of 11-year-olds
were not reaching the required level of reading—level 4?
Mr Hull: I think there are all
sorts of causes in the history of primary education, which I am
no expert on, but clearly literacy and numeracy were neglected
before 1997 and the strategies that were introduced from that
date have had an enormous effect.
Q698 Mr Gibb: Can I ask you about
the 14-16 programmes in colleges. They are complaining about money
and the fact that there is no certainty of continuity, and schools
are complaining also that, collaborating with the FE colleges,
sending kids off for three days a week to do these valuable courses
there is also costing money and they do not know what is going
to happen. Can you say what the long-term future is of these vocational
programmes in colleges?
Mr Hull: I will turn to Carol
in a moment, because she has been responsible for many of the
Pathfinder projects which have been looking at exactly those issues.
The fact is that there are a variety of collaboration methods
locally which have different impacts on funding and on organisation,
and we need to find the best way of managing that kind of collaboration,
managing vocational provision, and to look at the best ways of
channelling the money. We are still looking at that. Do you want
to elaborate?
Ms Hunter: Yes, through the increased
flexibility programme which is being evaluated this year, and
the 39 14-19 Pathfinders that I am responsible for, one of the
things we are looking at there is what the costs associated with
this type provision and this type of collaboration are, how we
can use the flexibilities that there are in the current system
to deal with those, whether we need to introduce some new flexibilities
into the system, and I have got some 14-19 Pathfinders who are
running slightly different methods of funding, which again we
are evaluating this year to see whether any of these gives us
a better handle on vocational provision. We have already made
it possible for Local Education Authorities to change the weightings
that they give for various students so that schools that are running
quite a lot of vocational provision can have a higher weighting.
I have to say that there is not much evidence that many LEAs have
done that so far, but the flexibility is there and we try to encourage
them to use it.
Q699 Chairman: Can I interrupt there,
Carol Hunter. The evidence we got, for example, from Bury College
and from Bedford College was that these were very successful experiments,
these pilots. Are we talking about the same thing?
Ms Hunter: Yes, we are, they are
very successful in terms of the provision that they are making,
the impact they are having on young people and also the impact
they are having in many cases on the institution—they are
finding this collaboration useful—but the specific question
was about funding for collaboration.
2 Note by witness: The number of 15-year-olds
achieving 5 A*- C including English, Maths and Science in 2002-03
was 239,560. This represents 39% of the 15-year-olds on roll. Back
| 
