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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 557 House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTS Wednesday 6 April 2005
SIR DAVID NORMINGTON KCB, MR MARK HAYSOM and MS SUSAN PEMBER OBE DEPARTMENT FOR EDUCATION and Skills
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 69
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Committee of Public Accounts on Wednesday 6 April 2005 Members present Mr Edward Leigh, in the Chair Mr Richard Allan Mrs Angela Browning Mr Ian Davidson Mr Alan Williams ________________ Sir John Bourn, Comptroller and Auditor General, National Audit Office, further examined.
Ms Paula Diggle, Second Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, further examined.
REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR GENERAL
SKILLS FOR LIFE
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Sir David Normington KCB, Permanent Secretary, Ms Susan Pember OBE, Director, Mr Mark Haysom, Chief Executive, Learning and Skills Council, Department for Education and Skills, examined. Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the last Committee of Public Accounts of this Parliament. We are once again joined by Sir David Normington. We hope that you will enjoy the last hoorah of this Parliament! We are going to deal with an important subject from your Department, Sir David, which is the progress that we are making in adult literacy and numeracy. Perhaps you could introduce your team, please. Sir David Normington: Mark Haysom is the Chief Executive of the Learning and Skills Council and the Accounting Officer for the LSC. Susan Pember is my Director in the Department responsible for the Skills for Life Strategy we are discussing and she has been responsible for it from the start. Q2 Chairman: Could you please start by looking at page 53 of the Comptroller and Auditor General's report and, in particular, if you could look at Figure 30. You are spending £3.7 billion in total on this programme up to 2006 to teach adults to read, write and count. If we look at Figure 30 and the results from Ofsted inspections, we can see very little improvement in the quality of teaching. Is this not absolutely key? What is going on? Sir David Normington: It is key. Clearly the quality of teaching is absolutely critical here. We come from a long way back with this strategy. It was piloted in 2001/02 and really gets moving in 2002/03. Some of the early work has been putting in place a proper programme of assessment, a proper curriculum, which we have never had before in this area, and proper teacher training. I hope as the years go on you will see significant improvements as a result of that. It would be surprising if there were significant improvements in this short timescale. There has not been enough time in the first couple of years of this strategy for it to have made a significant impact on teaching. This is a workforce that has been very neglected and very under‑trained over a lot of years. That is what we are trying to turn around. Q3 Chairman: It is also mentioned in that paragraph 4.23 that "Results from Ofsted inspections of literacy, numeracy and language provision in further education colleges indicate little improvement so far." You have basically given the answer that it is early on. We will explore this as the hearing goes on because it is absolutely key. I would like you now to turn to page 30 of the report and look at paragraph 2.13 which tells us that more than half of the qualifications that count across the target were gained by 16 to 18 year olds. What I want to put to you is that really you have only managed to reach your target, have you not, because you are getting 16 and 18 year olds to take qualifications they should have obtained before leaving school? Sir David Normington: I suppose the first answer is they have not gained them and in a sense one is trying to ensure that before they leave what you might call full‑time education and training they do gain those qualifications. As you know, we have a major programme to raise literacy and numeracy standards in primary and secondary school which is having a great effect, but it is not yet catching everyone. I think it is legitimate to go on making sure that those who leave school without the requisite qualifications do get them. Q4 Chairman: I do not deny that. Here we have a situation where we have got research from 2003 which tells us that only one in five of the adult population of working age have both literacy and numeracy skills equivalent to a pass A to C at GCSE. A pass C at GCSE is not high academia, let us face it. You are achieving your targets by concentrating on the 16 to 18 year olds and they should have been dealt with at school. You are missing out on these older people. Sir David Normington: We have some figures which show that we are now shifting the balance of the programme. Mr Haysom can update us on that. Mr Haysom: I can update you on the figure in the report because it is now 61% of the period of the strategy that is adults, in other words post-18, and it was 62% last year. There is a movement towards more and more adults getting qualifications. Sir David Normington: Clearly our aim is that people should leave school at 16 with adequate levels of literacy and numeracy. That is a central objective of government policy and we are making progress on that, but there are still some who leave school without those qualifications. We have to go on picking them up. Q5 Chairman: On page 25, paragraph 2.2 we see you have now spent £2.1 billion on adult literacy, language and numeracy since the strategy began. If we turn to page 29, Figure 16, we can see that that £2.1 billion is spent on 850,000 learners, so we have been spending, roughly speaking, £2,500 per learner. You have not made a great deal of progress. How much more money will you need to make a difference? Sir David Normington: I think we have made progress, if I may say so. What Table 16 is showing is the progress we are making against our Public Service Agreement targets, which is about the achievement of qualifications. In addition to the 839,000 shown on Figure 16 there are 2.6 million people taking literacy and numeracy programmes which are not leading to qualifications at the levels covered by the targets in paragraph 16. That £2.1 billion has paid for 2.6 million people to start on the ladder of literacy and numeracy improvement. Not all of them have got qualifications which count towards our targets, but to get them there you have to get them on the first rung of the ladder. Q6 Chairman: I may want to come back to this at the end. Let us look at the employer training pilots which are mentioned in paragraph 3.25 on page 46. It says there, "At local level, employer training targets are funded and managed by local Learning and Skills Councils." What have they told you? What seems to work as far as small employers are concerned? Sir David Normington: The basic message is that you need to customise the training to the needs of small and medium sized employers because they need training that does not interfere with the business they are doing and that it is done at times which suit both the employer and the individual. It is often necessary to do it in bite‑sized chunks because in a small firm you cannot be losing your employee for a long period. It may need to be done in the evenings or at weekends. It has told us that if we want to make an impact on skills in small and medium sized enterprises we need to be very flexible about how it is organised. Mr Haysom: It is all about flexibility. Something like 11% or 12% of the provision through employer training pilots is about this Skills for Life activity. I think it has actually shown some very good results in reaching some difficult people to reach, ie some of the adult groups we were just talking about earlier. So we are actually starting to get there. I personally have seen some really interesting examples of that with Skills for Life training actually taking place in the workplace. I have been working with union reps to encourage people to take part. Q7 Chairman: Let us look at what has happened around the country. If we look at page 35 and Figure 24, we have all sorts of figures here for numeracy participation and literacy participation. Mrs Browning is here. I see that in the South West they are particularly unwilling to learn how to count. Does this figure actually mean anything? I cannot believe that people in the South West are any less interested in learning than people in the North East or the North West. Sir David Normington: I agree with you, I do not think it means all that much. What it reflects is the historic pattern of provision. In other words, it is as much about what is available as what is needed because there was not a national programme until recently and therefore it depended on what was provided locally. Part of what is happening in the South West is that rather little was provided. Q8 Chairman: Mrs Browning will be able to leap to the defence of her constituents in a moment, but before I end I want to ask you about a key point which is to do with teachers. Let us look at page 51, paragraph 4.15, where the Comptroller and Auditor General says, "Existing teachers do not have to achieve the new qualifications within a given time." This is a fairly key and worrying point. If you are not requiring existing teachers to achieve these new qualifications how are you going to achieve the progress and targets that you want to achieve? Sir David Normington: It is on a long‑term basis, but by 2010 it is our intention, as the paragraph says at the end, that "all teachers should be qualified". That is quite a long programme. As I said at the beginning, we come from a long way back here. Q9 Chairman: Can you honestly commit yourself in front of this Committee to meeting that target by 2010? Sir David Normington: That is our intention, yes. Q10 Chairman: That is your intention? Sir David Normington: Yes. Q11 Chairman: Is there a realistic chance that you will meet that target? Sir David Normington: Yes. Ms Pember: We do feel that by 2010 we will be able to reach that target and we are working at it in different ways. We are working at it with the universities and they can provide part‑time programmes for existing teachers and we are also working with the existing teachers to find ways that make it easier for them to take up this activity, and we are also working with the managers of colleges and local education authorities so they understand the real importance and what a difference it makes to performance if your teachers are qualified in this area. Q12 Chairman: Instead of raising expectations in the way that you have done, if we are talking about teaching adults, should you not have started with a step‑by step‑approach, trying to get teachers in and raising their qualifications? Would that not have been a better way of doing it rather than having this programme and a great fanfare which appears to have achieved very little? Sir David Normington: With respect, it has achieved a great deal in a short time. It is the first serious attempt in this country to tackle literacy and numeracy problems amongst adults. It tackles teacher qualifications and quality. For the first time it sets a national qualification and assessment framework and it puts serious money into supporting people through a whole range of different types of training. It is a programme that builds up over time. We have started quite modestly. The long‑term targets are very ambitious indeed. We recognise we have to have the quality provision. This is probably one of the most ambitious programmes in the world and it is the first time in this country we have tried it and we should be really proud of it. Q13 Chairman: Yet, as we see in paragraph 4.22, the learners with the most need get the poorest quality of teaching. Sir David Normington: I say again, we come from a long way back here. There had been no focus on this at all before 2001. We have put in place now a programme to address the quality of training and to provide a national framework of assessment and qualifications. This is the first time this has been done. This is trying to reverse something which is much neglected. Chairman: Thank you. Q14 Mrs Browning: I would like to pick up on this point about the South West. Sir David Normington: I was not attacking the South West. Q15 Mrs Browning: I do hope not. Certainly in Devon ‑ God's own county ‑ we value the standard of our primary school teaching and I believe in the main most of our primary school children go on to secondary having achieved certainly an adequate standard. What analysis have you made of an area like the South West ‑ and by that I mean Devon and Cornwall ‑ in terms of rurality and sparsity because it does seem to me access is very important? Have you looked at whether the service could be more peripatetic and go to the person? I realise, given the stigma of this subject we are dealing with, it would not be appropriate for somebody to go into the workplace specifically to see an individual because they needed to access these services. Have you looked at overcoming that problem of sparsity? Sir David Normington: The brief answer is yes. The local Learning and Skills Council is largely responsible for this provision. It is the essence of this programme that it needs to be flexible. We need to provide online learning, community learning, college learning and work‑based learning because it is in the nature of this population that there are all kinds of ways that you need to provide them with the opportunities in the right context. Mr Haysom: I think you have hit on one of the very great difficulties that there is in terms of getting provision right. One of the things that you can track across is that there is an issue about rural communities and getting the right kind of provision and there is a separate set of issues amongst urban communities and the solutions do have to be different. We are trying all sorts of different solutions in different parts of the country to overcome that issue. One of the recommendations in this report is about sharing that best practice and building on that. Q16 Mrs Browning: One of the things that I constantly have to bat on about here is the question of deprivation in rural areas because we see it on a scale in larger towns and cities, but the difficulty for the truly rural communities is the lack of transport and it is totally impractical to think there is ever going to be a bus service running in a large part of a constituency like mine. One of my local charities provides motorbikes for young people who have been accepted on training courses and they borrow these bikes ‑ I do not know what their mums think ‑ for the length of the course. Are you as innovative as that? Mr Haysom: Yes. I was aware of that. There are all sorts of different initiatives. I would not wish to refer to any specifically at the moment. You are right about the transport issue, which is why e.learning is a big part of it and why the voluntary sector has a huge role to play. Q17 Mrs Browning: If you cannot read very well it is very difficult to find your way through a computer programme, is it not? Mr Haysom: I am not sure that is the case. I have had the opportunity of seeing some of the Learn Direct work and there is some really valuable work that Learn Direct have done with some of the provision they have made available around the country to help learners through all of this. I was talking about the voluntary sector and reaching into these communities. I think they are playing a key role for us and we are working very hard with them. I am glad that you have raised that as an issue. Q18 Mrs Browning: I particularly wanted to ask you about the service in prisons because clearly this is one of the core problems in terms of rehab, ensuring that while a prisoner is serving a sentence they have every opportunity to maximise and improve their literacy and numeracy skills. When I look at Figure 21 on page 33 I see there has been some improvement in prisons, but as we see from this report, it is these particular niche groups where one would be looking to see a lot more progress. What actually is the problem in providing this service on the scale necessary within the prison network? Sir David Normington: It is our aim. We have prioritised the prisons. There is a clear connection between people who cannot read, write and add up and their lack of employment and their prison record often. A major part of this programme is in the prisons. You asked what the difficulty has been. The difficulty with all training in prisons has been, at least in part, about the way in which prisoners get moved around and that is what we are trying to address. We are working with the Prison Service to screen prisoners when they go in so that we assess their needs and then develop a proper training programme. Ms Pember: The Prison Service and Martin Neary, who is now in NOMS, has been a champion of basic skills over the last five years and the Prison Service has met the targets that we have set them. You are right to say there are difficulties there. The main difficulties are to capture the person's need on entry and then to make sure that as they move through their prison sentence the learning programme goes with them. From last autumn the Prison Service has put in place a structure so that the learning plan for that individual prisoner goes with them for the length of their stretch and then goes out with them into probation and that is a real step forward, but we still want to be able to get to more prisoners and to be able to support them in different ways when they are at work within the prison as well as when they are in education and that means structural changes in some prisons to help us do that. Q19 Mrs Browning: Are you able to provide us with the figures in terms of the percentage of prisoners who you assess have these needs for training and how many you are able to set off on this course and how many actually complete it to a satisfactory level? Sir David Normington: We can certainly provide that. Q20 Mrs Browning: I think those would be very useful figures. Sir David Normington: We will definitely do that. Q21 Mrs Browning: Thank you very much. If we look again at paragraph 2.21, why is provision in places other than education colleges coming on so slowly? What is the problem here? Sir David Normington: Some of this is about the build‑up of the programme and getting enough provision in place with the tutors and the trainers to provide it. That is what has been happening. We are just entering the fourth year of the programme. This programme has been a programme where each year we have increased the reach. The job centres and Jobcentre Plus are now a major part of this programme, but it has taken until the last year to get in place the screening and the provision to support the results of that screening. That is now in place. What this report was reflecting when it was written was the position a year ago. This programme is building up and we are on this upward curve. Q22 Mrs Browning: Can you give us any idea about the people who are employed but who lack these skills and for whom it becomes a difficulty within the workplace? How does this work in practice? Is it that employers identify the lack of skills? I should imagine that many basic jobs today which require people to incorporate keyboard skills have identified a group of people who previously might have got by, but now it has been identified that their problem is not their lack of keyboard skills, it is their lack of basic literacy. Where is the driver coming from? Is it coming from within the workplace, from employers who have recognised the difficulty they have with people in their workforce and they are the people who are seeking this type of support, or is it the person themselves? My understanding of this difficulty, particularly with the older adults, is that once they have got by for a few years they become very sensitive to letting people know that they lack these basic skills and therefore they are not the best group to come forward and self‑certify that they need this support. How do you deal with those two problems, the one of the employer and the other one of the person in employment who needs a skill? Sir David Normington: You have put your finger precisely on the difficulty with this programme, which is identifying the people with the need and persuading them to come forward. Many adults have found ways of getting by, they have found coping strategies. They are not completely illiterate and therefore they cope. We know from our dealings with employers that they are increasingly frustrated with groups of their employees who they feel could achieve more but who have got blockages. Often the employers do not recognise them as literacy and numeracy problems because individuals have been getting by. It is easier to identify people who come into the jobcentre or if they come to the prison. If they come into the Army, for instance, you have ways of putting in place the screening process. If they are in employment it is much more difficult. We are trying, through our work with major employers, our work in the Civil Service, to show employers how you identify those needs and how you meet them, but even then you have individuals who are reluctant to admit it because of the stigma attached. We have been backing this up with a national publicity programme, it is really one of the most successful that we have ever run, which shows individuals trying to remove the stigma of coming forward for the first time. After all, this is a voluntary thing, people have to be willing to do it in the end and we have to persuade them. Q23 Mrs Browning: Forgive me if I have missed this particular grouping in Sir John's report. Among the older adults, those over the age of 40, there has been quite a move to encourage people who perhaps have never worked or who have worked in sheltered accommodation and who have either a physical or a learning disability to get into employment. If we look back at the education system, many of them will not have received what we would regard as a normal education. Statementing itself did not come in until the Eighties. So there is a whole generation out there potentially available for the workforce but who, apart from their other difficulties in accessing work because of their disability, will almost certainly have missed out on some of the basic skills in literacy and numeracy. I just wonder how you are handling that group because they clearly do need special consideration. How are you approaching that group? Sir David Normington: It is the essence of this programme to try to be inclusive and to reach all kinds of groups. The answer to each question is you have to reach them in a different way. Ms Pember: That has been a priority group of people for us. For the people with specific learning difficulties, which can be severe to moderate to just mild, we have had to have different strategies for each one. We have worked with employers. The four big ones that have been exemplars are Asda, Tescos, Walkers and Remploy who have worked with us to develop programmes so that they can recruit people from exactly that catchment of the population you are talking about. The fact that we have got those large employers and Remploy working with us has been an exemplar to other employers to think that they can actually take on these types of programme as well. Then we produce support like toolkits and Learn Direct learning centres. Just on the mobility point, coming back to your rural issues, it is the same for these employers as well. We have introduced online testing so that we can actually take an exam centre in a bus out into the community or to an employer's premises and the person can do the test or the assessment online where they work. Q24 Mrs Browning: I hope you will indulge me on this as it is almost the last day of this Parliament. I have got a difficulty with a lot of these schemes that do not seem to be approached by a joined‑up government approach in terms of adults and training and learning. I have just had a constituency case where a chap who is on a work‑based learning for adults course is on a course and they have told him that the training is going to cease at the same time as his short‑term work‑based contract ceases, which will mean he has a shortfall of about two months in completing the training course he has been put on. I know this is not specifically what we are looking at here. If you look at this whole area of adults and getting them trained and getting them into work, it is all part of the same package. Why do we do things like that to people? Why do we suddenly cut them off at the knees? I have had a letter from Jobcentre Plus this week for this constituent of mine. In response to me they have said they will extend the training for him but there will still be a shortfall of three weeks at the end of the course. Does this make sense in anybody's language? Why are we putting people through all these hoops? Sir David Normington: I cannot answer the specific case, of course. It is our aim to join up our different services better. We are trying to make this programme one in which Jobcentre Plus and DWP work very closely with the Department and the Learning and Skills Council. All across our training programmes we are trying to ensure that those sorts of gaps do not open up. That is all I can say really. We absolutely understand that issue and it is at the top of our agenda. Mr Haysom: We have to work increasingly closely with Jobcentre Plus and other agencies to overcome the kind of issues that you are flagging there. Q25 Mrs Browning: Thank you for that. This person is learning to be a plumber on a work -based learning for adults course and yet we learn that somehow they are going to cut the course off before the qualification. It does not make sense, does it? It is a pretty crazy idea, is it not? Sir David Normington: It does not seem very sensible. Mrs Browning: I am glad you agree with me on that. Thank you. Q26 Mr Allan: Sir David, it is good to look at a report where a Public Service Agreement target has been met. It is a rare treat on this Committee for us to see a target being met like this. You are lucky you have not heading up the Department of Transport, for example, with their targets on congestion because they are miles off. You have met this 2004 target. You have got a much more ambitious target for 2010 which looks like it is going to be as challenging as some of the ones we look at in other departments. Are you confident we are going to get there? Sir David Normington: It becomes more and more challenging. It has doubled and then there is a three‑fold target. Am I confident? Yes. We would not have accepted this target otherwise. These targets are negotiated. We start from a view that we have to hit this target in order to make an impact on the problem. The problem is large and therefore we need to have large ambition. In order to meet it we will have to have a much bigger impact on those in the workplace and those who are hidden from us. We have concentrated in the early part of this strategy on the people who are unemployed who we can identify through our contacts with various parts of some of the statutory services and public services. We have begun to now move on to people who are in employment or entering employment and that is how we will make a big impact. The big private sector employers are going to be really important to us here. We have got the whole of the Civil Service committed as employers to dealing with these issues. That is how we are going to get to these numbers. Q27 Mr Allan: The target you have got is about inputs, it is about giving training to people and that is still set against this very large number of people who are yet to be addressed. If we look at page 15, Table 6, which compares countries, even if you meet that target, are we going to be more like Germany or the Netherlands or a north European country, which are down at about 10%, or are we hoping to get up to the US level which is just a few per cent off where we are now? What sense do you have of where we are trying to get to? By 2010, if you get these numbers in, what will we look like in that table? Sir David Normington: Can I just correct you on one point? The targets are a measure of outputs because they are a measure of qualifications achieved. What we actually measure is whether someone has moved up a level, so it is a real measure of achievement. We also measure the number of people in training, but the target is related to outputs. I asked this question when I was preparing for this Committee meeting and we do not know the answer because we do not know what is going to happen to all the rest. Our ambition is to move as far up this table as we can. I would suspect that if we achieve the 2010 target we will be in the upper half of this table. Q28 Mr Allan: The other responsibility is school age education. I was quite shocked in Table 7, page 16, to see that the 16 to 19 year old group are really no better than those who are 55 plus. You have put loads of money into the education system. What this looks like is that 16 year olds are leaving school with the same levels of illiteracy and innumeracy as people who left school 30 years ago. My common sense assumption would be that that should not be the case, that general levels for school leavers should be improving over time. Sir David Normington: And they are. I think there are two things to be said about that. One is that there are some really steady improvements coming through now in the achievements of secondary school pupils in literacy and numeracy which we will begin to see reflected in this, but they are not reflected there yet. Secondly, what seems to happen here is that younger people go on in employment picking up these skills. What I think happens is that as 16 to 19 year olds become 20 to 25 year olds they will show up much better against the measure of literacy and numeracy, so you have a progression through. Many of those young people are going on learning either in employment or in further education. Q29 Mr Allan: So the number of 16 to 19 year olds will shrink over time. The ones already at 45 will have had a few years of shrinking, will they? Sir David Normington: That would be my expectation. I hope so. The absolutely key thing here is the improvement that is coming through from primary schools and secondary schools. We ought to be seeing the impact of that in the next two or three years. Q30 Mr Allan: And we should be looking for that if people are interested in value for money. Sir David Normington: It is essential. That will enable us to keep this movement towards focusing the Skills for Life programme on adults who missed out. Q31 Mr Allan: Paragraph 16 on page 7 talks about the Learning and Skills Councils' funding for literacy, language and numeracy being 40% higher than for other comparable programmes. I wanted to ask whether the funding going into this is additional because there is a perception locally that things like adult education courses, which are not directly tied into these kinds of targets, are somehow suffering because all the money is now being directed to the targets. That may be an explicit result of government policy. It would be helpful to be clear of the extent to which this is additional money and the extent to which you expect it to divert money away from other forms of adult education or LSC funded work. Sir David Normington: You can see from the figures in the report, although it is true generally, that over this Parliament the amount of resource going into training has been growing. In the lifetime of this programme so far we have actually been increasing the resource and it has been additional resource. I am aware of the worries that there are about adult and community provision. What the Government said in its recent White Paper is that it is committed to preserving broadly that level of provision. In fact, we are spending something like just over £200 million on that provision through local authorities at the moment compared with about £140 million in 2001, so that budget has been increasing as well. What the Government has not said is it will go on increasing that provision, but it has said that it will be looking for ways of broadly preserving that provision. However, that cannot mean that it is all frozen in aspic for all time. Within that budget of around £200 million there will be provision coming and going. There is a huge amount of adult and community learning goes on. I think the latest survey showed that under a million people are on those sorts of programmes and many of them are paying by the way. It is quite normal for you to pay if the courses are subsidised. We have asked the LSC to have a look at the balance of that provision but with the aim of broadly protecting it. Mr Haysom: And that is what we are doing. One of the things that we are quite keen to do is to increase the proportion of provision that actually leads to the qualifications that are part of the target because it does seem to be self‑evident that we should be trying to target that as best we possibly can. You will have seen within the report something like 44% of what we currently do does not lead to a qualification. We want to reduce that by getting it to lead to a qualification. We want to do that very sensitively. Q32 Mr Allan: I had a query about the funding of services for those who have autism and who still benefit from education post-16 but for whom that is not necessarily going to lead to a qualification. Mr Haysom: That is why we want to do it sensitively and at a very local level, to make sure that we respond to those needs. We will never see a situation where 100% of this activity is going to lead to targets because that would be an absolute nonsense. Q33 Mr Allan: The perception is that if it ain't got a qualification attached it ain't got any money attached. Mr Haysom: That should not be. The guidance is very clear. Q34 Mr Allan: My other point is on the relationship with employers. Are LSCs any better than techs? Techs were supposed to bring all the employers in and get them all signed up and a lot of them found that was very difficult. My perception is that the LSCs have found it equally difficult. Is it not the case from an educationalist point of view that the SME sector in Britain is pretty grotty? It does not prioritise training and education. It almost has the approach of you should not train them because then they will improve their skills and go off and get a job somewhere else. Do you not still find that prevalent? Sir David Normington: I believe that Learning and Skills Councils are an improvement on techs. We have brought together in Learning and Skills Councils training and further education. Techs were not responsible for all that. I do not think just doing that makes it any easier to tackle the problem that some employers do not train. What we are doing is providing the LSC with a lever, through the national employment training programme, for focusing precisely on that problem and I do not think the techs had that lever. This ought to be a major step forward. Mr Haysom: Our job is a different job to the techs' job. Part of our job is to engage with local employers. It is tough, there is no denying it. Part of the programme here is about motivating employers to get involved. The marketing campaign that David referred to earlier has been a great spur for that and the employer training programme, which is at a pilot stage at the moment but it will be rolled out in due course, is already showing it is possible to make that difference. Q35 Mr Allan: I want to talk about your advertising. We have some of the advertising shown in Table 26 on page 41. You have got a "Call us to get rid of your gremlins advert". I am interested to know whether you have measured the success or otherwise of these. My reaction to them was quite negative. I would be interested to know the extent to which you have assessed them from a value for money point of view and found them to be value for money or otherwise. Sir David Normington: We have. They are not aimed at you! It has been one of the most successful campaigns in reaching the people we are trying to reach. I can provide you with the evaluation of them which is very, very positive. It does get very high recognition among the group; it is something like over 90%. Q36 Mr Allan: It is a bit like Howard from the Halifax. Sir David Normington: It has caused 300,000 people to contact the helpline, with a very high proportion of people then taking up some provision or taking some action. It has been remarkably successful. You have to follow it up with lots of local advertising, some related to the gremlins, some not. It cannot be the only thing we do. It has been very effective. Not everybody likes it, but it is targeted on that group. The group does relate to it. The idea of the gremlin which is stopping them doing what they want to do does seem to work. Mr Allan: That is good to hear. Thank you very much. Q37 Mr Williams: If we look at the table of international competitors in Figure 6 on page 15, it is really quite appalling that we have lower levels of literacy and numeracy than 13 of the 20 countries listed there when you think of the priority that is supposed to have been given to education over the post‑war years. What this report does not do is address where it all went wrong. It had to go terribly wrong somewhere, did it not, for the figures to be this bad? Our children are as capable as other nation's children so it must be the education system that is the problem. Sir David Normington: I think you have to draw that conclusion. I pondered this because obviously these figures being this low in this league table is really disappointing. It must mean that not enough people have been leaving school with the levels of literacy and numeracy which are desirable and in the post‑war years that must have been so. Q38 Mr Williams: That is exactly what it says in paragraph 1.4 and yet we have done nothing to try to identify why that went so wrong. If we do not know what caused it to go wrong, at least not directly, we will not know what the things are we have to do to put it right, will we? Ms Pember: The previous work to our strategy had been done by Sir Claus Moser in the Moser Report that came out in 1998/99 and he did reflect on what had gone wrong in previous generations and there was a mixture of factors, one of which is culture. The importance of mathematics in England has not been seen as that important for a very long time. Another one may have been that we allowed many young people to leave school at 14 and then at 16 without the prerequisite qualifications that they needed for the rest of their lives. The second thing was about adults themselves not wanting to go back to learn in this area of work. Q39 Mr Williams: The point about numeracy is clearly correct in what you say there, but when you then look at the bar diagram in Figure 7, the literacy figure is almost identical. It was not just a numeracy cultural problem, there was a literacy cultural problem. Our figures are more than double those of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. Sir David Normington: I think it reflects on an education system which did not focus enough on literacy and numeracy and, of course, that is what we have been trying to put right for over ten years now. If you look at the achievements of 11 year olds ten years ago and the achievements of 16 year olds at GCSE level in English and maths ten years ago, fewer than half of all 11 year olds were getting to the accepted levels of reading and writing and maths at 11. In a sense that is what we have been trying to put right. I think it must mean that over a lot of years there have been one group of pupils in the education system that have been doing wonderfully well and some have been missing out. Q40 Mr Williams: It seems to me perverse that there should be opposition from some supposedly knowledgeable sources to the concept of testing. As we were not testing I assume we did not know it was this bad, did we? Sir David Normington: We did not. Q41 Mr Williams: Have we discovered anything as a result of tests? Sir David Normington: In the late Eighties we did not have a National Curriculum, we did not have tests, we did not know enough about what people were achieving against the national standard and that meant that we did not know at all what the baseline was. Q42 Mr Williams: We went through all manner of political correctness in literacy and your children picked magical ways of self‑education and this was allowed to dominate in so‑called academic quarters for years. It must have damaged the careers of numerous youngsters and their prospects. Sir David Normington: I think you cannot argue with the figures. Clearly not enough adults have literacy and numeracy at the levels needed to succeed. In a sense that is why the focus ‑ I never apologise for it ‑ in school education is on, first of all, giving people the basics. If compulsory education cannot do that then it is not achieving, is it? Q43 Mr Williams: I am agreeing entirely with what you are saying. When you go back to the days of National Service, at that time one did have a form of measurement because much of the Army's education service was devoted to teaching people to read and write. Someone I grew up with graduated and went into the Army. I remember him saying how he could not believe the gratitude you would get from big burly characters in uniform who could read for the first time. We have known for a long time there was something wrong and yet for some reason no one was willing to address it. Everyone seemed to be afraid of those who were preaching the doctrine of political correctness on literacy. Sir David Normington: It seems that people were not addressing that. I have been in this world for ten years and in all that time we have been addressing it and it is one of the most important ---- Q44 Mr Williams: I am not criticising you for that. Sir David Normington: I know that. I agree with you really. That is why it is such an important priority. Q45 Mr Williams: It is frustrating, all those wasted decades. Sir David Normington: It is frustrating because when you are faced with a table like this it is very upsetting. It is partly what has held the productivity of the workforce back here over a lot of years. Q46 Mr Williams: Even the Army does not want these people now. It had to take them when we had National Service. Everyone had to do their National Service and, therefore, they had to take them, but nowadays it is more difficult because of the nature of any equipment they have to use. Sir David Normington: That is true. That is why the Army has literacy and numeracy as one of the central things that it provides new recruits with, particularly the Army because it needs people sometimes to do quite a technical job. Q47 Mr Williams: It is not the day of the universal Army when every young man went in. Sir David Normington: They take 15,000 a year, that is all. Q48 Mr Williams: It is more selective and they are touching on a small group. Sorry, I meandered off on a personal hobbyhorse there. Can we look at chart 18, page 30, the section on English for speakers of other languages? Obviously this is an increasingly important subject. I have probably not had the time to go in-depth into the report that I should have, but do we have separate targets in this area for attainment? Sir David Normington: No, we do not. We do have performance indicators under the headline targets to measure how we are doing on English as a second language. English as a second language is part of the overall vision, so what we are measuring is literacy, numeracy and achievement in English as a second language. Q49 Mr Williams: You cannot draw comparisons because you are not dealing with comparable groups. In the English for speakers of other languages you are dealing with a high proportion of people who have a propensity to learn and a disposition and motivation to learn, I would have thought. Sir David Normington: Yes. Q50 Mr Williams: I am not trying to draw comparisons between one and the other. I see you have talked of 3.7 billion somewhere, but what proportion now goes into education for speakers of other languages? It is very important to us. Sir David Normington: Yes, it is. I think Mr Haysom can answer that. Mr Haysom: It is of growing importance, as you rightly say. Back in 2001 it represented 22% of learners going through; it is now up to 31%, so it is growing all the time. One of our big challenges is to be able to respond to that increasing demand. Q51 Mr Williams: How actively are we promoting the opportunity to learn in the market because with some groups there is a much lower priority given to allowing women to be educated than getting men educated? Are we making any penetration into those who are otherwise treated with a sort of sexist non-integration of a large proportion of the immigrant population who may not be encouraged to learn the language? Are we trying to ensure there is a degree of equal participation? Mr Haysom: Yes, we are. We recognise that is a very big challenge and very specific challenge. Personally, I have seen some really good work on this. In some areas of Birmingham there are some good examples, as there are throughout London. There is some really good, very targeted work to encourage some of the harder to reach groups. In overall terms, we have a high proportion of ethnic minorities taking part in the skills monitoring, so we are reaching lots of them. Sir David Normington: Obviously as a way to reach those groups you have to use the community groups. It has to be very local. Q52 Mr Williams: Tell me about that. Sir David Normington: In fact, an important component of this programme is to work with local community groups who can reach these hard to reach groups like Bangladeshi women, for instance. That is an important part of this programme and it has been quite successful. Obviously it is in certain parts of the country. Do you want to say a bit more? Ms Pember: We did a large survey two years ago that went down to ward level about how many people need support in literacy, numeracy and language, which we had never done before. We can match that with data about participation. There have been some absolutely first class projects, one done in the Medway in Kent where they were able to identify that certain Asian women were not participating so they went and found a community group that could give them access to those women. There is some really good work there. Q53 Mr Williams: That is very encouraging. How far is that sort of information disseminated more widely around the UK? This is a good example but is it a good example that is now being promulgated and how is it being promulgated? How is it being stimulated? Mr Haysom: If I may pick up on that? Q54 Mr Williams: Please, I do not mind who answers. Mr Haysom: I think it is fair to say that because of the speed with which this programme was put in place and the journey that David described earlier about how far we have travelled, perhaps the Learning and Skills Council was not as smart as it could have been about sharing best practice. We are now doing that very actively. We now have regional plans which describe exactly what we are doing in each area and we share across the regions the examples of best practice to make sure that we learn from each other. That is a very important part of the way forward. Q55 Mr Williams: The particularly good example you quoted, did you say Chatham? Ms Pember: Medway. It is Chatham. Q56 Mr Williams: Would it be possible to let us have a note on this so we can put it as an annex in the information and we can draw it to the attention of our own local communities as well? That would be very helpful. One final point: we dealt with prisons and one of our colleagues came up with a very original solution as far as prisons are concerned and the low attainment of literacy. He is not here today but he said that they should not be allowed out until they had reached a certain standard. We did point out that this would mean in many cases pickpockets would be sentenced to life! You will gather it was not one of our recommendations as a Committee but it was an interesting side view. Jobcentre Plus: what are they doing that is different from what the colleges for further education are doing and how cost-effective is one as opposed to the other? Sir David Normington: For quite a lot of people claiming benefits and Jobseeker's Allowance, Jobcentre Plus is the frontline service and they now do the initial screening to identify people who they think have literacy or numeracy needs at the point of claiming benefit. Then they refer them to a more detailed assessment if they judge that is needed and behind that is the provision. Some of that provision might be further education colleges, it will depend, it might be a community group. They will look for the best type of provision. It is not very easy to answer your question because Jobcentre Plus is the frontline point and then there will be a referral to a number of different agencies. Ms Pember: If I could just expand slightly. Jobcentre Plus advisers are now all trained to help diagnose where somebody has got literacy or numeracy need. They can refer them for a further assessment and then they signpost them to a programme. Some of the programmes are funded by Jobcentre Plus. The short intensive programme where the adviser thinks it will make a difference means they can go in, have the programme and go off to work. The new White Paper expands on the Jobcentre skills course, so we have people in Jobcentres whose main job is to make sure that people turn up for the learning, make sure people stay in learning, and if they get a job - this will be piloted next year - they make sure that somewhere in the community that learning continues so we do not have an example of what we have just heard from this side. Mr Williams: Thank you very much, that was most interesting. Q57 Mr Allan: I would like to follow up on precisely that area. To understand from the customer's point of view, if I turned up at Jobcentre Plus in Sheffield next week and I did not have Level 1 skills, Jobcentre Plus would contract to provide me with those Level 1 skills from DWP money, would they? Potentially I could go to Sheffield College funded by Jobcentre Plus. Ms Pember: In Sheffield they have got quite a good network that is quite mature. You would be funded under what we call the 16 hour rule, so you would be funded by the Learning and Skills Council but at Sheffield College. Q58 Mr Allan: If I turned up at the Learning and Skills Council because I was in work or I was a spouse at home not on benefit, therefore not Jobcentre Plus, I would get the same service? Ms Pember: Absolutely. Q59 Mr Allan: But the 16 hour rule ---- Ms Pember: For Jobcentre Plus clients they must be available for work and, therefore, they should be putting work first. What the new Skills Strategy is about is saying training for that individual can be as important as work and it might be better to put them in training and to pass the course so that when they go into a job that job is sustained, they are not made redundant. Q60 Mr Allan: But you have to shoehorn their training into 16 hours in order to avoid problems? Ms Pember: Not with the new Skills Strategy. Q61 Mr Allan: That is where you have put the flexibility in because this is something that people complained to us about historically. Ms Pember: Absolutely. Q62 Mr Allan: If it is Level 2 that they need, Jobcentre Plus does not fund Level 1 to Level 2, does it? Ms Pember: No, but if that would help the person's career prospects they would signpost the person to a college where they would get free training. Q63 Mr Allan: The monies all go through the Learning and Skills Council so it is in DfES's budget, not in DWP's budget. Ms Pember: It simplifies things that way. Q64 Mr Allan: As you develop this new concept, and I know Jobcentre Plus and private sector companies that we have looked at are providing a lot of training and so on, are we going to see a divergence potentially between Jobcentre Plus diverting to private sector training providers and Learning and Skills Council to colleges? Ms Pember: No. The Learning and Skills Council often funds the same private training providers, something like an apprenticeship scheme, so Jobcentre Plus has got the choice. If it feels it wants to signpost it to an independent provider they can do that if it is right for that person. If it is right for the person they could be signposted by the LSC to the same activity. Sir David Normington: Jobcentre Plus will remain a service for individuals first and it will be looking for the best provision for those individuals. Q65 Mr Allan: Where it works the way you want it to work, like in Sheffield now, it is a single family of providers and an LSC and a Jobcentre Plus working together without anybody worrying about whether it is DWP or DfES. Sir David Normington: I think an individual should not be worried about that, they need to get on the programme that suits them. Q66 Mr Allan: I was worried that the individual might have to be worried about it, but you are telling me they do not. Sir David Normington: Our aim is that will be the position over the whole of the country in time. Sheffield is ahead. Chairman: Mr Allan is retiring from Parliament, so ---- Mr Allan: So I may be at Jobcentre Plus next week! Q67 Chairman: Retiring at the tender age of 39, sensible chap. Thank you very much for those questions. This international comparison that Mr Williams reminded us about is interesting. For instance, I noticed that there are some figures here for France and French speaking Switzerland and they are doing so much better than we are. One of the things they do in continental education systems is force children to redouble every year who do not meet the minimum standard. I know this is rather outwith what we are talking about this afternoon, but why do we perform so badly? In France they force them to redouble the class. Sir David Normington: They go back through the same year in other words. Q68 Chairman: They go back through the same year if they do not meet the minimum standard, so they are not just left floundering as they move up the school, constantly falling further and further back. I think the redoublement is a very good system. Sir David Normington: Increasingly, in Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 we are looking for ways of doing just that. Not making people go through the whole year in every subject but not being able to progress in English and maths until they have reached a certain level and really sticking at it and, if necessary, giving them some flexibility to relax other bits of the curriculum so that they can continue to study English and maths until they get to the correct levels. It is such an important basis for subsequent progression. In the 14-19 White Paper, which the Government published a few weeks ago, which was not commented upon was a very, very important focus on just this issue of how you make sure in Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 that secondary school pupils get that basic level of function on maths and literature. If they do not their life chances and their employment chances will be reduced. Q69 Chairman: Okay, Sir David, thank you very much for a very interesting hearing. I am sure the key to it is to try to improve the qualifications of existing teachers, particularly because we are dealing with a very difficult area. Thank you very much for answering our questions in your usual positive and charming manner, we are very grateful to you. Sir David Normington: Thank you very much. I wish you all well, Mr Allan particularly. Chairman: Thank you very much. |