Memorandum submitted by the Adult Learning
Inspectorate (ALI)
1. FORMATION
1.1 The Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI)
is a product of the Learning & Skills Act 2000. An executive
non-departmental public body (NDPB), it is mainly the result of
a merger of the inspection remits of the former Further Education
Funding Council (FEFC) and the Training Standards Council (TSC).
To their work was added adult and community learning from Ofsted
and a wide range of wholly new duties, including the inspection
of Ufi learndirect, new welfare-to-work programmes funded
by the Department for Work and Pensions as they came along, such
as Workstep, and commissioned work for private businesses
which do not use public money to train their workforces, and for
the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Department of
Health. The remit of the ALI can therefore be summarised as comprising:
Workforce development; and
The scope of this remit extends to learning
carried out by every adult over the age of 18 who is not in higher
education, and everyone training at work over the age of 15.
1.2 The formation of the ALI four years
ago was a substantial piece of simplification and clarification
of regulatory arrangements. It involved winding-up FEFC and TSC
and transfer of staff to a new, built-for-purpose national administration
centre in Coventry, which opened in May 2002. Seventy-three inspectors
and 35 other staff transferred from the predecessor organisations
to ALI, which now has 248 staff in all, mostly home-based around
England. In a number of cases, the transfer entailed relocation
from Oxford to Coventry. The government's intention in selecting
Coventry as the centre for ALI was to create a national "campus"
for post-compulsory learning and skills. The Learning & Skills
Council (LSC), BECTA and, now, QIA are based in the city.
1.3 The one area where the new arrangements
were not simpler was inspection of further education colleges.
Instead of FEFC inspecting the whole organisation, the new Act
introduced delineation of inspection remits by learners' ages,
so that Ofsted holds responsibility for 14-18s and ALI for those
who are 19 plus. Ofsted was given powers to "direct"
and report upon all college inspections where its remit overlapped
with that of ALI. All these inspections are conducted jointly
using the Common Inspection Framework introduced by ALI
and Ofsted in 2001 and revised in 2005. Joint inspection of colleges
comprises around 23% of ALI work and a fraction of Ofsted's work.
Joint working has been reported as "seamless" by colleges.
ALI provides half of the lead inspectors for general further education
colleges and 60% of the inspectors. Higher education in FE colleges
remains outside these arrangements; the responsibility of QAA.
2. ACHIEVEMENTS
2.1 The ALI is regarded as a success by
its sponsors in government and its customers. Its four annual
audits by the National Audit Office have all been unqualified,
with no recommendations for improvement in the Management Letter
for 2004-05. ALI risk management is seen as exemplary. The organisation
has made a planned total underspend of £6 million on an annual
budget of under £30 million in the past two years and is
on target to return £1.5 million in efficiency savings to
DfES and DWP in 2005-06. (Grant expenditure £26.7 million
in 2005-06.) ALI achieved the Investors in People national standard
18 months after start-up. It is an Investor in Excellence (2005)
and a finalist for the Midlands Excellence award for the best-run
business in central England. It was national runner-up to Prudential
Assurance for Best Practice in a Fit-Out Project for its headquarters
building (2003); winner of the best Public Information Publication
for the chief inspector's annual report (2003); winner of the
CIPFA/PricewaterhouseCoopers award for Public Accountability and
Reporting (2004); winner of the Best (Car) Fleet Manager (2003)
and Best Place to Work in Information Technology (2005). An independent
staff survey by MORI placed the ALI in their top 10 organisations
nationally, on a range of measures of good management, well above
both the public sector and the private sector norms.
2.2 The ALI conducts around 1,200 provider
inspections a year, plus a number of survey reports. Recent notable
examples of these have been Safer Training (March 2005),
a study of welfare arrangements for recruits to the armed services
in the wake of the deaths at Deepcut; Building the future:
skills training in construction and building services (May
2005); The costs and benefits of ALI inspections (June
2005); and Aspects of vocational education and training in
Australia (August 2005). Survey reports are often published
electronically and distributed with the ALI's monthly newspaper,
Talisman.
3. CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
3.1 In a recent survey, over 85% of providers
said that their work had improved after ALI inspection. Respondents
said that between 40% and 90% of their improvement was directly
attributable to the inspection and its findings.
In response to the current public consultation
on the future of ALI, many favourable comments have been made
by customers:
"Members indicate they see no reason to
change their previous position of strong support for ALI as an
independent and separate inspectorate. Employers see little value
in joining it to Ofsted. We urge you to keep the inspectorates
for workplace training and education separate and focused on their
key challenges."
Sir Digby Jones, Director General, CBI
"The ALI should be retained. It provides
a thorough inspection of training providers and disseminates best
practice relating to training. The ALI's remit of activities,
incorporating both inspection and dissemination of best practice,
should be preserved. Given the ALI's strong performance, one has
to question the rationale for initiating radical reform."
Mike Harris, Business and Education Policy Adviser,
Institute of Directors
". . . There is no advantage in bringing
the ALI into the new body. It should be retained as a separate
inspectorate. It is vital to have a separate group of inspectors,
knowledgeable about the adult work-based learning route and understanding
the very different way it works, to help providers through the
inspection process and develop the quality of work-based learning."
Graham Hoyle, Chief Executive, Association of Learning
Providers
"While we agree that Every Child Matters,
we would argue that every adult does too. NIACE particularly values
the approach to inspection adopted by the ALItheir role
has been that of `critical friend' without any loss of rigour
or independence."
Alan Tuckett, Director, NIACE
3.2 These views were echoed by employers,
learning providers and other stakeholders, who participated in
a series of focus groups run by consultants on behalf of the DfES.
Reporting in October 2005, the consultants described inspection
as necessarily resembling an iron fist in a velvet glove: "something
that ALI appears to wear with grace".
4. THE LEARNING
AND SKILLS
SECTOR
4.1 In addition to the colleges, the adult
learning and skills sector consists substantially of private or
voluntary organisations, receiving a contribution to training
on the basis of contracts, mainly from the Learning & Skills
Council (LSC), Jobcentre Plus and the European Social Fund. Some
of them, notably employers, could readily withdraw from their
participation in government-assisted training, and thus a significant
part of their contribution to the national skills strategy, if
ALI's work failed to add value to their activities. The fact that
ALI does add value is reflected in a trebling of the numbers of
apprentices since the TSC was launched in 1997, as well as in
plaudits from companies with a worldwide reputation for quality,
such as BMW and Rolls-Royce. The proportion of work-based providers
rated inadequate has been driven down from 58% in 2001-02, to
25% in 2004-05 and under 10% in the early part of the second ALI
inspection cycle, begun in April 2005.
5. ADDING VALUE
5.1 ALI adds value by:
Deployment of 10 regional link inspectors,
working with the main funding bodies to tailor each inspection
to provider performance and development needs.
Publication of a monthly magazine,
Talisman, praising achievement and good practice, demonstrating
that excellence is attainable (7,000 subscribers).
Rigorous inspections, clearly indicating
where each provider stands on the way to excellence.
Operation of Excalibur, a
good-practice website receiving nearly 30,000 hits a month of
an average 15 minute duration, as well as publishing an "Inspection
Toolkit" and offering workshops on improvement to providers
in partnership with the Learning & Skills Development Agency
(LSDA).
Operation of the Quality Champions
awards for providers' quality managers, in partnership with the
Chartered Management Institute, and leading eventually to postgraduate
awards in quality assessment (already available to ALI inspectors),
validated by the University of Warwick.
Publication of clear, graded reports,
six weeks after inspection, with overall performance attested
by a certificate for each provider achieving grade 3 (satisfactory)
or above (gold award for grade 1, silver for grade 2, bronze for
grade 3).
Operation of the Provider Development
Unit, through which inspectors seconded away from inspection for
up to two years, work in collaboration with the funding bodies
to turn round weak providers.
Commissioned inspections for bodies
which are not subject to statutory regulation, which earned £1.7
million towards ALI's overhead in 2004-05. Business is said to
spend over £20 billion a year on training; government departments
a great deal in addition, for example the MoD spends £4.5
billion each year.
6. THE ALI'S
POSITION
6.1 The ALI Board understands the central
proposition of the consultation document to be that:
ALI would merge, becoming a part of an "enlarged
Ofsted", which would remain a non-ministerial government
department and be commonly known as "Ofsted", with a
single chief inspector working to a newly-created Board. The formal
designation of the enlarged body would be something like "the
inspectorate for children and learners". It appears that
ALI's quality improvement work would remain outside the enlarged
body, limiting its functions strictly to statutory regulation.
6.2 Although used to working with Ofsted
and respecting its work, the ALI Board has strong reservations
about this proposal on the grounds that:
The disparate scales of Ofsted and
ALI, with the former roughly eight times the size of the latter,
would in effect result in a takeover rather than a merger, with
a resulting loss of focus on adult learning and business.
The resistance being found among
employers to the proposal could, if it is persisted with, lead
to their effective withdrawal of support for the national skills
strategy.
No effective cost: benefit study
has been conducted, with work commissioned by DfES from one of
the major international accountancy practices in 2004 suggesting
that any savings would be nullified through transition costs for
between four and nine years after merger.
A merger on the terms proposed would
disrupt the learning and skills sector, much as did the changes
between 1999 and 2001, setting back the quality improvements now
coming through.
The proposed inspectorate for children
and learners is at odds with the consequences of Every Child
Matters at local level, where in most local authorities, children's
services (including compulsory education) are now usually separate
from adult services. It is also at odds with the proposed assignment
of CSCI's work in adult social care to the "health"
inspectorate, rather than the learning and skills inspectorate.
The cultures of the two organisations
are so different as to make true merger difficult to achieve,
consequent on the different types of customer each one serves.
6.3 The ALI Board strongly supports the
government's drive towards deregulation and self-regulation of
business. The indications are that an "enlarged Ofsted"
would have increased regulatory powers. ALI finds it hard to see
how increased regulation (which may well be appropriate for schools
and child protection) can co-exist with reduced regulation for
business, in a single unitary organisation.
6.4 ALI suggests that there has been inadequate
opportunity for clear formulation of the policy objectives which
the proposed merger seeks to meet. It also suggests that the complexity
and number of policy strands involved implies that there might
be several practicable ways to achieve "best fit", rather
than the stark choice between merger with Ofsted and the status
quo which has been presented for consultation. An adequate regulatory
impact assessment depends on full consideration of, and consultation
upon, a range of options for change, rather than just one. The
ALI Board does not believe that the status quo is ideal and does
not cling to it. Instead it seeks creative ways forward which
also save money and disruption and which reduce the risks to employer
engagement presented by the current proposal.
6.5 The Board believes that a number of
the characteristics of ALI's current operation, including governance
closely following that used in business under the Combined Code,
and the co-location of quality assessment and quality improvement
in order to raise standards, are essential features of the inspection
regimes of the future. It believes that while there might be exciting
opportunities for improving public services if ALI, Ofsted and
CSCI were to be brought together, these will be realised only
if there is a true merger, with the best features of all three
organisations coming together to form a new body. That is not
likely to be achievable under current proposals and the Board
therefore opposes the proposition described in the consultation
document.
October 2005
|