Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-129)
MR CHRIS
BANKS AND
MR MARK
HAYSOM
7 NOVEMBER 2005
Q120 Mr Marsden: What concerns me,
and probably other Members of the Committee, several times in
your evidence today you have said you took a great deal of evidence
from this, it took a great deal of time to do that, no-one is
querying your productivity, what we are querying, I think, is
your ability to act and respond rapidly on it. One of the issues
that I am trying to ferret out, if I can put it that way, is your
ability at regional level to respond quickly to some of these
issues. That is why I say, do you think your regional directors
have enough powers of initiative and enough power to do that?
Mr Haysom: Yes, I do. What I do
not think they have enough of at the moment is support around
them. I do not believe there is enough consistency across the
Learning and Skills Council in terms of that support. Let me give
you an example. In the North West we have made great strides,
and partly made great strides because we appointed a Regional
Skills Director doing a particular job with a particular team
around him. We do not have a consistency of approach on that.
One of the things we are able to do is to do just that. There
was a question earlier about our ability to respond to Sector
Skills Councils, a very big part of what we have to do as an organisation
is to make life easy for those Sector Skills Councils because
they range from tiny organisations to very large ones. We are
going to have a consistent approach at regional level to enable
us to do just that. I do not think, by the way, that is remotely
Byzantine in terms of structure, I think it is a simplification.
Q121 Mr Marsden: No, that was not
what I described as Byzantine, it was the previous thing you—
Mr Haysom: —inherited, yes.
Q122 Mr Marsden: The thing you are
now replacing. My final question, which is a very specific question,
I just want to confirm what you said earlier. Am I right in thinking
that you said that the anticipation was that you were going to
save £800 million through this slimming down process?
Mr Haysom: Absolutely not. What
we are going to be doing is saving £40 million a year from
this point onwards. Just for the knowledge of the Committee, when
the LSC was created from its predecessor bodies, the FEFC and
the whole of the TEC movement, that was an annual saving of £50
million that was achieved then as well.
Q123 Mr Marsden: You are saying £40
million a year. What I would like to ask you then is the £40
million a year you are going to save through this process, has
that already been divvied up, as it were, or accounted for in
your spending assumptions and priorities for the next three years?
Mr Haysom: It is going to take
us a couple of years to achieve that, as you can imagine, in terms
of a payback. Any of you who have done this in business will know
you do not get it immediately. It is not in the current plans
at the moment but it has been made very clear that anything that
is saved is designed to go to the frontline.
Q124 Mr Marsden: When you have finally
got these sums of money saved from the process, will you look
again—bringing us circular to what we discussed—at
whether some of this money might not be provided for some of the
adult learners we were talking about?
Mr Haysom: As I said a second
ago, and I am sure Chris will concur with this, one of our very
biggest challenges as we go forward is this whole adult skills
issue. While we make it really clear that the priorities which
are identified we believe are the right ones, because it is difficult
to say why they would not be, we do believe there is a very real
issue as we go forward in terms of adult skills.
Mr Banks: Just to reinforce that,
but also to say, to be very blunt about it, if we only deal with
the skills of young people it will not be enough for us as a country.
We are absolutely on the same page on that, it is where we are
focusing now that we are really talking about.
Q125 Jeff Ennis: On the continuing
theme of reducing the skills gap, Chairman, one programme I have
been quite impressed with in Barnsley and Doncaster is the Entry
to Employment programme for the hard-to-reach youngsters, for
want of a better description, I think it is working. How integral
is that programme and the expansion of that programme to reducing
the regional skills gap, shall we say?
Mr Haysom: I think it is a hugely
important programme and I think we should be very proud across
the country of what has been achieved through it. What has been
particularly impressive in the last year has been that more and
more young people have been coming out of those programmes with
something very positive so they are coming out with employment
or they are coming out with enrolment on a course and an increasing
number of them are coming out and going into apprenticeships,
it is still a small number but it is an increasing number. It
is what we would call in the bureaucratic world, if I can use
that word, a positive progression. More and more of our young
people are getting positive destinations. I think the real issue
for us to work hard on is what happens to those young people who
are not even able to get on to the entry to employment stuff because
it is not the right course for them, it is kind of a pre-entry
to employment provision that we have got to make sure we have
got across the country. That is the bit we need to work hard on
to deliver.
Q126 Chairman: Apprenticeships, high
dropout rates, you were concerned about it a year ago, are you
still concerned about it?
Mr Haysom: Yes. Again, there have
been some very good improvements in what we would call framework
completions. More and more young people are staying on longer
within the Apprenticeship but it is still not where we would want
it to be. We still need further improvements and a lot of that
is about the quality of the provision that is offered and we are
working very hard to improve that. Some of it is about the nature
of the frameworks themselves and whether they are absolutely right
for employers.
Q127 Chairman: On some of these more
specific areas we are going to have you back as part of our inquiry
into learning and skills.
Mr Haysom: We would be delighted
to come back.
Q128 Dr Blackman-Woods: Can you tell
us why you published agenda for change ahead of the Foster
Review and the Leitch Review?
Mr Haysom: We have been working
on it for well over a year; we did because we went out and talked
to the sector about what was important to them and we talked to
them about what it is that they wanted to see changed. We did
that during the summer of 2004 and the work was then carried on
from there. We came to a point where we were able to publish and
I was able to go back out on a series of road shows—which
I apologise they were regional but it seemed to be the only efficient
way of doing it—and fed back to everybody involved what
had been achieved. What we did do was to make absolutely sure,
because you would expect us to do this, what we were talking about
in agenda for change was not going to clash in any way
with what Sir Andrew Foster was talking about in his review of
FE, and indeed, what Sandy Leitch is looking at in terms of his
review. There has been a very serious attempt to align that work
and to be able to say that is clearly stuff that the LSC should
just be getting on with and working with the sector to sort out.
What we do not want to do is tie that up for another year waiting
for various reports to emerge, but let us make sure within that
that it all fits together and that is what we have been trying
to do.
Q129 Dr Blackman-Woods: Will you
amend it if necessary or revise it after the Foster Review?
Mr Haysom: It depends what emerges,
does it not?
Chairman: Certainly, we will find both
of those reports very useful and we will be writing up our skills
report after that. Can I thank you very much, Chris and Mark,
for quite a long session. Hopefully, you have got some value out
of it; we certainly have. Can I thank my colleagues and Gurney's
who I slandered almost last time because I said they were Hansard
and Gurney's, I believe the Clerk tells me, has been going longer
than Hansard, not that these two ladies were there when they started!
We ought to ask them sometimes about the high skills they develop
in the job! Thank you all very much.
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