Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 130-139)

SIR ANDREW FOSTER AND DR ROBERT CHILTON

16 NOVEMBER 2005

  Q130 Chairman: Can I welcome Sir Andrew and Dr Chilton to our proceedings. If you do not mind, once we get going I will be calling you by your first names, which will give a fair level of both informality and courteousness in this Committee. We try to strive for that balance, but that does not mean to say we will not ask you searching questions. You are both known as very competent public servants. I have known you, Andrew, from health days and in many guises, and Robert, you have had a wide experience in a number of all the professions. I always think of people like you as the heavy mob which the Government brings in when they have a difficult job to do, and possibly looking at FE is one of the more difficult ones. Is there anything you would like to say to start us off, Sir Andrew, or do you want to go straight into questions?

  Sir Andrew Foster: No. Frankly, you will know that Charles Clarke asked me to do this a year ago. It has felt like a difficult and demanding assignment. Clearly the Government were keen and interested because they felt as if they had put a lot of strategic work into FE, but I do not think they felt necessarily they were making as much progress as they wanted to and they asked me to look at it and report about it by this time this year. Frankly, I am very happy to take questions because I think that will get us into the heart of things more quickly.

  Q131  Chairman: Yes. Sir Andrew, with all your experience when Charles Clarke asked you to do this you must have said to him, "But there's a Skills White Paper, there has been a skills task force, there is Leitch coming out with the thing from the Treasury on this. Why ask me to do this when so many other people seem to be clamouring all over this already?"

  Sir Andrew Foster: I do not know that he explained it in great detail to me other than saying, "We feel like we've put a range of different strategic work into this but somehow it doesn't ever seem to have pulled together in the way that we want it to, and I'd be grateful for you to look at it and give us some ideas about how this could be pulled together in a more coherent way."

  Q132  Chairman: You are probably going to get another call to pull the Education White Paper together in the same way, Andrew. That was a little aside. Charles Clarke asked you to do this, so really he is asking you to give an overview of what are the major challenges, and so on. That comes out very clearly from the report. Already you are getting a reasonable resonance to the report, but does it worry you that some of the vested interests like the Association of Colleges have welcomed the report? Perhaps you think now that you were not radical enough?

  Sir Andrew Foster: I am slightly surprised at the level of acceptance which it has received, albeit the way the media played the report on the first day was to play up one of the particular recommendations about contestability, which was only one of sixty, and clearly the Association of Colleges did not like that very much, but generally I think they are being given very focus-studied attention about what the long-term direction is and in recognition of what they do extremely well, which I think is quite a lot. Also, I guess there has been quite a candid view in this report of challenging how the superstructure here, the Department, the LSC and the regulatory machine, works and sometimes does not work. I suspect that means that the AoC probably feel this is an objective view of things.

  Q133  Chairman: Yes. In terms of when you came to look at this, you must have looked at this and thought surely at some stage, with all your experience in the public sector and as auditor within the public sector, here is this vast bureaucracy, the Learning and Skills Council, which is the intermediatory between the Department and delivery of this FE function, and yet here is the Government producing a White Paper which actually wants to get away from any intermediary, local government, which again both of you know quite a lot about? It seems to want to have a direct relationship in funding and in policy direct with the schools, with independent schools across the nation, many more than colleges. Did you not at any time consider why on earth there is this vast learning and skills body as an intermediary between the Department and the colleges? It just seems that the two do not match up very well.

  Sir Andrew Foster: I certainly did spend some time, and Bob and I spent some time talking about what were some radical options of different sorts of change, and clearly one would be that you swept aside some of the existing infrastructure, and clearly the LSC would have been one of those challenges that you could make. The more I looked at it, however, FE actually feels like a very complicated situation. Its history in some ways feels like it is an accident about how it came together and it feels like it has had initiative upon initiative upon initiative, and I bluntly did not think eventually that the system was mature enough to be able to take something which went, let us say, directly from Whitehall to the locality. I think with most public services I have ever looked at you end up with a national level, a regional level and a local level. If you look at the Health Service and look at local government, you typically have that and I did not at this stage feel that this was a sufficiently developed set of arrangements whereby you could do that, but what I have gone on to suppose is that one reduces these organisations as much as you can because it does feel like the overarching regulatory arrangements are over-heavy, complicated and sometimes do not work very well.

  Q134  Chairman: That comes through right throughout the report, does it not? There is a feeling that you are irritated by how much baggage the FE sector has to carry in order to get on with its job?

  Sir Andrew Foster: Yes. I call it systemic problems, and if I were to give you two or three examples of what I mean, the fact that colleges were incorporated in 1993 and notionally given wide-ranging freedom, frankly then to put an LSC locality alongside which had detailed planning powers actually builds in conflict immediately because they have two different aspirations, in my view. That is what we say in the report. Secondly, I think quality matters a lot and I will not take you through them but there are something like five different quality and inspection bodies involved. In my book that is dysfunction. Then, frankly, I think at times there has not been enough clarity of roles between what the LSC does nationally and what the DfES does nationally. The point is, if you put all of those different things together I think that makes it quite difficult for colleges to do as well as they might if they have an overarching managerial system which does not have clarity. I think there are some challenges to be made to colleges, but I felt that one of the things I needed to do was to make a challenge to how the overarching system works.

  Q135  Chairman: But you did not take the radical options which I suggested to the Secretary of State ten days ago, to get rid of the LSC?

  Sir Andrew Foster: Clearly that was an option which I looked at and worked my way through. I do, however, think two things really. I do think that there is a place to look at regional economic context in terms of what "skills" needs to be. So I do think that there is a proper lightweight role to be played both at a local level to the local authority and other people there, at a regional level to RDAs and what the regions' needs are, and I think clearly there is a national need. A democratic government has an obligation to make its strategic direction. So I think there are roles at those different levels. I just think that they should be much lighter weight than they currently are.

  Q136  Chairman: Your judgment in this was not tempered by the fact that the Learning Skills Council and the Department were sort of your secretariat?

  Sir Andrew Foster: No, not really.

  Q137  Chairman: I know your reputation. I was not trying to infer that you would not stand up to them, but these people are giving you the information and planning your itinerary?

  Sir Andrew Foster: Yes. Maybe at a later stage Bob and I can tell you the different range of research that we put in place, 10 different levels of research, which we independently commissioned. So whilst we were administratively supported by the Department, I do not think they were ever able to stop us from making the challenge that we wanted to make.

  Q138  Chairman: We will come back to some of these things, and my colleagues will be getting impatient with me, but one last thing I wanted to say in these introductory questions is, what was your impression of what the market out there was saying? We have interviewed the Director-General of the CBI, Peter Jones, and what comes across when you talk to the employers, the people who are going to employ the people who are trained, who want highly trained people, is that they do not speak with one voice. We now have the Sector Skills Councils, we have a whole range of organisations representing different sectors in trade associations. What was the impression you were getting from employers?

  Sir Andrew Foster: A mixed one. You will see in the report there are some excellent examples of where colleges are in very good relationships with local employers and things are working extremely well. There is no doubt, if you look at some of the examples, that that is the case. However, when you then talk to the CBI you get the sort of messages they have brought out as this report has come out, where they are much more keen on the idea of these services being provided by private sector providers. They want contestability, they want responsiveness in terms of at the beginning of the day and the end of the day very competitive pricing. So I think the CBI has been quite consistent. The only thing I ended up saying back to the CBI, and which we say in the report, is that I would be critical of colleges in this area, but I also think that colleges have had a range of unfair criticism because I do not think many employers are anything like as well-organised on this front as they might be and I think there is a challenge to the CBI and employers to be made, which is how clear are you what your medium term skills needs are? Have you made a business case of how much it would cost? Have you then gone out to the market, be it a private provider or colleges, to have this conversation? In meeting employers, I frankly found that there were lots who had not done that and that there was some rank prejudice against colleges as well as some genuine criticism. I suppose a report like this is attempting to be objective and saying that if we want this to work we need to have some changed behaviour by colleges, but we also need to have some changed behaviour from employers, and I do not think the CBI should be allowed to duck behind genuine criticism not to take the mote from their own eyes as well.

  Q139  Chairman: Were there areas where colleges were more successful? In some of the visits I have made it seems that there is a better, more harmonious relationship between the employers in the community and the college when you are in an area where the manufacturing industry is still pretty buoyant and there is a regular relationship which has been honed over time. Where I have been to colleges where we have seen the post-industrial society arrive slightly faster and there are less of the traditional jobs and we are looking for training for new skills, there seems to be more of a problem of a match between local employers. Did you pick that up at all?

  Sir Andrew Foster: Bob in fact did some work on that, if you would be happy for him to tell you about that.

  Dr Chilton: Exactly that point. If I can reach back into my past, I come from Middlesbrough. In my youth the technical college knew exactly what it was relating to, the chemicals industry, the steel industry, ship-building, bridge-building, but the economy has changed. Those industries are still there, but it is much more diversified. So when you ask yourself, "Who are the local businesses?" an increasing proportion of people are self-employed, they are in small unit businesses, they are in the service industries and in some parts of the country that is a much more generalised pattern than in a place like that. So colleges need to relate to business, yes, but they need to relate to the economy of the locality and the region, and the nation eventually. That is why the Sector Skills Council process is so important, that it creates a remit, looking forward—Leitch will add to this—as to what is the economic remit for UK plc which you can then cascade down. Local employers will embellish that, embroider that. They will particularly focus on the productivity needs, once they have got employable people out of the local reservoir of the economy, then honing their skills to match what that particular business requires. The first task is to create that pool of employability. The second task is to be able to draw people out of that and hone that skill for productivity.

  Chairman: Thank you for that.


 
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