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.
|
