Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)
SIR ANDREW
FOSTER AND
DR ROBERT
CHILTON
16 NOVEMBER 2005
Q200 Mr Chaytor: So the answer is
no?
Dr Chilton: In terms of your taking
our thinking a little bit beyond where we stopped with the report,
what is quite interesting in the States is that they will close
down a school or a college, but they do not close down the delivery
of education from that building because the next day it continues
but under new governance and new management. So you can separate
out the two issues. One of the ideas already in the system, which
this report endorses, is hub and spoke. A lot of colleges want
to be hubs, but not too many are talking about being spokes, but
if you are at the failing end of delivery and somebody else is
skilled you can build an alliance to enable them to spoke quality
learning so that it continues in the locality.
Q201 Mr Chaytor: Thank you. You also
talk about colleges needing to listen more to their students,
to the learners and to employers. Is there such a thing as the
employer's voice or the learner's voice? Are we talking about
huge numbers of different opinions here?
Sir Andrew Foster: If we separate
them, because I think the needs and requirements are different,
a very important thing for us was to meet and listen to what the
learners said throughout this and you will see the report is peppered
with what the learners said to us. We should tell you before we
finish that there was a range of different researches that we
had and one of them was interviewing in depth 100 learners of
what their experiences were. What came through very strongly to
me was that if learners were listened to—and many of these
students, as you will know in this country, are people who are
disadvantaged either through their educational or personal domestic
circumstances—how much it increased motivation if people
felt they were being taken seriously. So for me, how you listen
to learners is a very important thing to increase motivation,
and motivation seems to me to give you a really strong chance
of improving quality. It is for that reason that we proposed learners'
panels in all colleges and that the board of the college should
then look at what the learners' panel says on an annual basis
and it should be obliged to say, "We listened. This is what
they said and this is what we are going to do about it, and this
is what is not very good at all." We also thought it would
be a very good thing that the LSC nationally had a learners' panel
and that learners should be able to say what they thought about
the national LSC. Before anybody says, "Gosh, this is so
much gobbledegook," you will see in here there is an example
of how this works in Denmark and it is very influential, and if
colleges do not do it they get fined. They do do it and it makes
students feel very good, and we involved the NUS in doing this
and we had the NUS at the launch of this the other day and they
said they had never been taken so seriously for a long time.
Q202 Chairman: You take that as a
compliment, do you?
Sir Andrew Foster: I do think
that the motivation of the students, especially if they come from
a disadvantaged environment, is a key feature of quality.
Q203 Mr Chaytor: What if the views
of the learners and the employers are in conflict, for example
the learners in a particular area may be pressing the college
to open a construction training facility at the local college
and the employers say, "Well, we would rather have a regional
facility run by the private sector"?
Q204 Sir Andrew Foster: I think the
local commissioner and management of the college have to make
a choice, but if I were to be managerially critical of this system
it would be the supply side, that the colleges very often are
running things to suit themselves, not malevolently but that is
the way they have always done it, and I would like to see a much
stronger input of what the student had to say and what the employer
had to say. I think it is quite possible that they would be in
conflict, but I think it would be a much better system if there
was regular input of what employers said and what students said.
That, I think, would make colleges even more relevant than they
currently are.
Chairman: Roberta, you were going to
take us through the last section, which is management challenges
locally and nationally.
Q205 Dr Blackman-Woods: Sir Andrew,
your report makes a number of interesting points about LSCs and
I think one interesting observation is that they have often acted
as a brake on FE development rather than an accelerator, but that
agenda for change might enable them to operate more effectively.
You say that the changes need to be monitored. Do you think it
appropriate that LSCs will be monitoring themselves?
Sir Andrew Foster: I think that
the DfES has an obligation to monitor what happens in the LSC.
It is the key oversight agency of this and I think the DfES must
have a critical interest in what comes out, but calling a spade
a spade, the first few years of the LSC have been difficult and
in the course of doing this exercise the LSC has been very substantially
criticised. I do truly believe that the five or six themes in
agenda for change are responding to the very substantial
criticisms which have been made. The key issue is making sure
those plans to do things absolutely happen. It is a key issue
and I think the Government has an obligation to make sure that
it happens.
Q206 Chairman: It has a role to play
in that given that the LSC reports to Parliament through this
Committee.
Sir Andrew Foster: Sure.
Q207 Dr Blackman-Woods: Do you think
the DfES needs to give LSCs additional support in order to help
them change, and what sort of support would that be, or is it
purely a monitoring role?
Sir Andrew Foster: At the very
beginning I think I gave several examples where I thought that
the system did not work very well and my report says that at times
during this period I think it has not always been clear what was
the role of the LSC and what was the role of the DfES. I have
said that at times I think the DfES has ended up almost doing
things it has asked the LSC to do, and I think that is not very
efficient. Therefore, the DfES is the Department of State, it
has the Secretary of State who is making the broad policy and
it has to be held to account for it, but I think there has to
then be a trusting relationship between that and the LSC, which
is its operational arm of its policy. But they have to have a
decent working relationship about how they are going to make those
things work out, and at times in the earliest years of the LSC
it did not always feel like that—so we were told anyway.
Q208 Dr Blackman-Woods: It is interesting,
though, because you suggest that the LSCs need to promote a possible
discourse about FE, and given what you have just said do you think
they have the authority to do that, particularly to argue the
case with Westminster and Whitehall, employers, etc?
Dr Chilton: They are in the best
position. They are in a sense the body with the responsibility
for regulating the market and provision. They should be able to
champion it. They have the best information flows. If a positive
message does not live in their mouth, we are in trouble.
Q209 Dr Blackman-Woods: So they have
to do it really is what you are saying?
Dr Chilton: Yes.
Q210 Dr Blackman-Woods: Could I just
ask one further question. I really like the way you have given
the Permanent Secretary some work to do in terms of some recommendations
about joining the various sectors together. Have you had a response
from the DfES about them taking on this role of bi-annual conferences,
etc?
Sir Andrew Foster: I met David
Normington in this exercise during the summer and talked to him
about it. It was probably not clear or known at that time that
he was going to move on. I got the impression during that conversation
that he had concerns that FE needed to be performing more effectively
and that he wanted to reflect on and view the report as a whole.
Clearly, what the Secretary of State has said this morning is
that a lot of this seems sensible and sound but the Government
wants to take time to reflect and consult on it, which is what
I guess you would expect.
Q211 Dr Blackman-Woods: But are you
confident that the DfES is going to adopt a more proactive role
towards FE, if not promoting it then being very clear about what
its role is in education?
Sir Andrew Foster: In the meetings
I had with the Secretary of State leading up to this, because
I reported to her on an interim basis as I did to the Chairman
of the LSC, Ruth Kelly was genuinely keenly interested in this
and I felt that she was very strongly interested to see how this
could be made better. We will have to wait and see, but she gave
quite a lot of time to this, clearly linking this to the 14-19
proposals, which I again got the strong sense that she felt very
positive about. I got an impression that she was very keen to
do something on this. I am not just mouthing those words, that
was the impression she gave me.
Q212 Stephen Williams: Just a quick
follow-up, Sir Andrew, and to return to the phrase which you mentioned
a couple of times earlier on about the neglected middle child,
which is in paragraph 194 of your report, where you say that a
multi-billion pound public service with a quarter of a million
staff should enjoy a bit more top-level commitment and representation.
I am sure the transcripts of these meetings are well-studied in
Number Ten Downing Street. Do you think that actually perhaps
there needs to be a separate Minister of State for further education
and skills, because currently the Minister of State level brings
together higher education and FE? I am making no comment at all
on the individual post-holder at the moment. Do you think that
is too much for one Minister of State, and would FE actually have
more of a national voice and be an equal partner amongst these
siblings of the Secretary of State if it had its own champion?
Sir Andrew Foster: In truth, I
did not go there. What I decided to say was that it absolutely
needed stronger leadership and that almost it was a matter for
the government of the day how it does this. Why I put that in
was that people in FE did comment, for instance, that their Minister
regularly gets called the Minister for Universities, not the Minister
for FE, and it just absolutely reinforces, as I think I say in
the report, that we reckon we came third. In truth, Bill Rammel—and
I take the point you are making that this is about role, not persona—has
been very actively involved, but nonetheless people do feel that
they are a significant sector and yet they do not get the attention.
So I suppose I was challenging the Government but not prescribing
what the outcome should be.
Q213 Stephen Williams: But if you
had an opportunity now, would you like to?
Sir Andrew Foster: I think I would
want to leave it as a challenge to the Government rather than
prescribe the opportunity.
Q214 Chairman: What about a Commissioner
for Skills? Are you looking for a job?
Sir Andrew Foster: No, I have
got lots to do.
Chairman: I know that.
Q215 Mr Marsden: Sir Andrew, your
response to my colleague Stephen Williams just now brings me on
quite neatly to the discussion of the national learning model,
which you talk about in the report, but I want to focus specifically
on one aspect of that and that is the relationship with HE and
FE because we know that there is a significant amount of HE delivered
currently by FE colleges. The amount will increase very significantly
again over the next five to ten years. How do you see that affecting
what you are talking about in terms of a national learning model?
Sir Andrew Foster: Bob in fact
developed this part of our thinking, so I will ask Bob to answer.
Dr Chilton: Let me share with
you an analogy which we did not use in the report, which was that
we said FE is like Belgium.
Q216 Chairman: Why, because nobody
knows anything about it?
Dr Chilton: It was for the reason
that the boundaries of Belgium were defined by the wars of France
and Germany, just as FE is defined by the territorial activity
of HE and schools. And like FE, Belgium also has two languages
(sixth-form colleges and general FE). That is a very negative
concept, because it is a boundary concept, it is a victim concept.
There is a more positive concept. If you were trying to develop
a common market, where would you put its headquarters? Bridge-building.
There is a lot of vocational work which goes on in HE and there
is increasingly vocational activity going on in schools, and the
core purpose of FE as the epicentre of vocational gives it a unique
pivotal role. Much of the HE which goes on in FE is of a vocational
nature, so we did not see that as inconsistent. It is a porous
common market of learning, and that is why you needed a common
learning model, not the silos of France, Germany and Belgium but
actually a trading matrix within which people could find their
personal learning pathways.
Q217 Mr Marsden: I will not pursue
your analogy and ask you to name 10 famous people in FE, but what
I will do—
Sir Andrew Foster: Stephen Fry
is one! Darren Campbell is a second.
Chairman: Paul McCartney, Jamie Oliver.
Q218 Mr Marsden: Okay, I stand corrected,
but what I would like to do then is to pursue something which
certainly has been fed back to me by people in FE, which is their
feelings that actually the universities still (with honourable
exceptions) really do not know what to do with people who progress
from FE into HE, and in particular that the qualifications which
people get from FE colleges and from the FE sector in general
are still not sufficiently recognised by the HE sector and there
is still not enough portability between the two sectors. Was that
something which you looked at in the report as having a bearing
on how effectively colleges worked?
Dr Chilton: To be honest, I cannot
specifically answer the question you are putting, but I would
answer this question, which is that in doing a mystery shopping
exercise and entering FE and trying to think to myself, "I'm
a 16-year-old who hasn't done too well in school. What's going
to help me find where I want to be?" I got lost. The websites
are confusing. The nomenclature is very varied and difficult.
So if employers find that difficult, and if indeed some people
in HE find it difficult to understand the value of the qualifications
coming out of FE, then I am not surprised, hence the argument
that there needs to be that relentless drive to rationalise the
learning pathways so that HE recognises the strength of what is
coming to it out of FE.
Q219 Mr Marsden: When I served on
the Standing Committee a while ago now which set up the Learning
Skills Councils there was a strong argument in the discussion
in that Standing Committee about the universities of the HE sector
being formally involved in the LSCs. Do you think it would be
of help and assistance if there was a formal involvement from
HE in the LSCs? I am thinking of that particularly in the context
of what you said earlier about the relationship with Regional
Development Agencies and the way in which HE and universities,
in some regions at any rate, are working much more closely in
that area.
Sir Andrew Foster: Yes. You would
need to look at exactly what the rationale for that was going
to be, but how I think I would want to respond to that part of
your question is that we have talked quite a lot in what we have
said about some of the negative things that we found. I would
want to draw your attention to the positive vision which we have
painted of where FE could be. Some people find it unbelievable,
but it is that you would need people to be going to university
for some of their higher level academic work but the quality of
vocational work which I think we should be aspiring to is absolutely
top quality where people, having been to university, were looking
to go for different levels of vocational training which allows
them to become much more fitted for the job which they need and
want to do. That is not how people in this country think about
vocational activity. It has a second-class feel to it. We want
to push it to the top-class. The second thing I want to say, and
it is linked in my mind, is that the really good bit about the
American system is open access community college onwards to university.
Therefore, the poorness of that barrier both weighs for progression
from FE to HE and then, though, that it was quite natural, having
done your computer degree, that you actually needed to go out
there and learn how to do things. I honestly think that if you
are talking medium to long-term that would be the positive image
I would want to paint. The other positive image would be of FE
colleges which were relatively independent in a model which was
self-regulating, and it was a very positive model, not one which
had this rather snobbishness, "Other people's kids go to
FE, my kids go to HE." That is the positive note and that
is very much linked with some of the status which comes from links
to universities, but I want it to go both ways.
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