Examination of Witnesses (Questions 224-239)
DR JOHN
BRENNAN, MS
PAULINE WATERHOUSE,
MR ALAN
TUCKETT AND
MR COLIN
FLINT
28 NOVEMBER 2005
Q224 Chairman: Can I welcome Pauline
Waterhouse, Colin Flint, Alan Tuckett and John Brennan to our
deliberations. Pauline, it is your first time in front of the
Committee, so welcome indeed. It is very nice when we have someone
whose MP is on this Committee. He is probably going to ask you
some very nice questions, but I will not. Any other close relationships
with constituency MPs that anyone wants to admit to, or a special
interest? John, who is your constituency MP?
Dr Brennan: Andrew Murrison.
Q225 Chairman: Okay. We are post-Foster,
post your conference, is there anything you want to say to kick
us off or do you want to go straight into the questions?
Dr Brennan: Can I just make one
or two general remarks?
Q226 Chairman: You can, yes.
Dr Brennan: Thank you for giving
us the opportunity to give evidence. This is a very important
inquiry that you are undertaking here, the first that the Select
Committee has looked at on FE in a wider scale since 1998, so
this is a substantial opportunity. I would like to say a few words,
if I may, about Foster just to set the scene and a couple of words
about some other issues which are linked to that. The first is
simply to say that we very much welcome the Foster report as a
comprehensive statement of the issues that are facing the FE sector
at the present time. In welcoming that, I think we do welcome
the recommendation that there should be a sharper focus on employment
as being the primary purpose of further education but, in recognising
that, we do recognise that there is a range of issues that throws
up for individual institutions which we want to see debated through
the sector as we take that forward. We do believe that it is possible
within the formulation that Andrew Foster has come up with to
accommodate many of the key and important activities which colleges
undertake. My second point would be to regret the kind of media
coverage which accompanied the launch of the report. It was unfortunate
that the focus was so much upon failing institutions and contestability.
I would want to put it on the record, for the Committee's benefit,
that the number of failing colleges is actually only about 4%,
about 16 institutions in total. That is very similar to the proportion
of failing schools in the system. I would say in that context
that we do not have a problem with contestability per se
and I would be happy to elaborate on that, if you want, in a minute.
In other respects, we recognise that the report raises a range
of issues for colleges which I think, on the whole, the sector
is ready to grasp and wants to tackle around things like workforce
development, ethnic minority representation and learner voice
and so on. I think we are ready to respond to all of that. The
bulk of the recommendations, about 75% of the total, are addressed
to Government and government agencies. We think it is very important
that Government should give very serious consideration to the
full range of those recommendations because we do share the view
that Andrew has developed that many of the issues which face colleges
have to do with the structures within which they operate rather
than the way in which they manage themselves. The report itself
pays fairly limited attention to funding issues but, following
the issue of Bill Rammell's letter of 21 October and the Priorities
for Success document from LSC, we think there is a whole raft
of funding issues which the sector is facing which I hope you
will allow us to develop a little bit later on in questions.
Q227 Chairman: We have got yet another
inquiry coming up with the Treasury soon, would that not more
appropriately address funding?
Dr Brennan: You may wish to do
that as well but I am happy this afternoon to develop some of
that, particularly because of the impact on adult learning. Over
the next few weeks, with DfES and LSC, we will be facilitating
a debate across the sector about the report and the recommendations.
We will be looking forward to a Government response in the spring
and early movement then towards implementation of a whole range
of recommendations to be taken forward. I think broadly that is
the position that we would see in relation to Foster at this stage.
Mr Tuckett: Can I say something
from NIACE's point of view? Firstly, for colleagues who may not
know us, we are a loose and baggy non-government organisation
in which most people concerned with adult learning right across
post-compulsory education work together. There is no doubt that
we welcomed in Foster a willingness not to lose time and energy
by restructuring the whole thing all over again, but on balance
we were much disappointed with a report whose focus was on how
this system needs to be five or 10 years out from now when we
face two in three of the jobs of the next decade needing to be
filled by adults because there are just not enough young people
to go round, and no significant attention in the report at all
to the inherited structural imbalance that might have been fine
at the time of the Learning and Skills Act 2000, which says you
meet the needs of 16-19-year-olds and spend what is left on adults,
and the result of success with young people—not an intended
consequence of government policy—with 16-19-year-olds is
that up to a million adults are likely to lose their places over
the next three years, structural changes to European Social Fund
leading to an intensification of the pressures on budgets on adults,
and yet where are the new jobs to come from? They will come from
migrants, for whom there is a set of educational issues in the
post-school arena. They will come from older people being motivated
to stay on at work, but for whom the balance of motivation and
of skills learning will be in a different mix than you would expect
in young people preparing for their entry into the labour market.
They will come from groups of women who are currently not participating
in the labour force, particularly from ethnic minority groups.
For each of those issues there is quite a set of challenges about
the balance between full-time and part-time learners in the operation
of the system and for the balance of funding that needs to be
struck to make sure that we do not rob Peter to pay Paul, that
we do not enable opportunities for young people to develop, as
we are very pleased to see happen, but not at the expense of adults.
I think NIACE's feeling about the report, but also the broader
place we now find ourselves with the Skills Strategy, is that
the Government has created a really impressive infrastructure
for lifelong learning over the last seven or eight years and now
seems not to be able to find the resources to sustain it. We were
very struck by the speed and effectiveness of intervention in
the school dinners issue when we clearly found we did not have
enough money as a state to do something that was sensible and
proper. It seems to us to be inappropriate to be disinvesting
in the adult learning sector just now at a time when we think
the economic and the social case is very powerful. We have had
a long history in the UK of stop/start investment in adult learning.
We too agree with Foster that the focus on preparation for engagement
in the labour force is the right focus, but to our mind that focus
is young people and adults both, not one at the expense of the
other. Our concerns are a little more than the AoC's. We published
a report, Eight in Ten a week or two before Foster and
we launched it last week with the All-Party Group on Further Education
and Lifelong Learning in Parliament. It makes a case for employability,
for access to workplace learning, but also for culture and creativity
to be fostered through the further education system, and we can
see no case that says today in a civilised society we need less
of that than we needed a generation ago. That is our stance.
Q228 Chairman: Pauline, you are at
the sharp end of all of this. Would you like to say anything?
I do not want it to seem as though I am favouring the institutional
spokespeople here.
Ms Waterhouse: From the college
perspective, we would very much welcome the focus that has been
given to the recognition of the contribution we make to economic
development in our communities. I think Foster recognises that,
albeit he is saying that colleges can do more, but nevertheless
there is a real recognition of what we do. That is very welcome.
Also welcome, in saying that we need to give a greater focus to
employability and to economic development, he also acknowledges
the important role that colleges play in terms of social inclusion
and our renewed focus on the employability agenda should not be
at the expense of social inclusion and widening participation
or, indeed, the work that we do in terms of academic pathways.
From my own perspective, my college very much welcomed that message.
What I would like to say is perhaps what I feel the report does
not emphasise sufficiently is that economic development and social
cohesion are inextricably linked and we really cannot promote
and foster economic development if we are not also underpinning
and nurturing social cohesion as well.
Q229 Chairman: Certainly, John, I
think we would all agree here that some of the press coverage
was poor at the launch of the report and concentrated very narrowly
on the issues that you suggested, plus getting out of proportion
the notion that the private sector might come in at certain levels.
We do find great difficulty getting the media to attend these.
Is there any media here today? Just one. TES? We had the
Learning and Skills Council with a two and a half billion pound
budget and not one person from the media put their hand up. It
shows an amazing lack of interest. When we deal with special educational
needs, the place is full of journalists. I would have thought
they are both important subjects but for some reason we just cannot
crack media interest in skills. We will carry on with that campaign.
Can I start the general questioning? Someone from outside looking
at the figures might say you are a bunch of whingers really: "Here
am I as a taxpayer, I pay my taxes and taxpayers' money flows
into education", if you look at the real increase in taxpayers'
funding of FE over the last eight years, it has been very generous
but you are really not happy, are you? You have not said one nice
thing about the Government, not one nice thing about an increase
of 52% in real terms, it is all, "Why don't they do more?"
or "Why don't they do it better?" Are you not being
a bit ungrateful?
Dr Brennan: The answer to that
is clearly no. I think you are unfair in suggesting that we have
never acknowledged the huge improvements both in funding and in
the policy environment within which we work. I think you will
probably know that I have paid regard to that in evidence to this
Committee in the past and, indeed, in many other ways in public
statements. I think in that sense, Chairman, that is not what
the issue is about. We acknowledge the progress which has been
made and we acknowledge that many of the policy objectives which
have been set are ones which the sector itself would have wanted
to aspire to which represent a considerable movement forward in
terms of trying to improve the learning opportunities in our society.
Where I think the problem lies is in the multiplicity of the demands
which are made upon colleges and the very different pressures
and pulls which are exerted on them which exceed the totality
of the resources which are available, and therein lies many of
the problems, coupled with an approach to the management of the
system which has produced layers of bureaucracy which has imposed
a considerable degree of micro-management and multiplicity of
agencies within which it has to deal. It is a combination of all
of those things, I think, which have created the stresses and
strains for institutions; it is not the broader environment that
you have drawn attention to.
Mr Tuckett: From my perspective,
Chairman, not at all. I have celebrated the Government's success
in achieving improved participation by young people and I think
NIACE over a decade have supported, as a critical friend, developments
the Government has made in work with adults. It is extremely difficult,
if you are one step along the journey to the transformation of
your life as an adult, if programmes which the Government is to
be congratulated for developing disappear, not because anyone
thinks they are not worth supporting any more but because money
is tight. At that point, you would argue, there is a serious political
choice for politicians of all parties to make about whether the
short-term shortages of money are best dealt with by short-term
intervention by Government while structures are changed, or whether
individuals should have to stop/start in their engagement with
the system. We are behind and have encouraged the Government in
the view that there should be a higher fee, higher volume provision
for adults, the balance between certainly company and state investment
needs to be the right one but that nobody in the kind of international
economic competitive climate that we are in can settle back to
saying, "Actually we are investing enough already".
We are not. To change the culture so that individuals pay more
and we get levels of investment comparable with other people in
OECD from companies will take time. What is to happen during that
time? It seems to us that adult learning is not an optional extra
once you have done the job, it is critical to the economic prosperity
of the country and to social inclusion. It has got a number of
benefits the Government has highlighted and then, as it were,
parked. The double-dealing dollar issue: if you teach a woman
to read and write, her children thrive as a result of it. Every
time you inhibit someone from developing the confidence as an
adult learner that they are after developing, you do not only
affect their chances, you affect the chances of the people around
them. I do not think Government's job is an easy one about where
you invest, but it would be irresponsible of us representing the
interests, in particular, of adults who benefited least before
to say it is okay to go three years with no significant investment
and then find we are sometimes desperate with skills shortages
because we have not got enough adults ready for the jobs that
people need to fill.
Mr Flint: If I can just add to
that. We would hope for a change in the statutory basis of the
funding for adult learning. We do not think it is sensible, given
the changes in demography that we are going to face, that the
only amount of money that is available for adult learning is what
is considered reasonable, which in effect means what is left over
when other priorities have been met. We are concerned with the
unintended consequences of policies rather than criticising the
policies themselves.
Ms Waterhouse: There is a concern
about the coherence of policy across the different sectors. If
we look at the situation in relation to post-16 within further
education, and if I can take my own college in Blackpool—Fylde—as
an example: last year we exceeded our funding target with the
LSC and effectively recruited more 16-18-year-olds and more 19+
students than we were actually funded for. That was to the tune
of just under £900,000 worth of education that was delivered
without any financial support from the LSC. We are likely to exceed
our targets significantly again this year. At the last count we
looked to be exceeding our targets by some 232 students. At the
same time as we are in this situation in Blackpool, we have discussions
going on with the Local Education Authority about the provision
of a new 11-18 academy in Blackpool. My concern would be why are
we fostering and stimulating these debates from DfES in respect
of additional post-16 provision when the Learning and Skills Council
cannot fund the provision that exists already in particular areas.
That is of very, very great concern indeed, that there is not
a coherence and a discussion between what is going on in respect
of secondary schools and in respect of what is going on in the
college sector.
Q230 Chairman: We can park that one
for a little bit later, but I hear what you say. If you read Foster
and the evidence we got when Sir Andrew came in, if you go back
to the Dearing principles of who should pay for higher, I think
there are some suggestions there for continuing education, it
is between the individual, the taxpayer and the employer. Does
not the employer, yet again, get let off rather lightly?
Mr Tuckett: Absolutely.
Q231 Chairman: When are we going
to get to the stage when employers actually stump up a significant
amount of money for the training of the people who add tremendous
value to their businesses? What do you believe in terms of that
kind of deficiency?
Mr Tuckett: For a long while I
have been arguing that regulation is the best way and you can
see an effective parallel in the way that health and safety has
become a perfectly normal part of the regulatory environment within
which British business works. A generation ago we had lots of
industrial accidents because we had a high level of voluntarism
about the level of safety that operated in industrial places.
If you move, as we did with health and safety, a small bit at
a time and say in five years' time we will have workplace agreements,
or we will have a plan together, you will find long before the
five years are up that the vast majority of people operating in
the economy will have adjusted to dealing with it. For those people
who have not, if it is part of the terms of trade eventually that
you develop the people who work with you, then that becomes a
price that is shared right across the competitive environment.
At the moment we have not got that right. There are things that
are very positive about the aspirations of the Employment Training
Programme to secure increased participation by adults, but with
a pretty gloomy outcome in the first place with very, very high
percentages of deadweight of either people who were previously
training getting funded or people who because of regulatory arrangements
in the wider economy are getting funded to do it. I think regulation
is something which we have put because of experience in the 1960s
as a sort of shibboleth, you cannot move in that direction, but
we have tried voluntarism for a quarter of a century and clearly
it is not providing the kind of step change politicians of all
kinds arguably need to retain the competitiveness as a knowledge
economy we need in the kind of changing international economy
we are in.
Dr Brennan: I think we would equally
question a number of aspects of the current Government approach
to this. Like Alan, we see there is a need to embed a commitment
to developing staff and training in businesses in a way which
does not exist at the moment. The average amount which companies
spend on training per employee per annum is £205 from the
last survey. That is totally inadequate as an investment in human
capital. We would see a series of issues relating to the current
policy framework which really do call this whole approach which
is being developed at the moment into question. On the one hand,
you have got the Train to Gain programme, which is due
to be launched next year, which effectively is free training for
employers. Whereas up until now they may have had to pay for Level
2 training, in future that will be free and they will not have
to commit to that. Equally, there is no guarantee that any of
the money that they release from their existing training budgets
as a result of the new programme is going to be reinvested in
further training. There is no obvious benefit to the nation in
terms of enhanced investment in training as a result of going
down that particular road. There is a series of issues about whether
that is going to inculcate an increased commitment to training
and whether, in fact, the Government has thought seriously enough
about a whole range of mechanisms to try and influence the demand-side
of the equation, of which regulatory mechanisms are one but there
may be others, financial incentives and so on. Just to give a
small example: in the care sector, the introduction of regulatory
and mandatory qualification levels for care staff has transformed
the state of that industry and it has transformed employer willingness
to train. I think we have done far too little in that sense of
trying to up-skill our workforce through those kinds of mechanisms.
The other part of the equation is the price which is being paid
for developing that strand of policy is we are seeing a reduction
over the next three years of some 700,000 in the places available
for adult learners and an increase for those who remain in the
system who are outwith those priority categories of something
of the order of 65% in the fees they would expect to pay. Just
to explain that arithmetic in case it is not clear to the Committee
how you arrive at that figure: the starting point for last year
was that the assumption in the system was that an individual would
pay 25% of the cost of provision and over the next two years that
is going to move to 37.5%. That in itself is a 50% increase in
the assumed level of fee. If you add three years' worth of inflation
that takes you to something of the order of 60% over that three
year period. I do not believe that any serious research has been
done about the sustainability of that policy or about the willingness
of individuals or, indeed, employers who are outwith those priority
categories to pay those kinds of increases and all the past evidence
has been that, in fact, there is a huge resistance to fee increases
on that kind of scale. I think that one of the real worries we
have about this policy is not simply we are going to see 700,000
places disappear, but actually we will see far more than that
number disappear because individuals and employers will feel unable
to pay for the enhanced fees that they are going to be charged.
Q232 Chairman: Some people who are
not in this field would find that quite technical. What does that
mean in terms of real prices for real courses? Standing outside,
if one of my constituents said to me, "How much does a person
have to pay for a course?" and I said it is going up from
25% to 37.5%, they would say, "Somebody else is still paying"
and they might feel that is quite a good deal. Pauline, what does
it mean in terms of real courses and how much are they going to
cost?
Ms Waterhouse: If you look at
it in terms of course hour—John will correct me if my arithmetic
is incorrect in this respect—over the next couple of years
you might be looking at an increase from about £1.45 an hour
to something like £1.95 an hour. It is a significant amount,
I do not want you to think it is something you can dismiss.
Q233 Chairman: Can you give us an
example of real courses?
Ms Waterhouse: Somebody might
decide to enrol on a GCSE English course because they feel that
would really raise the stakes in terms of their employability
and they might wish to have a Level 2 qualification in English.
That would be a course probably of about 90-96 hours, so it is
a question of doing the arithmetic in relation to that sum. That
is a fairly significant increase for people.
Mr Tuckett: If you think of a
full-time Level 3 course, you are dealing with very big sums of
money. Of course we are encouraging employers to pay in that area
but not everybody is fitting the frame of how our Skills Strategy
works out for people. If you are studying part-time within an
entitlement area but you are not likely to finish within 12 months,
which frankly is most adults who are not young adults without
responsibilities, even within our priority areas you end up asking
people to pay substantial amounts of money over time or to find
huge amounts out of a family budget to get skills which properly
we say now there is a public investment for. Beyond the 37.5%
there is a swathe of courses where colleges, in anticipation or
along the way with the changes LSC has been leading, have shifted
from investing 180 to 30 million in courses that do not fit within
the National Qualifications Framework over the last two years.
The result of that is masses and masses of people who have grown
used to the public offer being affordable, either paying not 37.5
but 100% of the real cost or going without provision at all.
Dr Brennan: I wonder if I could
just offer you a couple of other examples. One is in relation
to a college that I was at a few weeks ago which for a little
while had run a programme of about 10 weeks or so four times a
year. This was very much taster provision, trying to get people
back into learning. They charged a very nominal fee, about £10
for this course for 20 hours or something of that order, because
they wanted to encourage people back into learning. They were
recruiting about 800 students per entry, something of that order.
They recognised earlier this year that they could not sustain
that, they were going to have to move to something more like a
realistic fee, and they pushed the fee up to £50 for one
of those courses. The result was there was a two-thirds drop in
enrolment. That is not untypical of the kind of experience that
colleges have.
Q234 Chairman: Could not my man on
the Huddersfield omnibus say that perhaps you did not market it
as well as you could, or perhaps the course was not as good as
it should have been? If it was £10 for a 10 week course they
would put up with a pretty sub-standard course, but if you are
going to charge £100 for the 10 weeks then you need to be
a bit sharper.
Mr Tuckett: It is just how you
get the maximum return to the public interest and at what pace.
I am in favour of higher fee contributions, I think the pattern
of the way the Further Education Funding Council's awards to institutions
worked inhibited fees staying alongside a kind of publicly defensible
balance between individuals, the public interest and employers,
but you have got to do it over a period of time. Night school
adult education has traditionally charged significantly higher
fees. What you find if you do a fee hike too quickly is people
go away and they may come back in two or three years' time as
long as you stabilise your fees, but what you cannot do is rush
from being "pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap", to "let's
run an expensive boutique" overnight, and I am afraid that
is the way our fees policies look like they are working.
Mr Flint: We were encouraged to
make a lot of free provision in the interests of widening participation
which was one of the main aims of the Further Education Funding
Council, if you remember Helena Kennedy's report. Colleges did
that very enthusiastically and very well. There has not really
been any kind of government-led programme to prepare the public
or, indeed, employers for a major change in the way we do fund
education. People in this country think education is free and
believe it ought to be to some extent. Remember the row about
fees in higher education. We have not had the same sort of debate
in further education at all. Within a year, we have moved almost
from heavily subsidised adult provision to no adult provision
at all. There is another technical issue here about what is called
"other provision", which you might not want to get into
at this stage. Colleges are having to come out of "other
provision" because it is not recognised within the National
Qualifications Framework and that is another area in which the
offer to the public is being seriously reduced.
Q235 Chairman: We are very interested
in other provision and we are going to come back to that. A quick
word from Pauline and then Helen wants to take up the questioning.
Ms Waterhouse: In relation to
other provision, we were doing quite a significant amount of other
provision for some of our employers and when it became clear this
was no longer going to be funded we then, fleet of foot, as colleges
tend to be, worked very hard to get the provision on to the National
Qualifications Framework, and were successful in this. But then,
having been urged to start to charge our local employers fees
for this, I can give you an example of a very large employer in
Blackpool who, when being asked to pay fees, and the fee amounts
to £80 per head for each employee over the course of a year
for the particular programme that Blackpool and the Fylde College
is running for them, refused to pay that amount. They will not
make that investment of £80 per head in their workforce.
That is the kind of attitude that we are facing.
Chairman: I want to call Gordon quickly
because, this being a constituency interest, we will give him
a go.
Q236 Mr Marsden: I would not ask
you on this occasion, although I might ask you privately, to indicate
the company concerned. Is that not a pretty damning and disgraceful
indictment of the attitude of business in today's world? Obviously
there is an issue over what period of time and how many employees,
but if you cannot get a major employer to put that sort of money
upfront for what is clearly going to be a significant course to
benefit all of their employees, how are we going to move more
generally in the direction that is being discussed?
Ms Waterhouse: I would agree with
you entirely, not least in a town where the future prosperity
of that town is very, very much dependent, as you know as well
as I do, on its capacity to regenerate itself. Intrinsically linked
to regeneration is the need to improve customer service levels
and customer service skills in the town, and that was precisely
the area in which the training was focused in actual fact. That
particular aspect of the picture is a very despondent one indeed,
yes.
Mr Tuckett: It is difficult, is
it not, to add up the interest of the country by adding individual
employers' interests together and saying, "That will add
up to be what the country needs" because it could be perfectly
rational for an employer facing tight circumstances to think,
as so many of them do, including our own sector, that training
is something to save on when money is tight, but that ends up
being something that is completely not in the national interest.
Q237 Mr Marsden: I would suggest—at
the risk of sounding too sharp—you can make the argument
between the national interest and community interest but, and
I have just come from a major conference where all of the key
speakers were making this point, that is not just a question of
national interest, that is a question of business short-sightedness
and bad business practice. Any decent, successful employer wants
to invest.
Mr Tuckett: Beating people up
for the kind of culture we have created together in this country
and how you move people from there seems to me to be a real challenge
and to suggest, as John was saying, that we do not only have to
think about what funding measures we put in place and what provision
we put on offer but how we go about an active process of cultural
change, I do not disagree with him.
Dr Brennan: If I may reinforce
that. I think this is a message which we have been trying to convey
to Government for some considerable time. What we need here is
a significant shift in cultural attitudes in this country and
Government needs to take a lead in that. Ministers need to preach
the gospel that we need to have a very different approach to investment
in learning, individuals need to recognise the need to invest
more and employers need to recognise the need to invest more.
We need policy mechanisms and levers which encourage people to
do that. At the moment much of that is missing and until we put
some of that in place, I think we are going to struggle to achieve
the kind of shift that we all accept is desirable.
Q238 Chairman: The Government keeps
coming up with initiatives and one of the most recent is the four
Skills Academies. Are they not a sign of the Government wanting
to change the culture?
Ms Waterhouse: They are, but,
going back to the issue of coherence, if you consider the Learning
and Skills Council as it was under its previous chief executive,
we had the introduction of Centres of Vocational Excellence, which
are making a difference, they are enabling colleges to engage
more actively and proactively with employers and they are enabling
us to raise the whole agenda in respect of training but, as far
as the national Skills Academies are concerned, there is a need
to link those with the very strong work that is being done by
the Centres of Vocational Excellence. I think there is a danger
presently that sometimes when new initiatives are introduced,
like the Skills Academies, there is no reference back to existing
work that is already taking place on the ground successfully.
That is not to say that it could not be improved, it could not
be made stronger and more robust, but sometimes there is a tendency
to look at initiatives in a kind of silo way without linking across
the sector with previous initiatives which are being embedded
and becoming successful.
Q239 Chairman: Were not the Sector
Skills Council supposed to be consulted about where the skills
shortages were? After consultation out came these four Skills
Academies, that was the Sector Skills Council's response. Was
that not the way it worked or were you consulted? Were you consulted,
John?
Dr Brennan: I do not think the
system worked that way. When the original CoVE initiative was
launched we did not have Sector Skills Councils and LSC struggled
to gather in industry intelligence, sectoral intelligence, about
the needs of particular areas. The framework has been developed
largely without reference to those sectoral interests. As Sector
Skills Councils have come on stream they have begun to build up
the database and exert influence, quite rightly, over the system.
The initiative in respect of Skills Academies was one of Government
saying to SSCs, "Would you like to bid for an academy in
your sector?" Although there was encouragement to link into
existing patterns of provision, that encouragement was not that
strong and the models which have emerged are somewhat variable
in that respect. It is certainly our view that unless you link
those initiatives very strongly into the base which exists and
use the influence which those initiatives can create to shift
patterns of activity across the sector as a whole, then those
initiatives are not going to be particularly helpful in terms
of transforming the way in which the system works.
Mr Tuckett: Early on in the Skills
Strategy we asked the Sector Skills Council to hit the ground
running with a great deal of wisdom straight away. Our observation
of the first few of the Sector Skills Agreements made is they
all share a kind of fairly intelligent analysis of the demographic
challenges facing the sectors that they represent but there is
a serious gap between that analysis and any practical measures
affecting adult provision in those areas. The worry we have is
that an initiative like the academies will rebalance towards the
things they already see how to do, the recruitment of young people,
in ways that really will not work. If you add the first four of
those agreements together they assume the recruitment of twice
as many young people as there will be entering the economy over
the next five years, and there are 20 more agreements to follow
it. Where are they going to be recruited from? Our view is the
BBC and media might work on a reasonable assumption that it will
recruit as many young people as it wants but further education
and shipbuilding are going to be struggling.
Chairman: Is that why the BBC cannot
get anyone here? I thought it was a shortage of licence fee payers'
money.
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