Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240-259)
DR JOHN
BRENNAN, MS
PAULINE WATERHOUSE,
MR ALAN
TUCKETT AND
MR COLIN
FLINT
28 NOVEMBER 2005
Q240 Helen Jones: Are all your members
supportive of the Foster report's suggestion that colleges should
become more focused on skills for employment? We constantly hear
from colleges that they have a role in the community and they
see that role as important, that they are not happy with the increases
in fees they have to impose on some courses. Do they all support
that move?
Dr Brennan: We are still at a
stage of engaging in consultation around the system but certainly
the reactions which I had through our conference a couple of weeks
ago, through regional meetings I have been at, are that broadly
speaking people recognise the value and the importance of that
kind of focus. They do not want to lose sight of all those other
agendas that you have referred to, and I referred to that in my
opening remarks. Andrew Foster in the report formulating the approach
made it clear that he was not seeking to suggest that many of
those social inclusion objectives, objectives for young people
and so on, should be discarded along the way but they should be
seen as being a subsidiary and following on from that primary
economic focus. In those terms, I think the consensus of view
in the system, as far as I can detect it, is broadly in favour
of that.
Q241 Helen Jones: He does suggest
that what he defines as community education—we can argue
about the definition of that, I am not sure what it is—should
be done sometimes by colleges or sometimes by local authorities
and the voluntary sector. Are you happy with that? Alan might
also want to comment on that. If so, how is it going to work?
Dr Brennan: We have always had
a diverse and plural system in which there is a multiplicity of
providers in the system. Colleges provide a certain amount of
what we used to call adult and community learning, and now perhaps
call personal community development learning—the labels
change from time to time—and they have a role in relation
to that and that role may continue for individual institutions.
Q242 Helen Jones: Or not.
Dr Brennan: Alongside that, there
have been many adult education institutions, higher education
institutions and so on and, indeed, voluntary and private providers.
I do not think anyone in the college system is unduly worried
about that, that plurality will remain.
Q243 Helen Jones: I am surprised
about that. I wonder if Alan would like to come in. I am worried
about it because I am not sure that the capacity exists.
Mr Tuckett: I am worried about
it too. We did not argue with the primacy of role or with the
view that is there in Foster, but I think not adequately teased
through, that there are functions in widening participation that
involve a broader curricula agenda in support of the achievement
of the economic goals that you need to put in place for people
to be able to get there. Ever since the Skills Strategy was published
there has been a kind of remarkable gap in thinking of what really
constitutes first steps provision in a country that trades for
its living and the collapse of focus on modern languages in the
public policy arena, which does not sit within the definitions
the Government has been developing around the foci that Andrew
has been looking at, they all present problems to us. What we
have seen is a really positive step by Government in the Learning
and Skills Act to create a national system of securing opportunities
for adult learning right across the piece backed in the Skills
Strategy with a secure budget and now, in practice, that budget
stops being an absolute base of security and becomes more and
more what is on offer, so we have seen in the college system,
as I have said, a collapse from £180 million to £30
million expenditure on this kind of provision. That is real learners
doing real subjects. It is absolutely reasonable to my mind for
a pensioner to prolong active citizenship through engaging in
learning. That saves the state money in terms of social work or
hospital visits in lieu, as it were. It benefits a number of other
government policy strategies as well that there are opportunities
for adults to engage in learning that does not immediately have
a labour market focus. If you are in rural Cornwall, if the college
is not doing it, who is to do it? What we are facing is a diminution
of offer for too many people. In the National Mental Health Strategy
last year, the role of adult learning in colleges or outside them,
of enabling people to put their toe back in the water, to engage
in rebuilding relationships, is a perfect environment because
the world does not fall down if you do not feel up to going next
Thursday, exactly the sort of modest engagement with public support
that people need in order to be independent. Without that kind
of infrastructure there, what kind of expensive systems are we
going to have to put in place to enable people to take a step
back into the community?
Mr Flint: I completely share your
concern. The TES headline the Friday before last, after
the conference and Foster, was "Colleges are Skills Training
Centres". I fear that may be the most powerful message that
was taken from Foster and we are in danger of losing the infrastructure
of adult learning.
Q244 Helen Jones: I would like to
get Pauline's input on this for two reasons. One is, is it not
the case that a lot of courses that perhaps would not be defined
as skills for employment are a means of bringing people back into
education? Secondly, if we try to define it, what is "skills
for employment"? As a college principal, can you come up
with a working definition of this which you think is useable in
practice?
Ms Waterhouse: I think you are
absolutely right that what constitutes skills for employment would
have a very, very broad definition. If I think about some of the
young people we teach, perhaps at the most basic level, I would
argue that employability for those youngsters would be in the
very first instance, if they have come from a very chaotic lifestyle,
if perhaps they are not living at home with parents, if they are
looked after children or have been in care for sustained periods
of time, just getting to college and being on time for their lectures,
for me, is the beginning of the framework of employability, understanding
the structure to a working day, being punctual, attending regularly.
I think that would be one definition of employability. When we
think of some of the most deprived members of our community, before
they can engage in what would be traditionally defined as an enterprise
course, we would need to be talking about trying to raise their
levels of self-confidence, raise their levels of self-esteem,
that they can take steps back into working life. I would agree
with what other speakers have said, that in many cases it can
be about that first steps provision, which is very much about
raising levels of self-esteem and self-confidence before people
go back to work.
Q245 Helen Jones: Do we not sometimes
look at this the wrong way round. We look a lot at the supply
side of education, should we not sometimes be looking at the demand
side? How do we create that demand for learning, particularly
among those who have traditionally not done very well in the education
system? How do you go about that?
Mr Tuckett: NIACE started Adult
Learners' Week as a way of using the media, which of course is
trusted much more than any of us as institutions, to tell the
stories of people whose lives have been transformed by learning
as a way of encouraging other people to join in, and it has had
an impressive track record over 15 years. The Union Learning Fund
illustrates how you can use some kinds of intermediaries, trusted
already, to act as brokers for people to arrive. We were responsible
for hosting the DfEE Adult and Community Learning Fund and then
its transition across to the LSC's Widening Access Fund. Of course,
that work is coming to an end under these financial pressures,
yet it showed time and time again that if you find key movers
and shakers in a local community, however disadvantaged, however
marginalised, what you get is a kind of adrenaline rush of engagement
that people begin to see and ask different questions of themselves
and join the kind of journey that arrives in colleges like Pauline's.
That is something we rediscover and rediscover cyclically in the
UK. Our view is the Skills Strategy was right to put an entitlement
at Level 2 but it needed the steps up to it, and those steps include
what we have just been talking about.
Dr Brennan: Just to add a point
here, if I may. I think we all need to recognise that the path
to employability will vary hugely from individual to individual
and for some, they are a long, long way away from the labour market
and you have to take them through that journey to reach the point
where entry to employment is the right step for them. That is
what this First Steps initial entry provision is all about. In
the past, colleges—not exclusively colleges but colleges
in particularly—have been very successful at creating much
of that learning opportunity. Alan is absolutely right that the
squeeze both in terms of funding and towards nationally recognised
qualifications as being the only things which get funded in this
system, and so on, are all creating pressures to close down those
opportunities and that is very important in terms of individual
access to try to improve their confidence, their capability and
so on, but it is also important in terms of the ultimate supply
of skills into the economy because if you cut that off at an early
level people will not progress to the more advanced levels and
in the end you find you do not have the skills of plumbing or
bricklaying, or whatever it happens to be, that you need in order
to sustain demand from the employer.
Helen Jones: There is not a line, is
there? Can I go back to what I asked about dealing with what is
called community education in the Foster report. In your view,
are there people outside colleges with the necessary expertise
to undertake that kind of work? If so, who?
Chairman: I would warn you that you cannot
all answer each question otherwise—
Helen Jones: Other than the Chairman's.
Q246 Chairman: I am a special case!
Otherwise, I am looking at the faces of colleagues and we will
not get through everything. Can we have one or two of you on each
question rather than all four of you.
Mr Tuckett: Masses of learning
goes on informally outside the system but it privileges those
people who can find it easily. What we think the public education
system should be doing is guaranteeing routes for the people who
benefited least first time round. I think with public investment
we just will not see enough of that. That is the core of the argument,
for public investment in learning for pleasure, learning for its
own sake, assuming that we cannot quite predict the purposes that
learners bring when they begin a learning journey.
Ms Waterhouse: There is also the
issue of quality. As Alan has said, there are people out there
who can deliver other than colleges and so on, but the issue is
has the quality of what they are delivering been tried and tested
in the way that college provision has, which is very, very rigorously
quality assured, as you know. Yes, there is a problem in terms
of capacity and I think there could be a danger if other people
step into the arena—although where that funding would come
from is not clear—the very people who most need the highest
quality of provision would not receive it because it may be delivered
in an ad hoc way by people potentially not best qualified to do
so.
Q247 Helen Jones: One last question.
I did ask this last week. If in higher education we are prepared
to fund things which do not immediately relate to employment,
and the example I gave was if you wanted to go and do Classical
Greek or something, or if you want, like me, to read Chaucer,
you can, but what is the difference in further education? Is there
a logical reason why the two sectors should be different? If so,
can you give it to us?
Mr Flint: I do not know what the
difference is. Obviously the job of further education is very
different from that of higher education but I cannot see that
there is an important distinction to be made in that respect.
There is a value in education and we should be encouraging young
people and adults who have not had a proper opportunity the first
time round. I would say, and I think all my colleagues would,
that we failed very large numbers of the population. We all know
that 45% of school leavers are still coming out without adequate
GCSEs. We ought to be able to make a wide provision for all of
those people wanting to come back into the system and we ought
to be funding ways of attracting them back in, which is something
the colleges have done very well. I do not think there is a meaningful
distinction in that respect between further and higher.
Helen Jones: Thank you very much.
Q248 Mr Marsden: I wonder if I could
probe further on this issue of skills and particularly the definition
and the relationship between the bonus on skills that Foster recommends
and the LSC and, indeed, the colleges. I do have to say, as Chairman
of the All-Party Skills Group, we obviously welcome the focus
that Foster put on it and it was something that was the subject
of a report that we produced just two weeks before Foster's report.
In that report we also talked about two other things. One of them
was the demographic issue, and again this Committee challenged
Foster on his lack of comments on that when he came before us
the other week. The other was the relationship to small and medium
sized businesses in terms of skills. Certainly, and Pauline will
know this only too well, in my neck of the woods we have a very
large number of small and medium sized businesses but they are
not always by any stretch of the imagination the best people who
are engaging with training of skills for a variety of reasons.
I wonder if I could ask the college end, and maybe Pauline would
like to chip in, how do we have a Skills Strategy that is going
to engage and support small and medium sized businesses? What
is the role of Government in that in terms of funding? What is
the role of the colleges, because I think the colleges do have
a role regardless of the funding structures?
Ms Waterhouse: The college is
playing a very active role in relation to supporting small and
medium sized businesses in the tourism and hospitality sector
in Blackpool. We have a Centre of Vocational Excellence in customer
service for resort tourism quality and we are engaging with local
landladies and small hoteliers in very intensive customer service
skills training. Colleges are able to do that and to engage small
and medium sized employers in that kind of dialogue, provide training
on their premises. A great deal is being done but we need to acknowledge
the fact that there are all sorts of pressures and calls upon
the time of people who are running very small businesses and they
do not necessarily have at the top of their priority list the
training and up-skilling of their very, very tiny number of staff
they may be employing.
Q249 Mr Marsden: John, across the
piece in terms of the whole range of colleges that the Association
represents, is there enough engagement? Pauline has given a particular
example in a particular place, but is there enough engagement
by your members with the needs of small and medium sized businesses?
Dr Brennan: No, I do not think
there is. A lot of it has to do with the priorities which have
been set for the sector, the mechanisms and the regulations which
surround what colleges are expected to do. In recent times, you
have had considerable emphasis on issues like widening participation
and skills for life, which are not primarily focused on business
needs, and very little emphasis on trying to engage more with
business until quite recently. The funding mechanisms do not encourage
engagement with businesses, especially small business. You get
paid for individual enrolments, you do not get paid for engaging
with a business to deliver the programmes that are needed for
that particular business. Equally, you get paid for standardised,
off-the-shelf programmes which are approved for national qualification
purposes; you do not get paid for customised programmes which
are related to individual businesses. There is a whole series
of mechanisms of that kind which, if you were to address them
and reshape the policy environment, I think could do a lot more
to engage small businesses.
Q250 Mr Marsden: Give me an example
of what Gordon Brown might say in his Pre-Budget Report by way
of Government incentive that in a practical way would encourage
both small and medium sized businesses to invest in their employees
and encourage colleges to engage with them?
Dr Brennan: One mechanism that
we have suggested to Government is that you create a fund which
you offer to colleges to engage with business. The fund has to
be a partnership fund, so you say to a college, "You go out
and find the businesses who need training, you work out what the
training is . . . ."
Q251 Mr Marsden: So the colleges
would go out and be proactive to find small and medium sized businesses?
Dr Brennan: Yes, and you would
design packages which suit the needs of those particular businesses
and deliver them in ways which are appropriate to the needs of
those particular businesses, so you have a much more proactive
approach to developing training for this group.
Q252 Mr Marsden: Would that be a
ring-fenced pot of money?
Dr Brennan: I think it would have
to be in order to make it effective.
Q253 Mr Marsden: I want to ask about
the issue of apprenticeships because this is something the Government
has made major commitments to and is some way towards delivering,
but it raises the question of what sort of apprenticeships are
on offer and how they are monitored. I have examples, and I am
sure other colleagues have examples, of where people have been
put out on apprenticeships following or during FE training and
their experience with the employer has not been a happy one. What
more should the colleges be doing to engage with the monitoring
process in the apprenticeship area and what more should the Government
be doing in order to get some of the skills benefits that we are
all talking about?
Mr Tuckett: I thought you were
asking John.
Q254 Mr Marsden: John initially,
you might want to chip in briefly on that.
Mr Tuckett: I would like to have
chipped in on the last one. On the previous issue, there are two
points: firstly, when we heard the briefing from Lord Leitch,
one of the things he said that surprised me was that SMEs do proportionately
more training than large employers. I think the focus of the question
is real about reaching tiny ones, but when it remains true that
46% of the people who work for the National Health Service get
less than two days training a year, then you can see the scale
of the challenge and the problem we have. I think that is one
serious concern. The second one is the way in which we are all
committed to a more skilled society, but it is an elision in policy
between seeking more skills and seeking qualifications as the
best proxy we have got for them. What the Small Business Council
say on the Skills Alliance, which John and I sit on, is, to be
honest, it is not qualifications, but it is can do, just-in-time
skills building. It is not to argue against the role of qualifications,
it is just not the exclusive focus on qualifications and the policy.
Q255 Mr Marsden: Forgive me, Alan,
and I am speaking as someone who is a great champion of NIACE
and everything that you do, but if I was a mean and cynical Treasury
civil servant, I would say, "Well, that is a bit waffly,
is it not?" You are expecting us to either ring-fence or
to come up with an initiative to put hundreds of millions of pounds
in. Where is the analysis of the output for that?
Mr Tuckett: Look at where we are
going to be 10-15 years out. A significant proportion of the jobs
we will be doing have yet not been invented. How are we going
to skill people to engage with those? The kind of slow, sure,
secure, auditable route of only working on the qualifications
route will make sure that we can do all sorts of things we already
understand and need to be able to do well, they will not necessarily
help us with the creativity, the pizzazz, the imagination and
the investment in blue skies thinking that will help us get where
we want to go. What I am saying is if you were the chair of the
Small Business Council—until the last month or two I did
in the new technologies areas—what it is seeking is the
kind of support to help people move from quite low bases to the
very cutting edge of technological change and a qualifications
only route will not help us get that.
Mr Flint: Part of this problem
is that we are looking at the wrong qualifications anyway. The
National Qualifications Framework does not work, as Ken Boston
may well have told you. It is not a framework at all, it is a
list. Until we get credit based qualifications measuring and rewarding
small units that build up to qualifications, the system is not
going to work for industry at all. We are told that we cannot
have that until 10 years from now. Foster and our inquiry both
recommend very strongly that that needs to be much faster because
the delay is doing a great deal of damage in this arena.
Q256 Mr Marsden: Most people would
agree that the morass of qualifications is a significant barrier
to employer acceptance of vocational qualifications. I wonder
if I can take you on a little bit further on this issue of qualifications.
How, at the end of the day, within the Sector Skills Council do
we define effectively what are hard skills and soft skills, if
only for the purpose of jumping through the various hoops that
Government is currently setting up for funding? Is that not going
to be more difficult for the Sector Skills Councils that are dealing
in non-traditional subjects or harder to define subjects, People
First for example, than it is going to be for some of the ones
dealing with more hard edged traditional manufacturing skills
like engineering or construction, brick laying or whatever?
Mr Tuckett: It is interesting
to say "take up their work", that employability and
the softer skills involved with what is it that makes somebody
not only have the technical skills to get going in work, which
frankly employers see themselves as being able to underpin, but
for young people—Pauline was talking about this just now—what
are the employability skills that enable people to make a success
of the transition from being students to going to work. It is
true there for adults who are changing jobs and going back to
the labour force as well. My sense of it is that when we really
get a mesh between the college and the business environment working
closer, we shall need softer as well as harder skills, but that
does not make the job of the Treasury or of you in allocating
where public money should go an easy one at all, but it is not
a simple fix, that what we write down as the necessary elements
of qualifications easily fit with what changing businesses are
asking of the system. A lot of the criticism of colleges comes
from the inflexibility of the arrangements that they have had
to work to.
Q257 Mr Marsden: Pauline, can I very
briefly ask you, in your judgment is People First going to have
these sorts of problems in terms of pulling in the money for developing
work and that if the new criteria, particularly adult students,
remain as they are?
Ms Waterhouse: I think the issue
is that in many instances employers do not want full qualifications
anyway. What employers may well want are bite sized chunks of
learning, so many hours' worth of learning which focus on building
up a particular capacity and developing a particular skill. The
tension that we face all the time in colleges is, as colleagues
have said before, that the funding is driven by qualifications
and, therefore, there needs to be a radical look at that.
Mr Marsden: That brings the whole area
of portability within the sector between FE and HE which, hopefully,
we will have a chance to return to a bit later.
Chairman: We have to move on. I am going
to ask Tim to push you a little further on the funding priorities.
Q258 Mr Farron: It will be a little
further, Chairman, because I have got to speak at the Youth Clubs'
reception in about 15 minutes. You will be delighted to hear that
you have either asked or answered a large number of my questions,
perhaps making it easier. There is one question which I would
like an answer to here and one question where I am looking for
help from you, which I shall leave you with. Firstly, I agree
with the comments you made earlier on about the concern with regard
to the negative coverage with regard to the Foster Report. Andrew
Foster identified in the report—he said it verbally to us—that
"One in 10 colleges had relentlessly failed their communities".
You say one in 25, I hope I believe you. When we questioned him
about this, we asked him whether he could characterise what were
the characteristics of underperforming FE colleges, and we pressed
him on it, and he said there was no real style or type of institution.
I was getting at him as to whether there might be socio-economic
factors or regional factors, and he said no. He said that essentially
it was all down to bad management, that was the only common feature.
I wonder whether you think that is correct. As part of that question,
we were trying to pursue the possibility of whether the funding
gap had any kind of impact and whether money was, at least in
part, the answer. Is he right to say that management is the only
real key defining feature? Secondly, was he also right to make
no mention whatsoever of the funding gap in his report?
Ms Waterhouse: I think it is a
very complex issue. Inevitably there will be issues of leadership
and management. I think where there are issues of leadership and
management, those are frequently allied to a lack of clarity about
a college's strategic direction—Foster makes a great play
of the complex missions that many colleges have to serve—therefore,
it is hardly surprising that at times there are colleges that
may fail to prioritise appropriately and correctly. I think the
funding gap is a significant matter to take account of because
inevitably if staff in the college sector, as they are, are more
poorly paid than their counterparts in schools and, indeed, in
sixth-form colleges when you compare GFE colleges with sixth-form
colleges, then that is going to present difficulties of recruitment.
Inevitably it is going to mean that sometimes good staff who are
able to look for jobs in the secondary sector will start to do
so eventually. Then you start to develop increasingly shortage
areas where you cannot recruit, particularly in vocational areas
where it is better for people in terms of their future career
prospects to stay in the vocational occupation itself rather than
coming into the college. I think there are issues such as that.
Then there are issues relating to learner focus. If colleges do
not have sufficient strong focus on the learner as an individual,
if that person is not getting genuinely impartial advice and guidance
and, therefore, is not recruited on to the appropriate course,
then that is another reason for a failure which then comes into
the teaching and learning arena.
Dr Brennan: Can I add to that
because I think these are complex issues and leadership and management
clearly are an important component. If you have inherited an institution
which is still occupying 19th century school premises, has not
had equipment replaced for 30 years and in a whole series of ways
is struggling to come to terms with the agenda which it is being
presented with now, then clearly you do have a major problem and
resources are an important part of the solution to that problem.
Although in the short run there may not be a very strong correlation
between levels of funding and success or otherwise in terms of
overall institutional performance, there cannot be any question,
I think, that over time under funding has an effect upon the quality
of what you can do in your ability to deliver the outcomes that
people expect of you. I think those issues are not simple and
straightforward, and you do need to see it in those terms. The
funding gap has a number of different manifestations. It is partly
about the difference of treatment between different types of institutions,
partly, as Pauline says, about the quality of the staff and how
you can reward them, and so on, because of the resources that
are available to you. There are a number of different facets of
even that issue which need to be taken into account. Some of the
studies which have been taken in the past of leadership in the
FE sector suggest that it compares well with many in the private
sector, that there is world class performance in some respects
and not so good performance in other respects. The issue about
the levels of underperformance in the system, we base our assessment
on the data which Ofsted provide, which is of the order of 4%
of institutions are significantly underperforming. You can obviously
look at the system in other ways, but that is, broadly speaking,
an expression of the levels of underperformance which exist. One
of the things which has characterised colleges in contrast often
to schools in this respect is that where colleges have underperformed
significantly and then been put through a process of action planning
followed by re-inspection, typically they have managed to turn
themselves round in all the areas of underperformance. I think
there is only one institution in the history of this sector which
has failed its inspection on two successive occasions. I think
colleges are very good at tackling those issues once they are
identified, but they struggle because of the multiplicity of demands
which are sometimes made on them to be able to deliver everything
they are being asked to do well.
Mr Tuckett: I wanted to add two
things to that. One striking contrast with most other industrial
countries we look at is how unstable the culture of demand on
our institutions is. I think it is rather like under old trees;
all sorts of things grow if you leave them alone enough. The stability
in Germany and America—I am not arguing for either of those
systems, they are examples—makes a difference to people
learning the culture of what is good in the area. You do not have
to be a major historian of the sector to find that the college
is celebrated by government as the absolute pinnacle of what they
are hoping for one minute but find themselves in trouble the next
because they overbalanced an inch in that direction. We have not
had a stable view of what we have been demanding of the sector.
Q259 Chairman: A dynamic economy.
Mr Tuckett: Yes, we need a dynamic
economy.
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