Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-279)
DR JOHN
BRENNAN, MS
PAULINE WATERHOUSE,
MR ALAN
TUCKETT AND
MR COLIN
FLINT
28 NOVEMBER 2005
Q260 Chairman: We have de-industrialised
much faster than any others compared with the rest of Europe.
It would be crazy if we had an FE system that pretended we still
had a 25% manufacturing sector. We have a rate of 75% of people
who work in the service sector. You are not suggesting we are
still churning out people to make cars?
Mr Tuckett: No, goodness knows
I am not suggesting that at all, but I am suggesting that the
institutional drivers and changes we have been operating with
have not helped with that change as well as they might. If you
look at the areas of the work in the sector, they are consistently
not as good as others: literacy, numeracy, ESOL, construction
have been weak down the years. The way in which funding systems
or structural systems have shifted have taken management and leadership
attention on to the survival and shifting of the focus of the
institution as a whole, sometimes at the expense of a focus on
how you drive up quality in absolutely critical areas. I think
the advantage of the success of all initiatives government took
two or three years ago is its focus on curriculum development
in that area. One of the very best things in Foster is that he
did not go for yet another throwing of the balls up into the air
and waiting a couple of years until they settled. We do not benefit
from too much structural change, proper interrogation and, as
John said, sister institutions as a whole turn themselves round.
The harder question is how you turn round achievement across the
more vulnerable areas of the curriculum.
Q261 Mr Farron: My final composite
question, which I will not, I am afraid, hang around to listen
to the answer to, but there is something I am asking for more
generally is this: we have been talking about adult learning and
other provision and the impact on that provision of the particular
priorities on 16-19 and on the skills agenda. When we had the
Permanent Secretary here he expressed a level of surprise with
regard to the consequences, unintended or otherwise, of the changes
on adult education. He asked me for information to demonstrate
what those consequences might have been. In my constituency I
have got plenty of examples. It is a rural constituency in South
Cumbria, we have got a big FE college in Kendal and lots of small
adult education centres. I can see the impact on both types of
institution. My concern is—in my other hat I shadow Bill
Rammell for the Liberal Democrats—I am relying on the information
that I can find and I am not being sent lots from people outside
the constituency, from groups like yourselves, in terms of analysing
what have been the hard results out there in the community of
this change. What I am asking for is hard evidence of the consequences
on adult education for the people who remain, but also in terms
of providing us with the bullets to fire at Government to try
and make sure that we stand up for adult provision as best as
we can.
Mr Tuckett: Of course, it is not
consistent across the country, that is the significant challenge
we have had this year. If you take the piece as a whole, there
is quite a measurable reduction in adult participation. The LSC's
estimate on that is very straightforward about how many adults
we expect to see hit by the changes in priorities, but it does
not happen on a systematic and steady basis right across the country.
Some authorities, local authority provision, have seen an increase
in their budgets this year in neighbouring counties to ones where
things have dropped. The same thing, I think, is true to some
extent in the college sector this year. I think nobody can be
in any doubt that it is going to get worse next year and the year
after, and then ESF will come along and take away yet another
raft of adult opportunities as well. I think the difficulty is
you need to highlight the issue now, but it is not a tidy picture
this time round.
Chairman: I have never had the experience
of someone asking a question and not being able to stay for the
answer, but never mind, it is not his fault, he had to go to another
forum. Gordon, do you want to draw the curtains on this one?
Q262 Mr Marsden: I would because
the issue is a substantive one, but I think there is another issue
as well. I say in your presence, I am going to be a devil's advocate
on this. Nobody here this afternoon thus far, maybe because we
have not asked you directly, has expressed an iota of criticism
or concern about the way in which the LSC has handled this process.
It has all been blaming the Government or whatever, but surely
LSC have some role in terms of mediating and moderating. If you
are not happy with the fact that Government has taken this decision,
why on earth did you not all go back to the LSC and say, "Stop
being a paper tiger"?
Mr Tuckett: We did.
Mr Marsden: Okay, well you did not do
it loudly enough then because it certainly has not come across
to many people outside. The other question I do want to ask you
is, is there not a danger, John, that some of your colleges will
take the opportunity of accepting reduced funding over the next
three years to get rid of courses, for example, "This is
not really part of our core philosophy"? I think there are
particular concerns about courses which take place perhaps off
campus in other environments. I say this as someone who spent
20 years as a part-time OU teacher, before that a WEA lecturer,
that some of those courses that take place off campus are the
most valuable sort of gateway courses for bringing people into
further education.
Q263 Chairman: At this moment I am
going to say I want shorter questions and shorter answers. The
trouble is we get on to this subject and all my Committee love
this subject, so it becomes a seminar rather than questions and
answers. That is a slight reprimand to all of you.
Dr Brennan: Effectively there
were two questions in there. One is about the attitude towards
LSC and the way in which it is managed and processed. We were
quite vociferous last summer about some of the problems and the
inconsistencies of treatment at a local level. At the end of the
day, LSC was administering a policy which was determined for it,
and that is why responsibility ultimately has to rest with Government.
We have been critical, as you know, of LSC in all sorts of other
respects. I think that would be my answer to that.
Q264 Chairman: The LSC has got no
independence and no guts then?
Dr Brennan: That is an interesting
way of putting the issue.
Q265 Chairman: Sometimes we have
to call a spade a spade. In nicer terms, that is what you are
saying, John?
Dr Brennan: LSC has not seen itself,
I think, as being in a position to challenge Government about
the direction of some of the policy decisions they take.
Q266 Chairman: Should it?
Dr Brennan: I think there are
occasions when it should stand up for the system that it is trying
to administer and the institutions it is trying to manage. I think
that has not been the history of LSC. There were occasions when
FEFC in the past did take that kind of stance with Government,
but it has not been a characteristic of LSC in its existence.
To take Gordon's second point, which is about the pressures on
the institutions to cut back on some of the provision which they
make,—
Mr Marsden: To be fair, I did not say
pressures on the institutions, I said institutions taking advantage
of the situation. I am being slightly unkind, perhaps, but, nevertheless,
that is part of my question as well.
Q267 Chairman: "Institutions",
do you mean getting rid of colleges? I am trying to do a Sun
version.
Dr Brennan: At the end of the
day—Pauline may want to comment on this—institutions
see that they want to provide the widest possible range of programmes
they can within the resources they have got. Most institutions
see their mission broadly in terms of offering a range of provision
for a variety of audiences at different levels across the specialisms
which they are engaged in and they will seek to maintain that
where they can, but where they are facing cutbacks in provision,
then it frequently is an easy solution to close an out centre
because you save yourself a significant amount of money by doing
that. Institutions know that the consequences of that are often
that you cut off opportunities for learners in particular localities,
and they make those decisions with considerable reluctance in
my experience. They have to balance maintaining the financial
viability of their institution and the totality of the programmes
they are funded to sustain against the individual issues about
particular types of provision in particular locations. I do not
think anybody readily enters into a situation of saying "This
is an inconvenience. This is a course we do not particularly like,
so we are going to cut it out".
Q268 Chairman: Pauline, you would
not do that sort of thing, would you?
Ms Waterhouse: It is true that
when we have had to make difficult choices, we have had to look
at what has been cost effective and what is not cost effective.
It is quite true that delivery in the small community venues where
the numbers studying on a particular programme may be below a
viable number, that is where we had to look to take provision
out. In the case of my own college, we have had to remove 3,000
adult places this year as a result of a £650,000 reduction
to our adult funding budget. That has been significant. May I
return to your earlier point in relation to colleges' stance with
the LSC. I can assure the Committee that the majority of colleges
take an extremely vigorous and robust stance with their local
LSCs where there appear to be decisions being made which are not
in the better interest of the local community. If I can give you
one significant example where the LSC, in my view, did have autonomy
in relation to what it was going to do with its budget and chose
to make a decision which was really inexplicable. If we look,
for example, at the work based learning budget in Lancashire,
Lancashire's LSC's budget in this relation rose by 2.5% for 2005-06.
In Blackpool, we have a significant problem in terms of low rates
of post-16 participation and we have significant issues of attainment
at Key Stage 4, so one would have thought that this would be an
area where, in terms of work-based learning, the LSC was looking
to stimulate participation. The college had a reduction in its
work-based learning budget this year of 5%. The main private training
provider for Blackpool had a reduction in its budget of 12%, so
between us a 17% reduction, despite the growth in Lancashire LSC's
budget allocation in this area and despite the fact that Blackpool,
within the Lancashire sub-region, has one of the highest rates
of people not in employment, education or training. That is the
clear issue on which we are in rigorous debate and discussion
with the LSC. Yes, there are many, many instances where we, in
fact, do take them to task.
Q269 Mr Marsden: That will be an
issue I will be taking up further. Alan, I saw you urging to get
in. This thing about cutting off campus courses, is this something
that concerns you? Is it not the case anyway that—it might
save a little bit of staff time—it does not impact on the
overall overheads of colleges, does it?
Mr Tuckett: I would like to mention
something about the LSC too, if I may, and Colin may want to add
to it. We will try and be short in the answer.
Q270 Chairman: I am holding my breath.
Mr Tuckett: I know, I am finding
it hard! The issue is who misses out if you cut out off campus
work. The argument is—it is part in supplement of something
Helen asked earlier on—if other agencies are better at reaching
the hardest to reach communities, those are the people you need
to work with. Certainly my own experience as a practitioner is
that if you wanted to engage Bangladeshi women in participation
who are newly arrived in the UK, you had to start from wherever
they felt safe and appropriate to go, not where it was convenient
for us to provide the provision. Sometimes that leads you to slightly
awkward decisions about health and safety, balancing the best
conditions for teaching the subject with the only conditions that
work to make it available to some people. Those savings are at
the expense of the widening participation underpinning, which
I think Foster mentions, but that does not help us to resolve
the financial pressures on this. As for the LSC, I think there
are three really significant issues that inhibit a simple critique
of this. One is once you set up a non-departmental public body
and you create a board for it, then its agenda is not quite the
same as the remit it was given by Government. There is no doubt
to my mind that from the beginning there has been a much clearer
focus on its responsibilities in relation to young people and
the workforce development issues than all those delicate issues
about widening participation and inclusion that are there in its
original remit. Secondly, if at set-up you recruit large numbers
of people from techs, then what they will be really comfortable
and experienced at is in the arenas that their previous experience
sit with. There is no doubt there was a big under provision of
people who understood how community development, social inclusion
and the other goals worked together when it was first appointed.
You could argue that more capacity work should have been done
before now than that. The third thing is if you create public
sector agreement targets to measure its success by, that narrow
its focus to a narrow range of things, it is not wildly surprising
if a publicly funded body seeks to address the target which is
only a proxy for the complexity of the policy it is there for.
I think all the grey areas have been vulnerable.
Mr Flint: A lot of evidence that,
Eight in Ten, went into this is that many colleges cut
the community provision because it was the easiest thing to do
in circumstances where they had no choice but to cut.
Q271 Chairman: Thank you, Colin.
That will be very useful. We did not have that. We have not been
given that by FE.
Mr Flint: I thought
we had sent copies.
Q272 Chairman: We have not received
them yet.
Mr Tuckett: We will send them
immediately we get home.[1]
Q273 Chairman: Can I take you on to the
end of those very penetrating questions by Gordon. You have been
making a passionate appeal for the inclusion courses and all the
stuff that this Committee is very concerned about. If you ask
somebody what has been the main campaign that we have heard time
and time again from the Association of Colleges and others in
this field, it is the parity of funding, not for this sort of
thing, if you want that big chunk of new money, you want it for
parity with teaching kids A-levels in FE colleges. It does seem
a bit strange sitting here where on the one hand you are now all
making this passionate appeal, but the one drum you have banging
is for this qualification route and you want a lot of money to
bring you up to parity. It sits a bit uneasily, does it not? Come
on, Alan.
Mr Tuckett: What we are doing
is saying all areas of education need treating with comparable
seriousness, and where you are trying to do the same job in different
institutions, whether that is educating a young adult at Level
4 in comparison with similar work being done in higher education,
or whether you are doing it for a 14-16-year-old and you are seeing
schools being funded in a different way, then the effect on the
whole capacity of the system to be able to respond to all these
other things we have been talking about is inhibited because you
do not have the resources.
Q274 Chairman: That may be the case,
but you did not win that argument in the report that we all received
last week because that report actually said, did it not, that
with the amount of money that goes in per head funding of A-level
courses in that area, there did not seem to be a very close relationship
with more resource going into it and what you can achieve? In
a sense, here you are banging the drum, Alan, this is a lot of
money, and it is in the real world, not a fantasy world. If that
money goes into that provision, it is not going to go into community
education, is it?
Mr Tuckett: I do not think the
argument is that colleges need to be able to harmonise their provision
course by course, it is in order to do a comparable job they need
funding at comparable levels.
Q275 Chairman: Why? Perhaps you can
do it more effectively and cheaper, that is what competition is
about, is it not, a better quality result with less resources?
Why does it always have to be the same for schools?
Mr Flint: Surely if there is a
shortage of money in the system and good results are capable of
being achieved on lower levels of funding, why can the money that
is excess in those institutions not be diverted to adult learning.
Q276 Chairman: That is a very good
argument, but it is also an argument that if we are talking about
the older age group, and if we are talking about things which
you are effectively arguing for, resources that flow in one direction
cannot flow in all directions.
Mr Tuckett: There is a difference
between our interests here today. John's responsibility and Pauline's
is absolutely properly for the viability of institutions and colleges
to be able to serve a multiplicity of goals. My responsibility
and interest is to highlight what adults need to what the country
needs for adults to have the chance for the kind of learning that
will work for social inclusion and economic prosperity. To be
honest, the argument about what happens in schools and colleges
is one we are sympathetic to at NIACE. Properly funded colleges
will do better at exactly the sort of social connections that
we were discussing with Helen Jones and Mr Marsden before. They
need to be adequately funded to do proper outreach work, to offer
the kind of tutorial support, the kind of personal development
strategies that we take for granted in schooling and which we
argue curriculum area by curriculum area, subject by subject,
level by level, in FE.
Q277 Chairman: John, is that just
NIACE being nice to you?
Dr Brennan: Would that were so,
Chairman. Let me make a couple of points from our perspective.
We have placed equal emphasis on both those issues in our campaigning
activities over the last few months. I would emphasise that you
and your colleagues may have heard an imbalance, but certainly
that is not the way in which we have pressed these issues. Certainly
our analysis of the press coverage of parliamentary questions
and correspondence around these issues, would suggest that adult
learning has had at least equal, if not greater, coverage in terms
of media and political attention to the 16-19 funding gap issues.
We would say that we have in no way pressed the 16-19 issues at
the expense of adult learning, but I recognise the point you are
making, that if you do push too far in the direction of 16-19
it may be at the price of adult learning provision. I think one
of the concerns that we have is that the way the Government has
approached the question of resource allocation for the next few
years is, in fact, to make some decisions around those issues
which have not been the subject of any debate or discussion in
the sector, so no one else has had a chance to have a voice about
what is the right balance of priorities in this field. I think
that is a matter of concern for us. There are a whole series of
decisions which are being taken as part of the funding package
for the next two years which have quite major implications and
may not be deliverable in important respects, but which have not
been the subject of any serious discussion with institutions and
the people who have to deliver it.
Ms Waterhouse: Just to follow
on from what John was saying, I think there is a very real issue
about the fact that demographic change—and Mr Marsden touched
on this earlier—has not been taken into account, apparently,
in relation to funding decisions. We have both White Papers recently
in relation to 14-19 education, talking about giving a greater
predisposition towards supporting the opening of additional sixth
forms and yet there appears to be no concentration on the fact
that, in actual fact, the demographics indicate in Lancashire
we know we will have a 15% decline in the 16-18 cohort by 2016.
Therefore, that seems to be at odds, this whole concept of a drive
towards more coherent strategic planning, yet not taking into
account what is happening in demographic terms. There is a tension
and an inconsistency there which does not make for the best investment
of resources or best value for money.
Q278 Mr Chaytor: So far we have talked
largely about funding and priorities, but I want to ask about
quality and put my question particularly to Pauline and Colin.
What is the single most important development that could drive
up quality across the board in FE colleges?
Ms Waterhouse: I have to say that
in my view I think parity of funding is a major issue because
I would take it back to a point I made earlier about the recruitment
and retention of high quality staff. We know we have an ageing
workforce in further education. We have a great deal to do in
terms of trying to continue to attract the most able, the brightest
and the best into our sector. We are not going to be able to do
that if when young people who have just done a PGCE are determining
whether to go into the FE sector or the secondary school sector,
where they can get a greater amount than 10% in salaries in terms
of their take home pay, what is going to attract them to come
into further education. I am sorry to take it back to funding,
but I think that one cannot emphasise this sufficiently. I would
also say that colleges are beginning to see the flight of some
of their best staff to the secondary sector, as I said earlier,
the sixth-form college sector, because basically there are better
paid posts, better opportunities for career progression, and we
cannot have that. The quality of the sector is dependent upon
the most able, committed and talented staff that we can possibly
recruit.
Q279 Mr Chaytor: How do you explain
the numbers variations of quality between different colleges and
between individual departments within individual colleges because
the funding differential applies equally across the board, does
it not?
Ms Waterhouse: Yes, it most certainly
does, although some colleges inevitably are more hard hit than
others because there are some colleges which are very unstable
financially and others, like my own, which are particularly strong,
so inevitably that will have an impact.
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