Examination of Witnesses (Questions 522-539)
MS KAT
FLETCHER, MR
JOHN OFFORD,
MS JACQUI
JOHNSON AND
MR BARRY
LOVEJOY
15 MARCH 2006
Q522 Chairman: May I welcome John Offord,
Kat Fletcher, Barry Lovejoy and Jacqui Johnson. Today it is the
Education Bill and I think a lot of people will want to be there
and also at Prime Minister's Questions. My apologies for the fact
that it is going to be an hour long session, but we are going
to try to get the most out of it. We did it successfully with
the last group so I am sure we can do it with you. We are going
to go straight into questions. We are looking both at FE and skills.
We are getting into the subject. We were interrupted a little
by our inquiry into the White Paper so there has been a bit of
disjuncture in terms of the progress of the FE inquiry, but we
take it very seriously and with a number of other inquiries going
on we have got plenty of material. We particularly wanted to see
you. I remember Kat saying it would be very bad if we did not
have the NUS in to talk about this. We have met your requests.
Is that alright?
Ms Fletcher: It is very much appreciated.
Q523 Chairman: We have started getting
this flow of reports out, Foster and Leach and other reports.
What is your feeling about the way these recommendations are being
received by yourselves on behalf of your members?
Ms Fletcher: We are delighted
with the focus that has been put on to further education from
the Government at the moment. That very much fits with our agenda
and how we have focussed on further education over the last 18
months. Generally speaking we are working alongside the grain
of what the Government is doing and the general targets and policy,
although we would question some of those targets. I think Foster
has been very well received certainly by my membership. We really
welcome a variety of things that that report has come out with,
particularly the need to have a coherent vision around funding
and quality improvement and, of course, the reputation of further
education. All of these things must improve the quality of the
reputation of FEs and I think students can make a hugely positive
contribution to that. From my point of view, we have got long-standing
policy goals around learners being co-producers in their educational
environment and certainly in FE, which perceives itself as having
a very adult environment, and a very unique culture around an
adult learning environment. We think that that fits quite well
with our agendas and also a variety of government agendas around
citizenship and a decline in civic and political participation
and also that general move towards putting the user at the centre
of public policy and directing things. We are very keen on what
the Government is doing and hope that Foster will be implemented
in full. We were disappointed with Tomlinson and some of the cherry-picking
that we believe went on there. Generally speaking we are in favour
of what is going on at the moment.
Q524 Chairman: Barry, what is your
reaction to Foster? Was it the best thing since sliced bread or
do you have some reservations about it?
Mr Lovejoy: It is another report.
We have seen several reports in the further education sector over
time. Some have disappeared along the way. We welcome the vast
majority of the recommendations from Foster. We particularly welcome
the higher profile given to further education and think that is
very significant. Our reservations are centred around what it
did not do as much as what it said and, in particular, the failure
to address seriously the issue of funding. Foster was very upfront
and said it was more to do with managing the situation as opposed
to dealing with the funding and that was left up to government
and a public debate. We think that is unfortunate because we are
putting it off again. A particular positive element was its emphasis
on workforce development, which we think is long overdue. A lot
of pronouncements have been made over the last three years but
they have not really come to fruition. There has been lots of
discussion around the development of that. We are looking forward
either to the White Paper or indeed some other way of putting
that into practice. Our main concern is the stakeholders' involvement
in that, including the trade unions. There are a couple of other
things that are highlighted by Foster which again does not take
us very far. There are two or three things that we raised the
last time we met this Committee eight years ago. One was on the
persistence of an over-casualised workforce that was highlighted
by Foster. The other aspect—and I think something is moving
on this—is the lack of staffing data, which again we raised
eight years ago and it has taken until now to address that.
Q525 Jeff Ennis: Foster recommended
a clear `skills for employability' focus for colleges. Has this
got to be the grand objective for the future of FE or are there
other issues that need to be brought in and included in that focus?
Mr Lovejoy: We certainly have
no problem with the key focus for further education being employability,
that is what we are in the business for. One thing that we would
stress is that there are different routes to employability. We
must avoid, in the presentation of the new brand image, losing
sight of our other agendas, such as widening participation, which
many colleges have moved into and which, in fact, produces the
same results; in other words, you are bringing in people to employability
who are otherwise excluded. We also need to look at the possible
contradictions that are occurring at the moment between employability
and the focus of Government and their priorities on Level 2 as
opposed to Level 3.
Ms Johnson: I teach in a college
and I have got a couple of examples of where this shift away from
Level 3 and a focus on Level 2 and on the national qualifications
framework has meant some likely closures in the future. One of
them is in the electrical installation Level 1 course that we
ran. There is no national electrical installation course at Level
One at the moment. We ran this course for 14-16-year-olds and
16-17-year-olds. As it does not fit in the NQF its other provision
is not funded now and so all those young potential electricians
could not have the opportunities that we would otherwise have
given them. I know it may be remedied, but you cannot always get
the staff as electrical installation staff are hard to come by.
We had the staff trained, but when that goes away because the
courses do not run there can be difficulties. Any college is always
running on the edge on staffing which, of course, is 70% of our
budget. The other area is access to IT. I am in Berkshire and
it is a good area for information technology. For 12 years we
have had access to IT courses. We have run about five groups with
15 students in a group and that has been largely women returnees
looking to make themselves more employable, update themselves
and get back into jobs. They are not always highly paid jobs but
it is important to the family economy. We are now going to be
asking those students, if they are not on benefit, for about £1,000
a year. We have held off from doing that, the college has subsidised
that fee income, but we are not going to be able to do it in future.
We have also used European Social Fund money for that course.
All of that going means those courses could fold and so it could
be our last intake this year. FE teachers want to look after their
students. Lots of those students went into work. Is it not a shame
that that might go?
Q526 Jeff Ennis: In the Barnsleys
and Doncasters of this world the FE colleges are very successful
in getting people across the doorstep for the first time, especially
those who have always been against going into an education system.
Will the focus on employability skills stop people from going
across the threshold for the first time in terms of widening participation?
Is there a danger there?
Mr Lovejoy: I think the issue
is how rigidly priorities are translated into funding. Where you
have a very strict and rigid clear effect, which we are seeing
the impact of at the moment, it means a disastrous impact locally
in many colleges at the moment where there is this big risk about
courses being cut down and also pre-entry to ESOL et cetera. Perhaps
we should be allowing some flexibility of colleges within the
whole quantum. That is one message that came over. We have been
through what we would see as a famine and feast of funding in
FE over the last 20 years. We went through the famine years of
the 1990s. We had great expectations and welcomed the increase
in funding from 2003 onwards. The problem is that those expectations
lasted about 18 months. What happened was that when we saw the
application of those particular priorities we found that famine
existed at the local level. We need to prepare for a long-term
approach to the system and allow for some cushioning effect. There
has been too much jumping very quickly. We have a situation now
where we are faced with whole swathes of redundancies again as
a result of an emphasis on different aspects of funding and that
is a problem. We have no doubt that we are going to have to place
much more emphasis on Level 3 in the future and we are going to
have to switch around again. The problem is you are affecting
the infrastructure of the colleges in doing that. We are interested
in moving away from a stop-go process to having a bit more cushioning.
The first thing I said to Foster was that we want some change,
but let us not change for change sake and let us get some continuity
as well there.
Q527 Jeff Ennis: We have already
mentioned the funding gap between college and sixth form funding
provision. Two years ago Charles Clarke said to this Committee
they were going to close the funding gap in five years' time,
so we have got three years to go. At that time we had a funding
gap of 7-8%, last year it rose to 13% and now ministers are saying
they are hoping to get it down to 5% by 2008 and eventually close
it. How big a problem is this funding gap to the Barnsleys of
this world?
Ms Johnson: It is an enormous
problem. In my college, which I have no criticisms of, it is well
managed, we are a successful college, we will have a "light
touch" inspection next year, everybody tries to do their
best. The funding gap is an enormous problem for recruitment.
For example, I have a young colleague who is 28 years old, they
have just had their second baby this week, he lives in Berkshire,
he has a £100,000 mortgage and he is on £22,000 after
four years of teaching. In a school it would be substantially
more because the incremental scales are compressed. It is very
hard to recruit and retain young and enthusiastic staff if we
do not have fair pay.
Mr Offord: Some of our casework
around Level 2 for vocational qualifications centres on the fact
that you cannot progress to Level 3. That seems to be down to
the fact that there are not enough qualified assessors for NVQ
qualifications. I am not going to beguile you with tales about
plumbers, but we have had an awful lot of plumbing casework and
colleges simply cannot provide that progression. We have got a
piece of casework arising out of the saddlery course in Walsall
with no progression to Level 3 because they cannot recruit the
assessor. We were very pleased that Foster did address that and
that he was looking for some flexibility between high labour market
rewards for particular skills which are in scarce supply. There
is a real problem there that does need some kind of resolution
and I would perceive it as part of the funding gap. You need to
be able to provide for getting those up-to-date skills in. A skills
audit of lecturers in the FE sector would be a very useful thing
as well.
Q528 Jeff Ennis: Do we have any evidence
of a drift in teaching staff? In Barnsley we have got anecdotal
evidence that staff at the college are going to sixth forms in
the Sheffield, Rotherham, Wakefield and Doncaster areas where
we have greater sixth-form provision. Do we have any evidence
that staff are drifting from FE colleges into sixth-forms?
Mr Lovejoy: I am not aware of
any. Employers consistently speak of problems with recruitment
into further education. The enormous increase in funding was welcome.
We thought we would get to close the gap in terms of pay with
school teachers or at least be within striking distance from a
two-year settlement. The problem we have got at the moment is
that 57% of colleges have not implemented that. There are still
cultural elements around the reason why they are not engaged in
implementing deals, but underlying this is this uncertainty of
funding. It hit us at the wrong time. We were making good progress
and then excuses were given as to why they could not award this
new scheme which would bring us in line with schools and that
was because of that uncertainty of funding. It has major implications
and a knock-on effect for quality and recruitment for the future.
Q529 Mr Marsden: We have already
begun to touch on the whole issue of the controversy about funding
for adults and the implications and Barry and Jacqui have given
some very good and very specific examples. Can I say from my own
context in Blackpool that my FE colleges are obviously concerned
about it particularly on the issue on the funding of so-called
`soft skills'. There does appear to be a concern that a lot of
the things that have previously been funded under section 98 have
now been dropped and this affects people who need soft skills
not just to get Level 1 and 2 but to get a job thereafter. I wonder
if either of you have any comments to make on that.
Ms Johnson: This is a fairly ongoing
problem. Because we recognise the value of all these courses to
our students and because none of us can predict how going into
one course will lead on to something else, we have always offered
a range of community courses and we are expected to do so. Under
inspection and local authority regimes we are expected to do that.
We have gone to great lengths to try and make those examinable
courses, to shift things over so people get a certificate at the
end whether they want it or not and not everybody does, of course,
they just want to do things for fun. Sometimes in education we
are allowed to do things for fun.
Q530 Chairman: That is a bit of a
revolutionary concept. Some of us think politics should be fun.
Ms Johnson: Across the country
these courses are being hit and nobody can predict what the outcome
is going to be because they have been with us for so long and
have led on to something else. It is very difficult to say if
we drop that one it will mean people do not go on to something
else and get a job.
Q531 Mr Marsden: We have had the
LSC before us to discuss these issues and we will be having ministers
shortly. The elephant in the room in all of this is how much is
proposed and how much is disposed between the LSC and DfES officials.
Has the LSC been too supine in dealing with ministers over pointing
out the consequences of shorter-term funding changes?
Mr Lovejoy: LSC is an interesting
thing. What is a quango? Which is the non-Government bit and which
is the quasi bit? We have fairly good relationships with the LSC
in discussing these issues and we are sometimes assured that things
can be brought in to those categories. We sometimes get the impression
that if only the colleges would sort themselves out, but it is
not quite as simple as that. I agree that the LSC, as a key stakeholder,
should be more vociferous in terms of dealing with the contradictions
around the question of those priorities and pointing out the consequences
of perhaps broad decisions. That is why I was saying earlier that
perhaps dealing with these what we call "soft skills"—I
am not sure if I agree with the term soft skills as such because
I think they are essential basic skills.
Q532 Mr Marsden: I am not suggesting
by using that term that they are not essential. I am suggesting
they are the sort of things that some bureaucrat sitting somewhere
in Whitehall would find difficult to put in a box.
Mr Lovejoy: I agree. That is why
I was saying that in terms of the overall quantum of funding,
certain elements of that were allotted to those types of courses
which are better dealt with at local level because colleges are
quite in touch with their local communities; that is one thing
they are good at.
Q533 Mr Marsden: So the danger with
these short-term funding decisions that have been made is that
the implication of them will be too Stalinist and centralised.
Mr Lovejoy: Absolutely. A recent
example has just come out in Hackney where they have not managed
to turn a whole load of those into examination based with the
result of catastrophic cuts in community precision. That is about
to hit the press any time now.
Q534 Mr Marsden: Obviously a lot
of things are affecting adult students. I know that your profile
as a union is progressively moving in that direction because your
students are progressively moving in that direction. What can
you do on this issue?
Mr Lovejoy: I do think funding
is crucial here. If you look at what the FE sector does very well
and prides itself on, it is about reaching out to second chance
learners, those people who have been failed by the educational
environment beforehand. We really pride ourselves that that is
what we achieve, we reach out to those people and it is adult
courses that are the key to that and, in particular, not just
adult courses that therefore move you on to getting the next job
but actually get you re-engaged in the educational environment.
Maybe if you come in and do a part-time adult course, whatever
the course, it re-engages you and that means you go on to something
else.
Q535 Mr Marsden: What is NUS doing
to focus on and highlight this issue?
Ms Fletcher: That is part of the
reason we are here, is it not?
Q536 Mr Marsden: I mean over and
beyond that. Are you working with NATFHE and with other departments?
Ms Fletcher: Yes, we are. Our
focus over the last plan has been particularly on access courses
because we think access courses are the jewel in the crown of
further education and we think they are really high certainly
on this Committee's agenda and on the Government's agenda because
they bring adults back into further education and they then take
them into higher education and transform people's lives individually
through that. What we are seeing because of the LSC's priorities
as fed down by the Government is that access courses are being
cut because they are over-19 and they want to go into HE. What
colleges are doing is cross-subsidising their access courses because
they feel so impassioned about them and the value they play in
wider society and therefore taking it out of other bits of funding
and that is obviously difficult to sustain. That is what we have
been working on.
Mr Offord: Kat and I were at the
AoC Staff Governors' Conference this weekend and the major issue
exercising governors there was the Stalinist attitude of the Learning
and Skills Council.
Q537 Chairman: Stalin is alive and
well today. I have never heard him mentioned so often in this
Committee. Where is he alive and well, John?
Mr Offord: According to some of
those governors, he is at the heart of the LSC and particularly
those local ones where they are not getting the funding decisions
they want. The brutal facts of the matter are you cannot fund
x, y and z and it is a dropout of 1 million funded places by 2008.
They were coming up with all sorts of specific examples. It causes
a real tension in the governance of further education as well
because we are moving away from that business model that was birthed
in the last years of the Tory administration through to a stakeholder
model and that is being taken very seriously by a new range of
governors and they are seeing funding decisions being brought
down upon them which mean they have got to deny opportunity and
access to their local community. That puts you in a very, very
peculiar position as a governor. It does need to be addressed
and there needs to be some flexibility built in there.
Q538 Mr Marsden: What can we do,
given that Sandy Leach is going to come forward with recommendations
to 2020, to make sure that these short-term funding issues—and
they are short-term funning issues, there is no point pretending
that they are not—do not then produce a logjam in the system,
particularly of the demographic gap?
Ms Johnson: I sit on the local
LSC so I feel I have to say something in support of them.
Q539 Mr Marsden: So you are not Stalin?
Ms Johnson: Not yet! It is very
frustrating sitting on the local LSC because we started with what
felt like a much wider brief, which was to look at the whole of
post-16 education and move forward and think how we could reorganise
that and make a logical and coherent post-16 system. We have set
up all these strategic area reviews nationally at an enormous
cost and in the middle of that whole process various things were
thrown out by the Government which made our position seem much
weaker, things like yes, okay, schools can set up new sixth forms
and that has thrown the whole thing up in the air. I could throw
back the question what happened to that whole strategic area review?
We were looking for a real analysis of post-16 education in this
country and it seems to have gone nowhere, which was very disappointing.
As a local LSC member I feel that we have been pushed more and
more into a narrower focus, with more limitations placed on us.
I am not trying to dodge responsibility for this because I raise
these issues all the time at the LSC and we are not dodging responsibility,
but there are too many bodies doing too many things and too many
things being thrown at us. When we are in the middle of one thing
a new initiative is lobbed in that can throw something else out
and money has to be spent on that and I think that is a great
difficulty.
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