Examination of Witnesses (Questions 640--659)
BILL RAMMELL
AND PHIL
HOPE
24 APRIL 2006
Q640 Mrs Dorries: Why would you not—not,
why have you put the money with the LSC—put it with the
local authorities? I know you said it is one monolithic structure,
but why not, because LAs look after every community school in
the country and have done in the past? Why not put it with the
LAs.
Bill Rammell: I think you need
more than just the LA focus. The needs of employers, the employer
focus, I do not think, given the LA structure in this country,
are delivered through that route. I do think that that is what
the LSC additionally has brought to the table. You have to bear
in mind that you would be going back on the incorporation of FE
colleges, which was brought about in 1992. I just say: go and
talk to some FE principals about whether they would welcome going
back.
Chairman: She is suggesting it happened
under a Tory administration!
Q641 Mrs Dorries: Would not FE principals
prefer the money to go direct to them from government and cut
out the LSC altogether—take away all that funding and give
it direct to them? Surely they know how to liaise with employers;
surely they are doing it at the gritty edge all the time? Why
go through the LSC—this huge monolithic organisation?
Bill Rammell: Within HE education,
which, as the Chairman pointed out, we have universities that
are at pains to constantly reassure me that they welcome that
intermediary body, and they do not wish to be funded directly
from the Department. If you do not have an intermediary body,
then you do have the Government constantly micro-managing. Whilst
at one Level there might be some attractions to some colleges,
when it is reflected upon long and hard I think that being directly
managed from the centre in that way is not a recipe for total
success.
Q642 Mrs Dorries: Is that what is
going to happen to trust schools then; are they going to be micro-managed?
Why can they not operate in a similar way to the White Paper proposals
for new trust status for schools?
Phil Hope: Bill is right; they
have to operate within the context of the National Curriculum;
but trust schools, I think, are a very positive development to
enable external providers, very much building on the success we
have had within specialist schools, to come in and promote innovation
and drive within schools that can help within the most disadvantaged
communities.
Q643 Mrs Dorries: What about local
organisations, employers?
Bill Rammell: Local organisations
are important. To take your question directly, I have not had
one college principal in the last year who has said to me "do
away with the LSC and let us be funded directly from the Department".
Q644 Mrs Dorries: Is he likely to
say that to you, do you think?
Bill Rammell: College principals
lobby me about all sorts of things all the time, and if that was
on their agenda I am fairly confident they would be pushing for
it.
Q645 Mr Chaytor: Minister, can I
ask about the focus on skills as the base for the new FE mission.
Paragraph 19 of the White Paper states: "This economic mission
does not mean narrow vocationalism." If it does not mean
that, what does it mean?
Phil Hope: Because the colleges
will still be delivering A-levels and the new Diploma; but also,
as we discussed earlier, they will be delivering what Sandy Leitch
described as the skills gaps and the skills shortages. They will
need to focus on responding to that need out there, but in doing
so will be delivering a broad base, including, I might add, courses
for Level 1 skills, and PCDL will be playing their part in that
as well. However, the priority, the drive, the core mission being
around skills is that that will be a major focus for them, particularly
responding if we roll out the Train to Gain funding as well. It
will be a new opportunity for them to fulfil that mission by going
out to the market place and offering employers the training that
they know they can provide at a quality that employers need.
Q646 Mr Chaytor: What will go?
Phil Hope: It will be a matter
for each individual college to determine locally their priorities,
but clearly responding to the skills needs of their local communities
is a critical part of their core mission as we are laying it out.
They will be responding to that core mission—that is where
we want them to respond to be delivering. It does not necessarily
mean things will go, but at a local level people will be making
their own choices and deciding priorities within the funding envelope
that they are given.
Q647 Mr Chaytor: If the impact of
the new demand-led funding system, which will move to 60% of the
total budget eventually being demand-led-the impact of that and
the impact of the introduction of the brokering system for Train
to Gain significantly shifts the provision of skills training
from colleges to private providers. Will it be open to a college
to diversify out of the narrow vocationalism in order to survive,
or would you expect the college then to close or merge?
Phil Hope: I think there are huge
opportunities under Train to Gain for FE colleges. At the moment
some 28% of employers choose to use colleges to provide their
training for them, and those that do provide that training—they
get 80% saying it is satisfactory or very satisfactory.
Q648 Mr Chaytor: So would you expect
that percentage to increase?
Phil Hope: I would; I would expect
the colleges to become far more responsive to employers' needs
and to deliver the kind of training, funded through Train to Gain—and
indeed, as employers get captured, as it were, through the Train
to Gain, to deliver apprenticeships and other vocational qualifications
for the existing workforce, so this is a big opportunity for colleges
to develop. I know that colleges are now already looking at the
invitation to tender that was published today by the LSC to see
how they are going to take part in making their presence felt
so that the brokers, when they are advising employers, can clearly
see what FE colleges have to offer.
Q649 Mr Chaytor: Later in the White
Paper it states that: "As general FE colleges increasingly
focus on the core economic mission, local authorities and voluntary
providers may focus on the wider personal fulfilment and community
programmes." Is that an imperative? Is that Government policy,
or is that going to be a matter for local determination?
Phil Hope: It should be a matter
for local determination, but we are charging the LSC to establish
new local partnerships with local authorities and others—voluntary
organisations and others—to audit what is being provided
at a local level, to find out where those gaps are and then to
maximise all the resources locally to make this happen. In fact,
they may be led by a local authority. The LSC in fulfilling that
task may say to the local authority, "Let us bring this partnership
together and make this happen". It is not happening at the
moment.
Q650 Mr Chaytor: Will there be an
incentive in the funding system to segregate out the adult and
community programmes from the strictly skills-based, professional
programmes?
Phil Hope: There is the ring-fencing
of that PCDL budget. That is what we are referring to, and that
is in itself an incentive. We have written in the grant letter
to the LSC that this is a task that they need to do and that this
money is ring-fenced.
Q651 Mr Chaytor: Will that budget
be shifted to the local authority?
Phil Hope: No. I would anticipate
the partnerships—everybody bringing what they are doing
to the table, sharing it, and then perhaps changing and developing
what they are delivering at a local level. Now they have had that
dialogue, had that discussion, had that assessment, and saying,
"It is daft that you are funding it and I am funding it and
we are both funding the same thing, and we are both not meeting
the needs of the community; why do we not look at what we are
doing and find ways of using that resource more creatively at
a local level?" I would hope that they would be innovative
in their way of going about doing that. It might be that the college
is around that table, in that partnership, with a proud tradition
and history, as it were, of delivering this and carrying on doing
so. It may be that in other areas that has not been the position
for that FE institution, and they will not be. That will be a
matter for local partnerships to develop.
Q652 Mr Chaytor: So there would be
nothing to prevent colleges that currently have a broad range
of provision and have strengths in the adult and community work
maintaining—
Phil Hope: Certainly there will
not be anything to prevent it at all; in fact we would want to
see them creating better partnerships to ensure that what they
are doing compliments what the local authorities and others might
be doing, because at the moment the evidence is that that is not
happening off around the country—that kind of working-together
partnership delivering that kind of learning in local communities.
Q653 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask about
the development of the specialist element in colleges? I understand
the analogy with the specialist schools programme, but is it an
exact analogy, because, clearly, within a given area, even in
a large conurbation, there are far fewer colleges than schools
and therefore it is less likely that students will move around
college to college because of its specialism because it would
be further to travel. So is this a curriculum improvement programme,
or is it a device to encourage greater exercise of choice and
requiring students to travel greater distances to get to the provision
that they are looking for?
Phil Hope: The network of centres
of vocational excellence that we have already has proven its worth
in terms of raising the quality of vocational training that is
being delivered, both 16-19-year-olds but also to employers who
can make use of that facility. We are raising the bar on the quality
of that network, and those CoVEs are going to have to go through
a quality improvement process to ensure that they then qualify
for that status. We are building in the national skills academies,
as you are aware, as a new element; that is to say the first four
are being planned at the moment. We want to have 12 of these,
and eventually one per sector skills council, to be at the apex
of a range of CoVEs under the particular skills sector. All of
that will be to drive up the quality and standard of training
as well as the volume of training that is delivered; and for a
particular college that takes on a CoVE or has a CoVE already,
there are two things we expect: one is that they will become very
good at what they do and better at what they do; second, for example
not only is it an automotive CoVE—not only does that have
the ability to develop and deliver better training in that specialism,
but we do expect it to have the effect it has had in schools,
which is to raise the overall performance of the college; that
the college gains reputation and it has that impact on the wider
delivery of training by the college as the CoVE is seen to be
so successful for that particular college.
Q654 Mr Chaytor: Would you expect
there to be a CoVE in every area of the curriculum within a given
travel to study?
Phil Hope: No. We have a combination,
do we not, of sector skill requirements and different local requirements;
so the skills base of Corby or of Newcastle and the skills needs
and the manufacturing versus the service sector and so on, is
very different from one area to another. It will be for the college,
with the LSC to discuss locally that which meets the needs of
that community. As we described earlier, if you get a particularly
good college, good at a particular thing, it might want to confederate
or be delivering that kind of training speciality in another area,
or working with another college in another area, to raise the
quality of that training in that other area.
Q655 Mr Chaytor: Is that model equally
applicable to rural areas, where one college may serve a hinterland
of hundreds of square miles?
Phil Hope: Yes, I think the challenge
there is to be able to deliver different sorts of vocational skills
training to very sparsely populated area. When it comes to delivering
the Level 2 and Level 3 diplomas, we have to have ways of delivering
that which are outreached to employers in local communities. We
have good examples of doing precisely that, but we need to build
on that across the country because it is not sufficiently replicated
elsewhere.
Q656 Mr Chaytor: Can I finally ask
about the review of reputation that the Foster report argued for
and which has now been established. Can you tell us who is in
charge of it and when they are going to report?
Bill Rammell: It is being driven
across the LSC with the sector and with ourselves. I think this
is a really important piece of work. I would anticipate it reporting
by the back end of the summer, the autumn. It is a really important
piece of work, to get champions at a local and regional and national
level; and to get real advocates within the system. One of the
ongoing debates that I have with the Association of Colleges is
about the need to recognise that within the FE sector sometimes
the glass might be half-full instead of being half-empty. There
are challenges, and the sector needs to challenge us about what
needs to happen; but actually, if we are constantly talking about
the problems within the sector, whatever they may be, we send
a message outside about how well or not the FE sector is doing,
which is not in the best interests of the sector and does not
reflect the progress that is being made.
Chairman: We are working you well tonight,
but let us move to "Oversight and Management". You ought
to get some sort of honour for being so patient!
Q657 Dr Blackman-Woods: Before asking
about oversight and management, can I ask a question about employers,
because it is not that long since I left this sector. One of the
things we had real difficulty with was employer engagement, and
although I fully applaud the focus that the White Paper has on
employment issues, I am just wondering how confident you are that
you are going to get the employer engagement. Indeed, do you see
employer engagement as the way forward, or are you happy to deal
with proxies like sector skills councils or chambers of commerce;
or do you actually want it to be employers? There are so many
different ways in which you want to engage—
Phil Hope: There are two things
about this. For an employer who just has a workforce and says
"I want to train my workforce"—frankly, they do
not need to know or worry about what I call the wiring of sector
skills councils, regional skills partnerships and the rest of
it. They simply go to their broker and say they have a particular
training need under Train to Gain, and they get that training
need met quickly with a good training provider. Many employers
of course—and we want them to do this—engage with
the structures we have created to ensure that we create, with
the sectors skills councils, sector skills agreements that map
out the training needs and the training gaps and see how in partnership
they can work together, maybe contributing to a national skills
academy as we develop the specialism within the sector. I think
different employers will be engaging in different ways. In terms
of at the local level for the FE college engaging with employers,
it is critical—and I am confident that FE colleges will
respond really positively to this—and we have models like
that in the Sussex colleges where they have looked at how they
operate, how they behave, how they engage with employers, and
completely transform the way that they go about doing their business,
to such an extent that it is one of the bases for the quality
mark that we will be developing for the years ahead. I think that
this is a great opportunity for FE colleges to become much more
engaged with employers in a whole variety of ways at a local level
to meet those employers' training needs. With the demand-led funding,
the funding system drives them in that direction as well. That
is different from the infrastructure that we created to ensure
that those training needs that we develop are fully thought through
and developed in the sector skills councils and all of that area
of structure.
Q658 Dr Blackman-Woods: Moving on
to implementation, the Foster report said there should be an implementation
unit within the DfES and then a kind of user group, presumably
so that that group could monitor what was happening in terms of
implementation. You seem to have gone for this ministerial standing
group that brings in users and people who are involved in the
direct delivery of FE. Can you explain why you went for that model?
Bill Rammell: There are two levels
to it. Firstly, there will be a programme board of officials internally
within the DfES, chaired by Stephen Marsden, who is the Director
of Lifelong Learning and Skills. That group of officials—their
responsibility will be to track the proposals, to track the implementation,
to liaise with the external bodies to ensure that is happening.
Also, we do want a body that will look at the relationship between
colleges and the LSC and the Department, but also monitor the
implementation of the proposals within the White Paper. That is
the body that will be meeting within the next month or so for
the first time. It will be chaired by myself. Phil will be there
as well. It will bring all the key stakeholders together, as well
as some of the trade union representatives, as well as some of
the college representatives. One of the things that we did very
proactively in drawing up the White Paper was to go out and establish
sounding boards with different groups of principals and providers
across the country, to get their input. Some of those will be
represented on that body, so you will have the official group,
and you will then have the group that is chaired by myself. However,
I am keen to see that extended beyond that so that we keep some
of that interaction directly with groups of providers on the ground
and keep the dialogue going. That is the most effective way to
recognise the consensus we have established and make sure we drive
the changes through.
Q659 Dr Blackman-Woods: I think there
is a degree of consensus that rationalisation may not have gone
as far as it could go. I wondered whether that was something that
we shared, and if it was something that the implementation group
could keep on board, so that they could keep looking for opportunities
to rationalise. I know the FE sector is always complaining about
the number of accreditation and awarding bodies they have to deal
with—inspection, and employers and employers' organisations;
and I just wondered if that was something you had thought about
keeping in your sight.
Bill Rammell: Certainly there
are elements of rationalisation within the White Paper, and those
will be driven forward. In terms of the accreditation bodies,
that is something that Phil has been working on.
Phil Hope: There are two things:
there is the whole quality improvement—and Bill mentioned
earlier how that is being brought under the umbrella of the QIA;
and there will be a clear simple system for giving support for
quality improvement, which will bring together a lot of bodies
that so far have been playing a part in that. On the question
of awarding bodies and accreditation, the work we are doing around
the framework for achievement is a critical part of the landscape
here. I will not say it is not challenging, because there are
a lot of very important vested interests taking part in this,
but it is something we are determined to do. We are clear about
where we want to get to, and that is the work of the trials and
the pilots that are going at the moment, to ensure that we can
know that what we are about to put into place works. What is critical
is that you move from one system to another. You do not, as it
were, lose things along the way, which is why—I know there
is an urgency about this but in conducting it in an urgent way
we do not make mistakes because there is so much at stake in terms
of the credibility and robustness of the qualifications and the
awarding bodies that deliver them.
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