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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 609-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS committee
THE AMALGAMATION OF OFSTED AND ALI
Monday 31 October 2005 MR DAVID SHERLOCK, MS NICKY PERRY and MR DENIS McENHILL Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 44
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 31 October 2005 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods Mr David Chaytor Mrs Nadine Dorries Jeff Ennis Tim Farron Helen Jones Mr Gordon Marsden Stephen Williams Mr Rob Wilson ________________
Witnesses: Mr David Sherlock, Chief Inspector of Adult Learning for England, Ms Nicky Perry, Director of Inspection and Mr Denis McEnhill, Director of Inspection, Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI), examined. Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome David Sherlock, Nicky Perry and Denis McEnhill to our proceedings. We all know, because I was explaining, why it is so important to see you today, and we are very happy to do so. We are going to have some quick fire questions because, again, we only have an hour in this double session so do forgive us if we whizz through. I would ask colleagues to make short, sharp questions and similarly with the replies. David, do you want to say anything to open up, as long as it is not too long, just to give us a little background? Mr Sherlock: Yes, very quickly. Thank you very much for inviting us to be witnesses today, Chairman. Can I make three points: The first one is that ALI is an efficient organisation. We inspect some of the cutting-edge companies in the world, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, BMW and companies of that kind. We need to test our efficiency all the time against them if we are to make judgments about their training. We do that by benchmarking our work externally, you have some details in our submission. The second point is that we are a highly effective organisation. Again, we apply very rigorous standards to the training of those companies in order to add value to their activities. We have a huge range of different kinds of organisations that we inspect from blue chip companies I have described, to colleges, UFI learndirect, prisons, the police service, the Armed Services and so forth. We have, as an example, reduced the inadequacy rate in work-based learning from 58 per cent when we started in 2001 to around ten per cent at the current time. The third point is that we are an innovative organisation. We are absolutely not resistant to change, we have moved forward the inspection agenda very substantially in a number of ways which we can enumerate, but we are resistant to this particular change, which we believe will not save money and, indeed, will worsen the service to our clients, who include some of the most disadvantaged learners in this country. Q2 Chairman: The Chancellor of the Exchequer wants to get rid of lots and lots of different inspection regimes and wants three main strands. Now, who are we to stand in the way of the might of the Treasury? Mr Sherlock: Chairman, it is an issue which I have to say engages me somewhat from time to time and has done throughout this process. We support simplification; we support deregulation. Nevertheless this particular approach - and it is only one approach - we believe does not add value to the people who we serve. I think there is a case in many instances across the inspectorates where they were very small organisations which perhaps had some synergy coming together; we do not believe that is the case with ALI and Ofsted. Q3 Chairman: Does anybody else want to come in on that, Denis? Mr McEnhill: Yes. We have got a particularly interesting remit, David has enumerated particularly work-based learning, he has touched also on our role on employment programmes funded by the Department for Work and Pensions, adult learning in the prison service, the learndirect provision funded through UFI, University for Industry. Over five years we have developed an expertise in how to approach the inspection and the quality of these various organisations and, in a sense, how to engage with the very particular types of provider. That expertise we are very keen is not lost and our major fear with the proposal as it appears in the consultation document is that we will be talking about an inspectorate - our own currently has a budget around £25 - £30 million - joining with an organisation whose budget is in excess of £200 million. We are talking about the order of 8:1. The particular safeguards or the lack of safeguards in the consultation would lead us to fear, and I think fear probably with some justification, that because the overwhelming business of that large organisation is focused on schools and on children, inevitably the attention would focus on schools and children and would be distracted from the focus of our organisation at present which is focused on workforce development and improving the skills base in this country, contributing, making a good contribution to a good new skills base in this country. It is dilution of impact which is one of our main concerns with the proposals. Q4 Chairman: What about the criticism you are a bunch of softies really? You go and inspect and then, disgracefully, you then try and help people to get better. That is not the rigour that we know from Ofsted: Ofsted goes in, makes their judgment on the standards and then leaves it to the school to sort out. What are you doing playing around with helping these people? Ms Perry: I think it depends what you believe is the purpose of inspection and our fundamental belief is it is about helping providers to improve. There seems little point in just saying that something is poor and walking away from it and waiting three or four years and going back and saying "It is still poor". Our view is that it is important to work with local funding bodies and providers to drive up improvement. We tell it how it is and we are by no means soft. We give out low grades and we stare people straight in the eye and tell them they are not doing well enough every day of the week, but our job is not finished there. The expertise of the inspectors is well-regarded by the providers and they want them, not other people, to help them improve because they value that colleague help, if you like. It is about expert guidance that they need to help them improve, and we believe that is the fundamental purpose of inspection. Mr Sherlock: Can I say, a lot of the organisations that we serve are not in the public sector. In many cases, the money that they get from the government is a very small proportion of their income stream. If we did not add value to their activities they could walk away and the impoverishment of the National Skills Strategy which would result from that, I think, is very significant. Chairman: Most of you, who know my track record, know that I have often asked Ofsted to do the job that you seem to be doing, but nevertheless. Gordon? Q5 Mr Marsden: We have had you in the room about five minutes and you have already blown your own trumpet rather effectively. Of course, the interesting question about this consultation is that you have a range of people blowing your trumpet for you from people as diverse as the Institute of Directors, the Association of Colleges, NIACE and the Open University, all of whom have said, in various forums, that they value very much what you are doing. I want to ask you, however, let us just assume for the sake of argument at the end of the day that you are merged into a super-Ofsted, or whatever it is going to be, how do you think the new inspection arrangements will increase value-added to the education and skills sector as a whole? Are you saying it is the existing situation or nothing or can you see circumstances if you were included in that super inspectorate in which you would not necessarily be content but be happier than you are under the existing proposals? Mr Sherlock: I think the proposition on the table is an enlarged Ofsted and every indication we have is that the intention would be that the culture, skills set in terms of back office functions and so forth, the attitudes and approaches that ALI has developed would be lost in that enlargement of Ofsted. I think it is perfectly possible to see ways in which a new inspectorate could be structured, in respect of the different traditions, the different approaches to serving different groups of customers that all of the organisations that would come into this new organisation might bring and might need. Q6 Mr Marsden: You would envisage that, if I can use an analogy, less of a takeover and more of a federation? Mr Sherlock: Indeed. I think that is a perfectly possible way forward. I think that is still a possibility, at least I would hope it is a still possibility but it is a matter of regret that was not included as one possibility in the consultation paper. Q7 Mr Marsden: Would that federation, rather than a takeover structure, enable you to retain the distinctive elements of improvement and inspection coming together which, as I say, organisations as disparate as the IOD - who I think are generally regarded as a soft touch in these matters - have said is particularly valuable? Mr Sherlock: I would hope, yes. I think at the moment people have set their faces against that but I would hope more detailed discussion of these things would lead people to rather more flexible positions. I think the whole notion of an inspectorate which also works in quality improvement has been bedevilled, if you like, with positions which are perhaps open more to folklore than evidence. I think that it is assumed that there have to be conflicts of interests in those circumstances, even if one builds in, as ALI does, very substantial Chinese walls to prevent one thing leeching over into the other. I do not believe that is the case, in fact, indeed, if you look at Ofsted it has its schools improvement unit which deals with open screens which one could describe as an improvement function, just like that of ALI. I think these things can be done. I think that we could build a new organisation which brought in the best of all the predecessor organisations and thereby connected the skills strategy and the 14 to 19 strategy but it would need a great deal more sensitivity and thought than I think has gone into the consultation paper so far. Q8 Mr Marsden: Speaking of sensitivity and thought, can I ask you about money. One of the things, obviously, which is driving this is efficiency savings, and I understand you are already in a position to promise efficiency savings for 2005-06 to DfES and DW. There has been a report which I think DfES commissioned themselves from PriceWaterhouse which suggested that any savings from this merger would be in the region of £2.3 million a year but those would be swallowed up by the cost of bringing the bodies together for between four to nine years afterwards, and one or two of the other organisations in this sector seemed to think likewise. Is that your candid assessment of what the situation would be? Mr Sherlock: Yes, it is. Subsequent work has been done by the finance directors of ALI and Ofsted and I think the agreed figure - and let us say that there a degree of dispute over these issues - is about £3.3 million a year possible savings. There is a range plainly of the cost of the transition and that affects the payback period. It depends really on whether one, for example, closes down the relatively new office, three year old office, of ALI in Coventry and loses all the staff or whether one seeks to integrate them into a new organisation. I think that range of possible payback periods is realistic. It might be a little less, it might be rather more, it depends really on what we do in order to try to get the best out of the existing organisations. Q9 Mr Marsden: Can I take you a final overview question about the potential implications of this merger/takeover, call it what you will. Many organisations who represent adult students, and particularly adult students with disabilities, notwithstanding the good work that you do at the moment, feel that there is not enough profile given to the needs of learners with disabilities, and there are a range of adult learning disabilities. In fact still the National Bureau for Students with Disabilities have just sent a briefing to the Committee with various aspects of this raised. How do you think the needs of adult learners with disabilities would be met in this new proposed structure? Mr Sherlock: Let me say to start with - and I will pass it over to my colleagues then - we are the only organisation that grades equality of opportunity. Certainly, we regard the equality of opportunity and diversity as absolutely at the heart of adult learning. We think that grading affects behaviour and we believe that we have seen some improvements but it has to be said that this is the weakest area of all of those that we are dealing with. For example, the grades at specialist colleges for people with disabilities and learning difficulties, 40 per cent of them are still inadequate over a four year period, and that is a very poor record which has to be improved. Mr McEnhill: In my first response I mentioned the particular specialist nature of some of our work and it lies in this area. To take an example, work step provision, which is funded through Jobcentre Plus, DWP, is a particularly difficult issue where we have really had to work extremely hard to understand what the provision is. At the risk of telling you what you know already, work step provision is provision which is intended to help people get into work, essentially disabled people into mainstream employment, not protected employment or sheltered employment. That has been a tremendous problem; the inadequacy rate in that area is still very high, it is still 40 per cent. We are working very, very closely with the DWP, with Jobcentre Plus to address some of the incredibly complex issues that exist in that provision. That sort of approach, I think, would be lost without the sort of safeguards that David talked about. Q10 Mr Marsden: You are saying about those safeguards, in fact disabled learners would get a bad deal under this merger? Mr McEnhill: I go back to what I said earlier, I fear very much for the loss of that expertise and the loss of that style of working. Chairman: I am sure we are going to get more of that in a moment. Q11 Tim Farron: I wonder how you think the style and quality of inspection would differ compared to ALI and a newly merged inspection service? Ms Perry: I think one of the differences, because we are a small structure and we have a flexible attitude, if you like, we can bespoke inspection to the needs of a particular subgroup of provider. For example, with the disability staff, we do inspect it very particularly in the nature of what it is rather than just some other construct. I think that is a real fundamental difference about the way we work from a lot of what you perceive as a way Ofsted works. We can get those experts and that specificity down to a fairly tight set of definitions with different kinds of provision which is for the benefit of those kinds of providers. Mr Sherlock: Can I link your comment, Mr Farron, with Mr Marsden's point. Our understanding is that the initial thrust of this change came from Treasury considerations. There was a desire to reduce the cost of regulation and it was felt that the way to do that was to reduce the number of regulators and to narrow the scope of those regulators, in other words to cut off the useful but not absolutely core duties, if you like. Our understanding is that the quality improvement side of ALI, all the free bits, if I can put it that way, would be lost in a new organisation, that is our understanding from a consultation paper and discussions with colleagues. I think that the bespoke nature of inspection, which Nicky has talked about, we understand will be lost. If I can use work step as an example: work step involves some of the most respectable organisations in the country, providers tend to be people like the Royal British Legion, the Enham Trust and so on, very experienced, very caring organisations but a new programme comes along which demands that instead of just caring for people they start to moving them into mainstream work. They were unprepared for that and they failed at it, simply inspecting them time and time again and saying "You are doing badly" simply drives down morale, it drives down standards. You have to find a different way of intervening in circumstances like that. We have come across those circumstances very regularly and what we seek to do, therefore, is to have many different services, some of them about improvement, some of them about support, some of them about rigorous quality assessment which used in an intelligent way can move each individual provider upwards. Q12 Tim Farron: You are talking about expertise I guess there, I spent all my working life, until I got to this place, in higher education, and there were a whole variety of inspection regimes over my time working in HE, most recently, the QAA. The most obvious thing is that institutions are different, very different, particularly those at the more vocational end compared with those at the blue chip end of the market. Having worked at almost both ends of the spectrum you see very often that the inspectors that come into the second variety institution will be perhaps not so worried about what those institutions do. Do you fear for your own services, do you fear for the level of expertise and specialist experience that inspectors might have in terms of the adult and vocational context? Mr Sherlock: I think the word Denis used was "dilution" and I think that is exactly right. We could not get away with sending non-engineers into an engineering company like Rolls-Royce, for example. It is absolutely necessary to maintain people who are specialists and to appoint them at a provision which is appropriate to them, not have generalist inspectors. Mr McEnhill: I think a problem in time would be our inspectors are specialists, yes they are experts, yes they are engineers that have come from the world of work, many of them, or from an appropriate world anyway --- Q13 Chairman: Some of us would think the vocational end was the blue chip end. Mr McEnhill: --- but what they also are is inspectors. They have got all the generic skills in inspection. They can do the job, they can go in and look at stuff, dissect it and give a simple message and say "This is what is good, this is what is not so good". An organisation which was focusing on the massive childcare and school agenda for this funding basis would, I believe, want to make use of that general expertise if a body of people moved into it without safeguards, the protection of the ALI. Q14 Tim Farron: My final point is you are getting it but really I think it is not just the expertise of the inspectors, it is the expertise of the regime. You can send inspectors in with lots of expertise to any outfit you want to inspect working on the basis of a remit designed by generalists. Mr McEnhill: It is having an intelligent debate with specialists on the provider side. Mr Sherlock: This is a culture focused on welfare for work, workforce development and community renewal and nothing else. Q15 Dr Blackman-Woods: I would like you to expand on some of the comments you made earlier about the possible downside of the new single inspectorate. Why are you convinced that adult learning and business-focused activity will be pushed to the sidelines in the new single inspectorate for children and learners? Mr Sherlock: In terms of the particular proposals on the table at the moment, the background work that has followed those has been based on the notion that ALI will be absorbed and will disappear essentially in favour of an enlarged Ofsted. In other words, the organisational structure of Ofsted, as it is at the moment, is the organisational structure and culture which will go forward. That has been made very clear. We do not believe that is the right way forward; we believe that it is an enormous waste of human and financial investments that have been made over the last four or five years, and we would seek ways of realising those investments which have already been made and, indeed, producing an organisation, if there is to be a single organisation, which is better than any of the predecessor organisations. It ought to be better, different and more effective than anything we have done before if this is worth doing. Ms Perry: It is a simple proportionality issue. The quantity, the size of the adult sector compared with all the child protection, all the school, all the nursery, everything else to do with children, it is out of all possibility to presume that it would retain its specialism within that body. Q16 Dr Blackman-Woods: Do you think the model then should be thrown out completely or is it possible to put adequate safeguards in place that will ensure the adult learning and business skills are kept? Mr McEnhill: I think it is possible to allay some of our fears through the governance arrangements, through the composition of the governing body, through the extent to which the chief inspector of the new outfit is held to account for the discharge of his or her duties through that board, to specify, perhaps even go further, the type of person on that board. Also, in statue one could specify the duties of the inspectorate so that adult learning is not left as an implicit part of this job but it is explicitly required that this inspectorate reports on quality, standards and priorities to the secretaries of state of both the Department of Education and Skills and the Department for Work and Pensions. It can be done and it is relatively straightforward to draft that but there needs to be a will and what that, of course, will do is alter the culture of this organisation. We believe it would make it a better organisation, it would be better than its predecessors. Q17 Dr Blackman-Woods: You are presumably putting some written evidence together to demonstrate that is the case? Mr McEnhill: We have written evidence. Q18 Dr Blackman-Woods: You are continuing to, because I think what we are hearing is the system could be improved. To follow up Tim's point, do you think that in the new inspectorate there will be enough people with the right sorts of skills and if that is not the case how are you going to push to get people with vocational skills to fulfil the remit? Mr Sherlock: I think it is unlikely to be us, if I may put it bluntly. If the proposal, as it goes through at the moment, prevails, I think the chances that the people who have developed the ALI culture would be wanted on the voyage is very small. As I say, the proposal on the table is that that culture should be subsumed in the current Ofsted proposal. Let me make this absolutely clear, this is not a quarrel between ALI and Ofsted, absolutely not. Ofsted has a set of duties, which it discharges effectively, it is very well-known for doing so in that field but that field is not our field. What we would seek to do I think is to recognise the point that NIACE made in its submission "every child matters but every adult does too". At the moment the interests of adults are being rather lost in the concern with children and young people. If I use an example of the kind of work that we are doing, we published in March, a paper called Safer Training, which was about training for the Armed Service and welfare of recruits for the Armed Services; that is a long term programme. What has come out of that is a recognition in the Armed Services of a need to completely change the culture of training for young people entering the Armed Services. That will take us at least through to 2007, and ideally a great deal beyond. The question, therefore, in our mind is whether, in fact, that kind of work, that kind of focus, that kind of recognition of expertise can be carried forward in an inspectorate which is largely focused on the interests of children alone. Q19 Dr Blackman-Woods: Would it be your view that the new inspectorate could work providing the needs of adult learners? Mr Sherlock: I think a new inspectorate could work if it was specially tailored to do the job. I think that needs a good deal more thought and consideration. Q20 Mr Wilson: The main driver behind this seems to be to generate efficiencies as far as I can understand it. Yet, there does not seem to be a prevailing view as to whether that is going to happen. I see that PriceWaterhouse suggest that any efficiency savings would be lost for between four and nine years afterwards, although the Associated Colleges makes the point that they think there may be the opportunity for savings. What is your view on that, do you think there will be an opportunity for savings? Will there be efficiencies made? Mr Sherlock: I think in any coming together of this kind, if it is a coming together which builds on the best, in other words which looks in an objective way at who does what well and seeks to build on it, then almost certainly there would be some savings. I think that is a matter of common sense. If we take the best ICT and say "Let us build on that from three or four organisations coming together". it would take the best HR and the best finances and so forth to build it; there will be some savings. I think the value of the PWC paper, and indeed the work that has been done subsequently by finance directors of different organisations, is to suggest that in fact it will be rather small in proportion to the overall turnover of the organisation. Q21 Mr Wilson: Which brings me to my next question, what sort of size of savings do you believe can be made from this process? Mr Sherlock: I think the calculations are somewhere between one and one and a half per cent. Q22 Mr Wilson: So, fairly small? Mr Sherlock: Yes, I would say it is very small, yes. Q23 Mr Wilson: I do not know what the size of the budget is, what is that in pounds and pence? Mr Sherlock: Our budget is £26.5million, Ofsted's is £200 million or so CSKI is about £6.5 million, I understand, in the proportion of the campaign. Let us say that the initial aggregate is somewhere around the £230 million mark so we are talking about a relatively small proportion. £2.5 million or £3 million, they are not negligible sums of money but they are actually very sums of money in proportion. If it takes some years to recover them and if there are real losses to the momentum and the skills strategy, the opportunities for vulnerable people coming through the planning programmes that we work in, then I would suggest the game is not worth the candle. Q24 Mr Wilson: You would say the downside massively outweighs the upside? Mr Sherlock: You are suggesting the downsides considerably outweigh --- Q25 Mr Wilson: I hope you are suggesting that, I do not want to put words in your mouth. Mr Sherlock: Yes, I would agree with that proposition. I believe that for the proposition that is on the table at the moment the disadvantages heavily out weigh the advantages. Q26 Mr Marsden: I want to come back to this question of what you say and what you gain from any changes. David, how much of your current work, roughly would you say, is spent assessing non DfES-funded training? Mr Sherlock: 20 per cent is spent on DWP training, about another six or seven per cent is on privately commissioned work. What we want to get at is that £20 billion, if it is £20 billion that the TUC and CBI say is training in the private sector. I think we would see the real win for the skills strategy in forging a real partnership between privately funded trained employers largely supporting their own staff, and indeed the kind of training that people pay for themselves, bringing that into the ambit of the skills strategy. Q27 Mr Marsden: It is just under a third of what you are currently doing. If I am putting words in your mouth, then please disabuse me, the implication of what you are saying is that if this amalgamation went ahead without the ring fencing that we have talked about, the ability to pick up on that business, if I can put it that way, would be vastly reduced? Mr Sherlock: Certainly, the indications from the focus groups are that employers will be willing to commission work that adds value to their activities, as you would expect, but they are not willing to pay for regulation, again as you would you expect. Q28 Mr Marsden: In financial terms, the Government could lose out on that as well? Mr Sherlock: I believe so. Q29 Mr Marsden: Can I ask you a final question, relating to this question of what might happen, the Association of Colleges said in their submission that they have particular concerns about the announcement that Nord Anglia would be contracted out to deliver inspections, and they would want to have reassurance about their ability to deliver inspections of adult work-based learning. You may or may not wish to comment on that but is that a legitimate question to ask? Mr Sherlock: I think it is a legitimate question to ask. In a new regime we have only completed two college inspections, and I think those have gone pretty well. I think the problems can be overcome. I think that where large amounts of the core business of an inspectorate are contracted out to anybody there are problems potentially about conflicts of interest and, for example, in this particular case ALI inspect a number and Nord Anglia do. Where the two organisations are brought together then I think one would potentially have problems about conflicts of interest. Mr Marsden: We have had Nord Anglia before our Committee in a different context in the past and I am sure if this is to go ahead we would want to have them again. Q30 Chairman: Are you getting on all right with the Sector Skills Council? Do they appreciate you? Do they represent a new force, a new dynamic in the skills arena? Ms Perry: I think it is a bit variable, the Sector Skills Council, a lot of them are not very well developed yet so their ability to interact with department-attached bodies is less. We are getting on pretty well with lots of them and I think one of the interesting reasons for the turn of events is they are beginning to commission us to do special pieces of work for them. I think that is a reasonable indication of how they feel about what we can do for them. Q31 Chairman: They have been reasonably supportive of you surviving as an organisation? Mr Sherlock: Yes, I believe so. Q32 Chairman: Some of them have been well-established for some time and a lot of them are very new. Mr Sherlock: Yes. I think there are occasions, perhaps, when we have occasion to disagree with their view on the world but I think that is probably true of the construction industry in the last few months. Nevertheless, we work, for example, with the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders nationally which is, I think, one of the real beacons of that kind of activity. The motor industry works together very satisfactorily having recognised - even though they are real rivals commercially - that something like 80 per cent of their training is generic, therefore, we work with the SMMT National Academy to quality assure their work. The same is true of the Ceramics Academy which is based in Stoke-on-Trent and I think there are huge possibilities arising out of that new dynamic, if you like, of organising things sectorially rather than by government programmes. Q33 Mr Chaytor: Can you just clarify what the Government has said about the division of work if this merger goes ahead? Has it been said that you will not be able to do the DWP work and private sector work under the Ofsted umbrella or is it merely indicated that this may not be your core business? Mr Sherlock: The position I think with DWP's work is not clear, I think we are far from clear who would inspect that. Q34 Mr Chaytor: It has not been said definitively that this work would not transfer into Ofsted? Mr Sherlock: No, it has not. I think the DWP work, as I said, it is not clear to us at the moment, and it is not clear to us what the DWP's attitude to the whole consultation will be. We are aware of the views of a number officials but we are certainly not aware of the official stands from DWP. We understand that the new body will be allowed to commission work but we also understand it will not be able to indulge in activities which are about quality improvement. Certainly the attitude coming through from the people who have been consulted in the focus groups is that they are not interested, as I said, in paying for just straight regulation, why would they, they are interested in paying for something that adds value. Our view is that because the proposition that people have been prepared to pay for - and major government organisations like the MOD and the Home Office and so forth - is that unique combination between quality assessment and quality improvements offered by ALI then that work would tend to wither. That is certainly the indication and the belief is the MOD has serious anxieties about the proposition that is currently on the table. Q35 Mr Chaytor: There are two separate issues in this area of discussion. The first is whether ALI should be merged with Ofsted and the second is whether inspections should be separated from quality improvement. It could be perfectly possible that ALI could be merged with Ofsted and take quality improvement with it and it could equally be possible that ALI would remain separate and have quality improvement divorced. My question is, obviously you feel the preferred system is to link quality improvement with the inspection process but given the line has been put out that that is not going to be what happens, what would you propose should be the future of quality, regardless of whether or not you are merged with Ofsted? Mr McEnhill: It is very difficult to answer that. We passionately believe that if inspectorates do not engage in some form of quality improvement - and the definition of that can be very complex - if it does not engage then it is not exploiting its true potential. Q36 Mr Chaytor: That has been the position with Ofsted since it was established in the early 1990s. The national system inspection for schools is divorced from quality improvements, it is not going to change. Mr McEnhill: I think it can change, we have shown that it can change, we have shown that it can work. Again, at the risk of telling you something that you know already, can I say quality improvement is not necessarily cuddling up to providers and making them feel warm and wanted, telling them how to do it; there is a whole range of activities here. There are some rather pithy comments spreading good practice as though it happens through the ether. We have worked and found out it does not transmit itself terribly easily from inspectorate to provider, you have got to work at it, you have got to have delivery vehicles will can enable it to work. Another of our activity is the notion of quality champions. On our own, we cannot improve the quality provision to the extent it is needed, it is the provider which provides these catalysts and we can help, in a sense, to train those catalysts to work within their providers for stimulating. All of those things depend upon inspectors, practising inspectors who go in day in day out into provision and they see what is good, what is bad and what is dreadful, and they start to form opinions about what is good and start to turn people's gaze towards that. That is not done in that way in Ofsted currently. Q37 Mr Chaytor: That is an argument for an integrated process, it is not an explanation as to how you see the future if you are not allowed to carry out that integrated function. Mr McEnhill: Somehow or other there would have to be a very stretched umbilical cord between the inspectorate and this quality improvement arm which is somewhere elsewhere. That sounds inefficient to me. Q38 Mr Chaytor: In the documentation that has been put out so far, about the implications of the merger, what has been said about quality improvement or is it just ignored? Mr Sherlock: It asks a rather open question in the consultation document about what would happen to ALI's quality improvement activities. I think some people have been tempted to answer, "Well, QIA should do it", the new Quality Improvement Agency, but it has already been said that QIA will not be a delivery body, it will be a body which simply commissions others so that does not seem to be a sufficient answer. I think the answer is that a lot of things that have been made to work, and as Denis says, they do not happen by themselves, Excaliber good practice platform, for example, took us a couple of years of seriously hard work to make happen. We worked in partnership with Uniclub(?) for a year to learn how they did it and then built this practice platform and, with the support of the Department invested an awful lot of money in making it happen. I think all of those things are likely to wither on the vine. Q39 Mr Chaytor: If you are confident of the success of your track record so far, why are you not confident of your ability to change the Ofsted culture post-merger? Mr Sherlock: I think that the dice are heavily loaded against our being able to do so in the consultation as it stands. I think if we were asking for a single thing, it would be second thoughts by the Government on that particular issue, to have thoughts about how one might get two plus two equals five, if you like, bringing together those organisations to get a new organisation which is better than any of them, rather than something which is simply saying "These organisations will simply take some of their manpower and put them into Ofsted" and hope that that works. Q40 Jeff Ennis: A follow on to the point David is making, if the two weak areas are divorced - the inspection and the quality improvements - as the current planning, why cannot your union within Ofsted apply to do the commissioning work on behalf of the QIA? Mr Sherlock: I think that is exactly what we would do. Q41 Jeff Ennis: What is wrong with that? Mr Sherlock: Nothing. I think if one was looking at what Mr Marsden described as a ring-fenced structure where, in fact, you had a series of divisions within a large organisation which were particularly tailored to their own client groups, I think that might work very well and it might have the added-value of bringing together, as I said, the 14 to 19 strategy and the skills strategy which, at the moment, are somewhat stretched. Q42 Jeff Ennis: Does your record of achievement in this field not give you a leading edge, as it were, in terms of getting the work from the QIA anyway? Mr Sherlock: Yes. The indication from QIA is that they would want to buy and value the provider development unit that we operate, Excalibur that we operate, the Quality Champions programme that we operate and so forth. I think that QIA is certainly not an impediment in any sense, but I do not think the QIA either would provide those services itself or could provide those new services itself and if the new body, the enlarged Ofsted, were unwilling to continue to sucker them then they would simply disappear from the agenda from the providers that we serve. All the indications are that that blend of quality improvement and quality assessment services --- Q43 Jeff Ennis: One of your main concerns then is the disappearance of the quality improvement agenda? Mr Sherlock: That is certainly one of our main concerns, absolutely. Ms Perry: It is also the focus on the particularities of the different types of provision which we believe would be lost. Q44 Chairman: The Association of Colleges, they seem to be a bit ambivalent about you; is that to be expected or is that an incorrect reading? Mr Sherlock: I think it is to be expected, Chairman. At the moment 80-odd per cent of the students in the general FE college are adults, nevertheless we work under the direction of Ofsted. I think we work very effectively. I think we have put together joint teams which have been pretty much seamless. Nevertheless, I think the AOC is justified in feeling it is a fairly cumbersome kind of arrangement, I think they would prefer if there was a single inspectorate. I can understand that even though Ofsted and ourselves have worked hard and long in order to try and mitigate any structural difficulties. I think they would like to have a single inspectorate. I think perhaps their hopes in that regard are somewhat exaggerated because QAA and others would continue to be involved but nevertheless I understand that and I have some sympathy with them. Chairman: I think that has been a very good session. David, Nicky and Denis, can I thank you very much for your evidence and because time is short for the consultation process, it looks like we have got to get our act together quite quickly to make an impact. Thank you very much for your attendance. |