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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 649-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
FURTHER EDUCATION
Monday 28 November 2005 DR JOHN BRENNAN, MS PAULINE WATERHOUSE, MR ALAN TUCKETT and MR COLIN FLINT Evidence heard in Public Questions 224 - 302
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 28 November 2005 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr David Chaytor Tim Farron Helen Jones Mr Gordon Marsden Stephen Williams ________________ Memorandum submitted by National Institute of Adult Continuing Education
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dr John Brennan, Chief Executive, Association of Colleges, Ms Pauline Waterhouse, Principal, Blackpool and the Fylde College, Mr Alan Tuckett, Director, National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, and Mr Colin Flint, Associate Director of FE, National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, gave evidence. Q224 Chairman: Can I welcome Pauline Waterhouse, Colin Flint, Alan Tuckett and John Brennan to our deliberations. Pauline, it is your first time in front of the Committee, so welcome indeed. It is very nice when we have someone whose MP is on this Committee. He is probably going to ask you some very nice questions, but I will not. Any other close relationships with constituency MPs that anyone wants to admit to, or a special interest? John, who is your constituency MP? Dr Brennan: Andrew Murrison. Q225 Chairman: Okay. We are post-Foster, post your conference, is there anything you want to say to kick us off or do you want to go straight into the questions? Dr Brennan: Can I just make one or two general remarks? Q226 Chairman: You can, yes. Dr Brennan: Thank you for giving us the opportunity to give evidence. This is a very important inquiry that you are undertaking here, the first that the Select Committee has looked at on FE in a wider scale since 1998, so this is a substantial opportunity. I would like to say a few words, if I may, about Foster just to set the scene and a couple of words about some other issues which are linked to that. The first is simply to say that we very much welcome the Foster report as a comprehensive statement of the issues that are facing the FE sector at the present time. In welcoming that, I think we do welcome the recommendation that there should be a sharper focus on employment as being the primary purpose of further education but, in recognising that, we do recognise that there is a range of issues that throws up for individual institutions which we want to see debated through the sector as we take that forward. We do believe that it is possible within the formulation that Andrew Foster has come up with to accommodate many of the key and important activities which colleges undertake. My second point would be to regret the kind of media coverage which accompanied the launch of the report. It was unfortunate that the focus was so much upon failing institutions and contestability. I would want to put it on the record, for the Committee's benefit, that the number of failing colleges is actually only about four per cent, about 16 institutions in total. That is very similar to the proportion of failing schools in the system. I would say in that context that we do not have a problem with contestability per se and I would be happy to elaborate on that, if you want, in a minute. In other respects, we recognise that the report raises a range of issues for colleges which I think, on the whole, the sector is ready to grasp and wants to tackle around things like workforce development, ethnic minority representation and learner voice and so on. I think we are ready to respond to all of that. The bulk of the recommendations, about 75 per cent of the total, are addressed to Government and government agencies. We think it is very important that Government should give very serious consideration to the full range of those recommendations because we do share the view that Andrew has developed that many of the issues which face colleges have to do with the structures within which they operate rather than the way in which they manage themselves. The report itself pays fairly limited attention to funding issues but, following the issue of Bill Rammell's letter of 21 October and the Priorities for Success document from LSC, we think there is a whole raft of funding issues which the sector is facing which I hope you will allow us to develop a little bit later on in questions. Q227 Chairman: We have got yet another inquiry coming up with the Treasury soon, would that not more appropriately address funding? Dr Brennan: You may wish to do that as well but I am happy this afternoon to develop some of that, particularly because of the impact on adult learning. Over the next few weeks, with DfES and LSC, we will be facilitating a debate across the sector about the report and the recommendations. We will be looking forward to a Government response in the spring and early movement then towards implementation of a whole range of recommendations to be taken forward. I think broadly that is the position that we would see in relation to Foster at this stage. Mr Tuckett: Can I say something from NIACE's point of view? Firstly, for colleagues who may not know us, we are a loose and baggy non-government organisation in which most people concerned with adult learning right across post-compulsory education work together. There is no doubt that we welcomed in Foster a willingness not to lose time and energy by restructuring the whole thing all over again, but on balance we were much disappointed with a report whose focus was on how this system needs to be five or ten years out from now when we face two in three of the jobs of the next decade needing to be filled by adults because there are just not enough young people to go round, and no significant attention in the report at all to the inherited structural imbalance that might have been fine at the time of the Learning and Skills Act, which says you meet the needs of 16-19 year olds and spend what is left on adults, and the result of success with young people - not an intended consequence of government policy - with 16-19 year olds is that up to a million adults are likely to lose their places over the next three years, structural changes to European Social Fund leading to an intensification of the pressures on budgets on adults, and yet where are the new jobs to come from? They will come from migrants, for whom there is a set of educational issues in the post-school arena. They will come from older people being motivated to stay on at work, but for whom the balance of motivation and of skills learning will be in a different mix than you would expect in young people preparing for their entry into the labour market. They will come from groups of women who are currently not participating in the labour force, particularly from ethnic minority groups. For each of those issues there is quite a set of challenges about the balance between full-time and part-time in the operation of the system and for the balance of funding that needs to be struck to make sure that we do not rob Peter to pay Paul, that we do not enable opportunities for young people to develop, as we are very pleased to see happen, but not at the expense of adults. I think NIACE's feeling about the report, but also the broader place we now find ourselves with the Skills Strategy, is that the Government has created a really impressive infrastructure for lifelong learning over the last seven or eight years and now seems not to be able to find the resources to sustain it. We were very struck by the speed and effectiveness of intervention in the school dinners issue when we clearly found we did not have enough money as a state to do something that was sensible and proper. It seems to us to be inappropriate to be disinvesting in the adult learning sector just now at a time when we think the economic and the social case is very powerful. We have had a long history in the UK of stop/start investment in adult learning. We too agree with Foster that the focus on preparation for engagement in the labour force is the right focus, but to our mind that focus is young people and adults both, not one at the expense of the other. Our concerns are a little more than the AOC's. We published Eight in Ten a week or two before Foster and we launched it last week with the All-Party Group on Further Education and Lifelong Learning in Parliament. It makes a case for employability, for access to workplace learning, but also for culture and creativity to be fostered through the further education system, and we can see no case that says today in a civilised society we need less of that than we needed a generation ago. That is our stance. Q228 Chairman: Pauline, you are at the sharp end of all of this. Would you like to say anything? I do not want it to seem as though I am favouring the institutional spokespeople here. Ms Waterhouse: From the college perspective, we would very much welcome the focus that has been given to the recognition of the contribution we make to economic development in our communities. I think Foster recognises that, albeit he is saying that colleges can do more, but nevertheless there is a real recognition of what we do. That is very welcome. Also welcome, in saying that we need to give a greater focus to employability and to economic development, he also acknowledges the important role that colleges play in terms of social inclusion and our re-engaged focus on the employability agenda should not be at the expense of social inclusion and widening participation or, indeed, the work that we do in terms of academic pathways. From my own perspective, my college very much welcomed that message. What I would like to say is perhaps what I feel the report does not emphasise sufficiently is that economic development and social cohesion are inextricably linked and we really cannot promote and foster economic development if we are not also underpinning and nurturing social cohesion as well. Q229 Chairman: Certainly, John, I think we would all agree here that some of the press coverage was poor at the launch of the report and concentrated very narrowly on the issues that you suggested, plus getting out of proportion the notion that the private sector might come in at certain levels. We do find great difficulty getting the media to attend these. Is there any media here today? Just one. TES? We had the Learning and Skills Council with a two and a half billion pound budget and not one person from the media put their hand up. It shows an amazing lack of interest. When we deal with special educational needs, the place is full of journalists. I would have thought they are both important subjects but for some reason we just cannot crack media interest in skills. We will carry on with that campaign. Can I start the general questioning? Someone from outside looking at the figures might say you are a bunch of whingers really: "Here am I as a taxpayer, I pay my taxes and taxpayers' money flows into education", if you look at the real increase in taxpayers' funding of FE over the last eight years, it has been very generous but you are really not happy, are you? You have not said one nice thing about the Government, not one nice thing about an increase of 52 per cent in real terms, it is all, "Why don't they do more?" or "Why don't they do it better?" Are you not being a bit ungrateful? Dr Brennan: The answer to that is clearly no. I think you are unfair in suggesting that we have never acknowledged the huge improvements both in funding and in the policy environment within which we work. I think you will probably know that I have paid regard to that in evidence to this Committee in the past and, indeed, in many other ways in public statements. I think in that sense, Chairman, that is not what the issue is about. We acknowledge the progress which has been made and we acknowledge that many of the policy objectives which have been set are ones which the sector itself would have wanted to aspire to which represent a considerable movement forward in terms of trying to improve the learning opportunities in our society. Where I think the problem lies is in the multiplicity of the demands which are made upon colleges and the very different pressures and pulls which are exerted on them which exceed the totality of the resources which are available, and therein lies many of the problems, coupled with an approach to the management of the system which has produced layers of bureaucracy which has imposed a considerable degree of micro-management and multiplicity of agencies within which it has to deal. It is a combination of all of those things, I think, which have created the stresses and strains for institutions; it is not the broader environment that you have drawn attention to. Mr Tuckett: From my perspective, Chairman, not at all. I have celebrated the Government's success in achieving improved participation by young people and I think NIACE over a decade have supported, as a critical friend, developments the Government has made in work with adults. It is extremely difficult, if you are one step along the journey to the transformation of your life as an adult, if programmes which the Government is to be congratulated for developing disappear, not because anyone thinks they are not worth supporting any more but because money is tight. At that point, you would argue, there is a serious political choice for politicians of all parties to make about whether the short-term shortages of money are best dealt with by short-term intervention by Government while structures are changed, or whether individuals should have to stop/start in their engagement with the system. We are behind and have encouraged the Government in the view that there should be a higher fee, higher volume provision for adults, the balance between certainly company and state investment needs to be the right one but that nobody in the kind of international economic competitive climate that we are in can settle back to saying, "Actually we are investing enough already", we are not. To change the culture so that individuals pay more and we get levels of investment comparable with other people in OECD from companies will take time. What is to happen during that time? It seems to us that adult learning is not an optional extra once you have done the job, it is critical to the economic prosperity of the country and to social inclusion. It has got a number of benefits the Government has highlighted and then, as it were, parked. The double-dealing dollar issue: if you teach a woman to read and write, her children thrive as a result of it. Every time you inhibit someone from developing the confidence as an adult learner that they are after developing, you do not only affect their chances, you affect the chances of the people around them. I do not think Government's job is an easy one about where you invest, but it would be irresponsible of us representing the interests, in particular, of adults who benefited least before to say it is okay to go three years with no significant investment and then find we are sometimes desperate with skills shortages because we have not got enough adults ready for the jobs that people need to fill. Mr Flint: If I can just add to that. We would hope for a change in the statutory basis of the funding for adult learning. We do not think it is sensible, given the changes in demography that we are going to face, that the only amount of money that is available for adult learning is what is considered reasonable, which in effect means what is left over when other priorities have been met. We are concerned with the unintended consequences of policies rather than criticising the policies themselves. Ms Waterhouse: There is a concern about the coherence of policy across the different sectors. If we look at the situation in relation to post-16 within further education, and if I can take my own college in Blackpool - Fylde - as an example: last year we exceeded our funding target with the LSC and effectively recruited more 16-18 year olds and more 19-plus students than we were actually funded for. That was to the tune of just under £900,000 worth of education that was delivered without any financial support from the LSC. We are likely to exceed our targets significantly again this year. At the last count we looked to be exceeding our targets by some 232 students. At the same time as we are in this situation in Blackpool, we have discussions going on with the Local Education Authority about the provision of a new 11-18 academy in Blackpool. My concern would be why are we fostering and stimulating these debates from DfES in respect of additional post-16 provision when the Learning and Skills Council cannot fund the provision that exists already in particular areas. That is of very, very great concern indeed, that there is not a coherence and a discussion between what is going on in respect of secondary schools and in respect of what is going on in the college sector. Q230 Chairman: We can park that one for a little bit later, but I hear what you say. If you read Foster and the evidence we got when Sir Andrew came in, if you go back to the Dearing principles of who should pay for higher, I think there are some suggestions there for continuing education, it is between the individual, the taxpayer and the employer. Does not the employer, yet again, get let off rather lightly? Mr Tuckett: Absolutely. Q231 Chairman: When are we going to get to the stage when employers actually stump up a significant amount of money for the training of the people who add tremendous value to their businesses? What do you believe in terms of that kind of deficiency? Mr Tuckett: For a long while I have been arguing that regulation is the best way and you can see an effective parallel in the way that health and safety has become a perfectly normal part of the regulatory environment within which British business works. A generation ago we had lots of industrial accidents because we had a high level of voluntarism about the level of safety that operated in industrial places. If you move, as we did with health and safety, a small bit at a time and say in five years' time we will have workplace agreements, or we will have a plan together, you will find long before the five years are up that the vast majority of people operating in the economy will have adjusted to dealing with it. For those people who have not, if it is part of the terms of trade eventually that you develop the people who work with you, then that becomes a price that is shared right across the competitive environment. At the moment we have not got that right. There are things that are very positive about the aspirations of the Employment Training Programme to secure increased participation by adults, but with a pretty gloomy outcome in the first place with very, very high percentages of deadweight of either people who were previously training getting funded or people who because of regulatory arrangements in the wider economy are getting funded to do it. I think regulation is something which we have put because of experience in the 1960s as a sort of shibboleth, you cannot move in that direction, but we have tried voluntarism for a quarter of a century and clearly it is not providing the kind of step change politicians of all kinds arguably need to retain the competitiveness as a knowledge economy we need in the kind of changing international economy we are in. Dr Brennan: I think we would equally question a number of aspects of the current Government approach to this. Like Alan, we see there is a need to embed a commitment to developing staff and training in businesses in a way which does not exist at the moment. The average amount which companies spend on training per employee per annum is £205 from the last survey. That is totally inadequate as an investment in human capital. We would see a series of issues relating to the current policy framework which really do call this whole approach which is being developed at the moment into question. On the one hand, you have got the Train to Gain programme, which is due to be launched next year, which effectively is free training for employers. Whereas up until now they may have had to pay for Level 2 training, in future that will be free and they will not have to commit to that. Equally, there is no guarantee that any of the money that they release from their existing training budgets as a result of the new programme is going to be reinvested in further training. There is no obvious benefit to the nation in terms of enhanced investment in training as a result of going down that particular road. There is a series of issues about whether that is going to inculcate an increased commitment to training and whether, in fact, the Government has thought seriously enough about a whole range of mechanisms to try and influence the demand-side of the equation, of which regulatory mechanisms are one but there may be others, financial incentives and so on. Just to give a small example: in the care sector, the introduction of regulatory and mandatory qualification levels for care staff has transformed the state of that industry and it has transformed employer willingness to train. I think we have done far too little in that sense of trying to up-skill our workforce through those kinds of mechanisms. The other part of the equation is the price which is being paid for developing that strand of policy is we are seeing a reduction over the next three years of some 700,000 in the places available for adult learners and an increase for those who remain in the system who are outwith those priority categories of something of the order of 65 per cent in the fees they would expect to pay. Just to explain that arithmetic in case it is not clear to the Committee how you arrive at that figure: the starting point for last year was that the assumption in the system was that an individual would pay 25 per cent of the cost of provision and over the next two years that is going to move to 37.5 per cent. That in itself is a 50 per cent increase in the assumed level of fee. If you add three years' worth of inflation that takes you to something of the order of 60 per cent over that three year period. I do not believe that any serious research has been done about the sustainability of that policy or about the willingness of individuals or, indeed, employers who are outwith those priority categories to pay those kinds of increases and all the past evidence has been that, in fact, there is a huge resistance to fee increases on that kind of scale. I think that one of the real worries we have about this policy is not simply we are going to see 700,000 places disappear, but actually we will see far more than that number disappear because individuals and employers will feel unable to pay for the enhanced fees that they are going to be charged. Q232 Chairman: Some people who are not in this field would find that quite technical. What does that mean in terms of real prices for real courses? Standing outside, if one of my constituents said to me, "How much does a person have to pay for a course?" and I said it is going up from 25 per cent to 37.5 per cent, they would say, "Somebody else is still paying" and they might feel that is quite a good deal. Pauline, what does it mean in terms of real courses and how much are they going to cost? Ms Waterhouse: If you look at it in terms of course hour - John will correct me if my arithmetic is incorrect in this respect - over the next couple of years you might be looking at an increase from about £1.45 an hour to something like £1.95 an hour. It is a significant amount, I do not want you to think it is something you can dismiss. Q233 Chairman: Can you give us an example of real courses? Ms Waterhouse: Somebody might decide to enrol on a GCSE English course because they feel that would really raise the stakes in terms of their employability and they might wish to have a Level 2 qualification in English. That would be a course probably of about 90-96 hours, so it is a question of doing the arithmetic in relation to that sum. That is a fairly significant increase for people. Mr Tuckett: If you think of a full-time Level 3 course, you are dealing with very big sums of money. Of course we are encouraging employers to pay in that area but not everybody is fitting the frame of how our Skills Strategy works out for people. If you are studying part-time within an entitlement area but you are not likely to finish within 12 months, which frankly is most adults who are not young adults without responsibilities, even within our priority areas you end up asking people to pay substantial amounts of money over time or to find huge amounts out of a family budget to get skills which properly we say now there is a public investment for. Beyond the 37.5 per cent there is a swathe of courses where colleges, in anticipation or along the way with the changes LSC has been leading, have shifted from investing 180 to 30 million in courses that do not fit within the National Qualifications Framework over the last two years. The result of that is masses and masses of people who have grown used to the public offer being affordable, either paying not 37.5 but 100 per cent of the real cost or going without provision at all. Dr Brennan: I wonder if I could just offer you a couple of other examples. One is in relation to a college that I was at a few weeks ago which for a little while had run a programme of about ten weeks or so four times a year. This was very much taster provision, trying to get people back into learning. They charged a very nominal fee, about £10 for this course for 20 hours or something of that order, because they wanted to encourage people back into learning. They were recruiting about 800 students per entry, something of that order. They recognised earlier this year that they could not sustain that, they were going to have to move to something more like a realistic fee, and they pushed the fee up to £50 for one of those courses. The result was there was a two-thirds drop in enrolment. That is not untypical of the kind of experience that colleges have. Q234 Chairman: Could not my man on the Huddersfield omnibus say that perhaps you did not market it as well as you could, or perhaps the course was not as good as it should have been? If it was £10 for a ten week course they would put up with a pretty sub-standard course, but if you are going to charge £100 for the ten weeks then you need to be a bit sharper. Mr Tuckett: It is just how you get the maximum return to the public interest and at what pace. I am in favour of higher fee contributions, I think the pattern of the way the Further Education Funding Council's Rewards to Institutions worked inhibited fees staying alongside a kind of publicly defensible balance between individuals, the public interest and employers, but you have got to do it over a period of time. Night school adult education has traditionally charged significantly higher fees. What you find if you do a fee hike too quickly is people go away and they may come back in two or three years' time as long as you stabilise your fees, but what you cannot do is rush from being "pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap", to "let's run an expensive boutique" overnight, and I am afraid that is the way our fees policies look like they are working. Mr Flint: We were encouraged to make a lot of free provision in the interests of widening participation which was one of the main aims of the Further Education Funding Council, if you remember Helena Kennedy's report. Colleges did that very enthusiastically and very well. There has not really been any kind of government-led programme to prepare the public or, indeed, employers for a major change in the way we do fund education. People in this country think education is free and believe it ought to be to some extent. Remember the row about fees in higher education. We have not had the same sort of debate in further education at all. Within a year, we have moved almost from heavily subsidised adult provision to no adult provision at all. There is another technical issue here about what is called "other provision", which you might not want to get into at this stage. Colleges are having to come out of "other provision" because it is not recognised within the National Qualifications Framework and that is another area in which the offer to the public is being seriously reduced. Q235 Chairman: We are very interested in other provision and we are going to come back to that. A quick word from Pauline and then Helen wants to take up the questioning. Ms Waterhouse: In relation to other provision, we were doing quite a significant amount of other provision for some of our employers and when it became clear this was no longer going to be funded we then, fleet of foot, as colleges tend to be, worked very hard to get the provision on to the National Qualifications Framework, and were successful in this. But then, having been urged to start to charge our local employers fees for this, I can give you an example of a very large employer in Blackpool who, when being asked to pay fees, and the fee amounts to £80 per head for each employee over the course of a year for the particular programme that Blackpool and the Fylde College is running for them, refused to pay that amount. They will not make that investment of £80 per head in their workforce. That is the kind of attitude that we are facing. Chairman: I want to call Gordon quickly because, this being a constituency interest, we will give him a go. Q236 Mr Marsden: I would not ask you on this occasion, although I might ask you privately, to indicate the company concerned. Is that not a pretty damning and disgraceful indictment of the attitude of business in today's world? Obviously there is an issue over what period of time and how many employees, but if you cannot get a major employer to put that sort of money upfront for what is clearly going to be a significant course to benefit all of their employees, how are we going to move more generally in the direction that is being discussed? Ms Waterhouse: I would agree with you entirely, not least in a town where the future prosperity of that town is very, very much dependent, as you know as well as I do, on its capacity to regenerate itself. Intrinsically linked to regeneration is the need to improve customer service levels and customer service skills in the town, and that was precisely the area in which the training was focused in actual fact. That particular aspect of the picture is a very despondent one indeed, yes. Mr Tuckett: It is difficult, is it not, to add up the interest of the country by adding individual employers' interests together and saying, "That will add up to be what the country needs" because it could be perfectly rational for an employer facing tight circumstances to think, as so many of them do, including our own sector, that training is something to save on when money is tight, but that ends up being something that is completely not in the national interest. Q237 Mr Marsden: I would suggest - at the risk of sounding too sharp - you can make the argument between the national interest and community interest but, and I have just come from a major conference where all of the key speakers were making this point, that is not just a question of national interest, that is a question of business short-sightedness and bad business practice. Any decent, successful employer wants to invest. Mr Tuckett: Beating people up for the kind of culture we have created together in this country and how you move people from there seems to me to be a real challenge and to suggest, as John was saying, that we do not only have to think about what funding measures we put in place and what provision we put on offer but how we go about an active process of cultural change, I do not disagree with him. Dr Brennan: If I may reinforce that. I think this is a message which we have been trying to convey to Government for some considerable time. What we need here is a significant shift in cultural attitudes in this country and Government needs to take a lead in that. Ministers need to preach the gospel that we need to have a very different approach to investment in learning, individuals need to recognise the need to invest more and employers need to recognise the need to invest more. We need policy mechanisms and levers which encourage people to do that. At the moment much of that is missing and until we put some of that in place, I think we are going to struggle to achieve the kind of shift that we all accept is desirable. Q238 Chairman: The Government keeps coming up with initiatives and one of the most recent is the four Skills Academies. Are they not a sign of the Government wanting to change the culture? Ms Waterhouse: They are, but, going back to the issue of coherence, if you consider the Learning and Skills Council as it was under its previous chief executive, we had the introduction of Centres of Vocational Excellence, which are making a difference, they are enabling colleges to engage more actively and proactively with employers and they are enabling us to raise the whole agenda in respect of training but, as far as the national Skills Academies are concerned, there is a need to link those with the very strong work that is being done by the Centres of Vocational Excellence. I think there is a danger presently that sometimes when new initiatives are introduced, like the Skills Academies, there is no reference back to existing work that is already taking place on the ground successfully. That is not to say that it could not be improved, it could not be made stronger and more robust, but sometimes there is a tendency to look at initiatives in a kind of silo way without linking across the sector with previous initiatives which are being embedded and becoming successful. Q239 Chairman: Were not the Sector Skills Council supposed to be consulted about where the skills shortages were? After consultation out came these four Skills Academies, that was the Sector Skills Council's response. Was that not the way it worked or were you consulted? Were you consulted, John? Dr Brennan: I do not think the system worked that way. When the original CoVE initiative was launched we did not have Sector Skills Councils and LSC struggled to gather in industry intelligence, sectoral intelligence, about the needs of particular areas. The framework has been developed largely without reference to those sectoral interests. As Sector Skills Councils have come on stream they have begun to build up the database and exert influence, quite rightly, over the system. The initiative in respect of Skills Academies was one of Government saying to SSCs, "Would you like to bid for an academy in your sector?" Although there was encouragement to link into existing patterns of provision, that encouragement was not that strong and the models which have emerged are somewhat variable in that respect. It is certainly our view that unless you link those initiatives very strongly into the base which exists and use the influence which those initiatives can create to shift patterns of activity across the sector as a whole, then those initiatives are not going to be particularly helpful in terms of transforming the way in which the system works. Mr Tuckett: Early on in the Skills Strategy we asked the Sector Skills Council to hit the ground running with a great deal of wisdom straight away. Our observation of the first few of the Sector Skills Agreements made is they all share a kind of fairly intelligent analysis of the demographic challenges facing the sectors that they represent but there is a serious gap between that analysis and any practical measures affecting adult provision in those areas. The worry we have is that an initiative like the academies will rebalance towards the things they already see how to do, the recruitment of young people, in ways that really will not work. If you add the first four of those agreements together they assume the recruitment of twice as many young people as there will be entering the economy over the next five years, and there are 20 more agreements to follow it. Where are they going to be recruited from? Our view is the BBC and media might work on a reasonable assumption that it will recruit as many young people as it wants but further education and shipbuilding are going to be struggling. Chairman: Is that why the BBC cannot get anyone here? I thought it was a shortage of licence fee payers' money. Q240 Helen Jones: Are all your members supportive of the Foster report's suggestion that colleges should become more focused on skills for employment? We constantly hear from colleges that they have a role in the community and they see that role as important, that they are not happy with the increases in fees they have to impose on some courses. Do they all support that move? Dr Brennan: We are still at a stage of engaging in consultation around the system but certainly the reactions which I had through our conference a couple of weeks ago, through regional meetings I have been at, are that broadly speaking people recognise the value and the importance of that kind of focus. They do not want to lose sight of all those other agendas that you have referred to, and I referred to that in my opening remarks. Andrew Foster in the report formulating the approach made it clear that he was not seeking to suggest that many of those social inclusion objectives, objectives for young people and so on, should be discarded along the way but they should be seen as being a subsidiary and following on from that primary economic focus. In those terms, I think the consensus of view in the system, as far as I can detect it, is broadly in favour of that. Q241 Helen Jones: He does suggest that what he defines as community education - we can argue about the definition of that, I am not sure what it is - should be done sometimes by colleges or sometimes by local authorities and the voluntary sector. Are you happy with that? Alan might also want to comment on that. If so, how is it going to work? Dr Brennan: We have always had a diverse and plural system in which there is a multiplicity of providers in the system. Colleges provide a certain amount of what we used to call adult and community learning, and now perhaps call personal community development learning - the labels change from time to time - and they have a role in relation to that and that role may continue for individual institutions. Q242 Helen Jones: Or not. Dr Brennan: Alongside that, there have been many adult education institutions, higher education institutions and so on and, indeed, voluntary and private providers. I do not think anyone in the college system is unduly worried about that, that plurality will remain. Q243 Helen Jones: I am surprised about that. I wonder if Alan would like to come in. I am worried about it because I am not sure that the capacity exists. Mr Tuckett: I am worried about it too. We did not argue with the primacy of role or with the view that is there in Foster, but I think not adequately teased through, that there are functions in widening participation that involve a broader curricula agenda in support of the achievement of the economic goals that you need to put in place for people to be able to get there. Ever since the Skills Strategy was published there has been a kind of remarkable gap in thinking of what really constitutes first steps provision in a country that trades for its living and the collapse of focus on modern languages in the public policy arena, which does not sit within the definitions the Government has been developing around the foci that Andrew has been looking at, they all present problems to us. What we have seen is a really positive step by Government in the Learning and Skills Act to create a national system of securing opportunities for adult learning right across the piece backed in the Skills Strategy with a secure budget and now, in practice, that budget stops being an absolute base of security and becomes more and more what is on offer, so we have seen in the college system, as I have said, a collapse from 180 million to 30 million expenditure on this kind of provision. That is real learners doing real subjects. It is absolutely reasonable to my mind for a pensioner to prolong active citizenship through engaging in learning. That saves the state money in terms of social work or hospital visits in lieu, as it were. It benefits a number of other government policy strategies as well that there are opportunities for adults to engage in learning that does not immediately have a labour market focus. If you are in rural Cornwall, if the college is not doing it, who is to do it? What we are facing is a diminution of offer for too many people. In the national Mental Health Strategy last year, the role of adult learning in colleges or outside them, of enabling people to put their toe back in the water, to engage in rebuilding relationships, is a perfect environment because the world does not fall down if you do not feel up to going next Thursday, exactly the sort of modest engagement with public support that people need in order to be independent. Without that kind of infrastructure there, what kind of expensive systems are we going to have to put in place to enable people to take a step back into the community? Mr Flint: I completely share your concern. The TES headline the Friday before last, after the conference and Foster, was "Colleges are Skills Training Centres". I fear that may be the most powerful message that was taken from Foster and we are in danger of losing the infrastructure of adult learning. Q244 Helen Jones: I would like to get Pauline's input on this for two reasons. One is, is it not the case that a lot of courses that perhaps would not be defined as skills for employment are a means of bringing people back into education? Secondly, if we try to define it, what is "skills for employment"? As a college principal, can you come up with a working definition of this which you think is useable in practice? Ms Waterhouse: I think you are absolutely right that what constitutes skills for employment would have a very, very broad definition. If I think about some of the young people we teach, perhaps at the most basic level, I would argue that employability for those youngsters would be in the very first instance, if they have come from a very chaotic lifestyle, if perhaps they are not living at home with parents, if they are looked after children or have been in care for sustained periods of time, just getting to college and being on time for their lectures, for me, is the beginning of the framework of employability, understanding the structure to a working day, being punctual, attending regularly. I think that would be one definition of employability. When we think of some of the most deprived members of our community, before they can engage in what would be traditionally defined as an enterprise course, we would need to be talking about trying to raise their levels of self-confidence, raise their levels of self-esteem, that they can take steps back into working life. I would agree with what other speakers have said, that in many cases it can be about that first steps provision, which is very much about raising levels of self-esteem and self-confidence before people go back to work. Q245 Helen Jones: Do we not sometimes look at this the wrong way round. We look a lot at the supply side of education, should we not sometimes be looking at the demand side? How do we create that demand for learning, particularly among those who have traditionally not done very well in the education system? How do you go about that? Mr Tuckett: We started Adult Learners' Week as a way of using the media, which of course is trusted much more than any of us as institutions, to tell the stories of people whose lives have been transformed by learning as a way of encouraging other people to join in, and it has had an impressive track record over 15 years. The Union Learning Fund illustrates how you can use some kinds of intermediaries, trusted already, to act as brokers for people to arrive. We were responsible for hosting the Adults and Community Learning Fund and then its transition across to the LSC's Widening Access Fund. Of course, that work is coming to an end under these financial pressures, yet it showed time and time again that if you find key movers and shakers in a local community, however disadvantaged, however marginalised, what you get is a kind of adrenaline rush of engagement that people begin to see and ask different questions of themselves and join the kind of journey that arrives in colleges like Pauline's. That is something we rediscover and rediscover cyclically in the UK. Our view is the Skills Strategy was right to put an entitlement at Level 2 but it needed the steps up to it, and those steps include what we have just been talking about. Dr Brennan: Just to add a point here, if I may. I think we all need to recognise that the path to employability will vary hugely from individual to individual and. for some, they are a long, long way away from the labour market and you have to take them through that journey to reach the point where entry to employment is the right step for them. That is what this First Steps initial entry provision is all about. In the past, colleges - not exclusively colleges but colleges in particularly - have been very successful at creating much of that learning opportunity. Alan is absolutely right that the squeeze both in terms of funding and towards nationally recognised qualifications as being the only things which get funded in this system, and so on, are all creating pressures to close down those opportunities and that is very important in terms of individual access to try to improve their confidence, their capability and so on, but it is also important in terms of the ultimate supply of skills into the economy because if you cut that off at an early level people will not progress to the more advanced levels and in the end you find you do not have the skills of plumbing or bricklaying, or whatever it happens to be, that you need in order to sustain demand from the employer. Helen Jones: There is not a line, is there? Can I go back to what I asked about dealing with what is called community education in the Foster report. In your view, are there people outside colleges with the necessary expertise to undertake that kind of work? If so, who? Chairman: I would warn you that you cannot all answer each question otherwise ---- Helen Jones: Other than the Chairman's. Q246 Chairman: I am a special case! Otherwise, I am looking at the faces of colleagues and we will not get through everything. Can we have one or two of you on each question rather than all four of you. Mr Tuckett: Masses of learning goes on informally outside the system but it privileges those people who can find it easily. What we think the public education system should be doing is guaranteeing routes for the people who benefited least first time round. I think with public investment we just will not see enough of that. That is the core of the argument, for public investment in learning for pleasure, learning for its own sake, assuming that we cannot quite predict the purposes that learners bring when they begin a learning journey. Ms Waterhouse: There is also the issue of quality. As Alan has said, there are people out there who can deliver other than colleges and so on, but the issue is has the quality of what they are delivering been tried and tested in the way that college provision has, which is very, very rigorously quality assured, as you know. Yes, there is a problem in terms of capacity and I think there could be a danger if other people step into the arena - although where that funding would come from is not clear - the very people who most need the highest quality of provision would not receive it because it may be delivered in an ad hoc way by people potentially not best qualified to do so. Q247 Helen Jones: One last question. I did ask this last week. If in higher education we are prepared to fund things which do not immediately relate to employment, and the example I gave was if you wanted to go and do Classical Greek or something, or if you want, like me, to read Chaucer, you can, but what is the difference in further education? Is there a logical reason why the two sectors should be different? If so, can you give it to us? Mr Flint: I do not know what the difference is. Obviously the job of further education is very different from that of higher education but I cannot see that there is an important distinction to be made in that respect. There is a value in education and we should be encouraging young people and adults who have not had a proper opportunity the first time round. I would say, and I think all my colleagues would, that we failed very large numbers of the population. We all know that 45 per cent of school leavers are still coming out without adequate GCSEs. We ought to be able to make a wide provision for all of those people wanting to come back into the system and we ought to be funding ways of attracting them back in, which is something the colleges have done very well. I do not think there is a meaningful distinction in that respect between further and higher. Helen Jones: Thank you very much. Q248 Mr Marsden: I wonder if I could probe further on this issue of skills and particularly the definition and the relationship between the bonus on skills that Foster recommends and the LSC and, indeed, the colleges. I do have to say, as Chairman of the All-Party Skills Group, we obviously welcome the focus that Foster put on it and it was something that was the subject of a report that we produced just two weeks before Foster's report. In that report we also talked about two other things. One of them was the demographic issue, and again this Committee challenged Foster on his lack of comments on that when he came before us the other week. The other was the relationship to small and medium sized businesses in terms of skills. Certainly, and Pauline will know this only too well, in my neck of the woods we have a very large number of small and medium sized businesses but they are not always by any stretch of the imagination the best people who are engaging with training of skills for a variety of reasons. I wonder if I could ask the college end, and maybe Pauline would like to chip in, how do we have a Skills Strategy that is going to engage and support small and medium sized businesses? What is the role of Government in that in terms of funding? What is the role of the colleges, because I think the colleges do have a role regardless of the funding structures? Ms Waterhouse: The college is playing a very active role in relation to supporting small and medium sized businesses in the tourism and hospitality sector in Blackpool. We have a Centre of Vocational Excellence in customer service for resort tourism quality and we are engaging with local landladies and small hoteliers in very intensive customer service skills training. Colleges are able to do that and to engage small and medium sized employers in that kind of dialogue, provide training on their premises. A great deal is being done but we need to acknowledge the fact that there are all sorts of pressures and calls upon the time of people who are running very small businesses and they do not necessarily have at the top of their priority list the training and up-skilling of their very, very tiny number of staff they may be employing. Q249 Mr Marsden: John, across the piece in terms of the whole range of colleges that the Association represents, is there enough engagement? Pauline has given a particular example in a particular place, but is there enough engagement by your members with the needs of small and medium sized businesses? Dr Brennan: No, I do not think there is. A lot of it has to do with the priorities which have been set for the sector, the mechanisms and the regulations which surround what colleges are expected to do. In recent times, you have had considerable emphasis on issues like widening participation and skills for life, which are not primarily focused on business needs, and very little emphasis on trying to engage more with business until quite recently. The funding mechanisms do not encourage engagement with businesses, especially small business. You get paid for individual enrolments, you do not get paid for engaging with a business to deliver the programmes that are needed for that particular business. Equally, you get paid for standardised, off-the-shelf programmes which are approved for national qualification purposes; you do not get paid for customised programmes which are related to individual businesses. There is a whole series of mechanisms of that kind which, if you were to address them and reshape the policy environment, I think could do a lot more to engage small businesses. Q250 Mr Marsden: Give me an example of what Gordon Brown might say in his Pre-Budget Report by way of Government incentive that in a practical way would encourage both small and medium sized businesses to invest in their employees and encourage colleges to engage with them? Dr Brennan: One mechanism that we have suggested to Government is that you create a fund which you offer to colleges to engage with business. The fund has to be a partnership fund, so you say to a college, "You go out and find the businesses who need training, you work out what the training is...." Q251 Mr Marsden: So the colleges would go out and be proactive to find small and medium sized businesses? Dr Brennan: Yes, and you would design packages which suit the needs of those particular businesses and deliver them in ways which are appropriate to the needs of those particular businesses, so you have a much more proactive approach to developing training for this group. Q252 Mr Marsden: Would that be a ring-fenced pot of money? Dr Brennan: I think it would have to be in order to make it effective. Q253 Mr Marsden: I want to ask about the issue of apprenticeships because this is something the Government has made major commitments to and is some way towards delivering, but it raises the question of what sort of apprenticeships are on offer and how they are monitored. I have examples, and I am sure other colleagues have examples, of where people have been put out on apprenticeships following or during FE training and their experience with the employer has not been a happy one. What more should the colleges be doing to engage with the monitoring process in the apprenticeship area and what more should the Government be doing in order to get some of the skills benefits that we are all talking about? Mr Tuckett: I thought you were asking John. Q254 Mr Marsden: John initially, you might want to chip in briefly on that. Mr Tuckett: I would like to have chipped in on the last one. On the previous issue, there are two points: firstly, when we heard the briefing from Lord Leitch, one of the things he said that surprised me was that SMEs do proportionately more training than large employers. I think the focus of the question is real about reaching tiny ones, but when it remains true that 46 per cent of the people who work for the National Health Service get less than two days training a year, then you can see the scale of the challenge and the problem we have. I think that is one serious concern. The second one is the way in which we are all committed to a more skilled society, but it is an elision in policy between seeking more skills and seeking qualifications as the best proxy we have got for them. What the Small Business Council say on the Skills Alliance, which John and I sit on, is, to be honest, it is not qualifications, but it is can do, just-in-time skills building. It is not to argue against the role of qualifications, it is just not the exclusive focus on qualifications and the policy. Q255 Mr Marsden: Forgive me, Alan, and I am speaking as someone who is a great champion of NIACE and everything that you do, but if I was a mean and cynical Treasury civil servant, I would say, "Well, that is a bit waffly, is it not?" You are expecting us to either ring-fence or to come up with an initiative to put hundreds of millions of pounds in. Where is the analysis of the output for that? Mr Tuckett: Look at where we are going to be ten to 15 years out. Hardly a significant proportion of the jobs we will be doing have yet not been invented. How are we going to skill people to engage with those? The kind of slow, sure, secure, auditable route of only working on the qualifications route will make sure that we can do all sorts of things we already understand and need to be able to do well, they will not necessarily help us with the creativity, the pizzazz, the imagination and the investment in blue skies thinking that will help us get where we want to go another way. What I am saying is if you were the chair of the Small Business Council - until the last month or two it did in the new technologies areas - what it is seeking is the kind of support to help people move from quite low bases to the very cutting edge of technological change and a qualifications only route will not help us get that. Mr Flint: Part of this problem is that we are looking at the wrong qualifications anyway. The National Qualifications Framework does not work, as Ken Boston may well have told you. It is not a framework at all, it is a list. Until we get credit based qualifications measuring and rewarding small units that build up to qualifications, the system is not going to work for industry at all. We are told that we cannot have that until ten years from now. Foster and our inquiry both recommend very strongly that that needs to be much faster because it is doing a great deal of damage in this arena. Q256 Mr Marsden: Most people would agree that the morass of qualifications is a significant barrier to employer acceptance of vocational qualifications. I wonder if I can take you on a little bit further on this issue of qualifications. How, at the end of the day, within the Sector Skills Council do we define effectively what are hard skills and soft skills, if only for the purpose of jumping through the various hoops that Government is currently setting up for funding? Is that not going to be more difficult for the Sector Skills Councils that are dealing in non-traditional subjects or harder to define subjects, People First for example, than it is going to be for some of the ones dealing with more hard edged traditional manufacturing skills like engineering or construction, brick laying or whatever? Mr Tuckett: It is interesting to say "take up their work", that employability and the softer skills involved with what is it that makes somebody not only have the technical skills to get going in work, which frankly employers see themselves as being able to underpin, but for young people - Pauline was talking about this just now - what are the employability skills that enable people to make a success of the transition from being students to going to work. It is true there for adults who are changing jobs and going back to the labour force as well. My sense of it is that when we really get a mesh between the college and the business environment working closer, we shall need softer as well as harder, but that does not make the job of the Treasury or of you in allocating where public money should go an easy one at all, but it is not a simple fix, that what we write down as the necessary elements of qualifications easily fit with what changing businesses are asked of the system. A lot of the criticism of colleges comes from the inflexibility of the arrangements that they have had to work to. Q257 Mr Marsden: Pauline, can I very briefly ask you, in your judgment is People First going to have these sorts of problems in terms of pulling in the money for developing work and that if the new criteria, particularly adult students, remain as they are? Ms Waterhouse: I think the issue is that in many instances employers do not want full qualifications anyway. What employers may well want are bite sized chunks of learning, so many hours' worth of learning which focus on building up a particular capacity and developing a particular skill. The tension that we face all the time in colleges is, as colleagues have said before, that the funding is driven by qualifications and, therefore, there needs to be a radical look at that. Mr Marsden: That brings the whole area of portability within the sector between FE and HE which, hopefully, we will have a chance to return to a bit later. Chairman: We have to move on. I am going to ask Tim to push you a little further on the funding priorities. Q258 Mr Farron: It will be a little further, Chairman, because I have got to speak at the Youth Clubs' reception in about 15 minutes. You will be delighted to hear that you have either asked or answered a large number of my questions, perhaps making it easier. There is one question which I would like an answer to here and one question where I am looking for help from you, which I shall leave you with. Firstly, I agree with the comments you made earlier on about the concern with regard to the negative coverage with regard to the Foster Report. Andrew Foster identified in the report - he said it verbally to us - that "One in ten colleges had relentlessly failed their communities". You say one in 25, I hope I believe you. When we questioned him about this, we asked him whether he could characterise what were the characteristics of underperforming FE colleges, and we pressed him on it, and he said there was no real style or type of institution. I was getting at him as to whether there might be socio-economic factors or regional factors, and he said no. He said that essentially it was all down to bad management, that was the only common feature. I wonder whether you think that is correct. As part of that question, we were trying to pursue the possibility of whether the funding gap had any kind of impact and whether money was, at least in part, the answer. Is he right to say that management is the only real key defining feature? Secondly, was he also right to make no mention whatsoever of the funding gap in his report? Ms Waterhouse: I think it is a very complex issue. Inevitably there will be issues of leadership and management. I think where there are issues of leadership and management, those are frequently allied to a lack of clarity about a college's strategic direction - Foster makes a great play of the complex missions that many colleges have to serve - therefore, it is hardly surprising that at times there are colleges that may fail to prioritise appropriately and correctly. I think the funding gap is a significant matter to take account of because inevitably if staff in the college sector, as they are, are more poorly paid than their counterparts in schools and, indeed, in sixth form colleges when you compare GFEs with sixth form colleges, then that is going to present difficulties of recruitment. Inevitably it is going to mean that sometimes good staff who are able to look for jobs in the secondary sector will start to do so eventually. Then you start to develop increasingly shortage areas where you cannot recruit, particularly in vocational areas where it is better for people in terms of their future career prospects to stay in the vocational occupation itself rather than coming into the college. I think there are issues such as that. Then there are issues relating to learner focus. If colleges do not have sufficient strong focus on the learner as an individual, if that person is not getting genuinely impartial advice and guidance and, therefore, is not recruited on to the appropriate course, then that is another reason for a failure which then comes into the teaching and learning arena. Dr Brennan: Can I add to that because I think these are complex issues and leadership and management clearly are an important component. If you have inherited an institution which is still occupying 19th century school premises, has not had equipment replaced for 30 years and in a whole series of ways is struggling to come to terms with the agenda which it is being presented with now, then clearly you do have a major problem and resources are an important part of the solution to that problem. Although in the short run there may not be a very strong correlation between levels of funding and success or otherwise in terms of overall institutional performance, there cannot be any question, I think, that over time under funding has an effect upon the quality of what you can do in your ability to deliver the outcomes that people expect of you. I think those issues are not simple and straightforward, and you do need to see it in those terms. The funding gap has a number of different manifestations. It is partly about the difference of treatment between different types of institutions, partly, as Pauline says, about the quality of the staff and how you can reward them, and so on, because of the resources that are available to you. There are a number of different facets of even that issue which need to be taken into account. Some of the studies which have been taken in the past of leadership in the FE sector suggest that it compares well with many in the private sector, that there is world class performance in some respects and not so good performance in other respects. The issue about the levels of underperformance in the system, we base our assessment on the data which Ofsted provide, which is of the order of four per cent of institutions are significantly underperforming. You can obviously look at the system in other ways, but that is, broadly speaking, an expression of the levels of underperformance which exist. One of the things which has characterised colleges in contrast often to schools in this respect is that where colleges have underperformed significantly and then been put through a process of action planning followed by re-inspection, typically they have managed to turn themselves round in all the areas of underperformance. I think there is only one institution in the history of this sector which has failed its inspection on two successive occasions. I think colleges are very good at tackling those issues once they are identified, but they struggle because of the multiplicity of demands which are sometimes made on them to be able to deliver everything they are being asked to do well. Mr Tuckett: I wanted to add two things to that. One striking contrast with most other industrial countries we look at is how unstable the culture of demand on our institutions is. I think it is rather like under old trees; all sorts of things grow if you leave them alone enough. The stability in Germany and America - I am not arguing for either of those systems, they are examples - makes a difference to people learning the culture of what is good in the area. You do not have to be a major historian of the sector to find that the college is celebrated by government as the absolute pinnacle of what they are hoping for one minute find smf themselves in trouble because they overbalanced an inch in that direction the next. We have not had a stable view of what we have been demanding of the sector. Q259 Chairman: A dynamic economy. Mr Tuckett: Yes, we need a dynamic economy. 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 per cent manufacturing sector. We have a rate of 75 per cent 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 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 two and a half per cent 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 five per cent. The main private training provider for Blackpool had a reduction in its budget of 12 per cent, so between us a 17 per cent 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. Dr Tuckett: I know, I am finding it hard! The issue is who misses out if you cut out off centre 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 seed 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 went into this is that many colleges cut the community provision because it was it is 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. 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 3 or 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 as NIACE because properly funded colleges will do better exactly the sort of social connections that we were discussing with Relationship Jones and Mr Marsden before to be enabled 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? Mr Tuckett: 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 per cent 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 ten per cent 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. Q280 Mr Chaytor: Is there a direct relationship, therefore, between the quality of those colleges that have been a cause of concern - John, I think in the AoC memo you referred to four per cent of colleges now deemed to be in difficulty - and the level of their financial instability? Ms Waterhouse: There can be. Q281 Mr Chaytor: Is there? Ms Waterhouse: Yes. If you take a section like construction, for example, where frequently colleges have underperformed in particular curriculum areas, construction is one of those areas where it may be a problem. Part of the problem may well be because of an inability to recruit staff from the construction industry because basically the salaries on offer in further education are not sufficiently attractive. That is one of the reasons; I am not for one moment saying that is the whole reason. The reason for why curriculum areas, why sections, departments or whole colleges fail is multifaceted, it is very complex, and it would be naive to try to just say you can account for it by looking at one factor alone. Mr Flint: I would agree with Pauline, but I think there are other issues as well. If we are to assume that the funding situation is not going to change dramatically in the near future, then I think we have lost. I think there needs to be attention in some colleges to leadership and management. I think Foster is right to highlight that as a problem, though I believe the figures that John has given us today. I do not think it is a serious problem across FE, but it is a serious problem in a very small number of colleges, and linked to that is the whole workforce development. I think FE has probably, across too many colleges, neglected the kind of workforce development that is necessary, as well as the issues which Pauline mentioned about the difficulty of recruitment. There is not enough consistent, coherent policy about industrial placement for people lecturing in technical areas. That is linked to recruitment as well and to pay, but it can still be addressed without burdening the purse. Then there are two others: I think there needs to be an inspection regime which is developmental and supportive rather than punitive. I think too much of it in the past has been punitive. There needs to be less inspection and less messing about with colleges, frankly, and more encouragement to develop good practice in leadership and workforce development. A fourth one to mention is I think colleges have lost control of the curriculum in a way that when I was a principal, in the early 90s particularly, we developed OCN courses to meet the particular needs of particular groups of students. We have lost all of that now, and I think there is a demotivation of college lecturers as a result. Colleges need to get some more strategic control of the curriculum, and I think that will motivate staff and help in the whole process of improved quality. Mr Tuckett: One of the things Government has done really well on Skills for Life is to create a national platform of minimum training and competence for people to be engaged in the work. The same, but slightly differently structured, around Success for All, and the curriculum building, mentoring and coaching roles built into that I think point towards the kind of curriculum focused exciting development in the territory rather than just institutional structural debates about the way to go. Dr Brennan: I wanted to make two points just to complement the points that have already been made. One is about perceptions. The Committee kept coming back to this question and the media focused on the question of quality. The reality is that quality is at a pretty high level overall. Let me quote you a couple of statistics just to illustrate the point. Completion rates are one of the measures that we would use to assess whether institutions are delivering the right outcomes. On the most recently available data, college non-completion rates for 16-18s was 17 per cent and for 19s-plus 15 per cent. For universities, a comparable figure was 14.4 per cent, marginally worse in FE, but not hugely so. Just for comparison, in the work based learning sector, the non-completion rate was 54 per cent in the most recent year. I make the point that I think we need to put this in perspective. There are issues around quality, quite rightly, and the Committee is right to focus on them, but let us not get this out of proportion. I think one of the things that is also not well understood in this debate is some of the complexities of institutional provision. If you normalise institutional performance success rates for the different patterns of provision that they deliver, what you end up with is quite relatively narrow variations in performance, not huge variations of the kind which the raw league tables would suggest. I do not think we understand sufficiently well in terms of research and professional practice what drives some of those differences, why it is that long Level 2 course performance rates are relatively low compared with Level 3, for example, and I think much more work needs to be done in order to provide a better research base to address those issues if we are going to drive performance up. I think that is important work which needs to be done if we are to secure that kind of long term commitment to continuous improvement that we all want to see. We should see it- to emphasise this point - against a background of a system which is not performing at all badly, and in some respects is performing exceptionally well. Satisfaction rates among learners are higher in FE than they are in HE and higher than in almost any other public service. We need to understand those pieces of quality and performance to put alongside some of the criticisms which people have been wanting to make. Mr Tuckett: And higher for adults. Q282 Mr Chaytor: The evidence suggests that the quality is gradually improving year on year, the number of colleges and difficulties are reducing themselves, but my next question is, if that is the case, is that not the result of the very stringent inspection and auditing systems that you have been critical of? Would the year on year improvements in quality over the last seven or eight years have taken place without a pretty oppressive mechanism bearing down on the colleges? Mr Tuckett: I once went to Sweden for Malcolm Wicks to do a conference with the Swedish Education Minister. He said to me in the quiet of the moment, "Why do you spend so much time on policing the system rather than developing it?" I think there is not an issue about the value of external observation --- Q283 Mr Chaytor: But the previous 40 years have been spent on developing it, surely? The argument can only be sustained about policing the system since incorporation. Mr Tuckett: When does the quality we are concerned about become variable? Behind your question is an assumption that since we started auditing it more heavily --- Q284 Mr Chaytor: Because nobody was measuring it beforehand. Mr Tuckett: They were. They were not measuring it as intensively and we did not have quite such a dominant metaphor about the use of public money needing to be captured by audit regimes. I think there is no doubt that ALI, because they have had a developmental as well as a reviewing process, have been a positive force in the system. It is the question about how much of the investment you spend in that way and how much you spend on empowering people who teach and learn in the system to have confidence to peer group review and to develop the work together. There are real resource choices about where you strike that balance. Q285 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask John, what parts of the existing auditing and inspection regime would you dismantle? Dr Brennan: I think David has asked a very fair question in all of this. I think the emphasis upon improving data collection and improving measurement in the system has been hugely beneficial; I have no doubt about that. I equally agree that inspection is an important component in the process, both to provide public reassurance and to provide a stimulus to institutions. What I would say, though, is if you look at the inspection profiles across each of the three cycles which we have now been through since incorporation, they are not very different between each cycle. Individual institutions will have moved about a bit within those frameworks, but the broad profile is very similar across each one. I think there is an important question to be asked about how frequently you have to go and pull up the roots to check that everything is all right. The issues are about the frequency, the extent of the depth of inspection and measurement, and so on, in the system. I think we should be moving towards a system in which there is a lighter touch in respect of those activities and those institutions which are seen to be broadly performing pretty well, but a much tighter and sharper intervention in those areas where we know there are failings. I think the system should move to that kind of model of operation rather than a model which requires that every institution be subject to a detailed and comprehensive set of evaluations through inspection or in other ways all the time. Q286 Mr Chaytor: Foster goes further than that, does he not, because he suggests the idea of self regulation amongst groups of colleges? Would you go so far? Dr Brennan: Certainly, we would. AoC would be taking those kinds of ideas forward. We are engaged in a consultation now with the membership about taking that kind of proposal through, and we will be putting those proposals to Government, to LSC and to a variety of other partner agencies as a basis for taking the system forward. Mr Tuckett: With the caveat that the workforce development proposals in Foster also go forward so that we really enable staff to take those challenges on. Chairman: Stephen, you have been very patient. Q287 Stephen Williams: I want to take you back to a limited range of questions as well about leadership in the sector and just an observational idea Andrew Foster had about the funding debate. When he was here, he used a phrase that FE was the neglected middle child in education between schools, and that higher education gets huge amounts of both political attention and, as the Chairman was alluding to earlier, media attention as well. Who do you think should be the champion for further education? Should it be the Learning and Skills Council, which we have mentioned already, or should it be the Association of Colleges or somebody else? Dr Brennan: If I can offer you an alternative formulation first before trying to answer the question directly. I would not see us as a neglected middle child, I would see us rather as a --- Q288 Chairman: Spoilt! Dr Brennan: --- strong and, perhaps, relatively silent elder brother who can be relied upon when a problem arises to get in and sort it out, because I think that has been the history of further education: give us a task and we get it sorted. We deliver the things that are asked of us. Q289 Chairman: You missed your vocation, you should have been a diplomat. Dr Brennan: To try and come to Mr Williams' question a bit more directly, advocacy is an important issue in all of this, and I think ministers have failed to act in that capacity. If you look, for example, at the press releases which DfES put out for the current year, I think there are 95 in respect of schools and nine in respect of FE, and the tone is often noticeably different between schools and FE in terms of the wording. I think ministers do far less than they could do to promote the system. I think LSC has done relatively little to promote the system, despite the fact that it has a statutory responsibility to promote learning. One of Foster's recommendations is that we do some serious work to address this issue of reputation and begin to develop a new strategy to tackle it. AoC is certainly up for that, and we will want to work with our partners to do it. I do think there are a range of responses which are required. If I may say so, Chairman, I think one of the responses lies in your own hands, that you started at the beginning of this meeting by drawing attention to the fact that there was little or no press interest in this, I would suggest that there may be an opportunity for you to call some representatives of the press before you. Q290 Chairman: It has already been addressed. It is in hand, as they say. Does anyone else want to come back on that question? Colin, you are the most experienced of all four members; you have been in so many different aspects of this world. Mr Flint: I have certainly worked in it a long time. I think Government ought to give some consideration to there being a minister for further education. It is important enough to merit that. I was thinking of the Foster Review and there is a wonderful quote from Stephen Fry, page seven, saying that after a ruined first attempt at education, something along the lines of "...Norwich City College saved my life and FE is one of the great unsung successes of British society". If we could pick up that kind of message, which is true, and Pauline knows, and every principal knows, that we change people's lives every year because we are working with a very imperfect education system still. We still have not solved the problems of secondary education and this government is failing again because it should have embraced and endorsed the Tomlinson recommendations in full with a glad cry. Until we do that, we are going to keep an academic vocational divide and further education is going to be picking up the pieces and will not be understood by most ministers, most Members of Parliament and most of the middle class. That is our problem. Ms Waterhouse: If I may add to what has been said. I would agree with the point about a minister for further education, but I also think what would be helpful is if there was more longevity of service in terms of people staying within that particular post, because I would imagine that no sooner has somebody mastered their brief, like certain post-holders in the past, than they have been moved on. This does not help. This does not help the service and it does not help colleges at all in terms of being understood and valued. Q291 Stephen Williams: I am glad the two of you have taken up this suggestion of a minister for further education. That was something I put to Sir Andrew when he was here and he ducked it. John, I noticed you were slightly more reticent about whether you thought there should be a minister. Dr Brennan: Sorry, I did not understand that you were asking the direct question. Yes, we would advocate the same position, that clarity of responsibility at government level would go a long way towards helping the system operate in a more efficient way because at the moment the division of responsibilities among different ministers means there is a lack of clarity and a lack of focus often on the issues which matter. Mr Tuckett: I think you have a really difficult challenge. The political logic and the economic logic point in different directions. The political debate is acutely anxious about how children's opportunities get shaped and so on. The economic logic points you in quite a different direction, and probably colleagues in the media react more quickly to those short-time excitements of the political logic, but the championing, I think, clearly needs to happen in a variety of places. That was why we were very pleased to see the LSC given a duty to promote and why we were disappointed to see the participation target drop because that would highlight the role that post compulsory further education plays in opening opportunities to anyone in society. The real problem we have got in the territory is not championing an argument about where public resources go, but overcoming the problem that too many people learn early and really well that education and training are not for the likes of them. If you cannot overcome that challenge, we cannot create the learning society which, in the end, underpins all our political parties' concerns for the future. Q292 Stephen Williams: A more specific question on the Learning and Skills Council: Sir Andrew Foster in his report was supportive of their Agenda for Change, do you share his enthusiasm? Dr Brennan: Quite simply, Agenda for Change is a helpful step forward in terms of focussing LSC much more strongly upon a series of issues, which undoubtedly have been problems within the system. I think it is yet to be seen what the real effect of that programme will deliver. I think we will want to work with LSC to try and deliver the objectives which have been set. I do not think that in itself addresses many of the bigger questions which Andrew Foster was seeking to address in his report, so I do not think in itself it is a complete answer to the issues that we now need to tackle. Mr Flint: We would say the same thing as we said about Foster, that the Agenda for Change is important, but if the LSC is looking at the challenges it has got to confront over the next five to ten years, when the bulk of the people they are willing to be supporting into learning are adults, it is not a very well geared system just now, and that is not an issue which is confronted or highlighted in the Agenda for Change at all. Ms Waterhouse: What is useful, coming out of Agenda for Change, is the restructuring of the LSC so that it will take us towards the path of self regulation which Foster touches on in his report. Undoubtedly there is an issue, and there has been an issue, of colleges, like my own, being micro-managed by the LSC in a wholly inappropriate way. The move towards slimming down numbers of staff at the LSC and the move towards a greater regional focus will help us to have a more intelligent joined-up dialogue with the Regional Development Agencies to look at our regional economic strategies and to try to interpret those properly at a local level without constant and endless interference in day-to-day affairs, which is not appropriate. I think that is helpful. The other thing which needs to be mentioned about Agenda for Change as well is the focus on the business orientated aspect of college work, which is not dissimilar to Foster's emphasis upon employability and employee skills. That, though, needs to have a greater coherence and linkage with what colleges have already achieved through the Centres of Vocational Excellence because, basically, the Action for Business or the new accreditation or Kitemark which Agenda for Change puts forward for colleges is all very well, but it needs to link up with these national skills academies and the CoVE network as well. Q293 Stephen Williams: Chairman, if we have time, I would like to ask one final question on Andrew Foster's idea for a national learning model in his report, which he said should be published annually and should span schools, FE and HE. Colin earlier referred to the fact that people in this country think that education is free, and Pauline mentioned the difficulty of getting employers to make a contribution to education as well. Do you think this national model which would be updated every year is a helpful suggestion and do you have any ideas as to how it should be built up? Mr Flint: It depends on whose models it is and how it is drawn up. One of the things that is not in the Agenda for Change, and it is not really an area in Foster either, is a proper recognition of the need for a continued widening of participation. We still have very large numbers of people not engaged in learning. Unless the model includes that, then I think we will go on failing to meet the needs of many of the population and in the end of the economy. Ms Waterhouse: I think the National Curriculum model has got to look coherently across both the secondary and the FE sector so that, in actual fact, we are not proposing to open school sixth forms in areas where, as I mentioned earlier, the Learning and skills Council is unable to fund the capacity that already exists. I think, therefore, this need for coherence, taking into account the demographics as well, is what is absolutely essential; presently that is absent. Q294 Mr Marsden: You have all endorsed the idea of a dedicated FE minister, but one of the things any such minister would have to tackle would be the continuing ignorance and slight disdain from certain elements of the HE sector for the amount of HE that is delivered via FE. I want to ask you very specifically, therefore, about the question of portability and recognition of qualifications. What can we do, what should Government do, to improve a situation where more and more HE is being delivered by FE colleges, but so far there has been a limited engagement by the HE sector and particularly, perhaps, by some of the more traditional universities? Mr Tuckett: I did not say that about FE because I think a lifelong learning policy is what we need in which further education qualities have a profoundly central role to play. It is the work that matters, the opportunities for the people. There is no doubt over 15 years, if you look at HEFCE's thinking around what lifelong learning networks might work to, we shall see a blurring of the edges between further and higher education. My view is that a tertiary system will have the same reputational challenges you currently see between post 92 universities and other ones. Q295 Mr Marsden: HEFCE have not moved very far. We had them slightly dragging, twitching and screaming when they came to the Select Committee on it, but they have not moved that far. Mr Tuckett: No, they have not, but in time we cannot imagine we will not go down that route because the boundaries are too complex. The bigger challenge is how we talk about schooling in Britain and FE, and it seems to me that is the good argument for the question you were asking us about what Andrew Foster said. Q296 Mr Marsden: I would like Pauline's view on that because she is at the sharp end of it. Ms Waterhouse: I think through the development of the Lifelong Learning networks we are beginning to see universities taking a much closer interest in progression pathways. I think the Lifelong Learning networks, although they are in their infancy at the moment, are part of an answer to the question which you have posed, Gordon. That is the first thing. The other thing is that every university now, it appears to me, is increasingly taking an interest in how to develop its widening participation strategy. Certainly, in my own patch, if we take Lancaster University, of whom we are an associate college, there is an increasing interest in wanting to develop, through colleges like mine, progression into higher education on the vocational side, which it is acknowledged by traditional universities FE colleges are better served to deliver in terms of that agenda. I feel more optimistic than you, and I think there is an increasing recognition by traditional universities that they can deliver their widening participation agenda through the relationships they have with their local FE colleges. Q297 Mr Marsden: John, have you had a bevy of Russell Group vice-chancellors beating on your door saying, "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, we really need to do more with you, understand your qualifications and make our portability simpler?" Dr Brennan: If I have, I have not noticed. I think your question is very fair. There is a lot that can be done to articulate the progression routes, the relationship between qualifications, to build links through Lifelong Learning networks, and so on, between universities and FE institutions and to be clearer. I think in the past HEFCE have tended to fudge the issues around what proportion of HE, and what kinds of HE, are delivered through the FE system, and so on. I think there is room for considerably greater clarity and support in policy terms for all of that. I think if we go down that road, then it does begin to address many of these issues about widening access to higher education. Mr Flint: If I may add three very quick points. Firstly, if foundation degrees were given to FE to develop rather than to universities, there would be a lot more of the. Secondly, access courses are in danger at the moment because of the problems about other and about the funding, and access has been one of the great successes of the last ten years. Thirdly, Andrew Foster took some examples from the American community colleges, but I do not think he took enough. The integration of community colleges and universities in America, the two year and four year colleges, is a very good example which we could easily follow. He should be examining that as well, and so should we. Q298 Mr Chaytor: From the FE point of view, what are the best things about the new Schools White Paper? Dr Brennan: That is a very interesting question. From the point of view of institutions who are themselves independent, the idea of trust status, and so on, which gives schools greater independence is obviously not one that we are unsympathetic to. Although, I think in saying that, one has to recognise that it can be challenging managerially to operate entirely on your own and challenging in terms of leadership demands because you have to be responsible for the totality of your institutional activity and performance. We would not suggest that it is necessarily an easy road to go down, and it is not at all clear that many schools are thrilled about the prospect of going down that road. Where I think we are more concerned is about the messages which are encouraging institutional independence, about competition in the system, about the undermining of a planned approach to the development of provision and the changing responsibilities in respect of school organisation. It is not clear how that is going to work in a way which will ensure that you get planning of 14-19 provision in a coherent sense. I think we want to see all of those issues teased out in the debate which follows the White Paper and addressing in there the mechanisms that the Government is going to create. I think without that then we just move into a much more competitive environment in which the idea of collaboration, which I think is a strong theme of what the Government is encouraging the system to do, will go out the window because institutions find it difficult to collaborate and compete at the same time. Competition tends to undermine commitment to collaboration. Q299 Mr Chaytor: It is going to make it more difficult to build on the Tomlinson agenda, accepting Colin's point that there was not a outcry about the totality of Tomlinson, there was half an outcry and there is an opportunity to look at it again in 2008. Are you saying the White Paper is not going to progress the Tomlinson principles which the Government has set out? Dr Brennan: I think we would certainly have questions about , whether it will deliver that. If it fails to do so, then we would be deeply concerned about the movement of the system if we start to undermine that idea of an integrated and coherent approach to offering a range of learning opportunities at a local level. Q300 Mr Chaytor: You are concerned about increasing competition and proliferation of small sixth forms, and so on, but in the White Paper there is constant emphasis on the importance of collaboration, both between the trust schools and other schools. Do you think it is a workable model for the 16-19 phase to have pupils attached to one institution, but spend part of their week travelling around between three or four different institutions? Dr Brennan: I think there are a number of different issues which that question throws up. Some of them are issues of practicality, simply that movement of pupils between sites, and so on, raises all sorts of issues about timetabling, transport, and so on, which have got to be solved at the local level. Some of them may be soluble and some may be insoluble. I think a lot of work needs to be done to try and realise that. The extent of which they are soluble depends in part on the framework within which they are placed. If, for example, your funding framework is to say to schools, "You have money and you can buy or provision in other institutions", then all of history suggests that it is quite difficult for schools to go down that road because they find it difficult to realise savings as a result of moving individual pupils out of classes, and so on, and therefore it becomes a major inhibitor. On the other hand, if your funding model is such that you have a ring-fenced pot of money which is there to support the development of this alternative curriculum offer for that group of young people, and that can be accessed by the partnership of institutions who are providing that, then you may create the right incentives and the right support to deliver that. A lot depends upon the mechanisms which you put in place around all of this. If we can get the mechanisms right, then I think you can solve a lot of those practical problems. Q301 Chairman: Pauline, would you like to come back to any of this on the White Paper? Ms Waterhouse: I was thinking about the very first point that David made a moment ago, which was what colleges feel is the best thing in the 14-19 White Paper. I would say in both of the recent White Papers on 14-19 education, I really welcome the emphasis that has been placed on functional literacy and numeracy and the real drive and will there appears to be to start to address those literacy and numeracy development needs of young people because, for myself, in the days when I was a teacher, before I went into management, what I would say is one of the key reasons why it was sometimes difficult to ensure young people passed their vocational qualification was because of the very, very real issues of literacy and numeracy skills deficits. I think that is one of the key reasons behind people failing Level 2, Level 3 qualifications and, as we know, this then goes on to be a problem in the adult workforce as well. I think the need to address that, and the will that was there in the White Paper to do so, is very encouraging. Q302 Chairman: Colin, you have had some strong opinions today. With all your experience, what do you think of the White Paper? Mr Flint: My worry is an old worry, really. When I was working in the local authority in Solihull, we had a very good programme with local schools of link courses, which was funded by the local authority. It worked pretty well, except that schools did tend to choose the young people that they sent to colleges, and I fear that there may still be some of that even in the new arrangement and that it is going to perpetuate that academic vocational design. I am all in favour of good quality vocational opportunities being made available to young people, but I think they ought to be made available to all young people, not just those that particular schools decide will benefit from them, because there are dangers in that decision-making process. Mr Tuckett: I wanted to talk about the parental involvement issue which the White Paper addresses and the challenges that presents. You can see how well it will work in areas where there are lots of articulate parents who are already engaged with all kinds of arenas of the way our world works. For the least engaged parents, I miss the focus on how you would support them to be effectively taking up the kinds of challenges Government poses for parents here and with that a lack of linkage, as it were, to extended schools, to community schooling into the role adults have in the support of young people's achievements. Related to that, a kind of worry that not giving the local authority enough powers to ensure that the plurality of purposes we have for schooling in our communities can be secured and not just those which individual groups of governors and parents recognise for themselves. Chairman: We are out of time. Can I thank Pauline, Colin, Alan and John for appearing before the Committee today. You have been a difficult bunch to manage, I am afraid, because you are so knowledgeable and it is so interesting to listen to your answers, but it certainly honed up my chairing skills. We appreciate it very much, thank you. |