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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 649vi

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

 

FURTHER EDUCATION

 

 

Wednesday 15 March 2006

MS KAT FLETCHER, MR JOHN OFFORD, MS JACQUI JOHNSON

and MR BARRY LOVEJOY

Evidence heard in Public Questions 522 - 561

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Wednesday 15 March 2006

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods

Jeff Ennis

Helen Jones

Mr Gordon Marsden

Stephen Williams

________________

Memoranda submitted by NATFHE and NUS

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Ms Kat Fletcher, President, NUS, Mr John Offord, Further Education Policy & Research Analyst, NUS, Ms Jacqui Johnson, Lay Member, NATFHE National Executive Council, and Mr Barry Lovejoy, Head of Colleges Department, NATFHE, gave evidence.

Q522 Chairman: May I welcome John Offord, Kat Fletcher, Barry Lovejoy and Jacqui Johnson. Today it is the Education Bill and I think a lot of people will want to be there and also at Prime Minister's Questions. My apologies for the fact that it is going to be an hour long session, but we are going to try to get the most out of it. We did it successfully with the last group so I am sure we can do it with you. We are going to go straight into questions. We are looking both at FE and skills. We are getting into the subject. We were interrupted a little by our inquiry into the White Paper so there has been a bit of disjuncture in terms of the progress of the FE inquiry, but we take it very seriously and with a number of other inquiries going on we have got plenty of material. We particularly wanted to see you. I remember Kat saying it would be very bad if we did not have the NUS in to talk about this. We have met your requests. Is that alright?

Ms Fletcher: It is very much appreciated.

Q523 Chairman: We have started getting this flow of reports out, Foster and Leach and other reports. What is your feeling about the way these recommendations are being received by yourselves on behalf of your members?

Ms Fletcher: We are delighted with the focus that has been put on to further education from the Government at the moment. That very much fits with our agenda and how we have focussed on further education over the last 18 months. Generally speaking we are working alongside the grain of what the Government is doing and the general targets and policy, although we would question some of those targets. I think Foster has been very well received certainly by my membership. We really welcome a variety of things that that report has come out with, particularly the need to have a coherent vision around funding and quality improvement and, of course, the reputation of further education. All of these things must improve the quality of the reputation of FEs and I think students can make a hugely positive contribution to that. From my point of view, we have got long-standing policy goals around learners being co-producers in their educational environment and certainly in FE, which perceives itself as having a very adult environment, and a very unique culture around an adult learning environment. We think that that fits quite well with our agendas and also a variety of government agendas around citizenship and a decline in civic and political participation and also that general move towards putting the user at the centre of public policy and directing things. We are very keen on what the Government is doing and hope that Foster will be implemented in full. We were disappointed with Tomlinson and some of the cherry-picking that we believe went on there. Generally speaking we are in favour of what is going on at the moment.

Q524 Chairman: Barry, what is your reaction to Foster? Was it the best thing since sliced bread or do you have some reservations about it?

Mr Lovejoy: It is another report. We have seen several reports in the further education sector over time. Some have disappeared in a way. We welcome the vast majority of the recommendations from Foster. We particularly welcome the higher profile given to higher education and think that is very significant. Our reservations are centred around what it did not do as much as what it said and, in particular, the failure to address seriously the issue of funding. Foster was very upfront and said it was more to do with managing the situation as opposed to dealing with the funding and that was left up to government and a public debate. We think that is unfortunate because we are putting it off again. The positive element was its emphasis on workforce development, which we think is long overdue. A lot of pronouncements have been made over the last three years but they have not really come to fruition. There has been lots of discussion around the development of that. We are looking forward either to the White Paper or indeed some other way of putting that into practice. Our main concern is the stakeholders' involvement in that, including the trade unions. There are a couple of other things that are highlighted by Foster which again does not take us very far. There are two or three things that we raised the last time we met this Committee eight years ago. One was on the persistence of an over-casualised workforce that was highlighted by Foster. The other aspect - and I think something is moving on this - is the lack of staffing data, which again we raised eight years ago and it has taken until now to address that.

Q525 Jeff Ennis: Foster recommended a clear 'skills for employability' focus for colleges. Has this got to be the grand objective for the future of FE or are there other issues that need to be brought in and included in that focus?

Mr Lovejoy: We certainly have no problem with the question of a key role for further education's employability, that is what we are in the business for. One thing that we would stress is that there are different routes to employability. We must avoid, in the presentation of the new brand image, losing sight of our other agendas, which is widening participation, which many colleges have moved into and which, in fact, produces the same results; in other words, you are bringing in people to employability who are otherwise excluded. We also need to look at the possible contradictions that are occurring at the moment between employability and the focus of Government and their priorities on Level 2 as opposed to Level 3.

Ms Johnson: I teach in a college and I have got a couple of examples of where this shift away from Level 3 and a focus on Level 2 and on the national qualifications framework has meant some likely closures in the future. One of them is in the electrical installation Level 1 course that we ran. There is no national electoral installation course at Level One at the moment. We ran this course for 14-16-year olds and 16-17-year olds. As it does not fit in the NQF its other provision is not funded now and so all those young potential electricians could not have the opportunities that we would otherwise have given them. I know it may be remedied, but you cannot always get the staff as electrical installation staff are hard to come by. We had the staff trained, but when that goes away because the courses do not run there can be difficulties. Any college is always running on the edge on staffing which, of course, is 70 per cent of our budget. The other area is access to IT. I am in Berkshire and it is a good area for information technology. For 12 years we have had access to IT courses. We have run about five groups with 15 students in a group and that has been largely women returnees looking to make themselves more employable, update themselves and get back into jobs. They are not always highly paid jobs but it is important to the family economy. We are now going to be asking those students, if they are not on benefit, for about £1,000 a year. We have held off from doing that, the college has subsidised that fee income, but we are not going to be able to do it in future. We have also used European Social Fund money for that course. All of that going means those courses could fold and so it could be our last intake this year. FE teachers want to look after their students. Lots of those students went into work. Is it not a shame that that might go?

Q526 Jeff Ennis: In the Barnsleys and Doncasters of this world the FE colleges are very successful in getting people across the doorstep for the first time, especially those who have always been against going into an education system. Will the focus on employability skills stop people from going across the threshold for the first time in terms of widening participation? Is there a danger there?

Mr Lovejoy: I think the issue is how rigidly priorities are translated into funding. Where you have a very strict and rigid clear effect, which we are seeing the impact of at the moment, it means a disastrous impact locally in many colleges at the moment where there is this big risk about courses being cut down and also pre-entry to ESOL et cetera. Perhaps we should be allowing some flexibility of colleges within the whole quantum. That is one message that came over. We have been through what we would see as a famine and feast of funding in FE over the last 20 years. We went through the famine years of the 1990s. We had great expectations and welcomed the increase in funding from 2003 onwards. The problem is that those expectations last about 18 months. What happened was that when we saw the application of those particular priorities we found that famine existed at the local level. We need to prepare for a long-term approach to the system and allowing for some cushioning effect. There has been too much jumping very quickly. We have a situation now where we are faced with whole swathes of redundancies again as a result of an emphasis on different aspects of funding and that is a problem. We have no doubt that we are going to have to place much more emphasis on Level 3 in the future and we are going to have to switch around again. The problem is you are affecting the infrastructure of the colleges in doing that. We are interested in moving away from a stop-go process to having a bit more cushioning. The first thing I said to Foster was that we want some change, but let us not change for change sake and let us get some continuity as well there.

Q527 Jeff Ennis: We have already mentioned the funding gap between college and sixth form funding provision. Two years ago Charles Clarke said to this Committee they were going to close the funding gap in five years' time, so we have got three years to go. At that time we had a funding gap of 7-8 per cent, last year it rose to 13 per cent and now ministers are saying they are hoping to get it down to five per cent by 2008 and eventually close it. How big a problem is this funding gap to the Barnsleys of this world?

Ms Johnson: It is an enormous problem. In my college, which I have no criticisms of, it is well managed, we are a successful college, we will have a 'light touch' inspection next year, everybody tries to do their best. The funding gap is an enormous problem for recruitment. For example, I have a young colleague who is 28 years old, they have just had their second baby this week, he lives in Berkshire, he has a £100,000 mortgage and he is on £22,000 after four years of teaching. In a school it would be substantially more because the incremental scales are compressed. It is very hard to recruit and retain young and enthusiastic staff if we do not have fair pay.

Mr Offord: Some of our casework around Level 2 for vocational qualifications centres on the fact that you cannot progress to Level 3. That seems to be down to the fact that there are not enough qualified assessors for NVQ qualifications. I am not going to beguile you with tales about plumbers, but we have had an awful lot of plumbing casework and colleges simply cannot provide that progression. We have got a piece of casework arising out of the saddlery course in Walsall with no progression to Level 3 because they cannot recruit the assessor. We were very pleased that Foster did address that and that he was looking for some flexibility between high labour market rewards for particular skills which are in scarce supply. There is a real problem there that does need some kind of resolution and I would perceive it as part of the funding gap. You need to be able to provide for getting those up-to-date skills in. A skills audit of electors in the FE sector would be a very useful thing as well.

Q528 Jeff Ennis: Do we have any evidence of a drift in teaching staff? In Barnsley we have got anecdotal evidence that staff at the college are going to sixth forms in the Sheffield, Rotherham, Wakefield and Doncaster areas where we have greater sixth form provision. Do we have any evidence that staff are drifting from FE colleges into sixth forms?

Mr Lovejoy: I am not aware of any. Employers consistently speak of problems with recruitment into further education. The enormous increase in funding was welcome. We thought we would get to close the gap in terms of pay with school teachers or at least be within striking distance from a two-year settlement. The problem we have got at the moment is that 57 per cent of colleges have not implemented that. There are still cultural elements around the reason why they are not engaged in implementing deals, but underlying this is this uncertainty of funding. It hit us at the wrong time. We were making good progress and then excuses were given as to why they could not award this new scheme which would bring us in line with schools and that was because of that uncertainty of funding. It has major implications and a knock-on effect for quality and recruitment for the future.

Q529 Mr Marsden: We have already begun to touch on the whole issue of the controversy about funding for adults and the implications and Barry and Jackie have given some very good and very specific examples. Can I say from my own context in Blackpool that my FE colleges are obviously concerned about it particularly on the issue on the funding of so-called 'soft skills'. There does appear to be a concern that a lot of the things that have previously been funded under section 98 have now been dropped and this affects people who need soft skills not just to get Level 1 and 2 but to get a job thereafter. I wonder if either of you have any comments to make on that.

Ms Johnson: This is a fairly ongoing problem. Because we recognise the value of all these courses to our students and because none of us can predict how going into one course will lead on to something else, we have always offered a range of community courses and we are expected to do so. Under inspection and local authority regimes we are expected to do that. We have gone to great lengths to try and make those examinable courses, to shift things over so people get a certificate at the end whether they want it or not and not everybody does, of course, they just want to do things for fun. Sometimes in education we are allowed to do things for fun.

Q530 Chairman: That is a bit of a revolutionary concept. Some of us think politics should be fun.

Ms Johnson: Across the country these courses are being hit and nobody can predict what the outcome is going to be because they have been with us for so long and have led on to something else. It is very difficult to say if we drop that one it will mean people do not go on to something else and get a job.

Q531 Mr Marsden: We have had the LSC before us to discuss these issues and we will be having ministers shortly. The elephant in the room in all of this is how much is proposed and how much is disposed between the LSC and DfES officials. Has the LSC been too supine in dealing with ministers over pointing out the consequences of shorter-term funding changes?

Mr Lovejoy: LSC is an interesting thing. What is a quango? Which is the Government bit and which is the quasi bit? We have fairly good relationships with the LSC in discussing these issues and we are sometimes assured that things can be brought in to those categories. We sometimes get the impression that if only the colleges would sort themselves out, but it is not quite as simple as that. I agree that the LSC, as a key stakeholder, should be more vociferous in terms of dealing with the contradictions around the question of those priorities and pointing out the consequences of perhaps broad decisions. That is why I was saying earlier that perhaps dealing with these what we call 'soft skills' --- I am not sure if I agree with the term soft skills as such because I think they are essential basic skills.

Q532 Mr Marsden: I am not suggesting by using that term that they are not essential. I am suggesting they are the sort of things that some bureaucrat sitting somewhere in Whitehall would find difficult to put in a box.

Mr Lovejoy: I agree. That is why I was saying that in terms of the overall quantum of funding, certain elements of that were allotted to those types of courses which are better dealt with at local level because colleges are quite in touch with their local communities; that is one thing they are good at.

Q533 Mr Marsden: So the danger with these short-term funding decisions that have been made is that the implication of them will be too Stalinist and centralised.

Mr Lovejoy: Absolutely. A recent example has just come out in Hackney where they have not managed to turn a whole load of those into examination based with the result of catastrophic cuts in community precision. That is about to hit the press any time now.

Q534 Mr Marsden: Obviously a lot of things are affecting adult students. I know that your profile as a union is progressively moving in that direction because your students are progressively moving in that direction. What can you do on this issue?

Mr Lovejoy: I do think funding is crucial here. If you look at what the FE sector does very well and prides itself on, it is about reaching out to second chance learners, those people who have been failed by the educational environment beforehand. We really pride ourselves that that is what we achieve, we reach out to those people and it is adult courses that are the key to that and, in particular, not just adult courses that therefore move you on to getting the next job but actually get you re-engaged in the educational environment. Maybe if you come in and do a part-time adult course in whatever that re-engages you with that and that means you go on to something else.

Q535 Mr Marsden: What is NUS doing to focus on and highlight this issue?

Ms Fletcher: That is part of the reason we are here, is it not?

Q536 Mr Marsden: I mean over and beyond that. Are you working with NATFHE and with other departments?

Ms Fletcher: Yes, we are. Our focus over the last plan has been particularly on access courses because we think access courses are the jewel in the crown of further education and we think they are really high certainly on this Committee's agenda and on the Government's agenda because they bring adults back into further education and they then take them into higher education and transform people's lives individually through that. What we are seeing because of the LSC's priorities as fed down by the Government is that access courses are being cut because they are over-19 and they want to go into HE. What colleges are doing is cross-subsidising their access courses because they feel so impassioned about them and the value they play in wider society and therefore taking it out of other bits of funding and that is obviously difficult to sustain. That is what we have been working on.

Mr Offord: Kat and I were at the AoC Staff Governors' Conference this weekend and the major issue exercising governors there was the Stalinist attitude of the Learning and Skills Council.

Q537 Chairman: Stalin is alive and well today. I have never heard him mentioned so often in this Committee. Where is he alive and well, John?

Mr Offord: According to some of those governors, he is at the heart of the LSC and particularly those local ones where they are not getting the funding decisions they want. The brutal facts of the matter are you cannot fund x, y and z and it is a dropout of 1 million funded places by 2008. They were coming up with all sorts of specific examples. It causes a real tension in the governance of further education as well because we are moving away from that business model that was birthed in the last years of the Tory administration through to a stakeholder model and that is being taken very seriously by a new range of governors and they are seeing funding decisions being brought down upon them which mean they have got to deny opportunity and access to their local community. That puts you in a very, very peculiar position as a governor. It does need to be addressed and there needs to be some flexibility built in there.

Q538 Mr Marsden: What can we do, given that Sandy Leach is going to come forward with recommendations to 2020, to make sure that these short-term funding issues - and they are short-term funning issues, there is no point pretending that they are not - do not then produce a logjam in the system, particularly of the demographic gap?

Ms Johnson: I sit on the local LSC so I feel I have to say something in support of them.

Q539 Mr Marsden: So you are not Stalin?

Ms Johnson: Not yet! It is very frustrating sitting on the local LSC because we started with what felt like a much wider brief, which was to look at the whole of post-16 education and move forward and think how we could reorganise that and make a logical and coherent post-16 system. We have set up all these strategic area reviews nationally at an enormous cost and in the middle of that whole process various things were thrown out by the Government which made our position seem much weaker, things like yes, okay, schools can set up new sixth forms and that has thrown the whole thing up in the air. I could throw back the question what happened to that whole strategic area review? We were looking for a real analysis of post-16 education in this country and it seems to have gone nowhere, which was very disappointing. As a local LSC member I feel that we have been pushed more and more into a narrower focus, with more limitations placed on us. I am not trying to dodge responsibility for this because I raise these issues all the time at the LSC and we are not dodging responsibility, but there are too many bodies doing too many things and too many things being thrown at us. When we are in the middle of one thing a new initiative is lobbed in that can throw something else out and money has to be spent on that and I think that is a great difficulty.

Q540 Chairman: Some of us were with Leach yesterday, at a discussion at the National Skills Forum that Gordon chairs, and he was comparing a community college in the United States with our FE delivery. In the United States one of the great strengths was it was locally determined, ie you could assist what employers or employees want and you could react locally. Is that one of the faults, that there is too much drop down and not enough being able to respond to local community needs?

Mr Lovejoy: Yes. It may have drifted too far towards central rigidity. I would certainly agree in terms of responsiveness to the needs of a community and course development. On the other hand, where it comes down to questions of workforce issues, I think it has gone too far in terms of local determination and that is the balance that has to be done here.

Q541 Chairman: Gone too far?

Mr Lovejoy: Absolutely. What we have got is a situation where we can sit down and agree a framework that will take us through a modernised pay structure, which Government supports, employers are signed up for it, yet the problem we have is that because of the localised notion of employers and their ability to interpret those things we have got a complete mess still just as we did eight years ago. As I said, 57 per cent still are not abiding by that. The problem about that is that brings in another level of uncertainty which makes it difficult locally because on the one hand colleges want to respond to their local communities, which is good stuff, but, on the other hand, they find that because they have got these other pressures there is no constant. We need some sort of constant there. I would have thought given the fact that the workforce is the major cost in a college, like other public services, that should remain a constant. We are up to flexibility but in terms of other aspects, particularly of flexible workforce, I think it has gone too far.

Chairman: We have got to move on. Roberta is going to take us through improving quality.

Q542 Dr Blackman-Woods: I am going to concentrate on the participation of students in college governance. This is probably a question to you, Kat. What do you think is currently dissuading colleges from involving students more in their governance?

Ms Fletcher: All sorts of different things, I think. Certainly I think that over the last few years college governors and senior management in colleges have become far more interested and motivated by involving students as co-producers in what they do. People are very much looking for practical solutions to situations. We have had mandatory student governors on governing bodies, for example, for the last six years and we think that has worked really well and we have had lots of positive stories and feedback from clerks, students, chairs of corporations, but quite often we find that sometimes they feel they cannot find a student governor. Our response to that every time, I suppose, is "Possibly that is not surprising if you have not got the system underneath that can generate students who are interested and motivated in acting as learning reps on a governing body". The line I always say to principals is that students' views do not just appear out of thin air, they need time, space, encouragement and organisation in order to be able to produce and create those opinions.

Q543 Dr Blackman-Woods: Do you think they have something to learn from universities? Do you think universities do it better, first of all, and should colleges be learning from them?

Ms Fletcher: There are things to be learnt. It is very obvious that HE and FE are very different things with very different priorities and different ideals and values but there is an awful lot of money pumped into student representation in higher education. We know that student learners are represented at every level of universities and vice-chancellors regularly communicate with student unions. It is a real part of the culture and the cash that is invested in higher education. We think we can learn from that in terms of FE because in schools it is not just about cash, it is about government legislation. School children have to be listened to individually and collectively about their education, there is just a gap in further education. I think we can create a new system that is reflective of what FE is like and we have got practical solutions around that.

Mr Lovejoy: We very much support that in very practical ways. For example, we see that support of local student unions is essential to that because in practice that gives support to those people who come through. Associated with that is where you have got good student unions very often you have a staff dedicated towards liaising with student unions. That needs to be looked at very clearly because they make a big difference. My daughter is a 16 year-old student and has got herself within that via a liaison officer. That is a concrete example of what needs to be done.

Mr Offord: What Foster managed to put his finger on very ably, particularly because of the example of the upper secondary system, was the connection between self-assessment, self-improvement and self-regulation and the role of learner voice, in fact learner data, in that. We gave a workshop at the conference this weekend with Lynn Sedgemore and what we were arguing was there is all sorts of data that is required by inspection that can be triangulated with information coming exactly from the horse's mouth and it is not just about lockers and car parks, it is about "why am I doing key skills?" - that is a favourite moan of lots and lots of articulate FE students and it has got something to do with funding is what they normally come up, and they are dead right of course - right the way to how their education is working for them. That is an absolutely important source of data for a board and a senior management team looking to improve the provision that it is making through its local pilots. You are not going to get it adequately unless you have a system of student representation which starts at course level and then moves up and the governor position is the formalised bit at the top.

Q544 Chairman: Is there a problem with the age range? When I go to FE and see students they tend not to reflect the age range that you get in FE.

Ms Fletcher: I do not think that is our experience. We conducted a survey of student representation and how representative it is of its membership and we found that good student unions exist in a variety of institutions from sixth form colleges right the way through to general FE colleges and the diversity reflects the colleges providing that there is senior management buy-in and there is some dedicated professional staff support that can take on that challenge of co-ordinating representation from across courses and age ranges from the college.

Mr Offord: If you have two board reps and start to take this seriously you find that some sort of organic change starts to take over. More and more FE colleges are multi-campus operations and if you have two student governors you are more liable to find that one of them will be a more mature student because they are on a different campus and there is a different constituency that elects them.

Ms Fletcher: For me it is about how the senior management view a student union. If they view it as something that 16 year-old A level students do then that is what it will become. If they view it as an amateur social club that organises discos and maybe does something about Red Nose Day that is what it will become, whereas if you fund it, train it, give it professional support to become the voice of the learner in the college that is what happens and that is what the best corporations do and they are the best student unions with the best representation.

Q545 Chairman: Is that your experience, Jacqui?

Ms Johnson: I am from a medium-sized general FE college. I have listened with some interest and I think another issue is that our students are quite focused for a short time and often have to work. It is quite hard. We are pressuring them to do their college work and they doing paid work as well, so getting the time and commitment from students, even with some professional help - I am sure we could better - is not always very easy. They may be with us for two years and want to go on, hard focused. In universities they have sabbaticals sometimes, there are more opportunities for them, but it is harder in FE colleges.

Q546 Dr Blackman-Woods: For the purposes of this discussion we should perhaps set aside those NUS full-time officers. What I am trying to get at is the general issue of participation. Going back to universities, you are right to say that there is a very formal structure, that students have a key role to play in quality assurance systems, for example, but I would not like us to underestimate the difficulties of that, I still think that colleges and universities struggle to get the level of participation in general issues of governance at whatever level. I am coming back to the idea of your development unit. Do you think that will help to counter some of those difficulties? Although I want your views, it is not only about offering places on committees, is it, because unless students are clear about the degree of influence they have you are not going to get the culture changed. I want to talk a bit more about what can bring the culture change about.

Ms Fletcher: I will say something very briefly and then I will hand over to John, if that is okay, on just one very little thing around students being able to be involved and finding the time. A key issue for us is around the Educational Maintenance Allowance. We think that has been a fantastic initiative and has encouraged more people to stay in education but currently there are colleges where if you are involved in student representation you lose your Educational Maintenance Allowance. For example, we held an FE lobby two weeks ago and if you came to that you would lose your Educational Maintenance Allowance. We had a student who lost their Educational Maintenance Allowance because they were the student governor and they attended the governing board.

Q547 Chairman: Who took it away?

Ms Fletcher: The LEA.

Q548 Dr Blackman-Woods: Because there would be an attendance requirement presumably.

Ms Fletcher: They would not be marked, so therefore they lost their EMA. We think that there should be some formalised guidance that says if you are involved in student representation and acting in that role you should not lose your Educational Maintenance Allowance. I appreciate there is a balance to be struck but I think that is something that should be taken on. It is a tiny change but one that would impact massively upon individual members and collective members. In terms of how you get people involved, for us it is all very much about our course rep structures and making sure that you have representation at every level and different modes of representation at every level in the college. John, do you want to expand on that?

Mr Offord: In the past we have often been accused of trying to imprint an HE student union model on FE but we have never tried to do that because it would be woefully inappropriate and probably would not work except in a handful of colleges. We do see the heart of this as being course reps. That is the face-to-face where the learning takes place and that is where you want to articulate your concerns about learning. It does not take a lot to imagine what kinds of carrots and sticks would be good news here. Colleges can no longer issue their own certificates, that was taken away a long time ago, but they can say that X, Y and Z student made a significant contribution to quality assurance. That is very useful in the labour market, it is very useful for progression, it is very useful for entry into HE. It is also of value in and of itself - I do not want to sound pretentious - because it is a citizenship activity as well.

Q549 Chairman: Can we push on the citizenship aspect because we are also interested in citizenship. It does seem a critical time in FE, the broad student population you get, where citizenship is very important in a broader sense, not just in the governing of the college.

Mr Offord: Kat will probably want to say something on this as well. The way we are trying to approach this is giving equal weight to the quality improvement part of it and the citizenship opportunity represented here. We are also conscious of the fact that some people are more ready to come forward for those citizenship opportunities than others. One of the things we would like to see is some more targeted support for black and minority ethnic students inside those representative structures, we think it needs specific targeting. What we would not want to do is make that at board level because you cannot be too specific about governing body members. That has been a large part of our work on this. We did try that first off with the DfES and found that all the citizenship pot was going to LSDA and LSDA was distributing it in a way that we could not get involved in, although some enterprising student unions have. At City College Norwich they managed to get hold of £6,000 worth of citizenship funding and promptly spent it on course rep training for their own and six other colleges. With very modest amounts of money student unions will take off and do this and will spread it in a way that has got citizenship as its bedrock amongst other learners in other institutions.

Ms Fletcher: Citizenship is all about initiating or resisting change in colleges. There are lots of anecdotes but I know I was interested in the price of products in my college canteen. You will hear that quite a lot from FE students, that they got involved because of that. That was why I got involved, because the price of chips was extortionate. What I did was get involved with the student union and ----

Q550 Chairman: Strike the word "chips" out of the record and put "green vegetables".

Ms Fletcher: Through that I got involved with the student union and became a course rep and through the student union I got involved with the governing body. That experience has changed my life around. What we do is bring people into that organisation, give them the time, space and encouragement to debate and decide together. Citizenship is all about us collectively debating and promoting our values and trying to move things on. That is what student unions do so brilliantly in HE and we know that they can do it in FE as well just in a different way. That has got to fit into the wider agenda about participation.

Chairman: Your autobiography could be called Hello, Mr Chips! Roberta, your last question because we are getting a bit tight on time.

Q551 Dr Blackman-Woods: It was quite interesting that you brought up the EMA issue because it is a block to FE. Do you think as a Committee we need to look at how EMA is working on the ground? You have brought up one dimension of it here which is quite interesting that I suspect none of us had thought about, but generally.

Mr Offord: I think there is a need for research about it. There is a large range of entitlement for EMAs that are obviously different throughout the country because 30 grand in Newcastle is different from 30 grand in London as a salary for a parent. I think it is how EMAs are perceived by some families who are getting them. In poorer families EMAs are perceived as being part of the dole, they are not perceived as something specific for education. There is a lot that needs to be analysed about motivation both within the family and for an individual learner and I do not see anybody doing that. It would be very useful to do that, particularly given that LSDA has done very useful work through Brookes University and Joe Harkins' research on the 14-16 increased flexibility programme. I would like to see that kind of in-depth sociological analysis happening on how families perceive EMAs and whether that could lead to improvements in targeting and the level of the EMA.

Chairman: We are running into the time for the next section that we must cover. I want Stephen to lead us through it.

Q552 Stephen Williams: A quick question on the structure of FE. One of my other committees in this place is the Public Accounts Committee. We did an inquiry looking at the Learning and Skills Council and the National Audit Office report and in that report there was an extraordinary pictogram of the different structures and organisations involved in the whole of FE and the final report that we produced said there were about 500 organisations involved in the delivery of FE. Do you think there is scope for rationalisation? I assume that to be an easy question!

Mr Lovejoy: Quite clearly we can do nothing but agree on the amazing jigsaws that exist that sometimes do not fit in with one another. Such developments like the new Quality Improvement Agency we are hoping will assist in the process of having some sort of rationalisation in bringing the numerous institutions associated and involved in quality down to a lower level and maybe we can have some sort of bottom line idea about what quality is. We are hoping that will assist there. Similarly, the inspectorate and the merging of the two, as long as we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater so that ALI's strengths are not lost in the merger, I think that is vital. That is the situation with all of these things. As long as these are not reduced and we will not lose some of those key functions, that is fine. Obviously we did have an issue in terms of the LSC was established and all of a sudden we hit a crisis and there was an enormous amount of redundancies announced, et cetera. We are worried how well thought out they are. Probably some sort of mapping exercise needs to be done and thought out as to what are the key functions to be pursued. We are up for that. I think Foster highlighted that and that is something we would certainly be on board for.

Mr Offord: We were very keen on Foster's idea of a national learning model for a variety of reasons. There are questions about FE and whether it is a national system that is locally provided or it is a national system that is nationally funded. I know those two terms are similar but there is a wealth of difference between them. One of the things that we are hoping will happen is that a national learning model will take account of the fact that education is not just a market, it is an ecology as well, and a charge in one part of it impacts on a change somewhere else. This has to be understood if collaboration on 14-19 is going to work. The national learning model should reality test itself against some benchmarks. We are going to have to say this because it is echoing what Jacqui said: some policies are not sensible and joined-up thinking. George Monoux College is a very successful sixth form college in North London. It has got £3.5 million worth of new build that you can see from one side of the building and you will also see a building site for a new sixth form for a North London school from the other side. A national learning plan there with more coherence about who is saying what and who provides what to whom would be absolutely a boon to 14-19 education.

Ms Johnson: Are we going to talk about 14-16 within the 14-19 because I would like to say something on that now if it would be appropriate?

Q553 Chairman: Feel free.

Ms Johnson: I think this is an issue that would benefit from a bit of thinking through. As a college, we have been very successful at 14-16 but it is year-on-year funding. We do not know whether we are going to be able to continue with this. We have trained staff, we have gone into new buildings, we have moved into shortage areas like construction, hairdressing, which is very popular, and we have got links with 13 local schools including two pupil referral units. Those are the potential needs, are they not, the youngsters who are not going to stay in education, and yet there is no stable planning. We would like 14-19 yearly in a college so that you could say, "Staff, we know that for at least three years we are going to have stable funding". In fact, any stable funding for three years would be absolutely excellent, but the 14-16 year olds seem to be a particular area of concern as I understand that the money is now going to go back into schools which can choose or not to buy into the kinds of opportunities we are offering, so yet again we could have a short term muddle, which would be a pity.

Stephen Williams: I know that the City of Bristol College teaches quite a few GCSE courses in my constituency to people whom the school system has failed but hopefully they are going to achieve those in the college centre.

Q554 Jeff Ennis: On this particular point I would like to ask Jacqui if the over-achievement of student numbers with the LSC formula-funded approach is exacerbating this situation for certain colleges. I know Barnsley College had a problem with that last year.

Ms Johnson: I do not know enough detail to answer that usefully, I am afraid.

Q555 Jeff Ennis: Have you got anything on that, Barry? Colleges have to agree the number of sixth form students they are going to take with the LSC at the beginning of the year.

Ms Johnson: I could say something about that. That happens to us in that we could grow if we had the accommodation, if the LSC agreed that we could grow. Each year you are having a big discussion with the LSC as to whether or not you are going to be capped. With things like the electrical installation I mentioned earlier, there was some cap on the student numbers we could take, and that can impact on areas where you say, "Surely they will teach them. There is nowhere else for these youngsters to go", but if we have not got the buildings and we have not got the funding we cannot pay for the staff.

Q556 Stephen Williams: I want to put a question to Kat or John about the potential for a two-tier system within FE between sixth form colleges which primarily deliver A-levels and general FE colleges which are perceived as doing all sorts of things although, conversely again, referring to Bristol, probably the biggest deliverer of A-levels in the city of Bristol is the City of Bristol College which would be seen as a general FE college. Do you think there needs to be badging of different colleges or would that risk them not having parity of esteem?

Ms Fletcher: You are absolutely right. We do forget that the vast majority of A-levels across the country are conducted in FE, are they not, not in school sixth forms, and that general FE colleges cover a wide diversity of people. Some of that is about national brand and national reputation. There has been a real weakness there, and I think that is for a variety of reasons. I think it is predominantly around the fact that, sadly, most of the people who have positions of responsibility in the Civil Service or in governments have not been to a further education college and I guess their children do not go to a further education college and therefore there is a confusion about what it is and what it does. Often there is this focus on it being about adults who come back and do these courses et cetera and not what it actually does, and I think there is a lot to be done around the brand of FE. There is potential around a two-tier system and that is one of the things that we have been quite concerned about in terms of funding and reputation.

Mr Offord: A lot of the arguments are very well rehearsed, are they not, about what you need to get into a school sixth form or a sixth form college? It is always your five good GCSEs and the NUS has a particular problem with five good GCSEs and the ditching of Tomlinson. It is colleges like Bristol that are big enough and are in a sense the monopoly provider that can offer the flexibility to bring back in what was ditched, unfortunately, from Tomlinson, particularly the "stage not age" approach. You can develop and build a course, and it is not only happening at Bristol. There are very interesting examples going on with the new UCAD diploma at Newham College, which we have on our website, showing that you can bring back what was lost. There is a huge lack in the curriculum for something like this, which a general education diploma post-16 for that 46 per cent that do not get the five good GCSEs. You can have that kind of provision within a general FE college. It can be the straight down the line academic kind and it also be the kind for those young people who have not got the five good GCSEs but need a mix of general and specialist education to move on and progress.

Q557 Chairman: But, John, is there not a problem? I know my own FE college, Huddersfield Technical College, has two pre-eminent sixth form colleges on the same hill and they definitely say, "We do not see it as a two-tier system. We see ourselves as focusing on the vocational sector. We know the people up the hill can do A-levels better than we do. We know the University of Huddersfield do HE better than we do. We have got a very tight mission on what we want to do." Surely that is okay, is it not?

Mr Offord: Yes, it is. That is the George Monoux example, and if I can continue about that one, they have done a deal with Waltham Forest College down the road that Waltham College would not do A-level work any more. They would handle the specialist education and that works fine. What does not help is that a school sixth form is going to start up in competition to that already established useful provision.

Ms Fletcher: It is not about how the colleges see each other. I think we recognise that vocational education is a valid and very useful part of what we do. One of the things that we were so pleased about around the Tomlinson proposals was that they would take away that distinction between academic and vocational and level out the playing field and say, "These things are equally valid, equally important to what we do. They have very different skill sets, there are different teaching, there are different ways of developing people but they are just as equal as each other". That would have broken down some of that traditional elitism around academia and that is one of the things we were so pleased about around Tomlinson, that it would challenge that idea.

Ms Johnson: I have to come in on this one. A-levels are not taught better in schools than in FE colleges. There is a lot of evidence that the value that is added to students in FE colleges is better than in most schools. The other thing I wanted to pick up on was, do you remember Curriculum 2000 when students were going to be able to do some vocational courses and A-levels? In my college we do that. Students regularly, because they have not necessarily yet decided exactly what they want to do at 18, do a vocational course like a national certificate with one or two AS levels and take them through to A2. Once you separate A-levels from vocational courses you deny all those students those opportunities. Real parity of esteem comes, I think, with teachers who can say, "Hang on: I teach vocational, I teach A-level". I personally teach vocational courses and A-levels, and I know that those students are of the same standard and they can go on to higher education. I will absolutely stick up for all those students and say they are just as good as those students who say, "I just want to do four AS's and four A-levels". They have different skills but the economy and employers need them just as much, sometimes even more.

Q558 Stephen Williams: I will come back a little bit to the LSC bureaucracy. They have said to us in the past that they might reduce their annual data collection of profession. Other people have said that would be a mistake, and in fact I noticed, John Offord, in your introductory remarks that you lead a skills audit of FE, so do you think it would be a mistake if the LSC were to cease an annual collection of data about the FE workforce?

Mr Lovejoy: It is not a question of who does it as long as it is done, and it needs to be done by a single agency. It needs to be quite clear. We have not got enough detailed information about workforce in FE. It is unbelievable. I know that Foster was gobsmacked, if I can use that term, in terms of where we were on that. We think that it is essential that if institutions are getting public money they should be required to give particular information about how they use it. That includes workplace development and workforce data. It is also an essential tool for human resource planning and we do not see any contradiction there. We have had what we feel were some quite productive discussions with the minister over this and we are hoping that at last there is some movement around that and that in fact there will be data collected but, more importantly, that the data is produced in a way that is useful. I can understand colleges every year churn this stuff out but it is how that is produced and how that is accessible to everyone that is vital.

Q559 Stephen Williams: That data may educate a workforce development strategy. Do you think the DfES is doing enough to build a workforce development strategy?

Mr Lovejoy: To date, no, but Foster has highlighted this and we are hoping that the FE White Paper brings this up. There is an enormous need. What we are hoping for is that this is put into reality. Some time ago you may remember that something like the teaching pay initiative was established, in 2001. That was successful in the sense that it delivered things on the ground. It was successful because we involved all the stakeholders. It was in AOC, it was DfES and the trade unions. What we are calling for is a similar mechanism to devise that workforce strategy. We should be involved in that and that can be rolled out. One caveat, of course, on all that is that it will not work unless it is funded and inevitably that has to be addressed. At the moment lecturers are not able to access adequate time in order to do even initial teacher training once they are on the job. We pick that up consistently through the surveys we do, and that is essential.

Q560 Stephen Williams: I went to a City of Bristol College HE awards ceremony recently and I was struck by the ethnic diversity of the students who were collecting their degrees and diplomas, but Foster and another study in 2002 have shown that the lecturers in FE do not appear to have the same ethnic diversity as the students they are teaching. Do you perceive this to be a problem as well?

Mr Lovejoy: It is a problem and we had some funding from the department to assist and develop colleges in the implementation of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, which is crucial to this because it addresses questions about proportionality of staffing. We certainly agree that it is sadly lacking. I think there have been some improvements and indeed we welcome the DfES's input into that. There is a long way to go. I think that the LSC has got responsibilities as well around that to monitor that position.

Ms Fletcher: It is not just the lecturers. It goes right through the senior management team and also it is in the governing board of the corporation. We look around and what we see is white middle-class men from business communities and it is not reflective at all of the people that we put through further education and something has to be done around that diversity at that senior level because if it does not come from the mission and ethos of the governing body where else will it come from?

Q561 Stephen Williams: Is the racial profile any different in the general teaching force across schools as well?

Ms Johnson: It is because of the age in FE that it is likely. It is because so many of us are over 50. It is much more likely that we are not attracting young staff who are more likely to be from BME.

Mr Offord: One final point on that: the only thing that has improved the diversity profile of FE corporation boards is the addition of student governors. They are 12.7 per cent. If you take those out the picture looks even worse.

Chairman: We are going to finish there, I am sorry about that, because it is a very special day for us. We will be in touch with you about the bits that we have not been able to cover. We have covered most of the territory but there are other things I certainly would like to talk to you about, perhaps informally. Will you remain in touch with us because this is an inquiry which is close to our hearts? Thank you very much.