Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
DEPARTMENT FOR
EDUCATION AND
SKILLS AND
THE LEARNING
AND SKILLS
COUNCIL
24 OCTOBER 2005
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon, welcome
to the Committee of Public Accounts. Today we are considering
the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report Securing strategic
leadership for the learning and skills sector in England.
We welcome back to our Committee Sir David Normington, who of
course is Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education
and Skills, and Mark Haysom, the Chief Executive of the Learning
and Skills Council; you are both very welcome. The Committee want
to try to get a feel for what these bodies are about. If you look
at the executive summary, paragraphs 13 and 14 on page 9 and paragraph
22 on page 11, with which I am sure you are familiar, here we
have a system where we have 400 colleges, each with its own governing
body, we have 47 local learning and skills councils, each with
its own council of course and that is about 7,000 people just
counting the college governors and council members. What does
this have to do with increasing efficiency?
Sir David Normington: Most of
those people are volunteers of course and a local learning and
skills council is about a great deal more than just FE colleges:
it is about learning and skills in its area and the councils bring
together a whole range of local people to assess local needs.
The colleges themselves, since the early 1990s, have been independent
bodies with their own governing councils; they are incorporated
bodies. They have their own governing councils which effectively
set the ethos of the college and ensure it is run effectively.
Q2 Chairman: Let us now look at all
the bodies which are involved in this. Again this is mentioned
in the executive summary in paragraphs 24 and 25 which you can
find on page 11. You have regional development agencies, regional
skills partnerships, sector skills councils, the Learning and
Skills Council's 47 local councils and its regional structure,
local authorities, Jobcentre Plus, learndirect. Why do so many
bodies have a finger in this pie and what does it do to deliver
further education and increase efficiency?
Sir David Normington: They all
do different things. In terms of your question, I would have to
go through each one in a way.
Q3 Chairman: Why is it necessary
to have so many bodies with a finger in the pie of learning?
Sir David Normington: Because
they are doing different things. The regional development agencies
are about regional economic development and skills are a part
of that. Jobcentre Plus is about finding people jobs and that
is a different job altogether. The Learning and Skills Council
is one national body and 47 local councils, so that is a national
and a local body. They all do different things really. The sector
skills councils are important because there has always been a
weakness in the system in terms of sectors, big sectors of the
economy coming together to identify their skills needs. The sector
skills councils, which are new arrivals on the scene, are effectively
putting the sector picture alongside the regional and local picture.
Q4 Chairman: The sector skills councils
are mentioned in paragraphs 2.23 and 2.24, which you can find
on page 34, so let me ask you about those as you mentioned them.
To what extent are the sector skills councils doing much the same
work as the learning and skills councils?
Sir David Normington: They begin
by taking the big productive sectors of the economy and some public
sector areas, some big employing areas and their job is to bring
together employers to identify the skill needs of their sectors
and to set the long-term picture, and the standards which need
to be achieved to improve productivity in that sector. That is
not the job the local learning and skills councils are doing.
Mr Haysom runs them in a sense so he can provide the complementary
picture.
Mr Haysom: The way that it works
is that the sector skills councils are tasked with understanding
what those skills needs are and developing clear understanding
of those drivers. It is our job then to take that information
and work with the supply side to translate what they want and
what is delivered at a local level. We take what sector skills
councils are saying and, in part answer to your earlier question,
we also take inputs from the regional development agencies and
all the other people in what you rightly describe as a complex
field. We take that information and then take that to colleges
and other training providers and try to make sense of that at
a local level.
Q5 Chairman: The upshot of those
questions is that you can offer me no help in simplifying this
structure to which I have referred in these first three questions.
Sir David Normington: First of
all, it is a complicated structure; I admit that. I say again
that I think all those bodies are doing very specific jobs. Actually
the Learning and Skills Council was itself a simplification of
what went before. We had a further education funding council and
we had 72 TECs and actually bringing them together into the Learning
and Skills Council, which saved money and simplified the system,
was a very important step. We do simplify, but I agree this is
a complex system; obviously that is so from the description in
the Report.
Q6 Chairman: Could you please look
at page 44, Figure 27, which deals with the principal forms of
quality and financial assurance for colleges in the further education
sector. If colleges are performing well, why do they need such
bureaucratic quality and formal assurance controls and processes?
Mr Haysom: That is a perfectly
fair question. You may be familiar with the LSC's Agenda for Change
programme which we launched last year which is actually looking
at those questions and coming up with a major simplification in
the way these things work. Right at the heart of that is to say
that if we have a good provider of education and training then
surely we should have a much lighter touch arrangement in dealing
with them and we are redesigning the system on that basis.
Q7 Chairman: That is a fair answer.
If you look at the next page, Figure 28, which you can find on
page 45, do you see the figure of 10% of colleges which were inadequate
in 2003-04? Why do you not merge these colleges with colleges
which are performing well?
Mr Haysom: We do that on a number
of occasions, if that is the right thing to meet local needs.
It is not always possible; it is not always the right thing to
do, but we do work very hard to improve the quality of what happens
locally. There has been some improvement in the number you are
looking at there since this Report was published; there are now
only 35 colleges which are deemed to be unsatisfactory and that
number is coming down all the time. It is still an unacceptable
number and we are working hard to reduce it. One of those options
is always, always, to look at merger with successful colleges.
Q8 Chairman: Let us look at the guidance
you delivered to governors. If we look at page 25 and paragraph
1.28, it says "We concluded that there is an absence of concise,
authoritative briefing specifically for governors". Why do
so many governors feel uninformed about your policies and priorities?
Mr Haysom: Again, I thought this
was interesting and fair comment, when it was published. We have
invested an awful lot in trying to communicate with principals
and other providers and we have not been consistent enough in
trying to communicate with governors. We have done an awful lot
since this report: we have done things like Agenda for Change
as I already mentioned, but as part of that made sure that they
are being specifically consulted. We have done things like creating
a specific area on our website. We have very good training schemes
emerging around the country for working with governors and we
are working with the Association of Colleges to improve this whole
area.
Q9 Chairman: May I ask one specific
question now? If you look at paragraph 2.14 on page 31, can you
tell me why you diverted money from learners to sort out the Council's
own financial problems?
Mr Haysom: No, it is exactly the
opposite actually.
Q10 Chairman: If I have got it wrong,
tell me I have got it wrong.
Mr Haysom: What happened was that
we had an opportunity of moving our funding to more accurately
reflect the timing of spend in colleges and by doing that we were
able to get a one-off benefit of something like £180 million
in a year, which was to the direct benefit of learners.
Q11 Chairman: You have recently announced
cuts in your running costs, have you not?
Mr Haysom: We recently announced
a very significant change to the organisation to make us a more
effective organisation.
Q12 Chairman: Where are these cuts
going to fall?
Mr Haysom: Part of that is to
reduce the administration costs. We are looking at saving something
like £40 million a year and those costs will be reduced by
a combination of things, but particularly by reducing head counts
across the Learning and Skills Council by something like 1,300
posts. We are trying to get to a situation where the people at
the front line are much more expert but there are fewer of them,
where we have a stronger regional presence and a much smaller
national presence and a combination of staff reductions and savings
in premises costs gets us to that figure.
Q13 Chairman: Can we lastly please
look at whether employers are getting the sorts of skills they
need? This is dealt with in paragraph 2.30 on page 37. Are you
satisfied that you are getting colleges to provide the skills
training employers want?
Mr Haysom: I am satisfied that
we are starting to move in the right direction; there is a long,
long way to go. Sir David has rightly said that sector skills
councils are relatively new as a creation and what we need to
do is to get much more information from them and we need then
to be able to reflect that much more in the provision. There has
been a significant shift in provision towards Government priorities.
We have to make sure that those also align at local and regional
level.
Q14 Mr Khan: May I ask you what your
views are on the Mayor of London taking over the Learning and
Skills Council's remit for London?
Sir David Normington: The first
thing to say is that I do not have any views separate from the
Government.
Q15 Mr Khan: Yes, I meant the Department's
views.
Sir David Normington: I am afraid
that the answer I have to give you, which is true, is that the
Government are going to produce their own consultation document
on this in a few weeks' time, when they will be setting out their
views in response to the Mayor and the GLA's proposals.
Q16 Mr Khan: So you have no view
until the consultation period ends. Is that right?
Sir David Normington: I cannot
give you a view yet until the Government opine on the matter.
Q17 Mr Khan: But you can see some
of the concerns which are expressed about the various layers and
duplication and all the rest of it; you can see the advantages
in maybe the Mayor taking over the LSC functions in London.
Sir David Normington: I can see
the importance of having a very good coordination of the approach
to skills in London because there are some very serious issues
about the labour market and skills shortages in London. It is
important that the GLA and the Mayor are involved in that. We
will have to wait for the Government's own consultation to see
whether that means that the Mayor should take it over.
Q18 Mr Khan: That is helpful. One
of the problems outlined in this NAO report was the role of governors.
I was a Governor of my local FE college, South Thames College,
for a number of years; I gave up a couple of years ago. Even then
there were problems with recruiting governors and retaining them.
I see from the Report that this problem seems to have got worse
rather than better. What is your comment to that?
Sir David Normington: I think
it is true. Of course it varies from place to place but there
is a constant issue about getting good enough quality governors
and finding the next generation of governors and getting enough
diversity, getting a good gender balance and so on. All those
issues are there.
Q19 Mr Khan: Do you not think that
there are categories which colleges are required to fill, that
it is too rigid and it suggests that chairs of governors, with
the help of the clerks of the committees and the principals, do
not have enough common sense or nous to identify skills shortages
and fill them up?
Sir David Normington: I do not
want to criticise the clerk and chairs particularly. We have just
been through a consultation on governance and quite a lot of people
out there in colleges are saying that they think the categories
are too rigid.
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