Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-93)
DEPARTMENT FOR
EDUCATION AND
SKILLS, LEARNING
AND SKILLS
COUNCIL AND
UFI/LEARNDIRECT
21 NOVEMBER 2005
Q80 Stephen Williams: I do not know
whether it is an interest or not but I will declare it anyway.
I was formerly a tax manager with Grant Thornton, who I understand
are the auditors for Ufi, but I never had any connection at all
with Ufi while I was in practice. I want to focus on some of the
target groups of learners, particularly those at pre-Level 2 qualifications,
grade C GCSE. If you look at page 31, table 17, it shows the growth
in the advice sessions that people have had, and the contact people
have had with learndirect is increasingly via the website now
rather than the telephone. My own webmaster is always bamboozling
me with hits and visits to my website, and I notice you have web
sessions. These figures look quite impressive, with up to seven
million interacting with the website, but surely a lot of those
are the same person looking at different things over and over
again. Can you define how many people you think are using the
website to access learning as unique individuals?
Ms Jones: Yes, I can. I think
it does state in here how many we believe are repeats, although
I do not have the figure to hand. There is a proportion that we
think are repeat web sessions and there is also a proportion of
callers that we think are repeat callers. About a quarter of callers
are repeat callers and that is stated in paragraph 3.4.
Q81 Stephen Williams: It also says
in paragraph 3.4 that a quarter of the callers are up in London
and only 5% are from the north east or the east Midlands or other
regions. Clearly, 25% is not a fair share of the population for
Londoners and Londoners, from data I have seen elsewhere, tend
to have higher qualifications anyway, so do you think you are
reaching the right regions with the service or the server?
Ms Jones: Yes, we believe we are.
We think London is a bit of a quirk. Our own Ufi view is that
there is so much provision in the London area that people need
signposting through that, so they more often ring up to ask for
that help in directing them to the best course in the area.
Q82 Stephen Williams: Paragraph 3.5
maybe demonstrates how fatuous targets sometimes can be. I notice
that the Department for Education originally set you a target
of half a million calls from pre-Level 2 qualified people and
you failed to reach that target. In the following year, 2003-04,
they reduced the target and your success rate was lower again.
Now the Learning and Skills Council is perhaps coming to the rescue
with a lower target again for 2005-06 of 0.3 million calls. Do
you think you are going to meet that target this year?
Ms Jones: Yes. I am confident
that we are going to meet the target this year. There was definitely
a factor in 2004-05 which contributed and that was the fact that
we take the calls for other campaigns. For example, with the BBC
RAW Campaign recently, we have taken the calls for that and the
number of calls that we get are part of our target. The Gremlins
campaign, the apprenticeship campaign, they all contribute. If
one of those campaigns slips in time that means there are fewer
calls coming into our advice service, so part of it—and
I know this sounds a poor excuse—is beyond our control because
it is up to those organisations to launch the campaign that they
had planned at the appropriate time and for that campaign to be
effective. The other side of it is that the basis of the calculation
was changed and I think that is why we ended up with the targets
being misaligned for a while, but now we are back on track and
we are confident we will achieve those.
Q83 Stephen Williams: Do you think
the target for other people to contact is meaningful though?
Ms Jones: I think it is important
for the sector because it means that we are integrating our activity
across lots of different organisations.
Q84 Stephen Williams: I read also
in this section that you do a follow-up or you maintain information
on some of the contacts via the telephone but you do not maintain
a record of persons who contact you via the website. In that the
growth in traffic is on the website anyway rather than the telephone,
is that not going to make it harder in future for you to measure
how successful you have been in having an impact on individuals'
lives?
Ms Jones: We are talking to the
Learning and Skills Council and the Department to make sure that
we are working with the website side of the business as well because
it is growing at about 20% per annum at the moment. Vast numbers
of people are coming to us via the web and I think that is a shift
in how consumers deal with organisations nowadays.
Q85 Stephen Williams: Paragraph 3.26
relates to how effective this service might be given that the
key user group is people who have got below Level 2 qualifications
when they initially contact you. It says that after two years
from a survey only 9% of learndirect learners have progressed
to a Level 2 qualification. Presumably you are not happy with
that.
Ms Jones: No, we are not happy
with it and we are stretching the target and trying to improve
in this area, but we must not forget that many of the people who
come to our service are not aspiring to further qualifications
at a Level 2 level. Over 50% do progress to a higher level of
qualification than their initial point of engagement and also
eight out of ten people get a positive outcome at work. Going
back to the original basis of why Ufi was set up, it was designed
to enhance productivity, so if people are getting a more positive
outcome at work, getting a job, getting a promotion in a job,
that must be having a knock-on effect on the productivity and
the economy of the UK.
Q86 Stephen Williams: This might
be a question for Ms Pember. In the same paragraph, 3.26, it refers
to the unique learner number from 2007 which the Department is
going to introduce. Could you expand on that? What is the purpose
of this learner number? Is it going to be allocated to every school
leaver or every school?
Ms Pember: Every school leaver
and it is also the college and the number of the school which
the pupil has attended. The rationale behind the learner number
is to track people because we suspect that people start in learndirect,
they go on then maybe a year later to another course at a college
and often progress to Level 2 but because we have not got this
unique learner number we have no way of tracking somebody through
our system. We want to be able to introduce that so that we can
do this progression of information. We also know that some learners
go to more than one establishment to further their learning programme
and we want to be able to track that as well.
Mr Haysom: It is a really important
development which will also have a huge impact on reducing bureaucracy
because we will not have to keep collecting the same data over
and over again and it will also have a real benefit to individuals
so that their learning records will be captured and will be available
to them and will go with them wherever they are.
Q87 Stephen Williams: Ms Pember,
how much is this going to cost the Department?
Ms Pember: It is part of reducing
bureaucracy so you have to measure it against efficiencies. The
whole of what we call the in-management information project is
costing us between three and five million a year to get it started,
but we expect over the next few years to receive that back in
efficiency gains because of, as Mr Haysom pointed out, the duplication
in the system of every student having to fill out a registration
form for every course, every provider having to log them onto
a system. Once they are there this will be a very efficient way
of dealing with this record-keeping.
Q88 Stephen Williams: This presumably
is going to go on a database on everyone from the age of 16?
Ms Pember: Sixteen-plus, yes.
Q89 Stephen Williams: And the database
will be restricted purely to educational attainment?
Ms Pember: Absolutely, and to
the individual as well. Therefore, if they go into an establishment
and they cannot remember what their last qualification was or
the last time they took part in a learning activity, that information
will be there for them and they can keep it renewed themselves.
Q90 Stephen Williams: Will this information
be discrete to the Department for Education and the Learning and
Skills Council or will it be shared with other government departments?
Ms Pember: It will be shared with
other partners like QCA and the awarding bodies because that is
where it stops the duplication, but it will be done with the full
knowledge of the individual involved. It will be very similar
to the number we already use in HE for entry into university.
Q91 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Going back
to this innovation and the fact that it has taken this amount
of time to get this far, Ms Pember, you are looking to recouping
investment that has been made in learndirect through businesses.
Have you also looked at whether you can recoup it by using the
lessons you have learned in other government departments?
Ms Pember: Absolutely. We use
the example of offender learning with the Home Office. Learndirect
is also in contact with the Home Office for developing their own
staff skills. We also are very keen over this sort of direct involvement
to help people access government information and local government
information and we see the centres being part of that. We ran
a pilot last year and now we are doing a cost analysis to see
how we can do more on that but it is vital now we have grown this
expertise that we use it across Departments and across government.
Q92 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Presumably
the other Departments will get it cheaper and they will be looked
on as if they are really good value for money because you have
done all the work. Is there a mechanism for cross-charging?
Ms Pember: I think my colleagues
in Health will say they have developed some things that we in
Education use. I am thinking on mental health and things like
that for young people, so there is this conversation across government.
With offender learning and for the Home Office, yes, you could
say that Education did the development work for this in the beginning.
We have not thought of cross-charging. There are other things
we can do, and that is why we are doing this cost analysis where
other government departments might have to provide us with some
of the mechanisms to develop this activity.
Mr Haysom: Could I come back on
an earlier point? You used the phrase, "We are looking to
recoup the cost of Ufi". I do not think that is an accurate
comment, if I may say so. What we are saying is that Ufi is performing
an incredibly important function. There is a business opportunity
to bring in some money which will offset in part the cost but
I would not wish the committee to feel that we are looking to
recoup the costs of Ufi. That is not what is going on.
Q93 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I did not
say you should manage to recoup the whole cost. I wanted to make
the point that innovation costs money because it is trial and
error. Therefore I am sure you must be looking to get some money
back which we are not getting at the moment.
Mr Haysom: Absolutely.
Chairman: Ladies and gentlemen, thank
you very much. You have heard what the Comptroller and Auditor
General has said in his assessment of whether you provide value
for money, Ms Jones, and that will be dealt with in our Report.
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