Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 6 APRIL 2005
DEPARTMENT FOR
EDUCATION AND
SKILLS AND
LEARNING AND
SKILLS COUNCIL
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome
to the last Committee of Public Accounts of this Parliament. We
are once again joined by Sir David Normington. We hope that you
will enjoy the last hoorah of this Parliament! We are going to
deal with an important subject from your Department, Sir David,
which is the progress that we are making in adult literacy and
numeracy. Perhaps you could introduce your team, please.
Sir David Normington: Mark Haysom
is the Chief Executive of the Learning and Skills Council and
the Accounting Officer for the LSC. Susan Pember is my Director
in the Department responsible for the Skills for Life Strategy
we are discussing and she has been responsible for it from the
start.
Q2 Chairman: Could you please start
by looking at page 53 of the Comptroller and Auditor General's
report and, in particular, if you could look at Figure 30. You
are spending £3.7 billion in total on this programme up to
2006 to teach adults to read, write and count. If we look at Figure
30 and the results from Ofsted inspections, we can see very little
improvement in the quality of teaching. Is this not absolutely
key? What is going on?
Sir David Normington: It is key.
Clearly the quality of teaching is absolutely critical here. We
come from a long way back with this strategy. It was piloted in
2001-02 and really gets moving in 2002-03. Some of the early work
has been putting in place a proper programme of assessment, a
proper curriculum, which we have never had before in this area,
and proper teacher training. I hope as the years go on you will
see significant improvements as a result of that. It would be
surprising if there were significant improvements in this short
timescale. There has not been enough time in the first couple
of years of this strategy for it to have made a significant impact
on teaching. This is a workforce that has been very neglected
and very under-trained over a lot of years. That is what we are
trying to turn around.
Q3 Chairman: It is also mentioned
in paragraph 4.23 that "Results from Ofsted inspections of
literacy, numeracy and language provision in further education
colleges indicate little improvement so far." You have basically
given the answer that it is early on. We will explore this as
the hearing goes on because it is absolutely key. I would like
you now to turn to page 30 of the Report and look at paragraph
2.13 which tells us that more than half of the qualifications
that count against the target were gained by 16 to 18 year olds.
What I want to put to you is that really you have only managed
to reach your target, have you not, because you are getting 16
to 18 year olds to take qualifications they should have obtained
before leaving school?
Sir David Normington: I suppose
the first answer is they have not gained them and in a sense one
is trying to ensure that before they leave what you might call
full-time education and training they do gain those qualifications.
As you know, we have a major programme to raise literacy and numeracy
standards in primary and secondary school which is having a great
effect, but it is not yet catching everyone. I think it is legitimate
to go on making sure that those who leave school without the requisite
qualifications do get them.
Q4 Chairman: I do not deny that.
Here we have a situation where we have got research from 2003
which tells us that only one in five of the adult population of
working age have both literacy and numeracy skills equivalent
to a pass A to C at GCSE. A pass C at GCSE is not high academia,
let us face it. You are achieving your targets by concentrating
on the 16 to 18 year olds and they should have been dealt with
at school. You are missing out on these older people.
Sir David Normington: We have
some figures which show that we are now shifting the balance of
the programme. Mr Haysom can update us on that.
Mr Haysom: I can update you on
the figure in the Report because it is now 61% of the period of
the strategy that is adults, in other words post-18, and it was
62% last year. There is a movement towards more and more adults
getting qualifications.
Sir David Normington: Clearly
our aim is that people should leave school at 16 with adequate
levels of literacy and numeracy. That is a central objective of
Government policy and we are making progress on that, but there
are still some who leave school without those qualifications.
We have to go on picking them up.
Q5 Chairman: On page 25, paragraph
2.2 we see you have now spent £2.1 billion on adult literacy,
language and numeracy since the strategy began. If we turn to
page 29, Figure 16, we can see that that £2.1 billion is
spent on 850,000 learners, so we have been spending, roughly speaking,
£2,500 per learner. You have not made a great deal of progress.
How much more money will you need to make a difference?
Sir David Normington: I think
we have made progress, if I may say so. What Table 16 is showing
is the progress we are making against our Public Service Agreement
targets, which is about the achievement of qualifications. In
addition to the 839,000 shown on Figure 16 there are 2.6 million
people taking literacy and numeracy programmes which are not leading
to qualifications at the levels covered by the targets in paragraph
16. That £2.1 billion has paid for 2.6 million people to
start on the ladder of literacy and numeracy improvement. Not
all of them have got qualifications which count towards our targets,
but to get them there you have to get them on the first rung of
the ladder.
Q6 Chairman: I may want to come back
to this at the end. Let us look at the employer training targets
which are mentioned in paragraph 3.25 on page 46. It says there,
"At local level, employer training targets are funded and
managed by local Learning and Skills Councils." What have
they told you? What seems to work as far as small employers are
concerned?
Sir David Normington: The basic
message is that you need to customise the training to the needs
of small and medium sized employers because they need training
that does not interfere with the business they are doing and that
it is done at times which suit both the employer and the individual.
It is often necessary to do it in bite-sized chunks because in
a small firm you cannot be losing your employee for a long period.
It may need to be done in the evenings or at weekends. It has
told us that if we want to make an impact on skills in small and
medium sized enterprises we need to be very flexible about how
it is organised.
Mr Haysom: It is all about flexibility.
Something like 11% or 12% of the provision through employer training
pilots is about this Skills for Life activity. I think it has
actually shown some very good results in reaching some difficult
people to reach, ie some of the adult groups we were just talking
about earlier. So we are actually starting to get there. I personally
have seen some really interesting examples of that with Skills
for Life training actually taking place in the workplace. I have
been working with union reps to encourage people to take part.
Q7 Chairman: Let us look at what
has happened around the country. If we look at page 35 and Figure
24, we have all sorts of figures here for numeracy participation
and literacy participation. Mrs Browning is here. I see that in
the South West they are particularly unwilling to learn how to
count. Does this figure actually mean anything? I cannot believe
that people in the South West are any less interested in learning
than people in the North East or the North West.
Sir David Normington: I agree
with you, I do not think it means all that much. What it reflects
is the historic pattern of provision. In other words, it is as
much about what is available as what is needed because there was
not a national programme until recently and therefore it depended
on what was provided locally. Part of what is happening in the
South West is that rather little was provided.
Q8 Chairman: Mrs Browning will be
able to leap to the defence of her constituents in a moment, but
before I end I want to ask you about a key point which is to do
with teachers. Let us look at page 51, paragraph 4.15, where the
Comptroller and Auditor General says, "Existing teachers
do not have to achieve the new qualifications within a given time."
This is a fairly key and worrying point. If you are not requiring
existing teachers to achieve these new qualifications how are
you going to achieve the progress and targets that you want to
achieve?
Sir David Normington: It is on
a long-term basis, but by 2010 it is our intention, as the paragraph
says at the end, that "all teachers should be qualified".
That is quite a long programme. As I said at the beginning, we
come from a long way back here.
Q9 Chairman: Can you honestly commit
yourself in front of this Committee to meeting that target by
2010?
Sir David Normington: That is
our intention, yes.
Q10 Chairman: That is your intention?
Sir David Normington: Yes.
Q11 Chairman: Is there a realistic
chance that you will meet that target?
Sir David Normington: Yes.
Ms Pember: We do feel that by
2010 we will be able to reach that target and we are working at
it in different ways. We are working at it with the universities
and they can provide part-time programmes for existing teachers
and we are also working with the existing teachers to find ways
that make it easier for them to take up this activity, and we
are also working with the managers of colleges and local education
authorities so they understand the real importance and what a
difference it makes to performance if your teachers are qualified
in this area.
Q12 Chairman: Instead of raising
expectations in the way that you have done, if we are talking
about teaching adults, should you not have started with a step-by
step-approach, trying to get teachers in and raising their qualifications?
Would that not have been a better way of doing it rather than
having this programme and a great fanfare which appears to have
achieved very little?
Sir David Normington: With respect,
it has achieved a great deal in a short time. It is the first
serious attempt in this country to tackle literacy and numeracy
problems amongst adults. It tackles teacher qualifications and
quality. For the first time it sets a national qualification and
assessment framework and it puts serious money into supporting
people through a whole range of different types of training. It
is a programme that builds up over time. We have started quite
modestly. The long-term targets are very ambitious indeed. We
recognise we have to have the quality provision. This is probably
one of the most ambitious programmes in the world and it is the
first time in this country we have tried it and we should be really
proud of it.
Q13 Chairman: Yet, as we see in paragraph
4.22, the learners with the most need get the poorest quality
of teaching.
Sir David Normington: I say again,
we come from a long way back here. There had been no focus on
this at all before 2001. We have put in place now a programme
to address the quality of training and to provide a national framework
of assessment and qualifications. This is the first time this
has been done. This is trying to reverse something which is much
neglected.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q14 Mrs Browning: I would like to
pick up on this point about the South West.
Sir David Normington: I was not
attacking the South West.
Q15 Mrs Browning: I do hope not.
Certainly in Devon—God's own county—we value the standard
of our primary school teaching and I believe in the main most
of our primary school children go on to secondary having achieved
certainly an adequate standard. What analysis have you made of
an area like the South West—and by that I mean Devon and
Cornwall—in terms of rurality and sparsity because it does
seem to me access is very important? Have you looked at whether
the service could be more peripatetic and go to the person? I
realise, given the stigma of this subject we are dealing with,
it would not be appropriate for somebody to go into the workplace
specifically to see an individual because they needed to access
these services. Have you looked at overcoming that problem of
sparsity?
Sir David Normington: The brief
answer is yes. The local Learning and Skills Council is largely
responsible for this provision. It is the essence of this programme
that it needs to be flexible. We need to provide online learning,
community learning, college learning and work-based learning because
it is in the nature of this population that there are all kinds
of ways that you need to provide them with the opportunities in
the right context.
Mr Haysom: I think you have hit
on one of the very great difficulties that there is in terms of
getting provision right. One of the things that you can track
across is that there is an issue about rural communities and getting
the right kind of provision and there is a separate set of issues
amongst urban communities and the solutions do have to be different.
We are trying all sorts of different solutions in different parts
of the country to overcome that issue. One of the recommendations
in this report is about sharing that best practice and building
on that.
Q16 Mrs Browning: One of the things
that I constantly have to bat on about here is the question of
deprivation in rural areas because we see it on a scale in larger
towns and cities, but the difficulty for the truly rural communities
is the lack of transport and it is totally impractical to think
there is ever going to be a bus service running in a large part
of a constituency like mine. One of my local charities provides
motorbikes for young people who have been accepted on training
courses and they borrow these bikes—I do not know what their
mums think—for the length of the course. Are you as innovative
as that?
Mr Haysom: Yes. I was aware of
that. There are all sorts of different initiatives. I would not
wish to refer to any specifically at the moment. You are right
about the transport issue, which is why e-learning is a big part
of it and why the voluntary sector has a huge role to play.
Q17 Mrs Browning: If you cannot read
very well it is very difficult to find your way through a computer
programme, is it not?
Mr Haysom: I am not sure that
is the case. I have had the opportunity of seeing some of the
learndirect work and there is some really valuable work that learndirect
have done with some of the provision they have made available
around the country to help learners through all of this. I was
talking about the voluntary sector and reaching into these communities.
I think they are playing a key role for us and we are working
very hard with them. I am glad that you have raised that as an
issue.
Q18 Mrs Browning: I particularly
wanted to ask you about the service in prisons because clearly
this is one of the core problems in terms of rehab, ensuring that
while a prisoner is serving a sentence they have every opportunity
to maximise and improve their literacy and numeracy skills. When
I look at Figure 21 on page 33 I see there has been some improvement
in prisons, but as we see from this Report, it is these particular
niche groups where one would be looking to see a lot more progress.
What actually is the problem in providing this service on the
scale necessary within the prison network?
Sir David Normington: It is our
aim. We have prioritised the prisons. There is a clear connection
between people who cannot read, write and add up and their lack
of employment and their prison record often. A major part of this
programme is in the prisons. You asked what the difficulty has
been. The difficulty with all training in prisons has been, at
least in part, about the way in which prisoners get moved around
and that is what we are trying to address. We are working with
the Prison Service to screen prisoners when they go in so that
we assess their needs and then develop a proper training programme.
Ms Pember: The Prison Service
and Martin Narey, who is now in NOMS, has been a champion of basic
skills over the last five years and the Prison Service has met
the targets that we have set them. You are right to say there
are difficulties there. The main difficulties are to capture the
person's need on entry and then to make sure that as they move
through their prison sentence the learning programme goes with
them. From last autumn the Prison Service has put in place a structure
so that the learning plan for that individual prisoner goes with
them for the length of their stretch and then goes out with them
into probation and that is a real step forward, but we still want
to be able to get to more prisoners and to be able to support
them in different ways when they are at work within the prison,
as well as when they are in education, and that means structural
changes in some prisons to help us do that.
Q19 Mrs Browning: Are you able to
provide us with the figures in terms of the percentage of prisoners
who you assess have these needs for training and how many you
are able to set off on this course and how many actually complete
it to a satisfactory level?
Sir David Normington: We can certainly
provide that.
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