Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
WEDNESDAY 6 APRIL 2005
DEPARTMENT FOR
EDUCATION AND
SKILLS AND
LEARNING AND
SKILLS COUNCIL
Q20 Mrs Browning: I think those would
be very useful figures.
Sir David Normington: We will
definitely do that.[1]
Q21 Mrs Browning: Thank you very
much. If we look again at paragraph 2.21, why is provision in
places other than education colleges coming on so slowly? What
is the problem here?
Sir David Normington: Some of
this is about the build-up of the programme and getting enough
provision in place with the tutors and the trainers to provide
it. That is what has been happening. We are just entering the
fourth year of the programme. This programme has been a programme
where each year we have increased the reach. The job centres and
Jobcentre Plus are now a major part of this programme, but it
has taken until the last year to get in place the screening and
the provision to support the results of that screening. That is
now in place. What this report was reflecting when it was written
was the position a year ago. This programme is building up and
we are on this upward curve.
Q22 Mrs Browning: Can you give us
any idea about the people who are employed but who lack these
skills and for whom it becomes a difficulty within the workplace?
How does this work in practice? Is it that employers identify
the lack of skills? I should imagine that many basic jobs today
which require people to incorporate keyboard skills have identified
a group of people who previously might have got by, but now it
has been identified that their problem is not their lack of keyboard
skills, it is their lack of basic literacy. Where is the drive
coming from? Is it coming from within the workplace, from employers
who have recognised the difficulty they have with people in their
workforce and they are the people who are seeking this type of
support, or is it the person themselves? My understanding of this
difficulty, particularly with the older adults, is that once they
have got by for a few years they become very sensitive to letting
people know that they lack these basic skills and therefore they
are not the best group to come forward and self-certify that they
need this support. How do you deal with those two problems, the
one of the employer and the other one of the person in employment
who needs a skill?
Sir David Normington: You have
put your finger precisely on the difficulty with this programme,
which is identifying the people with the need and persuading them
to come forward. Many adults have found ways of getting by, they
have found coping strategies. They are not completely illiterate
and therefore they cope. We know from our dealings with employers
that they are increasingly frustrated with groups of their employees
who they feel could achieve more but who have got blockages. Often
the employers do not recognise them as literacy and numeracy problems
because individuals have been getting by. It is easier to identify
people who come into the jobcentre or if they come to the prison.
If they come into the Army, for instance, you have ways of putting
in place the screening process. If they are in employment it is
much more difficult. We are trying, through our work with major
employers, our work in the Civil Service, to show employers how
you identify those needs and how you meet them, but even then
you have individuals who are reluctant to admit it because of
the stigma attached. We have been backing this up with a national
publicity programme, it is really one of the most successful that
we have ever run, which shows individuals trying to remove the
stigma of coming forward for the first time. After all, this is
a voluntary thing, people have to be willing to do it in the end
and we have to persuade them.
Q23 Mrs Browning: Forgive me if I
have missed this particular grouping in Sir John's Report. Among
the older adults, those over the age of 40, there has been quite
a move to encourage people who perhaps have never worked or who
have worked in sheltered accommodation and who have either a physical
or a learning disability to get into employment. If we look back
at the education system, many of them will not have received what
we would regard as a normal education. Statementing itself did
not come in until the Eighties. So there is a whole generation
out there potentially available for the workforce but who, apart
from their other difficulties in accessing work because of their
disability, will almost certainly have missed out on some of the
basic skills in literacy and numeracy. I just wonder how you are
handling that group because they clearly do need special consideration.
How are you approaching that group?
Sir David Normington: It is the
essence of this programme to try to be inclusive and to reach
all kinds of groups. The answer to each question is you have to
reach them in a different way.
Ms Pember: That has been a priority
group of people for us. For the people with specific learning
difficulties, which can be severe to moderate to just mild, we
have had to have different strategies for each one. We have worked
with employers. The four big ones that have been exemplars are
Asda, Tescos, Walkers and Remploy who have worked with us to develop
programmes so that they can recruit people from exactly that catchment
of the population you are talking about. The fact that we have
got those large employers and Remploy working with us has been
an exemplar to other employers to think that they can actually
take on these types of programme as well. Then we produce support
like toolkits and learndirect learning centres. Just on the mobility
point, coming back to your rural issues, it is the same for these
employers as well. We have introduced online testing so that we
can actually take an exam centre in a bus out into the community
or to an employer's premises and the person can do the test or
the assessment online where they work.
Q24 Mrs Browning: I hope you will
indulge me on this as it is almost the last day of this Parliament.
I have got a difficulty with a lot of these schemes that do not
seem to be approached by a joined-up government approach in terms
of adults and training and learning. I have just had a constituency
case where a chap who is on a work-based learning for adults course
is on a course and they have told him that the training is going
to cease at the same time as his short-term work-based contract
ceases, which will mean he has a shortfall of about two months
in completing the training course he has been put on. I know this
is not specifically what we are looking at here. If you look at
this whole area of adults and getting them trained and getting
them into work, it is all part of the same package. Why do we
do things like that to people? Why do we suddenly cut them off
at the knees? I have had a letter from Jobcentre Plus this week
for this constituent of mine. In response to me they have said
they will extend the training for him but there will still be
a shortfall of three weeks at the end of the course. Does this
make sense in anybody's language? Why are we putting people through
all these hoops?
Sir David Normington: I cannot
answer the specific case, of course. It is our aim to join up
our different services better. We are trying to make this programme
one in which Jobcentre Plus and DWP work very closely with the
Department and the Learning and Skills Council. All across our
training programmes we are trying to ensure that those sorts of
gaps do not open up. That is all I can say really. We absolutely
understand that issue and it is at the top of our agenda.
Mr Haysom: We have to work increasingly
closely with Jobcentre Plus and other agencies to overcome the
kind of issues that you are flagging there.
Q25 Mrs Browning: Thank you for that.
This person is learning to be a plumber on a work-based learning
for adults course and yet we learn that somehow they are going
to cut the course off before the qualification. It does not make
sense, does it? It is a pretty crazy idea, is it not?
Sir David Normington: It does
not seem very sensible.
Mrs Browning: I am glad you agree with
me on that. Thank you.
Q26 Mr Allan: Sir David, it is good
to look at a report where a Public Service Agreement target has
been met. It is a rare treat on this Committee for us to see a
target being met like this. You are lucky you are not heading
up the Department of Transport, for example, with their targets
on congestion because they are miles off. You have met this 2004
target. You have got a much more ambitious target for 2010 which
looks like it is going to be as challenging as some of the ones
we look at in other Departments. Are you confident we are going
to get there?
Sir David Normington: It becomes
more and more challenging. It has doubled and then there is a
three-fold target. Am I confident? Yes. We would not have accepted
this target otherwise. These targets are negotiated. We start
from a view that we have to hit this target in order to make an
impact on the problem. The problem is large and therefore we need
to have large ambition. In order to meet it we will have to have
a much bigger impact on those in the workplace and those who are
hidden from us. We have concentrated in the early part of this
strategy on the people who are unemployed who we can identify
through our contacts with various parts of some of the statutory
services and public services. We have begun to now move on to
people who are in employment or entering employment and that is
how we will make a big impact. The big private sector employers
are going to be really important to us here. We have got the whole
of the Civil Service committed as employers to dealing with these
issues. That is how we are going to get to these numbers.
Q27 Mr Allan: The target you have
got is about inputs, it is about giving training to people and
that is still set against this very large number of people who
are yet to be addressed. If we look at page 15, Table 6, which
compares countries, even if you meet that target, are we going
to be more like Germany or the Netherlands or a north European
country, which are down at about 10%, or are we hoping to get
up to the US level which is just a few per cent off where we are
now? What sense do you have of where we are trying to get to?
By 2010, if you get these numbers in, what will we look like in
that table?
Sir David Normington: Can I just
correct you on one point? The targets are a measure of outputs
because they are a measure of qualifications achieved. What we
actually measure is whether someone has moved up a level, so it
is a real measure of achievement. We also measure the number of
people in training, but the target is related to outputs. I asked
this question when I was preparing for this Committee meeting
and we do not know the answer because we do not know what is going
to happen to all the rest. Our ambition is to move as far up this
table as we can. I would suspect that if we achieve the 2010 target
we will be in the upper half of this table.
Q28 Mr Allan: The other responsibility
is school age education. I was quite shocked in Table 7, page
16, to see that the 16 to 19 year old group are really no better
than those who are 55 plus. You have put loads of money into the
education system. What this looks like is that 16 year olds are
leaving school with the same levels of illiteracy and innumeracy
as people who left school 30 years ago. My common sense assumption
would be that that should not be the case, that general levels
for school leavers should be improving over time.
Sir David Normington: And they
are. I think there are two things to be said about that. One is
that there are some really steady improvements coming through
now in the achievements of secondary school pupils in literacy
and numeracy which we will begin to see reflected in this, but
they are not reflected there yet. Secondly, what seems to happen
here is that younger people go on in employment picking up these
skills. What I think happens is that as 16 to 19 year olds become
20 to 25 year olds they will show up much better against the measure
of literacy and numeracy, so you have a progression through. Many
of those young people are going on learning either in employment
or in further education.
Q29 Mr Allan: So the number of 16
to 19 year olds will shrink over time. The ones already at 45
will have had a few years of shrinking, will they?
Sir David Normington: That would
be my expectation. I hope so. The absolutely key thing here is
the improvement that is coming through from primary schools and
secondary schools. We ought to be seeing the impact of that in
the next two or three years.
Q30 Mr Allan: And we should be looking
for that if people are interested in value for money.
Sir David Normington: It is essential.
That will enable us to keep this movement towards focusing the
Skills for Life programme on adults who missed out.
Q31 Mr Allan: Paragraph 16 on page
7 talks about the Learning and Skills Councils' funding for literacy,
language and numeracy being 40% higher than for other comparable
programmes. I wanted to ask whether the funding going into this
is additional because there is a perception locally that things
like adult education courses, which are not directly tied into
these kinds of targets, are somehow suffering because all the
money is now being directed to the targets. That may be an explicit
result of government policy. It would be helpful to be clear of
the extent to which this is additional money and the extent to
which you expect it to divert money away from other forms of adult
education or LSC funded work.
Sir David Normington: You can
see from the figures in the Report, although it is true generally,
that over this Parliament the amount of resource going into training
has been growing. In the lifetime of this programme so far we
have actually been increasing the resource and it has been additional
resource. I am aware of the worries that there are about adult
and community provision. What the Government said in its recent
White Paper is that it is committed to preserving broadly that
level of provision. In fact, we are spending something like just
over £200 million on that provision through local authorities
at the moment compared with about £140 million in 2001, so
that budget has been increasing as well. What the Government has
not said is it will go on increasing that provision, but it has
said that it will be looking for ways of broadly preserving that
provision. However, that cannot mean that it is all frozen in
aspic for all time. Within that budget of around £200 million
there will be provision coming and going. There is a huge amount
of adult and community learning goes on. I think the latest survey
showed that under a million people are on those sorts of programmes
and many of them are paying by the way. It is quite normal for
you to pay if the courses are subsidised. We have asked the LSC
to have a look at the balance of that provision but with the aim
of broadly protecting it.
Mr Haysom: And that is what we
are doing. One of the things that we are quite keen to do is to
increase the proportion of provision that actually leads to the
qualifications that are part of the target because it does seem
to be self-evident that we should be trying to target that as
best we possibly can. You will have seen within the Report something
like 44% of what we currently do does not lead to a qualification.
We want to reduce that by getting it to lead to a qualification.
We want to do that very sensitively.
Q32 Mr Allan: I had a query about
the funding of services for those who have autism and who still
benefit from education post-16 but for whom that is not necessarily
going to lead to a qualification.
Mr Haysom: That is why we want
to do it sensitively and at a very local level, to make sure that
we respond to those needs. We will never see a situation where
100% of this activity is going to lead to targets because that
would be an absolute nonsense.
Q33 Mr Allan: The perception is that
if it ain't got a qualification attached it ain't got any money
attached.
Mr Haysom: That should not be.
The guidance is very clear.
Q34 Mr Allan: My other point is on
the relationship with employers. Are LSCs any better than TECs?
TECs were supposed to bring all the employers in and get them
all signed up and a lot of them found that was very difficult.
My perception is that the LSCs have found it equally difficult.
Is it not the case from an educationalist point of view that the
SME sector in Britain is pretty grotty? It does not prioritise
training and education. It almost has the approach of you should
not train them because then they will improve their skills and
go off and get a job somewhere else. Do you not still find that
prevalent?
Sir David Normington: I believe
that Learning and Skills Councils are an improvement on TECs.
We have brought together in Learning and Skills Councils training
and further education. TECs were not responsible for all that.
I do not think just doing that makes it any easier to tackle the
problem that some employers do not train. What we are doing is
providing the LSC with a lever, through the national employment
training programme, for focusing precisely on that problem and
I do not think the TECs had that lever. This ought to be a major
step forward.
Mr Haysom: Our job is a different
job to the TECs' job. Part of our job is to engage with local
employers. It is tough, there is no denying it. Part of the programme
here is about motivating employers to get involved. The marketing
campaign that David referred to earlier has been a great spur
for that and the employer training programme, which is at a pilot
stage at the moment but it will be rolled out in due course, is
already showing it is possible to make that difference.
Q35 Mr Allan: I want to talk about
your advertising. We have some of the advertising shown in Table
26 on page 41. You have got a "Call us to get rid of your
gremlins advert". I am interested to know whether you have
measured the success or otherwise of these. My reaction to them
was quite negative. I would be interested to know the extent to
which you have assessed them from a value for money point of view
and found them to be value for money or otherwise.
Sir David Normington: We have.
They are not aimed at you! It has been one of the most successful
campaigns in reaching the people we are trying to reach. I can
provide you with the evaluation of them which is very, very positive.
It does get very high recognition among the group; it is something
like over 90%.[2]
Q36 Mr Allan: It is a bit like Howard
from the Halifax.
Sir David Normington: It has caused
300,000 people to contact the helpline, with a very high proportion
of people then taking up some provision or taking some action.
It has been remarkably successful. You have to follow it up with
lots of local advertising, some related to the gremlins, some
not. It cannot be the only thing we do. It has been very effective.
Not everybody likes it, but it is targeted on that group. The
group does relate to it. The idea of the gremlin which is stopping
them doing what they want to do does seem to work.
Mr Allan: That is good to hear. Thank
you very much.
Q37 Mr Williams: If we look at the
table of international competitors in Figure 6 on page 15, it
is really quite appalling that we have lower levels of literacy
and numeracy than 13 of the 20 countries listed there when you
think of the priority that is supposed to have been given to education
over the post-war years. What this Report does not do is address
where it all went wrong. It had to go terribly wrong somewhere,
did it not, for the figures to be this bad? Our children are as
capable as other nation's children so it must be the education
system that is the problem.
Sir David Normington: I think
you have to draw that conclusion. I pondered this because obviously
these figures being this low in this league table is really disappointing.
It must mean that not enough people have been leaving school with
the levels of literacy and numeracy which are desirable and in
the post-war years that must have been so.
Q38 Mr Williams: That is exactly
what it says in paragraph 1.4 and yet we have done nothing to
try to identify why that went so wrong. If we do not know what
caused it to go wrong, at least not directly, we will not know
what the things are we have to do to put it right, will we?
Ms Pember: The previous work to
our strategy had been done by Sir Claus Moser in the Moser Report
that came out in 1998-99 and he did reflect on what had gone wrong
in previous generations and there was a mixture of factors, one
of which is culture. The importance of mathematics in England
has not been seen as that important for a very long time. Another
one may have been that we allowed many young people to leave school
at 14 and then at 16 without the prerequisite qualifications that
they needed for the rest of their lives. The second thing was
about adults themselves not wanting to go back to learn in this
area of work.
Q39 Mr Williams: The point about
numeracy is clearly correct in what you say there, but when you
then look at the bar diagram in Figure 6, the literacy figure
is almost identical. It was not just a numeracy cultural problem,
there was a literacy cultural problem. Our figures are more than
double those of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Sir David Normington: I think
it reflects on an education system which did not focus enough
on literacy and numeracy and, of course, that is what we have
been trying to put right for over 10 years now. If you look at
the achievements of 11 year olds 10 years ago and the achievements
of 16 year olds at GCSE level in English and maths 10 years ago,
fewer than half of all 11 year olds were getting to the accepted
levels of reading and writing and maths at 11. In a sense that
is what we have been trying to put right. I think it must mean
that over a lot of years there have been one group of pupils in
the education system that have been doing wonderfully well and
some have been missing out.
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