Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-103)
MR DAVID
BELL, MR
MARK HAYSOM
25 JANUARY
2006
Q100 Mr Mitchell: There is not a
reserved or a specified place for them; it is up to them to take
it up?
Mr Haysom: They are part of the
provider network we have in place. We do work very closely with
them, though, in terms of understanding what it is that their
members are looking for.
Q101 Mr Bacon: I know you are going
to write to the Committee in terms of the number of brokers, but
the number £30 million rings a bell in my mind as the amount
that the Environment Agency finally told this Committee they were
going to be spending on hiring agricultural inspectors. It worked
out at about 900 inspectors. £30 million divided by 30,000
would be approximately 1,000, divided by 50,000 would be 600,
so it is presumably somewhere of that order, between 500 and 1,000
brokers, you are going to get depending how much they are paid.
That is a lot of people. Like Mrs Browning I am concerned that
you will find out there 500, 600 or 700 people with the right
skills to go and do this. So if you could send us a note specifying
exactly how many you are expecting to find and exactly where you
are expecting to find them, plus the cost, I would be very grateful.
Mr Haysom: Absolutely.
Q102 Chairman: A last question from
me. Would you please look at the box on page 12, Mr Bell. Employers
want training that meets their business needs. It tells us that
employers who train their staff prefer to use private providers,
88%, rather than further education colleges, 46%. You see that
box, do you? Why is this, or another way of putting this question
is would it not be better to leave development and training to
market forces?
Mr Bell: I do not think you could
leave it absolutely to market forces because we want to get the
combination right of that provided by the private providers and
that by the public sector particularly helping to provide in areas
where the market does not provide. Can I make one comment, it
has already been touched on once, about the Foster Review because
I think it plays directly to your question. The Foster Review
made the point that further education colleges in many ways have
had to be all things to all people over many years, and what Sir
Andrew suggested there was that colleges, in a sense, should become
the engine room for training people for the future in relation
to the skills that they require, so I hope if we were looking
at such a table in the future we would not want to see further
education colleges doing it all, but we would want to see more
employers saying that a further education college is a place of
choice for them to go. So I think there is a real sense on the
back of Foster and the Government response during the course of
Foster that there is much to be said for colleges focusing in
a very singular way on their mission to have people train with
the right sort of skills, so I am optimistic that in the future
more employers will want to use further education colleges. What
this masks, of course, is the huge variation between individual
colleges. Some colleges are seen at the moment as real power houses;
other colleges, frankly, are seen as an irrelevance by local employers,
and often those are the colleges that do not do very well when
they have been held to account.
Q103 Chairman: Okay, thank you very
much Mr Bell and Mr Haysom. That concludes our inquiry. You are
spending £7 billion on employment-related skills and we hope
this process will help make business more cost-effective and help
with business needs.
Mr Bell: Thank you very much,
Chairman.
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