Examination of Witnesses (Questions 339-359)
MR MARTIN
LAMB, MR
GRAHAM MOORE
AND MR
JOHN WIDDOWSON
25 OCTOBER 2006
Q339 Chairman: Could I welcome Martin
Lamb, Graham Moore and John Widdowson to our proceedings. They
have, quite rightly, corrected me. Outside, the screen says "Sustainable
Schools" but of course it is obvious from this evidence session
that it is "Sustainable Schools and Colleges". Welcome
to this session. We very much wanted the inquiry to embrace schools
and colleges because they necessarily should be joined-up and
some of the questions will relate to FE and the links with HE.
Welcome indeed. We are looking forward to hearing of your different
experiences in the different parts of the country to help us with
our inquiry. As you know, we are trying to look at the sustainable
school and the sustainable college in the widest sense, not just
in terms of the design, the build, the servicing and management
of the premises, but the transport to the college and indeed what
goes on in the college in the 21st century in terms of the learning
environment. Martin, could I ask you to kick us off by introducing
yourself. We have your CV, so would you say briefly where you
are from and what you think the challenge is in terms of a sustainable
college.
Mr Lamb: Thank you very much,
Chairman. I am Martin Lamb. I am currently the Area Director for
Hampshire and the Isle of Wight for the Learning and Skills Council
and previously have worked in a similar role in Berkshire and
prior to that in the National Office, so I have a relatively wide
range of different LSC experiences.
Q340 Chairman: We are expecting great
things from you, Martin, because every time I look at Hampshire
these days there is some leading educational innovation. I hope
that is also true of colleges. Is it?
Mr Lamb: It certainly is.
Q341 Chairman: We will come back
to that, then. Graham?
Mr Moore: I am Graham Moore, Principal
of Stoke-on-Trent College. I have been there for 10 years and
before that at Stratford-upon-Avon College. I am the Treasurer
of the 157 Group, which is the large colleges group which works
with the AoC to help improve the reputation of the sector, which
we believe should be a lot higher than perhaps it is in some quarters.
Q342 Chairman: How do you get in
the 157 Group?
Mr Moore: Quality and size are
the two key criteria. You have to have at least a grade 2 in terms
of leadership and management, and normally colleges have a turnover
of over £35 million if they are members.
Q343 Chairman: That is 157 out of
how many?
Mr Moore: About 400.
Q344 Chairman: It is reasonably exclusive,
then.
Mr Moore: It is about 25 colleges,
but between us we have quite a large proportion of the total turnover
of the FE College Sector.
Q345 Chairman: It is paragraph 157
of the Foster Report. We are with you!
Mr Moore: Which is all about reputation.
Q346 Chairman: It is even more exclusive.
Mr Moore: It is even more exclusive
than that.
Q347 Chairman: Have you thought about
going to branding people and getting a different brand?
Mr Moore: We were conscious that
sixth form colleges had a group and tertiary colleges had a group.
We tend to be big, urban, city colleges, and we think there is
a whole cluster of issues that surrounds that. Also, we like to
feel we can exert some influence in the regions and so on, because
we are distributed right across the country. We can perhaps help
to lead our colleagues in putting reputation and the development
of FE forward.
Q348 Chairman: It is good to know
about that. John Widdowson?
Mr Widdowson: I have been Principal
and Chief Executive of New College in Durham for the last eight
years. I am also Chair of the Mixed Economy Group of Colleges—it
sounds a bit exclusive, all this—which are those colleges
that offer a lot of higher education within the FE context, which
we define as 500-plus full-time equivalent HE students within
the college. There are some 25 members of that. I also chair the
Further Education National Consortium, which is a group of 140-plus
colleges, which looks at learning and resource-based learning
across the sector and devises learning materials and tries to
encourage people to use different methods and different approaches.
The reason, I guess, I am here is that we have just completed
a complete college rebuild, a complete campus rebuild, that finished
about a year ago.
Q349 Chairman: Thank you. I will
start with Graham. What are the greatest challenges when you are
deciding what to do in terms of rebuilding or refurbishing a college
these days? There has been quite a substantial investment in new
build in the college sector which has been going on for some years
now. What have been the challenges, in your experience?
Mr Moore: We have just had one
building completed and I think I would like to start by saying
the whole sector has welcomed the greater attention to capital
expenditure in FE. It is good that it is not just schools having
a big programme of building; there is a significant programme
in the FE sector. We start from a good-news story, in the sense
that there is quite a lot happening, and I would say there is
a very positive relationship with the LSC, in terms of positively
being encouraged to look at new projects and think about high
quality buildings. That comes very much from the leadership of
Mark Haysom and the LSC. That is a very positive side of the story.
On the ground there are a number of issues we would like to see
done better. In Stoke, we are a pathfinder for Building Schools
for the Future. Because the colleges are very significant in the
11-16 issue in Stoke, because many of the schools are 11-16, it
would be very nice if Building Schools for the Future had looked
at schools and colleges and the context. With 14-19 being so linked
between what schools do and colleges do, it is unfortunate that
the capital programmes are not so obviously linked. Clearly our
LSC is very keen that as the schools are redeveloped, so the colleges
are redeveloped, and we have a university quarter—so there
is another element there: the links with the university and the
capital building programmes. If you really want to transform a
city, one of the key issues is ensuring that the school sector,
the college sector and the FE sector, and HEFCE, LSC and the local
authorities, all work closely together. I guess there is room
for progress in that. There is some progress but there is room
for development.
Q350 Chairman: How well does it work
in your patch?
Mr Moore: We work quite closely
with our schools. The secondary heads and the two college principals,
the sixth form college and ourselves, meet together regularly,
once a month or so. We have good relationships. We have a lot
of students from the local schools into the colleges, so that
relationship works quite well. We are developing cluster ideas
with the local schools. But, when we come to the building programme,
we are trying to say, "Look, if you have a cluster of schools,
what vocational specialisms are you going to put in each school?
How is the Building Schools for the Future going to link to that?
What facilities do you need post-16 in the colleges to match that?"
Then, when we talk to the local authority, who are supportive,
they say, "Well, Building Schools for the Future money is
specifically Building Schools for the Future money. It cannot
be used for colleges." If you look post-16, the money that
the LSC has for building colleges can also be used for school
sixth forms—so they can access two groups of money: the
schools' money and the LSC money to top up the schools' money—but
it does not work in the other direction. If we want 14-16 developments,
is it better to do, for example, construction in schools or in
the college environment with specialist resources? It may be quite
advantageous to bring the young people for a day a week or something
into the college, with the links with the employers and so on
as well, to get that sort of vocational experience, but the funding
for Schools for the Future would have to go into the schools.
It could not go into the colleges in those sorts of circumstances.
That is perhaps not a joined-up approach.
Q351 Chairman: It is not joined-up
enough.
Mr Moore: Not joined up enough.
There are steps to join it up.
Q352 Chairman: In your area we have
the new diplomas coming in. If everything goes on track, there
will be 50,000 students taking the new diplomas this time next
year—in fact, they will have started in September. What
level of cooperation and discussion is going on between colleges
and schools on that at this moment? Then I want you to compare
that with how much discussion is going on in terms of building
new schools and refurbishing schools and colleges.
Mr Moore: We have a collegiate
in the city which is made up of the local authority, the schools,
the LSC, the colleges, and that is quite a good basis for this
sort of discussion. The person we employ to lead the collegiate
has worked very hard. We have had an Edexcel BTEC consortium for
several years in the city where the colleges provide the verification
processes to ensure that the school standards in vocational areas
are quite high. We hope this will make the schools ready for the
new specialist diplomas—they will be used to working in
that sort of structure—and that is working quite well.
Q353 Chairman: I have not heard them
called BTEC diplomas before.
Mr Moore: The BTEC diplomas are
what exist at the moment. The new diplomas, of course, are coming
on.
Q354 Chairman: The name keeps changing.
Mr Moore: The name keeps changing.
I do not think we are allowed to call them vocational diplomas
any more but next week it might be something different.
Q355 Chairman: That is right.
Mr Moore: We knew that vocational
education in schools was key to the agenda, so working with the
schools and trying to help them deliver at the same sort of standard
as the colleges seek to deliver education vocationally seemed
an important issue for us. We agreed that with the secondary heads;
we agreed that through the consortium. Of course we are now going
through a gateway process, so we all say which of the lines, if
you like, of the diplomas, which of the first five, we would offer.
I think you will find that the colleges are ready to take those
lines up completely and the schools will pick and choose a bit.
We are trying to help the schools so that two adjacent schools
do not pick the same diploma lines, so they can begin to get a
specialist flavour about their activities.
Q356 Chairman: You will be well into
the 14-16 area if you are doing those diplomas.
Mr Moore: Yes.
Q357 Chairman: But you are still
not getting any cash that is up to 16.
Mr Moore: I think it is very odd
that Schools for the Future is so tightly defined as "schools".
Q358 Chairman: I just wanted to get
that nailed down.
Mr Moore: That is why I made the
point about the title of this inquiry. I think you do have to
look across the 14-19 agenda and look at capital expenditure in
that context. I am not saying it is not joined up at all. That
would be totally wrong of me. I am saying that there are ways.
Particularly if we look at the schools department in the DfES,
they are less likely to look into the college sector than the
college sector is to look into the schools' activity. I think
it works better from FE into schools.
Q359 Chairman: The schools' department
in the Department are the big bully boys, are they not? They seem
to rule everything, do they not?
Mr Moore: You would not expect
me to say yes to that, would you? But they do have a big voice
and they do have a big pot of money and they do also have the
Academies' agenda as well. The Academies' agenda can well affect
the provision for 14-19. I am sure the LSC can speak for itself
but I know our local office would like to be more involved in
those discussions so that we have a really joined-up strategy
in the local area.
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