Examination of Witnesses (Questions 480
- 499)
WEDNESDAY 21 MARCH 2007
PROFESSOR TIM
WILSON, MR
RICHARD BROWN
AND MR
RICHARD GREENHALGH
Q480 Chairman: Can we have a note
of that?
Mr Brown: Absolutely.
Q481 Chairman: Which seven universities?
Mr Brown: Yes, we can give you
that.[34]
Professor Wilson: I would like
to pursue a bit more the Leitch agenda, if that is your question.
Q482 Mr Marsden: It was not actually,
not specifically. I will come back to it, if I may Chairman, but
it was really about the issue of how fit for purpose HE graduates
are when they go into the business workplace. Perhaps you would
like to comment on this, Tim. Leitch talks a lot, and there has
been a lot of debate about, enabling skills, soft skills, call
them what you will, and who should fund them?
Professor Wilson: Yes.
Q483 Mr Marsden: Do you think that
we need to do more at an HE level on enabling soft skills, because
we seem to be producing a significant proportion of business graduates
who are perhaps very good with their paper qualifications in a
business area but not very good in terms of enabling more soft
skills?
Professor Wilson: I think that
is a very relevant point indeed. I firmly believe that as many
of our graduates as possible should have some form of employment
experience as part of their programmes, indeed post-graduates
as well, and I think this is a very definite and positive way
forward. If we look at the employment statistics, those students
who have had that work experience get better jobs quicker than
those who have not. This is not just a coincidence, this is because
they develop the social skills, the business skills, the awareness
skills, the enterprise skills through that work experience, and
universities like mine are looking to expand that. In my university
placements are increasing each year. The national trend is to
decrease, but ours are increasing.
Q484 Mr Marsden: I want to be very
clear on this. We have touched on non-traditional students, but
even with the traditional student cohort, the 18-21 cohort, you
think there should be much more dipping in and out, or much more
mixing of the concentrated academic work, if I can call it that,
with experience outside of the campus?
Professor Wilson: For my form
of university, yes, and it does not have to be a one-year placement
experience, it could be a three-week placement experience, a four-week
placement experience. To give you an example, every single Harry
Potter movie has had my students working on it, not for a
full year, but for a few weeks. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
is another one. These are students working for a few weeks
in a real life commercial experience. That is invaluable in the
context of their future careers. There are plenty more examples
like that.
Mr Brown: On the RDA point, if
there is one thing the RDAs could do it would be to develop and
encourage those student placements within their areas. They have
substantial funding. It would make an enormous difference for
students to be going into SMEs opening the eyes of both who could
learn from the other students solving business problems and bringing
back those problems that can refresh the curriculum. There is
a win-win in all areas there and we would encourage the RDAs to
do more of that.
Mr Marsden: Hopefully we will have the
opportunity to press them on that informally or formally.
Q485 Jeff Ennis: My first few questions
are directed towards the two Richards, as it were. Does the CIHE's
evidence concur with Leitch's findings that around 25% of the
existing workforce have Level 4 or higher level skills?
Mr Brown: I am sorry?
Q486 Jeff Ennis: Have 25% of the
workforce got Level 4 qualifications basically, Richard? That
is what Leitch concludes.
Mr Brown: We do not have the evidence
on that. It looks as though I am continually criticising Leitch,
and we do not want to, but Leitch comes from more of a supply
side perspective than we would have hoped. Businesses by and large
do not think in terms of levels, they have problems that need
to be solved, and that is why this issue is extremely difficult.
Our report, which I can give you a hard copy of, Chairman, finds
it so difficult to identify what is spent by businesses at higher
levels because they do not think in those terms.
Q487 Jeff Ennis: You are obviously
setting a target, if it is 25%, give or take 5 or 10%, or whatever.
You are saying there should be 40% by 2020. Is that an achievable
target?
Mr Brown: I think it has to be,
and, indeed, Ministers are rightly talking about 45%: because
if we look at what our competitors are achieving, they are at
those levels, and if we look at the future of the UK, as Richard
Greenhalgh said earlier, in our report on International Competitiveness,
our future lies in continuous innovation, in knowledge-based manufacturing
businesses and services and they have to increase the percentage
of graduates that they have in their midst. An analysis which
we have done, which will be out shortly in another report which
I can send you in two or three weeks, shows that the most successful
companies in the UK are (a) stuffed full of graduates and (b)
undertake a lot of research. A lot of that research is in the
services sector and does not get counted in official statistics
This all shows that the future of our economy rests on our higher
education institutions.
Mr Greenhalgh: Can I add to that.
I think that the real opportunity but also obligation is there
on employers now with Leitch to respond to the demand side equation
by being more articulate at defining what it is they want from
universities and particularly what they want from graduates. It
is too often, I think, a little bit headline stuff rather than
digging deeper down into what one is really looking for. We know,
Tim is absolutely right, that the interchange between being in
university and being employed is a very important one, but we
need to understand what it is that that brings to the graduate.
It brings certain skills, but we also know that when it works
it enhances personal capabilities, it improves general competences
and those sorts of things need further definition, in my view,
particularly for the SME sector.
Q488 Jeff Ennis: In your evidence
you say that the upskilling of the existing workforce is perhaps
the greatest challenge the business community and HE sector has
faced in a generation. Obviously we need to target the existing
workforce in terms of achieving the targets that we have already
outlined. What will be the sort of strategy for targeting the
existing workforce?
Mr Brown: There, I think, we do
entirely agree with Leitch. You have to work with the networks
in which small companies belong. Tim can say a bit more about
the Business Link because he is unique in owning one, but we have
to work with the Sector Skills Councils and (to pick up the RDA
point earlier from your colleague) the SSCs are even more patchy
than RDAs. Many of them are new, many of them do not adequately
relate yet to higher education. But there are many other networks
to which small companies belong and higher education institutions
just have to get involved in those networks and think of it through
business eyes. Before we move on, perhaps this is an appropriate
time for the advertising slot. I did bring a free sample of the
report we have written with all the subject disciplines in higher
education, which explains what employability capabilities you
have from having studied the 53 main subjects. So, if you want
to know why you should employ a philosophy graduate, this will
tell you the employability skills which the academics have signed
up to developing. We hope that this is part of bridging the gap,
explaining to small companies and other employers exactly what
today's graduates bring to the workplace.
Q489 Chairman: All vested interests
produce literature like that to MPs, Richard. What do you say
about the previous witness to this Committee, Professor Ewart
Keep, who pointed out that there is this vested interest that
always says more investment in higher education means higher productivity,
means that the economy does better. He pointed to Scotland, which
has a much better record for this sort of investment than us,
right across the board, and it does not work; they have lower
productivity. What do you say to people like Ewart Keep? Does
it make you feel insecure?
Mr Brown: No, the answer is in
this, my second bit of evidence, my second free sample, Chairman,
which is from the Advanced Institute of Management and Research,
which is jointly funded by the ESRC and the EPSRC and we have
worked closely with them. If I can quote one of their key messages:
"Skills can only make a substantive contribution to productivity
performance if they are effectively deployed in the firm. Supply
side skill policies are not sufficient by themselves." If
we come to our colleagues over the border, there we have a real
problem with, I think we call it, the absorption capacity of Scottish
industry to actually take graduates and really use them. So, many
of them will come south, many of them will add value in the City
of London, less will remain in Scotland than they might desire.
But that is a function of not being able to absorb the skills
that are there and deploy them effectively within the workplace.
Q490 Jeff Ennis: Tim wanted to come
back on that question?
Professor Wilson: If I may quickly.
Richard was talking about working through existing networks, and
that is really important I think. My colleague, the Vice Chancellor
at the University of Teeside, for example, has put together a
degree programme for SME chief executives designed by the Chamber
of Commerce, by the way. The Chamber of Commerce designed it and
sponsored the design. It was then adapted by academics and is
now taught through the Chamber of Commerce. We acquired a business
link, which gave us access to thousands of SMEs with trained people
to address their business needs. There are different ways of doing
this, and it is not just being imaginative and innovative in a
higher education institution, we need to get access to these markets
and to present our products, our services, in that sort of way.
Q491 Jeff Ennis: One final question.
It is a follow on to the point that Gordon was making. It is really
directed to Tim. Does Leitch mean that more universities need
to take a lead from the University of Hertfordshire and the approach
it has taken to business?
Professor Wilson: Far be it for
me to claim that.
Q492 Jeff Ennis: Should every university
adopt your model?
Professor Wilson: I am a firm
believer in a differentiated sector. No, not all the universities
are the same. We have world-class research universities in this
country, we should support them, but we should not all try to
emulate them. We acquired a business link 18 months ago, it has
been immensely successful, its turn-over has nearly doubled, and
other vice chancellors are now talking to me about what we are
doing with business links, seeking to emulate what we are doing,
and I think that is creating an increasing differentiated sector
and that is healthy for our economy.
Q493 Jeff Ennis: Effectively, we
should leave it to the business schools and one or two specialist
universities in each region to adopt your type of model?
Professor Wilson: I might wish
to argue, but not today, about the merits of the approach.
Q494 Chairman: Is there not a very
serious point here: that it does depend on leadership. Universities
are a bit like schools. If you have got good leadership in a school
you see the school very often transform because they know how
to manage the institution. When you leave Hertfordshire and come
back to a proper part of the world—
Professor Wilson: I thought I
had lost my dialect, Chairman.
Q495 Chairman: I do not think so.
What will happen to Hertfordshire then? Is it embedded, or is
it just you?
Professor Wilson: It is being
embedded at this very moment. The university board is convinced
that we are committed to being a business-facing, business-like
university. That is what we are and that is what we will remain.
Q496 Chairman: So it is embedding
a culture?
Professor Wilson: It is embedding
a culture, it is really important, not just inside the university,
in the surrounding businesses as well. We have this model of a
revolving door: university and businesses going through that revolving
door on a constant basis.
Chairman: I think we will be hearing
from Manchester, who use a similar philosophy.
Q497 Mr Carswell: There seems to
be an assumption that the higher skills need to be attained by
some form of planning by quango. There seems to be a sort of default
assumption. You talk about our economic future depending on the
UK achieving world-class levels of supply of high levels of learning.
I want to take you up on this point. In what way would supply
be constrained if the CIHE, and for that matter RDAs and QCAs,
did not exist? You could say that our economic future could equally
depend on us having a world-class supply of aircraft to transport
things or telecoms to communicate with the world. There is no
equivalent to the QCA or the CIHE or RDAs professing to run these.
Why is HE different? Why can we not attain these skills by leaving
universities and higher education alone, by letting business do
what is knows best, which is in its interest (it does not need
outsiders to tell it what to do) and by leaving people to pursue
their own interests?
Mr Brown: I will leave Richard
G to cover the quango angle, but we are certainly not a quango.
We are funded by our business members primarily and we are funded
because, if we look back 10 or 20 years, the founders of CIHE,
including a major politician called Jim Pryor, felt that business
was talking at and past higher and further education, that the
world was moving extremely fast and that neither side was engaging
in the dialogue that we needed to engage in. So, we are a facilitating
organisation that not only gets people round the table to talk
but also to develop an agreed agenda that we can go and influence
the Government on and also produce documents such as this that
can actually better inform both sides as to what each needs and
what each can supply. We have similar partnership organisations
in the United States—it performs exactly the same role—in
Japan and in Australia, and we have helped to establish them in
countries—
Q498 Chairman: Do not go into defensive
mode!
Mr Greenhalgh: I am not a million
miles away from you, in the sense that I think that employers
need to be in the driving seat in this whole process and they
need to be seen as a customer. By the way, that includes the Government
as employers too. As the customers, as best employers do with
their suppliers, they will set up partnerships, sometimes close,
sometimes not so close, with the higher education sector, and
if they cannot get what they want from the existing sector, there
is no reason at all why there should not be other ways of supplying
what the employer needs. If your thinking is taking you down the
road, for example, of a Tesco University or a Marks and Spencer
higher education student, why not? Providing they are accredited,
that may be a route we want to go. Competition in this field is
all to be desired.
Mr Brown: We are seeing examples.
We have the College of Law that has degree awarding powers; we
have Kaplan International that is applying for degree awarding
powers; we may well see Carter and Carter and corporate universities
applying, and why not? We in the Council would support this evolution.
We want to see a diverse sector, because our aim is to increase
the skills base in the UK and, while higher education has an important
role to play in that, we need to think of other ways of achieving
that goal.
Professor Wilson: I think it is
for universities to persuade business that they can add value
to business processes, and it is not necessarily a one-way conversation;
it is a two-way conversation.
Chairman: Again, we will come back to
this in other questions. I am going to move on to Stephen.
Stephen Williams: Can I start off with
Richard Brown. From your overview of the sector, if we use Hertfordshire
as an exemplar of how to have good links with business, there
are around about 130 higher education institutions, how does the
rest of the sector fare? Are people catching up with Hertfordshire,
or are there some universities who are a long way behind?
Q499 Chairman: Huddersfield is overtaking!
Professor Wilson: We will debate
that later, Chairman.
Mr Brown: I make no comment about
whether it is being lapped or not! I would like to pick up the
point that Tim made earlier that we have always encouraged institutions
to play to their strengths, to decide what their mission is and
to focus on that mission and not to be distorted by government
pots of money that tempt them to go in all different directions.
There will therefore be universities, and you may hear from Alan
Gilbert shortly, that are focused on international research and
meeting the needs of international global businesses for world-class
research and world-class graduates, and if we do not have institutions
in the UK that produce world-class graduates and world-class research,
then our multi-national businesses will go overseas because they
will acquire them from whatever country is providing that. Equally,
if you are an SME, then you may have specific difficulties and
that type of international agenda may not be for you, and it may
be that the Hertfordshires or the Manchester Metropolitans or
the Salfords—. If we think of our major urban areas, they
generally consist of clusters of higher education institutions,
all serving slightly different markets. So long as we maintain
that diversity, then the market, in its various forms, can be
satisfied.
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