Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
PROFESSOR EWART
KEEP, PROFESSOR
LORNA UNWIN,
AND MR
ALAN WELLS
OBE
21 FEBRUARY 2007
Q40 Stephen Williams: Do you think
that anybody in the real world of employers knows what a Level
2 qualification is? I spent 17 years as a business consultant
before I became an MP; no employer ever said to me "The big
problem in my business is that my employees don't have Level 2."
I did not know what Level 2 was until I became a member of this
Committee.
Mr Wells: It goes back slightly
to what Lorna said. I remember once speaking at a conference and
saying "Who would like their children to get NVQ Level 2?"
and nobody put up their hand, and then they realised they should
so they stuck up their hands, and I said, "I'm sorry; too
late," because actually what people recognised as valuable
was a GCSE, that is what they wanted their children to get, and
that is the problem with the vocational divide. One is very, very
well established, there are all sorts of criticisms of it, but
most people in the general public know what it is, or think they
know what it is; and the others are, in a sense, a myriad of acronyms,
of one kind or another. I think, not just employers, a lot of
people in the general public have not got a clue what that is.
Q41 Stephen Williams: Leitch has
got these two sort of headline targets, 95% of functional literacy
and numeracy and 90% Level 2; which one do you think is more useful,
or achievable even?
Mr Wells: I think the first. I
am not against people getting Level 2 qualifications. If the Government,
or anybody else, thinks it is a good idea everybody is educated
to a minimum Level 2, if that is equivalent to an A*-C GCSE in
English and Maths, we have got a pretty long way to go, let me
say, because that is the gold standard, that is what we hope all
our children will get. It is not something I achieved at school.
I think the percentage of the population with adequate literacy
and numeracy, there is a clear definition problem with that, is
really important; in an industrialised country as wealthy as we
are, we should not have a significant problem with poor literacy
and numeracy among adults.
Professor Unwin: The 95% notion
of everybody to a Level 2 can be achieved very easily by a credit,
and that is what is happening, particularly through Train to Gain,
people are having boxes ticked against what they can do already,
and that tells you a lot about the quality of the Level 2 qualifications.
Chairman: Let us move on to look at policy
priorities and funding.
Q42 Fiona Mactaggart: Alan, I thought
you were very convincing, in the evidence which you submitted
to us, that the framework of the Government's strategy is one
which enables the low-hanging fruit to be picked off and it does
not reach those people with the most significant learning needs
specifically in literacy and numeracy. In answer to an earlier
question, you mentioned the number of people in prison who have
poor literacy; so, assuming not including educating people in
prison, what other things could we do which really could reach
those parts which we are failing to reach at present, in terms
of literacy and numeracy? What strategies have you used, in your
long career here, to get those people without the skills that
they need through the door and able to achieve?
Mr Wells: I will make two points.
The first, which I think I have made in the written memorandum
which I submitted, is that we have got to redefine the audience.
If we judged people as fit if they could run 10-second 100 metres,
we would have a lot of unfit people, basically, or if they were
a pound overweight they were obese. We draw on such a huge number
of people as the target audience as to make a nonsense of it,
either through ignorance or because it is a lot easier to reach
targets if you have a very big target audience of people, who
have not got any literacy problems, that you can give certificates
to, to demonstrate they have not got any literacy or numeracy
problems. I think one need is to redefine the target; there is
no doubt about that. Then, in my experience of what motivates
people, there are a limited number of factors which motivate people.
One which is often overlooked is the desire in people who really
have got problems with basic skills to be like me or you. They
are the people who will not ask you if they cannot spell a word.
They will not say "How do you spell X, or Y?" as I might
ask you, or you might ask me, because they think that would pick
them out as somebody who cannot spell, for instance. The desire
quite often is that they want to succeed at something which they
feel they have failed at through the school system. Schools have
improved enormously in the last 20 years, I think, and it is rather
different for older adults than younger adults. Clearly, work
is a big motivator, we have discussed older people, but work is
a big motivator, particularly for younger people. Family is an
enormous motivator. I have never yet met anybody, however badly
educated they were themselves, however bad their skills were,
who did not want their children to do well. Somewhere in our education
system we drive that out of them, as the children get older; and
that is a great motivator as well. In order to do that, you have
got to provide opportunities that are wider-ranging, in terms
of choice. Driving everybody into further education colleges,
for instance, and thinking that everybody will go there; they
will not. Often FE colleges look like they are for young people
rather than for older people. Fundamentally, that will not work.
There has got to be more choice in the system, more incentive
in the system, I think you have got to try to encourage people
to improve their skills and use a lot of those kinds of motivations
in order to encourage them, so more family programmes, less ticking
of boxes. That is not to say that I am not in favour of rigorous
systems with high-quality teaching; certainly you need that, and
certainly you need to feel that you are making an impact. However,
I do not think that can be judged just purely by the number of
qualifications gained and by the boxes ticked.
Q43 Fiona Mactaggart: I was struck
by something, reading your evidence, and it is not really a criticism,
because I thought it was helpful in illuminating. I represent
a constituency which has a shockingly high level of illiteracy,
much higher than Peckham, where I used to teach, and the reason
for that is that the first language of many people in Slough is
not English and they are not particularly literate in their own
first language. I was struck that there was very little about
speaking, in the evidence about literacy, and I wondered, about
this, should we be brigading the speaking of English more closely
with some of these other basic skills than we have so far, and
what is your view about English for speakers of other languages?
Mr Wells: I could write you a
different memorandum on that, obviously. It is a different but
allied problem. My own feeling, looking back over the years, is
that, in relation to people who came here to settle who could
not speak English, we should be ashamed of our record. There are
people who settled here 30, 40, 50 years ago who still cannot
speak very much English and who have had precious few opportunities
to learn English, in any way that would suit them. They have learned
more English probably from working with other people than ever
they have learned in any other way. I think also that because
of a desire not to offend we did all sorts of things which actually
have turned out not to be terribly sensible. We did a lot of translation,
for instance, into Urdu, which made people feel good but they
could not read or write Urdu so it did not help their understanding
of what we were trying to communicate to them. If you go to settle
in Canada, there is a different history, of course, and they want
people, they have very intensive English language courses before
you get Canadian citizenship, but let me say you are encouraged
and there is a lot of support for you and a lot of help for you
in order to get through a minimum English language qualification
in order to get Canadian citizenship. Certainly I think we should
have done much more, and should continue to do much more, in terms
of encouraging people. It is not just speaking, it has got to
be speaking, reading and writing, for people who are coming to
settle in this country; otherwise they find it very difficult
to make any really significant contribution to the country because
they are barred from the thing which we need most, which is communication.
Q44 Fiona Mactaggart: Do we pay for
skills training in the right way? Is the contribution right, from
the state, from the employer, from the individual?
Professor Keep: It is a huge question,
because it varies, at level, for occupation, in different circumstances,
and, of course, hugely at different ages, so it is very difficult
to give a blanket answer to a blanket question which will make
a lot of sense. We have had very limited dialogue about this.
To be fair, although I am not a great fan of Leitch, I think at
least Leitch actually surfaces this issue and says "We really
need to sort it out." I am not sure, however, that what Leitch
suggests goes far enough, because I think there is a process to
be had of some quite open dialogue with employers and their representatives
about what it is that they want to pay for, what it is they ought
to pay for and what it is they imagine that the individual and
the state will pay for. We have not really had that discussion,
with cards on the table, as much as would be the case in many
other developed countries. I think there is a degree to which
employers are quite crafty, but probably it is at an unconscious
level, and they have learned that if they do not do something
which the Government desires, sooner or later, and usually sooner,
the Government will step in and subsidise them to do it. Therefore,
in a sense, there is a built-in incentive to be inactive and see
what the Government will come up with, and one of the things it
has come up with is Train to Gain. I do worry about the degree
to which the public purse may end up spending on things which
either employers would have done anyway or employers perhaps ought
to have done. I think a genuine public debate would be a profoundly
useful thing to have. The other thing about having a public debate
is that people would come away with a clearer understanding of
who pays for what currently, because I think most people have
not got a clue who is paying for what. The system is opaque, not
in just the way your chart suggests, though plainly that is true,
the average small business person has no understanding of the
system, but I suspect also they have no understanding of how it
is paid for, or by whom.
Professor Unwin: What is interesting
about a lot of the Government-supported training, and if we take
something like apprenticeship, actually a lot of employers are
not involved in the funding side at all because it is channelled
through the training providers, and the employers provide the
work placement but the bulk of the money goes to the providers.
Again, it links back to this complexity that employers are not
necessarily paying in the sense that you would expect, and certainly
in the sense that they are paying in some other European countries.
Q45 Fiona Mactaggart: Basically,
you are saying, nicely, it implies that in Britain they are getting
it on the cheap? I am sorry. I am turning this into a headline.
Professor Keep: Sometimes certainly
they get heavy levels of subsidy. Obviously, if you are in the
engineering industry and you are offering apprenticeship, you,
the employer, will be putting in very substantial sums of money.
In retailing, you could be making a profit out of it, or certainly
putting in zero, in effect. It varies enormously. I think the
other thing to bear in mind is, one thing that the employers have
learned is that it is much easier and quicker to get the education
system to do it for you, because the state will step in and force
them to, than to do it for yourselves. You could argue that one
of the reasons that we have never evolved, well, we have not in
the last 20 years, a coherent and high-quality apprenticeship
route is because the state has said, "Okay, you're not performing;
we'll expand higher education," which, from an employer's
point of view, is a cost-free action.
Q46 Mr Chaytor: Accepting the reservations
about the relationships between schools and productivity, could
I ask, and I think perhaps this is a question for Alan, where
should the priorities be really for our schools' improvement;
what levels of skills, what sectors and what age groups?
In the absence of the Chairman, Jeff Ennis
was called to the Chair.
Mr Wells: I do not think probably
it is a question for me, but I am happy to answer. You would expect
me to say that my major priority has been the area I have been
concerned with. I think that the long tail in the education system,
fundamentally, 15 to 20% of people probably who have been very
poorly educated. I suspect that what has happened over the years
is that, although there may be fewer in the long tail, as the
schools have improved, which genuinely I believe they have, the
tail is further away, in all sorts of terms, in terms of social,
economic poverty, in the wider terms of those. I think that is
a high priority. I think that should be paid for by the state,
because I think, in this day and age, people should expect that
their children leave school with those kinds of basic skills.
I would put a high priority on that, not just for economic reasons,
although Leitch makes the point that, in fact, the investment
in that level is more productive, in terms of its return, than
at almost any other level. I would argue that, in a wider sense,
it is more of a problem for our society, having such a long tail
of people largely disillusioned with education, poorly educated.
My priority certainly would be there. In terms of age groups,
of course you can take the view that some part of this problem
will die off as people get older. I think that is a slightly dangerous
assumption, largely because of the impact of parents and grandparents
on their children's education and aspirations. I would not want
to distinguish particularly in terms of age groups.
Q47 Mr Chaytor: Lorna, in terms perhaps
of the higher-level skills and the sectors?
The Chairman resumed the Chair
Professor Unwin: I think it goes
back to much more localised planning around that, to look at the
extent to which you might want to be investing in certain sectors,
in certain areas, more than others, to do with the nature of the
local economy. The further education/higher education interface
needs some serious attention, in terms of the extent to which
our FE colleges, for example, I think could be boosted much more
to take on part of that higher-skill responsibility.
Q48 Mr Chaytor: Is there logic any
more in having a separate further education and higher education
sector? Does the principle underlying your argument, really that
there needs to be a continuum post-16 or post-18, serve any purpose
in dividing HE from FE in this rigorous way, and in having separate
Funding Council arrangements?
Professor Unwin: I think it makes
less and less sense. In Scotland, they have one Funding Council,
and indeed 40% of higher education takes place in FE. I think
it makes less sense. That relates to my earlier point about things
like the Centres of Vocational Excellence, if we enabled FE and
HE, particularly in terms of staff, I think FE staff would gain
a great deal by having a much closer relationship with their cognate
departments in higher education.
Q49 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask Ewart
about the balance of funding and the responsibility of the state
as against the employer; how do you see those respective responsibilities?
Professor Keep: I think it is
very important, in the long term, that we arrive at a situation
where employers are seen to be paying for things from which they
reasonably benefit and that the state pays for things which employers
cannot reasonably be expected to pay for. I think, unless you
have that fairness, there is an awful danger that, in the future,
you could argue the state has become more and more generous with
employers, in many ways, there will be a change, people will get
fed up with it and we will find ourselves in the situation where
a lot of learning collapses because the state withdraws subsidy.
I think a much more sustainable position is one where we see the
employers making a reasonable contribution and, as I say, I think
a debate about that is really quite important. I think there is
also a major issue about what we can expect individuals to contribute,
and we are having that debate now in quite vigorous ways about
higher education. It seems to me that we need at least to think
about it, in terms of other areas of provision, particularly adult
provision, because it is hinted at in Leitch but then it is sort
of left hanging. I do think we need to be clear what we are expecting,
or what we might want to expect adults to contribute, particularly
adults perhaps who are earning relatively well, and how we can
create a system where everyone is very clear about what they are
meant to be paying for, because at the moment it is all amazingly
opaque and I think most people have not got a clue about either
what they are entitled to receive or are expected to pay.
Q50 Mr Chaytor: In the DfES submission
to the Committee, it talks about the reform, relicensing and the
empowering of Sector Skills Councils, and suggests they should
consider the introduction of collective measures, such as levies.
We abolished the employer levies 40 years ago; do you think it
is time to bring them back?
Professor Keep: No. I think it
would be a real distraction. The relicensing of the Sector Skills
Councils I think is one of the most grotesque things I have ever
seen; they have just barely been set up and we are already saying
"Let's get a little ball with the snowflakes in and give
it a shake and see if we get something prettier." We really
have to stick with this. If you want to set up employer organisations
which are genuinely representative, have a real handle on their
members and real contact with their members and can function as
genuine employer bodies, you have to give it time; it is not something
you set up in three years. I think the biggest problem that policy-makers
have generally in this area is their impatience, their desire
for quick results. It is a 10-year project to set up a network
of Sector Skills Councils, all of which will be capable of functioning
well and in the way you want. Simply changing them round again
after three years will not get you to where you want to be. I
think levies is a huge distraction, because it is perfectly possible
now to introduce a levy if employers in the sector want it, voluntarily,
and of course there are a couple of examples where that has happened,
like the film industry; great. You try imposing it on a group
of small employers, like the retail sector, you try to impose
a levy on them, and the sheer political fall-out and the amount
of energy that will be absorbed fighting about this will outweigh
any possible benefits, short- or long-term.
Q51 Chairman: Only in the five big
supermarkets?
Professor Keep: That might be
interesting.
Q52 Paul Holmes: Can I go back to
something that Alan said, because I think it is fairly earth-shattering
and it seems to have been skated over. Twice now you have said
that schools are doing a much better job in the last 20 years
than they did before, and in the written evidence you have submitted
you said that the idea about the failing of the system "becomes
received wisdom with even as experienced a commentator such as
Digby Jones claiming recently that ` ... 11 million people
cannot add up' and saying this is a `disgrace'."
You say: "There is no evidence that this is the case."
You go into a lot of detail about why. I taught from 1979 to 2001.
I agree with you that schools are doing a much, much better job
than they did when I was at school, for example, as a pupil, but
that is not the received wisdom, and most politicians and the
media, and so forth, tell us that schools are an absolute failure,
we should go back to the good old days of grammars and secondary
moderns, and so forth. Why are you saying the opposite?
Mr Wells: Somebody wrote the other
day, I think, that charities and organisations like my former
organisation, have done a good job at exaggerating the problems
so that they could benefit from it. The point I made was I have
found that the DfES alone can exaggerate the problem; they do
not need any help from charities or people like me. This is what
has happened now. You get someone like Digby Jones, an experienced
commentator, saying 11 million people cannot add up; there is
not a shred of evidence to prove that. It depends what you are
talking about. If you are saying 11 million people cannot do quadratic
equations, I bet that is probably true. The danger of this is
that it becomes received wisdom that 11 million people cannot
add up. In the last five years that I worked in Basic Skills Agency
I visited between 4,000 and 5,000 schools, all throughout England
and Wales. Schools would not recognise this as being the case.
If four out of five people leaving school, not just last year
but in the last 50 years, had left school with poor literacy and
numeracy, then we have had a real problem with the education system,
whether we had a grammar school system or whether we had a comprehensive
system. It would not be recognised by people in schools. It is
the definition and the headline which has become the problem.
If you look at the actual number of people who cannot add up,
of course there are some people who cannot add up, but it is a
very small number. These figures are plucked out of the air, unsupported
by any evidence whatsoever, and become received wisdom, and we
need to stop doing this, because it is bad for the country and
it is bad for truth and honesty.
Q53 Paul Holmes: Why do you think
schools are doing so much better now; because the question of
should employers pay for the training, and so forth, what are
their defences?—If we pay our taxes and the schools are
not doing the job, why should we make it up?—but your argument
is that the schools are doing the job?
Mr Wells: If you talk to people
in their 40s and 50s and you ask them what their school experience
was, they will almost always tell you that they sat at the back
and nobody took any notice of them, and you do wonder how they
managed to get through school in this way. You cannot get through
school like that any more. Schools are not all perfect. I am Chair
of Governors of a school in very challenging circumstances. They
are not all perfect, by any means, and I do not want to say just
that schools always are, but the identification of children slipping
behind is much earlier, the interventions are much greater, the
national strategies, not every aspect of them but generally, I
think, have been positive, they have had a much greater impact.
Even in secondary schools, the identification of children coming
into secondary school at 11 and the interventions which are put
in place from 11, 12, 13, that kind of age, are much more extensive
than they were when I was teaching, which is probably at about
the same time as you. We should see, gradually, a reduction in
the number of young people leaving with real literacy and numeracy
problems, outside of those who have got significant special needs,
and that is why the 11 million makes no sense whatsoever.
Q54 Mr Chaytor: In the Government's
White Paper and in the Leitch report, there are a lot of references
to making the system more demand-led: what does that mean?
Professor Keep: You can try asking
Lord Leitch, because I am not at all clear what it means. What
it seems to mean, in the Leitch report, is, in fact, more subsidy-led,
in that large chunks of government money which currently go through
the Learning and Skills Council to FE colleges are given either
to individuals, to spend through these new Learning Accounts,
the details of which are not available, or are going to be given
to Train to Gain brokers to parcel out to employers then to pay
for FE, which was funded in a different way in the past. It is
a refocusing, a rechannelling of FE funding which seems to be
the main way in which this is supposed to happen. I have serious
practical doubts about the wisdom of this. I think the potential
for what economists like to call moral hazard problems is going
to be quite significant with Train to Gain brokers, who are a
slightly anonymous and amorphous group. They are going to have
very powerful people, all of a sudden with large chunks of public
money to spend; how this is going to be monitored will be interesting
to discover, but more generally I think it does create huge problems.
For me, demand is when employers put their hands in their pockets
and pay for it themselves; that is real demand. This is re-diverted
government money, and I am not sure that it is not actually a
dangerous attempt to create a sort of proxy economy.
Professor Unwin: I think it is
clear what demand-led means. I think the Leitch report means,
as did the Foster review of FE, that we want employers and individuals
to demand what they want by way of education and training courses.
Parallel to that, it means that it is this ongoing, and we have
had it for 30-odd years now, criticism of education and training
providers, that they are not being responsive; so in the 1980s
there was a whole initiative called The Responsive College, which
was about trying to get FE colleges to be more responsive to local
employers. Actually, if you visit further education colleges and
other types of providers locally, huge amounts of what they are
doing is responsive; and, in fact, that is how our system grew
up. We have FE colleges because they were formed at the end of
the last century, end of the 19th century, in response to employer
demand. I think there is rhetoric about non-responsiveness which
you do not see at local level. What you do see at local level
though is providers being prevented from being responsive by DfES
regulations around funding. What we need to do is facilitate much
more the dialogue between employers at local level and their providers
and get them working together, without centralised restriction
on what they can do. Obviously, there have to be quality standards,
and so on, but it needs to be more flexible.
Q55 Mr Chaytor: The key relationship
is between the individual employer and the local provider, not
necessarily between the Sector Skills Council and different providers?
Professor Unwin: Yes.
Q56 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the brokers
and the other part of the new package, what is your observation
on the brokers?
Professor Unwin: We have had this
before, in that the brokers' key mission is to deliver the targets,
so their mission in life is to go out and raise this Level 2 target.
I am not sure that will mean they are that interested in raising
relevant skill levels at local level. It will be more a case of
can we persuade employers to let their staff do a Level 2, or
be accredited for skills they have got; it is not going to raise
capacity.
Mr Wells: One point on demand-led.
I think I understand what Leitch means by demand-led. I have always
had a problem with demand-led, in that the people I spent my career
working for do not demand much, fundamentally; they are not all
queuing up now trying to get into education, largely they are
queuing up trying to get out of it. If you have a demand-led system,
they are the very people who get neglected in that system, because
for employers they are a bad investment, basically, because they
have not got the basic skills. I have always thought that alongside
demand you need to look at need and, in a sense, it is a government's
job to look at need, rather than just demand, otherwise you have
this kind of false market-place situation, with the least articulate,
the least powerful, left out of the equation because they are
not demanding. It is true in every industrialised country, there
is not a massive demand for people to improve their literacy and
numeracy; they do not want to do it, often.
Q57 Mr Chaytor: Linking Lorna's point
about the incentives for the brokers to meet the Level 2 targets
with, Alan, your earlier point about the inaccuracy of the assessment
of the people who did not have the Level 2, does that mean that
what we are going to see is the priorities addressed to raising
the level of skills for people who do not actually have Level
2 but nevertheless may have acquired a significant level of skill
throughout their lifetime at the expense of other, more pressing
areas of the economy? Is that a fair comment?
Professor Unwin: I would say,
yes. In addition to that, the Level 2s that they will be acquiring,
probably, in the main, will have done nothing to raise their literacy
and numeracy either.
Q58 Mr Chaytor: The quickest way
to hit the targets would be to target older workers who happen
not to get the Level 2 but nevertheless who have spent 30 years
in acquiring huge amounts of informal skills?
Professor Unwin: Indeed; yes.
Mr Wells: Can I say, the way that
you get the target in literacy and numeracy is you get lots of
young people in colleges who are already doing GCSE and when they
get a GCSE you tick the box and say they have no longer got literacy
or numeracy problems. Fundamentally, that is probably what has
happened. Or you have what has been called embedded basic skills,
where you give young people a bit of brushing-up while they are
doing a course of catering, or something similar, and then you
give them another certificate which says they have no longer got
literacy or numeracy problems. They may never have had any literacy
and numeracy problems in the first place.
Q59 Chairman: You were saying that
demand should be balanced by need; what about the element of compulsion?
Some people argue that it should not be the case that a 16-year-old,
who is still a child, should be allowed to drop into worklessness
at 16, or should not go into employment without some form of training.
What is your view on that?
Mr Wells: There has been a lot
of work done, particularly in the United States, on compulsion,
aimed particularly at people on benefits, for instance. Quite
a lot of people actually feel rather good about being compelled;
they don't mind being compelled. I suppose, morally, I am just
not very comfortable with it, I never have been. I have never
been very comfortable with stopping people's benefits because
they will not do literacy and numeracy courses; largely because
you do not punish just them, you punish their children who depend
on those benefits. I am driven much more by incentives and I would
rather incentivise people, for instance, people in prison or people
on benefits, to take literacy and numeracy courses, to improve
their skills, than punish them. The only thing I would say is
that there is some evidence from elsewhere that people do not
dislike it as much as I do, that actually the people on the ground
do not mind a bit of compulsion.
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