Examination of Witnesses (Questions 250-259)
MR DAN
WRIGHT AND
MR SIMON
WITHEY
26 MARCH 2007
Q250 Chairman: Can I welcome Simon Withey
and Dan Wright. I apologise for the delay in bringing you in,
but you will understand that we have had a very good session but
have tried to cram an awful lot into a short period of time. Can
I welcome you and thank you for your time, and you get the same
chance to give a thumbnail sketch for two minutes, and saying
why you think we invited you in?
Mr Wright: My name is Dan Wright.
I am the Chief Executive of a company called Protocol Skills.
We are involved in the delivery of work-based learning nationally;
we contract with all nine LSCs, Scotland, Northern Ireland and
Wales as well. We are probably one of the largest private providers
in the country. We focus largely on the areas of hospitality,
retail, business administration and law.
Mr Withey: Simon Withey, Managing
Director of VT Education and Skills, part of the VT Group, which
is about a £1 billion revenue company, with a long heritage
in engineering. We have now a much broader base and employ about
13,000 staff, so we have some understanding of some of the needs
of industry, I would like to think, and skills.
Q251 Chairman: From memory, VT is
Vosper Thornycroft?
Mr Withey: Vosper Thornycroft
is our heritage in shipbuilding, that is right, yes. These days
though education and training is about 25% of our business, across
a number of different sectors. Within that, rather like Dan's
organisation, we are one of the largest providers of work-based
learning, very active on the Train to Gain programme, a role in
careers professional advice and guidance to young people and adults,
and quite a large education consultancy business primarily to
schools. Very recently we have been successful in two Building
Schools for the Future programmes in London as well, with which
we have been delighted, so hopefully we can cover a number of
the angles coming out of Leitch and Foster this afternoon.
Q252 Chairman: You two hungry guys
from the private sector, you would like to get rid of all this
paraphernalia and have just a sheer market, get rid of the LSCs,
and all that, you would like just a market red in tooth and claw
for training and skills, would you?
Mr Wright: Yes, I think so. I
think there is a lot of complexity in this marketplace and one
of the surprises for me, coming into this industry a couple of
years ago from the hospitality industry, was just how complex
it is, and indeed to make real progress and to get simple things
done actually is quite difficult.
Q253 Chairman: Hospitality seems
to have a reputation of low skills and low pay; what do you train
people to do?
Mr Wright: I think it does carry
that reputation, but it is a broad range of skills, ranging from
very basic skills, quick-service restaurants being a good example
of that, to the very highest skills in Michelin star restaurants,
so it is a very broad-based industry. I think one of the issues
with the hospitality industry as a whole is that it is trying
to cover a whole plethora of skills. The Sector Skills Council
for the hospitality industry deals with caravan sites, bingo halls
and Michelin star restaurants, so it is a very diverse area.
Q254 Chairman: Simon, the private
sector goes for the soft, low-hanging fruit, does it not, by and
large, not the tough, difficult stuff?
Mr Withey: Being a shipbuilder,
I think probably we go for the tough end as well, Chairman. In
terms of government business, and you say bureaucracy, I think
quite rightly so, actually, it is public funds that we are spending
here, providing the training education, and checks and balances
have to be in place; there is quite a lot of that and some of
that has been removed over recent years, we are pleased to see.
Ninety-five per cent of our Group's business is in government
sectors, so we are very used to working in partnership with the
Government, with various different departments, and the voluntary
sector. It is a sector we are very comfortable to work in and
the sorts of arrangements we are comfortable to work in as well.
Q255 Fiona Mactaggart: If you had
a completely marketised system, how would what you do look different;
what would you be doing, for which there is demand, which currently
you are not doing, and what would you not be doing, which currently
is subsidised, which you are doing?
Mr Wright: I think it goes back
to the demand led debate you were having earlier, which is that
in conversations with employers you are quite restricted in terms
of what you can do for them and with them. If you are driven by
targets and driven by restrictions on what you are allowed to
do then you can offer certain qualifications in some areas for
employers at a certain age range but not for other parts of their
workforce. I think you would have greater flexibility and be able
to come up with a whole solution to an employer's training needs
than currently we can give.
Q256 Fiona Mactaggart: Can you give
us a specific example which will help me?
Mr Wright: I have an employer,
for example, which covers several regions and I do not have a
contract for a Train to Gain contract in one of those regions,
therefore I cannot offer that employer any Train to Gain provision
whatsoever, simply because I do not have the contract. This means
that some of his workforce can get it, if they live in the West
Midlands, and they cannot get it if they live in Yorkshire and
Humberside.
Q257 Fiona Mactaggart: You could
partner organisations there, could you?
Mr Wright: We could partner organisations,
absolutely, but if the employer says they want to work with me,
as they do, and we are the preferred supplier of those services,
what we are saying is we have to subcontract to them; it makes
it a more difficult contracting arrangement.
Mr Withey: I think, at that point,
we do partner with quite a large number of FE colleges to give
us some national coverage, because we have certain skills and
they have others, I think they are complementary. We would like
to be more involved, to answer your original question, in the
FE sector; we think the private sector has got a lot to bring
to further education. Again, from us, our model is partnering
so we would look to work with colleges, provide some efficiencies
and some commercial best practice, along with their skill base.
The sort of top-to-tail offering, perhaps I could give you an
example of what we have done as an employer, rather than as a
training company; we are back in our shipbuilding business. Shipbuilding
is very cyclical, it is feast and famine, you win a great big
contract, you have not got enough staff, then it is finished and
you have got to lay them off, or do something. For about four
years now we have been running a Skills for Life programme, which
has got superb Government support for it, we brought in the unions,
and they were a bit concerned as well, to start off with, where
we provided a range of basic skills for the workforce, IT, literacy,
etc., so that when things like the aircraft carrier programme
finish eventually and the downturn comes, albeit it is 10 years'
time, the workforce will be empowered and able to do other jobs,
not necessarily in our company either, they could go elsewhere.
It is the longer-term, sort of top-to-tail type view that we would
like to be offering.
Q258 Fiona Mactaggart: Are employers
more or less willing than they used to be to pay for training?
Mr Wright: I am not sure they
have ever been particularly willing to pay for training, to be
honest; it depends. There are some enlightened employers out there
but I think the whole notion of employers paying for qualifications,
to me, is a very difficult thing to say to them, and we are looking
at other ways that we can explore them outsourcing more of their
training to us, so that we can add on to that some of the Government-funded
training to broaden their programme. If you talk to an employer,
really, the majority of employers I talk to, about whether they
are prepared to pay for training, the answer is, pretty much always,
no. Some do, and as they see people develop through their programmes
they can see that the natural progression is to move it on. In
terms of their overall training strategy, my experience, from
most employers, is that they believe, certainly for the big employers,
their internal training programmes are enough to carry them through.
When you get to the very small organisations, they are loath to
spend anything at all on training, and that really is an issue,
and that is why this notion of free training engages them in the
process more than the development of their workforce skills.
Mr Withey: I would agree. I think
it is not only size; the larger employers tend to invest, as a
broad-brush statement, more than smaller employers. I think also
it depends by sector, so the hospitality sector, in which we both
provide training, the staff move through much more quickly, and
a small employer probably will not want to invest anything, actually,
in training the more junior staff, in hotels and pubs, and so
on, or restaurants. The bigger chains we find are more interested
in it, but a local pub, round the corner, just would not invest
at all. The larger engineering companies and sectors like that,
yes, indeed, and we have got some big contracts with the likes
of Network Rail and others, who put in a lot of their own money
as well as Government funding.
Q259 Fiona Mactaggart: One thing
which seems to me to connect from what you have been talking about
to the evidence we had from the last group, who were talking about
a framework for qualifications, is that I have encountered this
thing about employers wanting bespoke qualifications, a little
bit of this and a little bit of that; Waitrose engineering guys
have a qualification which takes little bits. Do you ever spend
time with employers trying to get them to rejig their bespoke
qualifications so they become Level 2, or others?
Mr Wright: Some are doing that
actively now, some of the bigger employers.
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