Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300-319)
MR DAN
WRIGHT AND
MR SIMON
WITHEY
26 MARCH 2007
Q300 Chairman: If he, or she, goes
through, that is the percentage?
Mr Withey: No; that would be our
fee.
Q301 Chairman: What is the fee?
Mr Withey: Twelve hundred pounds,
in this particular example, and it varies depending upon which
course you are on.
Q302 Chairman: You get the £1,200
and then have to provide the training and you get about 10% profit?
Mr Withey: Yes.
Mr Wright: Yes.
Chairman: Let us move on, to talk about
apprenticeships.
Q303 Jeff Ennis: Can I raise a point
for clarification with you, Dan, to begin with; on your evidence
document, your address is "Weston Business Centre Stansted,
Parsonage Road, Takeley, CM22 6PU" CM, that is Chelmsford,
is it?
Mr Wright: It is Stansted Airport
area.
Q304 Jeff Ennis: Then at the bottom
it says: "Registered in England and Wales, Unit 9C, Redbrook
Business Park, Wilthorpe Road, Barnsley." I am just wondering
why that is?
Mr Wright: That is my base. I
happen to work out of Stansted, myself and a secretary, because
I am field-based. Where we registered the office is in Barnsley
rather than the West Midlands.
Jeff Ennis: What is the sort of operation
in Barnsley now? Forgive my ignorance; it is not my constituency,
it is Michael Clapham's.
Chairman: This is from a man who has
a record; I think there has never been a session in this Committee
when Barnsley has not been mentioned.
Jeff Ennis: It has been twice now; neither
in my constituency.
Q305 Chairman: One of these days
I am going to give you the chop. Sorry about that.
Mr Wright: My Finance Director
is based there, with the Company Secretary. We have a call centre
there, which is where we generate leads for learners, also we
have got a regional office which delivers learning in the Yorkshire
and Humberside area.
Q306 Jeff Ennis: That is very interesting.
Moving on to the apprenticeship scenario, Leitch is recommending
expanding to half a million by 2020; does this seem like the right
target for you? Obviously, this applies to Simon as well.
Mr Wright: What I do know is that
currently, everywhere, people are struggling to meet the targets
that we have in place now, so it will be a very challenging target
and it will be dependent upon ability to engage small to medium-size
employers. I think it is a very stretching target, to be honest,
and I know full well that in a lot of LSC regions, and you have
heard it today, particularly London, they really are struggling.
In some others it works particularly well; the North West is performing
particularly well and a couple of other regions also.
Q307 Jeff Ennis: Is that your take
as well, Simon, on the target figure?
Mr Withey: By and large, yes.
I think it is very important though that the jobs match the qualifications
and the skills, and that goes not only for Level 2 but for the
higher levels as well. I think we need to watch the growth of
the apprenticeships to make sure it is matched with the UK's demand,
or industry's demand, in those various sectors. In broad terms,
I welcome going to 500,000 and I think it sounds right to us.
What we will need to watch is that quality is maintained as well,
because it is a big increase on current numbers, in a relatively
short period of time. I know there will be some stretch on the
supply side, so we are very conscious of the quality side.
Q308 Jeff Ennis: Were either of you
disappointed that apprenticeships were not brought within the
Specialised Diploma framework; should they have been?
Mr Withey: We see the Specialised
Diplomas almost as a bridge between secondary schooling and the
workplace, so quite where apprenticeships sit does not worry us
particularly. We have been doing quite a lot of work with the
Diplomas, mainly on the school side, so to us it is a continuum;
and the fact that it is a different funding stream is potentially
an issue, but apart from that we do not have a concern over it.
Q309 Jeff Ennis: Dan, in your evidence,
with regard to apprenticeships, you said, and I agree with this,
skills acquired in one sector should be transferable as far as
possible. What needs to change to make that become a reality?
Mr Wright: The nature of the qualifications
is very prescriptive and when you are in a sector, let us call
it `quick service', the number of bits of evidence you need to
produce to get that qualification is highly prescriptive. They
are not transferable to other sectors, and the problem you have
got, particularly with the likes of hospitality, is that a young
person coming into the hospitality industry has not made up their
mind necessarily where they want to spend the rest of their working
life. They do transfer quite a lot between hospitality and retail.
You can transfer across only some of the units, which are transferable,
there is a lot they leave behind, and once they have left those
behind they have lost the funding for that qualification, so they
end up without having a qualification at all, albeit that they
want to progress their career. I think it goes back to some of
the softer skills we talked about earlier, in terms of how business
works, how you interact in a service-driven economy with the customer,
all those kinds of things, which the qualifications do not address
necessarily; I think they try to but do not necessarily, because
they are focused totally on the actual skills element and what
you need to do that job.
Q310 Jeff Ennis: Have you got anything
to add to that, Simon?
Mr Withey: Only the angle of personalisation
of learning, which, from where I sit, is aimed primarily at schoolchildren,
but I know it is going to FE and hopefully HE as well, and why
not apprenticeships, quite frankly. For me, I think the opportunity
is there not only to work at your own pace but also just to pick
and mix the most appropriate elements that you can, wherever possible.
Q311 Chairman: Can I push you just
a bit, Simon and Dan; you did not seem very interested in the
new Diplomas at all. Is that because it is not a market sector
for you, you are not going to make any money out of it so you
are not very interested?
Mr Withey: No. We think it is
a good opportunity for us, from a business point of view.
Q312 Chairman: You dodged the question
rather?
Mr Withey: I did not mean to.
I think it is fairly early days actually; what are they really
going to be, are they going to be taken up well, are they going
to be seen as, if you like, the poor man's GCSE. I think that
is the real worry, that those who cannot or do not want to do
an education route go on the vocational diploma route, and if
there is any stigma attached to that I think they are dead in
the water. I think how they are rolled out is really important.
Q313 Chairman: They have got to be
high quality from the beginning?
Mr Withey: They have got to be
high quality; they have got to be seen to be. It is like the early
days of some of the NVQs and BTECs, and so on, what will they
mean to employers, and they have really got to mean something
to employers, just as GCSEs, A Levels, and so on, are recognised
by employers. I think it makes good sense for young people who
are not academically focused and biased to take a more hands-on
professional route in some of their schooldays.
Mr Wright: I agree. I think the
issue for us is how they are going to work in practice and how
employers will see it. For an organisation like mine really to
get under the skin of that, you have to put a huge amount of resource
into it, you cannot just provide it, so we need to understand
how that strategy is going to work and then what resource we need
to bring to the party. At the moment, I think it is early days
for us. We are looking at it, in one or two isolated areas, but,
I have to say, we do not really understand how it will roll out
going forward.
Mr Withey: I think perhaps this
was an earlier question, of where we can help with FE actually.
Schools are not going to deliver these Specialised Diplomas on
their own; they need to team up with colleges and other training
providers, perhaps like ourselves. I think that coming together
is an area that we can add some more value to, in these consortia
and confederated training organisations.
Jeff Ennis: To acknowledge really the
point which Simon has just touched on, because if the Diplomas
are going to be successful, and we on the Committee all hope that
they are going to be highly successful, you have got to have both
FE colleges and schools working collaboratively, every secondary
school providing a certain level of these Specialised Diplomas.
I would have thought there was a niche there for you guys as well
to work collaboratively and work with the schools and the colleges.
Q314 Chairman: You can do some consultancy
in Barnsley. Can I push you on a couple of other issues. What
do you think of the Sector Skills Councils generally?
Mr Withey: Currently they provide
a national view on certain sectors; we deal with, I guess, five
or six of those in some detail and I think they have got an increasing
role to play. What is important, from where we sit, is that it
is balanced with a regional and a local requirement, with one
system all across the country. I think it is important to get
a balance locally and regionally with the national view, but I
think it is important to raise standards, it has had the body
like the Sector Skills Councils to do so, and we work very closely,
as I say, with a number of those.
Q315 Chairman: Do you work well with
them?
Mr Withey: We have our moments,
in terms of some of the changes to the scope of frameworks, and
so on, but we have some good, healthy dialogue with them and normally
it is very constructive.
Mr Wright: I think it depends
on the sector; some are more representative than others, I think.
Q316 Chairman: Which are the best
and the worst then, Dan?
Mr Wright: I do not think it is
about good and bad, I think it is about the complexity of what
we are trying to do. I mentioned People 1st, which is the hospitality
Sector Skills Council; it has an inordinately difficult job to
do. It is trying to lay out qualifications for a broad range of
businesses, many of which are very small; take caravan parks,
these are small owner-operators, and how do you truly represent
what they need. My experience as well is that whilst their job
is to represent the industry it is very difficult for them to
do it accurately, and in my experience, running businesses beforehand,
I had very little contact with them, very little. It tends to
get fed up through the process, but actually, in terms of representing
the real needs of what, for example, the hospitality industry
wants, they have a very tough job to do. I think they lay down
standards, in terms of the qualifications, reflecting what ought
to happen, but when you talk to a lot of employers they have very
little contact with a Sector Skills Council. Our job is to try
to influence them, bring them back to the table, the sorts of
things that we hear from employers, and try to influence them
in that way.
Q317 Chairman: What role is there
for quality of apprenticeships; how high a quality? You both said,
certainly Simon did, that the important thing about rolling out
apprenticeships is that you maintain quality; what is the quality
now?
Mr Withey: I think there are a
couple of measures to that. I guess what I had in mind most were
things like completion rates; there are two things, the content
and quality of the course and how many courses you get the individual
to the very end of so they get the qualification, and I think,
if we are going to be, in round numbers, doubling the output,
we need to be cognisant of both of those. There is a lot of work.
I think, quite rightly, the LSC have put a strong emphasis in
recent years on completion rates and they have increased and we
have been incentivised by the payment mechanisms to concentrate
on that. It used to be just pull the seats out and I think that
emphasis needs to stay there, as the numbers grow.
Q318 Chairman: We know that, very
often, employers give apprentices a job and say they do not want
a commitment?
Mr Withey: Sweep the yard, yes.
I think, again, if you bring that together with some employer
funding, which we touched on a few minutes ago, that will drive
the employer to make sure he gets some value for money out of
the programme. There is actually an upside, it is a challenge
for our businesses perhaps, to make sure an employer does partly
contribute, but if he is paying for part of the service he is
going to demand some quality there.
Q319 Chairman: Do you not think it
is a strange world this, of training, though, if you take one
of my constituents and explain to one of my constituents? I visited
a major engineering company recently and they said, "It's
dreadful. On the one hand, we haven't got enough skilled engineering
people coming through, applying to us for apprenticeships; we
do get a certain number but we take only half the ones we need
because the Government won't pay any more money for the other
half." Is it not a strange world to explain to my constituent,
that here is a highly profitable, international business which
wants more qualified workers but will not take on enough to fulfil
the jobs which need to be done because the Government will not
give them any money: what crazy world is that? You are in engineering;
is that the sort of thing that Vosper Thornycroft would say?
Mr Withey: We have never had that
problem, as it happens; we have always recruited and planned,
I guess.
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