Examination of Witnesses (Questions 620-637)
MR CHRIS
HUMPHRIES CBE, MS
ISABEL SUTCLIFFE,
MR GREG
WATSON, MR
JOHN MCNAMARA
AND MR
ALAN STEVENSON
OBE
21 MAY 2007
Q620 Mr Marsden: That is all a bit
woolly. Maybe it has to be but I am just saying, there is no magic
button you would press.
Ms Sutcliffe: No, and there cannot
possibly be because—stating the obvious—employers,
by definition, are a very diverse set of organisations. It is
very easy to say—and I speak as an employer myself—what
we do not get and what is not good, but when charged to be absolutely
articulate about what your needs are, it becomes quite difficult,
not least because their business is not in teasing out training,
learning outcomes and being able to then put them into a set of
assessed activity, that is our expertise.
Q621 Mr Marsden: Chris, if I could
take us on from there, you rightly reminded us you have been around
a long time and you said you would not be around if you had not
been doing something right with employers. Moving beyond City
and Guilds, do you think it is true across the board that qualifications
are in need of reform because they are not sufficiently responsive
to employer needs, or are we looking at particular black holes
in particular sectors?
Mr Humphries: I think we have
had two types of qualifications in the sector and they have been
meeting different needs. The vast majority of qualifications which
are on the NQF that are approved by their NTOs and get onto the
National Qualifications Framework, NQF as it is now, have usually
gone through two stages of good testing. They have either been
developed in conjunction with groups of employers, they have usually
then been signed off by the NTO. I think the vast majority of
those cases you can argue both from the initial testing with groups
of employers and the NTO side, most of those are now reviewed
every two to three years where they used to be reviewed every
five to six years. The rate at which they are updated and modernised
has really halved or doubled, depending on how you measure that.
That is part of the reason why it is essential to keep light-touch
because if the review process takes too long and you have to do
it every three years, then the gap between need and delivery is
getting bigger. The whole set of second groups of qualifications,
which were designed more for the learner, to meet the needs of
individual learners, perhaps learners doing lifelong learning,
doing a bit of tasting and testing or looking to update and professionalise
and modernise through short courses a set of skills they already
had, these have a much less measurable impact, both in terms of
benefit for employers. A lot of the criticism which has been focused
on qualifications over the last few years has been on those short
courses which serve as, immediately, the sort of thing John was
talking about.
Q622 Chairman: John said he had to
produce his own because people like you did not do the short ones.
Mr Humphries: City and Guilds
does not do short courses, there is no question about that, we
do not, we do full-scale courses. We do create modular programmes
where people can do bits and pieces. They are all modularised,
but we still design them in the context of a qualification which
qualifies you for something. It is not us that stops John putting
the short courses into the market place, it is the policy today.
A lot of the focus has been on the extent to which those things
can be seen to be making a visible and tangible employment difference.
Q623 Mr Marsden: This is the debate
between soft enabling skills or hardwire skills, essentially.
Mr Humphries: In part, it is also
the debate about whether you allow someone to do small bits of
learning in a modular form, and that is enough, or because of
the challenge which is seen to exist around how many qualified
people we have, whether the public priority for expenditure should
be on the full qualifications. It is that latter thing which has
driven a lot of the behaviour.
Q624 Mr Marsden: Fine. Thank you.
Greg, I wonder if I could bring you in here and ask you one or
two basic questions about what happens to your own agency, OCR's
agency. What would you say the rate of turnover is for the qualifications
which you produce? Is it possible to quantify?
Mr Watson: Pretty much everything
at the moment is turning over on an annual basis. I would have
to go back and check exact statistics if the Committee wanted
them. At the very least, because we are in a period of stasis,
because Leitch is up in the air and the QCF is slightly up in
the air, we have got a lot of things now on very short accreditation
cycles. In fact, when you read the misleading numbers of qualifications
which are often quoted in speeches and papers, much of that reflects
the fact that we have currently got three or four parallel versions
of the same qualification which is being re-licensed annually.
Q625 Mr Marsden: This is the new
improved version, it is not a new thing? I am not being critical.
Mr Watson: No, honestly, it is
very often not even newly improved, it is simply re-licensed for
another year while we work out what we are doing long-term.
Q626 Mr Marsden: You would argue
then that these figures which are thrown around of 6,000, 10,000
are based on a misunderstanding of what is actually out there,
that in real terms the real number of different products is far
less?
Mr Watson: Without a doubt. In
fact, John and I were talking about this the other evening. We
are three-quarters of the way towards the real answer through
some work that the auditing bodies have been doing collectively.
The sweepstake ticket I have got in my desk says 500 will be the
final answer.
Q627 Mr Marsden: In that case, I
am tempted to ask why you have not been more successful in your
PR in persuading the rest of us all who constantly quote these
things, but I will not go on to that!
Mr Watson: For the same reason
that CLAIT is still heavily used after 15 years, I suspect.
Q628 Mr Marsden: Let us talk about the
new things which you launch. Of the qualifications which you do
launch that are new, how many of them fail to stimulate enough
demand? How many flop?
Mr Watson: Of the ones which we
have conceived, consulted with employers or universities and schools
and colleges about a launch, I would say our success rate is 75%.
Of those which are born of a sector skills strategy of some sort,
less than 10%, off the top of my head.
Q629 Mr Marsden: That is a very interesting
differential, is it not? What happens to them? How long do you
leave them out there before you decide, "This is not selling",
to put it crudely?
Mr Watson: The shortest time would
be about three years. There is a lead-in for a typical college
of the year before launch needing to have it in a prospectus to
recruit students for it.
Q630 Mr Marsden: Chris, what about
you?
Mr Humphries: We have a significant
number of qualifications which do not have any sales, but in every
case they are qualifications we have put into the market at the
request of an NTO or an SSC. Many of them are there for very legitimate
reasons. They are qualifications at Level 4 and Level 5 where
the sector desperately wants to persuade people in their industry
to up-skill and they cannot do that unless there is something
in the marketplace. Then there are others where the sector is
keen to get a particular group or occupation to take up training
and, again, you cannot do it, so we will often put things into
the marketplace at the request of an SSC in order to allow them
to promote to the sector in order to do it. We accept that is
a loss-maker for us in the context of trying to provide a complete
service for the industry. What we have found recently, through
work we have been doing under this Vocational Qualification Reform
Programme, because the awarding bodies have a strand of work ourselves
in that, is that the most significant number of those vocational
qualifications which have low take-up, the SSCs themselves do
not want to remove from the market, because we have asked them,
because they are still keen to try and get their industry to take
them up, so you plan that into your business.
Q631 Mr Marsden: A cruel or cynical
person might say that the SSCs were anxious to keep them out there
because it justified their existence.
Mr Humphries: I would not say
that, I would say in our relationships there is always a genuine
industry reason behind them seeking to do it, particularly the
higher level qualifications where it is a hard sell to get the
industry to take up those. Given that this predates the SSCs and
dates back to the NTOs as well, I would not say that.
Mr Watson: To shed a bit of light
on the problem. OCR itself has a formal approval process for deciding
to go ahead with a new qualification. It does not have 13 steps
in it, it has two. What is interesting is, having seen a couple
of cycles through now since I have been involved in post-19 qualifications,
I am beginning to get interested in those qualifications which
come back for a second run when the first run failed. I have been
going back and reviewing the papers which were submitted with
the original internal proposal and I think the most regular feature
which I discover in those that have failed is that they were originally
claimed by the NTO or the SSC as licences to practise, "These
will be mandatory from ... " and there is usually a date
quoted in the paper. Many, many times, when we go back to understand
why that qualification never took off, in truth it is because
there was not appetite for that kind of very strict licence to
practise in that particular sector, although there was a desire
for it.
Mr Humphries: It was more intention
and desire.
Mr Watson: Yes, but because it
did not acquire the status of a licence to practise, no learner
felt compelled to go and get it.
Q632 Mr Marsden: Isabel, could I
possibly ask you quickly, would it help, both in terms of public
perception and also in terms of practical utility, if some of
these qualifications had a sunset clause in them? You would say,
"If they do not reach a certain target market within three
or five years, that is it".
Ms Sutcliffe: I think the system
works quite well as it does at the moment in terms of review,
evaluation and remove if because I think we all have similar systems
for keeping existing qualifications under review, particularly
those with low take-up. We would have an annual review, those
with no take-up and the reasons behind it. It is a long process
to remove anything because you are never quite sure where a learner
might be on a journey for all of those reasons. We have had some
issues with what seems to have been rather arbitrary accreditation
end dates placed on qualifications, which is the same sort of
thing because you are never quite sure if you are going to get
an extension or you can get it reaccredited. An employer using
a qualification is one thing, but if you think about a college
or a training provider looking at a range, it makes their planning
going forward quite difficult if they do not know whether to brave
security for something they want to invest in, it could be planned
as well as people, to get a programme off the ground.
Q633 Mr Marsden: The answer to my
question is basically no?
Ms Sutcliffe: Yes. It works okay,
so there are lots of other things to fix.
Mr McNamara: Can I give a very
brief view from a professional body. Any awarding body, professional
body is very, very close to employers in designing qualifications
at the design stage, as we do. We do not launch anything without
an employer group, sometimes with the regulator if it is regulatory,
but if it is business building, it is employer-led, we design
it, we float it and we test fly it. There have been a number of
cases where we have not launched a qualification because it does
not work, and if it does not work we do not launch it. We build
in our own sunset clauses because, certainly at Level 3, those
qualifications which build into a larger suite of Level 3s are
designed to improve bottom line. If they do not improve bottom
line they will not fly and that is an inbuilt part of the process.
Other awarding bodies I know do the same thing, but it is becoming
more and more critical for that to happen. To pick on Greg's point,
the work we have done on Strand 4 in terms of numbers, it looks
like it will be between 500 and 1,000, which is on that framework,
if you get the data right, if you count it right, if you codify
it properly, and we are getting into that data now. As you say,
the fact that people are still on platforms saying, "It is
5,000. It is 6,000. It is 22,000", these are real figures
and real complexities which we are trying to break through.
Q634 Mr Marsden: Chairman, I wonder
if I could come finally to the issue of accrediting in-house training,
which touches quite sharply on what you have said. Can I stay
with you, John, possibly Alan might want to add something on this
as well. There has been a lot talked about employers' own training
programmes and the point at which they come into sync with things
that come from outside. Would it be possible, or sensible, for
those training programmes to be accredited and effectively brought
into the National Qualifications Framework?
Mr McNamara: I think in some cases
the short answer is yes. We already accredit some organisations'
qualifications and they put them through the rigour of external
assessment, an external look, and they are accredited. I think
into the future, as long as that externality is brought forward
for those organisations coming into the framework, why not.
Q635 Mr Marsden: I mentioned that
particularly because we had a very stimulating session not so
long ago in this section of the inquiry with union learning reps.
It is fairly clear from the evidence they gave, and, indeed, from
the written evidence we have received, that some of the more dramatic
things in terms of trying to engage adult learners come from that
in-house short-term training.
Ms Sutcliffe: Absolutely.
Mr Stevenson: I was going to fully
support what has been said. The Meat Training Council has concentrated
on management development. As an industry, it has a weak management
structure. In many cases it is family orientated and does not
always follow that the rest of the family, as they go back, have
the ability to manage a company properly. We have done knife skills,
we have done supermarket courses, all designed in-house with the
help and support of employers and the industry generally and these
have been launched. Generally, in the case of knife skills, they
have now been accredited and management development as well.
Mr Humphries: This has been happening
for many years. The three examples which Ken Boston gave in his
QCA review this year were all employers which City and Guilds
is already accrediting and they are training for. Tesco's training,
Orange is another one, London Underground's training, all of their
training is both meeting national standards, completely accredited
within the framework, and branded Tesco's as well as City and
Guilds in the National Qualifications Framework. These things
are being done already and in big volumes when you consider the
whole of Tesco's training.
Q636 Mr Marsden: We had evidence
from the 157 Group of Colleges, and other people in the FE sector
have certainly said to me personally it would be a great help.
Why is there such a dichotomy of understanding between what seems
to go on in FE colleges about this and what, as you say, is already
happening on the ground floor?
Mr Humphries: Because, of course,
this training takes place in Tesco's stores, not in colleges.
The training is Tesco's in-house training but they changed—if
I use them as an example—their training procedures to meet
ours and QCA's requirements, they changed their staff development
requirements, they changed their reporting and assessment requirements
because their staff said, "We would like to have your training
accredited". They changed and built in new systems into Tesco's
so that their staff training would meet the externally accredited
requirements of the National Qualifications Framework but, as
a result of that, the training takes place inside Tesco's. It
happens to be externally accredited and assessed by us but it,
therefore, is not happening in colleges or training providers,
it is happening in the employer's premises.
Q637 Mr Marsden: You are saying it
is not a question of reinventing the wheel, it is a question of
better communication and better understanding between the different
sectors?
Mr Humphries: And encouraging
the practice because what I must say to you is when we took Tesco's
proposition we had to go to the QCA main board in order to get
it through because the tendency of the staff was to reject this
as a model for acceptance within the framework. It was quite a
battle to get it accredited and accepted that the standards were
being maintained. What we need to do is make it easier for it
to happen, providing external quality assurance requirements are
met. What you cannot afford to do is have acme stores provide
training which is not comparable to the network and then have
them taken up by Wal-Mart or Asda later and have them say, "This
is rubbish. Why was this accredited? These people can't do the
job". Maintaining quality remains critically important, but
let them bring it into the framework through external quality
assurance, sure, why not.
Chairman: I have got to call a halt to
this. It has been a very good session, and I think some of you
might prepare yourselves for coming back again because we just
started getting under the subject. It has been a very good session.
Alan, John, Isabel, Greg and Chris, can I thank you all very much
for your attendance. As I say, we have learned a lot, but we may
have to come back to you. As you are travelling away from here,
if there are things which we should have asked you or you should
have said to us, get in touch. Most of you meet us a lot of the
time anyway. We want this skills inquiry to be a rather good one
and we will not do that without your help. Thank you all.
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