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House of commons MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
Wednesday 28 March 2007 MR GARETH PERRY, MR DAVID KNIGHT, MR DUNCAN SHRUBSOLE and MR RICHARD PACE Evidence heard in Public Questions 325 - 447
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 28 March 2007 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr David Chaytor Fiona Mactaggart Mr Rob Wilson ________________ Memoranda submitted by Remploy and Crisis
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Gareth Parry, Head of Learning, and Mr David Knight, Head of Group Marketing Strategy, Remploy, and Mr Duncan Shrubsole, Director of Policy and Research, and Mr Richard Pace, Head of Crisis Skylight, Crisis, gave evidence. Q325 Chairman: Can I welcome David Knight, Gareth Parry, Duncan Shrubsole and Richard Pace to our proceedings. I apologise for a slightly smaller number of members of the Committee than usual, but, as I shall explain, the House sat until half past one last night, so I do take a more tolerant view of absentees than I normally do! As you will know, this is a very important inquiry for this Committee. We have never really tried to look in an holistic way at skills, and we thought it was a very good time to do it because skills have, thank goodness, become more fashionable, in the sense that we have a number of organisations looking at skills, skills have gone up the political agenda - something that I very much welcome - and we have had a range of reports. We have had Foster, we have had Leitch interim, Leitch final. There is a lot of work going on and this is already influencing how we are delivering skills, and today we want to see how it impinges on your particular area. I usually give people a couple of minutes to say who they are and why they are here. What do you know about skills and what is the potential for finding anything interesting from you? Mr Knight: David Knight, Remploy, Head of Marketing Strategy and External Relations. I work very closely with Gareth on our learning business. Mr Parry: Gareth Parry, Head of Learning at Remploy. I have been with Remploy for 18 years in various roles, but probably for the last seven or eight years I have been specifically focusing on skills-related issues. I spent some time developing an internal work force development strategy for Remploy and really became familiar at that point with how the issue of skills and disability come together. Having taken that learning from inside the organisation, we are now taking that into the placement side of the organisation to say how can we enhance our recruitment services business with a skills and learning composition. Q326 Chairman: Remploy has been going a long time, has it not? Mr Parry: Sixty-two years now, I think. Q327 Chairman: Who set it up then? The Labour Government? Mr Parry: Yes, it was in the 1944 Act. Q328 Chairman: One of the things, I imagine, that is still doing more or less the same sort of work. So, it has been going for 62 years. It always confuses me which department you look to. I know you to look to DWP, but you must have a relationship with the Department for Education and Skills as well. Mr Parry: We are increasingly trying to have a relationship, because our agenda is to bring the employment and skills agenda together. Traditionally we have been more on the employment side but, again, having learnt the significance of the skills agenda, particularly to getting disabled people into work, we have been working closely recently with the Learning and Skills Council and their new policies. Q329 Chairman: Which minister do you look to now? Mr Knight: John Hutton ultimately in terms of DWP. Q330 Chairman: I remember Margaret Hodge used to have responsibility for Remploy? Mr Parry: Yes, she did. Q331 Chairman: In which department? Mr Parry: In DWP. She was the minister for disabled people. Q332 Chairman: Good. Duncan. Mr Shrubsole: I am Duncan Shrubsole, I am Director of Policy and Research for Crisis, and this is Richard Pace, Head of Skylight, our activity and learning centre. We are very pleased to be here because, as you said, there is not a day that goes by without a different report being produced on skills and, crucially for us, Remploy might be 62 years old, but we are 40 years old this year, and if we look at homelessness--- Q333 Chairman: You have changed your name. Mr Shrubsole: No. Q334 Chairman: Did you not start with Crisis at Christmas and then become Crisis? Mr Shrubsole: Yes, sort of. Q335 Chairman: So you have changed your name slightly. Mr Shrubsole: Slightly. If we look at the challenges that remain for tackling homelessness, the real challenge is helping people break out of the cycle of homelessness so if they have been homeless before they do not become homeless again, and skills are crucial to that, whether it is skills to sustain a tenancy, to improve their health, to improve their mental health, being able to manage their health conditions using public services to get people ready to move into work, and if they are moving into work they have success in it. Through our own projects Skylight is an activity and learning centre which incorporates engagement, formal education and employability projects in London, and we are opening another one next month in Newcastle, and Changing Lives, which is a grants programme where we give money direct to homeless and formerly homeless people to pursue an education or work-related goal. Q336 Chairman: What percentage have you got on skills? Mr Shrubsole: In terms of our projects? Q337 Chairman: Yes. Mr Shrubsole: Actually the majority of our projects are either skills based or have a skills focus. So even at Christmas - we still do open centres at Christmas - we have a real focus. We have an internet area, we have a focus on outreach workshops to get people, when they leave, to get engaged in skills year round and take that forward. Alongside our projects we have had a whole programme of research with various research institutes looking at the relationship between learning and skills and homelessness, making the case for it, and last summer we launched a campaign which was snappily titled "Weapons of Mass Instruction: fighting homelessness through learning and skills", which some of the Committee signed an EDM in support of, and that is really about saying that those adults most in need of learning, of which homeless people are a core group, they are the ones who are not currently getting learning, we need to be doing all we can to maximise access to learning for those adults. Q338 Chairman: You sound very much like some of the people we talked to when we were looking at prison education. You always emphasise that when someone comes out of prison what they really need is the full package. They need a home, they need the skills, they need full support, which everyone in the prison calls "the full package". It sounds very similar. Mr Shrubsole: It is true. There is much read-across, whether you are looking at drugs or prison or homeless people. What is crucial as well is it is not just about doing things to people. Skills is about building up people's own capabilities. Their aspirations raise, they think there is more out there, getting involved in learning means they build up their own capabilities, their self-efficacy, in order that they can articulate for themselves and have the self-esteem and confidence to move on. We need to do things for people to help them, but crucially we need to help them help themselves as well. Q339 Chairman: Richard, you actually run the training centre, do you not? Mr Pace: Yes, I do. I am really very concerned about the way that we deal with individuals that come through our doors to assist them as best we can to find out what their aspirations are and to help them individually to move through the organisation so that they are in a position where they can access other agencies in terms of learning and skills as well. Q340 Chairman: How many people work for Crisis? Mr Shrubsole: How many people work for crisis? Q341 Chairman: Yes. Mr Shrubsole: It is about 70, but we have over 7,000 volunteers in our different projects. Q342 Chairman: Where do you get most of your funding? Mr Shrubsole: Most of our funding is voluntary income. A key point for us is that when we developed our learning activities we developed them in order to be what we thought was best for the client group rather than what necessarily was available in statutory streams, and, as we have developed the model from open access engagement activities to more formal learning to employability projects, we have been engaging with the formal education system; so we have a partnership with a college, we have Learndirect courses, we have some Learning and Skills Council funding, but crucial for us has been using our voluntary income to shape the curriculum and the learning offer, as it were, that helps homeless people and helps our clients. Q343 Chairman: Where do you get your money from, Gareth? Mr Parry: The majority of our funding is block grants from different Jobcentre Plus. Q344 Chairman: Do your two organisations work together on any programmes? Mr Parry: We have not up until today, no. Q345 Chairman: In terms of where we are coming from we really want to know, from your perspective, what kind of people you are dealing with in terms of their skills challenges. I was very disappointed recently when I visited my local Jobcentre Plus. I was trying to find out why in Huddersfield we had something like two per cent higher unemployment than some surrounding communities that actually historically had higher employment. I was trying to tease out from the DWP what sort of people were unemployed, could not get a job, trying to get a feel for it. I found it a bit disappointing that they could not really tell me. Can you tell me? Can you give me some impression about the sort of people you are helping and what sort of level of skills they have got, what they need and what you are trying to do for them? Mr Knight: We work across call types of disability, all ages, all backgrounds, so it is a mixture of physical disability, mental health, learning disabilities. Within that we have a core focus on those people who have more complex barriers or additional barriers that they have to overcome to get into employment. To put that into context, this current year we will enable around 5,000 people to gain employment with mainstream employers. In terms of skill levels, again a huge mix, from very highly skilled people through to people who have no formal qualifications whatsoever. Increasingly, I guess, we face people who are at the less skilled or less qualified end of the spectrum, so we have to spend more and more time developing those skills to enable those people to be ready for work, and that is particularly in the areas of the more soft skills, as in confidence, team building, analytical skills as opposed to necessarily a formal qualification. Mr Parry: From an academic context, the average academic level of the typical clients we work with, it is probably top end of entry level two, entry level three in terms of basic skills, so significantly below national level one, level two standards would be a typical candidate we would work with. Q346 Chairman: Level two, level three? Mr Parry: Entry level two. Q347 Chairman: What about the reputation you have at Remploy? Traditionally you have your own workshops. How many have you still got of those? Mr Knight: There are currently around 80 sites. There are two parts to the business. Remploy own the businesses, if you like, that are engaged in manufacturing and service operations, and then there is the work that we do with mainstream employers, and it is more that context that we are coming from today. Q348 Chairman: Have you been moving your emphasis and focus from one to the other? Mr Knight: Very much so. We have been growing the external side quite rapidly over the last few years, and the reasons are fairly straightforward. It is the aspirations of disabled people by and large to work in mainstream employment. Q349 Chairman: I used to be the shadow minister that covered your area, and in those days I can remember feeling a little disappointed in some of the settings in which your people worked. They were pretty basic and there did not seem to be much training involved. Has that changed? Mr Parry: Absolutely. First of all, in terms of environment, the company has had a property improvement strategy for some time now, so I think the overall service is better. We developed the Workforce Development Strategy round about 2000, and part of that was that we put a learning centre into every Remploy facility across the UK, so each one of our 80 sites has got a learning centre. We introduced a basic skills strategy that said every individual who had a basic skills need who wanted to learn could learn basic skills in work time, and the way we did that was we brought in the local college to offer that facility. We introduced Learndirect programmes into our sites, we brought in NVQs on the employer training pilots, as it was then. So, everything we could do we did in terms of bringing that into shape. As I say, I think it is the experience of seeing how much of a significant impact that training strategy had on our internal workforce that made us think, if we could capture some of that and link it into our recruitment services business and provide employers not just with candidates who are willing and able to work but also supported with focused vocational training packages, then in terms of the mainstream employment market that would offer added value, and we are starting to see the fruition of that now. Mr Knight: There are around 5,000 people employed in Remploy sites, there are 2.7 million on incapacity benefit; so you can see why our focus increasingly looks at the bigger number. There is a big need out there. Q350 Chairman: That could be interpreted as being you have been around for 62 years and you have not been doing your job very well! Mr Parry: I think we have been delivering to the requirements of the Work Step Programme, which is where we are funded from, and the Work Step Programme has gone thorough a change over the last four or five years as well. It is much more targeted now at integration, transition and inclusiveness, and I think we want to trail blaze on that programme. Q351 Chairman: Can I ask Duncan and Richard, one of the things that is coming in evidence and I think is part of the experience of visiting different schemes that we have, either as a committee or individually, is that a large number of people say that qualifications are not the main thing about getting a job and getting some status. I am thinking of the East London Business Association Initiative in Canary Wharf. They look at the long-term unemployed in an area and what they do is do not go for any sophisticated qualification but they go for soft skills and mentoring and they find that is what a lot of their people need to get into work. How do you feel about qualification or more informal skills? Where do you come from? Mr Shrubsole: Personally, it is a phrase that is always used: "soft skills". Q352 Chairman: It is an unfortunate term. Mr Shrubsole: It is unfortunate because the skills are some of the hardest skills you can develop, such as having self-confidence, being able to articulate yourself, work in teams, and they are key. What we offer through Skylight is the chance to get people to participate, to get them to engage, maybe for the first time. We do drama, Tai Chi, art, bike maintenance and, once people have done that, they move on to ESOL and IT and literacy and numeracy, and so that is key, developing those core competences or soft skills, whatever you want to call them. Alongside that, someone once said it is only those with qualifications who think that those without qualifications do not need them, but actually one of the things we see when we have certificate evenings for people who complete our courses is that they are really proud of getting a certificate and getting a qualification and that mark of achievement, and what is crucial is having the variety and choice of activities which engage people and then you accredit what they achieve through it. So we do something called the Learning Power Award, developed with the Learning and Skills Council. It is an entry level qualification for homeless people. They can choose from 80 modules. We do the element which is around literacy and numeracy, but some of it can be around even "me and my drugs" in terms of helping accredit somebody who is getting hold of their substance misuse. They can get a module and that builds up their confidence and they get a certificate, and so I do not think it is an either/or, I think you need the soft skills but you need to accredit and get qualifications to build up progress, but crucially you need progression as well. Once people start getting interested they have got to have somewhere to move on to. On the soft skills, there was a report a couple of days ago about graduates and the number of graduates that did not have the skills needed to move into work, never mind having a degree, and that is the same at the bottom level as well. You do need your basics skills. People want something that records the progress that they have made and to be able to show that to others, and people put certificates on their wall, but the learning itself, crucially it is not so much the qualification, it is what is the activity they are engaged with, and if that is broad and it offers choice, it gets people stimulated, it is enthusiastic and it is high quality, it is good quality teachers. You were talking about spaces. Good quality spaces is really key. It cannot just be a computer room in the corner of a homeless hostel, it has got to be a space which is bright and colourful and gets people out of the circumstances that they are in. Mr Pace: Some of the people that come through our doors are really traumatised by their experiences, they are unable to do anything, even communicate. We spend a long time working with these people. Talking about soft skills, we spend a lot of time being there for them so that they can slowly begin to open up and begin to articulate exactly what it is that they actually want in terms of the future. Some of these people have been on the streets for an awfully long time and they come to us and have absolutely no idea what is going on, and we slowly work with them, individually often, to actually find out exactly where they stand in terms of their ability, and we try to nurture them, and we work with them very closely and we assist them and we try to progress them through all the activities we have in our organisation. It may be that they start taking a place in dance classes, or in art activities, and once they start doing that, they are able to open up and say, "Actually I feel that I am quite good at doing this. I am quite good at actually being around these people", and we would slowly begin to encourage them to take part in other activities so they have a broad spectrum of interests, and once we can capture that, then we will persuade them, if possible, to look at the more accredited courses that we are doing and, hopefully, progress them through so that they are in a position to access other agencies, maybe going into FE, maybe going into volunteering and possibly even into employment with HE. Chairman: That drills down into Leitch, I think. David. Q353 Mr Chaytor: In view of what you have all said about the nature and the level of skills of the people with whom you are working, is Leitch in any way relevant to your organisations? Mr Parry: It is absolutely relevant, because I think that what we would be very supportive of with Leitch is the overall direction of travel which is making the skills supply side much more employer-led in terms of the direction of travel. We have argued for some time now that we need to take much more realistically an employer-led---. It picks up on something Duncan said. People need to know there is a progression opportunity for them as part of the journey, and I guess what we have done in Remploy is taken our background in understanding supply chain manufacturing and we have simply adopted that philosophy in a service environment and said, "Actually, if one of the key customer bases of this process is the employers, we need to understand their demands at the very start of the process and then drill that requirement as far back into the supply chain as we possibly can so that when people come to us they are much more readily equipped for employment." One of the observations we have as an organisation is that the many hundreds, if not thousands, of disabled people who come to us having been through some of kind of education and training process may well have a paper qualification but fundamentally they are lacking some of those basic skills to be able to work. They have got a qualification, but they are far from being job ready. It is all of the soft and enabling skills we have described, but it is also things like the ability to get to work, the ability to get to work on time, the ability to go to work regularly. It is those kinds of issues as well. I think the direction of travel with Leitch, therefore, is significantly strengthening the focus on employer needs and pulling that back into the system is something we are very supportive of. I think there are details within the Leitch Report we have some issues with, but I think it is fair to say the overall direction of travel we would strongly support. Mr Knight: I think that is right. One of the issues is that there is very little focus on the needs of disabled people within it, and, therefore, we have got to expand it to make sure it becomes much more embracing. Mr Parry: To put that into context, 10% of the LSC learnt population now are people who are declaring a disability, and this year they are taking up 15 % of the budget. It does seem a bit odd to us that both those figures are forecast to increase, both learner numbers and the value of support costs, and yet issues around learners with disabilities are below the surface level, not just in the Leitch Report but in a quorum of reports that come out from government. We are surprised it is not becoming more of a mainstream issue than it is, because the size of the population demands it. Mr Shrubsole: I think our view would be a mixed view. I think the interim report articulated quite a strong view about the social justice purpose of learning alongside the economic argument. The economic argument was won out a bit with the final report. There is a real problem out there for a whole range of agencies, not just Crisis, but of people when contracting with the Learning and Skills Council, or working with them, increasingly focusing on level two and level two alone. We should get to level two, but you need those progression routes up to level two to fund the entry level learning. The targets in Leitch, with an ever greater focus on level two, look like making that worse. Actually, you could turn it around the other way and say that Leitch's target is that 95 % of people should have basic skills and 90 % have level two. On the negative side it can have that focus on level two. On the positive side we can say, actually you cannot now any longer park those people who are a long way from level two. To reach 90 % you have got to reach down, you cannot just take those just below the threshold, which has been one of the problems of Skills for Life at the moment. On the positive side, he articulates that the economy needs adults who are already in the workforce who are low skilled, he sets high targets for people reaching level two in basic skills; the challenge now is to say, if you have got those targets, how do you help those clients of ours and at Remploy who are a long way below to get up to that? The real challenge is how it gets implemented. Do we just have a focus on, as someone has called it, "full-fat" learning, which is regular learning in formal institutions, or do we realise that lots of people, whether disadvantaged or not, learn best through informal modular or part-time learning. There is also a real issue about the difference between learning and qualifications, but for homeless people and other disadvantaged people, they might have qualifications. Thirteen per cent of homeless people have had level three or above, but what they need now is to get involved in learning that re-engages those lost skills and competences, lost confidence and might set them up for training on a different path. So, even if they have got qualifications, they still need the opportunity to learn. There are some definite positives in Leitch, but it is how it gets implemented and where the funding priorities lie. There were some statistics which came out yesterday from DfES about the extent to which the number of people in adult learning had declined because of the focus on level two predominantly, and that is a real challenge as to whether we are going to cut off those ladders of opportunity to get people up to where we want to go. Yes, we all want them to get to level two, but we need to help them get there first. Q354 Mr Chaytor: So, you have no fears that the obsession with level two or the high emphasis placed on level two is going to work against the interests of your client group? Mr Shrubsole: That is a real danger. The targets are taken and that focus on level two becomes a focus on core level two qualifications rather than a broader curriculum. It is interesting that at a time when we are saying that people within the Train to Gain programme or other programmes need choice but choice from an increasingly constrained range of what learning skills councils will fund, there is a real challenge to send the message that we need to not have too constrained a focus on just level two. Mr Knight: I think we would agree with that. There is that real danger. If the funding and the targets actually follow that through, then, almost by default, it creates a situation where there is less emphasis on those lower levels; so that is a real concern of ours. Mr Parry: I think the targets in Leitch are so ambitious there is a danger that everybody will go for demonstrating progress towards those targets, and, therefore, there is a danger that the people who are most likely to achieve level two will be focused upon first and that those people who are further away will get forgotten about. If there is a longer-term strategy for that candidate group and that learning group, that is fine, but the danger is that everybody will rush towards the quick winds, if I can use the phrase, and that the people in need of most support will be so far behind over a period of time that there is too big a gap to catch up in due course. Q355 Mr Chaytor: Presumably people will be prioritised because of the number who essentially have got level two skills already but do not have the qualification to prove it, so it is an issue of accrediting their skills pretty rapidly, is it not? In terms of the people you work with - again, a question to both organisations - what proportion do you feel have got the potential to reach level two and what proportion have just reached their limits and are never going to progress beyond entry level? Mr Parry: It is an almost "how long is a piece of string" question, I guess, because I think that often in the candidate group we work with it is very difficult to identify the true potential of the candidate until you can put them into a different type of environment. Our experience is that somebody who comes to Remploy for our services will experience the same kind of lack of self-confidence, lack of self-esteem. We do a lot of work with them to try and get them into employment, and once they have achieved the status of employment and they are in a different type of environment, which may open up different avenues for learning, suddenly you see a potential coming out that up to that point is hidden. It is very difficult to tie to figures. I know that does not answer the question, but there are so many variables around it. I think we would be reasonably confident in saying that maybe 30-40 % of the candidate group could get to that kind of level. We have lots of experience of the candidates we work with who achieve fork-lift truck driving licences, heavy goods vehicle qualifications which are probably on a par with level two but may not be categorised as level two, but lots of vocational qualifications that lots of people could move into. I think we would be reasonably confident that a third to maybe half of the potential IB claimant population and learners with disabilities could get there, but that still means there is probably in excess of 50 % that would struggle. Mr Knight: It is fair to say that the potential is greater than people realise. One of the challenges is that potential is often buried by all sorts of different factors, which perhaps we will explore later, which stops people from blossoming in the early days, if you like, and that is what we try and uncover, but given that 50 % of disabled people have no qualification whatsoever, then we are starting from a low baseline. Q356 Mr Chaytor: Duncan, homeless people are more likely to be more itinerant, I suppose. You have got a more shifting population than Remploy would be dealing with. What are the implications of that for what Leitch is proposing? Does it make it impossible to provide longer-term structure and work to longer-term targets if you have a more itinerant population? Mr Shrubsole: I do not think it makes it impossible. I echo much of what was said by Remploy. Some research we did showed six in ten homeless people had no qualifications or qualifications below level two, but I think, as they were saying, we see it with actual individuals. I can remember somebody telling me that once they started doing something their aspirations were there, they realised they had gone there and then they just kept going. Actually, if you either go to work first or level two first with the most vulnerable and say, "That is the thing you start with", you are setting people up to failure, particularly when 80 % of homeless people have been excluded from school[1] and so their previous experience of education was a negative one; but if you start where they are - it does not mean it has got to be low-level, low-quality - and then work up and keep pushing them, they can get to level two. I would not like to put a percentage on it, but I think a high proportion could. Coming back to your crucial question about itinerants, what Leitch does not address is the place people learn, and too much learning is focused on formal education establishments, whereas people can often learn best in the workplace if they are in low-skilled employment but, crucially, voluntary and community sector organisations where people are already going, it does not have to be a homeless organisation, it might be the Bangladeshi Women's Group, it might be the drop-in centre, whatever the population is, they are already going to those places, they feel trusting and safe there, and what we need to do is deliver learning in those places, high quality learning, which is a partnership of FE working with that organisation. If you create those places for learning, like we have been able to do with Skylight and other organisations do, then people will come. We get people who travel for an hour and a half across London to come to us because they see that this is a place they want to attend. Q357 Mr Chaytor: Realistically, is homelessness a difficulty that will permanently prevent someone from working towards a level two qualification? Is having a permanent home a prerequisite for achieving a level two qualification or can it be done with the kind of background of instability that many homeless people have? Mr Shrubsole: Last week in our new structured learning suite, which has only been open a year, we had our first level two qualification. The people who use our services come from a whole range of homeless backgrounds, some are direct rough sleepers, some are sofa surfers, some in hostels, but people can do it. Homeless people want environments where they are challenged in a supportive way to stretch themselves. They do not want to go on a course where, if they have had a key appointment and they have to miss a session, then they lose out on a qualification, but they do want to go on something where they are challenged and where they see a purpose to it, just like anybody else. They do not want to do something which keeps them going round and round the same circle. As Richard said, you have got to work with them to get to that point. It is a challenge, but you can deliver learning in places where homeless people will stick to it in order to not necessarily get up to level two but get on the way to it. Mr Parry: There is a similarity in the intermittent nature of the learning process to that for people with mental health conditions who are fluctuating, because of the episodic nature of the disability, and the ability to do learning in bite-sized chunks on a "when it suits" and "when able" to do it is a good way forward. The idea of a credit-based accumulator to work up towards a level one or a level two I think is a very sound way forward because it does give that flexibility. I think the challenges there are not over bureaucratising, or not over complicating the credit-based qualifications framework along with the provider infrastructure capability to work to that kind of bite-sized chunk approach, but I think as a methodology, be it homeless people or people with intermittent disabilities, I can see that being a good solution. Q358 Mr Chaytor: What are the one or two things that are missing from Leitch or require more emphasis in Leitch that would be of most value in the client groups with which you are both working? Mr Parry: I think there is number of things. There is not enough clarity of thinking on below level one in particular. It talks about a Foundation Learning Tier, and everybody seems to talk about foundations learning tiers and put it to one side as if a Foundation Learning Tier is going to be the answer to all problems, but we do not know anywhere near enough yet about the reality of the Foundation Learning Tier, how it can operate, how it is going to be constructed and, for us in particular, how it directly links into employment. I think that is one issue that remains clouded. I think a second issue is that there is a strong implication in Leitch in bringing employment and skills agendas together, but I think for the candidate group we work with progressing into employment has to be seen to be an outcome or an enhancement of the process, not something that falls outside of the process. At the moment we have got an absurd situation where if you have got a learner in a college or on a programme and, let us say, they get a job in the January - and most of us would think that is a fantastic success - the system records it as a failure because nine times out of ten they have to drop out of the education programme and they cannot complete their learning. So, we need a much more flexible system that allows learners to take a learning programme with them across different environments and continue that learning. Again, Leitch kind of moves towards that agenda but does not really get into that in any great way, shape or form. Mr Shrubsole: I would agree. On the Foundation Learning Tier, if that is the way to go, it encompasses pre-entry and entry level learning and accredits achievement and progression wherever it is achieved. So you can get modules accredited in an initial workplace setting, in a voluntary setting or in an FE setting, and there certainly would be funding for that pre-level two work. At the moment a lot of it is funded through ESF and EQUAL programmes, which are facing a real problem in that the current round has come to an end. Q359 Chairman: ESF? Mr Shrubsole: European Social Fund. Another homeless organisation in London, St Mungo's, particularly is facing having to shut all its services because the ESF round ended in December and the new round has not been announced and there is no funding in between. There is much debate around personal and community development learning and what happens to that. One option could be to use that to fund courses which are engaging particularly disadvantaged adults into learning, setting up those progression frameworks, but ultimately it has got to be a mainstream thing. Unless the Learning and Skills Council has on its priorities that it should fund, not just level two but learning before then, that learning will not get funded. Q360 Chairman: The Personal Community Development Programme. Who funds that? Mr Shrubsole: It is DfES funding for adult education colleges.[2] Mr Parry: I think it is the Learning and Skills Council that finances that. I think it has got a budget of about £210 million. Q361 Mr Chaytor: I want to ask finally about the concept of demand-led learning, and this phrase comes through a lot in Leitch. Is that relevant to the people you are working with? If they were offered a learning account, would they be able to use that funding productively, would they be able to accurately identify what they are going to do and know where to go for it? Is there a relevant concept to homeless people? Mr Knight: I think there are two separate things there. I guess it comes down to what we mean by "demand-led". Is it demand-led by the individual or demand-led by the economy, if you like? We very much focus on what employers want and then back that into the system, if you like, as opposed to someone coming to us and saying, "Hey, I want to become an astronaut, how do I become an astronaut?" We look at the demand in the local community economy, work closely with employers and then work with the individuals to help them find the available opportunities rather than something that is fairly generic, and then make sure that they have got the right training and development that equips them to get that task. If that is what demand-led means, that is absolutely critical, and we cannot divorce what any of us do from the real world. One of the key issues is, yes, Leitch talks about demand-led, but what does it really mean in reality. The individual learning account--- Mr Parry: The individual learning account gives the individual choice, which is a very important dimension. I think there is a very simple issue with individual learning accounts, which is what is the value of the individual learning account and what will it actually buy you? If it is £150 you might be able to buy the occasional Learndirect programme, but there is not going to be an awful lot outside of college short courses and vocational voluntary sector short courses. As soon as you get into things like NVQs, particularly if you are somebody who has had a level two qualification in the past and acquired a disability, you are an adult learner or you are trying to get back into work, the mainstream funding regime does not support you. If you have got an individual learning account voucher for £200, realistically that is not going to buy you very much. It can contribute to something and help with direction, but I think there has got to be a pragmatism here as to what value an individual learning account would get you. If an individual learning account, if we were to dream a little, could get us five, six, seven hundred pounds, then I think there is some real value-added learning that an individual could buy with that that could fundamentally change their lives. Mr Knight: What is key with that is to make sure that person gets the right advice and guidance to make sure they use it effectively. Mr Shrubsole: I agree, demand comes from both sides, and too often we have programmes which look either just to the employer, or just to the individual and do not link the two up. There is potential within Train to Gain, it has had teething problems but there is potential that that might be a way along the process. We have been talking to DfES about whether an adapted Train to Gain model could be used to work not just with employers, as it is now, but to work with homeless people themselves in order to get that brokering about looking at what are the employment opportunities in the local area and working with the individual, what sort of skills they have, and link them up. We think there is a potential role there. People do want to do courses and learning where they can see that there is a job that they can get to at the end of it, but, equally, that has to relate to where they are. To use an example, Crisis runs a social enterprise cafe to help people move into work. We set it up with Pret à Manger. We needed people who knew what they were doing about catering, and the manager was a Pret à Manger manager and we always say she knew what standards you have to be to serve customers and serve food and then work back to where the individual was to help them reach it. A lot of programmes just try and work up and make allowances. You have got to train people up so they can work in the work force to the standard you need to meet that employer demand and product demand and then relate that to where the individual is and help them fill the gap. Chairman: That leads us neatly into the next section. Q362 Fiona Mactaggart: I want to take something that Gareth was referring to and which is in the Crisis evidence, which is about people who previously had level two qualifications because I think this is a problem with prisons. In your evidence, Crisis, you referred to skills not applying to periods of worklessness and homelessness can be lost and need to be replaced. One of the things that I am interested in, all of the things you are saying, is actually how do we get a fair fix on these things? I understand that someone who before they became disabled might have had a level two qualification might then not count in Leitch type targets; I can understand that someone who before they became an alcoholic and homeless, for example, might have had a level two qualification and might lose it. How can one have a system which is fair but which meets those needs? I think it is a difficult thing for policy-makers and I want you to answer the policy problem that both of you have raised, imagining that you were responsible for doing it in a way which is a fair and reasonable investment. Mr Parry: Ultimately there are choices to be made. Everybody understands that there is a finite pot of resource available and there are choices to be made, but I think all too often we fall into the trap of making blanket policy decisions which do not allow for flexibility, recognising, on the one hand, we are talking about upskilling the workforce for the national economy needs and, on the other hand, we are talking about 2.6 million incapacity benefit claimants who we need to get back into work, and the policies do not always go hand in hand of how one helps the other. Our view would be that the policy framework should be targeting those in most need of support to get into sustained work, accepting that there are some independent recreational learning arguments in there as well, but, fundamentally, those people most in need of support should be doing that. The way that standard national government programmes are organised at the moment, a lot of money is invested into people who perhaps do not need as much as others do in that they are already in employment, they are on the route, employers would otherwise be supporting their developments, because employers do support a lot of workplace developments, and yet they are getting subsidised training from the Government because the one-size-fits-all approach says they can. If we can target the investment for those in most need, then that would actually be a more intelligent way to spend the money, but what that requires is much greater flexibility in the funding regime, and, to be honest with you, it also requires the funders to trust the provider base a bit more than it does in terms of making the judgments on how that money is spent. I think if that flexibility could be introduced, I am sure that the provider base could deliver a lot more value for money in terms of outcomes and people in other departments. Mr Shrubsole: I think there are three main points. The first would be that homelessness costs the taxpayer money anyway. The extent to which people are cycling round the system, some estimates have said that a homeless person can cost up to £50,000 a year and, crucially, how do we help people break that cycle. One in four people who move into tenancy, the tenancy then fails because of debt and isolation. Getting people involved in learning and improving their skills is crucial to tackling that. One argument is the taxpayer is paying anyway; we need to be investing to help break that cycle. The second point would be the Government's own strategy, its own targets. If it wants to get 80 % of people into employment, 90 % up to level two, it is looking at improving health, looking at tackling worklessness and housing together. For its own purposes, too much of what DfES does is often done in a silo and that education role needs to support what is going on in those other agendas across government. You were throwing the challenge out to us as policy-makers. There will always be some things that someone else might see as unfair. There is a lot of dead weight loss in the education system. Q363 Fiona Mactaggart: There will be a lot of people who think that providing Tai Chi to ex cons is unfair? Mr Shrubsole: There would. We fund it through our own voluntary income. It is people who give us five pounds a month who fund the Tai Chi. The Learning and Skills Council is helping us on the IT side, but equally lots of other people cannot get that voluntary income to fund the Tai Chi. Q364 Chairman: IT and Tai Chi. It sounds a very good combination! Mr Shrubsole: But if you look at the dead weight loss in the system, the employers who always benefit key from skills programmes, they are those who believe in skills and education, and then some chance to fund it comes along and so they take it. You will not get it perfect. You will always get some people who see it as unfair or a deal weight loss, but, as Gareth said, you focus on those most in need and you have frameworks for quality inspection monitoring so that people know that provision that people said was going to be delivered is being delivered. But crucially, if you look from the ground up - what do learners need, what is working for them - too often we look from the top down - what should be the framework for this policy or this funding area for the Learning and Skills Council - rather than rewarding success and looking at what is happening on the ground. Mr Parry: I think that is a good example of what I was trying to say in terms of trusting the provider base. If we understand what the strategic goals are, the strategic goals are getting people into employment and then to the right skill level within employment, and the journey for some people to get there might only be six to nine months, but for other people it could be five years, and the very start of that process can be a very soft engagement process which at that time does not feel like it has got anything to do with employment. I think if the providers were given the flexibility to interpret how they spend their money, but the accountability for that money has to demonstrate back to the funder that we are delivering outcomes on a journey towards that end point, and providing they are held to account on that, I think we would strongly argue that providers like ourselves or Crisis should be given as much flexibility as possible as to how to use that money, because you do need to look for bespoke solutions for individuals, and the savings potentially, we believe, are considerable. If we take the issue around young people with disabilities for a moment and the whole process of statementing and moving young people into further education, our observation is the majority of young people with disabilities who transition into further education do not go there because they are on a journey towards, a route to, employment, they are there because somebody needs to occupy them, somebody has got to find a solution for them: "I know, let us put them in further education college." The costs are huge. The per capita cost is £22,000 a year, whereas if we can progress some of those learners out into a workplace learning environment and find a more employment-related one, there are much more cost-effective solutions that can be found which will return to the funders significant savings. Q365 Chairman: You say "bespoke service". When do you break in? I thought Connexions were supposed to do that for disabled people. Mr Parry: We thought that as well, but the reality of it is Connexions struggle to do it because their remit is largely to support the transition of a young person with a disability into adulthood, and "adult" is a broad-ranging definition. Q366 Chairman: Why is it? A child is a child in our country still to 18. Why is this transition difficult? Mr Parry: Why is it difficult? Q367 Chairman: Yes, from where you are coming from? Mr Parry: I am not sure I know the answer to that question. Obviously there is a community of people there with complex needs and there is a whole range of services. I guess it becomes difficult because of the system, because you have got the Department of Health involved, you have got the Department for Education and Skills involved, you have got the Department for Work and Pensions involved and you have got lots of professionals who are all trying to do a good job but actually the whole process does not join up. Q368 Fiona Mactaggart: Your evidence is suggesting another one, a broker? Mr Parry: To facilitate all of that provision and to put that end-point. Our evidence was around if the end-point is a work-based learning solution in employment on the lifelong learning agenda, then take that end-point and drill it back into the system. We have got experiences where young people with disabilities were attending transition meetings, and they have all and sundry there, but the focus on employment is not there. It should be there from the age of 14 onwards. There should be a discussion around ultimate employment aspirations for the individual, but, more often than not, employment is not on the agenda because the people round the table do not understand the employment agenda, do not understand the employment market. What we are saying is we think there should be a much stronger focus on employment, because we believe we can get younger people with disabilities into an employment-based solution at a much earlier stage than they currently do, which in the medium to long-term will deliver substantial savings. Q369 Chairman: I am still waiting for any of our witness to say something nice about Connexions, but is not Connexions supposed to be your bespoke evaluation of a young person, whatever their background, disabled or whatever, and say, "Given your background, what you did at school or what you did not do at school, your achievements, this now is the best direction for you as a human being to develop yourself." That may be work, it may be training with work, it may be FE. Why is not Connexions doing that? The criticism we have is it only does it for people in the NEET category who are disabled but it does not apply to the average and other students. So all this resource is going into the area that you are describing but you are saying it does not happen there either. Mr Knight: I think we might see it the other way round, to be honest, that the focus is not in our area. Q370 Chairman: What do you mean? Mr Knight: There is not the focus on disabled people with Connexions. Mr Parry: I think there is a focus on disabled young people, but it is the focus on employment that is missing. Connexions do not have the routes to the employment market in the same way that organisations like Remploy do. We work with thousands of employers across the UK, many thousands of individuals. Connexions simply do not do that. The Connexions advisers, when they are giving employment advice to that individual or to their parents, the reality of the labour market needs just is not there. What we are saying is we think there should be an input from practitioners who are out there working with employers, putting people into jobs, dealing with skills issues every day as part of that process. Q371 Chairman: Who is this person? Mr Parry: We believe that Remploy could do that process. Mr Knight: It is about expertise, focus and consistency, expertise in dealing with disabled people and particularly the more complex needs within disabled people. Q372 Chairman: Duncan and Richard must be in this business. What is your dream scenario? When somebody comes into you, do they get this full package of an assessor, a broker, a NEET person who understands? Is Connexions the answer if it worked well? What is the answer? Mr Shrubsole: Our client group is generally an older client group, so they are too old for Connexions. Q373 Chairman: But do your people need a life coach, mentor? Mr Pace: Yes. Mr Shrubsole: Yes, crucially the value of one-on-one support is proven by research evidence and what we see with our own eyes. Our progression worker working with somebody one-on-one is crucial in helping them articulate themselves, what they want, sign-posting them to opportunities, whether we provide them or others provide them, and that is crucial as well. We have to be looking out to the whole range of opportunities out there, and that is why we have been talking to DfES about whether there is the possibility for adapting the Train to Gain model, to have a skills broker who can do that link between the individual and the employer but with them having an understanding of homelessness and the employment world. The value of one-on-one progression support is key. Q374 Chairman: Because people who have everything have this, do they not? They have life coaches and personal trainers. We all need those, do we not? Mr Shrubsole: Yes, people pay a fortune for it. Q375 Chairman: For the people you deal with, that is what you want, is it not? Mr Pace: Yes. We have a life coach coming in to run a class for our members, our client group, on this very basis. We treat people individually, and it is very important because they have such complex needs. Q376 Chairman: How do you do it systematically, Richard? How do you get it into the system that people get this individual treatment? Mr Pace: Everybody that comes through our door, when they enter into any of our activities, is formulated with an individual learning plan and we deal with the person and we try to get them to articulate what it is that they actually want to do as a result of coming to us, what are their requirements, we try to help them through that. So, we will offer them a range of different activities and we will try to engage them with other people. In areas where we cannot directly help them, we will refer them to other agencies. It is getting people to appreciate that much of this is up to them. They have to tell us what it is that they actually want. We can help them, we can provide them with support and guidance, but it is trying to get them to come out of themselves really. Chairman: Fiona, it is very rude of me, but I got taken away. It is Gareth's fault. He talked about the individually designed bespoke service. I want everyone to have a life coach and a personal trainer. Q377 Fiona Mactaggart: I think what is interesting about both of your evidence is that in a way you have looked at the present system, the brokerage system or Train to Gain, and you have said, "Okay, we will try and fit what we think is needed into the shape of what is going on." I want you to do something else. I want you to imagine that there was not a kind of existing shape and to tell us what, if you had a blank sheet, you would design for the client group that you work for, and then I want you to tell me what proportion of the clients you work with would succeed in achieving the ambition of employment or level two qualifications and what proportion would fail? Those are the two questions that it seems to me are the killer questions on this. I think you are adapting stuff that you would like to make it look like what you think the DfES wants, and so I would like to see what it would be like if you did not adapt it in that way. Mr Shrubsole: As part of our campaigning work we have coined the slogan "Right People, Right Places, Right Approach", which is that in the learning system the right people we should focus on are those most in need of learning, the right places we should crucially think about are where those people want to learn, could learn and get support in learning, and the right approach is ensuring that there is the right offer and the variety and choice that really engages with them. To unpick that a bit, on the right people, that is about having the focus nationally and at local level and funding and supporting learning for disadvantaged groups and having that explicit focus on it so that funding follows. Right places, yes, we need to support voluntary community facilities. There is a programme called the Hostel Capital Improvement Programme, it is a CLG programme, which is funding not just hostel spaces but day centre spaces, and that has been crucial in creating new types of spaces which are high quality. A high quality building leads to high quality expectations of clients and leads to high quality outcomes; so continuing and rolling that forward but bringing partnerships with FE, FE having financial incentives or being compelled. Your local FE should be reaching out to your local voluntary organisations, either supporting them doing their own learning or delivering learning. We have a partnership with Newham College which has been crucial. They helped us to accredit in our early days, now we can accredit ourselves. We have City Lit coming and delivering classes, we have Learndirect coming in and that partnership between the statutory and voluntary sector is key. Then, the right approach is what we have said before about pre level two learning, but the key role is the information, advice and guidance role. So, you have a wide offer and you work with people individually and say, "This is what is available. What works best for you?", and making that happen, and that individual advice and guidance needs to be within an institution and a project but crucially linked wider, dual-facing, looking at the client and looking at the education that is available and the employment that is available. Your second question was how many would it work for? Seventy seven per cent of homeless people want to work now and 97 % have said they would like to work at some point in the future. Six in ten want to get involved in learning and three quarters of those who do get involved in learning say, "We wish we had got involved in learning earlier." Most people when you work with them want something meaningful to do during the day, they want to be expanding their brain and, ultimately, they want to work too and even some in quite low-paid jobs. Q378 Fiona Mactaggart: They also want to give up the alcohol habit and they do not succeed. I am not disagreeing with you, but I am saying where will the failures be? Mr Shrubsole: A lot of them cannot give up the alcohol habits because they do not have anything to do to fill their time. They hang around the--- Q379 Fiona Mactaggart: There are other reasons why they cannot give it up. Mr Shrubsole: There are, there are clear reasons as well. One of the guys that we work with has just won an adult learners award, is now doing some work for Bart's Hospital training people. He was a heroin addict for 30 years on the street and he came to us one Christmas and he realised that he could not do this any more. He had done it for years. He gave up, and he was taught to read and write. He now writes a blog, which he does for the Hansard Society; he interviewed Yvette Copper on You and Yours. It does not happen for everybody, but he is crucial. Until he got involved in that learning process, there was nothing out there for him. So, yes, we need residential rehabilitation places, we need that drug support. This is getting people involved in meaningful learning. You cannot just have standard Micky Mouse courses that are put out. Q380 Chairman: We do not allow Micky Mouse. Mr Shrubsole: You do not like Micky Mouse? Q381 Chairman: No. Mr Shrubsole: The actual rate on Jobcentre Plus has very low success rates - three in ten complete basic skills courses. Q382 Fiona Mactaggart: I am just asking you how many do you think would fail. I am not saying: would you be worse than someone else, would you be better? I am asking for an honest assessment about how many you think would fail. Mr Shrubsole: We have 150 people come through the door of our activity centre in London every day. Last year 350 people went on to take qualifications and, of those, 70 % succeeded. So, in total across the piece, probably - I do not know, I am putting my finger in the air here - half would succeed and then you could work with more by continuously working with them. Q383 Chairman: Richard. Mr Pace: I think we that could deal with everybody. I think we could be successful with everybody's lives, given enough time. Given enough resourcing, I think we can move everybody forward, and that is exactly what we try to do. Q384 Chairman: You said the cost of not succeeding is £50,000 a year or could be as high as £50,000? Mr Pace: Yes. Q385 Chairman: Where does that £50,000 come from? Mr Shrubsole: Mostly funding for temporary accommodation or hostel accommodation, crime costs, inappropriate use of health services, using A&E rather than a doctor's surgery, but the bulk of it is the high cost of rent in temporary accommodation and then you add on lost economic output, and all the rest of it. Q386 Chairman: Gareth, David, you have not answered Fiona yet. Mr Parry: I think the starting premise is that the vision would need to have everybody signed up to a shared single objective which is about sustained employment. Our view would be that employment is the key route into independent living. Therefore, if sustained employment is the end objective, then all partners throughout the whole process are working towards that end objective rather than being distracted along the way by their own short-term measures, and we want to see that going right through, and when young people with disabilities are making choices round about the age of 14, we are already thinking, or the agencies involved are already thinking about that end objective, that the funding mechanism is flexible enough to allow the individual to progress across the different silos but still with an end focus in mind, and we would see everybody working to that overall transition and flexibility in the system that says you do not have to get over hurdles along the way because it is that end point that we are all working towards. That is the vision. Once you have got the infrastructure set up and the various government agencies are providing that route and working to that system, from young people going through to sustained employment, then adults who are outside of the labour market can come in and take advantage of that system as well, because it is all set up and they just join the process where it is appropriate. So it is a real cradle to grave approach, but everybody sharing a common objective of sustained employment. I think systematically that is where we need to be. I think the majority of the system is in place, it is just there are black holes in the system where people fall down. Q387 Chairman: You rubbished the Connexions service! Mr Parry: I think I said they were under resourced as well. Mr Knight: I think what we are trying to propose is something that makes the transition points that much better. Q388 Chairman: One minute you are saying it is nearly there, the next minute you are saying you are the only people that can replace whatever is there. Mr Parry: I do not think we said we are the only people who could replace it. Q389 Chairman: You said you could do this essential job. Mr Parry: We could do it, but there is a whole sector out there of people working with employers. Q390 Chairman: Fiona is giving you the opportunity with this question to dream an impossible dream if you were given the resources. These are the problems that we see, you for disability, you for the homeless sector. Thinking beyond all the normal parameters, this is what would work. I thought I was getting it from Duncan and Richard, I not sure I am getting it from you, David and Gareth. Mr Knight: What we are proposing, we believe, is something that would pull everything together. So it is not trying to reinvent everything, it is not saying that everything out there is bad. What it is saying is that it is not right, and where it goes wrong is at the transition points and that is where we start to lose people. What we are suggesting is that there is a service that pulls that altogether so that for any one individual they have got a relationship with that service all the way through. To give you an example, of all the people we deal with, less than two per cent come direct from education. The other 98 % come from some kind of benefit. That presumably means that people are in education, then ending their course, going into to benefit, going into Jobcentre Plus and then coming to us, and that does not seem right. So there is the potential there to get that much more seamless. Mr Parry: If we could dream, the dream would be that every school, college, university that has got anybody who is declared disabled who wants to work, Remploy would be available to support them into work and we would have all of that process set up; and, by having that process set up, people who are outside of the education system who come to us because they want to work as well but have got longer-term development needs, we could broker back into the system. It is a facilitation service we would be looking at. That is what our dream would be, because we think that would work. Mr Knight: Then we would maintain that relationship for the rest of their working life, so they would keep coming back to us every time they got to a transition point, which maybe education, it may be a change of job. Q391 Chairman: Are there any of the disadvantages that we found when we looked at special educational needs? There is a big flag above you that says, "We are different. We are only for disabled people", where people might put off. What we were discussing was inclusion and the philosophy has been inclusion in terms of education for disabled people for a very long time. We cannot always achieve it, but you are very special. You have got a big flag that says, "Only come here if you are special." Is that not a disincentive? Mr Parry: But we deliver completely inclusive solutions. The end point of our service is an individual completely included in the workplace, completely integrated in the workplace. We are a specialist service that delivers inclusive solutions. Q392 Chairman: Would you not do better if you were working with something like Connexions. So the gateway is Connexions for everyone, perhaps, but you are standing there offering a particular service when it is needed. Mr Parry: Absolutely. I do not think we would have a problem with that at all. Mr Knight: So long as the experts in any particular situation are involved at an early stage so that we are not putting artificial barriers in front of someone which say, "You have to go to this group, and if that does not work you go to that one, and if that does not work you will finally get to the people who could have helped you in the first place." That is the only caveat. Q393 Chairman: My dream is a life coach and a personal trainer for every person. My dream would mean they come to you if the life coach said, "This is what you need." That is the gateway, is it not? Mr Knight: It is potentially the other way round. They would come to us either at the same time or before somebody else, and then we would be able to help them into a link with the other agencies. Mr Parry: It is working on the assumption that we are the people who deliver the end-point, which is sustained employment, and all of the services lead to that point. If an individual does not want to work, then they do not fit that model. Q394 Fiona Mactaggart: I have heard from both of you that one of the things that you need to do in the learning activities you do with your clients is give them things which are useful to them - skills that can help them sustain a tenancy, for example - which can be very hard, it is very complicated to understand all those pieces of paper - or you were talking about fork-lift truck qualifications and the fact that they do not fit into the level two model, et cetera. Do you think that one of the problems with the Leitch model is that those kinds of qualifications do not fit, and am I hearing from you that you would like to amend it so that they get some status or some fit which means that they are more accessible to people, that you can provide them with the funding there? Is that what I am hearing? Mr Shrubsole: Yes, the fit can be in two ends: (1) does it fit within the qualifications framework and target, and (2) does it fit within the funding priorities? I talked about the Learning Power Award, which is a qualification specifically developed in our sector, the homeless sector and the Learning Skills Council working together. There are opportunities to fit things within the wider qualifications framework. People talk about whether the Foundation Learning Tier can incorporate other elements, but that funding has to fit too and within the Leitch framework the funding for the, as someone has called it, "full-fat" level two has to be within that Leitch framework too. Mr Parry: The supply side seems to have defined this thing called level two as the definition of employability. What we would like to see is more flexibility around the definition of "employment" that actually makes it much more employer-led, and any qualification or skill that means an employer will take an individual into employment is almost the rubber stamp. At the moment we are dictated to by a qualifications framework that says: here is a level one, here is a level two, here is a level three. If we are working towards a demand-led system, why cannot we let the employers make more of a standardisation as to what are the entry level requirements for that sector? Q395 Fiona Mactaggart: Because employers love bespoke little qualifications which mean you cannot work for anyone else. That is why, surely. Because it does not free people to actually transform themselves. Both of you are looking at people who are right at the entry level of employment a lot of the time, but one of the reasons for not doing that, one of the reasons for us as politicians not doing that, is because of the habit of employers, not malignly particularly, of getting their own bespoke neat qualification which is absolutely untransferrable into other employment and, therefore, that employer gets their oven-ready employee and keeps them because they are not oven-ready for anyone else? Mr Parry: But that is where the role for the Sector Skills Council could be, because they can make that judgment as to where the levels of specificity sit. If we go back to what we talked about before, both of our organisations talked about a range of soft and enabling skills which are generic skills. If we can then put those generic skills in the context of a vocational sector - it could be a fork-lift truck driver qualification, it could be an IT keyboard qualification, or whatever - you are then putting together very bespoke employability standards that could be sector-specific. Our experience is that the entry point for somebody to go and work, for example, in the warehousing distribution sector is a different profile from the entry point of someone going to work in the retail sector, but what we get with Leitch and what we get on the supply side is this generic definition of level two, and I think we could and should perhaps be moving towards a situation where we are looking at sector-specific qualifications because that is closer to what the sectors and the employers are saying they need. Mr Shrubsole: The employer does need to shape some end of it, but that is where the role of the broker can come in. If you had brokers who went out to see what is in their local labour market, and if you had (which happens in some areas) employers who did not guarantee jobs but would guarantee interviews for people if they were considered good enough and ready to move into it, the broker can then say, "This is the general package of skills which are transferrable", so basic might be level two or whatever it might be, and then we can develop work with you because we know in this area there is this opportunity, whether it is retail or fork-lift truck driving, and you need this extra bit, you need the client I am working with get you there. That is where the role of the broker comes in, because it is completely moving. You cannot have the employer specifying every single little package if you do not know where the job is, but if somebody can link up a general package of skills which are both some form of qualification but also the core competences of soft skills, the broker can make that link with the employer as to what the employers wants (specifically that employer), then the individual can get interview and, if they are good enough, get the job. Too often we either specify things for what we think employers want but then employers have either forgotten they wanted them, or want something different, or the landscape has moved on without the jobs, or we specify a general qualifications framework. We have got to try and bring those together, and there are different ways you can do it, but the role of the broker could be one way of doing it. Q396 Chairman: The people we heard from on Monday did not like the broker; they wanted a one-to-one relationship; they rather saw the broker as a parasite. You like the idea of a broker but only if you are going to be the broker. Is that right? Mr Shrubsole: No, it does not have to be, it could be anybody who could be the broker, who has got the expertise. Q397 Chairman: Who has got the expertise? This is what we keep coming back to. They were complaining that the broker was business links, and the one thing business links do not know about is skills. Mr Shrubsole: This is one of the problems with how Train to Gain has been rolled out and who their contracts have gone to, and there have been real teething problems. You actually need a smaller level of contracting. What we were looking at for our potential model was that you scaled up, you worked in one a small area, even one sub-region within London and somewhere else, and you look at the employers in the area and the learning providers and you have people who work on both sides. It can work; we know of projects. I talked about our relationship with Pret. We know of another project where crucially they have helped to get homeless people into the building trade because there was a builder who worked with them because he understood what was needed in the labour market and he knew the standard of professionalism that was needed. We cannot have a one-size-fits-all brokerage. A one-size-fits-all brokerage would have as many flaws as any other system has. Q398 Chairman: You know better than most people that politicians are looking at one-size-fits-all in a sense. You can see what the Minister has decided. He has said, "Look, who the hell could be this broker? What is relevant? Business link is the closest." Mr Shrubsole: This is one of the problems across the Learning and Skills Council. The Freud Report on DWP has some really good things, talking about intensive help to help those furthest from the labour market move to the labour market, but on the second section it moves to saying we need to have fewer contracts and a lean contracting model in a region and then it is their job to sub-contract out. We know of an example of an organisation that works in the South West who went for a Jobcentre Plus contract under the old model, did not get it. The people who got it then went to them and said, "Can you deliver it for us?" The bigger organisation had the ability to write the bid and get the contract but knew they did not have the skills. Subcontracting can be good, and, again, it can be useful if you say, "We can do this bit, let someone else do this bit", and do some subcontracting, but you have to move into a massive prime contractor model where it will only be the working links, the work directions, the business links, the private or semi-private organisations who can win them and it will mean that the little guys, whether it is the clients or the voluntary and community organisations that work and represent them, are likely to lose out. Q399 Chairman: Is there enough talent out there to do this? It is a difficult job. Mr Shrubsole: It is a difficult job, but there are people out there who can do it. You have to start with some successes, and that creates more successes. A crucial role as well as the role of role models and peers, people knowing that people who are like them, as it were, have managed to get skills and move into work, and good news spreads, as it were, on the moving to work, and good news spreads amongst employers. We have had employers who have come to us and have said, "We have had a couple of people and the workforce was really nervous, but now it is working out. Can more people come through that route?" What you need is to have solutions on the ground working up but have a skills framework to support that. Too often, with the kind of alphabet super organisations that change around, their specifications are changing and that makes it too internally focused. If you are in the Learning Skills Council, the Sector Skills Development Agency and your job title keeps getting changed every three months, you cannot get out on the ground, know what is happening in your regional area and know what the success is to then come back and say, "Actually, this is working, this is quite a good way of doing it." Q400 Mr Wilson: The deeper we seem to dig into this whole skills area, I am certainly finding that lot of evidence is suggesting that we have the wrong structure. What I mean by that is a very complicated, over bureaucratic, overlapping structure within the skills area. I am also getting the impression now that it seems to be concentrating in the wrong areas. Would any of you agree with that as an over-arching summary? David, you seem nodding both ways? Mr Knight: I was looking up and thinking. Q401 Chairman: I thought you were praying! Mr Knight: I might have been doing that as well. It is not necessarily the case structure, it is getting the objectives aligned, and that is one of the things we would have an issue with. There are a number of different parts to the overall structure, be it in education, be it within employment, and they are trying to do differing things, so what we would be keen to do is to get the whole thing working together. How that is structured from there on is another issue, but that would be a good start. Q402 Mr Wilson: You are happy with the current structure of skills provision? Mr Knight: I think there are still some issues there. Mr Parry: I think that the structure is cumbersome, I think it is complex and it is confusing, but I suspect if it needs change it needs wholesale change, and the effects of wholesale change balanced against what can we do with the existing infrastructure to make the system work better. I would come down on the side of the latter and say, if we can position the front-end service, whether it is the service to employers or service to the learners, and make the front end of it seem simpler, then the machinations of how it all works behind the scene probably can be worked out, but the front end needs simplification. One of the issues, as I have said, is the continual cycle of change, which means that nobody ever gets to a point of being held to account for anything: because every time somebody is held to account - "You said you have delivered this, have you delivered it?" - "Oh, that is okay, we are changing, so we know that already, we are changing" - it just seems that that continual change creates an awful lot of further confusion in the system. Sometimes even for an imperfect process, leaving it alone for a bit in order to let it bed down and taking more of a continuous improvement approach to it rather than wholesale change can be a more pragmatic way forward. Q403 Mr Wilson: Very little accountability in the system is how you feel? Mr Parry: I think there is accountability within the system, but the system keeps changing to let people get away without being held to account. Chairman: It sounds like the Civil Service! Q404 Mr Wilson: Can we move into the second part of what I said. We have heard a lot of argument on this Committee and evidence recently about the narrow economic assessment of the benefit of skills training and whether the Government really values the softer skills enough. Do you think that we as a society should only encourage training development skills that increase productivity or help somebody get into a job? Mr Parry: As a society? Q405 Mr Wilson: Yes? Mr Parry: No. There is a great role for learning as a process for the improvements of self-confidence, self-esteem, social integration and social cohesion. There is a great argument for that. So it is not about one or the other, there is a law for both, I have to say, particularly for the candidate group that we work with. Q406 Mr Wilson: Can I ask Duncan, I think you come from the sort of organisation that might have strong opinions on this. Do you agree with that assessment, firstly, that that there is a role for it? Mr Shrubsole: I would agree with much of what Gareth has said that there are clear both economic and social justice arguments for learning, and too often we focus just on the economic. It is not to say that people we work with and other disadvantaged groups do not want to work, ultimately they see work as what they want to do, like anybody else does, but there is a real need for both to help them get to work and to help them change their lives through learning and development, to focus on those earlier levels and those earlier stages of learning and not just the higher level qualifications. Q407 Mr Wilson: I thought you would both say that, but do you think that the Government is valuing that part of the skills agenda enough and is it funding it sufficiently to make it work? Mr Knight: I am not sure it is always right to separate the two areas. The economic, as in the economy, is going to grow, et cetera, et cetera, and we need the skills verses the social justice thing, because they become so interlinked, do they not, one actually feeds off the other? If we can get people to the point where they can work and can stay in work and develop in work, that is economic, but at the same time we are totally transforming that person's life and, through transforming that person's life, they are going to work better, be happier, healthier, et cetera, which leads back into the economics; so it is difficult to separate the two. Q408 Mr Wilson: I hear what you are saying, but my question was a bit simpler than that. What I was asking was: do you feel that the Government values those soft skills and in demonstrating that value is it funding the support of those soft skills to the degree that you would like it to? Mr Knight: I think the answer to that question is, no, because we would not be raising some of the questions if the answer was yes. We are both sat here as organisations saying a lot more focus and investment on the soft skills area, which actually is very strongly linked to employability but also helps social integration, can lead to voluntary and community work. The very fact that they are generic soft skills means that they can add value in all aspects of an individual's life, but most of the skills as we as organisations have described them do not feature in mainstream funding qualifications. So, I think, in simple terms the answer to that question would be, "No". Q409 Mr Wilson: There does seem to be a preoccupation within the skills industry now, and I think it is being pushed by the Government, that success is really defined by qualifications. That is the sort of output from it. Do you think that qualifications are the best way of judging the value of somebody's skills? Mr Pace: Not always. You cannot always measure a person's skill set by the qualifications they actually have. Somebody may well have a degree or a higher degree but not be equipped to deal with everyday situations. I think that is a common thing we come across with our client group. I do not think you can separate the soft skills from the hard skills. I think they are all part and parcel of the same thing. If somebody is going to be successful, I would measure their success not by whether somebody has a job, but whether they are able to support themselves within our society in whatever way that is, whether that is actually accessing benefits, housing agencies or any other thing, as well as being able to get a job, if that is what they want to do, if that is what they are able to do. That is the measure of success that I would use. Some of that is qualification-based, but a lot of it is not. Certainly the people that we see we are dealing with, the very low end of people's abilities, even getting them to be able to speak in public amongst their own peer group it is a success for us. Q410 Mr Wilson: Do you think those sorts of people find the whole idea of formal qualifications a quite frightening prospect? Mr Pace: I think they do. I think they find many things that we take for granted to be daunting, but that is what we try to do, we try to encourage them by simple steps, by very slow measures to integrate back into what we call the common world that we live within. Mr Parry: The very fact that people sometimes are daunted by qualifications, if you can ultimately work with that individual that results in something called a qualification that is relevant to what they have learnt, then actually the sense of achievement that can instil in the individual is quite important. So, I think qualifications, so long as they validate the true learning, can be incredibly powerful. Mr Knight: I think, ultimately, we would regard success as sustainable employment. For people who we help into employment, 50 % are still employed by the same employer four years later, and we would regard that as a success; and that is a hard measure, if you like, but I think we would also agree with our colleagues here that there is a softer success as well. Q411 Mr Wilson: You have gone back to my original question: should training be seen as an end to get people into jobs? I asked everybody about that, asking about the soft skills, and you said, "No, we want to develop the soft skills", and then you have put it right back to the opposite, saying, "Actually we want to get them into jobs." Mr Knight: Yes, because the soft skills are a key part of that. I am not separating them out. They are still critical. Mr Shrubsole: There is also a real change about getting people into work and sustaining that work, not just getting people in it so that they come back out again, which is another failure notched up of often many failures. So you have got to get people into sustainable employment that they can sustain and that they see a progression path. Some of that is about working with them before they go into work, it might even be work a bit longer before they go in, and it is about supporting them once they are in work as well, and that is where the next stage of welfare reform needs to start moving to. Q412 Chairman: Your people are obviously vulnerable and do need that support that other people take for granted from networks and friends and family? Mr Shrubsole: Yes, and they need it to be of a good and high quality and to push them. We talk about tough love sometimes--- Q413 Chairman: I am very impressed with Richard. I think we ought to get him cloned. He has impressed me with his commonsense and wisdom, not that the rest of you have not! Mr Shrubsole: I am hoping some of it will rub off. Q414 Mr Chaytor: I would like to stay with Gareth specifically about your view of the future of the labour market for disabled people, because the irony that I see is precisely that the Government is giving more attention to getting people off incapacity benefit and encouraging more disabled people to enter the labour market. The predictions about the changing nature of the economy suggests there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs at the bottom end of the schools level, so is there not some conflict here, and how do you see things developing over the next ten, 15 years (I think Leitch is quite specific about this) and a reducing the number of jobs at the lower schools level? Are we not likely to be encouraging more people to get back into the market at precisely the moment when there are going to be fewer jobs for them? Mr Parry: I know you said the question was specifically for me, but I suspect Dave is better an answering that question. Mr Knight: Ultimately, I think it is a positive situation going forward, providing we have the right support mechanisms to enable people to get into roles, but those roles, you are right, cannot just be at the bottom end of the spectrum, they have to be right across the board, and that is a challenge for us as a supporter and provider as much as it is for the disabled person and the education system, et cetera, et cetera. The route to solving the problem actually starts at school and getting that situation right and moving through so that when someone is sitting in front of an employer they are much better equipped rather than necessarily trying to resolve the problems later, but, overall I think it is positive. Mr Parry: I think it is worth saying, on a very short-term basis, as an organisation we are currently in a position where we have more vacancies given to us by employers than we have job-ready disabled candidates to take jobs. At this moment in time we do not have a shortage of employer demand, we have a shortage of suitable supply. Q415 Mr Chaytor: That may be the case in 2007, but in 2017 that is less likely to be the case, is it? Mr Parry: I think increasingly as we move into a service sector economy, there are an awful lot of jobs which people with disabilities can do. I am not sure I fully understand where all of the figures in the Leitch Report come from. It is almost an elimination of jobs that would be classified as low-skilled. I think the issue is how you learn to adapt the job and the job process to the ability of the individual that is trying to do that job. I think that that should not be dictated to by qualifications, that should dictated to by what the employer needs and what the ability of the individual is. That is the solution. We are absolutely convinced that there are tens of thousands of jobs out there for a range of disabled people to do in the short, medium and long-term. Mr Knight: Within that there is still a lot of work to do with employers. The picture is very mixed. There are some very good employers who have a very positive attitude to employing disabled people, recognise the skills benefits, recognise the corporate social responsibility benefits that it brings as well, but there are some that are not so good, and within the SME sector there is a lot of work to do as well. The public sector itself presents its own challenges, because the public sector sometimes lags behind the private sector in terms of employment of disabled people. Q416 Mr Chaytor: Public sector agencies are still bound by the three per cent targets of recruitment, are they? Mr Knight: I do not think so. Mr Parry: I do not think so. Q417 Mr Chaytor: That was an item in previous legislation: three per cent of the work force should be recruited from disabled people? Mr Parry: I think that might be an aspiration as opposed to the reality. Q418 Mr Chaytor: Within the public sector whereabouts do you think it is at the moment? Do you have any idea of the figures? Mr Knight: I would be guessing, but it is low. Q419 Mr Chaytor: This is a question for Duncan, because the people you are working with are more like to have chaotic backgrounds and less stability in their lives than a conventional disabled person may have. Is it the case that we should simply accept that some people are never going to be able to function in the conventional labour market and that, therefore, either they are left to sink or swim or there is a case for structured employment that may be with third sector organisations as a permanent solution? Would you accept that some people could perhaps never function with a "normal", whatever that means, private or public sector employer? Mr Shrubsole: I think I will go first and Richard will fill it. I have a nervousness about the word "accept", because as soon as you accept that somebody might not be able to work, that sets up expectations for them. If you do not have expectations they can do something, whatever their previous level of experience. Anecdotally, we have had people do everything from beauty therapy, to police community support to working in various catering establishments to developing their own artwork such that they can sell it, and often where they come out is not where you expected them to go in. There needs to be a range of solutions. There needs to be working with individual employers that you build up a relationship with (the issue about a guaranteed interview which I talked about before), there is a role for social enterprises (we run our own cafe; other organisations run different forms of social enterprise) and there is a role for working with people, and an employment goal could be a good few years off, not least because they have got to stabilise other issues in their lives, and that learning bit could be bit of stability. Some people use our art room - that is the bit of stability in their lives when everything else is really hectic, so they are not going to go straight into work. We need recognition: work for those who can, support for those who cannot, but activity and learning for all (to kind of adopt that welfare reform phrase) and we need to have the expectations and working to help everybody we can but accepting that for some people it is a long, slow process. It is about two steps forward, one step back for some people. Mr Pace: There are a very few people we could not help in the short term, but over a sustained period of time we should be able to help everybody, not necessarily to get the best job in the world but to be able to benefit society. Q420 Mr Chaytor: In your experience, Richard, in terms of employers, what is most needed to encourage more employers to be sympathetic to the idea of recruiting people? Mr Pace: Success - people going in and being successful. Q421 Mr Chaytor: So previous track record? Mr Pace: Yes. Q422 Mr Chaytor: Are there other specific practices or specific prejudices or systems that employers have that get in your way that you think could more probably be done to eradicate? Mr Pace: It is a difficult area really, because people do have their own prejudices. Providing you can get over those, our client group are as able as anybody else to do specific jobs. There is no problem there. Mr Shrubsole: You need some realism in how the relationship is constructed, and actually it needs to be done through the employment route, not the CSR route. It cannot be a CSR manager saying, "You are going to have joining your team today someone who is homeless or disabled", or whatever, because it sets everybody up for failure and you have to think it through. People who have done it --- We were talking to DHL the other week and they have been working with ex-offenders and they have had some real nervousness around it, but it has worked. She says, "But how do we help the other bits of the workforce know about it?" I said, "Do not you tell them. Get those guys who were working with them and get the guys who you have taken on to and go tell others about it" and, in the end, they might say, "I happen to be homeless", but up to that point they were someone in the DHL workforce. So there is needed success around there. It takes some commitment from the employer. It tends to be either an employer who wants a commitment to their local area, so they are a local employer, or a larger employer who can absorb people coming in and out. There needs to be success, it needs to be worked through and crucially it needs the employer to work with an agency who understands the client group to work out what is realistic and to work out a programme of working through things for six months and the people going on formally. The voluntary sector cannot just put some people into jobs when it does not understand the job. Equally, there have been times in the past where people have said, "We will take on some people", and everybody has gone, "Wow, that is great", without thinking it through. That is as bad, because every time you knock someone back, that is them back down the process of their confidence and their self-esteem again. Q423 Chairman: Here you are, you have got 70 employees, you are operating under a restricted canvas, doing a very good job, I am absolutely convinced, but are you not frustrated that you cannot roll your programme out to help a much larger number of people? Mr Shrubsole: We run a number of different programmes. The Skylight Activity Centre Programme, we are about to open another one in Newcastle in the next month. We have had capital help from Communities and Local Government to do that, but you need the funding to help you open somewhere else. The Smart Skills Programme we run, which is around working with people we give a rent deposit to get into the private and rented sector, now has our skills and training programme alongside to do not just the tenancy support, and we have had people going into work through that, and the Changing Lives Programme where we give direct grants to people. You talk about the individual learning accounts: we actually give up to £2,000 directly to homeless people across the UK who apply with a support worker to help them pay for either a course or some equipment. We would love to do more, and we are talking to DfES about what more we could do, but I think we should be judged like others. If you are successful and have a successful model, then people should come behind it and fund it, whether from government or the voluntary or business sector. Q424 Chairman: Or your success should inform government policy? Mr Shrubsole: Exactly, at which stage I would encourage you all. If any of you would like to come for a visit, please do so. Q425 Chairman: I was going to suggest that perhaps you should apply for a job in the Civil Service and apply some of the lessons you have learned, but you have been there and done that. Mr Shrubsole: I have been there and done that, yes. I wanted to do the reverse. Q426 Chairman: Why did you move? Mr Shrubsole: To find out what it is like in the real world. Q427 Chairman: Which secretary of state did you work with? Mr Shrubsole: Alistair Darling. Q428 Chairman: Was that enough to send you off? Mr Shrubsole: I had an amazing two years working for him, but once you have done that long on the railways, you certainly need a respite. Chairman: Thank you. Let us go on to the final section. Fiona Mactaggart: I think we have got from you a pretty powerful picture of the potential contribution of the third sector to particular groups with high levels of needs in this field, but what I am quite interested in is Joe Citizen who may be homeless, does not think of himself as a homeless person but actually is homeless or has a disability and, again, might not label themselves as a disabled person. Can they navigate this system? Is it clear? We produced a set of maps of the skills system which Alan Wells, the former Director of the Basic Skills Agency said, "I do not know how anyone could see their way through that", and he is right. How do people find you? How do they find something that can help them, and are the people they end up being forced to find, Jobcentre Plus or whatever, helpful? Q429 Chairman: David, you are doing that praying thing again. Mr Knight: It is terribly complicated. The simpler we can make it the better because it gets people a solution faster, which is the most important thing. How do they find us? Either directly. We are opening a network of High Street branches which are very professional, work focused, training, recruitment, development centres, if you like, but very much literally on the High Street, but most people will come to us via Jobcentre Plus. Are they doing a good job? It is very mixed. In some areas they are doing an exceptional job, in some areas it is very difficult for them? Mr Shrubsole: I think one specific is how you might find us and then the bigger issue is how the hell you find your way round the system? On the first, I was interested in the point about labels. One of the things we did when we first set up Skylight is we said it should be for homeless and non-homeless people to have some integration, because you do not want to label people. In reality it only happens to some of the physical stuff, but people in the city do a bit of Tai Chi alongside some homeless people, and the karate tutor is a black belt and he is from the city as well, so we get volunteer tutors, which is quite unique, and we call people members rather than clients to try and break out some of the barriers there. How do people find us? We do quite a lot of outreach work across homeless projects, day centres, soup runs, hostels, but we need to do more. In general, you do get people who say, "If only I had found you earlier." How do people find their way to us as specialists but more generally round the system? More generally round the system is a nightmare. The route for funding or for accountability or direction is complicated, but for the individual it is very complicated. The Mayor is supposed have powers, but then the budget announced that there is another Employment and Skills Board and then there are different arrangements coming out of Leitch and different arrangements coming out of Freud. It is complicated. It is not just in the education area. We expect our most vulnerable to navigate a system which you and I would find hard, and yet we are asking them to do it. There needs to be getting learning and education about learning out of the learning sphere. If people are going to Citizens' Advice about housing advice, or benefit advice, they might get help for that, but somebody might also give them a leaflet which says, "Have you thought that you are eligible for a qualification? You can do basic skills here." It might be in your college or it might be in a voluntary or community centre. We need to get information about learning into employers and to the workforce and in ways that learners can learn about. Some of the things that Learndirect have done have been quite good, but whether it is how we structure the system as a whole or how we get information to people, we need to think about what it is like for the guy at the bottom and steer the system round that, because it is too complicated. Those that know about it get more of it Q430 Chairman: This is where my life coach comes? Mr Shrubsole: Exactly, a life coach, a broker, a service navigator, whatever it might be, you need that point of contact where you go and where people who might come to you about learning issue but might come to you about something else and you are able to suggest a learning solution. Q431 Chairman: This is what an MP does in his advice surgeries. I sit there, most of my people come in and they need something that they do not actually present. It is only when you have the discussion with them about the problem that you realise that it is a very much more complex problem. Mr Shrubsole: That would be your experience, Richard, every day. You talk to them and you find out more. Mr Pace: Yes. Q432 Fiona Mactaggart: What that issue about complexity highlights is that, as well as the difficulties for the individual citizen to find their way round the system, there are bits of the system which bump into each other. I like your take on how the bits of the system work together. Do government departments work in a way which is joined up and which helps, or do they not, and what would you change if you felt that it could be improved? Mr Parry: I think it has to start with policy and integration of policy. An observation of where I do not think policy is as integrated as it could be: we have spoken a lot about Leitch and Leitch talking about the need to improve skills and skill levels for the economy. Duncan has mentioned the Freud Report, which talks about getting workless people back into work. It is interesting that in the Freud Report, a substantive piece of work, it does not talk about skills, and yet we have had a significant report coming out by Leitch. You have got one talking about getting people back into work, which does not really address the skills issue, and then you have got the Leitch Report saying low-skilled jobs are disappearing and it is all about skills. There you have two major policy documents, or discussion documents, which do not seem to be as connected as perhaps they could be in terms of working through a solution from two different departments. But let me give you a very simple example. Q433 Chairman: When did the Freud Report come out? Mr Knight: A couple of weeks ago. Q434 Chairman: Which department? Mr Knight: DWP. Q435 Chairman: Is it DWP? I have not seen that. Mr Parry: Again, this is probably a manifestation of the complexities of the silos that we have got, but the DfES report that came out this week, Raising Expectations, only has two paragraphs in the whole document that refers to issues around learners with disabilities, but one paragraph that does talk substantially about it talks about the LSC consulting on the draft documents for that policy issue. The LSC published its strategy, following consultation, last October, so even within one government department you have got niches of expertise that are not joined up. Q436 Chairman: Raising Expectations is a Green Paper. Mr Parry: Sorry, yes. Q437 Chairman: So it is consultative. You can improve it. We can improve it? Mr Parry: Yes, all I am indicating is the detailed level, but it is the detail that often drives the practicalities of policy; so I think it starts with the policy, and if we can get policy alive through common objectives, which Leitch says we should work towards, then I think the system will start to change and behave differently, but I think there is something missing in that integrated policy level, it seems to me. Mr Shrubsole: The disjunct between DfES and DWP is key. You will go and talk to their officials and they will be quite clear, "This is for DWP, we are only concerned with work outcomes." DfES will say, "We are only concerned with education outcomes", and there is a clear divide, but it is a moment of hope, as it were. Some of the things that have happened around offender learning where the Home Office has got together with DfES where it was very much Phil Hope and Baroness Scotland getting together and helping to drive some of that through the system, there are bumps that need ironing out and it needs to link on to the job agenda, but at the top there is a real divide between DWP and DfES which at the bottom is replicated by the divide between Jobcentre Plus and the Learning and Skills Councils. You then in the middle - I mentioned before about London - say, "The Mayor should link it up but then separate", but if the Learning and Skills Council have to operate to a set of national targets which are level two focused and other things, but then you have a broker at the bottom which is supposed to be getting the skills that the employer needs but within a menu which is defined by national targets, you can see it starts getting quite complicated. Yes, there needs to be a joining up at the policy level, but that needs to follow through. It does not necessarily mean they all join up around a single goal, because then everybody is entirely immediately work focused. Some of Freud, even though it does not mention skills, is hinting that you need to focus on the sustainable work, so therefore you need to focus on skills, but, as Gareth says, there was not any mention in the Freud Report of Leitch and the budget, which came out a week after Freud, did not mention Freud but mentioned Leitch because Leitch was seen as a good thing because it came out of DfES and Freud was seen as a bad thing because it came out of DWP; and that drives through the system that people are facing on the ground, and that lack of consistency of approach and the complexity and the extent to which it is constantly evolving, with new responsibilities transferring, means that the people within the system are not clear, never mind those who are trying to use it. Mr Knight: The City Strategy represents an opportunity to do something about that at ground level, where cities are given more freedom get the people on the ground working together, particularly Jobcentre Plus and the LSC. It is early days to see whether that is going to be successful or not, but the potential is there. Mr Parry: I think in the disability area as well we are expecting some protocols to be published shortly between DWP and about how at ministerial level departments can work together. Q438 Fiona Mactaggart: Do you think that the emphasis on your clients is partly a product of high level employment and do you think it would still be there if we did not have high levels of employment? Mr Shrubsole: In terms of? Q439 Fiona Mactaggart: It seems to me that one of the issues, one of the reasons why Estates is investing, one of the reasons why Press is investing is that there are actually job needs in the economy at the moment. What do you think would look differently if that was not the case? What impact do you think that would have on what you do? The reason I am asking you this is because I think there would be a big impact and I think we need to look at that impact to work out what is most valuable at the moment? Mr Shrubsole: I think that goes back---. On the employment side, over half of working age adults in 2020 are already over 25 now, so we need to have that focus on adults and we need the focus on kids as well but keep the focus on adults. So the future workforce does mean looking at those, whether they are on incapacity benefit or whether they are on long-term jobseeker's allowance or whether they are out of the system altogether. So we do need that for future employment, but other bit would be going back to some of those earlier points about social justice alongside economic efficiency arguments. But actually, yes, we want to help people into work, people want to work, the key to getting them into work is the stepping stones along the way. The reason why we are doing it, but also we need to be articulating that, is the arguments that even if they do not make it into a work outcome, that learning that they have gained, that self-confidence, those qualifications have benefits on reducing costs elsewhere in the system and the outcomes for them as an individual, and that is that economic efficiency alongside the social justice arguments together. Mr Parry: I think it comes back to the positioning of the whole proposition of the supply side to the employers and, in terms of a demand-led approach for employers, it needs to be dressed up as skills, recruitment and retention issues because employers will always have skills, recruitment and retention issues. They may not have them in the volumes that they have today, but they always have those issues. If we promote the benefits of our candidate group on the back of a corporate social responsibility agenda, the very fact we are talking about corporate social responsibility highlights the disadvantage the individual has, the disability and the negative side of things rather than concentrating on the business case, which is all about the ability of the individual. I think the more we can embed that in the way we position our services, the more we engage employers. Our experience is that employers, once they are through that process, are more than happy to take on people from that candidate group because they see loyalty, they see retention, they see a willingness to learn in the workplace, far more so than they do when recruiting people from the mainstream client group. I think it is fundamental. The supply side really has to understand what demand-led means and work those solutions through, and then I think that the disadvantaged groups are less vulnerable to economic change. Mr Knight: There is no doubt that a strong economy helps our call in terms of building up the skills, getting more and more people into work, but at the same time society has also moved on, has it not, and I think there is a much greater recognition and awareness that we need to support people across the spectrum rather than just the chosen few. Q440 Chairman: Why do you think a healthy economy is the right environment in which to do the stuff you are talking about? How do you explain the stubborn resistance? The NEETS category of those between 18 and 25 seems for quite a long period of time to have been quite stubborn, with high levels, 11 %, 225,000 young people. Why do you think that? We touched on it earlier. Is it because there are less unskilled jobs out there? What is your analysis of that? Mr Knight: I am not sure it is about the jobs necessarily, it may be more about how these people have fallen through the gaps. I talked about transition points earlier, and maybe that is one of the causes of that. In terms of the economy in general, the more jobs that are available the easier it is to place people. Mr Parry: I do not think we have got particularly extensive experience of the NEETS issue. Q441 Chairman: But a lot of them have a background of special educational needs, so it might impinge on your--- Mr Parry: My observation from the limited experience I do have, is that we are too much concentrating on trying to solve the NEETS issue by developing high-side solutions instead of going to employers and saying, "How can we engage you as a community in developing the solutions and opportunities for this candidate group?" Everything I read around NEETS and all the solutions I see all tend to be supply side led and I do not see much about what is the role for the employers in addressing this issue, but that is only an observation. I do not have any expertise in that area. Q442 Chairman: Duncan and Richard, do you have the forensics of where your people come from. Are they the sort of people who drop out of school, truant become a NEET, is there a kind of profile there that you are picking up the kind of post NEET syndrome? Mr Shrubsole: You can count everyone and everybody, and some have had high level qualifications and employment. I was talking to a guy who was a computer scientist for NASA and he became homeless. You get that whole range, but you do get a large number of people who dropped out of school pre 16 or who were excluded from school and who might have not been in education, employment or training, and there is a real issue. We crucially need to be getting that right, that crucial transition period from 16 to 19 and then 19 to 25; but what is very interesting is that some people who come in later, it is later that they realise what they have missed out on, and the opportunities for them post 25 are much more limited. So, yes, we need to do more in the up to 25 age group, but the opportunities after that are much more limited, and even within our own sector there are more homelessness agencies that work and provide training and employment opportunities for the younger age group than the older age group, and when people get to the point where either we are working with them and that awakens that enthusiasm or they have had it for some other reason, they need to be able to get into some form of provision which works with them. Q443 Chairman: We are coming to the end of this session. We have may have been three or four rather dozy politicians after a late night, but we have learnt a great from this session, we have really enjoyed it. Is there anything you think we should have asked you but we have been helpless because we perhaps are not operating at 100 % efficiency? Richard, you are a man of wisdom. What have we missed out? Mr Pace: Sometimes. I do not know really. It would be really nice if you came down to see what we actually do within our centre. Q444 Chairman: How far are you from here? Mr Pace: It is in the East End, it is not far, 15 minutes from here. Mr Shrubsole: District Line to Aldgate East. Mr Pace: We have got an art show on at the moment that you would be more than welcome to come and see. Q445 Chairman: You have to be careful at Aldgate East. Someone once arranged to meet me at Aldgate East; there are 32 exits! Duncan, what about you? Mr Shrubsole: The last thing I would say would be something I said earlier. If we think about the whole system, which does look so complicated, if we think about who are the right people we want to help; where are the right places to help them; and what is the right approach for the learning we want to offer, and then use that as a guide. Those would be my final thoughts. Q446 Chairman: Gareth? Mr Parry: We have not really spoken about higher education. I think we are anxious we do not really understand, and it is an observation rather than information, why only seven per cent of graduates declare a disability. There is evidence that says the higher the qualification level an individual can achieve the lower the differential between a disabled person and a non- disabled person in terms of employment rates, and yet the number of people going into higher education who have got a disability seems disproportionately low. I do not know what the answer to that is, but I am conscious we have not spoken about it. Q447 Chairman: In a parallel world we are doing an inquiry into higher education. Perhaps you will have to come back for that or submit information on that as well. That is a very good point. David? Mr Knight: Just to emphasise that it is the people on the ground who are the people who are best placed to help, be it the employer, be it the learning establishment, be it the individual. We need to avoid the top-down approach that we sometimes get. Chairman: Can I tell you that we only write a good report if we listen to what is out there. We are not a research institute and we are not a think-tank. We are what we are and we write a good report on skills if we have listened and picked up the resonance out there. If you can continue communicating with us, and we will visit if you invite us, perhaps not all of us but some of us, and if you, as you go away, think about the kind of things we are trying to do and help us write a better report, we would be grateful. Thank you. [1] Note by witness: Correction - over 80% of homeless people left school aged 16 or younger [2] Note by witness: Correction - Personal and Community Development Learning (PCDL) is a Learning and Skills Council fund that is distributed through Local Authortities. |